DB: Twins for a Queen?

Until last night, I have slept on the twin mattress that was on the bottom bunk of the bed of my childhood. It has always given me a peaceful night sleep, and I didn’t intend to fix something that wasn’t broken. I, like most Americans, will handle problems as they become critical. In this case I will only tell you that it had become an issue I was no longer willing to ignore.

After finding the bed I wanted I was able to borrow my friends work-van, seeing as the rain prevented me from using a regular old truck. Naturally, I borrowed the work-van only after my friend was off work. So, by the time the carriage arrived at my house with my new queen it was well after bed time. My roommate was mysteriously not home, and I was faced with the dilemma of ushering her highness into her chambers without the help of another knight. I called my friend Patrick who was not to far away, and he gladly came to my rescue.

Patrick was in a bit of a sore mood, and not just cause he had to lift heavy stuff up my stairs. It seems his frustration stemmed from a trend he has encountered among people of our age group. “I keep running into people that aren’t going to vote,” he tells me as we navigate the maze of motor scooters and bicycles that the front of the warehouse has become, “Its really getting to me that people don’t care to do anything about a problem until it affects them directly.”

The narrow stairs leading up to my keep made the mattress seem like it weighed about 4000 lbs. I strained my back manhandling it (no handles?), but we got her through the gap with little other trouble.

The box-spring was a totally different story, lacking the flexibility of its squishy counterpart. Patrick continued, “Did you know that a majority of Canadians would gladly give up their right to vote in the Canadian election in order to be able to vote in ours?” When I consider it, there is very little political banter happening between people my age. At first I assumed that it was rude or that it was obvious who the right candidate was, but sometimes I wonder if my friends outside of Patrick really think about the world outside Tacoma much at all. The election is there in the periphery, how could you miss it, but the passion to get into it, to belong to a side and rally your friends around the candidate of choice….

ehhh?

Apathy? I’m not sure. I was at the caucus and found that there were very few people my age even exploring the system. I have to admit that it looked like a chaotic mess. I watched the debates and found them to be difficult to understand and follow, with little education on the process of how a president is chosen, sometimes it seems…well…not real.

At this point, Patrick and I have managed to wedge the box-spring so tightly into the staircase that we can’t even get it to come back down, let alone continue up. I was told early in the dating game that you weren’t supposed to talk about religion or politics….sex and drugs was ok, as long as you didn’t admit to either of them openly at first. I crawled, now sweaty, under the box spring and begin to work it corner by corner up a few inches at a time. It’s bowed in there like some sort of graphing calculator problem and the fabric is beginning to tear off the sidewall as Patrick tells me, “I just feel like not voting is some holdover from the hippie generation. Some sort of punk rock early 90’s anti-establishment attitude, but we are supposed to be this hyper educated best-ever generation with access to a world of information. How could you not care about what our country is doing to the world?”

Sometimes it just felt like politics was just a way of pissing your Dad off at the dinner table. I don’t want people to tell me how to think, so I don’t tell them what I think. If we keep going on like that, hanging out and never talking about much…never admitting our passions to each other, then Patrick is ultimately right. We will change when it becomes absolutely critical. However, can checking a box every four years really be enough? Puppet on the left, puppet on the right? It seems like before we get people to vote, it might be wise to get them to care.

As I let Patrick out and returned to my queen to dress her in new fine linens, I wondered why I waited so long to get a proper adult sleeping machine. Having just woken from a pretty wonderful nights sleep, a thought occurred to me: perhaps the answer is to let this country trade in our twins for a queen.