You're reading this after election day yet I'm writing it beforehand (Tuesday is such an awkward day) so the sensible thing to do is ignore it. But the election is much on my mind. I'd rather write about elections past.

Just as an aside, let me extend my heartfelt wishes that by the time this appears in your mailbox (you do subscribe, right? 20 bucks a year, which is cheap, and do it now because it's about to go up), we'll all know who the next president will be. We don't need any more 2000s.

In 1976, I was just out of college in May, just married in June and just employed by a newspaper in August - pretty big summer for me - when I went to a meeting of liberal group I had belonged to for four years and found everyone else there wearing little gold peanut pins on their lapels. I remember thinking "Oh my gosh, they're bragging about it!" I wasn't very enthusiastic about Jimmy Carter, but he wasn't Gerald Ford, so he got my vote. But I surely wasn't going to wear a peanut lapel pin. That was the first time being in the journalism biz made for a handy excuse to not display any personal partisanship. It certainly wasn't the last.

All in all, though, given that Carter was a disaster and so were the marriage and the job (I escaped after four months), 1976 for me is best remembered by Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young," still one of my favorite songs. Wait, that was 1977. Never mind, forget 1976.

Carter, though, was one of only two winning candidates I've voted for in nine elections, although I've voted in only seven of those. In 1980, I was so disgusted with both candidates I didn't even go to the polls, while in 2000, I changed jobs and cities in October, went right down to the drivers license office and only afterward realized I could have voted absentee at my old address if I hadn't been so diligent about changing addresses. I lived in Louisiana at the time, so my vote wouldn't have mattered, anyway, but I really, really, really wanted to vote against George W. Bush, a man whose stupidity was so evident that I couldn't imagine the entire nation electing him. Not the first time I've been wrong.

My favorite election year was 1996. I was in Louisiana for that one, too. The Bayou State, unlike Texas, has really lenient ballotaccess rules. Basically, you fill out a form, send it to the secretary of State, and lo!, you're on the ballot. I was handed the task of getting ahold of all the minor parties on the ballot, I believe there were seven, and writing a story explaining, in 10 words or so each, what these parties stood for.

I tell ya, they were all over the lot. There was the guy who espoused the adoption of Biblical principles and turning it all over to God. There was the party with a name along the lines of "Environment, Fairness, Justice" or some such, but when I got hold of the candidate he admitted he had misread the form when he was filling it out and he was really the Green Party candidate. There was the guy who returned my call on a cell phone while he was campaigning

in Appalachia and his car kept going into tunnels and his signal would fade in the middle of an answer and all I could say when he finished was, "What?" There were the two women in San Francisco who were running

on some variation of the Socialist Workers Party (which has lots of variations). They were the only both-members-of-the-ticket I talked to, they being on separate extensions, and, evil-minded that I am, I couldn't help wondering if they were partners in more than just politics. They didn't bring it up, though, and I was too polite to ask, so they missed out on whatever chance they had of getting in the Guinness Book as the first homosexual couple to run for president.

I did such a good job on that story that one of the reporters on staff actually read it. (Reporters are notorious for not reading their own product.) He and I wound up making a bet - it wasn't really a bet because there were no stakes but I don't know what else to call it - over which of us could vote for the minor party that collected the fewest votes in our parish. The national outcome wasn't in doubt, nor was how Louisiana was going to vote, so we figured, why not?

I won, by casting my vote for the SanFran lezzies. I believe my vote gave them 12, parishwide. My betting partner went with the God guy, a fatal mistake in Beauregard Parish, La., if you're in a fewist votes contest. But then, he grew up in Detroit, and completely missed the Southern context.

That's been the downfall of an awful lot of politicians over the years.