I’m free from the vitriol. I voted

Aweek ago Friday, I was among the first people in my Toronto riding to vote at the advance poll. I’ve always loved the advance poll (duty done and early too), but never more so than this election. This campaign has been so dispiriting, so small-minded, that I couldn’t bear another day of it.

This time, voting early bought me freedom.

I am free. I have been for a week. I am perfectly good now to watch Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday night, instead of locking into CBC to endure yet more poll results, more discussion of a so-far hypothetical coalition government, more faux sincere talking heads.

I have no more voter guilt: I have voted, I am a lost cause. It’s as though I have been inoculated.

I was suddenly immune to the late-in-the-game attack ads, the mounds of BS sent the voters’ way, the rote answers and widespread failure of the major leaders to actually answer questions.

We didn’t cover ourselves in glory this time out.

I spent the first week covering Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, wherein the highlight was the day early on when the Liberal bus hit a wing of the Liberal plane.

I left the tour after six days, hobbled. An ordinarily active hiker and runner (1015 km a day was my norm), I effectively went from 100 klicks an hour to zero, and spent long days on a bus or plane. Something called the piriformis muscle (it is tiny, buried deep in the butt, right beside the sciatica nerve) seized, and the pain ran from butt to hamstrings.

It still does.

I blame the Liberals, of course.

The day after I left the tour, the “blackface” scandal broke. Despite my aching legs, I began spontaneously breaking into Day O, the Harry Belafonte staple Trudeau once performed, in blackface of course, at a high school costume night. Two other blackface incidents followed, the most recent when Trudeau was 29, and I realized that while the Snc-lavalin imbroglio was far more serious, this blackface thing might mean the end for him.

It didn’t.

As I am immunized against the drivel of the remaining campaign, so is he apparently immunized by his celebrity against scandals that would fell any other prime minister.

I will be watching election night, of course, fully expecting that is most often the case, I will get the government they (those Canucks so well-inculcated into soft-l liberal thinking) deserve.

Well, I’ll always have Day O.