Sorry, couldn’t resist.

What a wild ride it was last night! I bitch about social media at least as much as the next guy, but sometimes it functions as a virtual town square that gives us a sense of our own power and potential. No real-time space is big enough to contain us, to make us visible to each other.

Last night I quickly gave up trying to focus on anything else. On Facebook I flitted from my own timeline to the local Indivisible group to the MV Democrats group to the Stronger United Movement, with occasional detours to bona fide news sites. The gloom-and-doom option was always there, but I never stopped thinking that Doug Jones might, just might, pull it off.

Or thinking that if Roy Moore did win, the Republicans might come to sincerely wish that he hadn’t.

At some point hope coalesced and started to grow, like it really might happen. Nail-biting increased. I popped another beer. Like the vote was tied at 49%/49% and the precincts that hadn’t reported yet were urban and/or mostly African American and/or leaning blue.

And it happened. NowThis live-streamed Jones HQ. People were wired, pumped up, ready — then Doug Jones and family came on stage for a victory speech. All the while comments were pouring in from all over the country and Canada, so fast I could barely read them, never mind “like” the ones I especially liked.

I was part of this national/international celebration. I was whooping and hollering like a nutcase in my studio apartment.

Candidate Elizabeth Warren at the West Tisbury library in August 2012.

The election of 2012 was like this. President Obama was re-elected and Elizabeth Warren reclaimed for the Democrats the late Ted Kennedy’s seat, which was briefly held by Republican Scott Brown. 2016 was something else again: local triumphs coupled with national disaster, and knowing I was not alone was so important.

And now I do believe we’re on a roll. May it continue!

P.S. If you’re new to my cold-weather ice disk obsession, here’s an introduction from exactly four years ago. The mold is my dog’s outside water dish. Once winter gets going, I can have four, six, ten disks lined up in a row. It’s early yet. The most I’ve had so far this year is two, the mid-November weekend of the Indivisible Massachusetts conference in Worcester.