Eligible voter has the air of defeat without having gone to the polls

Tuesday is that marvelous day in American life when, if you listen carefully, you can actually hear the wheels of our great democracy grinding forward. You know, when we converge from all corners of the country, young and old, rich and poor, and cast those sacred ballots.

Or, as 30-year-old Shea Grode might say, yeah, whatever.

Grode, as I discovered in a highly entertaining if sobering conversation Friday afternoon, isn’t really into the voting thing. He won’t vote Tuesday. But it’s not just Tuesday. He didn’t vote in the June primary. Or in the 2004 election. Or 2000. Or for or against any candidate since he became voter-eligible in 1995. So far, that’s six national election cycles ... and counting.

“Counting” is the operative word. Grode doesn’t picture himself voting in 2008. Or ever.

I probably could have condensed the last couple of paragraphs into this: The dude is tuned out.

“I’ve walked by many places where I could have registered,” he says, “but it’s not my gig.”

But what about effecting change? “I can agree with a huge group of friends and we can have the same thoughts and opinions, but if we voted, what could we change? What’s the point of voicing your opinion if it’s not going to be heard by the people in suits and ties?”

That’s a common lament of the politically disaffected, but Grode’s disenchantment sounds more visceral. “Skull to toe, I’m covered in tattoos,” he says. “The only thing I haven’t tattooed is my face. Head, neck, arms, legs, so are they really going to listen to people like us?” His head is adorned with tattoos of devil horns, the sign of the devil and Satan’s child.

He knows that turns some people off. “If a person is true, they’re going to look past that and see inside that I’m a good, decent, honest person,” he says. “I’ve just been through so much. Instead of going out and robbing and stealing and hurting people, I take it out on myself. I hurt myself.”

Grode, the inventory manager at a San Clemente pizza restaurant/brewery, got off to a rough start in life. He says he was “left on a doorstep from birth” and was raised in foster homes before being adopted at 5. At 13, he hit the streets for good and with “straight Fs and F-minuses” on his academic record, was sent to continuation school. Despite six years of high school, he says, he never got a diploma.

“All I wanted to do was work,” he says. “I wasn’t learning anything in school, and I thought there was money to be made out here. I have more street smarts than book smarts.”

He didn’t like school but did like cooking classes at a job-training program. He’s a chef by trade and his resume shows a number of restaurant jobs, including some at well-known Orange County hotels. He’s been at the San Clemente restaurant for the last year and a half, his longest stint without cooking since he was 18, he says.

Election day will be just another day of work, he says. “I have no clues what the issues are, and I have no interest, either. I’ll still have to pay my tax dollars, they’re still going to take that from me.”

I ask if his alienation stems from anger, and he says no. “From simple lack of interest,” he says. “I just really don’t care.”

I trot out the notion of voting being the American way. “That’s hypocritical, because you know they’re not going to do anything,” he says of elected officials. “So why go do it? Just because you want to be American?”

He concedes that someone has to vote to keep the country running, and he doesn’t scorn people who do. “It’s their thing. It doesn’t bother me.”

I ask if he conceives of a day when he’s 40 or 50 and possibly voting. “No, definitely not. I’m pretty stubborn and set in my ways. And I really don’t even care.”

I tell him I appreciate his candor but try one last thing: Didn’t you ever, just once, want to slip into a voting booth and pull the lever?

“I didn’t even know you pulled levers,” he says. “I thought they gave you a pencil and paper and you just marked it.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.