Whistles and Those Who Hear Them

Alright, Ecua-blog is back with a vengeance. Here, in four parts, is the crazy story of our shaman experience.

Part I: The Whistleblower

A very brief history of John Perkins: For over two decades, Mr. Perkins worked to undermine the economies, and often the rights and general well-being of third-world nations in favor of the profits and power of multi-national corporations, international banks (namely the IMF and World Bank) and the United States government. If you want the details, and I recommend them, because all the same things are going on today all over the world, you can read his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and/or his follow up, The Secret History of the American Empire. Since retiring from that life, Perkins has written these whistle-blower books, spoken all over the country, and started a non-profit called Dreamchange to empower indigenous people and promote certain shamanic ideas and practices.

In May of this year, I went to Greenfest in Chicago to check out the various vendors, nosh on samples, and see an amazing line-up of speakers that included Perkins, Alice Waters and Paul Stamets. Perkins was first in that threesome. He recapped the major points of his book, and emphasized that every time we buy something, we vote for at least one company and everything that it's doing. Waters, it turned out was ill and couldn't make it, so instead they put on videos of her edible schoolyard, and stuff that I didn't stick around for, because if I wasn't going to see her talk, I figured I'd get a bite and wander around some more. John Perkins had a booth in the bookstore area where he was signing books and chatting with people. I didn't have a book for him to sign, but I got in line anyway, because I did have a question for him.

While I was waiting, someone handed me a card that told me how to get some sort of discount through the website of the bookstore. I generally resist acquiring slips of paper that I know I won't do anything with, but somehow I ended up with one in my hand. Eventually my turn to say hi to Mr. Perkins came and I said something like, "Hi, I don't have anything for you to sign, but I loved your book and your speech, and I'm going to Ecuador in a month, what should I do?" (He spoke a fair amount about Ecuador in his talk).

"What are you interested in?" he asked. As it happens, I am very interested in shamanism of all varieties, and have been getting more and more interested in South American shamanism for a while, and I knew that I shared this interest with Mr. Perkins. I didn't think to say that when he asked me, though. Instead I talked about the jungle and seeing what life is like for your average Ecuadorian.

He nodded, and took the card that was dangling awkwardly out of my hand. There was enough white space, amidst the offers of free shipping and 10% off, for him to write "Kapawi" on one part of the card (both he and a server at an upscale tea lounge in San Francisco recommended Kapawi. It's a lodge in the Amazon that looks amazing, but it's expensive to get there and stay there, so we ended up opting for a cheaper Amazon adventure) and on another part of the card he wrote:
"Otavalo
Carabuela
Esteban Tomayo"

"You're flying into Quito?"
"Yes."
"Take a bus to Otavalo, and find a cabdriver who knows Esteban Tomayo in Carabuela. He's my godson and a shaman. Tell him you're my friend. How's your Spanish?"

I'm getting chills just writing about it. I didn't have any particular expectations for that brief meeting, but that was a better outcome than I would have considered reasonable to hope for. Thanks again John.

Part II: The Whistler

After doing some research, Rachel and I planned a leg of our trip around being in that area and seeing Sr. Tomayo. There was plenty to do around there, including a famous Saturday market in Otavalo, a nearby bird-of-prey reserve and a stunning waterfall, so even if nothing special happened with Esteban, we could justify a couple of days there.

I was tentative about following Mr. Perkins' advice and stopping cabs to ask if they knew a specific person in another town (I grew up in New York City where that would be borderline crazy-person behavior), but I gained some confidence when we happened to tell a random guy at a bus stop where we were headed, and he said he knew Esteban Tomayo. The first cabdriver we stopped didn't know him, but the second, Luis, was a friend of his.

Once we were in Carabuela, it was clear why we weren't told to take a bus there and then find Sr. Tomayo. It was a hilly, rural area with rambling, unmarked, unpaved roads. There didn't seem to be a main drag, or any particular area where cabs might have been trolling around for business. Finding a specific house from the highway on foot would have taken hours.

Luis the cabdriver told us that Sr. Tomayo is famous in the area, and that his sons live nearby and are shamans as well. At this point you know about as much about Esteban Tomayo as we did when we were dropped off at his door.

There was a courtyard in front of his house that was littered with lazy dogs. They didn't pay us much mind as we cautiously stepped around them. A short, middle-aged woman appeared out of a little side building and greeted us friendlily. We explained ourselves as best we could, and said that we didn't want to inconvenience anyone, but we would love to meet Sr. Tomayo. She turned out to be the shaman's wife, and she showed us to a room in the larger building where we would wait for him.

The room was sizable, but contained only a refrigerator, a table and two benches. We waited maybe 15 minutes. Rachel asked me if I wanted to ask him anything specific, and I said no, I'll just say my semi-prepared opening and let whatever happens happen.

Enter Esteban Tomayo. He was maybe five feet tall, probably in his 50s or 60s (I either misheard John Perkins when he said that Esteban is his godson, or its possible for godparents and children to be roughly the same age). He had a wrinkled face and a slow, stable walk. He wore blue jeans, a white button down shirt, and a cowboy hat. He had a definite presence- not necessarily a room-commanding presence, but something that projected that he was sure of himself, and was sure of being sure of himself.

We introduced ourselves, and I explained that I was a friend of John Perkins and that he told us to come see him. I also presented a small gift to him, a smooth, skipping-stone sized rock with a turtle painted on it that I had gotten in Hawaii. I told him that in Hawaii, the turtle is a symbol of energy and power.

My Spanish isn't great, and he probably doesn't hear my accent too often, but I think he understood most of it. He asked us a number of questions, mostly basic stuff like our names, where we were from, our relationship, etc. Some questions he asked several times, but never (if memory serves) repeating the same one twice in a row. It was unclear if he didn't understand, needed clarity, or just wanted to hear the answer again. His peculiar but calm and present demeanor made it feel like his questions were akin to a musician getting to know the timbre and feel of an instrument, sometimes returning to a note to hear it again. He was learning about us, but also getting attuned to our vibrations.

He also repeated certain statements, perhaps to help his thought process and to reinforce certain ideas being passed between us. He said a number of times that I was a good person (usually accompanied by a warm touch on the shoulder) and that I would live a long life. He also told Rachel that the most important thing for her right now is her work (he said this not knowing that she was a month from starting law school) and the most important thing for me was my un-calm, discontent heart. I can still hear him leaning into the adjectives as he said "No es calma. No es contenta." in reference to mi corazon.

Somewhere during that conversation I remember thinking that if this was what the Esteban Tomayo experience amounted to, I was perfectly okay with that. It was one of those things where half of the importance to me was just to do it. Whatever came out of it was mostly bonus, and the interaction had already been positive. It was also, as it turned out, just beginning.

Part III: The Whistling

Sr. Tomayo asked us if we would like to have him and his wife perform a ceremony on us, and we said yes. What that meant, we had no idea, but I had quietly been hoping that some sort of formal healing would come out of this.

The first stop was to the bathroom, which was an outhouse- the sort where dainty Westerners like us try not to touch anything while using it. The time spent waiting for the other one involved the closest thing that either of us had to small talk with Sr. Tomayo. His slow, measured way of speaking meant that there wasn't a lot of conversational space to fill, and he talked to both of us about the mountains in the area and their various spirits and energies.

From there we proceeded into a long, dark room that wasn't much fancier than the ones we had seen so far, but did feel more like a room where a shamanic ceremony might happen. Sr. Tomayo told us that the healing would involve a general cleaning of our energy fields, and additionally would address Rachel's work and my heart. The procedure was not different for each of us, other than, perhaps, the intentions that our two shamans were holding during it. It cost $40/person.

He showed us the tools of his trade that would be involved in the ceremony. They were stones of a size that would fit in your palm, rose water, aguardiente (sugar-cane liquor), tobacco (traditionally, American shamans would use tobacco leaves rolled up or in a pipe, but these days, many, including Esteban Tomayo, just use cigarettes), eggs (in shell), and a fragrant brush, most-likely sage, that resembled a feather duster. Each had a sacredness to it, and a specific purpose in cleaning our energy field. (His wife had been going in and out of the room, getting things ready, but she was there the whole time once things got going.)

He checked with us one more time to make sure that we were on board for this, we affirmed, and it was time to begin.

He lit two candles, and stated that each would represent one of us for the ceremony. He had us remove our shirts (by good fortune, Rachel happened to be wearing a sports bra that day) and stand in the middle of the room with enough space between us that we could stick out our arms and not bump into each other.

They began chanting, which they did more or less continuously throughout the experience. It was neither particularly loud nor obscure. Just a steady repetition calling for our spirits to walk with the spirits of the mountain, of Pachamama (Mama Earth), of nature, and so on. He and his wife handed us each a stone and covered it with the rose water and told us to use it like soap to wash ourselves. When we were done they went over our bodies, holding one stone on a certain spot, the middle of the chest for instance, and tapping it with another stone. I had to bow my head so that Esteban could reach the top of it.

After that came the aguardiente... and the first major surprise. (We weren't expecting anything in particular, but there were some things we really weren't expecting.) He had us hold our arms out to our sides, and then he and his wife walked behind us with aguardiente in hand, chanting the whole time. Then, without any warning that I was aware of, he took some liquor in his mouth and sprayed it at our backs (I don't remember who got it first, I just remember hoping Rachel was okay with all of this). That happened a few times on both sides. It was bizarre and, in a strange way, thrilling.

We "washed" ourselves again with rose water covered rocks (that happened after every step), while Sr. and Sra. Tomayo prepared for the next step. The next part was much like the previous, with one added element: a candle (not either of the ones that represented Rachel and me). Even as Esteban was walking behind us, chanting, holding the bottle of aguardiente in one hand and a candle in the other, I didn't anticipate what was about to happen. He had us turn perpendicular to him with arms out, stood a few paces away, took some aguardiente in his mouth and used it and the candle to breathe fire at us! He did this at least twice on both of us (once per side). The plume of flame was large, and came close to my arm, but I never felt afraid- I trusted Sr. Tomayo to know what he was doing. It was more surreal than anything else. Each step on our journey leading up to that moment, to Ecuador itself, to Otavalo, to Carabuela, to that room, was a further step away from my normal reality. Esteban Tomayo breathing fire at us was the pinnacle of other-worldness for that whole experience.

The remainder of the ceremony involved both Tomayos rubbing us with the eggs (they thankfully did not break), blessing us and our "washing stones" with cigarette smoke and whacking us from head to toe with the sage brush. While he used the brush, he whistled. It was a haunting and beautiful whistle, the sort you might be asked to imagine when reading a fairy tale.

Part IV: New Songs

When it was all done, Sr. Tomayo returned to his seat on the other side of the room with the two candles. He said a closing blessing that acknowledged us, the candles and the healing. We thanked him many times, said goodbye and went outside. We did the same for his wife, who had returned to the little room she was in when we first approached.

We left glowing. It was sort of like the glow that stays with you after getting really good news, but this glow felt higher, and not attached to any particular item. We felt up and happy and alive. Most of all, we felt reset. All the stories and issues that we had been carrying around had been scrubbed off, and we were just ourselves. There was space to reassess the wiry mental structures that are generally part of my day-to-day life, and to see how snugly they fit. I even felt that dreams that I had realismed out of consideration had new life.

Dreamchange, John Perkins' organization mentioned above got its name from something a shaman in Ecuador told him (it was in the jungle, so it probably wasn't Tomayo, but I suppose it could have been). From Perkins' The Secret History of the American Empire (Penguin Group, 2007),

"The world is as you dream it," he told me. "Your people dreamed of huge factories, tall buildings, as many cars as there are raindrops in this river. Now you begin to see that this dream is a nightmare."
I asked what I could do to help.
"That's simple," he replied. "All you have to do is change the dream... You need only plant a seed. Teach your children to dream new dreams."

After our experience with Esteban Tomayo, that wisdom of dreams, and how they can change, was somehow apparent. No one needed to say it. It was as true as love and gravity.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Post-campaign I got lots of praise and thank-yous. There was many a "good job" and "thank you for your service," (which I'll admit feels pretty appropriate), and a friend of my roommate who stayed with us after the election bought me coffee and a donut for "bringing change we can believe in to North Carolina." And that was awesome. But the one I always come back to, the thing that solidifies that whole experience as worthwhile (I never questioned that it was, but it's nice to have little moments to crystallize things) is when my friend Aria told me she didn't recognize me at first when I got back. She figured I was my own cousin or something like that, and I don't think it had anything to do with a tan or facial hair. I think (and those of you who know Aria will back me up here), she recognized some sort of transformation that occured over those three months.

Part of it was the sheer volume of work. There's something transformative, hopefully positively so, about pushing yourself to a limit, any limit, because "to a limit" usually means beyond those limits. When you wake up after it all ends, you're a person with new, farther limits.

There was also the stranger in a strange land element. I honestly felt more out of place in southern North Carolina than I did during my year in Japan, but to be fair, no one expected me to act Japanese, so it was easier to define my space and self in Japan than it was in Richmond where every new acquiantancing started with some sort of tacit "See, I'm not from here." Constantly defining myself made me examine my lines more than usual. Never before had I considered how I fit the archetypes of "northener" and "yankee." As the Richmond County perspective seeped in a little, unusual (for me) thoughts and feelings would come out of my own mind. My decision to not eat meat felt snootier. My feelings on spirituality felt removed and over-intellectual. The fact that I had been asked to do little more than read, write and think for most of my life... not that I'd never considered that, but breathing RC air for three months gave me a new take on it.

Beyond all that, and at least partly because of all that, reality just seemed to play by subtly different rules down there. Perhaps it was the overall backdrop that contributed the most to that. I'm in Berkeley now (so far, every bit as awesome as advertised), and when the sublime and/or ridiculous happens here, it feels like NoCal tossing me a little extra sunshine from its perpetual surplus. When something truly nutty happened in Richmond, it was like a walrus in the living room. It was frogs and snakes falling from the sky or Curly spontaneously combusting while Larry and Moe merely feel a draft. Everything there was in a different context, and so the meaning was different too, and the whole poetry of experience was brand new for me.


So, all of that and more for three months, plus six weeks in Durham on the front end. That'll change a guy (or gal), and that's a big reason why I did it. I wasn't in a rut exactly, and I don't think I had gotten complacent, but, like the country, I needed a change.

That said, after three months of Richmond, I can't even describe how good it felt to go home.

Ecua-blog!

I just got back from two weeks in beautiful Ecuador. Two weeks isn't really enough to really hit all of Ecuador. Another month or so might have done the trick, but it would be easy enough to do a month volunteering at the Andean Bear reserve. As for the two weeks that did happen (and not the months of travel Rachel and I have dreamed up at various times- prepare yourself Easter Island!) there are many stories, but first I wanted to empty my head of a few facts and observations from my time there. Maybe after that we'll get to a few stories. Ready, set, jet:

In Quito (the capital) it is very common for pedestrians to run across the street to avoid cars. It is simply a cultural acknowledgment that in many situations, a person can cross the street if the car slows down, or if their feet speed up. In most cultures I've been in, the general choice is that the car slows down, unless it's the car's turn, in which case the pedestrian just waits. Travelling Ecuadorians seem to only use the turn taking system when the other option involves the hospital.

In a similar vein, the driving is free-form, unless there is an immediate physical reason to fall into line. If you think about it, there's usually space for a passing lane in the combined empty space in most two-lane, two-direction roads. Everyone just needs to move over a little. It's easy enough, as long as you're not completely terrified by the whole idea, which none of our drivers was, and we only were some of the time.

A guy we met at a hostal said they had a near miss on a bus. I didn't think much of that comment, because saying that in Ecuador is sort of like saying you almost bumped into someone on the train at rush hour in New York. It was only clear how near his miss was when he said that the bus driver pulled over to catch his breath and steady himself while all the passengers yelled at him for almost killing them.

Enough bus- Cotopaxi is the highest peak in Ecuador and an active volcano. According to our guide, it last went off 100 years ago, and so the citizens of the nearby villages (which are very much in range, should it go off again) are not worried. I can't recall if that's because 100 years is a long time for a human (it's been forever) or a short time for a volcano (it's not due for a while) or a long time for a volcano (it seems done for now), but as long as they're living there anyway, I'm glad they feel safe.

A full moon will make it harder to spot caiman, because they like to have as much darkness as possible. You spot them by shining a flashlight around the shores of the river and looking for their glowing red eyes.

There is a town called Iluman that has a shaman collective with hundreds of members.

We met a shaman in the amazon who is a mere well-informed mortal by day, but at night, when he takes ayahuasca, he can look into your soul and describe what ails you on the level of raw energy.

One day I hope to take that potion, but our actual introduction to shamanic ceremonies of South America was perfect. You'll have to stay tuned for that though.

In Ecuador, sometimes there are large rocks in the middle of the road. Not often, but more often than never.

I'm a big 1 for 1 in hitch-hiking.

You can make an awesome bread out of yucca root.

All this time, you people have been keeping possibly the best part of the cacao plant from me: the gooey stuff around the beans! It's colorful, sweet and nutritious! Was anyone going to mention this, or did you want me to figure this out on my own?

Church (1)

I don’t know what YOU came here for, but I came to PRAISE the LORD!!!
I mean, hello again.
One of the coolest parts of my job as a community organizer was that I had to go to church every Sunday. It was a black church every time except one Sunday when I was going to go to one church, but for some reason that didn’t work out, so a friend took me to a mixed church. That’s the one I’m going to write about this time, though the other churches deserve at least one post.
The black churches I went to all had a choir, and usually a drummer and keyboardist, but the mixed church had a full band. Actually they had at least two full bands. There were three or four guitarists, a couple of drummers, a lot of people singing, some of them into microphones, and I don’t need to tell you who was the most into it of anyone, it was the chick on the tambourine. It’s practically a law of nature that what tambourine players lack in range of instrument, they make up for in raw passion. They sounded good, and I’m not just saying that.
This church was the most consciously interactive of any that I went to. It might have been too much for me, but it was also really big- probably at least 100 people there- so if you weren’t rocking as hard as most around you, it didn’t make you stand out too much. At most of the other churches I went to, the bulk of the time was given to cultivating a good “Jesus high.” At this one, it was of the utmost important that you feel God’s love, that you are purified by his holy light.
(A quick word before things get out of hand. I think church is awesome. I don’t feel the need to make it part of my life, I don’t feel the need to draw hard lines around my spirituality, and I definitely don’t need to get it from one particular source. I’m sure some of my personal feelings are going to seep through here, but I’m not trying to endorse or anti-endorse anyone else’s choices.)
Once we were all feeling good and charged up from the music and the singing, the service proper began. The pastor was charismatic, non-judgmental, and carried a biblical wisdom to him. He was absolutely going to save as many souls as he could. To him, there was a very direct line between sinning and misfortune. He passionately told a story about trying to save a boy who had lost God. But he couldn’t. The boy drowned. This, to him, was not a coincidence. And you know what you have to do if you’ve been sinning, you need to confess… in front of everyone. Okay, maybe you don’t need to do that, but it sure helps…
I’m going to cut to the chase here: Not one, not two, but three, three different people over the course of the lengthy confession/sharing part of the morning announced their addiction to pornography on stage. At one point the pastor said “This is the difference between life and death here.” It was cathartic for all of them. There was no laughter or derision. These men had sinned, but now they were asking for God’s forgiveness, and who was going to argue with that.
I don’t think that morning did anything to advance the Obama campaign in Richmond county, but I’m really glad I went. For starters, you cannot understand church culture without going to see it. I see it as a lot of things, but perhaps most as an organized way of getting high. The experience is facilitated and mediated by a very specific set of beliefs (in the case of church). It doesn’t have to involve any sort of belief, it can come from music, drugs, (especially) community- anything that makes you feel connected to something big. The phrase “bigger than yourself,” is used frequently, which is fine, but I don’t like to imply separation- the whole idea is that YOU are big. Whether that comes from being a part of a god that plays by Judeo-Christain rules, or from being a child of mama Gaia, or from something more abstract that has less to do with a belief and more to do with a feeling.
For those folks, they are a part of a very special club, and if that means that they occasionally have to announce their masturbation habits in front of their friends and family (!), well, ego is nothing in the face of God’s love and acceptance. And it basically works for them. It may involve some brutal guilt sometimes, and much more (I don’t really know), and I would feel a little more comfortable with it all if I got more of a sense of choice of belief/lifestyle/the whole shebang, but at the end of the day I don’t have many judgments to pass out here.
That said, for those 3ish hours, I felt not at all like an organizer and very much like an anthropologist.

Waking Dream (life, blue jays)

The night before last I couldn't sleep a wink, so I stayed up until 7 playing video games and writing about the Toronto Blue Jays. Life is so strange, but I like it very much.

The Harmony of Dog and Tail

It's been a little while since I posted, so I thought I'd check in. If there's anything you'd really like to read a post about (from me) then let me know, because I feel we've entered the request part of the evening.

I had a thought the other day on why I still shudder a little when I really think about life on the campaign. The long hours were part of it, as was the pressure of how much the whole thing mattered (compounded by the organizational layers that existed to remind of that pressure), but I think it was something a little more fundamental. To be a field organizer, I had to be a slightly different thing than I'm used to being. If I'm a point I was in a different location. If I'm a vector I was pointed in a different direction. If I'm a polygon then my sides were stretched a little differently. If I'm a song, the chord progression changed a little. If I'm a sandwich, I had more celery. Yes dear reader, the Obama campaign made me into a celery sandwich.

I had to lean on people more than I like to. I had to find the cracks in other people's armor and wiggle my way into their lives. I had to interrupt people at dinner. I had to convince people that calling other people while they are at dinner, or even better, knocking on their doors, is way way more helpful than your f***ing yard sign. People wanted him to win, and they wanted to help, but they didn't want to help outside of their own comfort zone (I'm speaking of 95% of people here. I am infinitely thankful for the other 5%). And that's not because people are bad, it's because people are people, and I generally prefer not to ask people to be much more or much other than they are, but I had a job to do.

I don't know that the answer is, but wouldn't it be nice if politics wasn't so obscure? I mean, my job was to call strangers to get them to call other strangers and either convince them to vote Obama, or convince them to join them in calling from a targeted list of strangers. There was plenty more, but that sums up a lot of it. The whole system was articulated when things were smaller and much more based on agriculture. The needs of the me and the we were mostly known and tangible. The structure of decision-making was based on those sorts of conditions. Now we have that same structure stretched over the massive monster that is today's U.S. of A. The tail that was designed to wag in accordance with the wishes and moods of the dog has become more conscious and more powerful. Now we've got cluster and fuck pointing fingers at each other and asking for your money and support to prevent the other side from clustering or fucking you (depending on where your allegiances lie).

Still, once in a while something more true and more honest, something more about the dog than the tail comes along. I felt Obama was one of those people/phenomena, and was so badly needed now. So I went on a vision quest, a mission to mars, a journey to the south, to a place only loosely connected to where I'm from in time and space. I'm different now in ways that I only partially understand, but I feel better. Not only that, but our president is Barack Obama, and our VP is not Sarah Palin. In the last paragraph I kind of implied that the ideas that form our government are based on conditions that no longer apply, but I will say this: we just pulled off a major revolution without shedding a single drop of blood, and there aren't many places in the world where that is possible.

Call Time

I've mentioned call time here before, but I haven't really done it justice yet. I can't even think about it without having a visceral reaction- not entirely negative, but, well, I'll do my best to describe it.

There were plenty of rules, guidelines, goals, and the like for us field organizers, but none was hit harder than this one: call time is sacred. It was usually 3 hours a day when I started. It moved up to 4 on most days after that, and by the time election day had appeared on the horizon we were doing 5 every weekday, none on Saturday (though none sometimes turned into 3) and 4 on Sunday.

90% of that was volunteer recruitment. Usually it was 100%, but there were a few weeks when half of it was persuasion. One pleasant surprise: I loved and kicked ass at persuasion. Sometimes it took 10 minutes, but if someone wasn't already on one side or the other, I could often bring them over to Obama. Sadly, after a few weeks of that, the higher-ups decided it would be more efficient to have us do vol recruitment the whole time and have the volunteers do the persuading. Maybe that was true, but 4 hours of volunteer recruitment could be excruciating.

Here's what a great call time would be like for me: Before it started (usually around 4 or 5), I would nip over to the CVS and pick up snacks (usually trail mix and/or cookies) and, if it felt right, the energy drink called Rumba. I wouldn't call it healthy, but it's fruit juice based and doesn't have high fructose corn syrup for what that's worth. Right before I got started with the calls I would say to myself: "Let's get ready to Rumba!" then I would crack open my beverage and flip open my phone.

Looking at those words, I feel slightly ridiculous, but given the task at hand, anything to get me pumped up helped. The job was to make roughly 30 calls per hour for 4 hours straight. Ideally I would tear through a bunch in the first two hours so that I would have time for breaks. When I was really rumbling, I could do 40-50 an hour. On some nights I might be close to 100 by around the midway point. Even better, I might have had some success at the actual point of call time which was to turn people into volunteers. With some success in the first half, I could relax a little more in the last hour or so.

I would have a really good night of calls maybe once or twice a week. The other nights were mostly average and sometimes crappy. When I say average, I mean average for spending 4 consecutive hours calling strangers and asking them to volunteer their time (check the "Volunteer Ask" post if you want more of that story). You sort of get used to it, but it never really breezed by and was over before I knew it. There were two main things that could make call time fun and satisfying: Rumba and success. Snacks made it more tolerable. I had snacks almost every night, Rumba I tried to keep to a few times a week and success came and went like warm days in March or good news during the Bush administration.

Of course there was a substitute for Rumba or coffee or whatever and that was actual energy. I have some of that these days. I feel more healthy and alive, less drowsy and propped up by caffeine. I would put myself at around a 6 or 7 on most days. By September I hung around 4, and could clamber up to the midpoint with coffee. By October it was more like 2 or 3, as close to crashing as I was to normal, often closer. The best part of my day was when I went home and had some dinner, while I sunk into a chair and Rachel Maddow would say, "You'll never guess what McCain said today." The whole idea of feeling good as a general state, like when you get enough sleep, eat well, get some exercise, that sort of thing, was simply not on the table until after the election. It took at least a month till after it was all done before I really felt "back."

In a way the most impressive thing about the campaign was that they got us to do stuff like that. It took constant nudging, but they got us stressed, sleep-deprived warriors to start at 9am, work through the day, and then when most people would be finishing up, pull out our phones and make calls for 4 friggin hours. And that wasn't even the end of the work day.