Good Strange Things, Vol. III

There was one night on the campaign that I would describe as storybook style magical. There were lots of intense moments. Too many? Whatever, it's over. There were moments of elation and defeat. Moments of blowing past my quotas and moments of having no hope of making them. There were moments of everyone being giddy with Sarah Palin, followed by cathartic moments of Sarah Palin becoming a joke. Anyway, there were all varieties of moments in those three months.

This one was joyful and absurd.

So, remember the Obamamercial? The Obama campaign raised a lot of money. Do you know how much? Bush raised $250 million in 2004, but Kerry actually stormed past him and was up around $300. Obama spent $200 million on the primary. He spent about three-quarters of a billion dollars total. Not joking. For what it's worth, they gave us a month's pay as a bonus, and I'm typing on the laptop that they gave me to do my job. Anyway, it was revealed a month or so before the election that Obama had bought 45 consecutive minutes of ad space on all the major networks five days before the election. I was excited. My buddy Evan was nervous, he thought it would backfire.

On the night of the Obamamercial I was doing what I did nearly every night: making 3-5 hours of calls. I was also, at this stage of things, really really tired. The pressure to get through these calls was immense. It was kind of the lifeblood of the job, and a nightly slog, so calltime was sacred and there was no arguing with that. On this night the fatigue caught up to me. I was failing. I would take an inordinate amount of time to move from one call to the next, and I found myself doing the extremely-tired-stare from time to time. When the Obamamercial came on, I put it on in the background, but after a few calls I gave in. I was going to sit and watch the guy who I was doing all this stuff for.

My friend Lois, bald, talked more like a New Yorker than a Southener and cool as school, walked in. She flopped down in a chair and we commiserated on fatigue. The election was making everyone fatigued, but we were doing the legwork. The 45 minute piece was well-reviewed, did well in the polls and was therapeutic for me. Don't worry, Obama's got it all under control.

Midway through, Lois turns to me and says, "Hey who's that with the Obama truck? Have you talked to THEM about volunteering?"

???

I look out the big front window to see "the Obama bus" spray-painted playfully across the side of a van. It was pulling up in front of my office on an otherwise deserted night in late October. Two guys and a girl, all college-age and wearing funny homemade shirts hop out. They came into the office, gave us hugs and handed us t-shirts.

Their story as best I can remember it: They were from California. They had been deeply inspired by Barack Obama. Inspired to get in a van and drive through every swing state, spreading Obama love and good cheer. They had a blog with a map of all the places they'd been and the places they would be, and it showed a jagged line going across, then up, then down, then east again across the country. For reasons I don't know, they were driving through my dusty little county. They were not looking for me. They did not know that there was an Obama office in this town. They stumbled on me by providence.

We chatted for a while. They sharing their story, we sharing ours, both of us marveling that our paths happened to cross. Come to think of it, they might have been the only people not worn down by the campaign at that point. They were still full of magic. They gave me a much needed push toward the finish, got back in their van and went their merry way.

Here's the shirt they gave me, modeled by a certain someone who I gave it to after the election:
Pretty sweet huh? I was wearing it the next day when I heard the guy in the diner say, "I don't think Obama's a terrorist, but I think he's maybe a little more of a terrorist than John McCain."

This concludes the "Good Strange Things" series. Bizong.

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.

Secret Post!

Alright Wonkavator fans, here's the deal: I do have a post ready to go, but, I'm not going to put it in this space. The reason is that it is about someone specific, and while I don't think he (or maybe even she) reads this blog, you can never be sure on the ol' interweb. Back in 2003 (I think) when the internet was just starting to unfold into the beast it is now (it was the Friendster internet), I had a formative internet moment. There was a girl who went to college with me, and I had never talked to her, but I knew who she was, mostly by virtue of going to a school with 2800 other students. This girl was, for lack of a more accurate word, mannish. Eventually, rumors started to circulate that she in fact used to be a man. I'm a big believer in "to each their own," but we couldn't help being curious. Using nothing but her name, a logical guess on what her male name might have been, and of course google (just starting to take over), I was able to confirm this in 10 minutes. I didn't do anything fancy either. I googled one name, then the other, and that was enough. To repeat, I didn't know her personally, and within 10 minutes I was able to confirm that she had had a sex change. Maybe that's not as weird these days, but that was my first real moment of the internet revealing more information than it necessarily should. I'm all for the free spread of information, but maybe people should be able to have a sex change without it being public knowledge.

Anyway, the point is that once something is out there, you can't control what happens to it (the other point is that I think that story is amazing in a sort of sick way and I felt like telling it). Therefore, if you want to read the most recent post, you need to send me an email or let me know in the comments section or something.

And for what it's worth, I wouldn't bother with this story at all, but I feel like it ought to be told in some form. Curious, aren't you. The ball is in your court- whack it back!

Good Strange Things vol. 2

By October I was in a sort of altered state most of the time. I don't mean on drugs other than caffeine, which was certainly part of my state, and the occasional after-work drink. I mean I was fatigued in a way that I knew wouldn't go away fully into I really got to rest, and I knew that would not happen until after the election. At that point the election was just starting to appear on the horizon, but it was still a ways off. I accepted this reality without argument, which made me more able to live with it, but the work day rarely sailed by. I would generally go to sleep relaxed and wake up the same way, but once the day started all bets were off. There were days that I felt like I wasn't holding up my own body, rather I was draping it over the structure implied by my schedule and my superiors expectations. When I took a break, I relaxed hard and hoped it lasted, because if someone came into the office, I would jump back up and greet them.

I was finishing up a late lunch, waiting for me to tell myself I needed to get back to work on October 11th (gmail search), when a small, middle-aged, Indian (from India) man came in and started peering at the various things on the walls of the Richmond County Democratic Headquarters. He didn't seem to require any assistance, nor did he really look like he was looking to volunteer, so I let him do his thing and enjoyed the end of my break.

Eventually I gave him a "Hi, can I help you?" or one of those. We exchanged pleasantries, and he mentioned that he was from India. I told him that I've been to India, which was a shock to him. A lot of Richmond Countians hadn't seen much outside of the Carolinas, let alone another continent, let alone Asia. All of a sudden we were having a spirited conversation. He talked about how he liked all the Democratic candidates, how he came from Mumbai to here because his son lives here and has a clothing shop (I think). We talked about India, Gandhi, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, the Ganges- at first he didn't know what I was talking about because I was saying "the Ganges", and to him it's "the Gunga."

We talked for a while, and by the time we were done I felt refreshed. We quietly appreciated each other for unexpectedly providing a conversation that neither of us could have had with anyone else in Richmond County. I really don't have a problem with your typical resident of the RC, but I had seen a lot of them over the last two months, and to meet someone who fit a completely different description was very refreshing. I think he mentioned meditation at some point, and he had a subtle wisdom that I associate with meditators. As for him, I can only speculate as to how long it had been since he'd met a stranger who had been to his homeland, but I expect those were few and far between.

Eventually the time came for him to go and for me to get back to work, and the conversation came to a natural end. He stepped toward the door and then stopped and turned around, to say something. At that moment it was like everything up to that point was leisure time, but there was one point of business- wise little Indian men don't just wander into your office for no reason after all. He had a message for me, and he wasn't going to leave until I heard it. I looked up at him, and he said this:"I am sixty years of age. I am very healthy. No diabetes, no heartburn, no (something)."

I asked him how he does it

"Vegetables and hard work."
Somehow that was the perfect conclusion to the whole thing. I never saw him again, nor did I need to. We had given each other a boost, and he had passed on a little piece of truth to me. I wouldn't get many more, but life was expected to be hard then, and a little something like that every week or so was all I needed.

Inauguration Wrap-Up

So now he's president, and together we enter a brave new world.

The inauguration itself was... an experience. I'm definitely glad I went, but I'm in no hurry to do it again (not that the option is there). The area around our assigned security checkpoint had some signage, but not nearly enough. People found out where to go mostly by asking other people waiting in line. There were a few staff people who appeared infrequently, and had nothing but their own voices to try to direct people. After some searching, Rachel and I found our line. It went down one block, turned a corner, down another block, then turned into a tunnel (as in, the type that cars drive through on a normal day). Despite the knowledge that the inauguration crowd would be larger than all but a few U.S. cities, I still didn't quite have the mental capacity to anticipate the length of this line. It spanned the aforementioned two or three city blocks, went into the tunnel, went all the way through the tunnel and then a ways- probably the equivalent of another two city blocks- on the other side. I wasn't bothering to keep track, but we were probably in line for about an hour before we reentered the tunnel, and at least another two inside the tunnel.

It was cold, and it would have been an angry and miserable time had it not been probably the greatest cause for celebration I've ever seen in my lifetime. People were taking any excuse to be happy. At one point, a confusing and unnecessary backward curve developed in the line due to a few people lining up on a ramp leading into the tunnel, and a few more following their lead. Everyone immediately sensed that the curve should not have been created, but it couldn't be undone right away without a few thousand people backing up a few steps. Instead, a man with a deep booming voice (a shrill voiced person tried first, but her words weren't connecting) got everyone behind the part that curved up to wait patiently while the line gradually moved enough so that the people who were ahead of the others in line, but behind them in space to catch up, so that the line straightened out, and the curve, that was making us all anxious (line psychology) was undone. We all cheered. That might not be the normal reaction to getting a line of people slightly more organized, but on that day it was the only reaction anyone thought to have.

People were chanting and singing through the tunnel. At one point a wave went down the line. No one wanted to be in that line in the cold, but it just wasn't a day for being pissed off. That was a good thing, because things would soon get worse. We were in the line that made the news, because after we made it out of the tunnel (getting out of there almost felt like being born), down the block, around the corner... news started to travel that our gate had been closed- there was a problem with the metal detector (there were a few stories floating around, all we knew for sure was that there was an ambiguous security problem). That left several thousand purple ticket holders, many of them campaign staff and volunteers, in a huge cluster, wondering if and how they would get in.

Eventually the next gate over opened up, and everyone who had a purple ticket and a few people who didn't went for that gate. There was some order on the other side of the gate, but none on our side. It was literally a 180 degree crowd all trying to cram into the same small opening. I don't think anyone was trying to push forward, but there was literally constant pressure from the force of the crowd behind me. I was a little scared. It wouldn't take much for someone to get badly hurt or even killed. If someone fell, there wasn't necessarily enough space for people to back off enough for that person to get up. The crowd was getting more restless by the minute, breaking into chants every few minutes. The main ones were "Purple! Purple!" which I was okay with and "Let us in!" which I wasn't. They had a good enough reason to be frustrated, but it's not like the cops and staff managing the bottleneck could have done much more (though on the flipside, they weren't doing much other than looking perturbed and worried).

We made it in minutes before he was sworn in. After 8 years of horror and six hours standing in line, the long wait finally came to an end. People cheered, canons went off, and the Bushes got into a helicopter, and then an airplane that took them to a part of the country where George can leave his house without having to worry about someone kicking him in the balls.

I'm glad I went, but not so much for the swearing-in or even the speech. Years from now I'll proudly tell people that I was there, but the real treat was seeing an entire city so happy. There is no amount of celebration that could be too much for this. It's like the first real day of spring when you step outside and it feels warm and wonderful. After a winter that lasted more or less my entire adult life until Tuesday, this shot of sunshine feels better than the rest, and everyone in that huge crowd felt it.

One more thing: Everyone else has said this already, but I'm going to say it too, because it's important. We didn't deserve or get Obama because we had suffered so much under Bush, we deserved and got him because we worked for it. It happened to take an enormous amount of work but we can already see how worth it it was. I mention this because the things out there worth working for didn't end on November 4th. In fact, they became more available on that day. The sun is shining, and those of us who have spent a lot of this winter in hibernation might take a chance on waking up and taking the plunge into the big and amazing unknown.

Good Strange Things (vol. 1)

Once in a while, something magical happened. Amid the grey slog, in the middle of the trudge through the swamp, a burst of sunshine would appear, a moment infused with light and color would lift me up. Maybe it’s what happens when you work hard, or when you really need it, or in accordance with some sort of cosmic rhythm beyond my grasp- or maybe it just happens. I don’t know. I’m just glad that those moments do happen, not least because they had a funny tendency to show up when I was at some sort of low.

My car broke down (for the first, not last, time) one sunny afternoon. I was on the highway, not close to anything in particular, except for a house where no one was home. I called a towing service, and found a shady spot to wait. I had half an hour or so, and I took some time to think about the operation I was trying to create in Richmond County. I needed volunteers and I needed to up my voter registration numbers. I was short of where I wanted to be in volunteer numbers almost every day. At points I had some weekly participants who helped keep the flow a little steadier, but as a general rule I needed more volunteers than I had.

I took a minute to present my wish list to the universe. I don’t mean to get into a whole discussion about what that means, so I’ll just say this. This is not quite praying, or an attempt to make a deal with a higher force. It’s more of a “Hey universe, if you want to conspire some things in my direction, I could really use some volunteers and better voter reg numbers.” The trick to asking for something like that is to forget about it as soon as you’ve said your piece. If you hang on to your wishes, they can’t fly high enough to do anything. If this paragraph didn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry about it.

The tow truck came, and as it did I get a phone call from a woman who had gotten my name and number somehow, and wanted to volunteer. She was available to come in the very next day. Great. The rest of my day was spent dealing with my car situation and figuring out how I was going to get around until my car got fixed.

The next day I got a call as I was getting up from “Jon.” I met a lot of people and it was hard to keep track of all of them, so I pretended to know him until he told me that I didn’t. He also told me that he could bring me 40 filled-out voter registration forms that day, and that he had 200 more. Let me put this in perspective: my quota was 13 a day. I was generally happy with anything double digits for a given day. 20 or more was golden. My single day maximum was around 30- maybe lower. I was happy enough to be able to get into my office that day. To have someone hand over numbers like that out of the blue left me speechless. On top of that, when Jon came by the office to give me the forms, he gave me the names and numbers of about 10 really solid volunteers. Not every one panned out, but even 3 solids is a huge boost.

That’s how it happened so often. I would scratch and claw and grind for results, and it was never quite enough, and then someone would walk in and give me everything I needed. That happened a few times on the volunteer front, but the other two occurrences that come to mind didn’t get me any volunteers. They were strange and powerful though, so stay tuned.