Wonkavator

Candidate list redux

2011-07-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

It's been about a month since I posted my thoughts on the Republican candidates, and already much of what I wrote is out of date. Even with a giant bushel of caveats about how this stuff is impossible to predict, we are already comfortably outside the realm of where I thought this thing was going. Hopefully everything I'm about to write will be turned on its head again-- this is still at the stage where I find this lower and middle school tumbling show immensely entertaining.

Once again, I will list the candidates in the order of likelihood (according to me, obviously) that they will be the Republican nominee for president of the United States in 2012. Top up my wine, if you will.

1. Mitt Romney
Every narrative below him has changed, but Mitt Romney is still The Frontrunner. He is polling in first in Iowa and New Hampshire, he's raised the most money by a healthy margin, and, going by the media narratives, no one cares all that much that he's Mormon. He still seems plenty beatable, but that will likely require a shrewd, focused campaign, which, as we will see, has been tough to come by so far. I would still take the field over Romney, but no individual candidate has convinced me they will take him down.

As with last time, I am confounded by who to pick next. There are three people I am thinking about here, and they are all fairly problematic. Let's go with...

2. Rick Perry
There are two problems with this pick. One is that Perry, the current governor of Texas, is the media narrative du jour, and those always look better than they are. The other problem is that he is not officially in the race yet. This is a very clever campaign move. It keeps him in the news (every day there is a headline like, "Perry Hints to [news source] That He Is Close to a Decision), and it also keeps him intriguing. One of the hardest things about campaigns is having people still like you once they actually know you. By not entering yet, Perry is holding off the more substantial vetting for a little while. It also keeps him separate from the narrative of this field of candidates, which is similar to that of airplane coffee (that said, I had a coffee on a Virgin America flight, and it was stellar).

There's another thing about Rick Perry, something that may come more into play when he announces: he is super super religious. Enough to possibly freak out less religious republicans. I don't have all the details on that one right now, but I bet he is already out-Godding all the other candidates. I hope his presence in the race forces Tim Pawlenty to say some hilariously awkward stuff about God. I hope this for my own amusement.

3. Michele Bachmann
I started another post about the power of Iowa, largely because the somewhat arbitrary gift of being the first state to vote- or more precisely, to caucus- makes certain candidates viable, and one of them is Bachmann. I still don't think she can actually win, but hell, she's being considered. She's polling second to Romney in Iowa. She has, so far done the most to consolidate the large swarm of voters more conservative than Romney. Remember, only the republicans are voting here, so it doesn't matter that half the country thinks she is insane. It does matter that she is probably too much for the "mainstream" wing of the party. If Perry doesn't run or doesn't take off, and neither does Cain or one of the others, she will be in decent position. The fact that Bachmann has at least some chance to be president, is a symptom of what ails this country. I don't think it will metastasize, but... geez, things are weird right now.

4. Tim Pawlenty
I don't know why, after hearing the Pawlenty car make so many noises that would make you pull over right away, I still think he has a shot. He was "supposed" to be the main challenger in the same way that Romney was supposed to be the frontrunner. Instead, he has been polling in single digits since the beginning, and he was replaced by Rick Perry in Public Policy Polling's polls because his support was too low to warrant inclusion.

SIDE NOTE: Polls can be self-fulfilling prophecies, of course, but this was the first time I have thought about how a polling agency can affect viability just by who they include. Would Buddy Roemer start to gain traction if people started asking about him? Could someone tell republican voters that they have a candidate named Buddy Roemer?

Back to T-Paw, he does have a few things going for him. His foil is now Michele Bachmann, who is just about the easiest person to look reasonable in comparison to. Romney is trying to downplay the meaning of Iowa (his loss there was the beginning of the end for him last time), and Pawlenty is going hard for it. Bachmann may be peaking, and once her 17% support wake up from their collective, "I just had the strangest dream," perhaps they will see that Pawlenty is well organized and very conservative, and they won't mind his unexciting, vaguely annoying personality. If he can get Romney one on one, I think people would start to like him more, because enough people can't stand Romney.

On that note, I think everyone's strategy is to get Romney one on one and them treat him like a sucky incumbent. I think Mitt tries to have a big enough lead before that happens for it not to matter.

5. Jon Huntsman
Running for president requires a major commitment of time and energy. Whatever happens, the world will probably never look at you the same way. For these reasons, I'm sure everyone on this list is taking the task seriously. For other reasons, I can't tell if Jon Huntsman is. For starters, before he officially started his campaign, it was really difficult to find his website. Once you did, you got to watch this. Go ahead and watch. Then watch the next two. I'll wait.

If you are tuned into this sort of thing, you might be thinking, "this is the most surreal political ad since I am not a witch, or the epic and peerless Demon Sheep." (Watch those too, if you haven't, they are A-MAZING.)
All three were made by the same guy, Fred Davis. Now, all of those ads make me really happy, but if I were seeking the office of president, I would not hire Fred Davis. If an aide suggested I do, I would probably think they were joking. If you go to Huntsman's website now, you get to watch walk up some stairs, greet a few people in a large, otherwise empty room, then one of them (Carol Campbell- I'd never heard of him) announce to about ten people that he is endorsing Huntsman.

6. Herman Cain
On my last list I had him second. Bachmann has basically done what I thought he would. Cain's top person in Iowa quit because Cain "wasn't trying hard enough in Iowa." Dude, Iowa is where you should be trying the hardest. What I want to know is if he is still saying he would not sign any bill longer than three pages. That's every bill, so maybe he has replaced that with, "I will not sign bills."

7. Everyone else
Gingrich, Santorum, Paul, Roemer and the rest of you, just have a poker night, winner gets everyone else's voters. Buddy Roemer wants to remake our campaign finance system, and is not excepting donations larger than $1,000. Someone please vote for him.

I Watched the Republican Debate so You Don't Have To

2011-06-16T14:59:00.000-07:00

Yes, yes I did. Most of it anyway. I saw it in installments on YouTube, and I wasn't careful about not skipping chapters, but I think I got the idea anyway. Two weeks ago, a friend asked me who I thought the Republican nominee would be. I gave a weak "Huntsman," which was based on the following very fast calculation: Romney seemed like a token frontrunner. He had the looks and the name recognition, but was not all that exciting, and seemed to be waiting for an energetic candidate to knock him out, a la Huckabee last time. Pawlenty's defining characteristic seemed to be that he was unexciting. Newt could be interesting, but it seemed an uphill battle to change the perception of him as slimy, smarmy and worst of all, wonkish. That left a bunch of crazy people and Huntsman.

Since then, I started to think (and when I say think, I mean think about who Republican voters will nominate. The thought of any Republican candidate except for Ron Paul and maybe Huntsman actually being president makes me want to wretch) about Pawlenty and Herman Cain. T-Paw may be drab, but he is shrewd too, and if Romney absorbed most of the intra-candidate flak, Pawlenty could step in as an established alternative. As a former governor, he probably has an easier time than a former senator. The senate seems like a tainted institution right now. It's unclear if there is a senate in recent memory to look back fondly on, and it's hard to make the case that you were doing the right thing as your institution fucked over the country. The nice thing for Pawlenty is that enough people know that he was governor of a midwestern state, but he can pretty much define his term there however he likes, because no non-Minnesotan knows a single thing he did.

As for Cain, there is actual excitement around him, and I can see him winning, or scoring an impressive second in Iowa, winning South Carolina, and going into Super Tuesday with a lot of momentum. It would have to be a campaign that started with small victories and built momentum from there. At the very least, he's the most intriguing of the less established candidates.

So those were my thoughts coming in. Here, organized by candidate, in rough order of how I would handicap them now, are my thoughts coming out:

Romney: I get the frontrunner thing now. I used to hate it when people would say stuff like, "Well he does look presidential." What does that mean other than confident, well-groomed, middle-aged white guy? But damn it, that's the first thing I thought when Romney started talking. He seemed professional, seasoned. He has a strong donor base, and good name recognition. He is a crisp, good looking, middle-aged white guy. He has five sons and they are all alpha males. I get the frontrunner thing.

The healthcare thing could sink him. Everyone had lots of vitriol for "Obamacare" (I don't think a single one of them called it anything else), and while Romney did a good job of distancing his own handiwork in Massachusetts, the real punches haven't started flying yet. That will cut into his support, and might take his Tea Party support from 30% to 5% (utterly made up numbers). Still, if he hasn't been too badly embarrassed by Super Tuesday, I bet he looks pretty good the next day.

The other reason that Romney makes sense as the frontrunner becomes more clear to me know as I decide who to list next. Really, no one is jumping out here. I briefly considered Rick Perry, who I know little about, and has not announced yet. Instead, let's say... ah what the hell,

Herman Cain: Yes, there is energy around this guy, but the fact that I put him second does say something about this field. I read a pre-debate primer that asked this question: will Herman Cain give real answers to real questions? After watching the debate, I don't think I can give a real answer to that question. He described the United States as a train, and Obama had put all the resources in the caboose (I'm going off memory, but I'm pretty sure that was it). He was the most buddy buddy of the candidates. He said a few times that they have a strong field, they were a good group, etc. On at least a couple of occasions, he answered a question, and when the same question was asked to another candidate, the other candidate said "What Herman said," in one form or another.

If he can keep building momentum, I could see him winning Iowa and becoming the bizarro frontrunner. I don't think he can actually get the nomination unless he can basically sweep the Tea Party vote and have Romney and Pawlenty divide up enough of the rest, so that he ends up in the lead. Or something like that. Not likely, but stranger things have happened, and hey, someone has to win.

Pawlenty: My belief that T-Paw was the secret frontrunner is now a wet sock. Pawlenty attempts to be the republicanest Republican, and the result is hilariously unremarkable. Asked if Joe Biden or Sarah Palin was a better VP pick, he initially flubbered in a way that seemed to say: Seriously? You let these other guys give their stump speech on jobs, and then you ask me to either defend a bloviating but competent Democrat, or someone who revealed herself eventually to have no sense of politics below the Canadian border? Then he recovered, blasted Joe Biden, and called Sarah Palin "a remarkable leader."

He was asked about calling the national healthcare reform bill ObamneyCare. In response he turned into the kid who disses the playground bully from a distance, but can't say anything to his face. During the scheduled not serious time, Romney announced that the Boston Bruins were up 4-0 in their game. This got a big applause. In that moment, Romney scored would-have-a-beer-with-him points. Later, in the "what did we learn tonight" section, Pawlenty threw in that he learned that the Bruins have more heart than the Canucks. It was painfully clear that he was trying for his own sports applause. If you had a beer with him, and there was a game on, he would make confident, annoying and inaccurate observations about the game. He seemed like someone people would not especially like for reasons that they couldn't define. You can tell he's smart, seems like a nice guy, but, not unlike John Kerry in 2004, his attempts at smootheness leave him oddly uncompelling.

Ron Paul: Ron Paul is in this spot because I like him the most, and you might as well toss the rest together and see where they land. Newt, Perry and Huntsman are all more likely, but Newt's campaign just went kablooie, Perry hasn't announced yet and Huntsman wasn't at the debate.

Ron Paul is remarkable to watch in these debates. His views are unique, coherent and consistent. I don't agree with all of it, but I would like to peer in on a parallel universe with him as president. The candidates were asked about our military involvement in Libya and Yemen. No Republican candidate is allowed to like these involvements, because they are associated with Obama, and one thing this field is united on is not giving Obama an ounce of praise. However, they also have to appear tough on terrorism and wink at the defense industry. Yes Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Xe, Halliburton and the rest, you will get your contracts when I am president. Except Ron Paul. He declared, as he has been for years that we should not be in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Yemen. We should close many of our military bases around the world.

Most elected officials can be bent to the desires of certain industries. Their principles have conveniently placed ridges and safe zones where the rich get richer. Ron Paul is just Ron Paul. Sure, his America may be just as much of a corporate playground as any other candidate's, but right now, lobbyists mold laws and sometimes literally write them. If Big Money felt safer with Paul, he might get a little more attention.

Newt Gingrich: I don't have much to add here. I think he hangs around long enough for most people to forget about how his staff left him en masse, then bows out sometime before Super Tuesday, perhaps after New Hampshire, maybe before Iowa. Definitely one of the smartest people on the stage, but he's at the point of trying to get back to where people can start to talk themselves into liking him. Both him and Pawlenty could really use a big ground game. I wouldn't be shocked to learn that T-Paw is quietly putting that together now. I would be shocked to hear that about Newt, because, like, his entire senior staff just left.

Bachmann: Michele Bachmann took the occasion of her first answer to announce that she had filed papers to run and would be announcing in the next few days. You can't just announce you are running for president anymore. You first have to announce that you will be announcing it. Announcements, it turns out, were a repeated move for Bachmann. They got progressively less impressive. Her first one was a legit announcement (even if it was about another announcement) that made sense to do at the beginning, and called attention to herself in a logical way. Later she announced that as president, she would repeal Obamacare. There were no specifics about how she would do that, if there were powers the president holds to accomplish this on his or her own. Just a flat: I will do it. Finally, she announced, like a car dealer announcing a sale, that Obama is a one term president. No specifics on how they were going to beat him. Just that they would. At this point, announcements, it became clear, were Bachmann's trick. She might as well have brought an applause sign to the debate, it would have accomplished the same thing with equal substance.

As she talked, I kept wondering what she means to the race. Given that her chances of winning the nomination are very low, her presence must help some and hurt others, right? Rick Santorum has roughly the same (insane) platform, but you can ignore Rick Santorum. You can't just brush off Michelle Bachmann. Not in 2011 anyway, with the Tea Party wielding real clout. Cain, Bachmann and Santorum are vocally for, and part of, the Tea Party. Paul exists on his own island. Everyone else has a tricky balancing act. Watch for Romney to handle questions about the Tea Party with smooth, scripted replies and Pawlenty to waffle uncomfortably before finding something he knows how to talk about. See, there is a long list of things that Republicans are afraid to disparage, and the Tea Party is probably the most prominent right now. There were frequent moments throughout the debate that candidates tried to wriggle into the G.O.P. leotard without tearing it. The fringier candidates wear it all the time, but the Romlentys of the world have to appeal broadly and to the fringe simultaneously. Pro-choice, gay friendly or believe in man-made climate change? Back of the line.

But back to Bachmann's affect on things, I think she will take down someone, but I'm not sure who. Will she attack Romney till Tea Partiers can't look at him? Does she split the far right with Cain? Can Pawlenty step in once the smoke has cleared, or will anyone even be paying attention to him? What if she wins Iowa? In the end she might help secure things for Romney. She'll draw Tea Party votes while not being likely to take the nomination and not taking many votes from Romney. Also, she's a crazy person.

Santorum: I am always fascinated how every field has at least a candidate or two who just seems to be along for the ride, and has no chance to win. Why is that? He's not a bad speaker. His views are that of the most galvanized wing of the party. He's politically experienced. You'd think he has a greater than 1% chance. It seems he doesn't. I'm not unhappy in this case, but it's odd, no?

Tiger Style

2010-04-09T12:59:00.000-07:00

I'm guessing you don't- I didn't, but I suppose you might- know that one of the strangest ads to grace our eyeballs was released about a week ago. It involves three things: 1) Tiger Woods staring straight into a camera, expressionless (now that I mention it, I can't say with any authority that I've ever seen Tiger Woods ever make an expression). 2) A disembodied voice. If you are in the know (I was not) you would know that the voice belongs to Earl Woods, Tiger's father who passed away some years ago. That is the entire ad except for 3) the last few seconds which is occupied by a simple Nike swoosh against a black background.

I'm trying to find the right word, "bizarre" "peculiar" etc, but what keeps coming to mind is a very missable moment from The Muppets Take Manhattan when Fozzie is trying to jog Kermit's memory and we come in in the middle of a really long joke Fozzie is telling to hear him say "and then the koala bear says, 'well this is odd.'" This ad makes me feel like I've walked into the middle of something that I don't- can't- fully understand, and all I can say is "Well this is odd."

And I believe that is the point.

The Tiger Woods narrative, more than anything, has been depressingly simple. Before his rambunctious sex life became public knowledge, Tiger was mostly a black box. Not just unknown, but unknowable. A mystery that provided a mystique to cloak the best golfer ever.

Then, crash boom bam, he's just a guy who can and does sleep with a lot of women. The black box is blown open, and he's human all too human, and a sleazy one at that. His depth became shallow.

I remember a conversation I had years ago with someone who had just found out that Lance Armstrong had had a divorce. This ran contrary to her whole idea of Lance Armstrong. I was more of the "lots of people get divorced," attitude. I'm not sure whose divorce would shock me. The Obamas' perhaps. That's all I can think of. Tiger managed to hold that reputation of being above and beyond in body, mind and soul. I remember a day in the summer of 2002 when a housemate was watching replays of Tiger having a very bad day. "You're human!" he exclaimed, totally shocked. For most of the world, this is not news. Again, Obama comes to mind, and I feel his loss of approval ratings post-election is mostly from a general transition of people's mindsets of Obama as a concept to Obama as a human.

But back to the ad. I saw Doug Rushkoff (his book Life Inc., though cynical, is worth your time) speak once in high school. It was a good speech, I still remember it a decade later. He talked about how he had helped Diesel, the jeans company, come up with their ad campaign. Here's one. Apparently they make watches now:

The main point is to not make sense. Your conscious mind probably just says "weird" and moves on, but some part of you assumes that Diesel gets something that you don't. You try to piece together rational reasons for the timing of the laugh track, the woman's style, the choice of strange looking old men instead of the standard cool hunks. You don't know why (because there is no why), but you assume on some level that Diesel knows why. That's the idea anyway.

The idea behind the Tiger ad is that he is still deeper than you. There is something that Tiger gets that... well, you might get it but probably not. Nike gets it. Do you get it? Tiger is lusty but introspective, driven but distracted, focused but... oh he's focused. He's not looking away from the camera, but not giving you anything. Unless he did. Unless you get it. Do you get it? Nike gets it.

This ad will be 90% forgotten in a month, but cleverly and carefully, Nike-Tiger layers the mystique back on. If this works, maybe he should be paying them.

Good news from the previous century

2010-03-22T19:53:00.000-07:00

I just got some good news. The conflict between quantum physics and relativity over who rules the world is that relativity supposedly doesn't allow for quantum entanglement. Maybe this is a problem for relativity, but it's not a problem for me. For starters, quantum entanglement happens, whether or not relativity allows it. For twosies, I wonder if this problem is a result of perhaps the greatest feat of human imagination suddenly becoming too rigid once it had some rules in place.

Okay, now I'll back up (I didn't want to keep you waiting for the good news). Quantum entanglement, as you may know, is the name for the connection between two subatomic particles that causes them to instantly react to changes in the other. By changes, I mean a change in their spin. I always took this to mean no more or less than the direction in which they are spinning, but in the book I'm reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson- very much up to the Bryson standard- he refers to it as a "property called spin" which made me think that perhaps there is more to it. Anyway, the more important word in that sentence for our purposes is instantly. Changes of subatomic particles in response to their partners (electrons are most commonly cited, but I think the same holds true for positrons and other little guys that they don't bother with in high school chemistry) may be the only thing in the universe that is truly instant.

A website might advertise that it responds instantly to changes in the weather, the score, the world, whatever, but what it means is that when a relevant piece of information changes, a person or a computer inputs the change, and then some more computer things happen, and pretty soon, the website reflects the change. Sometimes people say that a person reacted instantly, but what they mean is that a thing happened, and the person's senses processed it, and very soon after, for a human anyway, the person did something in response. A wrecking ball hitting a building damages it just as soon as the force transfers over to the building, which takes such a short amount of time, that you probably don't notice it, but time passes nonetheless.

Change the spin of an electron though, its quantum entangled sibling changes INSTANTLY. This ruffled more than a few feathers of the birds examining the world of the smallest (most notably that Einstein guy). The reason for the trouble is due to two- maybe three, but we'll get to that- assumptions. The first is that nothing no way no how can go faster than the speed of light. It's not just that our rockets aren't awesome enough yet, it's that our universe apparently has a speed limit. The second assumption is that the particles must be passing a message between them, but if that were true, the message can go faster than the speed of light (people did eventually get around to proving this with entangled particles that were miles apart).

Like I said, this is a problem for relativity, but not for me. Relativity is concerned with mechanics- what makes particles bounce and spin in just the way that they do- I am concerned with ideas. From what I understand, entanglement has not been explained so much as accepted. My feeling is that 1) you eventually have to get to that point when you are trying to explain the universe. It might even be a goal. 2) This one may be beyond our ability to explain mechanically, at least for now. Perhaps there are strings that connect the particles that are undetectable to us, or, and here's where my allegiances lie most comfortably, maybe we just need to get our heads around the idea that the two particles are better described as one thing.

Science is better built for reductionism than holism, even when it's just a tiny iota of holism. It's not a molecule, it's a bunch of atoms! It's not an atom, it's a nucleus with an electron cloud! It's not a nucleus, it's protons and neutrons, and it's not those either, it's a bunch of quarks! The word "molecule" is often more efficient than useful than something like "a set of atoms that are stuck together," but it wouldn't be considered more accurate. Describing things by group saves time, not precision.

In the case of entangled particles, perhaps "one entanglement" is more precise than "two electrons." Maybe there doesn't have to be a signal between the two electrons because you are not just changing one electron, you are changing one entanglement. You could argue that this is avoiding the problem by redrawing the lines so you can't see it, but I would counter that it's the previous set of lines that cause it. Finding new lines and improving on the old ones is pretty much what science is all about.

So why was it good news that the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and relativity is essentially the entanglement problem? Well, I'd heard a while ago that these two systems were incompatible, and that made me sad. I wanted everything with quantum mechanics to be okay, and if it conflicted with relativity, than it didn't mean it was wrong, it just meant that something was wrong. But like I may have mentioned, the entanglement problem is no problem of mine.

That meant I was free to love quantum mechanics without reservation, and I do really love quantum mechanics. My attitude toward the world has always been absurdist. This is a style, but it's also a position. Absurdity touches my soul more than rationality does. Rationality is about rules and decisions, and these give the world some structure, both in our minds and out of them, but on some level I always understood them to be arbitrary. Useful, functional, purposeful, helpful, whatever else-ful, but not capital-r Right.

Absurdity touched deeper for me, but rationality always seemed to win. In the end I just seemed to be discarding reality for Hamlet's nutshell, and I would often dead-end there not entirely sure how it happened.

So imagine my delight, when these headlines made it into my sphere of academia:
Science fact! Electrons can blip out of space in one place and back in somewhere else without occupying the space in between! Science fact! It is completely impossible to know both an electron's trajectory and location! You can only know one or the other, almost as if, they don't exist at the same time! Science fact! Measuring a particle can change it! Not the mechanics of the measurement, the fact that it was measured! THE FACT THAT IT WAS MEASURED!!! WHAT KIND OF UNIVERSE IS THIS!?!?!?!

I'm not going to try to unpack all of that right now, but learning it caused a delightful explosion of many of my fundamental assumptions about the world. It's one of science's greatest triumphs, and to me, it was a reminder that somehow absurdity always gets the last laugh.

Three stories involving hitch-hiking in faraway places.

2010-03-07T21:39:00.000-08:00

In Ecuador, I had my first and so far only experience hitch-hiking. The first time I stuck out my thumb I tried to get a look at the driver first. Rookie mistake. Even a car bumping down a dirt road can't notice you and react fast enough to let you in. Also, the driver tends to want to get a look at you first. With hitch-hiking, they get to check you out, but all you know about the person you get is that they are willing to pick up a hitch-hiker. In our case, they weren't just willing, they were thrilled.

We were on our way back from a bird-of-prey reserve when it started raining. We had walked there, which had taken at least half an hour, and now it was getting a little chilly and wet. Why not, we thought. After my first abortive I summoned up the courage to try this without any idea who was going to stop. The first car did. It was a mini truck with an open back, which we were told to hop in. We couldn't really see our driver and his passenger, but we could see the people who trailed us the whole way and were tremendously amused by the whole thing.

After a bumpy and entertaining ride back to town, our driver pulled over to let us out, but actually they were on their way to a famous waterfall, and would we like to join them? Sure. Off we went. It turned out our car was part of a three car caravan, including the grinners behind us. They had an American exchange student behind us. It's kind of sad, all I really remember about him is that he was a Republican. I think he was from Indiana, and an Engineering/Spanish student, but that part I'm less sure of.

The waterfall was great. Later we mentioned that to our Amazonian guide and he asked us if we could feel the energy of the waterfall. I had. It was lovely and powerful. Afterward we were asked if we had time for lunch. We did. They took us to some restaurant that had fast-food decor (plastic trays and tables, you order at the counter, there were overly-colorful pictures of the food), but also had a little of that TGIFriday's thing of "This is a special place. Orange you lucky to be here."

The family was kind, spoke good English, were good conversationalists, had political opinions, and would not let us pay a dime for lunch. They made fun of us for trying.

I had a student in Japan who I didn't really like for at least my first few months of teaching him. He seemed too corporate, too salary-man. I was also a nervous teacher when I started, and he did not seem to appreciate this. He was my student for my entire year there, and eventually I got to know him. Over time, he became more interesting to me, more human. I remember his face, and one or two things he said and the general sound of his voice- little else. One time, toward the end of my stay there, he told me about hitch-hiking to Hokkaido after he graduated. It sounded amazing. It implied a freedom of spirit that I didn't much associate with him or Japan. That night, I was walking home from Ragbag, a trek of a little over an hour that I made every week, and I casually stuck my thumb out as cars passed me. I didn't make a real effort, I wasn't quite brave enough, but it was a long walk, and... his name escapes me, but he made me want to try.

Ragbag nights became the anchor of my week in Japan. Every Thursday I would stay on the Keikyu line one extra stop and go meet my buddies there. We would order pitchers, exchange books and CDs, get drunk enough to wipe away the week up to that point and provide a partial midweek reset. At some point, Carl would say, "Anyone feeling peckish?" and we would order the special pizza. The special pizza had a collection of toppings that freak out people with normal pizza sensibilities. Corn, shrimp, and more that I can't remember. Later I found out that the special pizza was not on the menu, and we were the only people that ordered it. It started half as a joke one night, when they were out of a lot of menu items, but Ryo, our friendly bartender, told the crew he'd whip up a "special pizza."

If it was someone's last Ragbag night we would do shots. On mine, I went to the bar to order them and Ryo asked if someone was leaving. I told him I was, and asked if he'd like to join us. He did. He sat next to me and said, "I'm going to tell you the most beautiful word in the Japanese language. It is 'Sayonara.' It means 'goodbye,' 'so long,' 'farewell,' 'good luck,' 'see you later...' all of these in one word."

In Hawaii, I was in a two car caravan. We spotted a mother and daughter hitch-hiking. Our car was in front, and was the more likely of the two to pick up hitch-hikers. It was also full, so we couldn't. Our driver, however, made the either bold or presumptuous decision to stop a little ways past the hitch-hikers, effectively forcing the car behind us to pick them up. I didn't interact with the hitch-hikers, but I heard from the other car that they claimed to be aliens who liked Earth best out of all the planets, and also apparently needed a ride to the beach.

Thoughts from five minutes of the Olympic opening ceremony from a bar with no sound

2010-02-13T12:47:00.000-08:00

I saw five minutes of the opening ceremony for the Vancouver Olympics with no sound at a bar last night. I thought about how it is a performance that is not really supposed to be good. It's not supposed to be bad either, but goodness is not the measure that they are going for. It's supposed to be good in the way that it's supposed to be wintery and expensive. These are all boxes that must be checked, but they are not the ultimate goal. The goal is for the ceremony to defy explanation. It wants to be visually spectacular and register a "DOES NOT COMPUTE" across your system.

I find this sort of thing stratifies the available reactions for someone watching it. There is accepting, impressed and disgusted. I found myself mostly towards the first. It is what it is. They are supposed to do something so over the top, that you lose your feel for where the top even was. That's their job. I had some impressed too. Skiers air-slaloming vertically from the ceiling of a huge arena? Pretty cool. That and Peter Pan were all I saw. From what I understand it was too long to actually enjoy it all, but again, the point is not to enjoy all of it. Short things can be more easily explained than long things. One of the ways to hit the DOES NOT COMPUTE button is to make it long enough so that you have multiple moments of "Wait, there's more?"

Disgusted, accepting and impressed are three points on a continuum that reflect where you stand on the Olympics in general. If you see it as a massive waste of money and resources, then there is no better example than the opening ceremony. If it's just something that is, then it is, and if you get a shiver of "Oh boy! Here come the Olympics!" that will last you through most of the ceremony, which gets its significance from that feeling.

As for me, it's all those things. It's cool, it's a waste, it is what it is, and it's partially redeemed by my love of hockey. That sentence describes my basic attitude toward the Winter Olympics, which will come and go with only a few scattered blips across my mind, but it also describes a chunk of my adolescence: Cool, a waste, is what it is, partially redeemed by my love of hockey. I remember back in the day I would freak out for the Olympics. I bought every moment of its self-inflated meaning. Now I'm more jaded, pragmatic, less patriotic. I wouldn't mind seeing the Americans win the hockey tournament, especially because it is one where they are solidly underdogs, but my favorite player is Canadian, and I have an odd affection for the Swedes. None of it is likely to strike a chord deep within me, the way it all used to, or even the way the White Album did this morning. The Olympics is a circus. It could be more- a cultural celebration, a moment of diplomacy- but it doesn't seem to want this.

I guess it's all about what you believe in. I used to believe that sports mattered more than anything. I don't think that any more, but I still hold on to my arbitrary partisanship toward the Mets and Devils. It gives the stories meaning, the way gambling does. Most likely the Olympics will be gone in two weeks and I will barely notice, but if I happen to catch them at the right moment, if one of the unfolding narratives captures a greater meaning for me, if somehow it all takes on a much greater significance than a few people, miles a way, doing one very specific thing that they have made themselves very good at, then I'll get to enjoy a few moments of that cosmic power that instilled so much of my youth.

Dreamy

2010-01-07T16:07:00.000-08:00

So I wanted to write something this in this space, because it's been a while, and if I don't tap on the keys with my fingers, they get restless and start doing the New Jersey Devils' work. Problem was, nothing was coming to me to write, so I'll start with the dream I had last night and go from there.

Weird one. Good weird though. My dreams lately had been weird and a little uncomfortable, like a movie more concerned with being personal than good. This one was fun though. It took place variously in Japan and my homes in New York and Berkeley. It involved Buddha, some sort of nature spirit, some sort of emperor, flying cartoon bunnies, and a visiting friend from New Zealand.

The main part I remember is a Japanese coworker (not one I had in real life) having me help him carry a table over near a stove. Behind the stove was the Buddha, or perhaps just a concentration of Buddhaness, or Buddha, but not the only Buddha. The table, which had to be rectangular and wooden, was an offering to Buddha. Not that Buddha actually took the table in any way. For starters we couldn't even get it behind the stove. It was just a way of showing him that we were putting in effort around being in his presence. Something like that. I told my Japanese friend that you can send Buddha good vibes, and that's sort of like a present too, just in case there's no one around to carry the table with him.

We both went back there and got a good Buddha high. Later I went back again and the stove was much more similar to the one in my home in Brooklyn. I still got the Buddha high, but things felt straighter and flatter. The Japanese guy said he can get a similar thing when he goes to Madras, India, and I thought about highs can be triggered by all sorts of things.

There was a bunch of stuff with the nature spirit and the emperor that I barely remember. The emperor wanted to turn invisible, but it was pointed out to him, perhaps by me, that between Buddha and the nature spirit, someone was going to be able to see him. Let's be reasonable here. There was also a moment where something or someone was ascending toward the ceiling because of something the emperor was doing, and a cartoon bunny jumped up and knocked it out of the beam it was ascending in. That was good, and someone needed to do it, but I don't remember why.

The rest was mostly mundane, involving things like assembling a bunk bed and getting ready to go outside.

I don't know if I'll ever hear a satisfactory explanation for why I get to experience things like this several times a week consciously and probably every night unconsciously. Obviously elements of processing recent events and various emotions and feelings is a big part of it. I've heard that if your relationship between body-mind and mind-mind gets more consciously communicative, that your dreams will become more obvious in what they mean. I'm loosely familiar with the idea of astral travel and similar concepts of some part of you literally wandering around (expanding? airing out?).

Those explanations, and plenty more, make enough sense. I just don't know if any explanation that was explained to me without some sort of seminal experience could make me say, "So that's why I thought Buddha was behind my stove when really I was just passed out in bed." Maybe if the explanation could be predictive or testable in some way. But no, that seems unreasonable, given the subject. I think if I'm ever going to really understand dreams it will probably be through them.

There is a sort of "loophole" that might provide for something that I can work with. As some of you know, I'm pretty into the Hawaiian system of thought known as Huna. The central principle of Huna is ike (ee-kay). Ike refers to the senses of sight, hearing and touch (possibly the other ones) and also means experience. On the esoteric level, it refers to the idea that your experience is all you have and all you know. A lot of people know this as the "your blue might be my pink" idea, but really it's "your walking in the park might be my battling space lizards," and "my whatever could be your anything." Um, got that?

A corollary of all that, and one of the main ideas contained in the word "ike" is that experience is not passively absorbed by your senses, but actively created by your being (I'm saying "being" because I don't want to get into a whole body-mind rigmarole). Our hardware is all very similar because we are all the same species, and our categories are somewhat similar, so can we agree on a lot, and we spend more time on what we can all agree on (I don't mean political issues, I mean that I am a human, and that is a computer, and these are words and they mean stuff, and we can mostly agree on what that stuff is). The experiences that are completely personal- the ones that only you have and only you CAN have- those we don't talk about as much, tend to forget, and tend to write off. The only catch is that anything you call a distinct entity has a distinct experience. What I'm saying is that qualitatively, dream experiences and "real" experiences are the same, but the real ones don't reveal as easily how they are created by you, and how personal they are. Fortunately, our completely personal experiences can also be largely shared, which I'm tempted to call a miracle, but what I really mean is that experience, both shared and personal, is a mystery on the level of why anything exists at all. If you say you know the answer, I probably won't believe you.

Good Strange Things, Vol. III

2009-12-05T13:03:00.000-08:00

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

2009-08-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-15T16:57:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-07-12T10:32:00.001-07:00

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)

2009-05-01T15:24:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-03-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-23T10:26:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-02-13T14:33:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-28T17:49:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-22T08:31:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-01-18T15:29:00.000-08:00

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.

Belligerent Rednecks and No-Good Muslins (and Xmas with family and friends)

2008-12-26T11:02:00.000-08:00

I had a lovely Christmas dinner at a family friend's place in our neighborhood in Brooklyn. The main sources of entertainment for the occasion were a Hollywood writer, his 3 year-old daughter and Max the cat. The hostess, who I've known since I can remember knowing people who are my parents' age, explained how the cat had come to its comfortable existence in Brooklyn Heights after growing up on the streets of Islamabad (I would explain, but I think that story will be better in your imagination). She finished the story with "and that's how we ended up with an Islamo-terrorist cat." I feel awkward printing that in a public forum on flat text, because it looks bad, but in the context of friendship and mutually understood liberal leanings, it was nothing more than a throwaway joke (she later backed up her claim with the evidence that Max had torn up a feather boa that very morning).

Later, I got to thinking about why that joke makes any sense at all. If the cat had been from Britain, maybe be would be a "stuffy intellectual" or maybe if Max was Hawaiian, he would be a "surfer cat." He could have been an Indian yogi cat or a Japanese robot cat. As it was, he had immigrated from Islamabad, so he was an "Islamo-terrorist." I want to make clear, in case it's not already, that the jokemaker does not think that the Middle East is packed to the brim with terrorists, and that if there's any commentary in the backdrop, it has to do with the loose usage of that sort of term that's infected too many conversations, both public and private.

It made me think about the rumors about Obama and his background that penetrated into some corners that not a lot of information reaches. "He's the antichrist" said a student from the community college. "You're voting for a Muslim," said a guy in a Walmart parking lot. My favorite was the secondhand story I heard of an old man holding up a sign that read "Obama is a no-good muslin." That's right, folks. Our next president is secretly one of these:

And a no-good one at that.

Over the course of the campaign I sometimes thought about why the muslim rumor took hold. For instance, I don't think it would have worked to call him a Soviet spy. I bet you could have made (certain) people believe that he's plotting something with Robert Mugabe, but I don't think that story would have gone viral. No, a totally false rumor of that kind needs to play off associations that have been pounded into the zeitgeist. The same connection of ideas that allows my liberal friend to make a joke about her Islamo-terrorist cat allows others to make people actually believe that we have an Islamo-terrorist president. The string of logic, as I understand it, goes something like this:
1) He's a black man with the name Barack Hussein Obama.
2) He spent part of his upbringing in Indonesia
3) He's a muslim
3b) He's a terrorist
Optional- 4) He's the antichrist

If you want the more fleshed out version you have to throw in a few details and a picture in between 2 and 3, and a Bible passage or two between 3 and 4, but I think the bare bones picture is more interesting and descriptive, because for so many people, the whole picture clicks into place very easily, especially the step from 3 to 3b. Some of them had details, and some of them didn't, but the basic picture was what mattered.

I came across the full range of beliefs and opinions over the course of my 3 months in Richmond County. There were two people that stick out in my memory. One was a man I spoke to going door to door on a beautiful late afternoon in September. He seemed reasonable, and at least somewhat informed on the campaigns and the issues. He liked Obama better on the economy, healthcare, education, foreign policy... and yet he was leaning toward McCain. Why? Well, he'd been getting these emails from friends and family, about how Obama was a muslim and a terrorist with a purely anti-American agenda. He wasn't sure if they were true, but what if they were? Could we really risk having such a radical as our president? Obama was potentially better, but McCain was safer. I chatted with him for a while, and maybe brought him back toward the middle, if not all the way to my side (I, to my surprise, really took to the persuasion part of the job). He was fascinating to me, because he seemed perfectly reasonable and informed, and yet he had been roped in by the extremist noise. Before him, my concept of people who believed those rumors could more or less be summed up as "belligerent redneck." He forced my ideas about that to become more amorphous and open-ended.

The other opinion that comes quickly to my mind was from a conversation that I overheard in a diner. I was waiting for my food while a family next to me discussed the election. Father, mother, parents' friend and older brother were all solidly for McCain. The one holdout was younger brother who I silently cheered on while he held his ground despite attacks from all sides. The quote that forced me to stifle a response and a lot of laughter came from older brother. They were discussing Mr. Obama's shady past when he said something that proved to me that whatever these ideas require to take hold, clear definition of terms is not on the list:
"I don't think Obama is a terrorist, but I think he's maybe a little more of a terrorist than McCain."

Fish Out of Water

2008-12-18T13:35:00.001-08:00

On a sunny day in Durham, I learned unexpectedly (and not the hard way) about what happens when a plane crashes in the ocean. It was during my six-week campaign fellowship that preceded my hiring as a paid staff member. Being a fellow was different from being a staffer in that I 1) wasn't paid, 2) was in Durham, not Richmond County, 3) would not necessarily continue on to the election as a staffer, and 4) did not feel the psychotic pressure of being a staffer. As a fellow, I hustled more and was better at voter registration than most of the fellows I was working with, so I got high marks from the higher-ups, and I could relax when I felt like it. As a staffer, I was expected to kick ass everyday, I was rarely the most competent person in the room, and I got daily reminders that if we screw this up, the world is fucked.

So anyway, one Sunday afternoon, two fellows and myself were running our first door-to-door canvass. Once we got our volunteers trained and mobile, I went out with another fellow to do some canvassing ourselves. Along the way, we met an old white guy in this mostly black neighborhood who asked me for change, and, I think, registered to vote. Later, when we were gathering our things once the canvass had finished, he wandered over to where we were and started chatting with me.

One situation that occurred a lot with this job is the one where someone you don't know well decides to talk to you forever and ever. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think this happens a lot more in the South. Sometimes it was really excruciating, especially when I had things to do, but this guy was interesting, and I felt like I could make myself useful by listening to him so that everyone else didn't have to, and could get other things done. He talked to me for about ten minutes, and he was, to say the least, an open book.

He was a broken-hearted fish washed too far inland, but he had stories to tell from it. He was divorced, and his wife wanted him back, but he had caught her with another man, and he couldn't risk being so badly hurt again. From what I could tell, the girl could only temporarily satiate him anyway. The only thing that would truly heal him is water.

The person who comes to my mind when I think of that man is the father character in Big Fish. I feel a strong personal connection to that character, because he had a deep need for water and telling stories, and the two seemed connected in an abstract but meaningful way. This guy was similar, except that i bet if he was back in the water, he wouldn't feel the need to tell his stories.

We happened to be by a public pool while we talked. He was surprised that there could be a pool in the area without him knowing about it. He would have preferred an ocean, but he had no means to travel, and a pool in the neighborhood was worth knowing about.

When I spoke to him, he was without money or employment, but in his past he had had possibly the most adventerous real-life job I have ever heard of. He was a rescue scubadiver for the navy. Meaning, among other things, when a boat sank or a plane crashed in the ocean, he would dive after it to try and save people. He told tales of rescuing people and sharing on an oxygen tank so that they could both make it back. He once won a bet by staying underwater for two minutes. He showed me two different scars from shark attacks. They were marks of achievement. Those wounds may have been the only physical thing he had remaining from his previous life.

Some stories, maybe even most, are best when we stop telling them. I don't mean the zingers we bring up for laughs at parties, I just mean the echoes of the past that play out in our bodies and minds. This guy was different. He practically was his story. His tales of who he was gave his existence a skeletal framework. Still, I can imagine him diving off of a helicopter, plunging into the ocean and all the dust accumulated in the wrinkles of his skin washing away.

Wake up Song

2008-12-15T21:30:00.000-08:00

I have a bunch of posts at least half way done for this blog, but for some reason they haven't made it up yet. There's one about the guy I was staying with, another about a guy I met in Durham, and another on church. Those will show up eventually, but I was inspired to put down a few words about something that happened tonight.

In the first post on this blog, I wrote about how I'm not sure how to handle all the thanks and praise I've been getting from friends and strangers for my work on the campaign. At the time, it made me feel awkward, because I wanted to respond with something like, "Honestly, I was just doing my job, and probably a lot of other people would have done it better." That's not what I would say of course, but it was always lingering behind my words. I've gotten better at taking in the thanks of others, but there was still something external about it. The praise only affected me to a point, and my responses came from that amount of depth, and no further.

Tonight all that was nowhere on my mind when I went to see a friend's episodic, gay soap opera. Every week they perform at a bar that has an upstairs part with a stage. I'd been there once before for karaoke night when I delivered a stirring rendition of Sweet Jane. The show follows the drama and exploits of a bunch of gay folk in Chicago. I was lucky enough to see the musical episode. Toward the end, completely unrelated to the plot, a character ran on stage and said "I've been living under a rock for the last month, who won the presidential election?" At that moment the cast broke into an ode to Obama. It was funny and silly like most of the rest of the show, but in those 20 seconds of song I found myself feeling unexpectedly proud. When Obama won I was happy that he would be the next president, and that the journey was over. When he started naming cabinet positions, I got excited because it made the idea of him being president more real to me. When the gay musical interrupted itself to be happy about his victory, it hit me in the chest. No one (that I know of) has ever felt the need to write and perform a song in celebration of something I was a part of.

My mind is satisfied knowing that we have a president who may just be able to steer this country through the layered, textured mess we find ourselves in, but my body doesn't know so much about that. It can't taste the recession. It can't see the wars. It can't touch the issues around where we get our energy. It heard the song though. It heard it and it liked it. Feelings source from our bodies and while the rules of bodies are logical, they are often hidden from our conscious minds. I could tell other people that I prefer that they thank me in song, but it might make more sense to tell myself that a lot of people are really happy about this, and some of them are just going to read the New York Times and thank the Obama staffers they happen to come across.

The Lyon King

2008-12-12T16:22:00.000-08:00

If you are ever driving south on highway 177 in North Carolina, and you pass the border into South Carolina, use the driveway of the closed down gambling house* to turn around, and drive back to the last driveway in North Carolina. You'll see a house with a vegetable garden, a few horses milling around and maybe a truck parked on one side of the house. Knock on the door, and say you're my friend. You might want to time this so that you show up around dinner, but don't tell Lyon I said that.

*Right across the N.C./S.C. border are a million little casinos and gaming houses that sprung up when South Carolina made them legal about ten years ago, and then illegal about five years after that. The end result is a whole bunch of very colorful abandoned buildings that once provided gambling at a minimal distance for N.C. residents. Lyon could have walked to them.

Lyon and Christian Bell opened their home to me from the middle of August through the election. I had room, board and much appreciated company for that entire time. Lyon often said that he wished he could have done for the campaign, but he probably did more than anyone in Richmond.

Before I moved in with Lyon, I was living on the outskirts of Fayetteville with a charming Honduran family. I would have stayed there through the election if it didn't take me an hour and a half to get to Richmond County. That family had hosted other staffers and was a known commodity. Unfortunately, the campaign hadn't identified any potential hosts in Richmond County, so I had to find one on my own. I wasn't really sure how I was going to do this, but I figured I should host a couple of volunteer events and get to know people before saying, "By the way, mind if I crash at your place for the next 3 months?" I was going to have to ask that question to someone, but cold calling for voter registration drives was hard enough.

Then, one night during call time at the Fayetteville office, "Bell, Lyon" came up on my list, and my practiced thumbs entered his number. I soon realized that I had the volunteer you fantasize about during call time but almost never get. He had helped during the primary and was willing to do whatever he could from now until the election. We chatted for a bit, and eventually he asked me where I was staying. I said Fayetteville, but I was looking for a place more in his area. "We have a spare room," he said. He had known me for ten minutes.

His generosity didn't end there, and I can probably thank him for whatever scraps of sanity I had as the campaign dragged on. No matter how strange and crazy my day was, no matter how many strangers had yelled at me, or how much my numbers fell short, I had Lyon and Christian and Lyon's cooking to come home to.

And that's to say nothing of the fact that they were probably the most cultured people I met in my three months in Richmond. They had traveled all over the world, worked (as producers, designers, creative consultants) with a zillion music celebrities (the Jacksons, Mama Cass, many more that I can't remember). Lyon had met three sitting presidents and sometimes talked about Bill Clinton's charisma. They had lived in L.A., Paris, Japan, toured Europe... and yet, there they were on the same plot of land that they grew up on.

Lyon, after leaving Richmond County as soon as he could, swore he'd never go back. There was a big world waiting for him, and for a number of reasons he needed to move on. It took him decades before he had to retract that statement, but his mother was ailing, and of his many siblings, Lyon was the one to leave what he was doing and return to take care of her. Mrs. Bell passed some years ago, but Lyon stuck around. Now he's taking care of Christian who suffered a brain aneurysm in Japan, and hasn't been able to live alone since. If it sounds like he is trapped at home, just as he was at the beginning of life, know that deep down, Lyon is a caretaker. He takes care of people, not because he is trapped by his circumstances, but because he is obligated by his own soul.

There's more to say about him, he's a fascinating man, but that's enough for now, and perhaps you'll hear some of his stories if you ever find yourself driving south on NC 177.

Land of Few Cafes

2008-12-07T16:53:00.001-08:00

Here I sit in the essence of what I lacked in Richmond County. It was for the best really. If the RC had coffee shops, I might have been sucked by the chance to spend hours with hot beverages, my thoughts, tasty pastries, a book, a refill, the internet, my thoughts….

I really like coffee shops. I like coffee and things that go with coffee. I like reading among other people. I can internet schmooze with the best of em. More than all that I like the culture that coffee shops create. They're as much about sitting and thinking as they are about purchasing a particular product. I am a ruminator, a probosculator, a dreamer, a wonderer. It's nice that there are places where people gather to do those things.

And in Richmond county there was none of that. I knew of two cafes in my area. They were both closed by 3pm. In fact, I'm not sure I ever saw either of them open. Even if they were, I expect they weren't really what I was looking for. There was a place named "Fatz' Cafe," which sounded promising. I gave them a call, and asked if they had a wireless internet connection, to which I got this reply: "No, but the wife has it at home."

That was one of my first big, "Oh wow, I am in the South" moments. That was a line you simply would not hear in the worlds am I used to. One thing I'm trying to get a handle on, and give others a sense of, with this blog is the South. The South is real, I can tell you that much, and it plays by different rules. There's a different vibe down there, and it manifests a different world. I was very interested in the lack of coffee shops in Richmond, because it seemed to capture something fundamental about the difference between where I come from and where I was. It wasn't just the lack of cafes, it was the absence of the sort of culture that would support a cafe. The environment is less academic, less contemplative, less symbolic, less abstract. Minds are mostly occupied by one's family, friends and job. Concerns were 99% local and tangible. In some ways it's bad- people generally didn't have much mental space for issues that they couldn't see with their own eyes. In some ways it's good- without those concerns, people couldn't use them, to quote the late Elliot Smith, to "fight problems with bigger problems."

At Oberlin, where I went to college, we would sometimes refer to the "Oberlin bubble," the mental outline around the campus that made us go for weeks or months with scarcely a thought to the outside world. The Oberlin bubble was a fascinating place to live. It was a co-creation of some 2800+ vivacious, angsty, arty, emotional, funny, active, stressed, hormonal and busy college students. When the outside world pierced through into your mind, it was usually because it demanded to, not because there was a lack of action within the bubble.

Richmond had a similar thing, but it wasn't a bubble. For most people, the world simply ended somewhere in or around the neighboring counties. People were concerned with the places and people that they had physical contact with. There wasn't much interest in travel. There were exceptions of course, and I was fortunate enough to live with two of them, but many people had been in the area their whole lives, and weren't about to leave.

I was a yankee (I didn't realize people still used that word to mean something other than someone who plays professional baseball in the Bronx) but I was also halfway to an alien. I was from the lands beyond. I don't go to church or eat meat. I like to write and watch absurd internet videos. I'm friendly in my way, but not in their way. "There's sumptin sumptin sumptin sumptin weird about you. Sumptin different." That's from a guy in Billy's Chop Shop. He spoke for many down there. He spoke for the majority who would be just as out of place in this Logan Square coffee shop as I was down there.

NC as Waking Dream

2008-12-03T16:55:00.001-08:00

Last night I had a strange and wonderful dream. I'm afraid many of the details are hidden just on the other side of a veil in my memory. What I do remember is being with a group of people. My relationship to them felt like we had been on a sort of retreat together, but we had grown close very quickly. The most peculiar and wonderful thing was that we all had an animal familiar sort of thing with us. I had a seagull (perhaps Jonathan Livingston Seagull) who followed me everywhere I went and represented some part of my soul like a daimon in the Golden Compass books (read immediately). Everyone, or at least everyone on the retreat had one of those in my dream. We played and learned tricks with other people's daimons. It was a time of elation and discovery removed from the usual rhythms of daily life (even within the context of the dream).

The strangest thing that I remember now is that when I woke up from that dream I wanted to cry with joy. I wasn't quite at tears, but I remember letting out a few dry sobs. They felt audible, but I can't honestly say if they were or not. Looking back on it now, those sobs of joy may have been a dream too, but the emotion was perfectly real. The reality of emotions exists in the strength with which they affect your mind and body, not what they are in response to. Really, neither waking or dreaming seems an accurate description. Perhaps it was the state described by the Spanish word fiaca- between waking and sleep.

I remember my dreams sometimes, but I usually don't feel obligated them to write them down. The ones with a big feeling attached to them I usually try to at least tell someone about if not write it down. I had one in NC about leaving a bar with my friends and going to this weird, underground hospital for deformed children. They may have been offering me a job, or I was supposed to help or something. I think that place was acknowledged in a later dream. It stuck with me for whatever reason.

I've had big dreams about watching shimmering golden eagles fly over a convertible I was riding in with a couple of friends. I got ice cream with my friends, then they left and I talked with one of the golden eagles about love.

Another time I had a dream about running around a giant hotel with long, wide hallways filled with fascinating things (don't you hate it when you're describing a fairly innocuous sounding dream, and all of a sudden it sounds extremely Freudian?) and anyway at the end of the dream I was getting ready to turn into a phoenix, and that was cool. That was years ago, but it stuck with me too.

The whole NC experience was kind of like one of those dreams. Different in form, and definitely content, but similar in weight. I was somewhere different, and big things that involved me were happening. One day I knew I would wake up in Chicago and be laughing with my friends about the crazy experience I just had, but for the time being the days were long, and my job was taxing on every level. Things would go wrong, things would go well. This thing was missing. That thing was printed for no reason. This volunteer wasn't helping. That one was generally very helpful, but not today. The fate of the world depended on us. The impressiveness of our numbers depended on us. Would we succeed in stretching McCain thinner? Yes. Would we succeed in winning NC? No idea. I followed the polls on fivethirtyeight.com and electoral-vote.com daily and I never had any idea if we were actually going to pull out the state. I would come home late to Lyon's delicious cooking and the therapy of Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow.

The whole experience had a different color tingeing it- A different rhythm guiding the clunky dance of my days and weeks. The people had a different way to them as well. The thing had the weight of real life, but a different form, and certainly different content. If felt like a rite of passage or a powerful dream.

Chum

2008-12-01T12:54:00.000-08:00

Nothing caused more misery in my 3 months in Richmond county than yard signs. I'm not joking. The very first volunteer meeting I held had a whopping three attendees. One was a solid volunteer, willing to do what he could once or twice a week. The second had heard that something involving Obama was happening at Billy's Chop Shop, but wasn't all that interested in volunteering. The third wasn't there to volunteer either. She wanted to know why there weren't very many yard signs in Richmond county, and when we would be getting more. This was a sign of things to come. I would be dealing with those questions every day, usually many times a day, from then through election day (yes, including election day itself).

So why didn't we have many yard signs? Well, despite having a fundraising operation of absurd proportions, the Obama camp was often very stingy with its cash. Maybe not when it came to advertising, but they didn't want to spend on things that would add up to a significant cost when multiplied by the amount of ground they were trying to cover if those things... um... didn't help win the election. Yard signs and other "chum" might break even moneywise, but they require time, energy and coordination that could be used toward more constructive purposes. From my own assessment, yard signs do two main things:
1) Provide (very) passive advertising and
2) Get stolen
Oh, and 3) Improve name recognition.
Item 3 would be useful to exactly one person I came across in my 3 months in the RC. I was still getting to know my county and I was wandering around the lovely hamlet of Hamlet, chatting with people on their porches and registering a few voters. I came across a couple on their porch who looked like if not for basic bodily needs, could stay on their porch until a tornado or chemical entropy got the best of them. I approached with a Hi, how are you... Are you registered to vote? Blah, blah, Obama, blah.
Woman: Who?
Me: Barack Obama.
Woman: What?
Man: The black guy running for president.
Woman: For real?

Other than her, everyone seemed to know who Obama was.

This is not to say that yard signs are 100% useless, but I did pretty much buy into the idea that they didn't produce many actual votes, and that other forms of campaigning were much more effective. Sadly I was completely unable to convince my local constituents of any of this. Every day, while I tried, often in vain, to cobble together a volunteer base, people would come into my office asking for yard signs. This might not sound all that bad, so, just for a second imagine that Starbucks stopped selling cappuccinos. Most customers wouldn't care, many would be ordering something else anyway, some would be happy to substitute with a mocha or something that costs at least $4 and involves words that did not exist until a few years ago. There would be some people, however, who would come in expecting a cappuccino, and some of them would be angry about not getting one. Disgusted, infuriated even. They would relentlessly point out that this is STARBUCKS and you don't even have CAPPUCCINNO. You might notice them carrying a subconscious belief, perhaps set in by childhood experience, that if they complain enough, the cappuccino will magically appear in front of them, possibly for free. Now imagine that you worked at Starbucks and this happened several times a day. That's what the yard sign thing felt like. Many people expected the Obama office to basically be an Obama store, and when I had nothing for them, they were somewhere between a little disappointed and pissed off. One lady yelled at me and stormed out before I could respond.

That was bad, but the worst were these words from a man I only saw once: "I guess you don't want our candidate to win." That's right sir, I'll leave you to guess why I left a cozy situation in a vibrant metropolis to come work 100 hour weeks in the middle of nowhere, but trust me, it's not because I want him to win.

Sorry, I'm not sure I'll ever be done venting about this.

The thingiest thing about this is that many people understood that this was a perception issue, but it didn't really matter. Even if I could successfully convince someone that yard signs didn't actually get votes, there was a deeper itch to be scratched. There was a warm feeling associated with hammering your Obama sign into your yard. On top of that, people had an expectation about political campaigns in general, and I couldn't do much to fight it. The expectation was that when someone runs for president, they run a few ads and distribute yard signs. If I didn't have yard signs, I or someone I knew wasn't doing their job.

Obama defied expectations every step of the way. It's what made his campaign successful. It also had the occasional side effect of making people think I was running a shoe store where nothing was for sale, and the only thing you could do was call strangers and tell them how great shoes are.

Fayette-nam

2008-11-19T08:05:00.000-08:00

The evolution of my feelings about Fayetteville was telling. The general sentiment that existed somewhere within every FO (field organizer) was summed up beautifully on the hungover morning after a training in Raleigh by Shaun, our resident Lewis Black. In answer to the question "Why is it called Fayette-nam," Shaun replied, without missing a beat, "because it sucks."

I don't know if that's as hilarious to an idle blog-reader (thanks by the way!) as it was to us unwitting inhabitants of Fayette-nam. To us, that one comment, which would be repeated again and again over the next two months, summed up the more dominant side of Shaun (who, I feel the need to say, is a really nice guy), but also made at least as much sense as the real reason it's called Fayette-nam- that being that it contains (I think) the largest military base in the country in Fort Bragg (and because 'nam = Vietnam and Vietnam = war associations in America).

Ah Fayetteville. Seemingly endless strip of fast food joints and shopping centers with 80% of the life bleached and processed away. The place where concrete goes when it has nothing else to do. Where you are never more than five minutes from a Wafflehouse or a Bojangles. Why is it called Fayette-nam? Because it sucks.

And yet, after a month or so of living in Richmond county, I started to really look forward to my once-or-twice a week trips into Fayetteville. A lot of that had to do with seeing the other FOs. They were mostly college-educated 20-somethings like me, and, of course, we could commisserate over the struggles of the FO. I also liked having the drive (90 minutes each way) to air out my thoughts. It wasn't a very scenic drive, but it was an easy one, so it was often therapeutic. Even Fayetteville itself started to hold some appeal. After all, it had the occasional coffee shop (I think the lack of coffee shops in Richmond county will get its own post) and it had food options. Food options! You know what my main food options in Richmond were (keep in mind, I'm veg)? Subway and lunch #14 at the Mexican place. La Cabana repeatedly put me into a food coma as I was approaching call time, and call time, like a 4-5 hour drive, was sometimes hellish if I had low energy, but could be fun if I was feeling up. That meant I usually went for Subway. By October, I would walk in, and whoever was working would immediately start preparing a foot-long veggie sub on wheat. Every sandwich-maker there voted for Obama.

Anyway, Fayetteville. I would never live there, I don't have any desire to go back there, but some part of me appreciates it. Not unlike how you would never hang out at a gas station, but when you're on a long journey, a place where you can refuel, physically, and in this case mentally, can feel like an oasis.

The Volunteer Ask

2008-11-18T12:37:00.000-08:00

The main tool of the FO is the volunteer ask. That's the industry term for asking someone to do something for which they will not receive any sort of compensation or tangible reward. I tried to explain the power and importance of what they'd be doing. I would bribe them with food when I could. I would downplay the time commitment, and do my best to make them realize that they do have a few hours somewhere in their week. And then I would say, "So, can you volunteer?" or if I was feeling feisty, "When can you volunteer?" I would ask some version of that question maybe 50 times a day. Anyone who came into the office for any reason, and anyone I met who showed some enthusiasm for Obama got the ask. That's on top of 4 hours of calls a night.

The reason is simple enough. Let's say you need some volunteers for a weekend thingy. So you call 100 supporters- that should do it right? Well of those 100 calls, you actually talk to, say 22 people. And of those 22, you get 3 yes and 5 maybes, and then you call all of them the night before to remind them, and 1 or 2 of the yes people show up and 0-1 of the maybes. 1-3 volunteer shifts out of 100 calls. Daunting. Daily reality.

One night, about a month in, I got a call about an NAACP meeting, starting in just 20 minutes. It was during call time, but I thought this was too good an opportunity to pass up. I raced across town to the meeting, was introduced by the secretary, said who I was and what I did, made my pitch for volunteering, explained the lack of yard signs as best I could, took names and gave out my number to everyone. I left beaming. I had hit the volunteer jackpot! Right?

Well, no.

I found it very easy to get people riled up and excited about Obama- much less easy to get them to do much about it, especially the specific tasks that I needed them to do- namely make calls and knock on doors.

Before long my perspective had shifted away from sympathy for all those who were "too busy" or "too anything" to volunteer. It was all the more infuriating when they assured me they were helping, and then defined helping as talking to their friends and family about the election. That's not to say that those things don't help, but for most people, two months of talking with folks you know about the election is worth about two hours of focused voter contact. Almost everything the campaign did was some form of focused voter contact, but I had to explain the importance of it many times a day, in the hopes of hooking someone into putting in some extra time. The trick was to draw as straight a line as possible from what I needed them to do, to Obama winning the election. It was probably the hardest part of the job, but I did just enough to turn my county blue, and we did enough collectively to turn NC blue (and, y'know, elect Obama).

I can get weary just thinking about it, but it's over it's over we did it we did it.

I lost my personal cell phone a month into the job, and didn't get it replaced until after the election. When I finally did, I had five voicemail messages. Three of the five were from Obama staffers asking me to drive to Indiana to volunteer or come to a phonebank in Chicago. Had I been in town, I probably would have. If I had time, and I was feeling up for it, and remembered to actually show up.

Election Night

2008-11-10T18:56:00.000-08:00

E-Day felt like another day at the office in a lot of ways. I had to be at the office at 5:15 instead of the usual 9:00, and the operation was different from the usual, but I didn't feel the enormous culmination of the last two years (or eight, or forty depending on how you're counting) bearing down on that one day as I went about my job. Like the last three months, I knew I had a job to do, and, while I was aware of the national hoopla, I didn't let it distract me too much. I did get a tingle when I realized that the polls were open and people were voting, but for most of the day I kept my fatigued head down and kept at it.

It only started to hit me when I got the call from the next rung up the ladder that my job was done. No more five hours of calls. No more nagging strangers to volunteer (I was doing vol recruitment 6 hours before the polls closed!). No more battles with the printer. There would be more people coming in asking for yard signs and other "chum." That will go on until they cut off my campaign phone and possibly longer (there will DEFINITELY be at least one post about chum and the misery it caused).

I stepped outside into the fresh air that I didn't get quite enough of in my long days in the office and glowed for a little bit. The moment I had been awaiting for months had finally arrived. I was finished. I could go home.

When I went back into the office, a crowd of about 15-20 had gathered for the moment a lot of the world had been awaiting for months or years for some. The group at the office consisted of some of my most devoted volunteers, my host and caretaker for the last three months, some people who had volunteered sporadically, a local barber who had allowed us to use his shop as a satellite headquarters, and some who had only watched the campaign and hadn't been involved. The mood was festive. The possibility of defeat didn't seem to be on anyone's mind. I felt good about our chances, but the thought that we could lose was somewhere in my calculations.

My mood followed a different trajectory than the rest of the crowd. I was well aware of which states were most important and which hardly required announcing. I was also extremely fatigued, energized by excitement, but completely out of reserves. I didn't cheer half as much as anyone else when Obama won Maine, and I cheered the loudest when he won Pennsylvania. When he won Ohio I knew it was over, but no one else seemed to.

The eruption happened just after the polls closed in California. In practically no time at all its electoral votes were awarded to Obama, putting him over 270 and giving him the victory. My memories of the five minutes after that involve no words. Just screams and crying, elated faces. Most of the people there were African American, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone so overwhelmed as they were at that moment.

For much of the campaign, the higher ups kept us in the field motivated with quotas. The national picture was always somewhere on my mind, but I was fighting most immediately for good numbers. Looking back, my mind replaces the drive to hit my benchmarks with those faces. Soon the actual Obama presidency will begin, and I'll get more reminders of what I fought for in his bills, appointments and speeches, but I don't think anything will make me understand the significance of that moment more than those faces, some of them over 70, crying with joy, the ghosts of their ancestors crying with them.

Begin the Odyssey Rewind

2008-11-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

Here I sit, alone in Rachel's bedroom in D.C., waiting for her to come home, and trying to somehow make sense of it all. One of her housemates, who I've met once before, pokes his head in the door to say a quick hello and a "Thanks for winning us North Carolina." It was a light thank you, so it was easy to respond to, but lately I've been getting all manner of praise, and I scarcely know what to make of it. A core component of my job the last three months was to make people understand the connection between their actions (or lack there-of) and what goes on in government, and especially the election. Still, when people point out my own impact with their thanks, I'm a little baffled.

I understand that I was part of the instantly-legendary Obama ground game, and that we were a crucial part of his win, especially in North Carolina. Still, after three months of grind and slog, I find my own impact hard to quantify. What I have an easier time with is the Obama field operation as a whole. Yeah, we did that. We won NC, we helped put MI in the bag early on, we protected the lead in PA, we convinced a whole lot of wary Ohioians. I only have a vague sense of what I accomplished, but I can tell you with much more certainty what we did.

Of course, you'll be able to read about the ground game as a whole in many places, and I'm sure a zillion books about it are on the way. So I'm going to use this space mostly to look back on my time in the trenches. Maybe it'll make more sense to me when I'm done.