A political career, abridged: part three

Arrived at the apartment, I pulled out the newspaper again and navigated to the election website. Although I had never run for office myself, I had always marveled at the students who chose to do so. Here were a dozen or so students who had chosen to devote huge amounts of their free time to the enhancement of student life, and who were probably only fractionally aware of the impact such service would have on their resumés. I hadn’t really any illusions that I was the ideal student-body representative to lead the school toward the promise of a better future, but I did want to vent publicly about the absurdity of my towing ordeal.

I started to compose my statement of purpose. I proposed that towing companies were nothing more than ruthless scavengers, fattening themselves on the carrion of people’s misjudgments, poor timing, and innocent oversights. The jurisdiction of such companies should be limited, I believed, to those cases where their services were strictly needed, such as traffic accidents and breakdowns. My statement was concise, direct, and passionate, with no idle filler about extending facility hours, taking certain needed public safety measures, revising the honor code, or improving relations between student groups.

A week passed after I posted my campaign statement, and for whatever reason, my plunge into the political fray had been met with little fanfare. Although I assumed my message alone would capture the imaginations of most of the students who would bother to research the candidates, I figured a little bit of advertising wouldn’t hurt. The evening before the election, I drove to Kmart to purchase a bucket of sidewalk chalk in a variety of eye-catching colors. I enlisted the help of a couple of friends, and at midnight we set off to pepper the campus with my name writ large in pastels. In a four-hour dash we left dozens of graffiti over the main quad and at the entrances of the more-frequented buildings (although it should be noted that we could have achieved the same production in half the time had I not had to edit my friends’ renderings for sexual innuendo and, in some cases, accompanying illustrations).

We took the light drizzle that moved in at about 4 a.m. as a sign to turn in for the night, our work complete. I decided to skip the Dunkin’ Donuts routine and instead went straight to bed; I fell asleep in no time, lulled by the constant patter of the rain. The next morning, when the rest of the student body arose and followed their usual routes to class, they would see my name over and over again as it passed beneath their feet. And hopefully when they reached the polls that day, mine would be the name that sang out loudest for the choosing.

Indeed it might have happened that way if the light drizzle hadn’t soon grown into a cleansing downpour that persisted until daybreak. The student body arose that morning to traverse a campus from which graffiti was uncharacteristically absent. In spite of that brief flurry of self-promotion, I would remain as anonymous as I had always been. When the thousands of votes had been tallied and the winners were announced a day later, I was not among them. I wasn’t completely skunked, but I received so few nods that the paper kindly neglected to convert my tally to a percentage.

It might have gone down as a watershed election, one that sent a clear message to Rhubarb and her unsavory ilk. Instead, a number of factors (and an act of God, mind you!) conspired to hobble my burgeoning movement before it gained any political traction. In retrospect my policy suggestions might have been a little too progressive for my fellow students to rally around. Perhaps an effort to introduce myself to voters prior to the morning of the election would have been prudent, but hey, I’m no baby-kisser. And besides, if I had quietly snuck in and stolen the hearts of the voters with a wee-hours campus canvassing, would I not have become the embodiment of the very thing I claimed to detest?

A political career, abridged: part two

At least I assumed the car had been towed. After all I had parked her in a faculty spot, albeit at a time when the only faculty members about were probably of the Hogwarts-dark-arts variety, combing the campus’s underground tunnels for rat droppings or communing with opossum. Moreover, I couldn’t imagine the prospecting car thief that would have tiptoed up to the window of my 160,000-mile-veteran of a Nissan Sentra, with broadening spider-web cracks across its windshield, a factory-installed, cassette-devouring stereo, and its backseat littered with crumpled fast-food wrappers and dirty gym clothes, and thought to himself, “Avarice compels me to steal this gem.” No, she must have been towed.

Thusly reduced to pedestrianism, I trudged back into the library and looked up phone numbers for a few local towing companies. The first number I called belonged to the offending company, as the early-morning receptionist, who announced herself as Rhubarb or something, confirmed on the other end of the line; and now I had a name toward which to channel my resentment. Secure in knowing the whereabouts of the Sentra, I resolved to finish the paper before I dealt any further with Rhubarb and her goons.

Fueled by persistent thoughts of vengeance, I furiously drummed the keys until the paper achieved the required length. I printed out this masterpiece of incoherence and walked across the campus to drop it off at the professor’s office, sliding it under the door. On my way out of the class building I grabbed up a copy of the school’s daily newspaper, which that morning focused on the upcoming student government election, and tucked it into my backpack.

I boarded a university bus that would deliver me to within a quarter-mile of the towing lot, sat down against the window, and retrieved the newspaper from my backpack. The front-page election article listed the website where students could find all the candidates, their desired offices, and what they hoped to achieve if elected. The ridiculous removal of my car from an empty parking lot had stirred my passions; when my car was restored to my rightful possession, I decided, I would devote myself to the public weal by running for elected office. My only campaign policy would be to advocate the banishment of these vulture towing companies that plagued our glorious campus.

But first there was the matter of recovering the Sentra, so I throttled my political ambitions for the time being. The bus had ventured decidedly off-campus by the time we reached my stop. I descended the steps onto a street that bisected a landscape of rusty, barbed-wire, overgrown weeds, and a number of long-since-closed garages in various states of decrepitude. People were strewn about the broken sidewalk, some huddled in groups, others wandering alone and conversing with the gremlins that tormented them, all of them with an eye, I guessed, to examine the contents of my backpack. Keeping my own eyes trained on the ground, I powered down the sidewalk in the direction, I hoped mightily, of the towing company.

A couple blocks down the street I spotted the faded logo of the scoundrels that absconded with my Sentra, and then I saw her. Even through the gaps of the chain-length fence, she stood out among the unwanted and abandoned clunkers of the town, all matte maroon paint bejeweled with gleaming avian deposits. While I was relieved to have found her, inside I raged at the audacity of the tow-truck driver who plucked her from harmless repose in the middle of the night. I found my way to the double-wide trailer that apparently served as an office, climbed two cinder-block steps and opened the door, preparing to unleash upon Rhubarb a verbal barrage born of justified indignation.

She sat behind a makeshift desk, comprising two filing cabinets with a sheet of plywood lain across them. Among the items cluttering her desk were a redwood tree’s worth of pink and yellow invoice slips, a cash register that was probably a relic from the Kruschev-era Soviet Union, and an oil-soaked napkin holding some crumbs from Rhubarb’s heart-smart breakfast. Some bits that hadn’t yet reached her mouth lined the folds of her stretched-out tee shirt, and still a few more were camped out at the corners of the orifice, momentarily spared. I, too, felt thankful to have missed the feeding.

“Hello, I’m the guy who called about the Sentra,” I said with poorly concealed disdain.

She turned her immense head to peer out the trailer window toward the lot. “Yep, we got it,” she replied. “It’s gonna be $125 to get it out. Cash or credit?”

“Oh, you don’t take checks?” I asked. “And here I already had one made out to ‘The bastards that kidnapped my car.’”

She smirked, releasing a morsel from a crevice near her mouth. “Cash or credit?” she asked again.

“Do you guys really have nothing better to do than drive around in the middle of the night, looking for innocent people to terrorize?” I countered.

“Was your car not parked illegally?” she asked.

“Well, technically, yes, it was, but…”

“Then cash or credit?” she demanded a third time, interrupting me as I was about to launch into a diatribe about the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law. Rhubarb clearly would not submit to reason. And since I would likely have been smothered and eaten on site if this disagreement escalated into a physical altercation, I begrudgingly reached for my back pocket.

Newly unencumbered of the contents of my wallet, I followed Rhubarb out of the trailer’s back door and into the gravel lot. While she moseyed over to open up the gate, I found my car, unlocked the driver’s door, and sat down behind the wheel. I ignited the engine right away, but then took an unnecessarily long time poring over the interior to make sure nothing had been removed. When finally I saw that Rhubarb had grown annoyed at waiting, I put the car in gear and did a protracted lap around the lot before pulling through the gate. She glared at me as I drove by, and I back at her.

(to be continued again.... I swear I'm getting to the 'political career' referred to in the title....)

A political career, abridged

All the attention on the primaries has reminded me of my own brief attempt at climbing the political ladder. I was in my second year at university when, facing a deadline a mere twelve hours away, I decided to stay awake through the night to finish a paper I hadn’t even begun to research.

I don’t mean to imply that a night without sleep was an extravagant measure; at that point in my collegiate career, the all-nighter had become a personal custom. Nearly everyday that year, after my two apartment-mates went to sleep, I would drive the three miles to the only Dunkin’ Donuts in town and order a large coffee with equal parts sugar, cream, and coffee. Sensing that a person keeping such hours must either be chronically desperate, mentally deranged, or both, the Dunkin’ Donuts cashier would often send me home with a free bag of yesterday’s donuts rather than risk provoking an outburst. So, having downed enough sugar and caffeine to incite a Grand Mal seizure, I would drive back to the apartment at an unsafe speed, swerve diagonally into a parking space, and retire for a night of guitar-noodling, infomercials, and heart palpitations.

On this particular night, though, I had a loftier goal in mind: to approximate the diligence of a good student. In order to finish that paper on time (and I would, by God) I’d have to ignore my guitar in favor of a textbook, and trade late-night TV for the hum and glow of a library computer. I would need those heart palpitations, however, so off to Dunkin’ Donuts I drove.

With my belly distended and sloshing with a mixture of hot coffee and stale cake, I arrived at the library around 2 am, parked my car in a faculty spot close to the entrance, and set off to work. After about five hours of typing long lines of unintelligibles, separated occasionally with randomly chosen punctuation marks, I decided to have a stroll to the car to move it to a legal spot before the morning crowd arrived. Where my car had been there were only two parallel lines and a pile of donut crumbs. My car had been towed in the middle of the night. to be continued….

Citizenship for beginners: part two

On a Thursday afternoon in September 2007, my then-fiancee and I left work early to attend a rally for Barack Obama at the Georgia World Congress Center. He had already been through Atlanta once, speaking to a crowd of 20,000 at Georgia Tech on a Saturday morning. While the attendance was expectedly lower on that Thursday afternoon than at the previous speech, the enthusiasm of the crowd far outstripped its size. The early arrivers to the GWCC (which I would estimate at 2,500) formed a serpentine circuit throughout the lobby, waiting abuzzedly for the auditorium doors to open. Once inside, the crowd filled the room wall-to-wall, facing an enormous American flag that had been draped to backdrop the stage. I half expected Obama to be lowered to the stage in an Uncle Sam tophat and flowing robe, a la Apollo Creed in Rocky IV.

For forty-five minutes the attendees milled about, anticipating Obama's entrance while pop songs spilled out of the overhead speakers. The crowd was beginning to grow restless when one of Obama's campaign managers finally took the stage to loud applause. He spoke for a moment, thanking the crowd for their support, and introduced a local organizer, who shared an anecdote about Obama and explained her personal compulsion to help him win the Presidency. She spoke of an almost-religious awakening to that calling; this was one of the first indications to me that this would be an extraordinary campaign. This was a politician unlike any I had seen since the dawn of my political awareness, one with the ability to stir the passion of ordinary citizens, to make them believe in his legitimacy despite being nationally unknown before the Democratic National Convention four years ago.

Unfortunately, we would have to wade through a host of less compelling personalities before we'd witness Barack Obama for ourselves. One after another, local celebrities and politicians like Dominique Wilkins, Rep. Sanford Bishop, and even Usher Raymond took the stage offering endorsements and seeking to align themselves with Obama. Finally, after Rep. Hank Johnson finished reciting an interminable and pedestrian speech from a stack of notecards, a staffer came to the stage to introduce the Senator from Illinois.

There are candidates from both parties who are principled and capable, who have demonstrated strength of judgement and political savvy, and who have been able to mobilize backing enough to sustain campaigns to this point. But none of his competitors has the charisma and force of character to engender the fervent support of those who feel alienated from the political system, younger and lower income voters in particular. As soon as he stepped onstage, illuminated by thousands of camera flashes and buried beneath a roar of applause, I felt it. He delivered a speech with palpable confidence, passion, and resolve, as all candidates do, and said all the right things, as all candidates must. The message of his current speeches doesn't differ substantially from the one we heard. He spoke about the need for unity and cooperation in a polarized country, for hope and optimism in the face of tremendous challenges. They're not revolutionary ideas, or even particularly original ones, but they obviously resonate with a lot of people. I am frankly shocked that none of his competitors have adapted their positions to his ideas, diluting the power of his approach.

It may seem trivial to judge a political candidate on charm and poise, but given the recent loss of American standing internationally and the racalcitrance of the Bush administration over the past eight years, these are qualities that will help to resuscitate our reputation and promote goodwill in our relations with other powers. And domestically, with both presidential and congressional approval ratings at all-time lows, it is clear that the American populace has had enough of the gridlock created by partisan clashing. His message is obviously taking. In Iowa last week, the turnout for the Democratic caucus doubled that of Republicans and bettered by far the wildest of pre-caucus estimates. Obama supporters convened at an Atlanta restaurant to watch the TV coverage of the Iowa returns, and the mood was excited before any tallies had been announced. As the percentage of reporting caucus precincts grew, so did Obama's lead. When CNN finally projected Obama as the winner, the crowd went ecstatic, waving signs and screaming out his campaign motto in a furious call and response: "Fired up! Ready to go! Fired up! Ready to go!"

A look at the Iowa return statistics reveals that fifty-seven percent of participants under thirty-years old caucused for Obama; also, of the more-than-half of voters that were participating in the caucus for the first time, forty percent chose him, driving him to a comfortable victory. In nearly every demographic he outperformed the projections. His success in that first primary demonstrated that winning this election will not only require that he persuade existing voters to choose him, but will also depend on his ability to rouse politically inert people to go to the polls and mark his name. And while the Democratic nomination is far from secured, Obama's performance in Iowa has shifted the national perception about his viability in the general election, and his remarkable fundraising effort ensures that he'll have the infrastructure in place to continue to perform well in the upcoming primaries around the country. My now-wife and I will be at the Atlanta Obama primary party tomorrow night as the votes come in from New Hampshire, hoping as we did last week that the voters push him to victory. Perhaps tomorrow night will prove again how powerful a force hope can be.

Citizenship for beginners....

I was a twenty-year old college student when Bush v. Gore monopolized the headlines for the entire month of November. On election night in 2000 I was pulling an all-nighter writing a paper in the computer lab of the university library. I hadn’t paid much attention to the campaigns or any of the debates prior to election night, and I wasn’t moved enough by civic responsibility to actually vote in the election. Nonetheless, as the popular votes were tallied and Electoral College votes stacked higher and higher in two equal piles, I was riveted by the closeness of the counts. I found myself switching back and forth every few minutes from work on my paper to the latest information on CNN.com. When the library flooded with sunlight the next morning, the only clear result of the night’s events was a sub-par, eight-page paper that took fifteen hours to complete. The election results would take much longer, as you may recall.

I took a greater interest in the 2004 election, but only to a point. I followed the lead-up to the 2004 election closely after Kerry was named the Democratic nominee; disillusioned with the Bush administration like much of the country, I didn’t particularly care who defeated Bush as long as someone did. I voted for the first time that November, checking mostly blue boxes for state and local officials about whom I knew next-to-nothing. When I left the voting site I was notified that I had to work in Raleigh the following morning, so I spent Tuesday afternoon driving through Georgia and the Carolinas, listening to conservative talk radio, and sensing that another nail-biter was shaping up. Indeed it had, and in spite of the result, I was encouraged by how mobilized citizens on both sides became in its aftermath.

As 2008's presidential candidates began to emerge from both parties a full twenty-four months before the election, I found that I was already roped in to the drama. I began to show signs of political junkiehood, plowing through a mounting pile of articles on candidates’ stances, fundraising statistics, attendance numbers at stump speeches, and anything else someone saw fit to publish. And if last week’s caucus results are any indication, the last two elections and the ensuing tumultuous terms have had an arresting effect on a lot of other formerly uninterested citizens, particularly younger ones like myself. (to be continued….)

Grace

At the hospital today I came across a patient suffering from a rare, congenital flesh-eating disorder that had completely disfigured her face and was beginning to ravage her arms and legs. In fact, the word ‘suffering’ doesn’t begin to convey what this person experiences as a result of the disease.

She has lost all her hair; her scalp is covered by what looks like scar tissue. The flesh of her ears have basically disappeared, save for the suggestion of an upper ear just above her canal. Her right eyelid can no longer close, and she has gone blind on that side; the immobile eye just stares emptily into the distance. Her left eye is beginning to do the same. She was thickly bandaged about the forehead and cheeks, and on her arms and legs were awful sores that hinted at what lay beneath those bandages. It seemed that movement of any kind caused her a great deal of pain.

I don’t know whether her condition is treatable. I can’t imagine that, if it is treatable, she would have let it get so far out of control before seeking medical attention.

I had a profoundly visceral reaction to seeing her in that condition, and it continues even as I type. Her plight is unimaginable, the stuff of nightmares, yet she was dealing with it. Even in her state of perpetual and extreme discomfort, she was gentle and very appreciative of all the medical personnel helping her. I am humbled by the strength she shows just to survive each day, knowing what she will have to endure the next.

Promises, promises

A few years ago, enjoying my early twenties and a blissful period of unemployment, I promised myself that writing music would be a lifelong pursuit. I mean, with nothing to do but noodle around on a guitar between marathon pleasure-reading sessions, how could I not manage to be creatively productive? Even accounting for inevitable life changes (career, relationship, family, etc.) and attendant reordered priorities, wouldn’t I always find the outlet of an instrument or a notebook when inspiration struck? Of course I would.

In the summer of 2006 I realized a personal dream by recording a handful of my songs professionally. Holding the finished product in a jewel case in my hands, with beautiful album artwork done by a gifted friend of mine, I felt like I had actually achieved something. And now that I had carried this set of songs to completion, it would be much easier to repeat the process a second time, and a third….

During the past year I got engaged and then married, traveled to Quebec, Barcelona, Chile, Argentina, and Easter Island, worked full-time when I was home, participated in dozens of improv workshops and shows, helped to maintain our old bungalow house, kept two pets alive, and spent a lot of time with family and friends. It was a phenomenally demanding and rewarding year, the most rewarding of my life by far.

The one thing I neglected in the midst of all that activity and responsibility was music. In fact I have only begun and aborted writing a few songs since the album was finished. I have completed just one song and I don’t really like that one. I have probably spent about four hours playing guitar in the past six months combined, an amount that I used to knock out every couple of days. It is frustrating, of course, but I keep telling myself that now that all the insanity of the past year is over, I’ll have a lot more time (and subject matter) to devote to music. I will, right? Of course I will.

Reacquaintance

Today I had lunch with an old friend, a person with whom I was close during the most awkward time of my life. And despite not having seen one another for the past half of our lives, we fell in like we did when we were 13.

As a kid he was always overgrown for his age, a bit oafish. He seemed to relish attention of any kind, even if he had earned it with clumsiness or feigned stupidity. In fact he was pretty smart but never betrayed it, and his grades and interest in school lagged as it became more competitive.

It was a shock to see him for the first time as a normal-sized person. I expected him to tower above me like he had in the ninth grade, a man-child extrapolated. But he stood before me, only an inch taller than I am, his features better defined than in his doughy youth. His speaking voice was mostly unchanged. He still spoke forcefully, from the back of his throat, bludgeoning words with a thick Michigan accent he inherited from his father.

A teenager from a well-to-do family, he was bold and crude and constantly on the prowl for small-time mischief. Nothing too damaging, but troubling enough that I had begun to distance myself from him in the year before his family suddenly sold their house and resettled on the opposite coast. The brashness was still there today, albeit channeled to a more productive outlet. He’s got ambitious goals for a business that’s still just an idea at this point, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to see him achieve them.

He came armed with a barrage of questions about my family (which he remembered with striking clarity), my current job, old acquaintances, and people whose names I hadn’t conjured in more than a decade. It is actually very encouraging to know that there are people like him: people who never fully lose touch, who even after maturing and moving on to adult life, still seek out the people and the context amid which they grew up.

Humans are funny

At around 7:40 pm last night I heard the opening salvo. A series of four loud pops in quick succession ripped through the neighborhood, and I found myself marveling anew at a human custom that I will never understand: celebrating significant occasions with crap that explodes. It’s as if people can only really enjoy themselves if there is some risk of deafness or losing a digit. The lawmakers of Georgia are keenly aware of the threat fireworks pose to public health and safety. Until recently it was illegal to sell or use fireworks of any kind inside state lines, but (probably because the allure of scintillating objects is just too powerful to deny) lawmakers have relented somewhat. Now the state permits the use of fireworks for private entertainment if the fireworks are don’t fly and don’t explode. Of course that’s like telling kids they can have all the ice cream they can consume, as long as the ice cream is really antifreeze.

Millions of people throughout the world participated in another of New Year’s Eve’s inexplicable traditions yesterday. The main thoroughfares of every major city were flush with revelers aiming to usher in the new year amid a heaving mass of drunken strangers. Here in Atlanta tens of thousands of people gathered, many of them arriving six or more hours early to find a prime spot near the tower capped by a giant fiberglass peach, to practice counting backwards in unison as the stroke of midnight approached. With the final minute of 2007 passing gradually into history, the enormous, illuminated peach descended jerkily down the tower and onto a platform below, whence 2008 had arrived at last and nothing but clocks really changed. Nonetheless the throng sent up a pulverizing roar and its members embraced one another involuntarily. Their faces brightened, mouths agape, beneath a cascade of, you guessed it, more fireworks! Dozens of explosions battered the sky with red and gold sparks, then disappeared as rivulets of smoke streaked back to the ground. For a moment there was widespread euphoria, but it soon gave way to the collective realization that, on any other night of the year, these people wouldn’t be caught dead in this part of the city after midnight. And so they dispersed, leaving a night of celebration and hundreds of tons of trash in their wake.