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….