My Brief Foray into Politics

Introduction

This post does not concern, nor reveal, my political views.  As I stated in my very first albertnet post, politics is a topic I avoid.  Why?  First of all, I don’t have enough readers to risk alienating half of them.  Second, politics is boring.  I firmly believe that most political dialogue between non-professionals is pointless.  Either you disagree with the other person and will never come to agreement, or the two of you already agree, in which case the dialogue is just reiterating each other’s opinions (or splitting hairs, which doesn’t generally change anybody’s vote).  I’ve personally never met an undecided voter.  I acknowledge they exist but this amazes me.

This post tells the story of my brief foray into politics, a couple decades ago, as a Precinct Captain during a Presidential election.  This was when I was a student.  My college career happened to span two such elections, with a different party winning each time.  I reckon I can safely tell my story without you figuring out which side I support(ed).

(I thought this would be a recycled “from the archives” essay, but discovered that most of my original version emphasized the wrong things.  The fun, human details that stand out in memory were largely missing from the original essay.  So I’m recycling some stuff here, but dredging up the more interesting details from memory.  Here’s a teaser:  a girl was involved.) 

My brief foray into politics

It all started with a knock at the door from some guy handing out political paraphernalia.  He represented the candidate I supported, so—being bored, idealistic, and bereft of the “refusal skills” they tried to teach us in junior high health class—I coughed up my name and phone number as a potential volunteer.  A week later, the phone awakened me from a late slumber.  The caller was a girl and asked for me by name.  I’d only moved to town a couple months before and didn’t know a lot of people, so this seemed too good to be true.  Her name was Charlie.  If you don’t think that’s a sexy name for a college girl, maybe that’s only because you haven’t heard her voice.  If she’s not running a political campaign today, she might be making a great living as a deejay or voice actor.  She “reminded” me (actually, I’d been ignorant) about the big rally the next day.

I decided to go.  Not because I’m a natural-born volunteer, which I am not, and not because I was a politically wild-eyed college kid, and not because I was looking for something that would “look good on my résumé” (having the good sense even then to leave out this kind of thing).  After two decades of reflection, I’m able to admit that my main motivation for attending was to meet Charlie and see if she was as attractive in person as she’d sounded on the phone.

The student pavilion was absolutely mobbed.  After much trumpeting, ballyhooing, and a few introductory speeches, a big boss asked each volunteer to state his or her name, organization, and reason for attending.  This threatened to take forever; the first few students gave long tirades about their beliefs, etc.  Fortunately, a lot of others (perhaps sensing the growing danger of death-by-blather) gave very brief intros like, “My name is Joe Blow and I’m hung over” or “Her name is Jane Doe and she’s shy.”

When it came to my turn I said, “I’m Dana Albert and I’m here because I disagree with almost everything [Candidate X] stands for.”  This was met with cheering and laughing and I was on the verge of thinking I had a talent for politics until somebody said, “Wait—almost everything?”  I feared I might be pilloried but there was just more laughing.  Everybody seemed pretty punch-drunk, which may well be normal at such gatherings.

Then we got down to the strategy for Election Day.  Each precinct would have a Precinct Captain who would lead a team of “walkers” to blanket the region, knocking on doors to hand out paraphernalia and remind people to vote.  Every door in every precinct would be hit three times.  This sounded like a whole lot of work and I considered slipping out and running for my life.  Once you’ve demonstrated a willingness to do volunteer slave labor, I reasoned, you’re marked for life.

On the other hand, I theorized that being a Precinct Captain instead of just a foot soldier might involve some interesting work and a lot less walking.  Who knows, maybe I was a bit punch-drunk myself, because I bit the bullet and volunteered for Captain.  Just like that, my apartment became the headquarters for Precinct 34-11.

The Precinct Captains gathered at one end of the pavilion to head up the walker recruiting process.  The volunteer pool was surprisingly small, to my dismay.  What’s worse, the other Captains actually knew how to recruit:  “Yo, free beers for anyone in my precinct!” and  “Coffee and doughnuts over here!” Being broke, I wasn’t about to pony anything up, so I scanned the room for anybody who looked like he could be cajoled, via mere words, into joining my team.  My eyes happened to settle on a singularly attractive young woman, and I was so stunned when she returned my gaze that I just froze, cowering inwardly.  Only the fear of being rude kept me from instantly averting my eyes.  I probably looked like a scared little puppy dog who’s made a mess on the rug that his master is soon to discover.  But to my surprise, the girl didn’t scorn me; in fact, she walked over.  And astonishingly, she turned out to be Charlie herself!

Actually, this only seemed astonishing at the time, and if you happened to read my original account you’d have thought I was a master of dramatic irony (i.e., the literary technique where the reader figures things out that the hapless narrator does not).  But actually, I was just clueless.  Only now, in retrospect, do I realize that Charlie came over not because I was looking at her, but because I’d stood up and stated my name a few minutes before, so she knew who I was; i.e., she realized I was the hapless last-minute recruit she’d telephoned the previous day, who had now recklessly named himself a Precinct Captain despite lacking the knowledge and volunteer base to cover a precinct.  My puppy-dog look had only increased her pity.  Surely this is why she—a higher-up party operative—agreed to be one of my walkers, for at least part of my shift.

Unfortunately, it would take a lot more than one volunteer to blanket my precinct three times over.  I wasn’t the only understaffed Captain; one of the big bosses announced, “It looks like we're really short on volunteers, so the best thing you can do is call up your friends and get them to help you.”  I thought about raising my hand and saying, “What if I don’t have any friends?”  This would have been taken as a joke, and yet the reality was, the friendships I had made were still too new and shaky to withstand this kind of burden.

And so, later that afternoon, I went around to all the apartments in my complex with my signs and posters to beg for support.  Only one neighbor agreed to help, and he wouldn’t commit to a specific time, which made him as good as worthless.  Going into Election Day, I had to kiss goodbye my dream of assembling a crack team of precinct-walking superstars, ruling over them with friendly yet absolute authority, earning their respect as a fearless leader, and then kicking back all day and watching the votes roll in.  But things weren’t all bad; after all, I was Precinct Captain over one of the most beautiful girls on campus.

I had to get up at 5:00 a.m. on Election Day.  The first task of our crew was hanging last-minute campaign signs all over town.  It was hard to see the point of this; perhaps the idea was to put on a show of great effort in order to guilt lazy voters into actually making it to the polls.  Then it was time for the first door-to-door shift.  Charlie had her real job to do until 3:30 p.m., but I was able to coax the party bosses into assigning me a couple of professional walkers who had come all the way from Washington, DC.  Despite 34-11 being a notoriously large precinct, every door was knocked on by 11 a.m. and I did only 45 minutes of walking myself.

I spent the early afternoon calling in the poll results and handling a few other clerical matters.  I was dreading the second walking shift because I had no volunteers and would have to do the whole precinct myself.  But check this out:  the neighbor I’d recruited not only showed up, but brought his brother!  The three of us covered the second wave in good time, so that when Charlie showed up at 3:30 I was already back at HQ and probably looked like I knew what I was doing.

I had to walk a lot during the final shift, by which time people seemed pretty sick of seeing us.  Going door-to-door was actually kind of fun; seeing college kids at home is kind of like seeing animals in the wild.  A lot of them seemed to be napping, and it wasn’t uncommon for pot smoke to billow out as the door opened.  I knocked on one door, heard a lot of shrieking and scuffling, and eventually it opened a crack and a girl giggled, “None of us are dressed!”  At another place the tenant, who’d been sprawling on a couch half asleep, roused himself to start arguing with me.  I explained that I didn’t have time to discuss the election, at which point his girlfriend took up the job.  They were really going at it as I left.

At 8:15 I headed over to the mandatory meeting of all the Precinct Captains.  I guess if our candidate had triumphed this would have been a big party, and there was certainly enough alcohol laid in for that purpose.  But our guy lost.  The state of the headquarters (somebody’s house) reflected the wreckage of the campaign:  all kinds of flyers and other paraphernalia, now completely useless, littered the floor; posters were beginning to curl and slide down the walls; charts of the periodic precinct checks displayed the carnage numerically.  I imagined being one of the bosses recording these numbers, the cause being slowly tortured to death before their very eyes. 

I went into the living room, where everybody was gathered around watching our candidate’s concession speech.  I don’t think advance polling was much of a thing back then, so this loss hadn’t been predicted.  Still, I was surprised at how nobody seemed braced for this eventuality.  It was like somebody had died … everyone was so depressed.

Maybe nobody wanted to be the first to leave, because we all hung around for a good while, some people drinking pretty heavily.  Maybe all the guys were waiting for a chance to hit on Charlie, which to be honest was the main reason I myself stuck around.  It did seem a bit crass to be pursuing such a selfish personal ambition under the circumstances, but then, defying my hormones to pursue extended mourning wouldn’t change anything anyway.  Life goes on, right? 

I nursed a single beer for so long it became warm in my hand, and I must have zoned out for a good while.  When I did my next casual scan of the room to see what Charlie was up to, I was startled to discover two things.  One, almost everybody seemed to have vanished, as though they’d been quietly dismissed or spontaneously bailed en masse.  Two, Charlie was totally making out with some guy!

Dammit!  This disappointment oddly mirrored that of the election itself.  In both cases, I hadn’t really had my hopes up but was nonetheless shocked to see them so suddenly dashed.  And who was the lucky guy?  I didn’t recognize him as one of the leaders, and he wasn’t particularly good looking or even well-dressed.  What was his secret?  Confidence, probably.  Yeah, even with (or especially with) his face mashed into Charlie’s, he exuded charisma.  Well, good for him.  Hell, he’d probably been working on Charlie for the whole damn election … who was I to think I could swoop in at the end, coordinate some pointless door-to-door campaign activity on Election Day, and sweep this gorgeous and important young woman off her feet?

Adding insult to injury, I now had to figure how to make a graceful exit.  Sneaking away seemed cowardly and antisocial.  But I couldn’t just tap Charlie on the shoulder to bid her farewell.  What would I say?  “Excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to say goodbye and thanks for … everything.”  And what would I say to the guy?  Offer him my congratulations?  It was all just so awkward. 

But then all the empty beer cans and bottles littering the place gave me an idea.  I was seated at a table and kind of slumped over it for a spell.  Then I let out a little groan and slowly pitched myself out of my chair, slipping down off the table and sprawling out on the floor.  To complete the illusion of being passed out drunk, I let my beer bottle slip from my hand and roll a short way across the floor.  I remained as still as possible, eyes slitted.

Charlie’s new boyfriend chuckled and said, “Looks like somebody’s overdone it.”  He and Charlie walked over and helped me to my feet.  I staggered and slurred as they walked me—my arms around their shoulders—to the door.  “You gonna be okay, buddy?” the guy asked, showing off to Charlie as the cool big brother figure.  Well played, sir! 

I did my best impression of a drunk foolishly assuring them I was fine, and tottered away into the night.  As the door closed behind me, I even started singing in an off-key, maudlin way.  As I contemplated Charlie and her guy resuming their make-out session—and escalating it, now that they had their privacy—I continued singing, all the way down the block, until some guy yelled to shut up.  Forgetting for the moment that I wasn’t actually drunk, I shouted back some mild, halfhearted obscenities.  Then I headed home, exhausted and dejected.

Did I learn anything from my brief foray into politics?  Not really … just something I’d already guessed, which is that no political effort, however humble or lofty, small or large, grassroots or massively funded, will ever exclude personal ambition of one sort or another.  There’s nothing wrong with this, of course.  Somebody’s got to do that work, and I can’t begrudge those folks their well-earned rewards.

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From the Archives - Cleaning the Preschool Yard

Introduction

I have a difficult relationship with volunteer work.  On the one hand, of course I want to be a helpful person.  On the other hand, when I do volunteer my time to an organization, I don’t always perceive that they make the best use of me.  After all, if they don’t, it’s not like they’re wasting their money.  Maybe my help was really needed, maybe it wasn’t—it’s all the same to them.  (My other altruistic behavior, donating blood, entails no such misgivings, since a unit of blood is worth about $5,000.)

When I wrote the story below, about cleaning up the playground at my kid’s co-op preschool, I was a bit bitter because our daughter’s application for the next year had been turned down.  The school was oversubscribed, with a long wait list, etc., and technically my daughter’s birthday was just outside their (seemingly arbitrary) cutoff.  That story has a happy ending—the school ended up bending the rules and accepting my daughter for the next year—but I didn’t know this at the time.  So I wrote this tale while in a cranky mood, which probably improved it.  (The tale, not the mood.)

Cleaning the Preschool Yard – April 23, 2008

Last Saturday we had to clean up the preschool yard again.  I was feeling incredibly fatigued to start with, unnaturally so.  I even passed out for ten minutes in the car when we got to the preschool, from this crushing fatigue just sopping the life out of me, and then when I joined my wife in the yard she’d snagged the push-broom.  Dang it!  That’s supposed to be my job!

Using that broom is the only thing I feel qualified to do at that playground:  sweeping sand back into the giant ground-level sandboxes.  The yard looks really nice when the sand is all flush with that spongy ground surface, but I wish they’d install a lip there to keep the non-sandbox areas from being invaded by great dunes between clean-ups. 

I guess there’s technically one more job I feel qualified to do, which is extracting dead leaves from the sandboxes, but I hate that job.  The scritch-scritch of the rake is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. And it’s a fool’s errand, trying to get the leaves out, because most of them are these tiny things like the crispy onions that lousy restaurants put on salads, and there are thousands of them, podlike, floating continually down from the trees, making me want to not only cut down the trees, but to fund the design of a sophisticated herbicide that could eradicate that species of tree from the planet.

So I wandered over to the water play station, which is this crazy tri-sink apparatus.  Surveying it, I was reminded how much I like this preschool, even though it’s expensive and they rejected my daughter for next year.  Some part of me can’t shake the thought that they’d have bent the rules for Lindsay if they liked her more.  This is irrational, but there it is.

So, yeah, this playground sink thing is a tribute to the school, having obviously been built by a very, very smart parent, not just a skilled plumber but somebody who understands how to educate a child.  A physics professor couldn’t have devised a better way to demonstrate the water table effect to children.  There are all kinds of valves to open and close, and sprayers, and tubes that feed water, via gravity, to other sinks, and it’s just a masterpiece except that it’s in this play yard with all this sand, and the less sophisticated students (probably the boys, frankly) evidently think there’s nothing more fun to do with this engineering marvel than to fill it full of sand. 

What is it with boys and sand?  When at a playground, my daughters play sophisticated games of psychological and social intrigue, their favorite being Incarceration, where they pretend they’re in a prison  and have to orchestrate daring escapes.  And what do little boys do?  Dump sand all over the slide, in the sinks, in the playhouse, everywhere, ad infinitum.  I’ve watched this play out at playground after playground.  It doesn’t usually bother me, except when it’s here, because every time I clean this sink, I am removing massive amounts of sand from it.

This time was particularly bad, as the plumbing was completely clogged.  I decided to drain the standing water from the sink manually so I could sweep the bulk of the sand out before tackling the plumbing itself.  To make the sink-draining process less tedious, I tried to teach Lindsay and Alexa about siphoning.  With each unavoidable mouthful of filthy water I got starting and re-starting the siphon, I consoled myself that at least I wasn’t siphoning gasoline.  The scumbags who steal gas out of our car, right in front of our house, have that to deal with; once there was a pile of vomit next to the hose the dude left behind.  Of course, when we’re paying through the nose to live where we do, it’s not actually all that comforting to think that gas theft is going on in our community.

Anyway, my kids were reasonably attentive with the siphon lesson, until they both realized that instead of listening to me, they could dig an extensive network of canals and such to make use of the water suddenly at their disposal.  I can’t very well tell my kids not to play, because the only saving grace of this particular work detail is that we don’t have to get a sitter as long as those two stay out of our hair. 

At one point Alexa killed my siphon by lifting up the end of the hose, and the prospect of another mouthful of filthy water doubtless influenced my reaction.  Here I marveled at my own grumpiness:  I should be glad that my kid is even halfway listening, whether or not she absorbs the lesson, because most kids would be ignoring me completely, flipping me off and/or dumping more sand in my tri-sink apparatus.  Which was proving to be my Waterloo. 

I scraped most of the sand out of there, to the detriment of my already wind- and ice-water-chapped hands (girlie-hands that should take real work in stride but have been softened by office work) and then set about trying to unclog the sinks.  Between flossing the pipes with a hose and trying to build up enough pressure to blast out the sand, I got confused and turned on the wrong valve and got a full sprinkler going, right in my face, soaking half of my dry-clean-only sweater.  Did I mention that there was a cold wind howling through there?  I thought this was spring!  I thought this was California! 

Anyway, I eventually got the drains basically working, and Lindsay and Alexa complained bitterly when their water supply was finally cut off for good.  It was sort of hard to tell what Erin had been working on this whole time.  The place looked better, sure—the sand was smoother, there was a bit less of it on the non-sandbox surfaces—but it seemed like I’d been fighting with the sinks for ages; surely by now everything else should look good as new?  I’d hoped so, because my contribution would be practically invisible, and one little boy in five minutes would probably re-clog the whole sink station before any adult laid eyes on it.  But there was no metamorphosis in the yard, and—worse yet—Erin still had control of the coveted push broom.

Oh how I envied her that push broom.  I think the best thing about the push broom is that you can just stand around leaning on it, feeling like a government-employed janitor killing time until his shift is up.  Whenever I do schoolyard cleanup I fantasize about living in a socialist country, taking comfort in the idea that when that whistle blows, I’m done, whether or not I accomplished anything during my time there.

Our actual situation is quite different:  we don’t get to leave until Erin is satisfied that we’ve done a kickass job of cleaning, one that will bring glory to the Albert family within this preschool community—never mind that they’ve already rejected our daughter and by extension our whole family, so it’s too late anyway.  And never mind that most of the other volunteers probably show up, set a tipped-over pail upright, bury a few dog feces, and bail after five or ten minutes.  I looked around and made the mistake of being obviously between tasks, and Erin asked, “Are you ready for our special job?”

Man, I thought this whole thing was special.  You mean we have some extra tacked-on thing to do this time?  Yes, we do.  We have to organize the tool shed:  she’d signed us up for this.  Now, if there’s one thing I’m really uncomfortable with (actually, there are actually a great many things I’m uncomfortable with), it’s organizing some area that isn’t mine.  If somebody went and organized the tools in my garage, I’d be really annoyed.

Actually, that’s untrue.  I’d be really pleased if somebody organized my garage, but only because there is no organization there—I’ve got house tools (coarse, ugly, practically unusable) and household gewgaws (incomprehensible, crummy, made in China) all mixed up with bike tools (beautiful, perfect) and bike parts (precise, precious, expensive).  But this isn’t my garage we’re talking about.  It’s an established preschool, and if there’s one thing worse than performing manual slave labor to incrementally beautify this doomed child-ridden environment, it’s putting out similar effort to actually lower the quality of the adult-focused subset of that environment.  Somebody who actually cared about the tool shed probably spent a fair amount of time and energy figuring out how to organize it, and it’s pretty well organized.  What could I do to show that I’d put in my time, besides changing things around arbitrarily?

So I hauled everything out of there, swept, and hauled it back in.  This took a great deal of time.  Most of what I was hauling out were tricycles:  really awesome, heavy, bulletproof tricycles, the coolest I’ve ever seen.  At least a dozen of them.  Glorious, surely European-made, some with trailers, some with cargo bays, most of them swept back like choppers, with the sleek yet burly industrial look of WWII-era aircraft or Kitchen-Aid mixers.  Where did these things come from?  The newer tricycles among them—also Euro, also cool—were already wearing out.  The older ones suggested an earlier time, a golden era, when the preschool was either totally flush with cash, or had a kid whose dad was either a tycoon or just very, very fond of exquisite trikes and children.

I suppose handling this fleet of sweet trikes could have been pleasurable to me, but the sad fact is, my appreciation was lessened by the thought that Lindsay doesn’t even ride the trikes, because she’s not strong enough to pedal them.  (I’m not surmising this—she’s told me so.)  Alexa tried to ride one while we were there, but the effort of running over a hose or a tree-root-lifted concrete lump was enough to ruin both her forward movement and her resolve.

So anyway, I got everything out, sorted some rubber balls (a grown man, sorting balls!), flung some things back behind other things to create the impression of tidiness, swept a bunch of sand out of there, and then brought everything back in, and half the sand with it.  Meanwhile, another family had shown up to clean the inside of the school, and their kids ran through the puddles, joined by Lindsay and Alexa.  Those two completely forgot their very clear instructions, and tracked sand all over the play structures until they looked exactly like they did when we arrived.  I kept a close eye on the tri-sink area, ready to intervene should anyone go near it with so much as a pinch of sand.  Another gust of wind came in and broke loose a mind-boggling flurry of leaves, which settled down over the sand  like a blast of confetti in an operating room.  (Don’t over-think that metaphor.) 

To my amazement, at this moment Erin declared we were done.  And for what?  By the time we found Lindsay’s and Alexa’s shoes, put our equipment away, and hauled ourselves out of there, the place looked like a war zone.  Two and a half hours, and the teachers will probably think we never showed.  Sweet.