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At a Ray Lutz Rally
Warming up the crowd for our fearless leader, candidate Ray Lutz**** THIS POST IS A "CATCH-UP" POST, from the Summer of 2010, the first in a series of posts bringing my blog up to the present day *****
Wake Up
I rubbed my eyes and literally slapped myself in the face. That’s something I do occasionally, mimicking cartoons I’d watched as a child, when I need to wake up. It was three in the morning, and there were probably 150 cars in front of me.
I had another half an hour until I reached the checkpoint, but this was just another Tuesday.
I did wonder however, if the air quality of living in Tijuana would impact my health if I did this long enough. What was I doing commuting daily across the busiest border in the whole world, and running a national political campaign anyway? How did I get here? And what are we going to say on CNN tomorrow?
Getting back After returning from Europe, I was compelled to return to the land of my birth, Southern California. I hadn’t lived there in eight years, and my best friends were growing old without me. I’d flow back to the states, claimed my old diesel VW
from my friend Jon in Portland, and began trekking across the western states, to arrive in San Diego about a week later. I took the long route, through Idaho, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, picking up passengers to cover my fuel cost all along the way. One idiotic passenger decided to quit the trip, while we were perched at the top of Mt Aire on the Lincoln Highway, just east of Salt Lake City. This guy, in what I firmly
believed would be his final act, insisted on drunkenly riding his bicycle back down the freeway, opposite traffic, with a giant unbalanced bag slung over his
shoulder. I tried to talk him out of the ordeal, but you can’t reason with morons; a lesson I should have been applying to politics already.
Other passengers included an entertaining Swedish man named Robert who now lives in the Congo, and an entertaining young girl named Charlotte who shared
the last leg of the tour from Phoenix to San Diego. I left her, at her insistence, with a drug dealing sleezebag in Ocean Beach, and we stayed in touch.
However, my own accommodations were to stay with my
best old buddies Josh Harford and Jeff Bauer in San Diego. These guys had always been there for me since high school, and it was truly rewarding to know that they could prop me up until I was able to stand alone.
I fell back on my college “career,” reclaiming a security job at Pinkerton, which was now owned by a Swedish company and called “Securitas.” I recall my first night back like yesterday. Jeff took me to a bar in La Mesa called Centifonti’s, where you could order beer to drink out of 112oz glass boot. As we caught up with each other, Jeff watched me with amusement and took pictures at each stage of my “progression.” Instead of choosing a light beer that might be stomachable, I was enticed because the bar had my favorite ale in all the world – the Ayinger Celebrator, a true and rare Bavarian Dopplebock. I think it rates at about 6 percent.
Like a good friend, Jeff wanted to make sure I was able to finish my boot, so he stole a swig every now and then. I still got more than enough, as attested by the trail
of barf I left outside his flat that night.
But Jeff’s flat was very compact, and I was granted accommodation at our friend Josh’s house.
Team Violence My friend Josh lived with a group of our mostly-mutual friends in a cyber-collective called “Team Violence.” It’s mostly a gathering of nerds and cats with shared interests who tolerate each other easily, and my friend Jeff and his wife Brandy had once shared the household before out-growing it. I made my accommodations in the garage. You can do that in San Diego. I had a nice bedroll, cooked my own food and contributed in small ways. But the household was moving, and I hadn’t yet received my first paycheck from my security work, and I was forced to awkwardly tag along to the new house, which didn’t have a garage. My accommodation now, which I was modestly amused with, was a makeshift collapsible murphy arrangement in the dining room of the new apartment. I was leaning heavily on my friend’s hospitality, and had found the apartment I wanted to move to, just as soon as I had a paycheck.
On one particularly gassy day of eating
Army MRE’s and other cheap food from the food bank, a frustrated, anti-social non-feline member of the dwelling
ripped into me with a profound ugliness, and inspired me to move back onto Jeff’s couch for the remaining days until I could claim my apartment. It was a
rough period for me, and I still appreciate their patience with me. In retrospect, I have a hard time imagining how I could have managed this period
without my friends’ help.
The New Apartment San Diego is an expensive place to live; most people know this. It has the best weather in the country, beautiful beaches, and lots of nice restaurants. But
you pay for it, big time. And I didn’t have any money.
A beachfront apartment in San Diego is going to cost you about $2,000/month. That’s what I would EARN in total with my new security guard job. And I didn’t
have any money for a deposit in the first place.
So I took a different approach. I looked at the fact that I’d just traveled the Balkans and lived three weeks in Albania, and realized that I enjoy being immersed in foreign cultures, and have very
CommonChains
Here they've got a movie theater, KFC, Carls Jr, Starbucks and a Blockbuster - Just like home low housing standards in my own personal preferences. A house is a house, a bed is a bed, but THE OCEAN is THE OCEAN. In other words, living in squalor for a while had given me an advantageous adaptation for choosing my housing based on unconventional factors.
San Diego County shares a border with Tijuana, Mexico, which is actually the most trafficked border on the entire planet, with about 165,000 cars crossing per day. Tijuana has a population approximately equal to San Diego, with 1.3 million residents.
I found an apartment located on the beach in the Las Playas sector of the city for only $300, and became one of them.
Life in Las Playas Moving to Mexico was, in a way, exactly what I wanted. It was life in a foreign culture, keeping me on my toes and awake to the world around me. Always something to keep you entertained.
Mexico has a reputation for occasional violence, usually linked to drug trafficking, and this made my mother nervous. I tamed her fears by singing the James Taylor song, longingly painting images of warm beaches and sunsets. Truly that was my experience.
What I couldn’t express enough, however, was that I didn’t live in Tijuana proper. I lived in a neighborhood that was separated by a canyon and a terrible road. Here there were roller-skating teenage girls on the newly reconstructed boardwalk and boys practicing banda music on their tubas come Sunday afternoons.
There were saloons overlooking the ocean, thousands of beach-goers, public concerts and community festivals, and an abandoned bullfighting ring.
And my favorite part… there were schools of dolphins every day, swimming right past the oceanfront window of my apartment.
Mexico also constituted something of a role reversal for me - a society where AYE was the alert and cautious one; this is rare for me.
When I moved in, the careless team of handymen who helped me get settled offered to hook me up with a refrigerator. It was essential, and I really had my doubts about the way they went about getting it into the flat.
The ancient apartments were literally crumbling in many parts, and the hallways were too narrow to move the fridge in a traditional method. So these McGyvers decided to rig it with a rope, leverage it over the
roof on the third floor, and
swing it onto the second floor balcony where my apartment was located. Except this brilliant mind didn't realize that the unsecured line next to him, as soon as the weight was applied, was about to end up supporting the entire weight of the fridge via the rope, which may well decapitate him. Luckily I was there to point this out, allowing him to live at least one more day.
Crossing the Border: The real cost of it all But there were some hefty sacrifices to life in Mexico. Chief among them was crossing the border every day. I believe there were only 2 days during the summer of 2010 when I didn’t have to cross the border, spending the whole day in Mexico.
Crossing the border took hours. Sometimes in the hot sun, drivers would sit and sweat in their cars, with plumes of exhaust poisoning the whole planet while they waited.
Mexicans are great entrepreneurs. Seeing opportunities, they created two businesses from this. First, many Mexicans stand along the lines of traffic and sell all manner of goods. One thing they like to sell to drivers
is water. They sell bottles of cool refreshing water. However, often the bottles have been opened, and refilled with Mexican tap water (at best), or Tijuana river water (at worst). Most US Citizens don’t have the necessary biological adaptation to digest either of these waters, and that leads to the second industry. For most US Citizens, it takes only about 10-15 minutes for Mexican tap water to have a laxative effect on your digestive system, and soon the driver is waving down another vendor along the traffic lane, and offering them money to sit in their vehicle while they access the nearest makeshift restroom facility. Together I believe these two business efforts contribute significantly to Mexico’s GDP.
Because I never lived there long enough to receive a “fast-pass” that would permit me to use a special lane of traffic and reduce my crossing time to perhaps only a half hour, crossing the border meant anywhere between 45 minutes to 3 hours. It would be only 45 minutes if you crossed between 3am and 4am and it went upwards from there.
Here’s the thinking: traffic BEFORE 3am is late night revelers returning to San Diego after a hard night
Behind the Gov
Somehow I found myself standing behind Governor Brown at an event. of partying. Traffic AFTER 4am is full of people commuting to work in San Diego trying to arrive by 7 or 8am.
My usual pattern, after I changed jobs, was to cross at 3am, arrive to work around 4:15, and then nap on a cot at the office until about 6:30 or 7.
One sometimes issue of concern was that there was no bathroom in the office, and the nearest Starbucks didn’t open until 6am. Usually I could find acceptable resolutions … but not always.
Sometimes I’d only be “home” in Mexico between 11pm and 3am.
Green Smoothies This horrible schedule, which obviously had a significant impact on my sleeping, gave rise to a new issue – energy. Because I was slightly powerless to address the sleep-side of energy supply, I had only one tool to turn to – nutrition. I’d learned from brilliant friends that you can get the most energy from raw, vegan food. But if you can’t do raw vegan, you can still get great energy from natural fruit and vegetable smoothies, loaded with healthy stuff. So every day I would get my energy from a natural smoothie comprised of
approximately 23-26 fresh items. Often they included orange juice, spinach, pineapple, coconut, bananas, blueberries, strawberries, walnuts, carrots, tomatoes, yogurt, flax seed, celery, honey and anything else I had lying around. Existing on this high-powered concoction, which I called “food of the Gods,” helped counter my lack of sleep to keep me a modestly-functional human being.
Other incidents and factors making life in Mexico difficult: I was once busted for drinking a beer (open container) on the beach. The notoriously corrupt Mexican police officers basically asked me for money as they drove their truck by on the beach. I actually didn’t know/think it was illegal to drink on the beach, but of course there is a different set of rules for foreigners and locals alike. I had no money to buy them off on my body, but tried to tell them I could get them a few bucks up in my apartment. They had me ride in the car with them for about 50 feet and eventually just let me out when the language barrier prevented us from understanding anything.
Often when I was walking in downtown TJ, I would be accosted by
the overwhelming number of prostitutes who reside there. It was deeply troubling, and I did my best to avoid them whenever possible.
My apartment window opened onto the roof of another, lower home. There was an irresistible temptation I had to place my chair on the roof of this home and sit out, overlooking the ocean. I made this mistake once. The sound of my footsteps on the roof was greeted by a frenzied, menacing young man in his 20s, who acted to protect the honor of his mother’s home with vigilant zeal. His eyes alone scared me into immediate submission. Again, he spoke no English, and I backed away shouting “Lo siento, lo siento!!!” It did happen, several weeks later, that something fell out of my window and I reached down to pick it up. Even those sounds triggered a similar response, which I anticipated and therefore hid in the bathroom like I wasn’t home. Eventually he backed away.
I stopped leaving my computer at home while I was away.
Glow plugs, bump starts and fungus
Another situation I was constantly dealing with was an old diesel with bad glow-plugs. Though I’d
taken my car in to several service garages (most notably the lazy idiots who worked at the UTC Goodyear) and been assured that my plugs were “fine,” they weren’t fine. But every mechanic was too lazy to dig in and actually check their condition (admittedly, it isn’t easy to check a glow plug on a VW diesel). However, at least twice, when I had a day off, I spent the entire day sitting outside the garage,
mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">waiting for them to tell me what was wrong with my car. If you’re wondering why I took my car to a Goodyear center it’s because at this moment in my life I was dead broke and the only method of payment available to me was my Goodyear card.
mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">After two or three of these episodes, I gave up and agreed to have it looked at by a Volkswagen specialist. I took it to an old German man in Escondido. He
laughed toothlessly and told me what was happening was the rare condition of fungus in my fuel tank, growing due to diesel’s organic environment. He said
he’d seen it before, and that most certainly was the condition – since
my glow plugs were “fine.” It wasn’t until months later (months of parking my car on an
incline – even in flat El Cajon) when I left it with another specialist while I took a 4-day trip to Seattle and they predictably couldn’t get it started to
hand it back to me --- that they actually fixed the glow plug problem (to get it off their own lot). I can hardly express…. it truly felt like any one of these shops COULD have fixed my problem if they weren’t so damned lazy, but instead colluded simply to keep me frustrated.
Parking in Mexico So even in Mexico, I had to deal with the persistent problem of parking on an incline and bump starting. And the nearest
opportunity to do this was on a suburban street around the corner from my home, approximately 200 meters from my home. I ended up choosing a spot in front of
an average looking home with a balcony, and after several nights, the homeowner began interacting with me. George was an American who had moved down with his
wife, and would sometimes chat me up whenever I brought the car back at a
reasonable hour.
It was after parking at this location, one late evening after attending a Rush concert with friends up in Irvine, that I
discovered my passport and music collection had been stolen from my Golf. I’d left my doors unlocked, once. Thankfully, they left my wallet, which I’d also
made the mistake of leaving behind, which actually had some cash in it, for once. Sadly, the majority of the stolen discs were MP3-coded, which aren’t even
playable on most devices. The result was that I had to spend several hours the next day at the American Embassy in Tijuana, which can be found in the most inconvenient location conceivable. And the experience for all the Mexicans seeking legal status to enter the USA is actually quite harrowing to observe.
Another unexpected situation I encountered in Mexico was meeting several black couples who had fled the states in a similar way as I had. They said they were sick of being treated as second-class citizens in America, and found they weren’t discriminated against by property managers in Mexico, the same way they had been in the states. They found it well worth the effort to cross the
border for their American jobs every day. I was pretty impressed with their reasoning, and found it validating.
Surfboard One thing I decided I wanted to do was start surfing. I’d never really had a chance to go surfing since I’d left Hawaii. And even then, whenever I had a chance to surf, there was always something wrong with the board I was given. I decided to get my own short-board and hit the Mexican waves. I found a board on Craigslist that fit me, at 7’4”. But when I picked it up, the skag fin was missing.
Determined to address the problem immediately, I found a surf shop near my house and asked the proprietor to fix it up right
away. He said he’d get on it. The repairs took two months. It got the board back the day before I moved out of my apartment, and gave the board to my
brother to salvage my defeat.
Returning to Security work As a college student in Hawaii, San Diego and Chico, I’d paid the bills by working as a security officer. Sure, I’m a harmless lug, but I’m a six-foot-four-inch harmless lug. My plan
when I moved back to San Diego was to do as much security work as possible, while saving money through
living in Mexico. I hadn’t meant to come back to America. I came to pay off a tax bill, and save enough to go back to Europe ASAP. I took a job at Securitas
Security, which had purchased my former employer, Pinkerton. I got hired as quickly as they could push me through the process, and was assigned to a military contractor’s facility in Kearny Mesa.
Mostly night shifts, I was assigned to patrol this large facility, sitting in a command station near the gate. I had a partner assigned along with me, and twice per hour I was supposed to patrol the entire building. I enjoyed my partners, and worked the job just fine for the first two or three weeks. When my paychecks and bills started coming in, I realized I wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be; I started looking for ways to supplement my income.
Literally sucking the life out of me The San Diego Reader publication frequently advertises for a company that pays cash for the plasma in your blood. At
first, I felt altruistic about the idea of giving my plasma for medicine and getting paid for it. That was before I learned that most of the plasma is used for cosmetic products. Somehow they turn the life in poverty-stricken you into youth-faking product for the wealthy. But that’s the least of my issues here.
The clinic opened at 8am, and the line to get in formed around 7am or earlier. There was competition to be first, as there were only 18 machines, and the
process took about 40 minutes. Basically, if you weren’t high in the line to get in when they opened, you might expect to be there for four hours – only to
be paid about $25 for all the life in your blood. Essentially, it was a scam that paid less than minimum wage – and literally sucked the life out of you.
The first time I did it, I think it was the forth of July. I remember that day well. I decided to celebrate America by visiting America’s most popular restaurant and eating a “Big Mac.” To really drive home the point, I visited a MacDonald’s at a WalMart. But then, staring
at the menu and being completely disgusted, I couldn’t go through with it. I left and grabbed a burrito somewhere. I couldn’t subject my cherished body to MacDonald’s “food.” And that night I went to a strategy meeting for a political campaign I was interested in.
Hoping to offer some hard-earned advice from my time working on a presidential campaign just two years prior.
But that night, after giving plasma, I found myself so unimaginably tired. I literally could not keep my eyes open at my post. No matter how much coffee I drank. Finally, I asked my partner to cover for me, found a dark room and set my alarm for two hours hence. Two days later, my site supervisor, Fred, had reviewed the surveillance tapes and found me absent. He had me immediately suspended, and taken off my post. But this was fine. In the two days that had passed, I was offered the position of campaign manager for the Ray Lutz for Congress Campaign, at a salary equal or greater than what I’d been paid to sleepily wander around a military facility every night, scaring away stray cats.
Congressional Campaign Manager I couldn't stay away from politics; there was an election going on! I’d taken a moment to look up who was running for office in my “home” district, where I’d gone to high school, in Poway, California.
There was a man named Ray Lutz, a Democrat, running with some solid-looking credentials against the son of the guy who’d held the seat in congress as long
as anyone could remember.
I attended his strategy session on July 4 as an interested observer, contributing my ideas. Ray was looking for someone who’d played politics in the big leagues and had some fresh ideas. He was very interested in my opinions, and we had a great discussion throughout that evening. I was excited about his campaign and working as a media director for him.
The next day he called me and said he couldn’t afford a media director – but he COULD afford a campaign manager. I took a minute to think about it and then accepted. At least I wouldn’t have to sell any more of my plasma.
It occurred to me as I worked on the campaign, that my entire life situation was probably one of the most extreme examples of what was WRONG with Southern California. Here I was, the executive manager of a US Congressional Campaign, and I actually LIVED IN MEXICO because our city was so unreasonably expensive that I couldn’t afford to rent a clean room. So instead I spent hours in traffic at 4am every morning, commuting across an international border to get to work.
We just don’t compensate people in this country.
I started working 19-hour days (from the time I started heading to work until I left for home). I was totally consumed by the campaign. It was all I thought, spoke, and did. I worked seven days per week. If there was something that could be done to impact Ray’s chances, I did it. I made calls, I visited people, I wrote press releases non-stop; I was totally committed. Nobody noticed him.
In fact, there was a running gag at the office that Ray’s wife, Jill, thought I was lazy. Somehow, every single time she stuck her nose into the campaign or an event we had, I was either taking a rare break or absent for that particular event. She knew he was paying me, but probably thought I was some lazy fool taking advantage of him. It got so extreme that one of my top campaign workers and I made a joke out of it. Somehow, every time Jill saw me, I wasn’t working. In retrospect, I wish she’d come around more often, because then maybe I’d have somehow found more time off!
Power-link protest Everybody in the United States hates their power company, and San Diego is no exception. Most cities used to have cooperatively owned, municipal power companies. But now they’ve all been pushed out by corporations, which exploit the public demand for power to create monopolies and extort citizens.
In San Diego, the local entity is known as San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), and in the vernacularly as “San Diego Greed & Extortion.”
During our campaign, SDG&E was moving forward with an extensive new project to provide dirty Mexican power from south of the border to hundreds of thousands of Southern California homes, called the “Sunrise Powerlink.”
This link was dangerous because the immense scale of the project as it crossed severely fire-prone regions of east country and inhibited aerial fire-fighting capabilities, among other concerns.
Candidate Lutz was very loudly against this project, and he tapped into a network of opponents, hoping to activate them in his campaign.
So he organized a mid-summer protest in the suburb of Lakeside, a community directly in the path of the approaching project. We planned it for months, promoting, scheduling, finding speakers and organizing event sponsors.
The campaign’s event coordinator quit just a few days before the event was scheduled; our volunteer coordinator and I picked up the pieces.
If I didn’t have to answer for it, the result was one of the funniest spectacles I’ve ever seen.
Something like 40 people showed up. We almost lost the media that did come because we tried to wait for more people to arrive. It was hard to imagine that on a 95-degree Saturday, people might have something better to do than wander around a park in the downtown of San Diego’s most red-necked neighborhood. But good old Ray made it the biggest show possible, leading chants through the downtown streets, fanny-pack, straw-hated and all. “What do we want? No power-link! When do we want it? Now!” Or something equally banal…
Then, after our confusing (to the local population who were almost completely unaware of the project) parade, we led all the stragglers we could find back to the park, where Ray debated the libertarian candidate in his congressional race (the Republican incumbent simply ignored our invitation). And there, in front of a grand, impartial
audience of perhaps one family, I sat quite inconsequentially with the solar power company, which had unwisely agreed to contribute several hundreds of dollars for the right to make their appeal to our pledged throngs.
As the moderator of their debate, I made it a point to thank them between about every 5 or so words I spoke. It’s possible the light I shined on their solar company simply burned their shame a little deeper.
Rag tag crew of volunteers I’ll never forget the first meeting I attended with Ray and his team. I didn’t even know what to expect. One immediately grants some measure of credibility to any team attempting to run a campaign for a national political office when they are affiliated with one of our distinguished mainstream political parties. Ray, a Democrat, had established a strong reputation of fighting difficult local battles, and successfully leading angry mobs in justified endeavors. I had read about him before the meeting, and considered him a reputable candidate if the circumstance permitted.
One thing I learned over the summer is that there are, on the onset, exactly three recognized campaign scenarios: you can be the favorite (usually the incumbent), you can be in a tight (contested) election, or you can be the underdog (challenger). With money being the most precious resource in the world, either the republican or democratic national campaign committees both direct essentially ALL money exclusively into what they consider to be the “contested” races.
For instance, of the five congressional districts in San Diego County, only one was considered “competitive” and received inflows of cash; it wasn’t ours.
In 2010 it was Francine Busby’s house race for the 50
th district, having lost the same race twice before (’04, ’06). Despite receiving every available resource in the county, she lost the 2010 race as well.
Her campaign money, though it didn’t win her race, allowed her to purchase the services of the best political minds, campaigners, merchandise and paid staff available.
We had none of her money. Instead we had the hearts, hands and feet of the ragtag, dedicated volunteers of East County. There were two groups – a directional leaders board – and a general group of less-active followers. Most of the people who were able to attend our meetings were either retired or working, and with only limited time. The leadership team had been broken into smaller committees, including fundraising, events, promotions and volunteers. Ray was coordinating them himself.
In our mix, we had good-hearted liberals, off-duty professionals (who were true experts), bored housewives with initiative, undependable college students, former politicos in their twilights trying to re-live their glory days, union workers, wealthy socially conscientious citizens, and general community activists.
I’d sketched some media outreach ideas, and when I attended the first meeting I was willing to take on a role as the campaign’s media director. I had made a list of all available media, suitable contacts, and a strategy to engage the public on a consistent, ongoing basis.
Ray was impressed with my ideas, and thought my credentials from the Kucinich Presidential campaign brought even more credibility to the team. However, when he looked at the financial reality of his campaign, he knew he couldn’t even think of hiring a full time media director. If he was going to hire anyone, it was going to be a general campaign manager, who would also be responsible for media. I let his offer stand for about an hour before accepting.
Door to door canvassing Part of any campaign involves door-to-door canvassing. I’d done some of it on each of my two previous campaigns, but this was the first time I was involved in the planning stages. As the campaign manager, I was the only one actually getting paid and I figured that I certainly needed to put in as much time as my volunteers. I figured if we hit the ground hard enough, we could achieve anything. We must have covered every inch of La Mesa in the hot summer sun of East County.
Scandalous One of my top staffers and I ended up spending a tremendous amount of time together in our planning, fundraising and organizing efforts. Our long days turned into evenings, and our after work dinners turned into nights at the bar and karaoke. And our friendship gained a little spice. It added just enough intrigue to make the 100+ hour weeks manageable and almost pleasant. It was just what each of us needed.
Debates plan Our plan to get Ray Lutz elected was hindered by the fact that we had no money. No money = no exposure. No exposure means the incumbent politician can simply walk all over you and pay no price for it.
I tried gaining attention by subtly adding Beastie Boys song lyrics to every press release I sent out… still nothing.
I soon realized our only chance for gaining exposure would be at our televised debate – which was guaranteed to have a minimal audience anyway. Probably cable access TV. So we developed a plan – to bring the debates to every corner of our district – from La Mesa and El Cajon,
to Clairemont and Poway and even Borrego Springs. Local debates. We looked at Rep Duncan Hunter’s congressional schedule, and planned the debates for his
summer recess. We sent out invitations and then … waited.
No word came. We realized that he was about to simply ignore our requests, and deny the people of our district a chance to
hear an honest debate on the issues.
As we scratched our collective heads about how to proceed, at our largest fundraising event, a former congressman (whom I’d enticed to attend with a hand delivered invitation to his rural Ramona home) suggested to Ray that perhaps he could get the media’s attention by doing something dramatic. Ray considered it for the evening and then decided to act on it.
Hunger strike On the next business day, we announced that Ray would be going on a Hunger Strike until Rep. Hunter agreed to debate him. We attempted to brand him “The San Diego Chicken,” but apparently there’s already one of those.
We made a video of Ray eating his “last meal” at a Greek chicken restaurant, with the whole staff gathered around.
Within 24 hours, Ray was being interviewed on the radio. Within three days we were on a CNN morning show via satellite uplink. And by the time we got home from the CNN interview, Hunter’s campaign manager was ready to hand-deliver their pledge to debate us. Victory! It wasn’t the series of debates we were searching for – just a single televised debate – but it was still a clean victory we could hang our hat on.
In any case, we still held our own series and debated Mike Benoit, the Libertarian candidate, with an empty seat where Rep. Hunter was supposed to be. Each time we did it, the crowds were disappointed that their representative didn’t care enough to come see them. And that was the truth.
Kelly came to visit During this summer living in Mexico, only one friend came down and saw my sunny living conditions. It was my friend Kelly, who came all the way from Birmingham Alabama to spend a few days with me. We’d been friends for about 5 years already, but never met. Over this summer, Kelly
became a major source of support for me, and our conversations ran for about an hour a day. She was my outlet and my vent; I felt like I could tell her
anything, and I’m forever grateful for the support she gave. We had a great time visiting and showing her my “other” home town of San Diego.
Hired off the campaign to work in Washington as a newspaper publisher This phase of my life came to an end rather unexpectedly when, in early September, I was given the chance to interview for a publisher’s position at a community newspaper in the Seattle suburb of Enumclaw, Wash. I’d never heard of Enumclaw before, and when I Googled it, I discovered it was mostly famous for 1) its location near Mt Rainier and 2) because a man had died there recently after having carnal relations with a horse; the mountain sounded nice.
My aunt had lived in Seattle for my entire life, and it has always been like a second home to me. I flew up for the interview, impressed the hell out of the company VP, and was offered the job, beginning in late October. When I told candidate Lutz about the job offer, he was convinced it was a conspiracy led by our opposing campaign to hire me away when we were on the very cusp of victory.
After a few more campaign events, I loaded up my life into my ’85 VW Golf, and started the long drive up the California Coast.
A month later, Ray lost by about 30 points.
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Nancy Hall
non-member comment
Wherever you are
Just finishing the second draft of my novel, struggling, decided to take a break and Google somebody> And there you were! I think of you and Molokai often. Read the Dispatch on line because it's all there is. Adveriset torpedoed like so many fine papers. Where are we going for news? Hope this goes through. You seem to be having a great life - many young people's dream life. Keep it up. All the best, N.Hall