Early Voting in Ohio: Day 3

DSC_0199, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday — 35,836
Miles travelled today — 123 miles so far

6:12 pm — Sickness and injury, all thoroughly deserved, have plagued us this trip. I should explain: we are deservedly sick because tour manager Ebenezer, brought back some terrible flu-like infection from Scotland and we did nothing to protect ourselves. I mean nothing. Nothing at all. Sharing jackets? Check. Sharing food? Check. Sleeping hardly at all? Check. Hand-sanitizer? Obviously not. We may as well have simply injected ourselves with concentrated virus samples.

And our injuries? Well, we are injured because we are astonishingly clumsy people.

An example? I’m glad you asked.

Let’s look at dinner last night. Mary, our tour manager, is very diligent about scheduling. When she says be in the hotel lobby at 8:30, she means be there with your luggage, having already eaten, shaved, showered, and otherwise groomed yourself. We have all come to understand this and strive to be there when we are told. But we never are. Never ever. Individually, the people on this tour are very bright. We are capable problem solvers, creative thinkers, and generally mature reasonable people. But as a collective, we are brainless infants who must be constantly coddled and reprimanded. We are each told every night how important it is to be on time and then the next day someone is late and Mary must give him or her a lecture.

So last night at dinner, Mary tried to preempt this lateness by lecturing on timeliness before we were actually late as we walked out of the restaurant and back towards the hotel. She begged us, she appealed to our sense of higher duty, she wheedled, she pled, she enjoined… and then she walked into a light pole. Hard. We had been power walking, so Mary had built up a real head of steam before hitting this perfectly huge pole with a deep gonging sound. Obviously we were concerned for her welfare at the time, but with hindsight I can say that it was a thing of beauty.

It was also far from unique. Trips, falls, drops, crushed fingers, and minor boo boos are an unfortunately common experience this trip.

Which all brings me to what was so magical about today: this morning, with the exception of Mary’s slightly pole-battered face, we were in sound health for the first time this tour as we hosted Carney for a quick concert in front of the Ohio state house in Columbus.

So feel free to congratulate us.

This evening we head to Cleveland for a show with Rise Against. Four days until the voter registration deadline.

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Rock the Vote Bio: Rock the Vote was founded in 1990 to organize artists and fight against censorship of musicians. Since then we've evolved to focus on empowering young people to get involved in the political process. We use pop culture, peer-to-peer organizing, and the latest technology to raise visibility of politics and demystify the process of registering to vote. @rockthevote Email the author at: blog(at)rockthevote.com

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