The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Bop 'Til You Drop (politically speaking)

There have been two reasons for the recent lull here. For a few days, I was spending a great deal of my spare time engrossed in following the ongoing developments in the zany California recall election that's coming up. There was a whole series of ups and downs for me in terms of the Libertarians who are running or might run, but I don't have time to get into the whole thing right now.

Which brings me to reason two for the recent lull -- The Nevada County Fair has begun, and it has swept me up like so many tsunamis of local political party organizing. Now, all the crazy jostling and booth preparation is mostly past, and all that's left is 13 hours a day of staffing the booth from today until Sunday. I'm not working all those hours, but I will be doing about 35 hours or so of booth staffing in this 5 days. Today has been pretty much go-go-go since 7 AM, which is crazy-early for a night worker like me (especially considering the night before was booth setup until almost midnight, and bedtime at 3). Now, I'm off to bed as quick as I can, since I'm opening the booth at 10 this morning, with much to do beforehand.

I've got one leg of my "Lights of Liberty Triathlon" done though -- in a big way. And I heard that one of our outer core members who worked the booth today was so impressed by how nice our setup was that he plans to donate some money toward the effort. (Which is especially sweet, since I bankrolled most of the cost for this, in hopes of fundraising my reimbursement...which still has a ways to go.)

I didn't have my camera on me during good photo-shooting hours today, so you'll have to wait to see the real deal, but I wanted to have something to show you to account for my absence, so I took a picture of the closed-up booth tonight right before I left. Here it is. It's just a tiny taste for you...though when I look at that picture I see about 150 details that had to come together to create what's in it. It only looks easy. :-)

With all the various forms of nuts-and-bolts activism I've done over the past 15 years or so -- rallies and petition drives and poster design and public forums and fundraising and letters and tables and protests and coffin-painting and sign-making and videotaping and interviews and newsletter writing and page pasting and postering and picketing...and so on -- I've never worked a booth before, or a county fair. It came together pretty well, though there's plenty that could have been done better. This was a first time for the party, so we had to get the first set of all the supplies. Now that we've got the whole rig figured out and bought, we're ready to rock with much greater ease in the future. And at next year's fair, the energy can be devoted mostly to upgrading, rather than creating.

I may unload some thoughts about this booth effort, and about active political effort in general, during this week. Or, I may collapse from exhaustion until my NCLP peers have to come by my house and rouse me. You'll just have to tune in to find out, I guess. ;-)