Richmond, VA

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

11:21 pm - The bus hit two events today. First a brief voter drive at Virginia Commonwealth University where we registered the small contingent of very sleepy students who managed to get out of bed early enough to catch our bus in the mid-morning rain, register, and then wander back to bed or to class or wherever else their near catatonic states took them.

The second event involved our crack squad of newbie roadies throwing together a stage, speakers, DJ booth, and sound box in a frantic fifteen-minute flurry after the power went out at Virginia Union University. Power outage notwithstanding we drew three or four hundred students out of a student body of twelve hundred for a concert with The Band Belief, Bugs Raleigh, C4, and the Scholars. Of those we had a hundred voters freshly registered.

The concert - to use the phrasing appropriate to our generation given the times - kicked ass.

In order to really celebrate fully, I felt that it was important to lose my hotel key. This is a dangerous proposition in our current hotel, as it is run and occupied by nincompoops and wretches. To be fair, they are renovating the hotel which may make it a livable place in some few years. For the moment though the only tap water available scalds the skin off your palms; the towel racks are positioned to bludgeon the unwary bathroom goer; construction debris litters the hallways; the weight room has only a ten pound weight and a Pepsi machine rather than water; jackhammers wake you in the early morning; zombies roam the basement; the spirits of the damned haunt your dreams; and - really, genuinely - one of our party woke this morning to find two construction workers in his room. Fortunately, I caught the day-shift desk attendant before she left for the evening and she was willing to remagnetize some plastic cards for me.

Unfortunately, both my roommate - DJ Aaron James - and I lost our keys later in the night, forcing us to brave the lobby after the witching hour. The desk attendant, probably a perfectly reasonable woman before she was reincarnated in her present profession, made the new keys with little fuss, but while we hovered in the ghoulish lobby, we saw two separate domestic disputes progress from yelling to violence with little reaction from the hotel staff or any lobby dwellers.

Tomorrow we head to our nation's capital early in the morning and then to Annendale, VA for an afternoon of vote rocking.