Everyone Is Nuts All The Time
Finding myself slightly terrified with the way of the world these days, I’ve been spending some time this month collecting signatures in Providence to get presidential candidates on the ballot. You need 1,000 signatures to be on the ballot in Rhode Island; otherwise anyone with time on their hands could sign up to run for President. So I’ve been traipsing through the city, asking people to put their name down. I’ve been doing this for one presidential candidate specifically, but since naming names would alienate a good percentage of whoever ends up reading this, I’ll keep things vague. Let’s just say I’ve been collecting signatures for George Washington. Everyone likes George Washington, yes? Hasn’t been cancelled yet? Great.
I’m not exactly a natural fit for this job, because I very very much don’t like confronting people. My definition of confrontation is a pretty expansive one, too. Last week I ordered a hot chocolate at Blue State and they gave me what must’ve been some combination of chai and rat poison, but I dutifully drank my purgative without a word because I am scared of confronting baristas and, more generally, people. Back home, I once veered my bike off the path into a ditch and fell off rather than do the unthinkable and actually verbally ask someone to move out of my way. Please contact me privately for more humiliating stories.
The point is that I really don’t like talking to strangers. So on the first day of collecting signatures for George Washington, I walked to the train station and just stood there. Literally approached no one. And of course no one approached me, because I was holding a clipboard, the universal sign of Crazy People With An Agenda. And the thing is, before I started volunteering, I never would’ve gone near someone holding a clipboard. My parents have imparted very clearly on me the wary lessons of their Cold War-era youth: Don’t stop to chat when people approach you on the street. Be aware of your surroundings when you’re in a city. There’s a Commie around every corner. They didn’t actually say the last one, but it was implied.
But now I was the Crazy Person with the Agenda, and I had to actually suck it up and walk up to someone. So I gave myself a pep talk and marched up to an unsuspecting soul at a bus stop. I asked them if they were registered to vote in Rhode Island. They said yes. I asked them if they’d like to add their name for my candidate. They beamed, took my hands, blessed me, signed their name, and sent me on my way with an ice cream cone. Actually, they glared at me and said no. As did the next person. As did the fifty other people I asked that day, at the train station, the bus depot, and the park. On my first miserable day of signature collection, I got exactly one signature, from a man who looked eager to sign anything. You know the type.
One of the other volunteers drove me to Whole Foods the next day so I could bother people there instead. He said he understood my frustration with downtown because he had been threatened at knifepoint there the other day. (This was after I had spent five minutes whining to him about how downtown was cold and nobody was nice to me.) Whole Foods was another world entirely. Fewer people were menacing and way more people stopped and signed, but the clientele there is a set of bizarre people. One lady tied her dog to a table outside the store and asked me to watch it. She came back 30 minutes later with a cantaloupe, took her dog, and disappeared. Another guy just looked at me and my clipboard and said “Fuck you.” Between the two of them, those folks represent everything that Whole Foods has to offer. (This post, by the way, is brought to you by Whole Foods.) I tried Stop’n’Shop a few nights later, where an angry man yelled “Vote Republican for better living!” before getting into his truck and driving away. That might be all you need to know about Stop’n’Shop.
The capstone to my week of signature collection was at the Warwick Mall, where I finally hit my stride. I was raking in signatures. They called me the King of the Clipboard. (They did not.) But, of course, the nuts-o people came in throngs. One lady asked me to send her an absentee ballot. One woman told me “If this Trump guy gets into office, we’ll be in serious trouble.” The gold medal goes to the man who locked eyes with me, said “I am the President,” and stormed away.
There’s probably some takeaway about being involved in the political process blah blah blah. But the real lesson here is that everyone, in any public place, is nuts. And the only way you’ll find out that they’re nuts is by running up to them with a clipboard when they’re trying to buy groceries and asking them a series of disorienting and politically charged questions. We got our 1,000 signatures, though! And the next time the barista gives me the wrong drink, there’s just slightly more of a chance that I’ll say something.
Image via.