delirium diffused.

OK, so I have the black death.

I don't know if it is H1N1, the Swine Flu, or the actual bubonic plague, but I have been flat on my back since last Thursday. I did a house party yesterday afternoon and I looked so bad that the hosts sent me home right after my pitch. They even bundled up my buttons and bumper stickers and the donation basket and sent them home to me with one of the guests when the party was done. Oof. That's pretty bad.

Late last week I got a note on facebook from one of the big shots with the campaign asking if I'd be around to take a phone call Monday morning. Sure, says me. I'm always available to take a call when the No On 1 people call. I may be a renegade of sorts, but I do try to be a team player when I can.

But then I got paranoid. Years of insecurity, coupled with a delirious brain from this flu conspired to get me to think the worst. I wondered if I insulted someone, if I filed something wrong, if I screwed up a pitch or got something backwards and I was about to be bawled out. I searched my (fevered, remember, I'm sick as hell through this) memory for instances, real or imagined, that might cause the big shots to be upset. Exhausted and still not sure what I might have done to be called to the principal's office, I resigned myself to whatever chastisement was coming my way and set my alarm to be by the phone.

I woke up and made coffee for the first time in four days. I sat on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket sipping some orange juice and squinting at my computer for the day's news when the phone rang.

Flu-addled me: Hullo?

Very perky woman: Hello is this Dawn?

Me: Yes, this is Dawn.

Very perky woman: Hi, Dawn. This is (Maine 1st District Congresswoman) Chellie Pingree calling from the No On 1 Campaign to thank you for all you've been doing.

Me: stunned silence

(tick, tock, tick, tock, tick)

Me (startled to life and scrambling for my mental feet) : Oh wow! Hi Chellie! Wow!

Chellie (still very perky): I understand you've been pretty busy up there with the campaign.

And so we chatted, somewhat awkwardly, for a minute or two. I have no idea what I said. Something about house parties and having the flu. Something else about thanking her for helping out, being busy in Congress, that kind of thing.

And then it was over.

I sat and stared at the phone.

Nobody yelled at me.

In fact, someone pretty important just thanked me for the stuff I've been doing. Wow.

I rapidly called a person or two who might be interested in such a thing and updated my facebook status to reflect the morning's events. Wow and damn. That's pretty cool. I'm not her constituent, but it was amazingly cool to have a phone call from Chellie Pingree to start my day. Hot dog!

Time marches on...

We're down to 16 days before the election now.

This campaign has taken over my life.

Our side is out-stripping our opponents by nearly a 3-to-1 margin in the fundraising arena.

The polls still have us in a statistical dead heat.

No matter how right we are, no matter how just our cause, no matter how high-minded and ethical our methods, this thing is not going to be won on those merits.

Voter turnout will win this thing, plain and simple.

We're in an off-year election cycle. People just don't come to the polls in off-years like they do when there is a big race on the ballot, like President or Senate or Congress or Governor. The only things on the ballot this year are some citizen initiatives and a couple of bond issues.

Which means the only people who are going to vote are those who vote every year, no matter what or who is on the ballot, and those who have a dog in the fight, namely the activists on either side.

So truly, it comes down to which side can mobilize their people better on November 3.

I am nervous, but I have hope. In the campaign finance reports for the third quarter, our side had 12,000 donors ranging from large to small. Their side? Well, not so much.

I read through all 450-some pages of our donors when they were posted on line. An interesting thing I noticed was that our campaign staff is donating to the cause. From the executive director to the temp field organizers. They almost all give. The opponents? I didn't see that at all. Oh, I'm sure there are a couple doing just that, but not like I have been seeing on our side. Every two weeks on average, our staff will donate some portion of their earnings back into the campaign.

We believe in this. And it's personal.

I'm doing all I can here in my little end of the world. I am organizing house parties. I think I've raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000, or I will by the time the election rolls around. That's not bad for a volunteer who's unemployed and trying to make ends meet.

We're transitioning now into get out the vote (GOTV) mode, so my pitches involve more about volunteering than giving money, and that's OK. It's what needs doing right now.

I'm going to be preaching a sermon (yes, you read that right) on November 1 at a nearby Unitarian-Universalist church. It being a UU church, I am going to trust that the structure will not cave in upon my head when I step up to the pulpit, but I have endured no small amount of teasing and hilarity at my new found speaking engagement.

This could all turn into something different for my life when this is over. It's still in the air. I'll write more about it as it develops, you can be sure. For now, I am just going to concentrate on getting through the pile of thank-you notes I have to do, and maybe watch some football this afternoon. Stay tuned.

Oh, and if you want to donate, HERE is where to do it. Thanks.

Oh, before I go, take a look at this commercial released this week. For those from away, this woman's accent is French-Canadian. Her family is probably one of the thousands who migrated to the mill towns that sprung up along Maine's rivers during the industrial revolution. She may still speak French at home -- many of our Franco friends do. They are proud of their culture and their heritage, and their church. And many have been very very torn by the Catholic Bishop's venomous involvement in this battle, and they are standing up and speaking out for justice. I do love Yolande Dumont. She is everything that is right about memeres in Maine.

do we have to do this again?

Ah, it seems that we need to revisit the divide between Maine's urban and rural worlds.

People from away look at some of our cities - Portland, Bangor, Augusta, Lewiston/Auburn, Waterville/Winslow and see rural outposts of suburbia. What they don't know is that Portland is as urban as Maine gets. Our largest city has a mere 60,000 people. By comparison, when we lived in Minnesota, the Twin Cities suburb of Burnsville had 60,000 people, and it was but one of a dozen similar communities arranged around the larger metropolitan area.

We're a small town here in Maine. No, I did not say that Maine has a lot of small towns, although that is certainly true. I said Maine is a small town. A thing that happens in Portland in the morning is known from Kittery to Calais by suppertime. This is especially true in the glbt community here. We know each other's business. That is a double-edged sword at times, but it is largely true. If there is upheaval and distress in the queer community, we all know it and feel it as soon as it happens. If a prominent couple splits, well, let's just say that lots of people often know about it even before the two people involved.

So here we are with an influx of eager and talented volunteers and professional organizers from all over the country. They're pouring into Maine to work on the final push of the campaign, and they are as FIRED UP and READY TO GO as my little dog ever gets. Only they need a lesson in rural life before they begin, and not everybody is going to understand our world.

Telling voters in Sullivan or Medway or Phillips to "just go on line and request a ballot" is akin to telling them to hop in their helicopter and fly to France for lunch. These rural folk often don't have computers in their homes, never mind the high-speed Internet connection required to navigate the necessary websites. My local bank branch manager does not have a computer in her home. She's chained to the thing all day at work, and she'll be damned if she'll do that once she gets home. I get that.

Here in Maine, and particularly in rural Maine, we do things on a more personal, face-to-face level. We like to go to our local hardware store and ask a guy named Duffy or Pete about the problem under the sink or on the roof. We don't cotton much to on-line DIY stuff. We want someone to talk to, someone to ask questions of, someone to grab by the shirtfront and shake vigorously if necessary, to make a point. We shake hands and it means something. We know where each other lives and what kind of vehicles each other drives, and if we see someone broken down beside the road, we stop and don't just offer a ride, but we get out our tools and fix the flat or try to tinker with the engine. This is how we do things.

I recently recommended to one newcomer that she read "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" by Carolyn Chute and that she watch the Stephen King movie "Delores Claiborne" starring Cathy Bates. Those two stories I think illustrate the world where I live better than any other thing that I have seen in popular culture. The characters and places in those stories are true to our world. Laura and I fish for trout in Egypt, Maine. It's not far from Ellsworth, and there are places there that look like any photograph of Appalachia I ever saw in a college sociology text.

Laura and I sometimes discuss the fact that her mother and stepfather don't vote. Never have. Don't have any plans to start. They view the whole political process as so much elitist bullshit, and that the politicians in charge of things will do what they want no matter how people vote or which of the scoundrels gets elected.

They want to come to our wedding, which makes my teeth itch. I'd love to require that nobody can attend who was eligible to vote but did not. This thing is so important to us, I cannot describe it. The idea that her MOTHER would not register and vote to cast one more mark in our column utterly confounds me. But I cannot change her. She is a product of her community and her environment. Neither of her parents ever voted, either, and her stepfather cannot read or count much higher than is required to play cribbage.

This is the part of the world where education and opportunity are in short supply. People here run from their desperation through alcohol and drugs. They buy lottery tickets at a rate higher than any other counties in Maine. It's a good thing you can't buy a bus ticket out of town with food stamps, or there'd be nobody left. No shit. That's a lot of what this area is like. Jobs are few and far between. There is no wifi for executives to telecommute from their retreat cottage.

This is rural Maine. I attended a house party this evening at a working farm. The hostess served home made corn muffins that I watched her mix and bake (four dozen, by the way). There was a big salad, some organic chips made from corn and dulce, a kind of seaweed, and salsa made from vegetables grown in the garden, and there were two kinds of chili, a vegetarian one and one made with moose meat. For the record, the moose meat chili was more popular. And she sent me home with a small tub of the stuff for Laura, who was most grateful.

That's how we roll here. Moose meat chili at a house party and a basket of feather-and-manure-speckled eggs on the counter. And nobody blinks. There was some chatter at the party of a recent potluck gathering that involved the slaughter and gutting of chickens. Everybody got to bring a half-dozen birds home to put in the freezer, so it worked out.

I love Maine. I love rural Maine.

I love Portland, too, but for different reasons.

I just get frustrated when people who don't know how we live try to show us new and improved ways to be. If I wanted a Starbucks nearby, I'd live in a city. I prefer the moose meat chili and eggs that need to be washed before you can cook them.

So please, all you well-meaning people from away? Listen when we tell you what will work in our communities and what won't. Not everybody here has the Internet. Not everybody has a cell phone. Not everybody has cable television. Hell, I know people who don't OWN a TV. I know people who don't have a phone. Or indoor plumbing. When we tell you that "go to the website" won't work for our voters, trust us, hmm?

On the other hand, don't look at the ramshackle farmhouses and run-down trailers and assume that we are all the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging products of years of marrying our cousins. There are some very smart and very capable people here. Yes, there are some from the shallow end of the gene pool, but there are those of us who can write a complete sentence, who are unafraid to creatively split infinitives and defend a run-on sentence as a matter of artistic expression. And who resent it mightily when we feel looked down upon.

Our world is not "quaint" thank you. It is hard work most days. But we value the natural beauty of the place we live and the freedoms we enjoy here enough to work as hard as we do to stay. We don't need or want a Starbucks, a CVS, or a Dunkin' Donuts on every corner. We love our rural world and our rural way of life, even if it is beyond what many can understand. Just respect that please, and don't try to treat us like urban voters or dim-witted fools, ok?

Thanks.

so it's finally July here

and hot as hell.

I mean hot.

Really hot.

Like we don't get but three or four days like this a year hot. And they usually come in July.

On Friday, it was up around 80 degrees, then Saturday and Sunday were both in the 90s, and then Monday was in the 90s again and today was in the upper 80s.

WTF?

Yeah. Mid-July in late August. Go figure.

And I'm really sorry for not having written in forever. We're 77 days from the election right now and things are getting down toward critical. We have to get lots and lots of people to the polls in November to Vote No On 1 so that Laura and I can get married.

Only I have to pay the rent and electric and all that other stuff, too, so I have been scrambling around to find work. I have a couple of estimates out there, but no big money-makers are on the horizon. Eight weeks of rain really screwed things up. The economy is making noises that sound suspiciously like a death gurgle, and nobody is hiring me to do anything.

OK, that's not entirely true. I have been finishing a hardwood floor this week, and that's nice to watch come around. It started off as a hardwood floor on a screened in three-season porch, and it got weathered pretty solid. It got dinged up and weathered gray and some stuff spilled on it through the years, so the women who own the house asked if I could sand it down a bit and put some kind of varnish on it to protect it. Sure thing. After six hours on my knees (YES, I was wearing knee pads) in Monday's 90+ heat and 90%+ humidity, grinding off that silver patina with an orbital sander, I nearly cried. It felt like there was molten metal behind my kneecaps. Oh man, that was bad. And my back was not really happy about the whole situation either, but the knees were complaining loudest, so it really sort of kept quiet so as not to appear a wimp. Urk.

I went through a whole box of 60-grit sanding disks grinding that stuff off, but I got down to the good wood, then dusted and swept and wiped it all down with a damp towel before applying marine grade polyurethane with a long-handled roller. That stuff sucked into that wood so fast I think the first board was nearly dry by the time I got to the last one. And the room is approximately 12 by 12 feet.

The wood looked great today when I showed up to apply the second coat of poly, and if it is dry enough, I'll go back tomorrow to put on the third and final coat. Friday I'll go move the furniture and upright freezer back out there after it has a couple days to dry and harden properly.

All of this is provided that the weather cooperates. We'll have to see.

Last week we got to meet Robin over at Around the Island and her tall and handsome husband Jay when they were in town for a little mini-vacation. They were delightful people and they treated us (and our friend L) to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants and then we treated them to the best ice cream shop on the island and then we wandered downtown looking in shop window for a little while. But we local folks were pooped, so we barely made it to 9 p.m. before we were all yawning and we had to make our apologies and head off to our respective homes.

Food report: The chef sent us a complimentary starter tray of melted cheese, roasted garlic, soft bread and roasted peppers which we shared, then we also shared an order of marinated mushrooms on a seaweed salad with vegan caviar (I have no idea what vegan caviar is, but the others liked it. I found it a bit odd.). For dinner, Robin got the lobster penne, which looked divine, Jay got some crunchy-crusted fried tofu that also looked fantastic, Laura got the pecan-crusted chicken, I got the duck (medium rare) with spiced pears and L got the tempura ahi with shoestring sweet potatoes. For dessert, Jay and I both got vanilla ice cream (the woman who makes it scrapes the vanilla beans by hand!) Robin got Thai chili ice cream, which she described as peanutbuttery with a chili kick, and Laura got something called "Dude" which she describes as an ice cream version of a White Russian. L skipped dessert.

Funny thing? Robin's shorter than I expected. What the hell I expected, I do not know. We are blog buddies. We'd never met before. She looked just like her head shot, just it was closer to the ground than I had expected. Maybe she writes tall and that's what threw me. Who knows. It was an odd, odd thing to have that expectation somehow come up. I have no idea where it came from. And Jay? Really tall. And THAT threw me. My brain is a very strange place, I have decided. I imagine I was heavier, grayer and quieter than she anticipated. The quiet part was just tired - I had hiked AND worked that day and was wiped out.

But really - neat, neat folks. We traded hiking stories and good ideas and food challenges (no fresh berries or shellfish in TelAviv, and how to eat lobster 21 meals a week while on vacation here) and I got to hear how her kids' names are pronounced. What fun it was to hear the live, up-to-date version of their growing process! It's neat to see it on the internet, but to hear that stuff from a parent is just very cool. It seems they are making progress every day. Almost enough to make me want one. Note that I said almost. Almost is not wanting one, almost is almost.

It was a very cool visit. Very, very cool indeed. I think she might have the picture up over on her site - she's been waaaaaaayyyyy better about blogging than I have lately. Go check.

Also brewing in my world is a little painting job on a house just yards from the ocean and nestled in a shady little corner. That damned thing does NOT want to dry out enough for me to scrape and paint, it just doesn't. Damned thing. Going to try this week if I can get a day that does not rain when I am not putting on varnish.

Ah yes, and then there is this referendum campaign thing we're doing. Good god. It seems like every spare moment not spent working is eaten up by the volunteer effort. I am in charge of coordinating house parties to raise money and lining up speaking engagements to the animal groups and funny hat clubs in the area (you know... the Moose, the Elks, Lions, Masons, Rotarians, etc.). I have no idea how receptive these groups might be to our pitch, but I think we can offer some very sane and understandable reasons why each of their members ought to support marriage equality at the polls this year. We'll see if they can just let us have an audience.

We have three house parties this week, two of which I have to be at to do the pitch. This means I may have to wear grown-up clothes and not swear. We'll see how that goes.

Last weekend we went up to Machias for the annual Machias Wild Blueberry Festival, where we helped staff a table collecting pledges of support. Between the booth and the volunteers circulating with clipboards, we amassed 301 signatures. For rural Washington County, Maine (look it up on a map, folks - it has around 34,000 people in the whole county!) that was simply fantastic. We had a good time and met some neat people and Quinn got to play with her friend Emma. A good time was had by all.

We did get shouted at a couple times, and a couple volunteers were called hateful names (one was even prayed at - loudly - in the middle of the street fair), but overall people were pretty decent. A couple vignettes worth sharing:

elderly couple passes by our booth, gentleman in the lead, hunched back and shuffling slowly, followed by lady with wheely-walker-with-flip-down-seat and fancy locking hand brakes. He looks at our sign ("Support same-sex marriage? SIGN HERE!") and says something to the missus. She looks up, reads the sign, locks down the walker and shuffles six or eight steps uphill to where we are.

"Where do I sign?" she asks. We ascertain that she is indeed a registered Maine voter and that she supports same-sex marriage, and she begins to fill out the paper, painfully slowly, hands gnarled with arthritis. Her husband ambles up and stands beside her. Would he care to sign? No, he already did with that nice young man over there. Great, thanks. Mrs. finishes up and asks her husband if he found what he was looking for at the last booth.

"They didn't have an extra small" he told her as he reached into his trousers pocket, pulling out an infant's t-shirt. It was emblazoned with the Machias Blueberry Festival logo. He held it up so she could see.

"That's for our grandbaby in California," the woman explained. "Our son and his partner just adopted him."

Four jaws dropped and eight eyes welled up on the inside of that booth. Love makes all the difference. We wished them well, offered them cookies, and sent them on their way.

And I said a little prayer of gratitude.

Earlier that day, our intrepid volunteer C was out gathering names of supporters and he found himself for one reason or another inside the church hall where the bathrooms and lunch areas were. An irate person stormed up to him, pointed to the clipboard in his hands and said "How DARE you! How dare you bring THAT (finger jab in direction of clipboard) into a HOUSE OF THE LORD?!"

Our young friend did not have time to answer before a member of the church (Congregational, I think) came over to the scene.

"This is an Open and Affirming church," the man told the offended visitor." He is welcome here. If that makes you uncomfortable, then perhaps YOU should leave."

If this shit is happening in Machias-freakin'-Maine, we might just win this thing. Wow.