On your left is former Senator Mike Gravel, who recently announced for president. How former? A Democrat, he represented Alaska from 1969 until 1981. That means his last real relationship in the White House was with Jimmy Carter.

I don’t think we’re going to need to say much more about Mr. Gravel, no matter how much fans of Charles Dickens might appreciate names like Mr. Gravel.

I’m posting his photo so you can get a little look at him. This is more of a look than I got at the convention, because Mr. Gravel was not afforded a true speaking opportunity at the convention — a decision I support. You open that door for Mr. Gravel and Lyndon LaRouche might think he’s entitled to step through it as well. Rather than a speaking opportunity in the main hall, Senator Gravel was offered “comments” during the party chair’s welcoming reception Friday night. By the time I got there, both all the food and every bit of Senator Gravel were gone. No one I spoke with seems to have caught Senator Gravel’s comments, or to be able to relate them to me. I don’t even think I was very late for this function, so he may have spoken while I was there and I missed it too. Although I was able to get a half cup of Coke for $2.75. With ice. Luckily I had cash on me.

I say luckily because I pulled into the convention center at the precise time my orientation was supposed to begin and didn’t have time to stop at an ATM. Parking at the convention center is eight bucks, they want payment upon entry, and no, they won’t take a credit card. They will take a check, though (?) and, of course, cash. I fished in my wallet and found five singles. And then spent what felt like nine hours digging through the jumbled coins-and-CD-storage area of my car trolling for stray quarters and such until finally exhuming three bucks in change including, yes, pennies. The attendant wasn’t thrilled and the 87 drivers behind me were decidedly unhappy. Once inside the convention center I immediately hit the ATM and took out $200 — and was dispensed four $50 bills. Want to know how many places won’t take a $50 bill? One way to find out is to do what I did — make sure it’s the only cash on you.

After orientation and receiving the schedule, I got back in the car and drove to find my hotel. It was somewhere near the end of the known universe. Remember the famous New Yorker cover that shows everything past the Hudson River in the far distance, hovering near the vanishing point? My hotel, one of the convention headquarter hotels, was similarly located. From the convention center, my hotel was somewhere past the point where Medieval mapmakers showed ships passing sea monsters and falling off the map. After 20 years of regular visits to San Diego, I had naively asserted that I had stayed in every hotel in San Diego. Not so. This hotel, and I use the term loosely, was something called “The Handlery.” No, I don’t know what that means either. I can say that it is a hotel in the way that Ticketmaster service charges are “convenience fees.” Rather than a hotel, it more closely approximated a Howard Johnson’s from Pennsylvania cow country. From the luxury of my ground-level room, conveniently adjacent to the parking lot where someone was having a tailgate party while I checked in, I could listen in to my neighbor’s television through the wall. Not because the television was too loud, but because the walls were too thin, a determination proved by the fact that I could also hear him use the bathroom. You may use your imagination about that; I didn’t need to.

Once I had checked in and absorbed all the glamor afforded by these surroundings, I went back to the convention, missed Senator Gravel as detailed above, and then went to my first caucus meeting and did the tour of hospitality suites. A lot of this was inspiring, some discouraging, and some downright wacky, as I’ll recount next time.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.