23 April 2008

12. Woman Working For A Child Welfare Organization

I was sitting with McCain at a rickety table in a camper, and I was advising him about his campaign. I pointed to an oddly shaped orange-and-black spider crawling down a 70s-era curtain behind his head. I handed him a piece of paper with which to kill it. He killed it, then looked at it ponderously. He said, I liked spiders as a boy.

16 April 2008

11. 24-Year-Old Male History PhD Student

There was a town on a hill and the bad guys were slaughtering everyone. McCain got shot first, twice, and fell down in a haystack. Then I watched as the robots or bad guys killed everyone in town. I was sure they'd kill me when they found me, but I hid near where McCain had fallen.

After everything was quiet, McCain woke up. It turned out he had been wearing a bulletproof vest. I was overjoyed because it meant I would be saved. Then as he and I were walking away from the town along the edge of a cliff, a black admiral and a young woman came towards us.

All set? the admiral said.

Yes, said McCain.

I walked off with the admiral and the woman.

They said it had been McCain who betrayed everyone in the town, and that they were glad he was finished. I asked what that meant. They said that they'd run his carriage off the cliff. I looked back and there was McCain's horse-drawn carriage, smashed on the rocks at the bottom. I felt very disappointed in McCain.

12 April 2008

10. Female Computer Programmer

I was at work. The office manager was in her office with her door closed, taking a bath. An old man came to the door wearing a bright yellow baby-doll nightie. He was a little disheveled and I was worried he was disturbed or something. Then I realized it was John McCain.

I asked him what he needed and he said he was there to see our office manager. He'd met her in Las Vegas and was romantically interested in her. I hollered through the door that John McCain was here. She yelled back that she’d talk to him later.

I felt really concerned for her. Did she realize he was wearing women’s lingerie and was quite possibly crazy?

01 April 2008

9. 22-Year-Old Male Political Staffer And Obama Supporter

It was the first day of my last semester of college. It struck me that I had enough credits to graduate and did not really need to be there.

I entered a classroom and sat. Seconds later, the professor opened the door. It was John McCain. This surprised me at first, but then I vaguely remembered registering for a class he was teaching.

In one abrupt motion, McCain walked through the door and sat at the first empty desk he saw. Without any introduction, he scolded us for not doing the reading. (We didn't know how he knew we hadn't done it, but he was right –- most of us hadn't.) I took from my bag the text for the class –- a thin, illustrated paperback mostly about McCain's life. McCain barked about some kind of onerous weekly assignment we had to write based on the book, but then revealed that all of the installments would be due at the end of the semester. We took this to mean that for all McCain's sternness, the class would be easy.

When we went to discussing the book, his mood flashed from angry to sugary. McCain turned to me, smiled, and asked, So, it is really possible for a bird to change the course of history like that? I had no idea what he was talking about.

I flipped through pages of the book for a period of time, and the question seemed to stretch for a minute, but was really only a few seconds. Are you referring to the scene in the book where the cat eats the bird? I asked.

Yes, McCain said. Some know-it-all who had done the reading jumped in and fawned at McCain, taking the light off me. I turned to my right and discovered one of my friends was sitting next to me. He marveled at the improvisation.

I left thinking I would probably just drop the class.