Celebrating in the Emergency Room (a.k.a. How I Spent Election Night 2008)

So, it is not very often that I write stories of personal trials and tribulations on this blog. Sure, you get opinionated political rants and movie endorsements, but you rarely get a story about something going on in my personal life. Yet, I figure this is a story worth telling. Here is my story of the night we elected Barack Obama!

I had been running behind all day...people were going to start showing up around six pm for the joint election results watching party I was having with my neighbors across the hall. Other than a sink full of dishes, my apartment looked pretty damn clean. People were already arriving. James (my best friend growing up) and Saku (my law partner) were already at my place, and Arrendt and Jake had at least 10 people in their apartment (including a super cute girl named Lauren who I only got to talk to for a few minutes because of the events about which you will read), when news broke that Obama had won Ohio. We were giddy. A bunch of us took celebratory shots of whiskey! That pretty much meant Obama was going to win the election. It somehow seemed fitting that I was with two of my closest friends, who are both black, when we knew we were likely to have our first black president. I was literally jumping up and down with glee.

Shortly thereafter my parents arrived. My dad was still parking the car, and I took my mom over to meet the neighbors. My mom had brought over gourmet lasagna she had prepared, to add on to the Tofu Yakisoba Stirfry I had made, and I started to cut pieces of cheese from a tin of Cougar Gold to put with crackers. Somehow, in the process, my hand slipped and the serrated edge of the can nearly sliced off the top of my right index finger. Luckily it stopped a few centimeters short of taking the entire piece of skin off, and just missed my knuckle, but I had to be rushed to the E.R. after it became apparent that the bleeding was not going to stop and that the cut was pretty bad. Here is a picture I took in the emergency room (hence the low quality):

Once I got to the E.R. they asked me all sorts of questions and then I got to go sit in the waiting room and watch the CNN election results show (the MSNBC coverage I had been watching at home was so much more enjoyable!). Then at 7:53 pm, I had to go back into a room to be evaluated...yeah that's right...SEVEN MINUTES BEFORE THEY WERE GOING TO OFFICIALLY CALL THE ELECTION.
So there was no celebration for me, just text message after text message of people expressing their joy. The calls started to roll in too (me having to say time and time again that I was sorry I could not talk but I cut myself and they don't allow phones in the E.R.). Then I got a tetanus shot. Ow.
Luckily, right before Obama made his speech, the nurses started streaming CNN. So, at the nurse's station we all stood, watching his speech. All of the nurses, me, my mom, the guy who broke his ankle because he missed a step while canvassing for Obama, a cute gay couple who were holding hands, and a disgruntled doctor who wanted to be watching the speech and not working. About half way through the speech they took me back to clean my wound and stitch it up. (At the end of the speech, apparently all of the nurses and patients out there hugged). Once that was all said and done, it looked like this:


Seven stitches and four hours later I was out the door and headed back to my apartment. I was very happy, but at the same time I was feeling pretty down about Prop 8 passing in California. On the way back we ran into a giant parade of what must have been a thousand people celebrating, but my mom wouldn't let me get out of the car. Everyone had left my apartment but Saku, (my co-dj on KGRG) Nicole, and my dad. People had continued to show up at my party who never even got to see me, let alone celebrate with me. I was super bummed. I was in a ton of pain, but luckily the two whiskey drinks I had (and the vicodin I took) tempered it a bit...so after Nicole left, Saku and I headed out into the streets of Capitol Hill;. Stupidly, in my haze, I forgot to bring the memory card for my camera, so I will have to rely upon other people's videos to show you what went down.

First, we caught up with a small parade of about 50 people heading downtown. But right when we got on the cusp of downtown, Saku and I decided to head back up the hill to Broadway to see what was up. And, once we got there, everything was OFF THE HOOK! Here is a video of what it was like:

Obama Election Celebration in Seattle from Ray Lucke on Vimeo.

It was even crazier before I got there...this was the scene:


and here are a couple videos of the crowd singing the national anthem:

and


I have never seen anything like it before in Seattle. People were laughing. People were crying joyfully. I was just kind of in awe. I was in pain and the gravity of everything hadn't hit me yet. I was excited though. And I ran into a bunch of friends up there. I think I am still kind of in shock. In 2004, I cried tears of sorrow. This time around, it is tears of joy. What a momentous day in American history! I am sorry that I missed a lot of it, but hey...I have a story to tell and we can now begin healing from the past 8 years. 8 years of civil rights being set back 150 years. 8 years of war. 8 years of agony. Thank god it is almost over!