Originally sent to friends on November 4, 2008

I was searching for a better heading to forename this piece and many came to mind but nothing was sticking.  I played around with a few but nothing seemed to have enough clout to nibble my liking; so, I opted to having no words.  I have no words. I have no words to describe what I feel, no words to interpret what this means and no words to translate its limbs.

I need to weak up from this big roar, the cold shower that has frozen me in the interim as I have yet to process what this is all about.

A flow of wires is running through my brain and tears are emblemizing my cheeks, my heart is pumping at speed of light, and I am shaking. I am bewildered and it has not sinking in.

I am hallucinating from it all.  I am still floating on a couple of balloons shivers drifting down my spine as the barrel tumbled down.  I am in awe, subdued, all chocked up in a ball of emotions with pride and I have no words. I have never seen it, I have never experienced it, and I never thought I would see this day – a play that I thought I would never be able to witness in my lifetime. It is mind bugling, exhilarating and one hell of a page-turner.

My heart hammered perfidiously as I wept convulsively as I learned that Barack Obama has come victorious for this nation highest office. I squirmed back and forth biting my nails throughout the night as I waited nervously for the results. I was locked in a steel box and dumped in a wall hanging only by pins and nails, high adrenalin waiting for the ball to drop.

The feather begun to descend slowly oscillating, and waiting for the perfect place to land. The goalie positioned at the basket patiently waiting for the perfect score. The world stopped and I waited for the pin to drop.

For twenty-one excruciating months now, the pundits have been at it, giving their two cents, estimating, satirizing.  Each side mined with a perfect agenda hoisting their own game, pushing their own calculator and wonder contraceptive injecting a drill into my brain. The surrogates armed with ferocious menacing play-by-play sound bytes selling cheap spit, perpetuating me into a dangling yoyo.

This election made a pariah out of me and I obsessed with everything election.

I could not go a day without the seductive pill. It was delivered either via the tube or the net to the point of contaminating my peeps. It was additive, captivating, and downright maniacal, and yet draining. It was like killer bees going for the prey and splattering honey; bubble gums ready to pop.

I could not go anywhere without breading election. I could not turn one TV station without having my adrenalin mutilated by their every penetrating drunken words pounding, pounding, pounding vociferously into my dwindle soul.  I could not pick up one magazine without breeding election with pictures of the candidates splashed everywhere.

I was on a bubble and left alone to treat my dependency – my doing for having licensed myself to the quandary, and resorted to lollipop, which gave me a nauseating heartburn.

As if academic and as I was not tortured enough, the networks instituted the countdown clock; the little box of different colors depending where you were, on the right hand corner of the TV screen that kept winking at me every time I looked at it. Moment by moment, tic tack, tic tack, tic tack, it begun registering the seconds, tic tack, the minutes, tic tack, and the hours tic tack, intoxicating my psyche even deeper as if I did not care to ingest it.

My head spun into ferocious loop scouting for a stick to land.  I was already in a drunken stupor mode when it was alerted to me that the clock was not in my jewelry box but on the store display. I envied it for a moment but pluck right back into harmonic pastures with trickery Powerball jams: he is ahead, he is behind; he is up, no the campaign is dead; he has pulled away, how is going to find his mojo; October surprise, last minute push, miracle on the road, polls don’t count, polls count, look at numbers, he has no chance, there will be a surprise, on the home stretch, six days, five days, four days, etc, etc, etc… oh Lord stop please?! No, they did not stop and I did not turn off the TV either.

And so it was.

Like any major disease, the first round of pills did not work. As time widen down, the acceleratory rhetoric elevated even more. It was akin to a spinning class as the days changed to hours and pedaled, pedaled, pedaled driving my anxiety heartburn to needing zantax. I opted to release my burner on a basketball field, not playing basketball but jogging.

I did not get to Obama bandwagon until when the wave begun to turn. I belonged to the 18 million cracks of glass ceiling and was proud of it. Who could have imagined it? I must confess that I was part of the pejorative black section who was skeptical of a black man ever being nominated for a major party less again reaching the highest office in the land. But Hillary made it possible by making him a better candidate as the primary prolonged.

This country has come a long way from the days when Mr. Story, my English 101 professor told me “what are you doing here. Why don’t you go back to my country?” or the time when I was passed over for promotion countless times just because there was no because, or those of us who have been accused of preposterous just because of the color of our skin.

But all did not matter as we came together as country juicily starving for change. It was awesome to see streams of colorless aisles marching through the tunnel to deposit a vote for a black president or the sea of monochrome flashes at Grant Park in Chicago. The divisiveness that drove us apart, young and old, black and white, Jews and gentiles, yellow, pink or orange, brought us together in an immeasurable proportion and deliciously we became a purple nation.

In the end, race did not matter neither did the Bradley effect, neither did Ayres, neither did Jeremiah, neither did the patriotism; a testament to what we have become. Where else can a minority be elected President? Not in France, not in England, not in Italy, not in Australia, not in Japan, not in Argentina, not in Brazil, not in Iceland… not in any western hemisphere nation but only in America.

We have elected the first minority President of a free world and for that we have to pad ourselves on the back. The mountain is stiff and difficult to climb; and even if he turns out to be the hopeless or dreamless President, he has transformed us; he has opened the doors and good or bad, the new chapter is here; we can finally holler that change has really come to America.

What a race, what a fight, and what an amazing drive it was.  The battle is over and the party has just begun. Where were you when …

Congratulations to President Barack Obama, COC – Community Organizer in Chief