Your mother's presidential campaign was a disaster.

Yesterday, I went to a Barack Obama rally. Over the next few days, I will write on that experience. This is Part 1 of a four-part series

Obama's decision to speak in Eugene, Oregon, surprised me. Surely, he had no chance of losing in a town where smoking a joint in the middle of downtown is unlikely to draw a sidelong glance. This suspicion was confirmed for me when, nine hours before Obama's rally was scheduled to begin, I walked past the basketball arena on the University of Oregon campus that would host it and saw two long lines stretching out of the entrance.

At roughly 3:30 p.m., I joined one of those lines with a couple of friends, perhaps a quarter mile of sidewalk away from the entrance. Considering that Obama was showing up at nine, it was likely that almost everyone there, except perhaps for the four guys waving signs with John McCain's name on them a hundred feet in front of me (you never know in this town, though, and I am an idiot), was pretty sure he was voting for Barack Obama. And we weren't even sure we would get in.

MacArthur Court, Oregon's creaking basketball venue, seats 9,000 people and I would have believed anyone who had told me that many or more had gotten there before me. Considering how few people vote in primaries, 9,000 is almost enough to render a visit to a state of Oregon's size redundant for Obama. That doesn't even take into account the people who got there after 3:30, of which there were many, many thousands. So I was even more mystified as to the reasons for the Illinois Senator's visit.

No matter what's at the end of them, waiting in long lines is grim, especially with an overactive, paranoid imagination like mine. The people who moved past me to get to the back of the line seemed to be picturing themselves killing me and taking my place. I could feel hatred emanating from the family behind me and it intensified my own hatred for the screeching high school kids in front of me. I visualized a future in which, just as I was about to enter the arena, someone threw me aside and muscled his way in and started a riot. I was teargassed, brought before a court, and sentenced to jail to spend the rest of my life with my guilt about somehow ruining Obama's change.

My own paranoia aside, though, there was also a hint in the air that something special might be about to happen in Mac Court. It wasn't the muscular, heart-swelling feeling you can probably read about in books on Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Certainly it was not as strong as the collective buzz at an Oregon Ducks sporting event. But I did have, or think I had, the sense that everyone felt they might be part of some big, historical change for the better.

That feeling was somewhat undercut by the hippie screaming "BY BEING PART OF THE SYSTEM YOU'VE ALREADY LOST" as he hurtled down 15th Avenue on his bicycle and the man walking around the block with an orange sign that read "9/11 was an inside job." As he passed, I said, "probably not, man," to which his only response was to chuckle and smile even more smugly.

As the line started to move, people started coming up to us to demand our attention. A seriously jaded-sounding Hillary Clinton supporter halfheartedly tried to shift some pins onto us. A pungent man asked us to sign a petition to end the war in Iraq that was the object, some time later, of derision for the loud, mannish woman who cut in back of us. Obama volunteers prowled back-and-forth registering voters. One of my friends registered several times. Then there were the men loudly selling Obama merchandise. One peddler had a rack of banal buttons, among whom the "Obama for American Idol" pin stood out for its inanity.

Panic swept the line as we passed the Rec. Center. We were told that coins and backpacks were not allowed, so I scampered into the gym to purchase a bag of Skittles from the snack machine with my friend's change. My friend put my backpack, with the great works of literature I had assembled to read this break, in her locker. I won't see it until the end of spring break.

As we reached the end of Fifteenth Avenue on campus to turn the corner onto University, upon which Mac Court has its address, the imposing, navy blue figure of the Eugene Metro Bomb Squad's paddywagon silhouetted itself against the setting sun. Attached was a safe detonation chamber on wheels, looking like a squat, light blue cement mixer with gleaming silver handles. As a couple of elderly women turned the corner and descended Fifteenth holding aloft a rainbow-striped flag emblazoned with the word "PEACE," I wondered at how many storied missions this bomb unit must have seen in this city.

At one point, as the line finally moved far enough to put me in sight of the entrance, a young boy, probably an eighth or ninth grader, passed us in line. "The candidates suck! Vote for me!" he was yelling. Spying a likely signpost, he grabbed onto it and began to hang off of it. His spindly, bruised legs stood aloft and behind them, people were lined up all along the sidewalk in thick ranks that curved around the block and out of sight.