More memories of get-out-the-vote in Iowa:

1) A guy on the bus had a hat saying: "Commes des F*ckdown".

2) As I was leaving the campaign office to stop at a legendary diner before catching my bus back to the city, one volunteer woman came up and tried giving me a $20 bill to treat me to dinner there.

"Please," she was like.

I refused, but she kept insisting, and she was like, "No, you have to, my brother-in-law owns the place, the money stays in the family."

I finally took it, but told her I'd use the leftover money to give the server a nice tip.

"Or buy yourself some junk food for the bus," she was like, "I don't care."

3) At that diner, late on a Sunday night, David Bowie's greatest hits kept playing on repeat.

The guy doing the seating said the cook liked that, and it was always that, or Prince.

4) That same diner had t-shirts for sale for $10; usually they were $20, but there was a fire and the t-shirts suffered minor burns, so they added a commemorative 2014 fire sticker to all the t-shirts and reduced the price to get rid of the stock faster.

5) The rental houses for students were astounding: piles of wet and moldy paper on front porches, beer bottles everywhere in screened-in porches, even one house where all the address numbers were broken off except for a very small bit of the top part of a "2", that was just dangling there by a screw.

6) One house advertised music lessons and guitar repair.  A woman answered the door in a black turtleneck and black beret, with heavy eye makeup like an Egyptian pharaoh.