I Eat No One

Best book I read: The Broken Earth Trilogy. But The Third Reich was evocative and queasy, too.
Best movie I saw in a theater: Sorry To Bother You, of course. But The People Under The Stairs was a hoot.
Best movie I saw not in a theater: Hellbound: Hellraiser II
Best album: What a Time to Be Alive; runner-up: Invasion of Privacy
Best song: One Thing; runner-up: Raise Your Voice Joyce
Best show I went to: Shilpa Ray at Reds Need Green / DCTV. Unbelievable.
Best US House district: NY-14
Best New York state legislative district to spend the summer in: SD-18
Best video game I finally caught up on: Gone Home

It was a blur, really. As I recall, I spent every spare moment trying to figure out (slowly) how to help my politics friends build an organization, even though most of the time I felt like Lisa Simpson trying to scale the walls of Little Pwagmattasquarmsettport. Tried not to let on how badly I wanted to be there. Tried to tire myself out, like Moneta said to do, to stop from thinking about myself.

My feelings of professional alienation came to a head when the not-so-bad company I'd been working at for almost ten years got acquired by evil grifters. So I decided to return to the gaming industry, a wholesome place where bad things do not and have never happened. Which turn of events, though, led me improbably enough to the Anaheim Convention Center for BlizzCon, a strange cultural nexus of corporate aesthetic power and consumer monarchism. We watched a parade of gamers in fish pajamas march up Katella Ave. in eighty-degree November heat. I got bad diarrhea at a Benihana. Nina and I spent a day in San Diego, where we took a long walk through Balboa Park and saw some ethereally beautiful giraffes at the Zoo before catching the night train north. Watched a naval ship send a message in flag semaphore. Everything grubby-pristine Mission Revival, bright on the outside and alluring and dark on the inside. A place that feels like it was abandoned by people a long time ago.

But the weight of the year feels centered on the summer and the Julia Salazar campaign, which I worked on pretty much every weekend and some weeknights. The hallucinatory early June heat found me drenched in sweat, barely able to speak except for repeating the rap, getting plausibly lost in the hill country of Cypress Avenue on my way back to 82 Central. The weekend construction work on the subways made a train commute practically impossible, and so I started biking from Gowanus to Bushwick, dividing the route into five segments:

1. From my house down 3rd Ave. and across Flatbush Ave. to BAM
2. East through the lush brunch republics of Clinton Hill, the Co-Op building on Waverly forming the border with...
3. The Pratt Lands, a long, mostly straight shot on Willoughby (past the woodworking shop I could've sworn was a secret bookstore) to Lewis Ave., which I remembered because of Sam
4. Turning left, then right onto Myrtle and past Zombieland
5. And finally to the Home Stretch, past Broadway and somehow onto Central Ave., usually biking against traffic for a moment or two near the Rotten Island Records.

We started hosting barbecues in the back of the campaign office on Sunday nights and I'd go to the bodega on the corner for beers and ice to fill up the metal wash basin, and to say hello to Lupita, the little gray cat lolling in the produce aisle.

The dispatch location I worked out of for GOTV on September 13th was a vacant ground-floor apartment on North 7th St., half-furnished with tacky wall sconces and decals that the landlord explained were features of the orgies the previous tenants had held. The building's scruffy back yard was overrun with fuzzy yellow-green caterpillars, which, not content with webbing up the anemic tree that stood above the damp picnic table, dropped onto our heads and shoulders as we ran traingings for canvassers. If we forgot to shut the door in between shifts, they'd inch their way across the threshold and into the kitchen.

The caterpillars must have been a good omen, like Bernie's bird. I wasn't expecting to head to a victory party when I locked up the office, but that's what it was, and The Well was an undulating sea of red shirts hugging and cheering and already planning the next assault on the political establishment. Feeling like we'd plucked the string of the universe and it was vibrating through us. Or we were the string that was plucked. My eyes welled with tears as Tascha addressed a "speechlet" to the adoring crowd from atop a wooden table, framing the work of the campaign itself as a template for a great rebuilding of the world. We howled A! - Anti! - ¡Anticapitalista! until our voices gave out.