Good Night AltReich

In the shadow of a hospital, these days it's hard to feel bad for yourself.

It's been almost a month and I still feel like shit. I can't help it. I can't help but feel that what little I could contribute wasn't quite enough.

I didn't expect paradise, I expected a valiant effort in the name of peace, humanity, and dignity! I expected Bernie Sanders not to drop out when he did. I wanted a drawn out bloody fight to the death between him and the DNC and the donors and all the other retirees with shit eating grins telling you that you don't get shit. Maybe my hopes were too high. Drop the maybe, my hopes were certainly too high. But this isn't a self-evisceration about the hours I spent at bars, restaraunts, and in front of the TV where I wasn't phone or text banking, this is more about what went wrong and what we could learn from it.

First off, a quick narrative. Sanders began his campaign never quite as a frontrunner. Despite the popularity of his platform and his very strong base, he would've struggled to win an outright majority of Democratic primary voters as the constituency exists. Mostly older, retired, and more conservative, the Democratic primary voters don't represent the Democratic electorate as a whole. Really, anyone could tell you that. Even the most garbage brained pundit could point out that an 80 year old lifelong Democrat in the South does not have the same interests as their 29 year old grandson working at Subway for minimum wage while still living with his mother.

Hell, that guy probably doesn't even vote! And who could blame him? I'm lucky enough to advance slowly towards the professional middle class of computer geeks who lurk behind the scenes flipping the right switches and elegantly making little changes to your software that you are not even supposed to notice. I also studied politics with some help from Pell Grants for a few years and managed to get myself a degree in it. If I have problems with voting and tend to see it as a certification of a system that does not even deserve my attention, then how can I expect the man who has been given so much less reason to make the effort?

The entire Sanders campaign was based upon this idea that if you said what you believed and offered up a vision of the future that was truly inclusive of working people, they would come out in droves to vote for you. And in many places, that worked. In California for instance, the mostly laboring Latino working class came out in droves to support “Tio Bernie” as many young activists had dubbed him. The energy was palpable! The excitement was there! And he took the largest state in the union with many committed Democrats to almost zero fanfare. It was Super Tuesday and the headline was that Joe Biden swept the states.

Joe Biden, the Lazarus of this season couldn't be bothered to campaign here, except in small town halls in and in shadowy meetings with Hollywood creeps and pedophiles to work them over for a nice check. He still did pretty well, all things considered.

Before this, there was a concerted effort to undermine Bernie. One doesn't have to look any further than the made for viral video moment by the snake Warren. A simple accusation of hidden sexism didn't do a lot to damage him, people have a natural revulsion to lawyers which is 100% healthy and an even greater revulsion to a lawyer who does folksy affects and pretends that she's your friend and understands you. What really did him in though is she continued when no other candidate would've. After decidedly losing in all the earlier contests, she refused to drop out before Super Tuesday and refused to endorse Sanders when she finally did drop out. The candidate who insisted she believed in all the same things as Bernie let the mask drop at that moment and her supporters didn't care.

This is exactly where I lose many Berniecrats. The typical response is to believe that we have come across a deeply corrupt and manipulative organization that unfairly conspired against the ascendant Sanders in an attempt to destroy him. I don't dispute their version of reality, this is very much true. I dispute what it means.

While many cry foul play and insist that in a fair fight, Sanders would've won, I differ. The socialist left has believed for many years that the Democratic party was an institution that was against our very interest and would attempt to undermine us at every turn. It's unfortunately the truth that the Democratic and Republican parties both represent two separate wings of capital, ones that could roughly be transcribed to technology and professional services (Democrats) and then finance and small business (Republicans). We are not so fortunate as to have a Socialist party yet in the United States, or else the election would look very different today in these days of COVID-19.

We are instead stuck with the warring wings of the capitalist class and we should've realized that the socialist entering the party would create a problem for these PMC pricks. The socialist Sanders could not win, and even if he won the nomination could not be allowed to win the general election. But he must be allowed to win a few contests and he must be allowed above all to run. A resounding rejection of socialism was the thing that the Democrats hoped for and they received it.

And every dirty trick they pulled in 2016 was ready to go. In 2016, we could be forgiven for our starry eyed idealism. We could be forgiven for believing that the Democrats were the left party and we could draw them out of their long coma and force them into a new age of social democracy. We could be forgiven for believing that they cared about human misery and wanted to do something to eradicate it. But in 2020? We should've known.

We should've approached this as a hostile takeover of a capitalist party. A simple attempt to use their structure against their will in order to gain the ballot access to put socialism before the American people. We should've looked to Donald Trump as the example. He thoroughly changed a conservative party into a fascist party with little effort by appealing to the underlying hatred in the heart of the Republicans!

Sanders frankly should've done the same and went on the stage not just to expose Michael Bloomberg but Joe Biden for his indentured servitude to the credit card industry. He should've went after Elizabeth Warren's legal career and her “red-face” grubbing up of every benefit she could steal from non-white people. He should've pointed out the suspicious past of Pete Buttigieg and his little vacations to Somaliland with USAID operatives. The idea being that if he is destined to lose, he will lose whether he is nice or not.

Frankly, the Bernie wing of the party should've realized that they would throw everything at us and they did. We can't control that, they will behave corruptly no matter our actions and we can only be a bomb thrower in response, threatening to bring down the entire party on top of them.

Our collective naivete was our downfall, without a doubt. But the final nail in the coffin was the craven self interest of the Democrats beyond what even a cynic would think reasonable.

The procedural argument that an election must take place at its appointed time and could not be delayed even in the even of a national emergency is very interesting but I won't bore you with it. But fundamentally, what the DNC prescribed in the face of a national pandemic with several dozen state governors declaring total lockdowns of their state for public health was unforgivable.

They allowed the election to go on. They in fact forced it to continue. With many polling stations closed, mail in ballots unable to received and hazmat suits worn by some cunning pollworkers, they had the good people of Florida, Illinois, and Wisconsin continue to vote even as the masses demanded a delay and a by mail election.

The good people lined up with their masks and gloves waiting for the opportunity to exercise their civic duty. Ballots in hand, they lined up nervous about what little invisible demons lurked on the card stock paper. And they voted.

Amazing! The misty veil of depression has been lifted! Even just briefly, it is amazing. I feel like Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time and with a great sense of fluidity experiencing my entire life at once.

I remember snippets, more vignettes, scenes evocative more of a feeling than the truth of my relationship with Shereen. Year 20 of my life coming in crystal clear in a rare affirmation of the power of human memory. The meandering search for meaning of year 21 makes sense in context. It was just missing a little more Jeff Rosenstock apparently.

I remember the long drives in my Toyota Rav4, a microSUV with little in the way of attitude or sex appeal but an incredible amount of formative experience for me. I remember when I took that car into the parking lot at California State University Long Beach on an empty Saturday. Me and Shereen went in to work on the paper and I sidetracked her to a distant parking lot off campus and showed her my amazing find. After months of struggling with the hunk of junk 96 Dodge I had, I felt competent and fairly modern with this car. I beamed with pride and self confidence. We drove that car to all the little folk punk shows we so admired. I even went up to West Covina with her to see bands at Bridgetown DIY including the venerable Jeff Rosenstock in one of his earliest solo shows.

In a lot of ways, Brittany fixes the things that were wrong with Shereen while maintaining much of the essence. So delicate and feminine, so unstable. I cannot resist her. But instead of shirking and falling away when confronted, she builds herself up. Shereen the delicate little wallflower could not contend.

But then again, at the same time I was not the same man. I had not been hardened by the rough edges of the gig economy, drug use, a brief period of alcoholism or disillusionment in college yet. I was still very much ready to be molded by the world. Soft sensitive clay overforming and overshaping to the inputs of a myriad of sculptors. I remember missing her so dearly that after a devastating first attempt at Mock Trial in which I had overextended myself and collapsed very publicly, I went back to her and walked in to see her writing at the Union Weekly opinion desk. Her sad eyes said so much to me that I didn't have to hear a word.

“It's not going well sweetheart, I know. Just stay here with me and everything will be fine.”

I slept the night with her and then went back up the next day. Maitlyn filled me the flutter and excitement of romance but none of the comfort. Maria filled me with comfort and no excitement, a dead pulse from the beginning. Only Shereen and Brittany have managed both.

The stability with Brittany is certainly the happiest I've been in my life but I miss the long nights wailing at the moon. Just looking so desperately for meaning in the stars, listening to my favorite music and being alone alone alone at the end of it! I wished for nothing but the solitude to end but now I find it has its charms. And each following morning, waking up on a mattress on a floor with no money and no way to get it and not a care in the world. No student loan repayments, no savings, and maybe a couple spare beers in the fridge and half a bottle of Jim Beam in the freezer. Even with Blake there, it felt like an impossible dream to be on my own. I would give anything for the exhilaration of going back to that life with the only condition that I don't lose the life that I've built. Anything for that feeling without giving up a single one of the gains I made abandoning it. Yeah that sounds about right.

It's funny that I should mention Blake, he serves as a fairly vital symbol here on this monologue.

The drug addict layer of the seeds of both my downfall and renewal. I know it sounds a little dramatic but I've got some intense feelings about him. The thin pale conman who I've alternately believed to be both the greatest sociopath and empath of his day has perpetually shown an undying loyalty and willingness to give anything for my well being as well as a cutthroat capacity for greed, lying and shortsightedness. I still don't know what to make of the man.

In recent days I've appreciated the distance that has grown between us and decided to invite him back into my life. After nearly a year of very rare isolated contact, I've taken to inviting him over so that we could drink, talk I.T. And occasionally relitigate old memories and conflicts. He overdosed a couple times this year on fentanyl, only his girlfriend and a sprayer of Narcan in the bathroom has saved his life all this time. He was in the hospital for pancreatitis caused by a profound case of alcoholism a few months ago, attempting a rehab facility but then inviting me out to the bars a couple weeks after leaving.

My nostalgia for the past, for that old apartment and everything in it will kill me if I allow it. It will kill him. While I have fun with him and I will likely continue to do so should I seem him again, this trite nostalgia I have dedicated so many words to will surely result in my death.

Spiritual.

Emotional.

Physical.

Pick all that apply.

When I want to look back, I will no longer entertain the coked up nights or the constant smashing of all manner of painkillers. I will no longer attempt to scrub the squalor and cigarette tar off the walls of my old home. I will look to the late nights, a couple beers deep, driving down the 10 Freeway from Shereen's old West Covina stomping ground. I will look to the drunken rain sodden walk from Roxanne's to the Bixby home of Maitlyn with stars in our eyes indicating a romance never to be fulfilled. I will look to singing Dean Martin to Maria outside the Dresden before stopping for sandwiches and a last late night beer.

I will look to the love I felt and the love that I missed over the chemical facsimile.