Real Life in the CHOP: On the Ground in the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest

I know everyone is wondering. I’m aware of the fact that Seattle has ended up in the national news over the last couple of weeks again due to the unique brand of protesting that’s been going on. It started when a basic, everyday demonstration went wrong and turned into a series of riots. The rioting that got all the glamor happened in the commercial district downtown. You might have seen the videos on television – the news reporters breathlessly talked about how people were destroying and looting the struggling businesses. But I’d like to clear something up – there are few, if any, struggling businesses in Downtown Seattle. The businesses that took the brunt of the damage were all billion-dollar national chain corporations. They’ll all be just fine and don’t need your pity. Hell, if I was down there, I would have stolen TWO cheesecakes from the looted Cheesecake Factory.

The real action, though, started happening in Capitol Hill. Long story short, the protesters and police spent days on end standing off against each other. The police, with no compulsion or reason, started getting violent with the protesters. The protesters were gassed multiple times – that was controversial not only for the obvious reason, but also because tear gas enables the spread of Covid-19 and because tear gassing people is classified internationally as a war crime. Numerous videos were taken, and by all accounts, the cops were the ones who started the trouble in all those incidents. They were joined by local alt-right armed vigilantes, who of course weren’t touched. Protesters were the ones getting beaten, arrested, and otherwise assaulted. But with the videos out, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan couldn’t get away with turning a blind eye, so she created a weak little resolution which prohibited the use of tear gas against protesters… For 30 days! And an exemption was made for SWAT teams. I assume there were a lot of SWAT officers in Capitol Hill for the next few days, because the gassings continued. They also had the misfortune of hitting three members of Seattle City Council who were there showing support for the protesters. And those three council members weren’t lost in the crowd, either – they were front and center, where everyone could see them, so the cops knew damn well they were gassing sitting members of the Council. One of them, Kshama Sawant, showed up at the protests again the next day and was gassed again. 

Now, as far as PR control goes, this was as big a disaster for the Seattle PD as it could get. The first issue was the videos, which made it plain that they drew first blood. Then there was the presence of Sawant, who is 1-the most senior and powerful member of the Seattle government (yes, even more so than the Mayor); 2-very, very popular; and 3-tough as nails. Then a passerby assaulted one protester with his car and shot another protester before approaching the police barricade with a thumb up and a shit-eater grin. The police managed to stay composed during that incident; they didn’t attack him. They didn’t even have their guns drawn. They basically shrugged off a man who was fucking RECORDED committing a violent crime, and everybody saw it. Before long, it was the protesters who were smelling blood. They went on a night march to City Hall and overtook it. Soon after that, City Council began calling for Durkan’s resignation, and the Seattle PD precinct in Capitol Hill – one of the department’s flagships – was evacuated and overrun by the protesters. An autonomous zone was set up in the area, and the protesters haven’t given an inch since.

Since mainstream news outlets are in the pockets of the rich people and the corporations who are out trying to turn Capitol Hill into another one of their personal playgrounds, they’d like nothing more than for you to think the CHOP – the Capitol Hill Organized Protest – is a Mad Max-style wasteland. And, well, that ain’t the case. The only violence has been from outside invaders like the Proud Boys and others who are eager to start trouble. But I certainly can’t praise the CHOP as some sort of giant hippie lovefest. The CHOP is called the Capitol Hill Organized PROTEST, after all, and it was set up to be exactly that – a protest. In fact, the organizers of the CHOP started using both the phrase and its acronym after already being there for a week. It was originally called the CHAZ, for the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, but when things started settling down a little bit, the entire thing started to take the feel of a big block party. The point of changing the name was to remind people that the CHOP started because of a protest. Both the people going in and out every day and the people camping out in Cal Anderson Park are protesters. They overtook Capitol Hill with a very specific set of demands and aren’t planning on going anywhere before those demands are met. 

The CHOP isn’t a place that just anyone can visit for an afternoon walk, though. The protesters want CHOP visitors to be their allies, and they can sniff out the people who are only there for the free food and the spectacle. Tim Eyman decided to pay a quick visit to the CHOP under the apparent pretext of “enjoying people using their freedom of speech.” The people there, though, weren’t buying it for a second. Tim Eyman is best known for passing a bill which threatens to gut Seattle’s public transit, and for trying to troll the governor over his lockdown orders. Everyone in the CHOP knows who he is, and he was quickly chased out. The volunteers are also disdainful of the media presence, and they make sure everyone knows there are specific times and places where they can go if they feel some urge to talk to the media. If you’re just there for a few selfies and to say you walked on the wild side, you’re not wanted. The folks frequenting the CHOP are happy if you’re there having a good time, but you better be there to learn and to act. Various speakers have all made it clear that they’re putting their foot down. I’ve broken a few of those rules myself, but I also made it clear to everyone present that I’m there as an ally. I consider my right to a dignified life as a disabled person tied into the rights of other minorities to lead dignified lives, so I’ve been a frequent visitor in the CHOP. The way I see it, I don’t have much of a choice in the matter.

Learning happens in the CHOP. There are stages where the various organizers and community leaders can speak, and there’s a conversation cafe on one of the corners. My favorite thing to do in the CHOP is sit in that conversation cafe and talk to various random strangers, comparing my experiences as a disabled person with those of others. The times I’ve done that, I’ve never seen any tempers flaring or any judgement being passed. The conversation cafe is a place where anyone can walk in with an open mind and chat up anyone else. Really, talking like this is the most basic form of learning people can do, but it’s pretty damn remarkable how much we suck at it. 

The protesters aren’t going at this alone, either. If you’ve been hearing anything about how the local businesses hate them, that’s more bullshit. The CHOP has been running strong for a couple of weeks now. It’s pretty clear that the CHOP is sustaining itself, and much of the protest’s ability to hold itself up is coming in the form of donations from the local businesses. If you need a necessity in the CHOP, there’s a tent set up somewhere there to get it free of charge. Food is everywhere – I’ve seen large stacks of pizza and donut boxes from local suppliers on every corner. There are tents set up which hand out free clothes, tents with little box libraries, and petitions and voter registration places all over the place. The one business in the CHOP which DOES appear to be charging – a food truck that sells hot dogs – is still selling in bulk to the food tents to be handed out to protesters. Hell, there’s even a place that gives out small camping tents for the long-term protesters who are going to pitch next to the baseball field in Cal Anderson Park. Yes, everyone’s heard all the breathless reporting about the protest interrupting small, struggling businesses. What the reporters seem to avoid talking about is how those businesses don’t own the buildings they’re using. The REAL struggling businesses in Capitol Hill were being forced to pay exorbitant rent prices in order to keep their spaces during a pandemic that shut down the entire country. Why shouldn’t they support the protesters? 

It’s true that the CHOP is an anarchist zone, but anyone who tries to use that term derogatively misses something: An anarchist zone isn’t necessarily going to be violent. Anarchism is strictly a system where the rule doesn’t revolve around any kind of government whatsoever. And it’s hard to figure out what, exactly, a “good” rightist would have against the CHOP. After all, the people there managed to reduce the presence of a pervasive government entity. They’re demanding more fiscal responsibility. They’re even using privatization to help the people in need – any homeless people who wander into the CHOP can get food and maybe even shelter for free, and they won’t even be using government assistance! The protesters also managed to create a communal vegetable garden in an area of Cal Anderson Park. Doing that would take a government permit that costs thousands of dollars, but the organizers decided that, fuck that, people need their veggies. 

The CHOP is not a place that’s going to shake or destroy anyone’s faith in humanity. If anything, it can restore it. The CHOP, as it stands right now, is free of a lot of the repressive systems devised by humanity to keep down the so-called inferiors. Capitalism is a lost concept in the CHOP. Racism and ableism and sexism are spotted and called out for what they are. There’s no bitching about private property because a lot of that private property there isn’t actually owned by the people who actually use it. But the CHOP is, more than anything, an example of something that can happen when the underclasses get riled up enough to act and start gunning for the root causes. I’m planning to return many more times, and I’m hoping to see a lot more examples of such places popping up more. 

The Corona Chronicles Part III: Emptiness With a View

Being an introvert doesn’t mean I’m not prone to cabin fever. I like to be out and about just to enjoy the fresh air and get my own distorted thoughts together. All things considered, the form of cabin fever this epidemic has thrown at me hasn’t been that bad. I’ve suffered worse forms of it living in my native city of Buffalo, New York. Buffalo is famous for its gigantic winter storms; a foot of snow is routine there. Storms which drop 18-24 inches of snow will happen five or six times every winter. And there are at least three or four times in my life when the snow piled up to at least five feet. THOSE storms were brutal, because they meant truly being trapped inside for days at a time. Even if you’re the type of person who walks outside multiple times during a winter storm to clear the sidewalk and driveway, there’s still going to be a good two or three day wait for the snow trucks to physically remove the snow and take it somewhere out of the neighborhood. Until then, you’ve got two or three days of doing nothing but drinking beer and watching football.

In the coronavirus pandemic, I can still go outside. Hell, I’ve seen ads promoting social distancing which have been saying we can go outside, so long as we keep to the six-foot rule. I’ve been taking advantage of the nice weather to go out and walk, but the difference between walking after a five-foot snowfall and walking in the coronavirus apocalypse has been rather unsettling. After a hard storm, when enough of the snow was taken away, going back outside was an invitation back to life. The neighbors could usually be seen outside shoveling the front sidewalk and driveway and digging their cars out. With the recession and removal of the snow, you could always see the neighborhood slowly spark its way back to life. Everyone was back on the streets walking their dogs and driving out to the store like every other winter day. The stores opened back up one by one like nothing had happened. This pandemic has shown me the exact opposite. I’m not trapped, but going outside is futile because I’ve been watching a total shutdown right from my first day on furlough. 

In the days before my furlough began, the buses stopped taking fares. Then they started telling riders to get on and off strictly through the back doors. Right on my first day of furlough, I went to the DSHS office to apply for SNAP benefits. The office was pretty barren, but there were people there, and all the agents necessary were there to help. Getting SNAP benefits, though, required signatures from people where I work, and getting those signatures took me a couple of days. Those two days were the window the DSHS office needed to decide having people physically come in was dangerous, so when I returned with the form, they told me to put it in a nearby mailbox. At this point, things didn’t look like they would be so bad. Social distancing was easy because people were staying home, but most of the places I personally enjoyed going were still open, and the buses were still running a full schedule. Within a week, I had visited a mall that was damn near empty, bought a $3 video game I had been interested in, and looked in local stores for a decent book to get through my furlough. I was ALMOST enjoying myself. 

My free explorations around the area, though, proved to be revealing. When I dropped by my workplace to pick up my paycheck and get the signatures I needed for DSHS, tape had been placed on the floor to mark the safe distances between the customers and service reps. A few days after that, my usual grocery store started asking customers to stand in line outside. When protective glass started appearing in stores, I noticed. And those were the best-case places. In my own life, I had a dental appointment to get a botched filling taken care of in early April. That was moved to early May, and I’m pretty sure THAT is also going to get moved. 

Within a couple of weeks, society had fallen to emptiness. My next visit to the local mall ended with me walking off after a sign in the door said they were complying with social distancing. A lot of other places I would have gone just to kill time were also closing up shop. The stores in the cross-street strip mall started reducing their hours before just saying “screw it” and closing up one by one. The Gamestop cut its hours to 12-4 PM or something like that, and only let people in by appointment. Then they closed. Another Castle only let six customers in at a time before closing. The last time I checked my favorite comic store, it was doing streetside pickups two days per week. Half-Price Books jumped straight to closing. My favorite Friday Game Night spot, Otherworlds, was ironically forced into staying open. The place was preparing to close for good in April before the owner apparently decided he could keep it going for one more month so his regulars could say goodbye. Eventually, the bus started running on a part time schedule too. First, the buses started restricting the seats passengers could sit in. Then the service cutbacks started; one bus per hour here and there, then one bus per day in either direction in some places. 

The irony in this, of course, is that with all of the usual crowds out of the way, the infrastructure itself was revealed for the mess that it is. If there’s a telecommuting infrastructure in place which enables a very significant number of tech workers to keep home offices, it’s going to raise a few questions: WHY would someone sit for an hour on the I-5 to fight traffic on the way to an office? Why are eight-hour workdays insisted upon when a lot of workers don’t have eight hours of work to do? If buses can take passengers places without fares, why aren’t they doing that more often, and why are poor people ticketed and arrested for not being able to pay? And for that matter, there are a lot of OTHER questions worth thinking over as well: Why would anyone want a health plan which tied to an employer that could lay them off and deny them coverage in the middle of a time when they would NEED that coverage? Why are workers who are considered essential denied sick pay so they’re forced to work and possibly make customers sick? Why is it that we find ourselves suddenly having a hard time finding supplies in the vaunted land of plenty? Yeah, this pandemic has made the mighty invisible hand visible. Turns out the hand is a rotten zombie hand which is trying to choke everyone to death. 

The one place I’ve seen everything slowly coming back to life is in the grocery stores, and most of them still aren’t heavy on essential supplies. It took me two weeks to get my hands on the vitamin C supply I needed. As for the infamous toilet paper stocking fiasco, people seem to have finally woken up to the fact that a tool shed of TP is probably not the first thing they should concern themselves with buying for an apocalypse. I should note, though, that grocery stores aren’t facing their usual crowds, either. And even they have their own restrictions to deal with: Standing spots in the checkout lines are marked by tape, and don’t expect to take advantage of any free samples. 

Seattle itself looks like a setup shot from The Walking Dead. I sometimes like to hop the bus and drop in just to see how everything is holding up. And, well, everything is still there. I watch the skateboarders at Westlake Park; it’s not like anyone can climb around on the little playground rides, since they’re all blocked off by Police tape. There are occasional cafes – mostly the independent places that can’t afford to close – offering takeout food. On a recent stroll I saw a couple of bicycle messengers walk in and out of King County Courthouse. Seattle City Hall is apparently open, but inaccessible by the general public. There are plenty of people out on daily walks, but the hollow appearance of Seattle’s business and commercial districts is revealing a lot of the people and things that Seattle’s One Percenters prefer not to think about. The tent villages near Pioneer Square and the International District still exist, and any random passerby is prone to ask for a handout. God forbid you should be on a walk and find yourself in need of a bathroom. Seattle’s lack of public restrooms was a problem before, but getting that takeout coffee now is a bad idea unless you’re rushing straight home.

I’m hard pressed to think of anyone fortifying their homes to prepare for a zombie horde, even though fortifying a home would be a decent way to pass the time. Hopefully, though, it won’t get to that point. I personally still have a sizable collection of video games to beat and movies and TV shows to watch before I start pouring a concrete bunker. 

The Corona Chronicles Part II: Paper Labyrinth

When the coronavirus started really making the rounds in early March, none of my coworkers thought anything of it. We played and joked the way we usually did. The idea that a virus was going to cause some giant standstill was absurd – we had seen how far older viruses like SARS and Ebola had gotten, after all, and that wasn’t very far. So the collective mood around work after the first week was that this whole thing was gonna blow over and be forgotten like all the rest of them. Management seemed to be taking it a bit more seriously, though, and in the space of two weeks, there had been two meetings about it within my department to give the employees new directives about how to act and what to do to avoid spreading the virus and becoming infected. 

While my coworkers weren’t concerning themselves over the coronavirus, though, all of us noticed that our lack of concern didn’t translate to our customers lacking concern. The people of Seattle had gotten an early start shutting themselves in. While that cut our commute times by over half, it also meant the customers were slowing to a trickle. That, in turn, meant the employees were coming in for nothing, which suddenly meant cutbacks in hours. Our amusement over the coronavirus turned into fear upon realizing that work could simply stop for several of us. And in the second half of March, I was pulled aside and told I was being put on standby. Now let me be clear: I still have my job. I still have access to all the benefits that go with it. But they’re not going to be able to let me work until there’s, you know, real work for me to do, which means I’m not going to be able to go in and earn money. My paid time off was enough to cover a couple of weeks, but that’s not what you would call consistent. So a few days after my furlough began, three of the company higher-ups called me personally and said I should take an unemployment claim so I could wait this thing out. 

Thus began my journey through the magical world of bureaucratic paper trails! When I received my standby notice, people everywhere were coming to the realization that this virus was going to slow things down for awhile and applying for their benefits en masse. Not only that, but the government workers who work the front lines of the welfare system were already staying home. I was stuck doing everything online, which meant I couldn’t turn to the worker in front of me and ask if I would be considered a laborer or a materials handler. The day my standby began, I was down at the DSHS office to apply for EBT benefits. The agent who helped me fill out the form said he needed me to get some information from my workplace. It took me two days to get it, and when I returned to the DSHS office to return the form, I was directed to the mailbox. DSHS was closed. But at least they had an agent sitting outside their closed office to dispense information, which was more than I found in the unemployment office. The unemployment office just had a couple of signs in its windows. A passerby could have spotted it and thought it was moving. 

With no recourse, I filled out my unemployment forms online. It was fairly straightforward, although it did leave me with a few questions. With the unemployment numbers taking off like a rocket, though, calling the service line turned out to be a dead end. I made two calls to the unemployment office. The first time, I was put on hold for over an hour and a half! The only reason that call ended was because I hung up after the office’s closing time rolled around. The next day, I called again. That call at least went quickly. After receiving two hold messages about how busy the lines were, I was booted outright. I’m sure that in 99 other dimensions, I’m still on hold. After that, I resorted to trying to fill out the forms myself. When I got to the trick spots, I made a call to one of my bosses, who seemed to know his way around the forms. The unemployment office says anyone who needs to fill out the forms online should set aside a half hour to an hour to do so, but if I had known what I was doing, I probably could have finished it in 15 minutes. After that, it was hit send and wait. 

So wait I did! I waited for a couple of days before getting a surprise message from the unemployment office. They said they suspected I had been available to work during the time period between March 15-28 and sent me some extra paperwork for me to explain myself. Now, this HAD to be a result of the logjam at the main office. I WAS available for that entire period and, in fact, had worked on March 16 and 17, which had been a Monday and a Tuesday. My first day on standby had been March 18. What’s more, these papers had been sent to me over an online PDF a solid four days before March 28! That meant I had to either download and edit them, attach them to my original document, and send them electronically or print them up before faxing and mailing them. Filing them electronically was out of the question, since my computer is a dingbat with no editing program, and it doesn’t properly download PDF files half the time anyway. So what I usually do when I have to print up a PDF document is email it to myself and print it at a library. That method was also out, since the libraries were all closed. 

Since I needed to get this thing done and out of the way as soon as possible, I figured I had one final option: Pay the money to get the paper printed up at the local FedEx shop. First, props to them for being open. Unfortunately, though, this method meant lugging my computer to the shop and hoping their printers used a remote connection. My heart sank a little bit after learning that wasn’t going to happen. But one of the employees suggested that I send the PDF link to the shop by email, and they could print it up that way. Again, my computer is a dingbat, and it took around a half hour to establish a secure connection to the shop’s wifi. Then it felt like denying me a download to the PDF until it suddenly didn’t. It took nearly an hour of fiddling and fighting, but I finally managed to get a PDF downloaded and emailed to the store and printed. (Major props to the employees there for their saintlike patience in helping me.) 

I rushed home with the forms and filled them out, explaining where the unemployment office had managed to confuse itself. To return them to the unemployment office, I chose a fax machine over the post office because I wasn’t sure how the post office was going to act by that point. Even faxing the forms to the unemployment office, though, would require a wait until the next day because the FedEx store was operating on reduced hours. So I returned to the FedEx store the next day. That visit was quicker, but it still took nearly 20 minutes because the unemployment office’s fax lines were logjammed. It took six tries before they were clear enough for my papers to get through. 

At this stage, everything seems to have gotten through just fine. What’s left now is to set a new daily routine as I wait for the call to return to work. 

The Corona Chronicles Part 1: Overture (How We Got Here)

To think, last Friday my Friday night game group played Pandemic. It was meant to be a joke. Now it hasn’t even been a week later. Hell, it hasn’t even been a BUSINESS week since then, and I’m starting to wish those One Quiet Night and Resilient Population cards could be played in real life! Here I am now, in the middle of a quarantine, mulling over the situation – I have plenty of time to do so since my workplace is now among the casualties and I was told not to report until further notice – and wondering just how everything came to all this. Where do you start? Well, like all good stories, we start at the beginning. 

I don’t remember anything about the first time I heard about this coronavirus being a thing. I picked up the term somewhere in the middle of February, and even that’s a rough estimate. Coronavirus. Coronavirus. So they’re naming this new disease after a terrible Mexican beer or something, is that it? There was no way Budweiser was ever going to stand for that. Still, there was no way I was going to let such a thing keep me up during the night, and I didn’t. I forgot about the coronavirus as quickly as I had first heard about it, whenever that was. I returned to my regularly scheduled life, never to hear about the coronavirus again. The next couple of weeks were eventful and productive and I had an old friend fly in to visit from out of state and go to a Seattle Sounders match with me. 

It was a good thing my friends came in and got out when he did. It was also a good thing my tickets – a gift from my brother in law and sister – were for the game they were. What I remember over the next couple of days was a blur. This coronavirus thingie had apparently stowed away into Seattle on some unsuspecting traveler. But the next thing I knew, there were reports of infections. And deaths. And they were coming and going quickly; they appeared to be almost doubling by the day, and people were suddenly starting to get worried. Not that I really thought a whole lot of it at THAT time, either, though, because all the deaths that occurred were in people over 50. And I had still lived through other virus scares – Ebola and SARS had come in and been subdued in short order. What I forgot during those two scares, though, was one thing: During both of them, we had presidents who didn’t gut the part of the government dedicated to fighting outbreaks like this. That being said, GUESS what very smart genius Donald Chump did! That’s right, the CDC was gutted under Dump’s administration, leaving the country with a sorry excuse of an outbreak response team. 

Coronavirus didn’t slow down. Instead, it seemed to be gathering steam and jumping from place to place. That, of course, was followed by the hysterical national media reporting on the newest great crisis. Again, it looked cute. It had all been done before. As had all the fraidy cats going to the grocery store to buy out the entire stock of toilet paper. Toilet paper? Yes, apparently in the event of a national emergency, toilet paper is a commodity more precious and versatile than duct tape. Can you eat toilet paper? Perhaps use it as emergency clothing? Yeah, this was little more than people being people. I went into the grocery store, bought my groceries, and left believing myself well-prepped for another week of healthy eating. I still wasn’t thinking anything of it when I went into work on Monday and found my regular transit center with plenty of leftover space. I was able to get a spot much closer to the stop I needed than usual. 

I won’t lie: Getting in and out of Seattle for work was downright pleasant. I didn’t worry about the bus getting there on time, and the drive was a little over 20 minutes long – a rarity even during lower traffic hours. But as it happened, during the work week, the staff was holding regular meetings about how they were going to combat the coronavirus. I was informed that extra hand sanitizer would be on hand and that my newest work duty was to rub down the door handles with alcohol once every hour or so. My workplace wasn’t going to put up with the tough guy act – no showing up if you were infected with anything at all. If we had PTO, we were instructed outright to use it, and to have clearance when we decided to return to work. Better safe than sorry, and work wasn’t going to pull any punches. As I roamed around work performing my regular duties, it was tough to ignore a few things. Work was unusually slow during the week. Like I said, it was nice getting in and out of Seattle, and it’s not like I don’t enjoy an occasional bit of downtime. But there’s downtime and then there’s a total snoozer. 

By the following week, I was starting to regret my comments about a media-fueled mass hysteria. Whereas parking spaces at the transit center are spare under normal circumstances, we were now at the point where cars were sparse. Finding a spot close to my bus stop was never any problem. Upon getting into the city, Seattle looked like a scene out of The Walking Dead. While work was a little bit busier, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of dread wash over me when it occurred to me that the increase of work was coming from a good, long backlog that we suddenly had all the time in the world to cover. Although we were getting news about two or three other cities being worse – hello San Francisco! – local businesses were changing and shortening their hours. They weren’t getting any customers. Even businesses that were providing essential services were forced into survival mode. Except for grocery stores – grocery stores looked like they were going through a golden era of selling out their stocks. A glance at a local Trader Joe’s showed me shelves that were nearly barren. Seattle hasn’t reached total lockdown, but it doesn’t look like it’s too far off now. 

So here I am, writing about my life in the center of a local pandemic which has everyone frightened out of their minds. Here I am, planning to continue this project as a way of passing time during this weird odd era we’re living in, having plenty of time to think to myself about micro and macro sociology and plenty of time to observe and peck out my thoughts about everything I see. Hopefully you’ll be entertained and get a better sense of what it’s like living in the middle of a pandemic center.

To the DNC

Hey DNC, I just want to send out a quick message here. Its been popping up repeatedly in my news feeds lately that you’re planning on running Hillary Clinton for the presidency again in 2020. I’m going to make this as clear as I possibly can: We hate Hillary Clinton! We never actually liked her! If you think we liked her, you’re obviously watching just as much Fox News as the man Clinton lost to!

Running Clinton back in 2016 made perfect sense. She was a brand name going up against another brand name who was a loudmouth, and considering any other option would have been suicidal. But we have to get one thing straight: No one who voted for Clinton was really VOTING FOR CLINTON. We were all voting against Donald Trump. That was a monumentally terrible election in every possible way, so it’s no wonder voter turnout hit a low. And the fact of the matter was that Donald Trump ran the better campaign. He was going and speaking to all the poor, blue collar types that you folks at the DNC claim to be in the business of looking after.

What has Hillary Clinton done since then? She wrote a book and bitched about everyone who was responsible for her campaign! She’s been attending the Donald Trump School of Uselessness and Cluelessness. Clinton during the Trump presidency hasn’t been any more productive than Trump himself. She’s still out there being the DNC’s little corporate token, and yet you’ve somehow managed to concoct the idea that people still want more of her. And so what next? Are you going to let her play her senses of privilege and entitlement in yet another one of her failed presidential bids? You know, as often as Trump threatened to run for president in years past, he at least pulled himself out of the running until 2016.

We don’t want Hillary Clinton, we don’t need Hillary Clinton, and the younger demographics are all sick of you force-feeding her to us. I promise you that another Clinton campaign is only going to lead to the same wholesale abandonment that the Republicans are facing right now. Worse, you’ll be guaranteeing four more years of Donald Trump, because even out of necessity, absolutely no one is going to settle for Hillary. Did you learn nothing from the 2018 general elections? We’re sick and tired of the same old, same old corporate shills and sellouts. We want to have an option who’s NOT some old white brand name!

All of those new people got elected into Congress because we don’t like the way things are going. Hillary was a representation of continuing a status quo that most of the people who Hillary was trying to appeal to found unacceptable. And the only reason Hillary got as many votes as she did was because her opponent was Donald Trump. That’s not something we’re up for doing again, so we’re not going to do it again. You want the progressive vote? Give us a real candidate who’s in touch with our issues and yank Hillary out of the spotlight once and for all. I speak for all of us when I say we’ve had enough of you shoving the Clintons in our faces. Let them retire to some ranch in Arkansas gracefully and show us someone real. Otherwise, don’t bother trying to ask us for our vote again. Ever.

Giving Out a 1up

I’ve spent a lifetime playing video games for a thousand different reasons. Boredom, fun, loneliness, escape, procrastination, and imagination-sparking are among them. But recently, I added a couple of new reasons to my list: Charity and encouragement. That made it the first time in my illustrious gaming career that I was playing video games for people other than myself. See, it turns out that there’s a charity out there called Extra Life which gets people to play video games in order to raise money for a children’s hospital. It wasn’t the first time this thing and I crossed paths – I have a friend, Jacob, who’s been gaming to raise money for a few years. Hell, I had even vocalized a desire to partake in such a marathon myself. But it wasn’t until a few days ago that I finally got the chance.

This wasn’t the result of one of my crazy ideas. I know my limits, and even me back in my loneliest and most depressed phases would never have been able to sit down and complete a straight 24-hour video game marathon. Even all the pizza, candy bars, and Mountain Dew on the planet couldn’t keep me up and going for that long. Believe it or not, there are times when the outside world does call. So no, there was no way I was going to attempt to pull this kind of borderline self-abusive stunt on my own.

I don’t want to say Sarah Smith’s campaign office roped me into it, because getting me to play video games doesn’t require any rope. I’m drawn to them like a moth to the flame. And one of the reason’s Sarah’s campaign platform resonated with me so much was because she’s in touch with a lot of the issues that chip off pieces of my being. Sarah is younger than me – I think I have about seven years on her. That means that one of her generation’s quirks is that she grew up never knowing a world where video gaming was strictly a hobby for thugs and delinquents who hung out in smokey, dimly-lit rooms. No one thought it weird that my candidate was a little bit of a gamer, so I’m probably the only one who blinked a little when her campaign sent out a text inviting volunteers to play in the Extra Life marathon. Obviously, I got over it. I said I would be there for a couple of hours to fundraise by doing what I was good at. And hey, no forcing myself on to the phones for this!

When the big day came, my schedule was crammed. I had to go out, finish a piece I was writing for Every Team Ever (shameless self-plug), go to the library, get to Sarah’s office to play for Extra Life, go back up to the University District to work my volunteer job at Scarecrow, then get to Capitol Hill for an introverts’ meetup for drinks. And the fact that I was going to be tackling all this without my car – I’m way too smart to attempt driving through Seattle – left me little room for error. I managed to get to the campaign office right for an early afternoon break, but I was already pretty wiped out by the time I stumbled through the door. Fortunately, there wasn’t any trouble getting me squeezed in for a session or two. Going roundabout to see that the new faces there got an idea of who I was, I made conversation with a pair of fellow upstate New York natives. One fellow, Cliff, happened to be from Buffalo, which meant I was subjected to a comment about how sketchy South Buffalo is. They gave me the rundown, told me what’s been happening, and welcomed me to the impending Street Fighter II tournament.

I’m a classic overanalyzer. Put anything in front of my face, and I guarantee I WILL find a way to overthink and overanalyze it, then second- and third-guess my analysis. (I think of this as the “this is why I like to be drunk when I write” node.) I tend to play my fighting games in a chess-like fashion because I like trying to learn characters and decipher their strengths and weaknesses. And like every other gamer on the planet, Street Fighter II stands among my all-time favorites. But I never did manage to become – ahem – GOOD at Street Fighter II. I developed a passable fighting ability with most of the characters, but never exactly mastered any of them. And more to the point, everyone in the room was a self-admitted button-masher. Button-mashing is a crude way to play a fighting game – especially one as eloquent as a Street Fighter game – but it WORKS. When my rounds of Street Fighter II were over, I had reached a brand new social class: Someone running an active political campaign for the United States Congress had totally thrashed me in a video game. Had I been allowed my regular master class of fighting game characters (Galford from Samurai Shodown, Cinder from Killer Instinct, and especially Jacky Bryant from Virtua Fighter), the results would have been different.

Throughout the 24-hour duration of the Extra Life marathon, the campaign was running a livestream. That meant there was going to be more substantial talk than the usual “Oh shit!” during this gaming binge. I don’t have problems with being filmed or photographed; what bugs me are the times when I have to do them without preparation. And a livestream meant that my weird non-sequiters were going to be caught. As we put Street Fighter II away and opened up a game of Mario Kart 8, I let my three companions perform most of the chatter. It seemed to come more naturally to them than it did me. But I did get to say my pieces, and I made sure they had a little bit of heft. We made little observations here and there – every character in Street Fighter II is a racial caricature, and good luck unseeing that – and talked about the issues. What drew us into politics? Who were our heroes? The talks covered such thoughts as our biggest concerns as progressives, what the current financial policies in the country were keeping us from doing, and why we thought getting real working people into Congress was important.

In between subjects, we invited everyone who watched us to write in with questions. Which they frequently did. Some wondered about how we dealt with the stress that goes with activism. Others wondered what we thought was important, and still others wondered about the climate that disabled people face every day. I remained the quietest presence there, mostly because I was busy trying to master all the Rainbow Road courses, but I did manage to get my words in edgewise. While gaming is stereotyped as a loner hobby, Extra Life showed just how social it can be. Mario Kart 8 was a four-player game, and as we talked, we grew comfortable with each other. The next thing I knew, I had been gaming for nearly four hours and had to make a mad dash to the University District.

It was just my luck that, upon getting up to Scarecrow, I was told I could skip my shift because the week was slow. Had I known that would happen, I probably would have played out the rest of the Extra Life marathon.

 

Dispatches from the Sarah Smith Campaign

My desire to stay informed in the goings-on of the world today is currently at odds with my desire to retain my sanity. The presidency has been a train wreck; you know it’s god-fucking-awful, but there’s no looking away. And to think, we seemed to be set on a good course. Gay marriage was now legal, medical care was easier to get than ever, and we were left with the economy in better shape than it was when Dubya left the White House. Things had shifted in a positive direction, so while I have some deep roots in political activism and social justice, I found myself slacking off a little.

We all know what happened next.

Upon these rather unfortunate circumstances, I felt a deep stirring which I hadn’t felt in some time. It was time to get back into political activism and get everyone foaming at the mouth once again. Unfortunately, I had no clue how to do that or where to start. In Chicago, I didn’t need to approach anyone. In fact, political activism wasn’t a thought in my head until I just happened to be approached by a grassroots group in May of 2006. They called themselves World Can’t Wait, and their stated goal was to create enough opposition to George W. Bush to drum up support for his impeachment. Although they originally came to me looking for a signature, they straight invited me to join the group when I gave them the Lackawanna Six story. But me and my relationship to and eventual split with World Can’t Wait is a whole other piece. The bottom line is that, for a longtime activist, I had no clue where to go to get back into politics. Yes, there were the usual outlets, but I have a radical streak and wanted nothing to do with the big parties, political machina, and their dirty money. But I’m a grassroots boy and I was on the hunt for something real.

Back in my native state, a recent electoral victory has sent shockwaves across the country. Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had won the right to represent New York’s 14th District. She was young and inexperienced, but she wasn’t there to grease the machine, and she wasn’t a child of privilege. She was in tune with her community and had worked real jobs to make ends meet. As I watched her victory, I wondered why my own home district – Washington State’s 2nd – didn’t have a candidate like her. I’ll continue to wonder that until I decide to run for public office myself. But in the meantime, the 9th District DID have someone very much like Ocasio-Cortez. She went by the name Sarah Smith, and after some research, I decided I had found my entryway.

After making my way down to the campaign office on Airport Way and introducing myself, I learned that I had walk into a bit of unfortunate timing. Yes, in the back of my mind, I knew the primaries were less than a month down the road, but the list of candidates in Snohomish County was filled with losers and snoozers, and I could never seem to bring myself to care about them. Unfortunately for me, there were only a few things left to do: Canvas, phone bank, and text. Calling back on my old skills as a fundraiser for WNED Buffalo, I picked phone banking.

I’m not exactly proud of how that turned out. I ended up running through three phone banking sessions and one can of (ugh!) Pabst Blue Ribbon before the election came and went. The thing about having done work where you cold call people and ask them for money is that the mentality of such a job never quite gets out of you. When you pick up the phone, you feel the pressure to sell, sell, sell. Your job is running on that premise. And if someone screams at you or swears at you or hangs up, you feel the anger rushing through your capillaries like a jolt of electricity. Phone banking for a political cause is different in that you aren’t there because someone is offering a paycheck. You’re there because you’ve decided you believe in a cause and want to get the word out. Getting hung up on isn’t something that should have bothered me, but even though my phone fundraising days are long in the past, my impending eruption was very real.

Actually, in my first session, there were so few calls that got through that I just straight gave up and went to the International District to place posters. My second session was by far my most successful. A lot of calls got through, and I got to recite the shpiel a lot. Sometimes, I was even allowed to finish. I gave the phone bank that day a good two and a half hours before deciding I didn’t have the willpower take more verbal abuse FOR AMERICA! I started getting so pissed off that I finally had to walk into the office kitchen and grab that corn-syrup-and-cold-urine concoction known as Pabst Blue Ribbon in order to calm my nerves a little bit, but that ended up backfiring when my famously vicious temper started to flare up. I managed to call it quits before any words got out and affected Sarah’s vote. The third session lasted a good 45 minutes before one of the campaign managers told me to just take a rest. I had spent most of the day doctoring posters and taking pictures, so it wasn’t a waste, but when I start to get angry with people over the phone, you KNOW it. I was surprised that I was able to ask for credit card numbers for as long as I did, but when Sarah herself told me she spent nine years doing phone work herself, I tried to troop it out. If she could do this shit for nine years, I could offer my best for an afternoon.

Since I had come in just a few weeks before the primary, phone banking was all I got to do, but I gave it what I had. On August 7, I was right there at the election party for Sarah in Columbia City. I took a few pictures, but I was there mostly because I had invested a lot in my time working Sarah’s campaign, even though my time was brief. I was curious to know how she was doing. When I got to the restaurant where the party was taking place, Sarah greeted me with news: We were surviving. Okay. Surviving didn’t sound particularly promising. Watching the constant news reports on The Young Turks, I kept barely avoiding anxiety attacks. I would look over at Sarah periodically, listening to her, and studying her movements, looking for some sign of reassurance. Hindsight being 20/20, that probably wasn’t the thing to do. She was the one who threw all of her time and resources – her lifeblood – into her campaign. She was the one who was running, and she was feeling everything probably more than the rest of us put together.

Worried, I tried to find new ways to distract and amuse myself. I drank. I ate. I tried to watch the soccer match between Real Madrid and Roma, but it had already ended. I made conversation with a fiery campaigner. Results? Results? Anyone for some results? The Young Turks were already calling the Smith-on-Smith Crime election for Sarah’s opponent, Adam, but ballots would be dropped over the next few days, meaning results wouldn’t be definitive for some time yet. It was around this time that I left – the journey from Columbia City back to Edmonds wasn’t exactly short, and I had work the next day. I Before I left, I was sure to tell Sarah that I was still going to be in it, come what may. I also mentioned the idea of maybe doing something for District 2, since I, you know, live there. What Sarah said when I mentioned that was a show of her character: She offered to advise me should I ever try.

The 2017 Acid Martini Award

Say it once, and you’ve said it a thousand times: Our Chinese overlords are going to be pissed off when they get to the United States and start remaking English. They have a language with two common variations – Mandarin and Cantonese – and we’re soon going to end up adopting one or both of them as a basic way of making a living. We can complain all we want about foreigners coming in and blurring up the lines between our own wonderfully quirky language and their native tongue, but we’re well on the way to being outright owned by China, so better start learning while we can!

While we start becoming polyglots, though, we can do something that precious few of us know how to do: Start learning to speak proper English. English is in danger of being lost forever, and those placing it in the greatest danger are ourselves. The President of the United States, the symbol that the world over sees as a representation of everything about our country, has a vocabulary only big enough to fit inside a single paragraph. So as people in the rest of the world see and hear Donald Trump, they think to themselves, what on Earth about English is worth holding onto? Let it fucking die! And we don’t do English any favors by mudding it up with bullshit words and repurposed terminology. That’s why we need to learn how to speak. I know many people reading this have been inspired by Donald Trump to believe proper English isn’t worth holding onto, but come on! George W. Bush wasn’t verbose, but he made the effort to try. Bush Senior wasn’t bad, and Reagan was brilliant. We need to follow Reagan. Or Obama, if we’re leaning Democratic.

So with that in mind, I present the 2017 Acid Martini Award, named for the drink I would happily serve to anyone I caught using the following affront to English.

Snowflake

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not talking about snow. I’m talking political speak by right-wing dumbasses who don’t know anything about politics. “Snowflake” is the term adopted by people on the right who whine about the fact that swaths of people who aren’t them are waking up to the fact that they deserve basic human dignity. And they’re all a bunch of white people who are upset that they can’t get away with being racist as hell anymore.

Perhaps the worst thing about this term is that the people using it have managed to get offended by a broadway play, Starbucks cups, and other mundane everyday objects. They’re people who also whine constantly about having their own dignity as Nazis and Confederates – people who are trying to obtain their own dignity through subjugation and outright genocide. Now the American version of Hitler is in office, these assholes have gotten their way, and yet all they can do is find various ways in which the country is trying to oppress them.

Think about it: Starbucks cups vs. real discussions about having laws guaranteeing the right of other people to vote revoked. Yeah, whatever.

 

The 2017 Extinct List

Well, that time has finally come again. We all hate the big stuff, but it’s the small stuff that gets sweated. We like to tell everyone to take chill pills and to not sweat the small stuff, but we can’t really avoid doing so, can we? It’s the small stuff that assaults us every day of our lives. If it weren’t for the small stuff, we might not get so easily triggered about the big stuff, to the point where we get set off in spurts of outrage at points where keeping a cool head might help us prevail. Thus, this list. A list of the little things that have been driving everyone – but mostly me – absolutely bonkers in the last year. And so, without further ado, I give you the 2017 Extinct List, the list of all the small things that drive us (but mostly me) nuts to the point where we (I) need to see them driven to extinction.

Bad Traffic Mergers

Maybe you’re lucky. Maybe you don’t live in a place where the definition of traffic means a two-hour, bumper-to-bumper drive 15 miles to and from work with a crowd of surrounding drivers who can’t drive in the rain, which is supposed to be their element! Traffic always sucks, doubly so if there’s a lot of it, and our seeming inability to merge causes it to be worse. Bad mergers are usually the ones holding everyone up in spots which are hypothetically fast-moving, but where the delays have a habit of hitting us the hardest. You wonder why that glorious 60-MPH freeway is moving so slow at rush hour? Bad mergers are the usual culprit. Perhaps the worst aspect of bad mergers is the fact that in order to survive, you may end up turning into one yourself. I know there’s a way to merge without slowing down traffic, but it seems pointless now.

Limited Release Movies

Maybe that’s not the best term – I’m thinking more along the lines of movies that you’re dying to see only to find out they haven’t been released in any theaters close to you. That kind of nullifies the whole point of advertising or reviewing the movie, doesn’t it? It sort of tells the interested audience, “Here it is! You can’t see it. We only intend it to be seen by a very specific class of people, and, ah, you’re NOT that class. No, we don’t care if the people we’re appealing to are movie nuts or not. We are haughty assholes.” It’s one thing when this happens with an independent flick – those guys don’t have a lot of money, so they can’t be all that concerned with trying to reach people in the boondocks. But even insiders with connections have taken on the habit of doing this to show off how cool they are with the hipster crowd. Cool or not to the hipsters, though, the people who make you famous will think you’re an asshole.

Taxpayer-Funded Sports Stadiums

So, here’s the logic of the right wing, so much as I can tell: Those huge-ass tax cuts? They’re for LE PEOPLE! Except that the people aren’t actually having their taxes cut. The people getting their taxes cut are the rich people, who create all those jobs overseas. Or something? Well, sports stadium logic operates pretty much the same way: Give your sports owners money, and they’ll use it to build a new stadium for their team, and give them more money, and something about community investment? Yeah, this is right wing bullshit. The billionaires can build stadiums all by themselves, but they won’t, but they’ll take all our money and skip town anyway if we don’t do it for them. Because that’s how conservatives think. They’re all about self-sufficiency and pulling themselves up, long as someone else does all of it for them. Yet, when asked to produce proof of any public-funded sports stadium ever coming up with a profit for a city or any civic improvements, everyone has come up short.

Overly Expensive Sandwiches

Somebody please tell me when we all became rich. Unless we’re going into a national fast food giant that specializes in food with quotation marks, we’re paying upwards of five bucks for a sandwich made with bread and ordinary ingredients we find at the grocery store. For the price we pay at the local cafe for one sandwich, a lot of the time, we could just buy all the stuff the sandwich is made from and eat for a week. There’s such a thing as a good money-to-food ratio. I hate to tell people this, but the quality of big chain restaurants isn’t the only thing forcing millennials to learn how to cook.

Anti-Millennial Raging

People seem to be of two minds about us Millennials. First, they whine about us spending money on smartphones. Then they turn right around and scream about how we’re NOT wasting money on the following things: Diamonds, which are nothing but large, sparkly rocks made at the expense of slave labor and made expensive by falsified scarcity and made into essential marriage tradition by a 1930’s ad campaign from De Beers; the golf industry, which means we waste money on sets of metal sticks which are used for nothing but hitting small white balls – which we also paid for – very long distances in large private organizations for which we pay and arm and a leg; napkins, which are smaller, more bittle versions of paper towels; and gambling, for which we pay very large sums of money for nothing in return. In the meantime, we can’t afford to do much of anything on the meager salaries people bitching about us pay us. Then they whine about how we stagnate the economy. Just so we’re clear.

Sega Classic Game Collections

I guess I’m not quite finished with these things yet after all. Pay $20, you get a collection of 40 games, which is pretty reasonable. Pay $70 for a mini-version of the Genesis with over 80 classic Genesis games… Except nearly 30 are shovelware games, around 15 are Game Gear and Master System games, and the remaining 40 are mostly found on the $20 collection I just mentioned. Folks, those of us in the know about video games call this a scam.

Early Christmas

The morons on the right want you to think there’s some sort of war against Christmas. And they’re playing limitless Christmas music starting in October now, putting up the decorations right alongside the Halloween decorations.

Novelty Flavored Spirits

I just don’t like them.

Long Coffee Shop Lines

When we’re in a hurry, there’s no need to discern between roasts and beans. Coffee, after all, is a medical necessity – we get up and we don’t really function without it. But getting it does present us with the problem of having to wait in line much of the time, which is bad enough in and of itself. Then there’s that one bastard right in front of you who fancies themself a professional taster and expert. They ask where the beans are from, how they’re roasted, and they’ll go out of their way to personally take the coffee cup and write down the recipe, telling the barista what to do. In the meantime, there you are, late for the bus, waiting around while this fucker argues about the price and the exact amount of double skim milk going into his coppa latte. And all you want is your basic drip. Black.

National Chain Pizzas

Has ANYONE ever had one of these that was any good? There’s a reason these places are constantly getting attacked – the pizza tastes like cardboard. It’s pretty much inedible. For some reason, though, no one seems to be able to help reaching for their phone numbers at the earliest inconvenience. It’s not like the small places that are good don’t deliver. It seems to be that people are just too lazy to do the simple Google research that would enable them to find out what is and isn’t worth their money. And so we get A-grade junk like Domino’s, Papa John’s, Pizza Hut, and Little Caesar’s ruling over the pizza racket with an iron fist in far too many places.

 

The Best of Chicago in Ten Years

Seattle Weekly ran its Best of 2017 issue today. On the introductory page, they ran a piece predicting the future. What would the Best of Seattle be in 2027? I liked that idea and knew I had to rip it off. Here is the Best of Chicago in 2027.

Best News Story

Be honest: When Chicago’s street gangs, underground activist groups, and police colluded in 2024 because they were sick of getting abused by National Guard soldiers here by Donald Trump’s martial law edict, we thought it would be a tenuous alliance at best. They would barely get along, do just enough to fight back, and return to their prescribed places after everything was over, win or lose. But that didn’t happen! Everyone got along swimmingly, and the tide of the war turned as the Red Star Alliance smashed the Guard’s front lines on every street from Madison to 95th. They chased the Guard out for good with a quick and decisive victory against the Bronzeville Bulge, coming within a hair of killing Trump himself when he showed up to lead his henchmen in Bronzeville… And failing only because Trump boarded the first helicopter out when he realized that hey, war is dangerous.

After that, the Alliance stayed together. The violence and murder rate dropped instantly, and notoriously dangerous Chicago was suddenly one of America’s safest cities almost overnight. The Alliance’s quest to rebuild Chicago’s ruined neighborhoods has resulted in an influx of adult education centers, after school programs, and job services for anyone in need. But nothing they’ve done so far is on the level of what they’ve created this last year: A set of independent banks and credit unions which found a way to offer loans out to wannabe homeowners and wannabe business owners without any interest. Between that and the residents of the South Side now getting in touch with their creative dreams, the ruins of the Martial War are sparking back to life faster than anyone could have imagined.

Best Real Estate Story

Willis had to know that its attempt to buy out the name of the Sears Tower wasn’t going to go over very well. But the latest sale of the iconic building has finally placed it in the hands of an owner who has decided to restore the tower’s rightful name. The Sears Tower has finally returned to us, and the city has taken the extra step of declaring the name of the building – not the building itself, but its NAME – a historic landmark so this kind of thing never happens again. The city has also decided to punish Willis by attaching its title to the now-former Trump Tower, a move meant to be just as permanent so Willis has to keep its name on a building of shame.

Best Sports Story

In a year of great sports stories – Jonathan Toews retiring a champion after defeating old linemate Patrick Kane and the defending champion Buffalo Sabres in the Final, the Cubs winning their fourth Fall Classic since 2016 over the Seattle Mariners with a 109-win, all-time squad – the best sports story may be the most unusual sports story. When the Bears announced their move to San Diego two years ago, every NFL pundit imagined Chicago would be up in even more arms than the ones the Martial War was being fought with. But the people hardly raised a peep at all. A year went by with no football, then the McCaskeys announced they would bring Bear football back to Chicago!… Only, in an odd twist, “Bear football” meant an entire team of cardboard cutouts of the 1985 Bears. The cutouts stand out on Soldier Field every Sunday and do nothing. Despite that, though, the McCaskeys have made the Bears a financial success, charging $500 a ticket, and Soldier Field sells out every Sunday as the cutouts do nothing and the scoreboard slowly runs the score up to 46-10 over the course of a few hours.

This is more than a fanbase trying to compensate for a lost team. This is one of the most dedicated fanbases in the world apparently not even realizing the team is gone. The cardboard team is more than enough to placate them. A staffer went to one of these football “games” and tried to interview fans. When they pointed out that the team was literally made of cardboard, fans looked downright confused. When they said these Bears aren’t even playing football, the fans simply said that it was BEAR FOOTBALL, REAL FOOTBALL, not the pansy passing game they play today. It’s almost as if the fans don’t even know what football is.

Best L Line

The Circulator would be awesome if the city managed to get around to actually building it. At least there aren’t any construction delays, so that’s a plus.

Best Political Story

Rahm Emanuel is out of office. But what makes this story unique is that the people of Chicago VOTED him out! No other city has even done corrupt politics the way Chicago has done corrupt politics, and Chicago frequently responds to corrupt politics by opting for the evil they know over the evil they don’t know. Now, just to set the record straight, no one thinks the Buck O’Hare Scandal is why people got fed up with Emanuel. His crime was trying to get away with replacing the sweet relish on a Chicago dog with KETCHUP.

Best Art Exhibit

The Real Capone, which got the city to take a hard look at the reality of one of its mythologized heroes. Chicago sells so many little knickknacks with Capone’s face on it, you would think he was some great champion of the people, but Capone was a nasty character. This art exhibit showed the side of him that all the cheap souvenir shops don’t show you: The victims and their families, all in graphic detail. Several souvenir shops around the city have announced that they will cease selling Capone’s merchandise.

Best Architecture Story

Remember how the Sears Tower lost its title of the tallest building in the United States to Freedom Tower years ago on a silly antennae technicality? Well, as it turns out, Chicago was right to lose its mind over it. Several members of that committee were found to have taken bribes from the New York City Government to vote in Freedom Tower’s direction. The committee ended up being rather blatant about this; when a new bank tower in Tallahassee, Florida, which was clearly shorter than both ended up becoming the tallest building in the United States, we knew something was a little fishy. They all lost their chairs and the rightful place of the Sears Tower was restored.

Best Theater Story

The restoration of Englewood from its wholesale destruction during the Martial War has people across the country wondering if Englewood is going to turn into a new Harlem. The notoriously violent pre-War neighborhood has gotten a makeover and a hell of a reputation to go with it. The Halsted stretch of Englewood has given rise to a series of alternative theaters which run every kind of theater known to man. There’s an emphasis on African-American work, of course, with such iconic plays like A Raisin in the Sun and A Soldier’s Play, theater based on the books of Richard Wright and the life of Malcolm X, and poetry interpretations. Much is the district is painted up and down with colorful murals which would have been illegal before the War. The new Englewood Theater District has attracted so much attention that notable African-American playwrights such as Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange have recently announced their decisions to debut new, never-before-seen works there.

Best Pizza

Giordano’s. Eight years running.

Best Hot Dogs

Franks ‘N’ Dawgs. Nine years running.

Best Newspaper

The Chicago Tribune. They own this newspaper, after all.

Best Street

Milwaukee Avenue. The Milwaukee Strip between Ashland and California remains the city’s best-kept secret if you’re looking for unique, out-of-the-way swag.

Best Ice Cream

Margie’s. It’s probably just time to retire them from contention by now.

Best Donuts

Glazed and Infused. Not only excellent donuts, but they deserve credit for the low-key role they played in the Martial War. Alliance spies used to drop off phony donut deliveries from Glazed and Infused under the guise of gifts from those supportive of Donald Trump and the martial occupation. Guard troops loved the things so much and ate so many that they ended up slowing down and being easy pickings for the Alliance.

Best Cafe

Ipsento. Not so much for the coffee as for their version of London Fog.

Best Bar

The California Clipper, which also doubles as an excellent and popular music venue.