I’m sposedta write about voting this week. I’m going to write about voting this week—a short piece about “joy returning to politics.” I’ll write it; I know I’ll write it, because I have to write it. My name’s next to it on the editorial calendar. I’m writing it.

But I, um, haven’t written it yet. I’ve made a half-dozen attempts so far, and one even made it to the 200-word threshold—usually a point of no return for me—before I mashed the delete button like “old people playing slots.” It read like fucking civics homework. I’m struggling, because political writing is not a gear I’m comfortable moving in, and because joy hasn’t necessarily returned to my politics. I want Kamala and Tim to win this thing, yeah, but more than that, I want Trump and Vance to lose in numbers great enough to teach them helplessness and shame. They’ll never cop to it, of course; it’ll be all “the election is stolen” this and “violent insurrection that needs to suppressed by police and military” that. But in their private moments, when it’s just their oatmeal faces and a mirror, I want them to look at themselves and scream “FUCK!” I want them to learn what it is to feel diminished. Like the rest of us have felt at one time or another.

And oh yeah, I’m scared. Fucking terrified. Trump is insane; I know you know that. Many of his most ardent supporters know that and like it. This contest shouldn’t look this close, even if “polls don’t vote.” Maybe you could get something joyful out of that realization. At press time, I got nuthin’.

So, while I wait for the handle on this piece to reveal itself, I’ll tell you a story that can’t go in the Weekly because it’s meandering, self-referential and … well, you’ll see. But it is about politics, and how it feels to find the joy in it.

In late October 2008 I was laid off from the Seattle Times. My bosses, visibly upset, called me into a conference room and told me that the financial meltdown that was upending mortgages and cratering banks had, not surprisingly, utterly fucked our company revenues and that I would be let go eight weeks hence, along with several other employees of the Times’ online division. In the fog of the moment, I comforted them—”Aw, don’t worry about me; I’ll be fine.”

They told me to take the rest of the day off. It was barely 11 a.m.

I wasn’t in a position to process my feelings then. In the days, weeks and years to follow, I’d move through a lot of them—anger, sadness, desperation, contrition. But just today, I realized what it is that I felt that day: I was frustrated because I’d been dismissed from my position at the precise moment I was beginning to get good at it. I’d been given a chance to be a supervising editor while my supervisor was on maternity leave, and I’d learned how good it felt to Ted Lasso that shit—to take almost-there stories and work with the authors to zhush ‘em into great ones, and to give the right assignment to the right writer and watch them tear into it. When I do it right, it should feel to the writer like I didn’t actually do anything at all—like in cartoons, when one character is sleepwalking on the beams of an unfinished skyscraper and the other is using the crane in creative, Monument Valley-like ways to prevent them from falling.

Editing is now my favorite part of what I do for a living. I’ve worked with both experienced writers and developing writers, and both make me smarter and better. Editing is the shit. And on that morning, through accident or design, the Seattle Times pushed me of that track just as I was finding my pace. It would be a year before I was asked to edit anything, and nearly four years before I landed another staff job.

I need to jump in here and note that the presidential contest of 2008—Barack Obama vs. John McCain, you remember it—was in full flower on the day I was laid off. Seattle was fully in the tank for Obama, and mail ballots had already gone out. Obama’s name and face were everywhere—on wheatpasted poster walls, on cafe menu boards, painted on shop windows. I saw the symbol of his campaign, a blue “O” rising from a field of red-and-white stripes, easily a hundred times a day on stickers and campaign pins.

And, naturally, in the memes. I didn’t make this one, and its language has aged poorly. But it was, and probably remains, a solid representation Seattle’s feelings toward candidate Obama.

I supported Obama, but couldn’t bring myself to share in the rampant Obama fevah. I didn’t believe he could fix everything Bush the Younger had ruined. America felt like a ruined commodity to me—even more so now that I’d been made one of its labor statistics.

So, then: 11 a.m. on a weekday in Downtown Seattle. There was really and truly nothing doing; everybody I knew was working, and Seattle is less a “city that never sleeps” than one that fell out of bed against its will. I walked downstairs to 13 Coins, a 24-hour restaurant and lounge that’s as exactly old as I am. (Their booths, high-backed brown leather banquettes, are worth a visit in themselves.) I walked up to the bar and blurted out “I just got laid off” when the bartender asked how my day was going. I ordered a Negroni and, for the first and ultimately only time during the decade I lived in Seattle, the house paid for my first round. (Someone once told me why Seattle’s bartenders are disinclined to give, or forbidden from giving, the buybacks I’ve enjoyed in Vegas bars more times than I can count, but I’ve forgotten what they said.) Over two more drinks, I even reassured the bartender that I’d land on my feet, even though he probably never asked.

Sauntering out of 13 Coins at noon, I got a call from my friend Marlene, who said that she’d been laid off from her job as well, and that we should meet up at Ancient Grounds, an antique store and coffee bar that answers the question “What if Indiana Jones had retired somewhat young, learned to pull decent espresso shots and cultivated a ponytail.” There, we could … work on our CVs? Compose our vision statements? Hitting the ground running is something I do with a 50% success rate at best. The next course of action after a layoff was more clear to her in that moment than it was to me, but I went with it because I needed a friendly face.

I walked through the Denny Triangle to Belltown, eventually landing on 1st Avenue, the more ritzy of the two Belltowns. (Locals differentiated between “First Belltown” and “Second Belltown,” with Second being the hipper of the two: weirder bars, better galleries, cheaper places to eat. Today, I imagine that both Belltowns are wall-to-wall overpriced tech-bro bullshit.)

I still had time to waste before Marlene would show and I wasn’t hungry, so I ducked into the Lusty Lady.

The Lusty Lady, now defunct, was an old-fashioned peepshow, like the kind Madonna riffed on in her “Open Your Heart” video. And as Penn Jillette once wrote when telling a similar story to this one, I didn’t go in there to use the phone. (Or the ATM. Or the bathroom, heaven forfend.) I went in there because I’d been kicked out of my job, had sucked down three drinks and was in full emotional rebellion. I thought of a Vegas friend of mine, sadly gone now, who used to allow herself to bottom out by getting shitfaced on weekday mornings and going to “wiggle joints,” like Holly Golightly. (“Do you think she’s handsomely paid?”) In this atmosphere of democratic fervor, I elected to follow her example and look at naked ladies while I had a decent buzz going.

The big difference between the Lusty Lady and other striptease establishments is that, no matter where you turned, solid walls separated you from the performers. Given that, the performers always seemed relaxed, even distracted; they didn’t make eye contact or pull pouty faces. Most of them were tattooed, and nearly all of them were unshaven. They didn’t give a damn what the sad, flailing men behind the glass thought of them, because management said they didn’t have to. (In fact, their sister operation—in San Francisco—was even unionized.)

For those reasons, I felt somewhat less guilty about getting $20 in quarters, picking a viewing booth—a choice of one-way or two-way glass, though the “anonymous” booths often had, erm, fluids on the floor—and dropping all of it in the slot to watch the performance while I gathered my thoughts, arms crossed neutrally on my chest. (My “wiggle joint” friend’s advice: “Keep your filthy paws where they can see ‘em.) The dancer on duty was a beautiful, athletic black woman with a short pixie cut. She was shimmying to Massive Attack’s “Antistar” … and not gonna lie, it was sexy as hell.

Something caught my eye as she spun around. Painted on her breast was the Obama logo, the one I’d sighted on dozens of campaign pins that afternoon alone. Her nipple poked neatly through the “O.” I stared, not in lasciviousness, but in giddy disbelief: Wow, that’s just plain brilliant political advertising.

I knocked on the glass. She turned, looked at me expectantly, and I pointed at my own chest and gave her an enthusiastic double thumbs-up. (“Paws where she can see ‘em.”) To my surprise, she approached the glass, leaned close and cupped her hands around her mouth to speak to me.

“ARE YOU VOTING?” she asked.

“HELL YEAH!” I said. “DROPPING OFF MY BALLOT THIS WEEKEND!”

She broke into a huge grin and returned my thumbs-up. We beamed at each other, joined participants in a free democracy. Then I waved a goodbye, which she returned, and I vacated the booth for some other underemployed jerkoff. When I stepped outside, I felt like I was floating above the street, the tips of my sneakers dragging across the sidewalk.

We can win this thing, I thought. We can fucking win this thing.

I have voted in every single election, general and midterm, since November 2000. In the beginning I took it only half-seriously; like Chappell Roan, I believed that both parties were cut from the same ugly cloth. And in some contests, too many of them, that’s uncomfortably close to the truth. (Cough Carolyn Goodman cough.) But after the debacle of the 2000 election, in which I voted “None of the above candidates” as a protest of Bill Clinton’s bullying and deceit, I realized that I had to do the reading and make principled choices if I didn’t want to lie awake through eight fucking years of Dubya. I couldn’t base my choice on whether or not I actually liked the person running for office; I had to think of the people who would be uplifted or endangered by the principles by which that candidate would govern. People of color, LGBTQIA+, immigrants, veterans, the impoverished. Women.

If you’re reading this, I probably don’t have to tell you how Trump feels about women. It’s writ large on his character, and it’s been there since well before made that stupid escalator entrance. If I were voting one single issue in this election, just one, it would be for a woman’s absolute and inviolable right to reproductive healthcare, with all the compassion, privacy and dignity they’re due. The video above is from the March 2017 Women’s March in Las Vegas, and if you can see the protest signs—sorry, I panned kinda quickly—you’ll see that most of them are about reproductive health, and the fear that Trump would manage to tear down Roe v. Wade. (There was also a sign that depicted Wonder Woman punching Trump in the face. I quite liked that one.)

A few years later, a Supreme Court stacked with Trump loyalists struck down Roe. He bragged about it in fundraising speeches. Now, he’s out there saying that everybody wanted the right to abortion “returned to the states,” and that only he has the power to protect the rights of women in the coming days, which are both proven fucking falsehoods. Trump’s principles are dogshit. He failed my test long ago. Men like him are the reason the Lusty Lady had that protective glass.

And men like me, too. I’m fully aware of the hypocrisy I’m displaying here, and I need to own it. One thing I didn’t fully comprehend when I walked into the Lusty Lady that day in 2008 was just how fucking rough women have it, from the workplace to the doctor’s office. I’m not gonna pretend that I fully understand it now. Nearly every corporate, political, social and religious institution in this country identifies, or once identified, as white and male. I was raised in that system, taught by it, branded by it. I’m half puertorriqueño—Mom’s side—and I didn’t fully identify myself as Latino until my early 40s. (Speaking of: I’m voting against Trump also for his grudging, tone-deaf response to Hurricane Maria. The fucking paper towels.) If I don’t fully understand the weird, baseless discrimination towards my ethnicity, how can I begin to know what it feels like to have a different skin color, a different gender, than the one I was born with? The one I’ve taken into every polling place for nearly 25 years?

I’m not the best feminist. I would submit as evidence the cringeworthy anecdote I just related to you. But I want to a better one. I’m striving to be being a more empathetic listener, and striving to cultivate a greater range of understanding in myself by receiving other perspectives with my mind open and my mouth shut. Meaning: If there is joy and optimism fueling the Kamala Harris campaign, I need to take it in, feel it and share it. (It doesn’t hurt that I actually like Vice President Harris, in addition to holding with many of the principles that will inform her governance.) I can’t put my anger and fear in front of that joy, even though I’ve long used that cynicism to shield myself. I need to dare to feel optimism now, without waiting for a boobies message to hit me between the eyes.

And, hand to heart, I believe that VP Harris can win this thing if we all do our jobs in the coming weeks. Day by day, hour by hour, “all gas, no brakes.” When I’m not face-down in Elon Musk’s Twitter or the New York Times—both of which seem to have some sort of vested interest in keeping Trump afloat—I actually get a bit excited about the prospect of a Harris win. I try to manifest it. I imagine myself in the midst of a crowd, like that Women’s March crowd in the video, celebrating a win for women and people of color. Celebrating a win for that Lusty Lady performer, who I imagine is probably canvassing for Kamala right this second. I daydream about losing myself in the joy of winning one for a free democracy … and the following morning, getting back to the unending work of keeping it that way.

One last thing. When Obama won in 2008, Seattle immediately vaulted into dizzy, unfettered rapture. The streets of Capitol Hill, Fremont and the U exploded into impromptu dance parties. (My erstwhile neighborhood, Ballard, did not, but it’s only a couple generations removed from a stoic Norwegian fishing village. Ballardites dance and whoop inside their hearts.) We’d pursued that happiness with a resolve, and with joy. And for a moment, we won that pursuit. We caught up with that happiness and wrapped it around us. It was a beautiful time, and it didn’t matter that we knew it was finite.

And that, savage reader, could be the handle I need to write the other column. I guess we’ll see.