"Would you or your dog like a postcard?"

It's been three years since Trump was elected. In those three years, I have posted on social media, I have donated to Democratic candidates, I have written to legislators (even though I live in Tennessee and asking our state legislators to do anything against Trump is about as useful as slamming my hand in the car door on purpose), I've gone to marches, I've gone to protests, I've cut people out of my life, and very little has changed. Yes, Democrats were able to take back the House in the last election, but they're not actually able to do anything there with Republicans in control of the Senate, but that's all we've gotten accomplished and it hasn't been enough.

For the past several months, I've had a feeling building in me that I have not done enough.

We all know that I'm not having kids, ever. Some of my friends have kids, though, and someday those kids might look at me (they'd be in their thirties at this point, past the age of jam hands and acting out in restaurants) and say, "What did you do to help stop Trump?" and I feel like I wanted to be able to give some kind of an answer besides, "I tweeted a lot," so when the Warren campaign called me and asked if I wanted to volunteer, I said yes.

And that's how I ended up knocking on doors alone in 27 degree weather at 9 AM on a Saturday.

The call to volunteer didn't come out of nowhere. Both the Warren and the Sanders campaigns have been texting me. I've been having a lot of really good conversations with the Warren texters about health care, student loan debt, consumer protection, actually taxing businesses, saving the middle class, and salvaging the remains of the Presidency, and I've been avoiding conversations with the Sanders people by staring awkwardly at the phone and hoping they believe that I'm just really super busy and can't talk right now but totally might text them back later. While texting with the Warren people they mentioned that there are opportunities for volunteers, like canvassing, texting, and phone banking, and I eventually said, "Sure, go ahead and have someone call me about that."

I'll admit, I tried really hard to get phonebanking or texting, but they had plenty of people to do that already.

"What we really need are canvassers. To knock on doors."

"Just random doors? Like, knocking on strangers' doors?"

"No, no. There are lists of people who have polled as Democratic voters, or donated, or expressed interest in Democrats online, so you're not knocking on hostile doors. We really, really need people to canvass before Super Tuesday."

"I..., well, I..."

FLASH FORWARD:

It is 20 years from now, and one of my friends' kids who is now an adult but I don't know their age in twenty years because I have no idea how old they actually are right now looks at me with big, wide eyes and asks, "What did you do to help stop Trump?"

"Oh, you know, they wanted me to talk to strangers but it was supposed to be cold on Saturday so I just tweeted out some early voting location information, and that's how we ended up in a fascist theocracy like in 'V for Vendetta'. Now, eat your Soylent Green, and I'll tell you about how we have always been at war with EastAsia."

"I'LL DO IT. I WILL CANVASS ON SATURDAY FROM 9 TO 11."

"Great! I'll send you some instructions this week, and then call to confirm."

The instructions were to go meet up at a campaign volunteer's house near me, and being the person that I am I got there twenty minutes early while they were still setting up signs in the yard and the guy's wife was still in her robe. I also met my first dog of the day, their rescue, who has a bit of a short term memory loss and thought I was a new person to meet each time she left and re-entered the room. It was delightful. I've never canvassed before, but in my head it was going to involve clipboards and checkmarks. This turns out not to be the case. Instead, you download an app onto your phone, and it tells you where to go and then who to ask for. We ran through it a couple times, and then I got a stack of informative postcards and was ready to go.

"Who's going with me?"

"Nobody else is signed up for the 9 AM shift."

"I'm going to talk to strangers by myself?"

"It'll be fine! Come back at 11!"

For a minute, as I walked to my car, I was nervous about knocking on strangers' doors, interrupting their Saturday mornings, and then trying asking them questions and trying to tell them about the Warren campaign. What if they got mad? What if they all decided they were voting for Trump instead? What if, this being Tennessee, they had guns and tried to chase me off their suburban land? I took a deep breath, remembered that I am from New York and have talked to a number of hostile residents of New Jersey as if they were actual human beings, and set out to canvass.

It actually went pretty well. In many cases, there were multiple houses on the same street, so I could park in the middle and walk up and down. I met a ton of dogs, all of whom were friendly, and I ended up peering at a ton of Ring doorbell cameras and pointing at my Warren postcard for people who would not come to the door. Several people thanked me for being out canvassing, but out of 30 or so people that I actually got to speak to (a lot of people had cars in their driveways but no one would answer the door; I marked them as "not home" so that someone would call or knock on their door again in the future), only two had decided on Warren. One had decided on Trump, although she didn't seem like an evil fascist racist wall-builder, two were set on Bernie, and everyone else said they were undecided. Many of the undecideds also said they were planning to early vote, so I hope they make up their minds soon.

Only one person closed their door on me while I was trying to tell them about early voting. They smiled when they did it, but that doesn't make it less rude.

Overall, it was a good experience.

But I told the volunteer that I'm probably busy next week and won't be able to do it again.

Next weekend is someone else's turn.

All The Books I Read in January

It's February, which means I have to tally up all the books I read in January before they end up sitting in a big pile on an end table, waiting for the end of the year. I only made it through four books this month, but if I'm going to make it through a book a week this year then I'm right on track.

1) I started the month and, I guess, the year with politics. As the election approaches and the field of Democratic candidates narrows, I've read Mayo Pete's book, Kamala Harris' book, a book about Joe Biden, and now Elizabeth Warren's This Fight Is Our Fight. Warren does a good job of clearly defining the problems facing the American middle class, and lays out defined, logical policies for addressing them. Right now I'm planning to vote for her in the primary, and really hope that Harris gets a vice president nod from someone, or maybe becomes attorney general.

2) My parents got me Rainbow Rowell's Carry On for Christmas, and I enjoyed it, so I ordered the sequel, Wayward Son. It finds our heroes, Simon, Baz, and Penny in a road trip across America in a convertible, finding wild magic, dragons, vampires, monsters with goat heads, and maybe themselves? What does the hero do the summer after he fulfills his destiny?

I enjoyed this, but the end makes me want another sequel and it took a few years to get this one, so now I'm a little bit sad about it.

3) Stephen King's Elevation was a novella, rather than a novel, and probably would not have gotten full hardcover treatment if it came from a less established author. Scott is busy fighting with his neighbors, a married pair of lesbians who moved to town to open a struggling restaurant, over their dog pooping on his lawn. Scott is also, a few pounds at a time, becoming immune to the effects of gravity, a secret that he'll only be able to keep for so long as his scale slowly counts down to zero. This was an interesting character study, but really should have just been part of a larger collection.

4) On the last day of the month I finished Mike Pearl's The Day It Finally Happens. Pearl is a disaster thinker, and this book walks through a number of world-shaking scenarios: the day Saudi Arabia runs out of oil, the day the internet fails, the day we verify the existence of extraterrestrials, and even the day we build Jurassic Park, among other things. What was a little surprising is that even though Pearl is a worst-case thinker, he manages to sound rather optimistic and hopeful. Overall, he thinks we'll get through it.

So, like I said, I'm on track for reading in January. Let's try to keep it going in February or, possibly, maybe even get a little ahead.