What a fantastic two days I’ve had! I already bemoaned my dilapidated state in the previous post, at the interval of pause in my volunteer period. Saturday was the day of the event, and I was down there first thing in the morning at 5, then to work by 5:30. I worked the whole day and was, essentially, the bouncer directing event participants to parking and allowing vendors and pick-up/set-up cars through to load or unload. I stood in the sun and was highly effective and helpful for 4 or so hours. Got a nice sunburn going on too, which stands in stark contrast to my overall pastiness.

At the end of the day, an hour of manual labor taking down those 10×10 canopies and loading the trailer. Thoroughly exhausting and my body is beat like a dead cat against a dirty rug. The part that really got me was all the “thank you” messages I got from people leaving the event. All around, everyone I talked to was thanking me for what I did. Erin the event coordinator knows my work ethic and sees that I’m not just another kid in an orange shirt. I know I made a difference, and I gave my total energy capacity limit for this event. I feel really proud of that.

Monday I’m back on the warmline until about 2:00 pm (my personal stopping point). I’m slowly making myself more relevant to NAMI Sacramento and with two months to incessantly badger them with my helpfulness, there is no resisting embracing me into the fold. I need to be making money at some point, but it is not a dire priority. I hope I can be someone of importance within NAMI Sacramento but we shall see. I have good connections with RI and NAMI in San Diego as well, so maybe there’s a bridge to be built there some day.

Advocacy, outreach and persistence. I will continue to tell my story of lived experience and help affect positive change in the environment I find myself in.

On a totally separate note: the “drip, drip, drip…” of American politics has been more like a very entertaining TV show and less like real life than ever before. The Executive has become a reality show, the Legislative is just as mind-numbingly stupid and or boring as ever, and the Judiciary is showing signs of falling hard to the right in a 6-3 swing by next year. I’ve used terms like: “stepped on his own dick,” “uh-oh,” “oh no” and “oh my gawd, why did you say THAT?” to describe the various things I see happening before my eyes. I have also used the following analogy to describe the presidency of Donald J. Trump: The Administration is a huge meteor beginning its descent into the thickening atmosphere of Earth. Right now, the front exterior of the Administration is starting to liquify and burn away, but as we watch in slow motion, unfolding before us is the ever excruciating moments of impending meteoric destruction, eagerly awaiting a final impact on the surface. When this object finally meets its doom, the Administration will be mostly vaporized and what remains will be splattered across the sky for hundreds of miles around the area of peak destruction. Right? Either way you think about this whole thing, it’s looking more and more like there’s going to be a big fucking hole in the ground and a lot of people going “WTF!!!” Just a prediction. I’d be interested to hear a sound argument that somehow exonerates the President or makes this whole sequence seem less like disaster and more like coherent strategy. Good luck with that.