Oh how I envy the fine people of New Hampshire! You don’t know how good you have it. You get to go second in the presidential primary process (I know you think you go first but who are you kidding), remind everyone you aren’t Iowa, and enjoy a year-plus of candidates and media pandering to you as if you actually mattered. It must be nice.

While my friends in the great Granite State regale me with tales of Tulsi Gabbard attending Super Bowl parties, Bernie Sanders hosting ice cream socials, and Joe Biden actually existing, I’m down here in New Jersey with a whole lot of nothing. We get bupkis. Candidates barely even pass through, let alone avail themselves to us at the level to which you’re accustomed.

What I would give to have a congresswoman from Hawaii stop by and compliment my mom on her buffalo chicken dip or to discuss the mouthfeel of Breyer’s Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream with the socialist senator from Vermont. My lifelong dream of having a former vice president yell at me? That is a dream that shall remain deferred forevermore.

It’s not fair, damn it!

New Jersey’s primary is on June 2nd, which in case you didn’t know is almost dead last. Only the US Virgin Islands go after us. Even Guam gets to go before we do. When it finally gets to us there’s a considerable sentiment of “Why bother?” By then it doesn’t really matter, the nominating conventions are only a few weeks away, and everything is already more or less set in stone. So no Tulsi, no Bernie, no Biden. No nothing.

I admit, I am one of those independent socialist types that doesn’t care much for the American two-party system. I’ve voted in a primary only once, in 2016, for Bernie Sanders. And I did so knowing he only stopped in New Jersey one time and was likely to lose both my state’s contest as well as the nomination. That was about the limit of what my participation in these sorts of things can be. They don’t care much for us, so why should I for them?

There’s a pretty good chance I might’ve ended up differently. I could have become a real fan of the process. I have a degree in political science and am in fact a huge nerd when it comes to electoral politics. But the experience here vastly differs from what you in New Hampshire are used to. In the end, there’s not much to enjoy about it.

Other than the fact that we, too, are not Iowa, that is.

The Gabagool Primary was originally published in Monadnock Underground on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(This story was originally published on awinnerisme.com.)

Fatherhood. For a single guy with no prospects, it sure is something I like to think about. My dad. I see the man two ways. First, in my childhood as the archetype, Jack Arnold from The Wonder Years kind of Dad. You know, he was busy working a lot and seemed to have a gruff demeanor. I knew he loved me but we just weren’t very close. Of course, I realize now that this was mostly due to my perception as a child. How is an adult supposed to be close to their child? He was playing a role. He provided. He guided us through life. He made sure we became adults in our own right. As an adult, having gotten to know him better it’s been easier to see who that true person was and realize he was always there. I watch old family movies and the man at 45 wasn’t much different than he was at 70. I was the one who was different. Now that he’s gone, all I have of him are memories. Some always stand out more than others: the speech he gave at my sister’s wedding, the last time he played with his band, The Corvettes. The day James Gandolfini died.

That last one sounds kind of weird. Considering my father was one who generally eschewed celebrity worship, it was weird. But upon reflection, it makes perfect sense.

It was June 19th, 2013 and the news broke that James Gandolfini dropped dead of a heart attack in Rome at the age of 51. My father began to cry. I was taken aback. I’d be lying if I said I never saw the man cry before but I’d certainly never seen him upset over something like this. This was different. Was it because of Gandolfini’s relatively young age? Was it because my father, having undergone bypass surgery nearly a decade earlier, was forced to reflect upon his own mortality? Was it because Tony Soprano just died? I think it’s all of the above but somehow, it’s the connection to The Sopranos that is most meaningful.

That show was everything. It was funny, the acting was good, and it was New Jersey. Oh boy, it was New Jersey. Gandolfini, a child of the Garden State, somehow managed to pull off a New Jersey accent that was more believable than his own. It was a show about family. Yeah, a crime family but also actual family. An episode devoted to AJ or Meadow was just as likely as one that featured Paulie Walnuts. There was so much to explore about the people in our lives and our interactions with them. This wasn’t Goodfellas or The Godfather. It was something else entirely.

At the Palmucci homestead we’d developed something of a tradition surrounding this show. We’d do the normal Sunday gravy earlier in the day but we’d surely need to eat again by the 9:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. So we begun to make homemade pizzas. It became our thing. My dad made a hell of a pizza. I don’t know what I looked forward to more, the show or the pizza. Perhaps I’d gone Pavlovian and just always came to associate one with the other.

Eventually, the tears having dissipated, my father handed me some cash and sent me to the liquor store to buy a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label. The man loved that swill mixed with water. We spent the rest of the day drinking with each other. Toasting to James Gandolfini. Getting day drunk. My mom wasn’t happy, but despite the tragedy, my father and I were. We’d created another memory. One that I cherish. For some god awful reason, I’ve even come to develop a taste for Johnny Red.

It wasn’t just the pizza though. I’m named after my father yet I have no knowledge of him ever referring to me as “Junior” until after The Sopranos became a thing of ours. There were the references to places like Nasto’s (a New Jersey Ice Cream institution) that we felt were thrown in there just for us. We even started making Johnnycakes for breakfast. Of course, we’d go around quoting the thing. To this day, whenever a sensitive subject is brought up I have reply with, “It’s a difficult situation!” in my best (meaning worst) attempt at a Tony Soprano impression.

Eventually, the tears having dissipated, my father handed me some cash and sent me to the liquor store to buy a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label. The man loved that swill mixed with water. We spent the rest of the day drinking with each other. Toasting to James Gandolfini. Getting day drunk. My mom wasn’t happy, but despite the tragedy, my father and I were. We’d created another memory. One that I cherish. For some god awful reason, I’ve even come to develop a taste for Johnny Red.

In the last scene of the final episode of the series, AJ says to Tony something about how we have to “focus on the good times”. Tony takes it as sarcasm but, in a rare moment for AJ, it was a genuine recollection of something his father tried to instill in him when he was younger. Here’s what Tony actually said all the way back in the Season 1 finale:

“Someday soon you’re gonna have families of your own. And if you’re lucky, you’re gonna remember the little moments…like this…that were good.”

He was right.

The Day Tony Soprano Died was originally published in Monadnock Underground on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Escapism gets a bad rap.

A month or so back it was intimated during a political discussion that our indulgence in it is why we find ourselves in the situation we’re in. Climate change, abortion bans, capitalism, Donald Trump…all of it is a result of our tendency to seek refuge in that which is not real. Our conditions would improve and the existential threats on the horizon would all but vanish if only we turned off the TV, stopped going to the cineplex, and started getting real!

I reject this.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t take these things seriously. Climate change is real, the government has no place in the womb, and some German guy with a beard wrote three voluminous texts critiquing capitalism that remain relevant to this day. We must treat the issues pertinent to our times with the gravity they deserve!

But we also have to work, usually at jobs we didn’t choose, because our realities are thrust upon us. We find ourselves in places where we don’t quite fit because that’s the way of the world. We have mountains of bills to pay and complicated personal lives to somehow navigate through. Sure, we get to fall in love and experience other niceties but we must also endure real heartache, grief, and despair.

It’s only to natural to seek a refuge.

I drank a lot the week my father died.

The day he shuffled off of this mortal realm everyone — and I do mean everyone — showed up at our home with food and drink in tow. There were antipasto platters and hot entree’s and beer and wine and whiskey. Makes sense for a repast, but the day someone dies? It’s just how we do things here in Jersey. At least my family anyway.

It’s not that we’re a ridiculous lot who just finds any reason to party. It wasn’t a party. We were all devastated. I certainly was. Only two days prior he had asked me what I’d tell people about him after he died. He kind of blind sided me with it and in retrospect I can say that I didn’t take his question seriously. I gave him platitudes about how he still had much more living to do. Maybe I should feel guilty about that but it’s not like he was terminally ill or anything. He just never woke up that one Saturday morning.

I was the one who touched him. He was the kind of cold that can’t be explained. I was the one who gave him CPR but I couldn’t breathe life back into him. I was the one who made those dreaded phone calls one must make when the reality of the situation becomes all too clear. And I was the last person to see him alive a scant few hours earlier.

When food was placed in front of me I’d eat it. And when someone handed me a drink, I was all too eager to imbibe. It’s all I knew how to do in those moments. There’s no handbook on how to grieve properly. And so I drank.

It wasn’t sustainable. I didn’t want it to be. I’d have to return to my life any day now, as all those who surrounded me days earlier had already. I had to go back to work. I’d have to plaster on a fake smile of appreciation whenever anyone would express condolences. I’d have to figure out how just get on with things. It would ultimately just be me with my thoughts. Each and every one about him.

It was torture.

My mind needed a break.

That’s when I started binge watching David Lynch’s early-90’s TV series, Twin Peaks.

I don’t know if it was the mystery behind Laura Palmer’s murder, Kyle MacLachlan’s portrayal of the quirky FBI Special agent Dale Cooper, or the portrait of the All-American town and the darkness beneath the surface that drew me in but each and every minute of it provided a most welcome distraction. For a couple of hours each night I was granted a reprieve from my grief.

When we lose ourselves in the latest Marvel film or 30 year old cult TV series on Netflix or anything else, it’s not because we’ve decided to shirk our responsibilities. It’s not an act of willful neglect. We aren’t contributing to societal downfall.

I couldn’t prevent my father’s death. I also can not single handedly reduce carbon emissions. These are forces more powerful than any one person. While we obviously can not revive the dead, the solution to other issues, such as climate change, aren’t exactly clear. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care, we just have to understand our place in all of this. No one person is equipped to bear the full weight of these things at all times. I’d posit that we have yet to figure out how to collectively deal with them as well. All this being taken under consideration I think that we must take the escapism of others and deal with it compassionately. We owe ourselves the same.

I could have kept drinking. Even worse, I could have turned down an even darker path. But instead, I decided to watch well produced TV shows, I took in every movie I damn well pleased, I picked my guitar back up and actually got kind of good at it, I even started going to museum and on hikes. These are all forms of escape but they’re something else as well: reminders of what we live for and that which must be preserved.

What’s So Bad About Escape? was originally published in Monadnock Underground on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(Warning: For those of you who care about this sort of thing and haven’t seen Game of Thrones before, there are some minor spoilers ahead.)

Recently rewatching Game of Thrones, I found myself particularly focused on the story of Theon Greyjoy. Taken from his father after a failed rebellion, Theon was fostered by (or, depending on one’s perspective, the hostage of) House Stark. He didn’t seem to mind the situation — he was treated very well, arguably much better than he would amongst his family on the Iron Islands. After all, the Ironborn are kind of a poor man’s version of the Vikings — they take the sea a bit too seriously and are determined to mostly rape and pillage their way to supremacy …(something they never quite achieve).

The Ironborn have some interesting customs. They have “salt wives”, which are glorified concubines, “rock wives”, which are just what a normal person would call their spouse, their leaders are only truly crowned if they survive being forcibly drowned, and their dead are floated out to sea in what looks like a big wooden commercial lobster trap. They’re an unusual bunch. But my fascination really only starts there. I’m much more interested in their commonly used turn of phrase: “What is dead may never die…” It’s obviously a reference to the aforementioned drowning ritual, but I suspect there’s much more to it that’s worth exploring, which requires examining a bit more about Theon himself and his…uhhhh…”journey”. For brevity’s sake, I will lightly summarize.

Thanks to some poor decisions and an infected heart, a future once possible now goes unwritten. A life broken down and beaten into the ground. Why would anyone call that “living”? Many of us — if not most — go through an experience like this at some point in our lives.

Acting as special envoy on behalf of House Stark, he visits his family and homeland and renounces the idyllic existence he had with his guardians/kidnappers. So far, not so bad, right? He is convinced by his family to execute a strong-arm invasion of the Stark’s homestead, Winterfell. He and his forces don’t hold it very long as he is eventually held captive, tortured to an extent that would even make Dick Cheney squirm, convinced he’s really a thing called “Reek”, and is forcibly turned into a castrato…minus the beautiful singing voice. Suffice to say, things went downhill for him.

While Theon might be an extreme example, we the living are no strangers to such adversity. You know, the kind that doesn’t actually kill you dead but kills you in other ways, rendering one what I’ll refer to as “effectively dead”. You’re effectively dead when you’ve had so much taken from you that you begin to question why you are still technically alive. I know, I’ve been there. The expectation that your life is going to take a certain direction and the deprival of such due to forces stronger than oneself. I had a partner once, a woman whom I adored and a love I was ultimately deprived of. Thanks to some poor decisions and an infected heart, a future once possible now goes unwritten. A life broken down and beaten into the ground. Why would anyone call that “living”? Many of us — if not most — go through an experience like this at some point in our lives.

There has to be a way back, right? What else could “what is dead may never die…” mean, if not that?

Though it takes him quite awhile, Theon finds a way back. Life presents him with new choices to make and new reasons to live. He starts acting on those choices, starts finding reasons to be Theon Greyjoy again. I see quite a bit of myself in him, now that I think about it. I have held myself captive and I have tortured myself, if not physically, I have done so in just about every other way imaginable. I never lost an appendage much less THAT appendage, but I have lost enough. For far too long I went about being anything but John Palmucci. But as I said before, there has to be a way back, right?

It bears mentioning that “what is dead may never die…” is not the full saying but only the first part. It is actually “What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger.”

Theon found a way to rise again and so too did I. There’s exists a possibility that we “die” many times over before we finally do in the literal and inescapable sense of the word. I don’t think we should define ourselves by these “deaths” we experience along the the way. The truly lived life is earned — and in large part defined — through the learning to rise again.

I am Theon Greyjoy was originally published in Monadnock Underground on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On November 7th, New Jersey voters will be going to the polls to elect a new governor. As is usually the case in the Garden State, the choices we have leave much to be desired. While Republican Kim Guadagno represents a continuation of the last 8 years of damage to this state endured under the administration of Chris Christie, Democrat Phil Murphy represents something else altogether. Phil Murphy is a corporate democrat in progressive clothing. He may talk a good game on certain issues but once we start to peel back the layers, we see him for what he truly is: more of the same. He may be more gentle as conditions in New Jersey worsen, but he will allow them to worsen all the same.

Given the position that we, the people of New Jersey find ourselves in, the Socialist Party of New Jersey (SPNJ) can not in good conscience endorse voting for either candidate. We are prepared for the criticism, we’ve heard it all before about how we have a duty to vote for the candidate of least harm. I think it’s safe to say that as socialists, we are justified in the expectation of elected officials who do no harm rather than less than their opponent.

There is also the question of the two ballot questions to be voted on. It is the opinion of the SPNJ that a yes vote to both would be in order as their passage would ensure increased availability of public services, improvements to the environment, and would take the power to decide what to do with a large sum of public funds out of the hands of the government of New Jersey and into that of its people. We are being given an opportunity to decide for ourselves where our money will go and should not hesitate to do just that.

At our state convention this past March, the SPNJ decided that it would not run its own candidate in the race for governor and would abstain from offering any endorsements to others. It’s not that what don’t believe in electoral politics, but rather it’s the realization that any kind of substantive change can not be handed down from on high. We instead decided to dedicate our time and resources towards improving the conditions in our own communities. We call this our Campaign for Democratic Socialism and it’s about putting our beliefs to practice in order to offer tangible improvements to the quality of life of the residents of New Jersey. It’s about identifying the challenges our communities and working to ensure a tangible solution.

Voting is essential to democracy but it’s not the only thing. It’s the community based work that we engage in that will bring about the most significant change. It’s hard work with many obstacles, but once those obstacles are overcome the possibilities to help one another are endless. We hope you join us!