How to create change when you are not elected, appointed, or hired.

Prologue (part 1)

I have two very serious problems.

One, I think I’m funny. I’ve been told the disease is terminal, but I do what I can with it. And two, I am not the best with time. Often time is perceived as more “fluid” to me than to others. The upside to this is a greater understanding of how and when things will happen strategically as time changes specific variables.

The downside? I am always late.

It’s December 21st, 2019 and I’m racing to Venice Beach, California for an event on very familiar ground. I gave myself enough travel time, but every moment I creep over the hill from the San Fernando Valley, THE Valley, Google maps says it is now an extra minute away.

This is my first event with a new media group and I’m not even sure that it’s official. Being unsure usually means that it isn’t.

The morning started with throwing together a press pass and the constant ask from my handler for a headshot. “An actor in L.A. without a headshot?” she asks.

I can feel her shaking her head through the phone.

I had given myself plenty of time, but LA roads can be tricky; you always think another way might be faster and it rarely is. This could be said about a lot of things.

It’s 1998 and I’m learning how to drive in my hometown of Los Angeles. I’ve already burned out the clutch in my first car while leaning on it too hard, but I was finally venturing over to Venice Beach for the first time. The 405 freeway was packed, so my friends tell me to jump on to Sepulveda Boulevard.

I remember my stepdad often talking about riding it on his bicycle. I see riders there now and I think they’re all crazy. I veer on to Sepulveda and get to Venice Beach in no time.

Today me curses 16-year-old me because we didn’t have Google Maps back then to show you exactly how much slower it is. I watch the clock tick down, knowing press sign-in closes at 11:50. Google predicts I will be there at 11:45. They say there is parking, so I tell myself it will be okay.

Today we are all headed to Venice to watch Bernie Sanders receive endorsements from a litany of music performers, actors, and elected officials, including the ‘Progressive Champion,’ Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“It’s going to be packed,” I tell myself and promptly ignore that thought because it means parking will be a nightmare.

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It’s July 2017, I’m sitting at my computer browsing Reddit and a brand new but familiar name pops up with a fundraising ask. A group called Brand New Congress had recently taken nominations for local activists who would make good candidates. One of them was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but the story of her nomination has changed a few times. Originally it was said she was sought out by Saikat Chakrabarti to be one of their first candidates, then it was later said that her brother nominated her. Like many stories with AOC, it all depends on who the storyteller is. The important factor was that I could tell from her Reddit post alone that she was a serious candidate and worth our time.

The dirty secret about Brand New Congress (BNC) and later Justice Democrats (JD) in 2018 was that besides putting you on a slate, setting up some promotional events in DC, and sending out the occasional tweet, they didn’t do a whole bunch for candidates. Running for office is hard and a ton of work so anyone who says they can do it all for you or give the appearance that it can be easier or less work is usually not being honest with you. Despite holding two PACs and raising a lot of money, they could only give $5K per candidate committee, per campaign cycle each, but they raised a butt-ton of cash and most thought it was going directly to candidates. It wasn’t.

It’s 2017, I’m arguing with the entirety of the combined BNC and JD leadership minus Cenk, on my Facebook post, but before their names were well known, over their double-dipping on small-dollar fundraising and transferring it all to one group. We had FEC filings showing that they were transferring $60K a month from the Justice Democrats PAC to the Brand New Congress PAC while they were using online fundraising for each entity separately. This was double-dipping and though not illegal, it is certainly immoral and dishonest.

This situation was brought to my attention by an organizer who had coordinated all of the Delegate GoFundMes in 2016. We had organized together for the DNC Convention among other things. She had transferred her efforts into online fundraising similar to the Delegate crowdsourcing in that it put the money directly into the candidate’s coffers. She was very concerned about what was happening because it might damage our ability to get funds directly to candidates. She had FEC filings to back it up and it appeared her fears were correct.

We had two groups dominating online fundraising from Bernie’s grassroots donors taking money that should go directly to candidates and instead centralizing it between themselves. Donors had a hard time understanding even far after the fact that the PACs themselves could in no way legally give the candidates more than $10K even under the best circumstances. In 2017 and 2018, a majority of the money the movement had for candidates was being concentrated by one group that was controlled by one person… Saikat Chakrabarti.

I would ring the alarm bell only to be met with a stone wall of resentment from all sides, including many of my allies. People were committed to the idea represented by BNC and JD, but it was just an idea… it was not translating into reality and it wouldn’t until AOC won in June of 2018. Saikat would leave BNC for JD and become Ocasio’s campaign manager, but not before writing his consulting firm a check for almost one million dollars and handing the mess over to one of the most hardworking and talented individuals that worked on the 2018 midterms.

Isra Allison inherited a dumpster fire and did a damn fine job with what she was left with. It would be unfair to grade her work against theirs even though most of her candidates ultimately lost. If she had the money that he ran off with, then candidates all over the country would have had a better chance. She is an amazing organizer and I look forward to what she will do next.

A cynical part of me thought that our fighting with them precipitated the transfer of power that they would eventually use against me later. After our argument, they did rotate from BNC to JD which stopped the double-dipping, Cenk was suddenly out in a very political move that I would see later used again to remove a State Party Chair in Florida, and now I was viewed as a hostile entity by a group growing powerful in the country all because I was defending the limited grassroots fundraising the movement had in a mid-term election.

I had already learned from 2016 and Tim Canova that handing a small group that much money too quickly was a mistake for several reasons and there is no reason, except for a presidential campaign, for that much concentration of our limited resources.

Luckily, I ignored those that said it was just my ego and I baited out one of them with a frustrated post about something we will discuss later. Sure enough, the new leader of JD was ready to slander me as a racist. It didn’t have a huge impact on me directly at the time but it spoke to a larger issue I had to deal with later, as far as I could tell she was the organizer who implemented the strategy I brought to AOC back in March of 2018. I would later recognize her name from the argument in 2017.

The leader of BNC and I stayed allies, though it has changed leadership since. She was and is a fighter, I have so much respect for both of them but especially her. I would not have been able to power through 2018 if I had to deal with what she did. The current leadership made a statement saying they are unsure why a payout was made in that large of a sum and had no other comment.

Politics is a dirty place. Saikat would go on to become AOC’s Chief of Staff then resign after taking potshots at Nancy Pelosi while Progressives were finding out about the million-dollar check at the same time. But in 2017, when I was reading AOC’s post for the first time about fundraising as a BNC candidate, it was a pure moment.

Canova was not running a proper campaign at his second attempt of unseating Debbie Wasserman Shultz and was no longer the movement’s best shot at taking a seat in Congress. We could flip sitting representatives all day but they could just as easily flip back. Ro Khanna, for example, endorsed 7 or 8 times against Justice Democrats in 2018. He endorsed AGAINST candidates who were on the same slate as him. We needed someone who would go all the way and never look back, even if the “politics” of the situation called for it. We needed someone to be a better example.

And right now that meant I needed to switch support to a new candidate who could help lead the movement and take out a piece of establishment leadership at the same time. I was being pecked apart like a wounded chicken by my own people and I knew that my already limited resources would not last forever, someone else had to take over. They needed to be young, smart, and cunning… I had no idea how cunning Alex actually was until much later.

Unlike many candidates, she had hit the ground running. I would later find out that she was much closer to everyone in BNC and JD leadership than I initially realized, even sitting on JD’s board at one point. She knew something everyone else didn’t and you could tell she was operating on it. But at this moment, Justice Democrats didn’t exist yet and her goal was to fundraise as a newly endorsed BNC candidate for data access to a voter network.

At the time in 2017, I was juggling a lot just trying to keep the movement going. We were still dealing with the fallout of Bernie’s inevitable endorsement of the 2016 nominee and the dysfunction caused by the various warlords in the movement fracturing off groups for their power. We needed to get a progressive into congress as Canova, our best 2016 Congressional candidate, wasn’t working out, while we were preparing a full official launch of DemEnter at the same time. That last effort would later be permanently stalled by a combination of the launch of JD and then a hostile takeover of the organization by a particularly toxic Bernie Delegate. We were also in the middle of attempting to organize Florida for the 2018 Gubernatorial election in preparation for the 2020 general election because as we all know you can’t win the Presidential race without Florida and it had a long way to go. There was a lot on the plate and I had no support from anyone except the crowdsourcing to DNC meetings.

I emailed AOC, we spoke a bit briefly and I filed it away.

Her then Campaign Manager with a BNC email address would ask me to start working on a fundraising strategy or anything I could. Like too many things, I would then be too late.

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It’s 2001 and I’m looking for parking in Venice Beach, California. I’m 19 and living with my first girlfriend. When I first met her, she told me that she knew some people that I would like. I had no idea that she would introduce me to people that I still consider my family today.

But that day in 2001, the Venice Beach native was showing me a trick. “Turn down this road,” she says as she points to a small one-way street just off Windward.

I had completely missed it when she says, “Yeah, everyone does.”

We found parking there and that remained the place to park in Venice Beach.

It’s 2019, and I had completely forgotten about that secret one-way street as I got closer to Venice and traffic continues to pile up. It is now 11:42 as I pull up to the media parking and realize the streets have been shut down a full block before the lot….

The clock ticks, it’s 11:43. There’s no way I’m going to make it, Venice is already its own parking lot.

I turn into the myriad of one-way streets that makes up Venice Beach in somewhat of a panic. “I’m going to get shut out and look like a fool in an already hostile environment,” I thought.

This is starting to feel more normal than I am comfortable with.

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It’s October 2018 and I’m in Jacksonville, Florida, working for the North Pod Director as her consultant as we worked to elect Andrew Gillum. We both knew the state party would never authorize my hire, although the state party chair and I were polite friends at the DNC meetings and she did adopt the push for neutrality that Ione Townsend, Florida, Hillsborough County Chair, inspired me with when I was working on the Senate race there. I would eventually help spread this to other state parties after a conversation with the ASDC Chair during the reform process. All you need is one good example and other states will try it.

Instead, the Pod Director had another Congressional candidate whose district was in her Pod hire me to help with their faltering campaign. While driving down from Chicago after the SuperDelegate Reform, I stopped in Flint (more on this later) and then Vermont for Bernie’s Birthday Cruise. Then to New York City to meet with the Treasurer of the DNC. Shortly after, I received a call that I was needed in Florida. I worked with each of the campaign’s team members and rebooted the whole campaign over the phone while I drove there and finished my meetings on the way. All roles were redefined, and we established a new Fundraising strategy. I was able to breathe new life into a failing campaign all before I arrived in Florida.

Organizing the Congressional campaign this way allowed me the freedom to be in the North Florida Pod office while the campaign structure operated under the view of the first time campaign manager. This gave me priority access for anything that might help my candidate while staying abreast of the day to day to assist with strategy when necessary. It was ironic because, after the success of negotiating the Super Delegate reform, I was immediately branded as a DNC spy. While in the North Pod office we had an actual DNC hire there every day to watch and grade the performance of the team. I really took that joke for a run, but the fun times came to a swift end.

I’m sitting on the stairs of the home where I’m staying trying to figure out who the Regional Field Directors are in the other areas of the state. Our Pod had discovered that the field plan from the campaign was broken. The canvassing packets were all being printed in Orlando and were being withheld from the Field Directors until the last minute. We had someone from our team working on the packets and they drove us up a sample of the field. The targets were bad, canvassers were coming back saying that the address was incomplete or not in the turf. We had decided to rewrite our field direction/canvassing strategy from scratch and ignore the campaign’s delayed field plans. The results were an instantly higher response rate from potential voters.

So I’m trying to figure out who the other Regional Field Directors might be when my phone rings and I pick it up. It was California calling, our freshly minted Our Revolution group in LA that I had helped form had its Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) revoked by National. I thought at first it was a mistake, then I hear that 125 people, mostly from LA and California, signed a document saying that I had lied about my relationships within the movement and misled members of leadership about my intentions.

At the time I was still on a bit of a victory parade having completed the Super Delegate reform to help ensure that Bernie or any political outsider could be the Democratic nominee if voters so chose. The argument for the reform was built on the idea that Democratic voters had lost faith in their inner party leadership and consequently this depressed our general turnout. By putting the voters back in the driver’s seat and having a bunch of candidates this time around it would breathe new life back into the party. Though this has turned out to be mostly true, the real reason I argued that many candidates were a good thing was a combination of complex outreach to inspire voters and to abuse the 15% rule that would help Bernie gain more delegates. The bottom line was the reform passing in a manner that would function properly was a huge success and I hadn’t looked back to California since I left for Chicago after what had happened a few months earlier.

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It’s June 2018, I’m starting to organize for the Assembly District Delegate Elections (ADems) next January, they are the lowest elected position in the state party. Someone has given me insider information that the telecoms are going to make a push on ADems to stop the net neutrality bill in California by shifting policy around the party. I would later see a similar move over the County Committee elections but instead from renters to stop the move toward rent control. But at this moment, I just wanted to get Berniecrats started early and share the successful tactics I had learned from all over the country, but I was met with the hostility and backstabbing that one would expect in politics or Los Angeles… so really, twice as bad.

This is a story for another time but suffice it to say, I decided to devote my time elsewhere. I don’t know how true the telecoms play was, but I do know that Berniecrats all over the state were wiped out of their elected positions because they were too busy excluding instead of including.

Despite this negativity, after completing the three things I had set out to do in 2018; complete the Super Delegate reform, elect a Progressive to Congress, and get Andrew Gillum through the primary, I needed something new to focus on. All of the large scale elements that would guarantee Bernie would run again were in place and going well, that was after all the purpose of all of this.

I had already been in direct communication with Bernie’s Senate Campaign Manager, Shannon Jackson, and sending him information since 2016 when he was the Our Revolution Executive Director. He is now Bernie’s New Hampshire state director and is doing a fantastic job. When we win New Hampshire it will be in large part because of him. But, ironically, I had helped the very institution that banned me in 2018 with successful direction at a critical time in 2016 but no one ever knew.

Matt Killen, Rachel Piotrzkowski, and I all met with Shannon in 2016 while we were filming “What’s Next?”, the documentary I may or may not finish. The goal of the documentary was two-fold; on one level we were capturing the post-convention loss and the lead up beforehand, but the priority was that we were distributing a secret plan for the movement moving forward. In the past, we would have done it all online, but after hearing how Hillary delegates would spy on Berniecrats online leading up to the convention, I knew that this telegraphed our moves.

On our travels, we were able to quickly put together that, due to how Hillary handled the party, many inner-party elected officials had abandoned their positions as soon as she won the nomination. It turned out that they were just holding space in the first place. That meant that anyone who showed up first could take the now empty seat.

So, Matt and I drove all over the country with Rachel, who joined us for two long sections, to not only capture the movement as it stood but to distribute the plan using the top-down word of mouth system created by the delegate process. We can get into the details later but the plan was simple… The Democratic Party is vulnerable for a progressive takeover and it was time to get even for what they did to us in 2016. We don’t run, we dig in and take it back.

It’s October 2016. Matt, Rachel and I have just walked into the Our Revolution office in DC. We’re on our way to Shannon Jacksons’ office. They had just experienced a loss in direction after their staff that rolled over from the 2016 campaign had walked when Jeff Weaver was put in charge suddenly. When we walked into their offices it was clear instantly what was going on.

Their small office had one single pull sheet on the wall that simply had “BLM” on it and circled wildly. Matt and I looked at each other because we knew what that meant. They had no plan.

Shannon was on the fence about an interview because I had questions about Bernie’s support for Tim Canova who had run against DWS in South Florida where we had just come from. After AOC’s win, Tim would slander me as a paid operative who destroys progressive campaigns to cover up for an email that he sent to an election integrity group about dropping out of the race early. Canova had forgotten that I introduced him to the group who was handing his eventually successful election integrity lawsuit in the first place.

I knew what Shannon’s fears were and they probably included me writing something like this one day. He always plays it so safe, sometimes too safe. I was out in the field and since I was taking my own initiative it was hard for many folks to tell if I was actually successful or even what it is that I was doing at all. Many thought I was simply on vacation but I was crowdsourcing to make it happen while live-streaming and even though important people refused to say my name, it was already done. This pattern of silence has existed far beyond my time in the progressive movement and seems to be one of the more effective tools against a strong personality like mine.

The real goal of our meeting that day in 2016 was simple… We needed Our Revolution to use their network to support the “take over the party” strategy and we needed Bernie on board to end the debate as to whether Bernie should start his own party. That debate had been dangerously dividing the Movement moving out of 2016.

We did eventually get Bernie to agree via Shannon. This wasn’t my first time getting Bernie Sanders to sign on to something via proxy from the grassroots and it wouldn’t be the last.

But in the end, there was no debate. While others were fighting online about what we would do, we had already gone and gotten our answer. This was the moment while sitting in DC where it happened.

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I never distributed the plan in California nor did any significant interviews, it was only distributed in private online chats. Instead, for the majority of the last three years, I’ve been working away from my home state, putting my energy into Florida. We all know how important Florida is — we need it to win the Presidency — and that meant Bernie had to believe that support in Florida was there for him. He had famously pulled out of Florida in 2016, I believe he did this because he misunderstood the layout of the state and still does today even after Gillum. But right then it meant a friendly primary and it all started with trying to build a neutral state party.

It’s 2017, I’m in Daytona Beach, Florida, at a former mortuary that was being rebranded as “The People’s Whitehouse.” I was doing three things: developing a new strategy for a candidate I had only spoken to briefly, writing a proposal to turn The People’s Whitehouse into a functional operation, and working with the Vice-Chair of the Florida Dems to build a team to network between the two clashing sides of the party there. I was able to build on relationships developed when I was the only campaign staff for a Senate Campaign in 2016. We did end up beating a sitting Congressman in several areas but had a poor showing ultimately and I was not even with the campaign beyond the DNC Convention.

Unfortunately, right as we were preparing to launch this project in 2017, the State Party Chair was removed for behavior that everyone knew about when he was elected. He was, however, actually removed because he wanted to restructure the secret debt the Florida State Party is holding that no one wants to talk about. This problem rules Florida and controls our Presidential Elections but we will have to get into that later. This experience in Florida would later come into play as I headed to the DNC meetings to lobby for the SuperDelegate Reform using the experience I had gained on the Senate Campaign.

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I have had meetings or sit-downs with many of the top party leadership and at one point had a Regional Caucus Chair who would call me when I would post certain things on Facebook. And despite what some might say about me, I have always been an unabashed Bernie supporter and have walked into the most hostile areas imaginable to change folk’s minds. When it comes to changing minds about Bernie, I’m always successful because Bernie is the most successful when the party will simply not work against him. So all you have to ask for is neutrality in the name of party growth. It will work every time because it is technically true and you don’t even have to say his name because it’s not for him, it’s for all of us.

I had hoped the Bernie Campaign would be interested in using these developed relationships as the Delegate process heats up. I think the people who are the most surprised they haven’t yet is the DNC leadership themselves. They watched me do excellent work and are baffled by how many of the leaders who show up to represent the movement have no awareness of much of the work that is/was done behind the scenes. They have asked if these leaders are intentionally ignoring my efforts because they watched me pick up the ball where they dropped it and carry it across the finish line. I am unsure but I know that while I watch them get paid and credited for successes that they didn’t do that it can be infuriating. Inspiration is important, but it is so critical we have leaders who either know the direction for the social movement or aren’t afraid to ask for help. The current progressive establishment that has surrounded Bernie since 2016 and earlier rarely have either. The one size fits all approach causes us more attrition losses than gains. I lose friends when I talk about this but if Bernie has taught us anything it’s that we must be the most critical of our allies and leaders because they represent more than just themselves.

After the meetings, I would then travel across the country, either working on the documentary I have spent way too much of my life on or just gathering information that might help progressives win but generally, I was picking up more pieces left by our own Progressive Establishment. Phone calls unanswered or unreturned, serious issues unmanaged, a lack of basic organizing direction, and oftentimes Our Revolution groups that wanted to break away from the national organization because they didn’t think Bernie would run again. I have been met with a lot of resistance over these meetings and whether they happened, except… I live-streamed the whole thing … The folks who said it wasn’t true expected that no one would go check, and no one ever did, but, honestly, I never expected them to either.

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I’ve never been close to the activists in LA. In 2016, I was the “California State Lead” for a tiny group called “Bernie’s Grassroots Family” and for some reason, that mock title never sat well with many of them. It might have been the attitude that accompanied a title like that. I assume it had a lot to do with not having a voice in choosing me. I had been asked to take on the role by a group of passionate grassroots organizers out of the northeast after the Bernie Campaign had done such a dismal job in so many states and I had developed a reputation as someone who knew what to do when it mattered, especially when it came to capturing Delegates. And for the most part, that was true but not everyone always cooperated and, in a social movement, there has to be cooperation. The more a social movement cooperates the more successful it will be and our success is tracked by lives saved.

Fortunately, in 2016, these negative issues had not yet manifested into my on-the-ground organizing. I was helping lead one of the largest barnstorms in LA and would regularly get my entire group to sign up to phonebank, complete with a video on YouTube to document these happenings. We produced two episodes of a talk show about the California primary leading up to it, released a bunch of articles, and had some peak national success for an unknown in a grassroots movement when the official campaigns showed up at our event first. But instead of lifting each other, it wasn’t long until other organizers would show up at our events just to pick apart my performance with my attendees, hoping to turn others against me.

For many organizers this was their first time with any power and power is a helluva drug but this wasn’t my first experience with these problems. I had a whole life in Venice Beach before the movement, before my wife, before Bernie … just before. A man by the name of “Seattle Bob” gave me the nickname “The King of Venice” because of my relationships in the city, including a series of events between ‘02–07’ and my work with VAMU. But being a King of any kind is simply not worth it because even when it’s not real and only perceived someone will still want that crown. When you have a Birthday on January 8th this is just something you have to deal with, you can look it up.

When I received the news that our Our Revolution charter had been revoked, I wasn’t so much disappointed that it happened, but disappointed with myself that I had made myself vulnerable to attack. The problems with these folks in California were not new and extended out to other states. The main problem with being in a national role is that you become a target for every loose cannon in every state who is looking to climb up the ladder. They seem to be unaware that you gain a national role not by knocking down those around you, but instead by lifting them.

I remind myself of that as I write this.

This becomes a larger problem if you are not famous or well known enough to counter the negativity that comes with being in a national role. Others then assume that toxicity, which is normal for someone on your scale, makes up a majority of your behavior. You throw a city like Los Angeles into that perception and it’s easy to look like a giant hot toxic mess.

But in Florida, with only days left in the 2018 election, I found myself distracted for the last few, very important days and unable to focus on the task at hand. It’s simple, find the Regional Field Directors (RFDs) or the Pod Directors I know and get them to rewrite their field strategy as we had done to great success.

The outcome? I failed, I did not find them. But while the whole country lost, my team didn’t. We won Jacksonville for the first time in 25+ years by expanding “the universe” on the voter access database, we were using VAN, to include more nonvoters than they had previously, but we did not gain enough in South Florida where the bulk of the votes were.

But still, Gillum lost by 32,463 votes in an election that cast 8,119,909.

That’s .3% of the total vote.

It keeps me up at night thinking that maybe I could have done more and maybe Florida would have gone Blue. If Gillum’s team had been smart and kept the establishment Dems away who would eventually sabotage him, maybe if his staff had listened when I tried to warn them about what was happening, and maybe if I wasn’t distracted and reached out to my friends in South Florida.

I would later find out that I not only knew the RFD’s but I knew them well. They also knew there was a problem but NO ONE thought to rewrite the field… except me. That’s why we won Jacksonville and why we lost the state… I admit I became distracted because insanity at this level is all but impossible to unravel. I have since stopped trying.

While they, whoever “they” even are, were preparing this letter to defame me with Our Revolution, I was in Flint arranging a fundraising drive for a permanent water truck with Bernie’s Senate Campaign Manager and Abel Delgado, one of the “Flint Six” who were arrested at a city council meeting a few years back. I had gone there to do interviews and try to better understand the issue on the ground when the obvious solution presented itself. They were begging for it. Simply put, it would save lives. Those interviews are and have been available the entire time.

No-one stopped to ask what damage something like this might cause, if what the letter’s authors wrote was true, what might be happening outside the state or even take the time to tell me that this was happening. Maybe they thought it, but no one took action. I’ve been told the letter would be altered after people signed it, but I’ll never know and it doesn’t matter. Because of the events and how they unfolded, it made me look like just another activist seeking fame off the pain and suffering of the people of Flint and that is probably the worst part for me.

Berniecrats all over California knew and yet every single one of them thought either I or it wasn’t serious and consequently no one warned me, or at least that is what they say now.

The stakes were high on so many levels and one petty letter put an end to all of it. Shannon has since stopped taking my calls and may never again.

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It’s December 21st, 2019, my anxiety flares as I look for a parking spot at the last minute, knowing that I have to face the people who signed an official document against me. The worst part? I have never been allowed to see who signed the document while they hide like cowards, afraid that I might know how they feel. Ironically, they would try to hold me accountable for situations that only existed in their perception while hiding their accountability at the same time.

Today I have to face those people, or not, I have no idea really since I don’t know who precisely signed it, but, luckily, I get to do it on my home turf; Venice Beach, where it all started. And, just like I am remembering who I am now, I remember where I was as I turned right down a small but familiar one-way street and there it was… the perfect parking spot just two blocks from the event.

The city has a spot waiting for its King.

I park and I run, it’s 11:48… I’m going to be late and I don’t think it’s funny.

You can follow Don on Twitter for more updates @TheWordOfDon.