Pete Buttigieg had another town-hall rally in Cedar Rapids tonight ...

where he continued to inspire and enthrall and impress the hell out of a packed room of supporters and still-undecided caucusers.

His messages of big-tent inclusivity and his standards of decency and his unfailingly measured and principled and educated policy proposals shaped more than his well-rehearsed stump speech; they drove thoughtful, meaningful answers to audience questions drawn randomly from a literal fishbowl in front of everyone. Pete doesn’t just talk for the sake of talking—he has things to say that he’s clearly thought about and taken the time to research and understand and make informed opinions about.

Issues related to mental illness—and caring for people with mental illnesses—came up more than once over the course of the evening, and amid discussions of stigma and a lack of available care and his loan-forgiveness proposals to draw more people into the field, he specifically mentioned bipolar disorder. I was sitting with my dad in the ADA section, wedged between him with his cane and a stranger with hers. My tardive dyskinesia—a permanent tremor disorder brought on by my bipolar meds—happened to be firing on all cylinders tonight, and as I was struggling mightily to sit still and not bounce like an earthquake and jostle everyone wedged around me, my chosen candidate—the measured, educated, thoughtful, egalitarian, inspiring, openly gay, perpetual adult in the room—specifically mentioned ME and my struggles and my family’s struggles ... and he had solid, workable ideas for addressing them for everyone living with our struggles.

And though my meds have also pretty much neutered my emotions and left me virtually unable to cry, I found myself repeatedly choking back tears.

If you’re undecided or overwhelmed or even underwhelmed by the field of Democratic candidates, reach out to me. I’m more than happy to share with you why I find Pete Buttigieg so inspiring and important and eminently capable of leading us all as a citizenry and as a country.

I have a preexisting condition. Rick Santorum doesn't care.

Scamming?

I'm bipolar depressive, and I've been bipolar depressive since long before I was finally diagnosed as such seven years ago. So I definitely, unquestionably have a preexisting condition. And when I learned years ago that because of this I was de facto uninsurable if I lost my job, it terrified me.

And then I lost my job.

Scamming? Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, I can get insurance despite my preexisting condition. My insurance is not subsidized through the ACA marketplace; I pay the hundreds and hundreds of dollars in monthly premiums, the thousand-plus-dollar deductible and the chokingly high co-pays entirely with my own money. I'm on four medications that cost over $1,000 a month. I see a psychiatrist once a month to regulate my meds. I see a kidney specialist every few months to monitor the potentially fatal side effects of my meds.

Scamming? Despite your 9-months-of-payments accusations, Rick, I am faithfully making a full 12 months of payments for a full 12 months of coverage. I SPEND ALMOST HALF MY SALARY FOR COVERAGE ON THE COMBINED ELEMENTS OF MY MEDICAL CARE, WHICH WOULD PROMPTLY BANKRUPT ME AND THEN FORCE TAXPAYERS TO PAY FOR MY EXORBITANT MEDICAL EXPENSES IF YOUR CONGRESSIONAL ILK REPEALED THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT FOR NO QUANTIFIABLE-AS-OF-YET REASON BEYOND YOUR PARTISAN GRANDSTANDING.

And YOU accuse ME of scamming the system—without a shred of evidence to support your lies, no less. You have a staggering amount of nerve, Rick. A staggering amount of repulsive, hypocritical, selfish, hateful, lying nerve.

YOU are the one who is scamming. You're scamming the religious community with your "faith-based" campaigns to destroy the families of gay people, immigrants and now sick people with preexisting conditions. You're scamming your vast low-information base that looks to you for moral and political guidance on matters regarding public policy, the common good, witnessing for Christ and basic human decency. You're scamming Trump's all-caps FAKE NEWS with your insistence that you bring value to the public dialogue on anything beyond your self-righteous narcissism.

You are a catastrophic moral and intellectual failure as a human being. And that fact is compounded by your desperate attempt to distract the country from your ethical bankruptcy by condemning me and every other taxpaying citizen who is dutifully and faithfully and responsibly managing preexisting conditions through the financially essential and morally right Affordable Care Act, which you—again, without even hinting that you have or are willing to supply a shred of supporting evidence—dismiss in blanket-statement Trump style as "a failure."

There is a reason you have been publicly vilified for well over a decade, Rick. And no feigned persecution complex can exonerate you. You are beyond contempt. You are beyond pillory. You are beyond malice.

And you'd better pray you're never beyond uninsurable.

In which I whine like an entitled first-world child

(Self-indulgent navel gazing ahead. Plus words. Lots and lots of words. With a tinge of judgey misanthropy. Plus some legitimate stuff so I don't come off as some asshole judgey misanthrope. If I've already bored you by this point, you're gonna be hating my by the time I get to the closing parenthesis. Assuming I ever get there. I'm clearly in a cranky mood though, so I can't help you. Or is it won't? Anyway, abandon hope all ye who read from here. You've been warned.)

• Everyone at Kohl's tonight was either moving too slowly, chatting in front of the extra-large clearance shirts so I couldn't get to them or stupidly looking in the wrong direction as they bumped their carts into me.
• Stupidly.
• Plus Kohl's didn't have anything I wanted. At least that I could get to.
• The cute guy who waited to hold the door for me at Barnes & Noble and circled the CD racks with me and ended up right in front of me at the checkout told the clerk that the CD he was buying was for his wife.
• Dinner at Cheddar's was accompanied by a full 30 minutes of bloody-murder baby screams to my right and a bellowing right-wing redneck hawking up gallons of phlegm and emitting an almost visible effluvium of cigarette stench in the booth behind me.
• I got a Facebook memory reminder this morning with my dismayed post about just having shattered my iPhone screen. Which means I've been using and squinting through and whining about my shattered screen for a whole year. The Verizon guy tonight told me I had to get the screen fixed before he could do anything related to my warranty, so I let out a long dramatic sigh and reluctantly decided to suck it up and give up my phone for 24+ hours to finally get it fixed and I drove over to the fully lit screen-fix-it store just as my phone clock ticked over to 7:01 pm. Guess why I'm telling you this. Just guess.
• Aside from a few blips, I've had at least three full weeks of good and engaged and productive and present and functional and relatively happy days. Which is an almost unprecedented record over the last 4-5 years. So the new bipolar med cocktail that initially made me black out and sent me lacerated and bloody to the ER seems to be actually working. But the uncomfortable and frustrating and embarrassing side effects have steadfastly dug in their heels, and I spent the morning wiping miles of spider webs off my face and loudly chomping on invisible gum. And trying everything in my power to sit the goddamn fuck still like a normal fucking adult.
• Plus I seem to have stopped peeing. Both in frequency and volume. Plus I just told you about my pee problems. Which just compounds the embarrassment. Nice going, me.
• Our lying, petulant, willfully ignorant man-boy of a horrifying national embarrassment of a president gave a morally and intellectually infuriating press conference packed with accusations and excuses and insults and tantrums and laughably implausible generalizations yesterday that continues to send shockwaves through the media and the educated class and the reasonable voices that he's well into his second year of attacking relentlessly with a conspicuous and alarming and desperately pre-emptive level of defensiveness. The last four weeks have made my family and my ex and many of my friends almost physically ill with worry and discouragement and deep, profound concern. And yesterday—when I heard a staunch man-boy supporter sum up the press conference with a thoughtfully nuanced "he sure told 'em"—it finally broke me too.
• I have so many shoes and shirts and shorts and pants and belts and socks and probably layers of flattened desiccated cats piled up in my bedroom that I don't even know how or where to begin sorting and inventorying and letting go of any of it. Sometimes it makes me feel all cozy when I climb into bed surrounded by jumbled mountains of all my stuff. But mostly it makes me feel paralyzed with panic and shame.
• All my real-life and Facebook crushes are pairing up and getting engaged and getting married and are mostly straight anyway. Fuck.
• When I blacked out and cracked the tile floor with my face last December, I bit most of the way through my lip. It's still swollen and hard like it's healed as scar tissue and I have a difficult time drinking through a straw or eating without getting food all over my lips.
• Hey, paired-up and engaged and married and mostly straight anyway crushes who've been bored enough to read this far! How ravishingly sexy am I right now? You should date me! It'd be fun!
• Actually, dumping all this whiny shit out of my head and posting it here after everybody's bedtime where it probably won't be seen has alleviated most of my crankiness. Thanks, Internet!
• Except I'm still furious and incredulous and devastated about the petulant, inarticulate man-boy.
• And frustrated and embarrassed by the spider webs and invisible gum and whatever fresh indignities tomorrow has in store for me.
• Plus Bitch Kitty will sleep contentedly on my clean laundry but won't exist in the same room with me unless she can draw blood or crush spirit. And sometimes it just quietly destroys a little bit of me.