[Editor's Note: PubliCola's D.C. correspondent is taking a break from the politics beat. He's spending the summer in America's real capital city, Brooklyn, NY.]



One of the things that bugs me about reporting on politics is the way political journalists and politicos talk about "the electorate" and watch polls that describe how people feel about issues and candidates and try to boil down thousands or even millions of personal opinions into some overarching trend. That's fine. But every person who's interested in working politics should grab a clipboard and ask random people what they think of a candidate.

Before I got fired from my job collecting signatures for Manhattan D.A. candidate ("Former State Supreme Court Justice and District Prosecutor Judge Leslie Crocker Snyer, Ret."), I spent some long, hot hours standing outside of Stuy-Town or down in Chelsea with my clipboard. A lot of people said they aren't registered or, spitefully, that they're Republicans. A few people, that they just don't like the way she looks. Or that she locked up a friend of theirs. Or yeah, that they're planning on voting for her, because they met her when they were serving jury duty and she was really nice. It was just a little sad to discover first hand that "the electorate" is a mostly an uneducated mass of people who often vote based on the way a candidate looks, or out of spite, or not at all. Everyone knows that, but talking to people about it face to face is different. Anyway, I got fired because I spent too much time talking to people and not enough hustling for their signatures. All in all, I'd say that gig was a pretty hearty bummer.

The thing I really miss about the job is taking the commute: Walking across Bushwick to the JMZ subway station, riding the M across the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan (sunglasses on, iPod blasting ) where the train swoops South and back across to the Brooklyn bridge. Then I can walk across the bridge back to Brooklyn, to catch the A train back into Manhattan and to the Times Square office where I picked up my clipboard and signed in on the time sheet.

And so, I thought, I was stuck with nothing, but all the absurd carousing again: Rooftop barbecues in Union Square that culminate in drunken Brooklyn dance parties, Michael Jackson blasting on the stereo and the Hasidic Jews and the Puerto Rican kids busting moves together on the dance floor. Or parties like the one on that rusty yacht harbored on an industrial waterway/superfund site called "English Kills," where I danced with 100 drunk party people, all of whom are dressed as pirates, to a brass band.

(Rooftop party. Photo by Michael Fehrenbach.)

A couple of days after the dance party, I was saved from this dumb decadence by a trip to the hospital. It was Monday, two days after the barbecue throwdown, and I felt like I had a head full of bricks and I could barely breathe, not to mention the weird redness around the eyes and an ominous nosebleed that wouldn't stop.

A couple blocks from our dilapidated apartment, in adjacent Bedford-Stuyvesant, is a hulking, black-girdered hospital. The entrance, hidden behind the elevated subway tracks, was crowded with hot dog carts and people milling around and speaking Spanish. I was dazed from the sickness and the sun, and I wandered inside, squinted at the signs on the wall before I realized they were in Spanish, and then mumbled something to the front desk attendant about being so sick I couldn't breathe. She showed me to the snaking line at the medicine clinic.

I was the only white person in the room, and I was acutely aware of that fact, which was embarrassing to me, and, being from Denver and Seattle, which are both whiter than Moby Dick, it's a situation I think I've only ever been in in New York. I got out of there with a prescription for some antibiotics, but watching the financial counselors walk around with their clipboards, and seeing the anxious faces on some of the patients made me wonder about how many of the people waiting with me at the clinic didn't have health insurance.

I couldn't figure out how to get stats from the hospital, but according to the New York Department of Health, two out of five people in my neighborhood aren't insured, and that number is skewed because it includes the population of both diverse, low-income Bushwick, where my apartment is, and Williamsburg, which exhibits more of the trend toward gentrification, and which has been the locus of my weirder Brooklyn nights.

Leaving the hospital, I felt overcome with a sense of irrelevance about all of the nights of carousing, which feels relieving, actually. It's like the city won't let me feel comfortable with it, and, at least for now, that's an exciting feeling.