A brief guide to the election

And long guide to the Worcester references in Kevin Can Fuck Himself

Greetings Worcester Sucksters! Today, frankly, I’m taking it easy. I threw my back out reporting on the Gaza ceasefire demonstration Tuesday. Read up on that if you haven’t. I am in desperate need of a few days off to be honest.

The election guide is pointedly brief. The Kevin Can Fuck Himself guide is pointedly fun and silly. A few other things too. 

Don’t forget to think about throwing Worcester Sucks a few bucks a month so we can keep delivering what I proudly believe to be the best local journalism in the city and *Donald Trump voice* frankly, the state—no, perhaps, and many people are saying this *sucks in breath* the entire country. 

Also, Liz Goodfellow’s latest “Worcester Speaks” with unhoused organizer Sam Olney went up Friday. It is brutal and powerful. Not to be missed!

Election guide—Dibb for State Senate—Yes on 2—Evan Faiths on the Pike—Kevin Can Fuck Himself—Odds and ends

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Guide to the Nov. 5 Presidential Election

TL;DR: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ for president. Questions 1-4: yes, Q5: no. Sheila Dibb for State Senate. McGovern for Congress, Warren for Senate, DePalo for Governor’s Council.

By the way, you can print this guide out and take it with you into the voting booth, or just have it open on your phone. No rule against bringing notes. (Here’s a PDF version of this guide for printing purposes.) 

Ballots vary slightly depending on where you live for certain races, especially state senate. Use the state’s ballot lookup by address tool if you’re unsure. And your polling location. 

Early voting is already underway. You can do so at one of six locations on a rotating schedule. Here’s the list of places and times. 

Below are short summaries of all the contested races, starting with the one race where your vote really truly genuinely matters. 

MA Senator

Peter Durant (R) versus Sheila Dibb (D)

Vote Dibb.

You can only vote in this one if you live over here:

Peter Durant is a psycho (he endorsed Ron Desantis, lmao). Also check this mailer he sent out recently:

Ugly stuff right there.

Sheila Dibb is cool. She ran a successful write-in campaign to get on the ballot, which is rare. She was a town official in Rutland for 13 years. Her priorities are spot-on:

...desperately needed changes to the state education foundation formula, fully funded regional transportation; water protection and sewer infrastructure; public safety, public works & good community policing; support and protection for our communities' "third places" - our libraries, senior centers, parks, conservation land; affordable housing, municipal infrastructure, and locally owned businesses.

She has an uphill battle here given most of the district is decidedly insurance-salesman-in-exurban-mcmansion-who-drives-a-lifted-Ford-F-250-with-a-punisher-skull-decal-on-the-back territory. 

Here your vote truly matters. An influx of Worcester voters could easily unseat Durant and add another member to our overwhelmingly progressive state delegation. 

Dibb all the way. 

President 

Harris Walz versus Trump Vance

It’s intellectually insulting to say your vote for president matters if you live in Massachusetts or any other state besides the seven with the mythical swing voters. And even then you gotta take it county-by-county. 

Leave it blank or write something funny in and take a picture like I do. “Moth Man Real” is how I voted in 2020. If you’re excited about Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, or if this paragraph has made you mad in any way, I’d suggest watching less TV.

Side note: Jeff Bezos made a unilateral decision to pull the Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris Walz and make the publisher say the newspaper is never doing another presidential endorsement again. So no matter who wins, journalism has already lost the election. Increasingly difficult to go on pretending there’s an actual free press in this country. 

U.S. Senator 

Elizabeth Warren (D) versus John Deaton (R)

Warren is... fine. Deaton is a weird “moderate Republican” running on an “I’m not a complete psycho” campaign that’s centered around his support of abortion rights. Billionaires Mark Cuban and Elon Musk have endorsed him, so that’s all you need to know. 

Vote Warren or blank. 

U.S. Representative 

Jim McGovern (D) versus Cornelius Shea (independent, which means R)

Every election some weird little freak runs against Jim McGovern. For instance Shea is on record calling McGovern a “globalist,” so... you get the idea.  There’s not a chance in hell of a Shea victory and McGovern is better than your average congressman. Your vote doesn’t matter here but fill in the circle next to McGovern if it makes you feel good. 

Governor’s Council 

Paul DePalo (D) versus Andrew Couture (R)

Paul DePalo is fine. Andrew Couture on the other hand is one of these kinda guys:

Vote DePalo. 

Ballot questions

For the ballot questions it’s most instructive to look at who wants it and who doesn’t. So we’ll focus on that. 

Question 1: Audit the state legislature (Yes.)  

Who wants it: the auditor, the people who pay attention to our incredibly ineffective state legislature.

Who doesn’t: the leadership of the incredibly ineffective state legislature.

This one is easy: Vote yes on 1. 

Question 2: End MCAS graduation requirement (Yes.)

Who wants it: teachers, students, school administrators

Who doesn't: the “business community,” the governor 

There’s a ton of bad-faith chatter on this one coming from the “business community,” which cares about high school standardized testing for reasons that have not been clearly stated but have been plenty lied about. For instance, what do we think this, from the Boston Globe, really means?

Removing the MCAS standard as a diploma requirement, business leaders say, would harm one of the state’s biggest selling points: its strong public education system — considered crucial to attracting and retaining talent as well as preparing our future workforce.

And what does it have to do with learning?

The MCAS is complete bullshit. It reinforces inequities in educational outcomes and it sucks the learning out of school. First of all, it’s classic corporate rent-seeking on a public good. Pearson, the for-profit company that administers the test, gets about $30 million from Massachusetts taxpayers every year to do so. Standardized testing makes up around 40 percent of its revenue. A London-based company, it reported £573 million in profit in 2023. 

Second, it’s a massive exercise in what philosopher Paulo Freire calls the “banking” system of education. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book The Message, he makes frequent reference to Freire in diagnosing the problems in education that disincentivize good writing. 

Why do we teach our students this way? I return to the idea that seeing the world clearly allows for clearer action. I taught "The Really Big One" for its craft because it does a hard and necessary thing: It fuses beauty and politics in a way that clarifies our view and clarifies our action. Now that I can see the full scale of this disaster and the terror that will inevitably ensue, and now that I understand this as the eventual fate of a large swath of the western coast of my country, it is natural that I also now ask what our government is doing about it.

But there are people who would prefer that that question remain unasked, that the world and its affairs be reducible to flash cards and pop quizzes. Paulo Freire wrote of the "banking" system of education, in which students are treated as receptacles for information and judged on how efficiently — how "meekly" — they "receive, memorize, and repeat" that information.

A teacher delivers the student information and the student succeeds by repeating it. But the medium is the message: What is being learned by students is not just the facts they memorize but the purpose of this knowledge.

He then quotes Freire: 

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

Back to Coates: 

This makes me sad in so many ways. I feel the sadness of being back there in third grade, disappointing my teachers and parents, wondering what was wrong with me. I feel the sadness of knowing my parents and teachers were doing the best they could. And then, finally, I feel the sadness of knowing that we were all enrolled in a banking system and that, even now, there are young people laboring under this system, being told that their dreams of being a writer, or an artist, or even just an educated person, hinge on their ability to sit still in a square box, when, for so many of us, it hinges on the opposite.

If any of that resonates with you, vote yes on 2. 

Question 3: Rideshare unionization (Yes.)

This allows rideshare drivers to form/join unions and collectively bargain with rideshare companies like Lyft and Uber. 

Who wants it: Drivers, unions, Jim McGovern

Who doesn't: The Mass Fiscal Alliance (???), ostensibly the rideshare companies 

All workers should have the ability to join a union. No brainer. The opposition campaign has invested 0 dollars in this race, so it looks to be a sure thing. 

Vote yes on 3.

Question 4: Limited legalization of shrooms and mescaline (Yes.)

Who wants it: Progressive medical professionals 

Who doesn’t: Reactionary medical professionals 

First off, the law would make it legal to possess and grow mushrooms. Second, there’s a provision to allow for certain licensed centers to administer psychedelics in supervised, on-site fashion. The idea here is to incorporate them into therapies, which makes good sense. A mushroom trip, even a bad one, can be quite restorative.

Laughably, the no camp warns of “black markets” that will be created by this law—as if the whole market isn’t currently a black market. Stupid, stupid, stupid. 

Vote yes on 4.

Question 5: $15 minimum wage for servers (No.)

Who wants it: One Fair Wage, Inc., Hillary Clinton

Who doesn’t: restaurant workers, restaurant owners

The law would require restaurants to pay the minimum wage for tipped workers and it updates tip pooling rules to allow restaurants to cut in the back-of-house staff. 

This one is the trickiest and to be quite honest I wasn’t sure where I stood until today. 

On its face, the proposal seems to make good sense: $15 base pay is better than $6.75 base pay. Back of house deserves tips too. 

But I have a lot of friends in the service industry and they’re all, to a person, against it. And that seems to be a common opinion. 

The yes campaign is primarily funded by One Fair Wage Inc., a non-profit out of Seattle, fiscally sponsored by the Alliance for a Just Society, which doesn’t disclose the source of its substantial funding ($5 million in 2023).

But there has been a lot of spending from the Massachusetts Restaurant Association against it...

...and a lot of fear mongering about the death of the restaurant industry should it pass, which certainly plays into the opinions held by restaurant workers. 

But then, ultimately, there’s this line from the One Fair Wage committee’s official messaging, which rubbed me the wrong way:

Tips should be a reward for good service, not a subsidy for low wages paid by large corporations.

Regardless of what they should be, tips are just patently not a reward for good service. They are the wage that servers and bartenders make. The way this is written suggests a certain comfort with the idea of replacing that real wage with the minimum wage for the benefit of consumers. Sacrificing workers to spite the bosses. 

In the present reality, the minimum wage is a poverty wage. I can’t support a measure which doesn’t recognize that a $60,000 a year job off of tips is a real and good job for a lot of people. Were the alternative in this proposal a minimum wage that provided that $60,000 a year good job, then calling tips a subsidy or reward would be fair. But the alternative right now is a $31,000 salary. 

They really had me there until they went and called tips a “reward for good service.” Anyone who believes that needs only work in a restaurant for a few days to be disabused of the notion. And they have no business writing policy for service workers. 

No on question 5.

That’s all you need to know! Go vote, especially for Question 2 and for Dibb if you can!

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Join the Worcester Sucks Booster Club!!

This column is one of four sustained entirely by Worcester Sucks readers. It’s just $5 a month and allows us to provide the closest thing this city’s had to a real alt weekly in years perhaps decades. 

There are also a few Outdoor Cat beanies left in the merch store!!

I should be getting them in from the printing company this week, as well as another run of shirts! More on that Thursday hopefully. 

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Evan Faiths on The Pike 

First a quick update on the very real protest at Ralph’s Rock Diner I covered a while back. 

Evan Faiths, leader of the WETTFOC Church, brought his message to 100.1 FM The Pike on Friday. It starts at 3:39 and hoo boy it is something. 

The haunted house is tonight, by the way! I’ll be there pretty much right after I post this. 

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Guide to Kevin Can Fuck Himself

Premiering in 2021, Kevin Can is a dark comedy set in a fictionalized Worcester. The second, and last, season aired in 2022. The show came out on AMC and was just recently added to Netflix—which is how I came around to finally watching it. Back when it first aired, someone poorly explained the premise to me one time and I reflexively wrote it off in that moment as “not for me” despite it having me written all over it, it turns out. Kicking myself a bit for letting my pretensions get in the way but hey, better late than never. 

The show creator, Valerie Armstrong, isn’t from Worcester, and the decision to set the show here was mostly pragmatic. As she explained in an interview with the Harvard Crimson, she’s from Milford, Connecticut, and didn’t want to set it there because when people think of Connecticut they think upper class. Searching for somewhere in New England with no such connotation and plenty of townies, she remembered how her brother’s old college roommate would talk about his hometown. 

So I thought of Worcester, because my brother's college roommate was from Worcester… he knew all the flaws in his city, he was sort of embarrassed by it, but at the same time, immensely proud of it… And I thought that was a really good place to set this show, which has this glossy finish to it and a lot of chauvinistic, unearned pride, [showing] the rot beneath it in the single-cam.

It’s cooler, I think, that she arrived at Worcester this way than having any personal connection to it. Really says a lot that the combination of embarrassment and pride this casual acquaintance of hers once exuded when talking about this place stuck with her so much. 

So let’s get to it. While I intended to do the whole first season today, it would be way way way too long. So I’m going to do it as an episode-by-episode series instead. Since the council doesn’t meet again until after the election (November 12), this will be a fun way to fill up a couple editions during a time that might be light on hard news (unless I just jinxed it). And, it turns out, this guide is a great vehicle for observations about this city you can’t get from news reporting. 

Since the show contains Worcester references both real and fictional, I’ve marked each one with “real” or “fake.”

While this guide isn’t about the show, really, it does contain spoilers.  

Episode 1: “Living The Dream” 

3:45 (Real): Ralph’s Rock Diner sticker on the fridge. 

I have a few of these in my apartment, but they’re not necessarily easy to find. Someone would have had to go to Ralph’s and ask someone there who actually knows where they are to get this. Pretty neat. 

4:29 (Fake): The Worcester Harvest Fair 

Allison: I just stepped on a roach.

Kevin: Oh no? Did you kill it? The Worcester Harvest Fair has a contest for biggest vermin.

This should be real, I think. We should make this real. 

7:23 (Real): Worcester road conditions

Except for a few scenes, the show wasn’t filmed in Worcester. But they still managed to get the cracks and potholes and poorly maintained sidewalks right. That’s because this was filmed in Brockton, which is basically a Worcester that could beat Worcester up. 

8:35 (Fake): Book store called Worcester Books

7:46 (Real): Shuttered storefront 

Right down to the plywood covering the windows and graffiti covering the plywood. We love an eye for detail. This calls to mind the iconic “For Lease” video on Worcester Community Cable Access from more than a decade ago that Brendan re-introduced to the world on the WCT3k stream one night. A true gem. 

8:02 (Fake): A public trash can 

We don’t do that here. 

11:22 (Fake): City seal but sorta wrong on a trash can advertisement for the “Beautify Worcester” campaign, also fake. 

14:00, (Real): Resident who wants to move to a suburb but can’t. 

Allison, the lead character, shows Kevin, her husband, a listing for a home in the fictional stand-in for Holden, Amherst Gates.

Allison: Kev, look, this is fancy. It’s got granite countertops and a mudroom. We could be Amherst Gates residents in one month. 

Kevin says it’s not so bad here as the curtain rod falls down. 

Allison: “It’s not about the house. It’s a fresh start. We can be everything we’ve always wanted.”

16:23 (Real): Deep subconscious desire to live in a suburb.

In a moment of self-loathing, Allison conjures a fantasy dream world: pouring her husband a beer in a slightly nicer house with a stainless steel fridge and granite countertops in fictional Holden, dressed like they’re from the 1950s. This is the foundational aspiration of the westside homeowners who, through their stranglehold on municipal elections, have prevented Worcester from becoming a real city since, well, the 1950s.   

20:00 (Fake): Bev’s Diner 

Sam Park owns Bev’s Diner, a yuppified version of our many real diners, minus the cable car. He moved back from New York, having washed out of the restaurant industry there in some vaguely stated way, and now he’s “getting into the Worcester game,” with the help of his rich in-laws. Though the diner’s fake, everything else about it is very real. 

21:00 (Real): Small business owner repeats city hall marketing language without really meaning it.

Allison: Doesn’t market research also show that Worcster’s not the best place to open up a yuppie diner?

Sam: You’d be surprised, Worcester is an up-and-coming city.

Allison: No, it’s not.

Sam: No... it’s not. 

22:00 (Fake): In the time that Sam has been gone, Allison tells him, “there were like three new traffic patterns for Kelley Square you missed out on.” In real life, there was only one, and it was fuckin’ stupid.  

23:00 (Real): Getting sucked back to the city. 

When Allison asks Sam why he moved back, Sam says, “It kind of just pulls you back.” There is an innate bond people form with this place that’s almost Ballardian—an instinctual beckoning, like Robert Kerans in Ballard’s The Drowned World looking out at the scorched and swampy marshes south of London. 

23:30 (Real): You think you’re better than me?

Allison gets mad at Sam when she learns he’s doing better than her (bought a house and is renovating it) and storms out of the diner. This is an example of the distinctly Worcester “what, you think you’re better than me?” mentality—a foundational element of the city’s culture.

24:00 (Real): Judgy townie aunt. 

At the liquor store where Allison and her aunt both work, Allison is assembling a charcuterie board. Passing by, her aunt looks at it with contempt, saying “I should have known you’d be trouble when you tried to drop your accent in high school.” 

To make a charcuterie board for a party is absolutely the kind of thing that would rattle the “you think you’re better than me” bone in the Townie Aunt that everyone in this city either has or is. 

26:00 (Real): Coney Island Shirt 

Neil, Kevin’s best friend and next door neighbor, has an assemblage of cool Worcester shirts, both real and imagined, as we’ll get to. 

32:00 (Real): Sarcastic townie woman who comes off bitchy because of her bluntly realistic assessment of life, the world, and her station in it.

Kevin’s friend Patty, the “girl of the group” (also real), is smoking a butt on the porch when Allison, having just learned she won’t be moving to Fictional Holden, runs out of the house and punches the mailbox. Patty has a conversation with Allison, snark knob turned to 11. 

Allison: Mother eff.

Patty: My god, just swear. “Eff” is so much worse. 

Allison’s face is full of dread.

Patty: You throwing a little tantrum out here?

Allison: Just getting some fresh air. 

Patty: Oh, and the mailbox offended you?

Allison sits down on the porch, sulking. 

Patty: Oh, right. Silly me. We’re all in mourning because Barbie lost out on her Dream House. 

32:00 (Real): “It’s not about the house.” 

Confronted by Patty, Allison admits she’s extrapolated all of her grievances and stuffed them into her house and what town said house is in.  

Allison: It’s not about the house. I’m just so tired. 

Patty: Yeah, who sleeps these days?

Allison; No, I mean mentally. Aren’t you?

Patty says she’s fine with her life, despite the dull and monotonous nature of it.

Patty: Everyone knows what their life’s gunna look like in 10, 20 years. Pretending things will change is how they sell washing machines.

Allison: I really think if I could start over and go somewhere else and just do everything right this time, I can finally be... done. Is that insane?

Patty: You know how many people come into my salon every week thinking a perm will solve all their problems? You might be insane, but you’re not alone. 

In this moment, we have another universal Worcester truth: the bluntly sarcastic townie woman has, it turns out, a big heart.

Allison: Calling me crazy is the nicest you’ve ever been to me. 

Patty: You’re welcome. 

36:00 (Fake): Another public trash can. Real, however, is that Allison throws a glass beer bottle onto the ground right next to it, leaving shattered glass on the road and sidewalk. 

38:00 (Real): A punishing conversation with a stranger who shares their cocaine. 

Allison is in a garage with a mechanic who cat-called her earlier in the episode. She takes a key bump of his cocaine and launches into a protracted rant about everything wrong with her life. The mechanic’s face is impassive, not so much listening to as enduring this cocaine-induced trauma dump.

We call that the Hotel Vernon Special. 

41:00 (Real): Hot Dog Safari shirt.

Kevin is also, by the way, maybe the most Hot Dog Safari-coded character in television history. The man would absolutely love the Hot Dog Safari. 

That’s all for “Living The Dream.” Did I miss anything?

Episode 2 in Thursday’s post! 

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Odds and ends

One more pitch to join the Worcester Sucks Booster Club!

On Tuesday me and the WCT3k crew are bringing on Allie Cislo, an organizer of the Gaza ceasefire demonstration. Starts at 6:15 p.m. like usual over on the Twitch page.   

We’ll be doing a recap of that beautiful night and all the petty foolishness that’s gone on since. Speaking of, here’s Joe Petty on Talk of the Commonwealth defending his decision poorly. And then Allie and Khrystian King criticizing him.  

Ayuen Leet, the 13-year-old a driver put into a coma on Shrewsbury Street is officially back from the hospital. Relatedly, Commissioner of Transportation and Mobility  Steve Rolle gave the Board of Health a rundown of the year to-date: 10 deaths and 75 serious injuries, the worst year in recent memory. Rolle’s office recently put out a map detailing where crashes are most common/most severe, called the “priority network.”

This map will inform where improvements go first, as part of the overall Vision Zero initiative. Like every other map, this one pretty neatly matches the income map. 

I finished There Are No Accidents the other day, a great book by Jessie Singer with a lot to say about pedestrian deaths. I’m reminded of a passage about how in the 1920s, when cars and trucks first became a steady presence on city streets, drivers who hit and killed children would be swarmed by angry mobs.

Today, it is extraordinarily rare to hear of a riot incited over a traffic accident. A sober driver involved in a fatal car accident today is no more considered a murderer than a child who finds some poison under the sink is considered to have a death wish.

Back then, fatal traffic accidents were “understood as a horrific crime.”  And... 

...the idea of car murder was widespread enough that in

the 1920s, the City Club of New York, a reform-minded gentlemen's club, began to publish a map of child traffic accidents every year. They called the project the municipal murder map. 

"Each black dot on the map marks a spot where a little New York boy or girl was killed by a street vehicle," the 1926 version read, "There are 200 of these child murder spots. And this is only Manhattan."

Something we should bring back, I’d say. Something we very unfortunately need to bring back. 

The emergency winter homeless shelter at the RMV is re-opening after spending the entire summer shuttered. It should have just stayed open but we take what we can get. It has 60 beds and it will stay open until April. 

Ours is one of the thousands of households impacted by the dispute between Tenet, the owner of St. Vincent’s Hospital, and Point32, the owner of Tufts medical insurance. 

Point32Health said the company is still in negotiations with Tenet Healthcare, which owns MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham and St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, over provider reimbursement, claiming "Tenet has demanded significant rate increases every year over the course of a multi-year contract."

It is a pain in the ass, especially for someone in Katie’s position, to have to switch providers. We don’t know yet but it could end up making shit a lot more expensive. All because this leech¹ of a company that owns the hospital is playing hardball with an insurance company. So much raw hate in my heart for the American healthcare system. 

I’ve not been paying much attention to school committee and Aislinn’s on a month-long sabbatical from WPS In Brief, but this controversy over naming a road after former School Safety Director and Binienda crony Rob Pezzella is something I need to look into, maybe for Thursday.

Ok talk to ya then.

P.S. Highly recommend Outside, currently on Netflix. Filipino zombie/psychological horror movie. Very good!

1. Special shout out to Worcester Sucks copy editor Liz Goodfellow who prevented me from using “lecherous” here, hence calling the Tenet Healthcare Corporation horny. (Lecherous, it turns out, does not mean leech-like).