We are deep in our endorsement process, otherwise known as our pit of suffering. The compensation is snack time after candidates bribe us with their delicious treats.
State Sen. Jesse Salomon, who is running for re-election in the north-of-Seattle 32nd District, brought us a feast fit for a black bear.
As we walked up the office stairs helping Salomon carry one of his bags he said, “Can you guess what’s in there?” We said no. He said, “Well, what do you know about me?” We thought of the mushrooms and the psilocybin legislation Salomon has tried and failed to pass in the legislature over the last five years. “Is it mushrooms?” Salomon said no.
It was salmon Salomon had caught and smoked himself and stored in his big ass freezer. We should have known this. When we asked Salomon to send us a headshot ahead of this meeting, a request made to all candidates, he sent us an email that read “How’s this?” Included was a picture of him on a boat holding some sort of fish—was it a marlin?—by the sword. He wore sunglasses and a cowboy hat.
“Hmmmmm we’ll definitely need a more standard one than that, but that rocks,” we wrote.
At the meeting, Salomon unveiled the salmon with a helping of cream cheese and bagels from Bagel Oasis. He’d also brought a big blackberry rhubarb pie with the words “Vote Jesse” in raised, crusty letters in the middle. He’d harvested the blackberries himself last year and “borrowed” some rhubarb from a constituent, he says.
We typically save the feast for after the meeting. But Salomon needed to return the baking dish to his wife. Ingeniously, he’d baked the pie on a sheet of parchment paper to ease the transfer, but it was a soggy, hulking pie. An SECB member flipped the pie out of the dish and onto one of our beautiful office plates, which we placed inside a cardboard box.
It was a workable solution, until we started picking at the pie, which was delectable, and had a butter crust so good it made a staff member angry.
Then the pie wept, and all of its juices seeped off the plate, and through the box, and onto the table, and through the slats in the table, before pooling onto the floor and onto the seat of a chair. Sticky and red, it looked as if the pie had menstruated all over our office. The pie’s middle school nightmare.
The SECB is no stranger to mess. We set to work scrubbing and cleaning and plugged up the dam of pie blood with one of our 92-page Pride Issues (on newsstands now!).
As we finished, we received another email from Sen. Senator Salomon.
“Follow up: I forgot to tell yall I got a dogbite while Doorbelling on Sat. Want a pic or no?”
