When I was a weird little trans preteen, I used to play Super Mario Kart with a bunch of cool older sixth graders.

I was always so excited when they invited me — a full year older, they were also cool enough to have a microwave in the dingy unfinished basement where we played, which they used for pizza bagel bites from their second fridge (also in the basement!!). So cool!!!

There was no world in which I would have ever been GOOD at Super Mario Kart, disembodied little nerd that I was.

But I felt especially bad at video games when playing with this much more experienced group of cool kids, all of whom had played video games for years on their own consoles at home.

It’s worth mentioning that a friend of mine had recently started hanging with these dudes. My friend was cool, but he was still an eleven year old boy subject to all of the laws and rules of the sixth grade social order. Though we had met doing a summer theater program, this identity was not something he claimed outside of the local arts center during summer break.

And, since he had first been invited to this elite social group, he’d been… different.

He stopped waiting for me to walk home after school or setting his away messages on AIM to Linkin Park lyrics.

In spite of our shared values — even though my dad was consistently his ride home from summer theater camp — he changed.

I had witnessed this change in my friend, but it hadn’t impacted me or my experience of my occasional Sixth Grade Cool Kid Mario Kart invite much. My friend was t particularly good at Mario Kart, but he wasn’t shamefully bad at it, especially not for a theater kid. He usually chose to play as Luigi, which I respected — and most days

Until, one day, one of these older dudes gave me a controller. I was a little daunted, but I figured I could get it together. I chose Toad, which apparently was a social faux Paul so damaging my friend had to take action.

“Toad sucks,” he said as I struggled to hit the right and left arrows. All of the Cool Sixth Graders nodded.

Fuck! I was consumed by shame.

What he said wasn’t mean or WRONG, exactly. He was doing the best he could — but he was definitely not acting like the same person I knew. He couldn’t — he was a cool sixth grade now.

Even though he was my friend, he had his own stuff to deal with, and the rules and constraints of his new position (cool sixth grader) meant that he couldn’t do much to help me.

At any rate, every time I got close to any of the non-computer simulated players, my friend would run me off the road. Damn! I was the slowest person on the track but he showed no mercy. sure if it was any better having him in Office – – I mean, in this cool crew of sixth graders — than it was before, especially when it took so much work on my part just to keep him from running me off the road.

That’s when we hit the bonus round.

No one else wanted to keep playing – – so the two of us started a new race.

The microwave had pinged and his friends were focused on pizza bites, entirely disinterested in our Player V. Player death match.

So, in a uncharacteristically chill moment for my sixth grade self, I figured — fine, whatever. What did I have to lose?

And here’s the weird thing: I was just the two of us, I actually started to win.

My friend didn’t run me off the road anymore, now that the people who had put us in this situation weren’t directly involved anymore. He definitely didn’t help, or try anything but his hardest to win — but maybe he remembered why he wanted to play Mario Kart in the first place, you know? He started acting like himself again.

But I didn’t matter if he was acting like himself or not, because I was winning anyway.

And when I started winning — a bunch of people showed up were also invested in those freakin rings man. His mom came down from upstairs and his little sister and the abolitionists and the national unions and the deeply segregated parts of the city who had been pitted against each other for resources — I mean, anyway. You get the idea.

When I started winning, other people showed up, because it mattered.

And because very few things feel like a win these days, in a world where we have very little political power and horrifying unjust things are happening all the time and government, even local government, is darker than ever — this Toad v. Luigi round mattered a lot.

And my friend, in spite of his own position, in spite of the way that he had been acting previously, in spite of the fact it was not in his self interest to let me win at all – – he lost. And I won the game for uncool fifth graders everywhere.

None of this would have happened if all left up to my friend on his own.

The benefits of him being a cool sixth grader were pretty much useless until we hit the bonus round.

The benefits of him being a cool sixth grader mostly did not matter UNTIL we actually had direct conflict — and it still didn’t matter that much because he had the totality of the Cool Sixth Grade crew behind him, just like they would have anyway.

But then we won anyway. And it mattered a lot.

Do you see what I mean?

Which Mario Kart Character Did You Play As Most and Why?

PS — My friend was wrong. Toad is cool.

Other Stuff:

🪨 I wrote this explainer thread about the fake Right Wing “think tank” Illinois Policy to distract myself from the horrific things happening in Gaza right now.

🗡️ This is a video I like to watch when the despair from, say, the killing of 80 journalists over 75 days, is too loud.

🧵 I just took a job with the Chicago Teacher’s Union and they’re preparing for contract negotiations— I’m excited about this. I’ve worked with unions before, I’ve never worked with them like this. I’m excited to figure out how to make my work there, governed by union democracy, work with my weirdo writing about Chicago politics here, which is very much not governed by anything at all, let alone union democracy. It will be a messy and imperfect process and I’m excited to try. This, of course, has nothing to do with Mario Kart.