Tokey was sitting by the phone one morning, waiting for the call that never came. The Obama-era Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro was scheduled for a chat about his new book, An Unlikely Journey—but there was no call. Pretty bogus.
Tokey was sad that Castro did not call. He left the office and stopped at SPARC for some medicine, and was less sad when he got home. He carried on with the critical task at hand. Having binged through Madam Secretary, next up on Netflix was Designated Survivor, starring Kiefer Sutherland as a HUD secretary who becomes commander-in-chief after conspirators blow up the Capitol. “This is weird,” thought Tokey, “Keif’s a former HUD secretary too?”
Tokey was enraptured by the glow of flame as the Capitol dome blazed out, and plowed through most of the first season of the SPARC medicine. Now it was later, much later, and he was about to have a revelation. The dog jumped off the bed and hid. “What if Julian got elected president and gave Joaquin a cabinet post—and made him the designated survivor! He’d be, like, his own designated survivor! Whooa!” Tokey grabbed An Unlikely Journey and found the relevant passage—the virtue-signaling moment.
Here, Castro writes about his college friend Jon: “A Californian in the mold of Jeff Spicoli of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, he always seemed to be holding a beer in one hand and dribbling a basketball with the other. Jon was a lesson in how you can succeed and still be relaxed. After all, he wasn’t smoking weed at the beach—he was at Stanford.” So nobody who graduated Stanford ever smoked weed? Not even Elon Musk?
Tokey recalled Spicoli’s views on Jeffersonian Democracy as he thought about Castro’s likely 2020 run for president. “So what Jefferson was saying was, ‘Hey! You know, we left this England place because it was bogus. So if we don’t get some cool rules ourselves, pronto, we’ll just be bogus too.’”
“Now that’s a statesmanlike . . . statement,” Tokey thought, and wondered if Marin County resident Sean Penn would return his call if he reached out for further comment. Probably not, but it never hurts to ask. And if it does? They got some good medicine for that kind of pain.
Julian Castro appears at Dominican University’s Angelico Hall on Thursday, Oct. 25, at 7pm. $40 (includes book). 20 Olive Ave., San Rafael. bookpassage.com/event.
By Tokey McPuffups
