Congratulations to my friend and HSNB Volunteer (that’s how I originally met her) Tonya Johnson on winning the title of Miss Vallejo Tri-City!!! She’s an amazing and well-traveled young lady with a passion for animals, so I know she is very deserving of this opportunity.
Several weeks ago we ran into each other at a mayoral candidate’s forum.
Despite all the doctors agreeing with us, they kowtowed to the cannabis industry.
I’m very disappointed that Oakland City Council, where I called in last night with many other tobacco control advocates in the Bay Area, delivered a haphazard ordinance. While I’m thrilled they will have smoke-free bar patios, they included an exemption for cannabis smoke on their smoke-free multi-unit housing ordinance, which renders it toothless and completely unenforceable. Here are my comments (in the video below). At least I’m happy to say that when it came to SFMUH, we passed it CORRECTLY here in Vallejo in 2022!
This is the full video of the item that was discussed on November 12:
I know it’s cliche, but all politics are local works on many levels. Unfortunately, the clown show that will soon be the federal government, full of corruption and misinformation, is going to bring hell to the USA and the world. Many innocents will die unnecessarily for many reasons (Ukrainians, Gazans, pregnant people, etc.) just to suit the ego of a few people, and in particular one extremely flawed man in decline. I predict mass incarceration and police brutality will be emboldened, together with the racism that promptly saw the harassment of Black people with texts asking them to pick cotton the day after the election.
If there’s any good news from my perspective about the 2024 elections, it’s that with local politics things went the way I had hoped. I supported my friend Andrea Sorce for mayor of my city of Vallejo and she was victorious, even though I like the other three candidates and have known two of them for a while. Our new state senator I got to meet on election night at Andrea’s election party and he remembered me from our zooms and emails, which was nice. Christopher Cabaldon is a gay half-European/half-Filipino guy just like Shea and was a very successful mayor of West Sacramento. Cassandra James is northern Vallejo’s supervisor officially now, although I’m not her constituent. Similarly, my friend Alex Matias is for District 1 in northern Vallejo, but he was victorious. My new city councilmember, Tonia Lediju, is my friend and she was uncontested in her bid to run for that office.
I am grateful to live in this state (California) but really done with the USA experiment. I have had so much respect for those who have served in the military including so many in my family (soon to be five generations). However, American pride is really gone when I think about how the electorate in disproportionately powerful states are invoking the worst of the puritanical roots of this country’s political origin.
Yes I’m lucky that I am eligible for European citizenship, even though Italy itself, the country through which I can obtain that citizenship, has a fascist bitch at the helm. However, that country still has universal healthcare and a high standard of living, even based on my own family’s prosperity. Almost all of them have a vacation home in addition to their primary home, which they own. They work far fewer hours and have vastly more time off from work.
I woke up this morning considering throwing my US flag in the garbage. I used to insist on having it out for every holiday that was appropriate to show that a liberal like me would still always identify as American. I don’t think I can bring myself to do that again, even if the next president is a butch, full melanin, indigenous Latina trans woman. I would say, “great,” but it will never reverse allowing Bush 2 to get the popular vote the second time because he used racist electoral college methods to steal the presidency the first time. Very similarly the name recognition of Felon McRapist was something the ignorant American electorate gravitated to rather than another overqualified, experienced, and competent woman.
Cults are a real problem and misinformation is rampant. Things are not going to get better, but the white supremacists will go to the ends of the earth to maintain their power.
He doesn’t know what a tariff is. He doesn’t know what a socialist or fascist is. Everything is a word salad and the man is declining, with a 39-year-old nutjob as his VP pick.
What could possibly go wrong?
Attended my tobacco control activist friend Tehra’s housewarming. What a cool home in Vallejo from 1915 with a huge backyard with lots of features and amazing plants. She’s a cool lady (pictures with her thumb up in one of the pictures) and a great public speaker with a story to tell about Big Tobacco and its targeting of the LGBTQ population.
Halloween night Snoopy and Bonnie joined me at Children’s Wonderland Park in Vallejo for a huge GVRD event. We were there representing Humane Society of the North Bay (where I’m on the board and from where I adopted Bonnie). It was very well attended. I was skeptical when they said 2,600 people showed up last year, but at least that many were present this time.
We had a slightly early Halloween party on Mare Island with friends from the Humane Society of the North Bay, so Ernie and Bert (which I accidentally called Bernie and Ert at one point) made another appearance.
I’m very pleased to report that Vallejo received one of the highest awards in the state of $931,758 from the California Department of Justice to “fund tobacco retailer inspections, minor decoy operations, retailer and officer education on tobacco laws/ordinances, and prosecution of tobacco sales violations.” This portends well to the timing of the Tobacco Retail License that I’ve been working on with our coalition to reduce the addiction to commercial tobacco among local youth.
I called into this committee about an ordinance that is being brought to Oakland (a historical leader in non-smoker rights) on both smoke-free bar patios and smoke-free multi-unit housing, which passed in Vallejo in 2022 unanimously, thanks to the hard work of our coalition.
Here are my comments, which I had to shorten to under ninety seconds:
“I’m Joseph Hayden with LGBTQ Minus Tobacco and the Alameda County Tobacco Control Coalition. Protecting bar staff should be a given. Staff members often must walk into patio areas of their places of employment. It is also unfair to patrons who want to breathe fresh air to have to be subjected to an uncontrolled amount of passive smoke in a confined area. We strongly support the passage of THIS aspect of the ordinance as written. I WANT to support the adoption of a Smokefree Multi-Unit Housing Ordinance, but the burden of proof to show the type of smoke that is being forced on should NOT fall on victims who may be wheelchair-bound or otherwise immune compromised from asthma, cancer, Covid, and any number of respiratory diseases. Smoke (which could be the CO-USE of Tobacco and cannabis) permeates through balconies, windows, and even electric sockets. Smokeless cannabis options abound. Oakland should prioritize the protection of its citizens rather than yielding to the cannabis industry’s talking points. Many California jurisdictions, including numerous cities in the Bay Area, have already implemented smoke-free multi-unit housing without a cannabis exception because that’s the only thing that makes sense. Thank you.”
This video has all the comments from our coalition and the cannabis lobby.
Today the Humane Society of the North Bay newsletter had an article on my adoption of Bonnie and her surgery this year after the fire that took the lives of five of my dogs in January. I’ll cross-post it here.
On January 18, 2024, Joseph Hayden’s home (back patio pictured above) was devastated by a fire, resulting in the loss of five beloved rescue dogs of the seven pictured here. Hayden was away helping a neighbor take her two dogs to the vet at the time. Two of Hayden’s dogs survived the fire, including a foster dog that is back with her original family (pictured on the ottoman near his leg) and Snoopy, the black dog with the white chest. Two of the dogs that died were blind. Most of them were seniors. Not getting to say goodbye to these souls that were lost before their time was what made this tragedy all the more devastating to a dog lover and board member of HSNB, on top of the complete devastation to the home.
Hayden could not imagine what the future would bring after this tragedy, particularly as he had only been out of a ten-year relationship for nine days at the time of the fire that left him with seven dogs. As the rebuild takes place, he focused on finding silver linings. During a Zoom board meeting for HSNB, Hayden overheard that there was a “difficult to place” blind dog that had been languishing in the shelter for over a year. He was immediately intrigued, as this seemed like a sign. She was even the same size and approximate color as the two blind dogs he had recently lost, but she was only about six years old and needed many drops a day in her eyes to address her constant pain caused by two types of permanent blindness. She was human-selective, meaning she growled at every stranger unless introduced in a very specific way. The fostering went well, and she immediately bonded with Snoopy, who surely was missing his many lost companions.
Just a few months after fostering and then adopting Bonnie, the recurring ophthalmologist appointments took a daunting turn. Bonnie’s extremely limited eyesight was suddenly no longer there at all. The glaucoma was so bad that she was in constant pain, which the eye drops could no longer manage to stay ahead of, even though they had increased to 22 drops a day over three intervals, together with an oral medication. Unfortunately, it was determined that the only humane way to proceed was to do a bilateral enucleation, which means both eyes should be removed completely. Hayden had experienced this with one eye of a dog he had years prior, so he was familiar with the process, although that dog continued to be able to see with the one remaining eye, even if depth perception was lost. While the cost of the surgery was many thousands of dollars, over time the cost of the customized eye drops and other medications were going to add up as well.
Bonnie had her sutures removed a month after the surgery and is now pain-free and medicine-free. She navigates amazingly well, even up and down the stairs in the rental house, jumps on the furniture, and has a higher quality of life without having to sit for eye drop after eye drop, although she was admittedly very patient with the process because it was probably soothing for her. She gets to do all the fun walks and car rides while using her other senses. Fortunately dogs “smell in color” so she’s living her best life and loving her new family.