total time: 31.31 minutes
total words: 1112
[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelley. Shelley is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and changemaker. And this is the Medford Bites podcast. Every two weeks, we chew on the issues facing Medford and deliver bites of information about the city by lifting the expertise of our guests.
[Danielle Balocca]: Join us in discussion about what you hope for the future of Medford. And as always, tell us where you like to eat. All right, thanks so much for joining me today. If you don't mind just starting by introducing yourself with your name, pronouns, and a bit about who you are.
[Patrick Clerkin]: Glad to be here, Danielle. My name is Patrick Clerkin. My pronouns are he, him, and about myself. I grew up on Boston's North Shore, lived in Medford for nine years now, was a mechanical engineer, have been a handyman for a bit, have traveled the country on a bunch of road trips, Yeah, that's a couple things.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, and we did we did talk to each other two years ago when you were running for city council and you've just announced that you're going to run again or that you are running again. And before we get into that, I just want to ask you arguably the most important question of today. What is your favorite place to eat in Medford and what do you like to eat there?
[Patrick Clerkin]: Gosh, OK, so. It's tough to choose, but I would say that it's a tie between Bob's Italian food, which is right down the street from me, and there's a lamb tip sub, which is awesome. And then Rosso's, which is also fairly close to me, and they have a great vinegar, pepper, and fingerling potato pork chop, which I really enjoy.
[Danielle Balocca]: We don't hear about Bob's too much, but Razzles for sure. Great, well thank you. So, like I said, you ran for city council two years ago. You didn't win that time, so I'm kind of wondering, in the last two years, What you've done in sort of that time in between maybe if you, you could remind us a little bit about your platform initially kind of what you're thinking this year is you're like kind of how you decided to run again.
[Patrick Clerkin]: Yeah, definitely. So, um. Okay, I'll start with the last time I ran, I really came out of the woodwork. It was actually someone I had been doing handyman work for had said that he wished more people were running and I was civically inclined. So I looked into it. But I really jumped in like a week before the signature deadline. And so it was just a rapid fire immersion, learning everything that I could. At that point, I'd been in Bedford for seven years, but you really start to learn a lot more a lot quicker once you jump into the political fray. I did what I could that time, but ultimately, there was a lot of limitations. Three-month time period, I was my own campaign manager, and I would say that my assessments of things and my The way that I was speaking was less matured than it is now and also less polished in the sense of I was working on a I was working in incubator at the time, I was trying to get an entrepreneurial idea started. And so my way of talking was a little bit more kind of like technical with that. And so I kind of came right into this, this public facing field and was maybe a little bit jilted and awkward with the way that I was talking. So this time around, I really want to build off of the foundation from last time, but take some of the critiques and really, you know, run a better campaign. The second thing is I really want to focus on Medford in its entirety. And by that I mean, you know, not just conservative or progressive or libertarian, not just this precinct or that precinct, all of the precincts, all of the people, and really just take inventory of all the resources that Medford has. So focusing on Medford in its entirety, and I would say also focusing on Medford locally, you know, like what's happening within the city. There's clearly all kinds of things happening right now, you know, from a personal to local, state, national, global, but I really think that we have to, in this context, as a city councillor, I would need to focus on, you know, what's happening within the city. So, you know, The other part of your question was, what have I been doing since last time? After the tail end of the election, I was really like, okay, I want to do a postmortem on what it is that I did, what could I have done better, etc. One of the big things that I learned from that campaign was, yes, there are all these city issues, what I'll be focusing on again, like, you know, the streets, high school, fire station, the city budget, development. But one of the big things that wasn't really getting a lot of attention was the distribution of information, communications within the city, which I feel like is quite fractured and has resulted in people sort of retreating to various uh you know facebook groups and reddit pages and newsletters and sometimes it can be kind of like an echo chamber you know so i had really been trying to from january of 2023 i'm sorry january 2024 through memorial day of 2024 to work on a um an answer to that you know to fill the information void that I felt was in the city. And I learned about how there previously had been a paper, but there hadn't been for, I don't know, maybe five years. But getting a paper started would have been exorbitantly expensive, production run and getting the distribution out. So what we settled on, it was me and a team of people that I was leading from who I had met. during the election who cared about this issue, we decided to choose a platform, it was the Mighty Networks platform, and to try to build upon that basically a local social media site dedicated to Medford. Not like a group on a Facebook page, but a Medford-wide group for Medford residents. And there's all kinds of issues that arise with that is like, how do you have it be both open and somewhat moderated, where like, there's there's ground rules for it, you know, it's not like anyone can just stomp through and start lobbing grenades. But how do you have it be as open as possible, and we're creating sub sections on it that were dedicated to our specific topic areas like Medford dining, or recreation or You name it, really. There was a governance section as well, and this was really supposed to be a comprehensive hub, if you will, like a dashboard for existing Medford Media, and also adding on to that as well. actually the plan was to have, you know, this very podcast be one of the things that would be linked to that hub. It would it would be this podcast, it would be WMFO, the Tufts radio station, it would be Medford Community Media, anything related to the city. Now we have Gotta Know Medford, and there's a program Medford Happenings as well. But yeah, that was what I had been doing related to Medford. And then around March of last year, I got, I started getting involved at national politics level with the Kennedy campaign, which is, you know, a controversial thing. Some people like him, some people hate him, but my entry point into that, and I want to, you know, people have been asking me about this. I want to state that my involvement with that was basically, I felt that at a federal level and at a global level, the United States The pharmaceutical industry and the food industry, the agricultural industry and the chemical industry have become a powerful lobby and that we're sort of immersed in chemicals and it has affected our health. And so that's one of the things that I felt like was a high priority. And I had previously, I know I've been going on at length here, but I had previously been working when I was an engineer as a chemical project manager at one point, where it was swapping out the chemicals in the mechanical systems from a chemical that was now considered a forever chemical and was very constrained to an alternative chemical. And I think what people don't realize is these forever chemicals like asbestos, like lead, these things that are very durable in construction environments are also very durable in biological environments, whether that be the ecological environment or whether that be in the human body. And so similarly to that, what people don't realize is that the industrial food supply in our country, the preservatives that get put in the food that keep them shelf stable, or actually, you know, like prevent them from rotting, basically, are actually the same preservatives that are being fed into our body continuously that, you know, have an effect over time, an aggregate effect. And so that was really how I started to get into that. And like people, you know, I don't agree with everything, like, I'm not trying to delve into national politics here. I don't agree with everything that, you know, Kennedy has done or everything that he has said. That was kind of my entry point. And so I was involved from March through July with students for Kennedy, the goal of which was to get, you know, college students, particularly in Massachusetts, aware of his campaign because he was running as an independent candidate and to consider you know, how on their campus they could organize awareness. So I was involved with that and once his campaign ended at the end of August, I was at both the RNC and the DNC, once his campaign ended at the end of August, I started getting involved with this unity coalition concept, which was basically like, how do we get, there's clearly this major political divide, how do we get the populists, like the Bernie supporters, the Trump supporters, the Kennedy supporters, that have a lot in common with each other. They're reform-oriented people that see all these systemic problems. How do you get them to see what they have in common with each other and work together, basically? And that was a tall order, but that was what I was working on. And then I sort of, you know, once the election happened, it was kind of like, okay, now I can re immerse myself and in Medford stuff. And so I started showing the local meetings and stuff again.
[Danielle Balocca]: But okay, that was a lot of busy, busy time for you. So I want to start like, back up to what you were saying about the media and sort of creating like a way of maybe like concentrating information for people about Medford. What you described sounds to me a lot like Reddit. Can you say, did it take form? Is it something people can find? How do you find it to be more accessible than other social media outlets?
[Patrick Clerkin]: um it was the website it's uh it was once again it's called the medford community network it's mcn02155.com it's still operational but it's incomplete so the original goal was to like basically find local representatives for each of these topic areas you know one of them was dei one of them was um uh as i mentioned a bunch of them before to find local sort of um leaders or people who were stores of tribal knowledge basically and get them to be the representative for that topic area and to to build out the page on the site and then to to you know invite others to uh to engage in those spaces basically so the goal was to not only have all these different spaces on the site but to also have a like a hub space that would be like the equivalent of a A virtual cafeteria where, you know, you could go on to Medford community community networks and say, oh, I want to, I only care about the arts and culture and the city government. I don't care about this other stuff. So you could, you could do that. And you could. Like each of the sections would have its own calendar of events, and those calendars would migrate their events towards the main calendar. So if you only cared about two pages, you'd only be getting the events of two of those pages on your main calendar. And you would also have the space where you could go and engage with other people in like a digital common forum basically that would be you would allow cross-pollination of ideas and awareness but it was all right there it was all like the digital version of a of a shopping mall where it has all these storefronts in it and the goal was to not only have that be um pulling together all these components digitally, which I feel like Reddit is more... First of all, one of the problems with Reddit is it's anonymous. The anonymity factor really, I feel like, undermines, in a local context, that community building because it allows people to be... some cases nasty to each other and in some cases to do things that they would otherwise not do to people if they had their name or their or their photo associated with their account. So one of the things was to get people to be open about, you know, their they didn't have to use a photo of themselves, but like, at least their name, you know, a real person, it would be focused on residents, because as far as I know, there's not really a constriction with the Reddit page as to like, you could be a non Medford resident, you can still be on it. And then just like, yes, we have this digital thing, but also encouraging people to go and interact with each other in the real world, basically, these events are these various things. And that's what builds the civic, the social fabric.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. And so I do think that's definitely a problem on a lot of our social, on a lot of our Facebook groups in Medford is that it's, you're right, people say things to each other on those groups that some of these people I've met in person and wouldn't talk to me like on the street. But I think it's an interesting problem that we've been thinking a lot about is how how to make something that's accessible to all parts of the community, right? Like elderly people, non-English speaking people, people that, like young people, right? That is, that's also easy to interact with, right? That, yeah, that also kind of like brings people together in a way that's not as, you know, lets people kind of stay in their corners, for a better phrase, right? For all who worries. So I'm also interested though in like, I gotta ask you about the RFK stuff. It feels like... to try to be, to model yourself after, or to sort of like collect ideas from an independent, I think that RFK so far has done a lot of harm in terms of his like policies around like disease prevention. And like, you know, we've seen like a drastic uptick in things like the measles, which is a very preventable disease, right? And, you know, our very short-term history in Medfair, like we went through the COVID pandemic, right? And like, And vaccines helped us get out of that, right? And his controversial ideas around an autism registry and medicines for mental health. Those are things that are happening on a national level that will impact Medford locally, if they haven't already, right? And also, I guess I wonder how you kind of think it's one thing to like if you have a somebody that somebody that you're modeling yourself after that is truly like independent and it hasn't been sort of like drawn to the to like this sort of ultra conservative side is what it feels like um how like how you're sort of thinking about that now yeah okay so there's a there's like a bunch of questions within that but i guess when it comes to how i would what i'm modeling myself after i don't really have a model like i'm i'm kind of um
[Patrick Clerkin]: somewhat improvising in the sense of like, you know, I'm certainly not modeling myself after, after RFK, I'm modeling myself after My politics, I'm more of an independent centrist. And when I say that, I don't mean I don't have opinions on things. I don't mean I'm a fence-sitter and I'm like, can't we all just get along, man? What I mean is in the aggregate, my opinion on this issue might lean more progressive. On this issue, it might lean more conservative. On this one, it might lean more libertarian. But, um, so, so, yeah, there's no real model model on and I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm improvising on a large way. But when it comes to what you're saying about Kennedy. Yeah, I, you know, I would say that my personal take on it with when it comes to like, vaccines is like, I think vaccines have have were like, 1 of the miracles of of modern science. And I think that they helped to prevent a lot of the naturally occurring diseases like. you know, measles would be one of them and, you know, like typhoid, I'm not sure if these were vaccine diseases, but like typhoid and tuberculosis and malaria and like, you know, hepatitis and all these various things, you know. I feel like it gets into more dangerous territory once you start getting into gain-of-function research because there's, that's where the, first of all, I feel like people assume that when you question sort of some aspects of medical science that you're like anti-science and I think that is some people are but like I think that it's dismissive because there's really a lot of valid critiques of the pharmaceutical industry you know which is like they fund a lot of medical science and so it would be like saying it would be wrong to critique military policy coming out of the Pentagon, because yes, the Pentagon, they're in theory the experts, but they get a lot wrong, too. So I feel like, on the one hand, critiquing the pharmaceutical industry is different than critiquing the science. And the other concern is like when I just what I just mentioned with gain of function research is like, and this is a rabbit hole, but there is a Pentagon slash. defense agency partnership with pharmaceutical companies on bioweapons, and people don't really realize that. They don't really realize the history of the bioweapons program in the U.S. and global bioweapons programs. They don't really understand Going back to World War II, how the Japanese had Unit 731, which was a bioweapons facility, and the United States, after the end of World War II, inherited that. It's just like Joseph Mengele was sort of that experimenter at Auschwitz. The Japanese also were experimenting. And so that bioweapons program combined with American bioweapons programs and I don't remember if it was like Fort Detricks or Fort Dix, but we had our own facility. It ties into pharma, it ties into military, it ties into various aspects of US policy. And I feel like that is worthy of critiquing because one of the concerns is that, where does medicine and health policy begin versus defense and military policy?
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, no, I don't think it's unreasonable to critique any of those things, and I think that there's some pretty harmful things happening right now around that kind of, like I mentioned, autism registries threatening to take away people's mental health medication. So yeah, no, I think those are, and so that sort of leads me into my last sort of question about what, you know, your kind of opening remarks about national versus local politics. So like, in the last two years, our city councilors have had to have been asked and have created policy around their thoughts about like, you know, like the war in Gaza, about abortion rights, about just like protecting certain rights that we have had as a country for a long time. And so I think that, I guess, and I know that recently you've challenged our current president, Zach Bares, to a debate around this topic. And I'm hearing you talk about how much national politics are informing how you think about these things. And I think they have to sort of inform, they affect us every day, right? So they have to sort of inform how we think about local politics. So I guess I'm wondering, how you would, how you can separate those things, or how you would imagine focusing only on local issues.
[Patrick Clerkin]: Yeah, like I'm basically a federalist in the sense of like, I believe that there's the realm of the personal, the realm of the local, the state, the federal, the global. And that doesn't mean that they don't lead into each other, of course. But I think what people, you know, like some people have said to me, well, all politics is local. Tip O'Neill said that. And it's like, I understand like what's meant by that like local politics is where the rubber hits the road, so to speak, but I also like that's a slogan and and so like there's some truth to it, but like saying all politics local is like saying all all. all life is cellular, you know what I mean? Like, it's like a human, the human organism is composed of cells, which make up tissues, which make up organs, which make up organ systems, which make up the organism. And so clearly, not all the functions of the organism could happen at the cellular level, to draw an analogy. So like, what I'm what I'm trying to say is like, there's levels of complexity and levels of order, that really can only be handled at higher levels. And so it's not to say that like, clearly Medford doesn't exist in a vacuum. Like I've mentioned this before, it's like there are effects of higher level things that come down to the Medford, there's the animosities that exist among people in different groups, there's technologies, there's inflation, there's immigration, there's there's these things. But I so you know, as they affect the city like i i feel like you you can obviously comment i'm not sitting like no no we can't comment on um you know like that student granted some people say you shouldn't like because it was in somerville but it was right on our doorstep that student that was uh was abducted by ice uh i'm not saying that shouldn't be talked about that was right in in our area but what i'm saying is the example of like you know, there was one meeting where it was calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and then calling for an end to the to the the American embargo of Cuba. That to me is like going out of your way to find an issue to make it the city's issue. And I just felt like that was like that. That wasn't just like, let me say that this is going on. And it's it's it's unjust that that was like that took like hours out of the meeting and it pushed the other things out of the way. And at the end of it, it's like, we don't really. It's not really something that the city council is capable of.
[Danielle Balocca]: getting to the bottom of or addressing in a meaningful way that's kind of but so i would i would argue though that did you did you go to that meeting where we they we heard people talk about their support of that motion yeah yeah and like i think that was really really meaningful for a lot of people to hear that their city had was thinking about this was supporting this and I think that that's sort of how people become engaged with local politics, is that my city cares about me. And even if they're not going to fix this problem, they know that it's something to address. When we called for calling racism a public health emergency, when we talk about codifying abortion rights in our state, when we talk about sanctuary cities, those things affect Medford residents. And it may not ultimately be the city council's decision to change those things, but knowing that you have allies in the city I think is really, really important for a lot of constituents.
[Patrick Clerkin]: Yeah, I think that it's like for some of the issues that you mentioned, like if it was addressing prejudice within Medford, I think that would be one thing. If it was addressing an abortion clinic within Medford, things like that. But talking about some of these general things, I think it overwhelms the city's capacity to address the things that are within its
[Danielle Balocca]: But except that, so there may not be abortion clinics in Medford, but there are probably doctors that are performing abortions in some way, prescribing abortion medication, people that are getting abortions that live in Medford, people that are experiencing discrimination in Medford. So like, I think it's a little short-sighted to say it's not happening as a city function necessarily. Those things are happening, and those are affecting the lives of people in Medford.
[Patrick Clerkin]: So yes, and that's why I think that those should happen through things outside of the city council, like action networks and in various organized groups and things like that. It's really, my point isn't that people shouldn't talk about these things or have opinions about them. My point is ultimately, is city council the place to address these things in this way, basically? And if we allow, and I feel like people, assume that i'm specifically targeting like progressive policies in this and in reality it's like i i would be the same with conservative or libertarian or whatever like it's really like once you open the door for this it really overwhelms the like there are core functions that the government is is supposed to uh deliver on and our capacity to deliver on those gets marginalized and pushed to the perimeter when it becomes sort of an open forum to address any topic, basically.
[Danielle Balocca]: I think that a lot of those motions by the City Council were brought to them by citizen groups like Safe Medford and groups like that. And I do think in a city like Medford, a lot of power is consolidated in groups like City Council. I had an issue with the plumbing in my house that was caused by trouble with the city's pipes, right? The only way I could get them to get a reply from someone was to contact a city councilor, right? I think people do rely on city council in that way. And I guess I'm curious, what do you think was not attended to when city councilors were talking about these issues in their meetings?
[Patrick Clerkin]: I mean, on that specific meeting, I'm not sure. recently um there was a charter uh there was a charter thing that got kind of pushed late so like my concern is and this is this other issue isn't entirely city council or any one uh entity or person's fault this has been a cumulative issue that what i was talking about before with the city communications i think that because the communications have um degraded over time. And by the way, I scoured the city website over the last two weeks and really went into every nook and cranny to find important plans and important maps and things that I felt like the public might have been missing. Because I think that there's this notion that just because something gets put onto the municipal website that it gets beamed into everyone's brain, which clearly isn't true. And so, yeah, the point of what I'm saying is, a lot of people feel that some of these plans and some of these proposals get dropped out of the void into their consciousness at the last minute, past the moment of public comment. And so some people show up to these meetings to speak on these Medford issues and to hear on these Medford issues, and then they find out that, you know, that issue is being displaced to the end of the meeting so that people can talk about trying to solve the, you know, the Gaza crisis or the ending the embargo in Cuba. And then they go home eventually because they're like, you know what, I can't spend three hours here, four hours here, into the wee hours of the morning. I was hoping that I could get this addressed. That's where I'm saying like, I really feel like people sense that it's like a lack of compassion in me. It's not that I lack compassion on these issues, it's that I feel like some of these are just the wrong place. Like the Gaza issue or the Cuban, and I don't mean to just harp on those two things, but those are the most obvious. It's like the amount of complexity that it's like, you know, it's it's like the the what the UN and some of these global governments haven't even been able to address these things and I feel like like you know the everyday person can get involved through like an action network or through organized means but I just think that it's really it's wading into very very deep waters that local government doesn't have the capacity to handle. And I understand that people It gives people comfort, but I think that can be dealt with by giving referrals to people to say, hey, you're being heard. And just so you know, like this, this isn't the best place to solve this, but there, there are resources like there's this group, there's this action network, there's this support group, there's this meetup group, there's this, there's other avenues. You can petition the, the, the other higher level governments. There's other avenues to, enact this, you know, I'm not implying like, hey, squash this. Don't address it. Forget about it. Yeah, it's like a particular thing that I'm basically taking.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, and I guess like, Imagining if I am a voter coming to voice a concern or frustration, or in this case a real fear about the safety of my neighbors. you know, your example about Gaza, like, Medford's not immune from, like, antisemitism and Islamophobia, right? So, like, how is all this that's happening in the world affecting us? And if I were to come to you as my city councillor to say, what can you do about this? And you gave me a referral, like, I don't know, like, I don't know what that would feel like. And maybe that's not what you're saying. Yeah.
[Patrick Clerkin]: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, the answer is, like, Medford can't solve those issues. You know what I mean? And maybe people just need to hear that outright is like, this is not going to be solved in Medford. And it doesn't mean that it's not important. It just means that there's, it's the wrong tool to use. It's the wrong avenue to approach it. And like, if we lose sight of like, if we try to make everything i mean maybe this is like you know i mentioned i've been a handyman maybe this is like a handyman way of looking at it but and i know that's not handyman work is not you know work in the public sector but pools are for specific purposes and if you like if you start using things forever like if you start using uh you know a hammer for every for every purpose or a screwdriver for every purpose like that's not what it's intended for and you're gonna get you're going to not only get bad results, but you're going to destroy the tool.
[Danielle Balocca]: You know, it's, that's sort of, yeah, it feels like a little bit of an exaggeration there, but if I use my sewer analogy, right, we had a problem with our sewer. Nobody listened to us until we talked to city council, the city council person didn't come to my house to fix the sewer. They knew who to talk to, who to connect me with. Like they use their power to help advocate for me, but the sewer is a local issue.
[Patrick Clerkin]: That's, that's my point. They had a way to address that, because the issue that you addressed was a local issue.
[Danielle Balocca]: Right. Well, yeah, and I guess maybe it's a little more abstract, but the impact of a war in another country is a local issue, right? The way that that's impacting people that live here, among other things, right? But we can move on, I feel like.
[Patrick Clerkin]: Yeah, yeah. Ultimately, I think what should also be considered is, How do we give people a sense of comfort, but without inflaming Islamophobia and antisemitism in a local context where it might have not existed at that point? That's another concern is like in addressing some of these things in the way that we're addressing them, we're creating inflammation and counter inflammation and sort of in some sense, bringing the war to Medford and we have to be careful about like and that's just one issue but like any any of these things is like it creates inflammation and counter inflammation that makes the performance of of other functions lessened or more difficult.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, maybe I do think though that like when you know that makes I think when you're addressing an issue that has so much that is so sensitive, I think that that may be one outcome is that people are people that are reacting to that may not have reacted to it otherwise, but also you're reaching those people who are reacting to it and are feeling pain around it right and like and I think that there is a benefit to. to interacting with these big issues. I think if Medford said nothing, it would have felt a lot worse. And I think that goes for a lot of things. And I do appreciate that city councilors have to hear about a lot of stuff that personally they might not agree with, or decisions might be reached that they weren't necessarily the ones that they would choose. And I think if you were elected to the city council, you'd probably be amongst people that had maybe different opinions about things and I wonder how you might handle that.
[Patrick Clerkin]: I'm fine with I'm fine. Like I actually this is one of my big things is like I've been so first of all, I understand that people a lot of people want catharsis, you know, there's so much happening right now. And there's so much that is unsettling and uncertain and disturbing. And people people want an anchor point and they want a compass and they want like, you know, what the hell is happening? Am I going to be okay? Is the world going to be okay? Is that like, there's all these things, right? And so naturally I understand people looking for comfort. I don't mean to be dismissive of that by any means. But I will say that I'm very comfortable around people of different persuasions and people of different beliefs. I've been in in virtually every group, politically, demographically, whatever. And I find that like, you meet wonderful people in all of them. And then I find that you also meet assholes and all of them. Like there's there's people who are like, I think that people shouldn't be afraid to be prideful of whatever, you know, that all that intersectionality, like whatever fragments of your identity, like, shine your it's your kaleidoscope, right? You know, like, be prideful, but don't be. This is to all all groups. Don't be chauvinistic or militant. Because some like any group can have the capacity to become a, like a dark version of itself, basically, you meet you meet people in any group who are, as I just said, chauvinistic or militant, where they take it beyond a healthy pride, to the point of like, Everyone else must see the world through my sliver, basically, and pushing everything to the margins. And so I think that that needs to be kept in mind. The overall balance. I think that Medford will do well when things are kept in balance and people don't have to be in fear. But they also shouldn't feel that they can dominate others. I feel like I've seen examples of that from a lot of different corners, and so the fault doesn't lie exclusively on any one group. But I'm hoping that we can transcend that. Yeah, so I'm comfortable. I very much am comfortable with different groups. If I got invited or was, you know, as long as, you know, I'm not being chased away with a bat, I would feel comfortable going into any circle.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. So, well, thank you. I mean, this has been, like, really helpful. I appreciate you hanging with my pushback there, but is there anything else that you want us to know or, like, places that we can, like, get more information about you or engage with you in a different way?
[Patrick Clerkin]: My campaign website, CLERKIN, C-L-E-R-K-I-N, the number four, medford.com, and that has an Anadot donation page on the front, but also at the top has the different tabs where you can find a little bit more about me, a little bit more of what my vision is, and the issues. Starting out on the campaign, the issues are more crude in the sense of, as I learn more, I update my perspective and make them more nuanced. So right now, it's a little bit like, hey, I'm out there learning on these issues, but you'll see that there. Um, I have three social media accounts. Um, one of them is on Instagram once again, at clerking for Medford on Facebook, clerking for Medford and on Reddit, I think it's just like CP clerking or something like that. So that's primarily where you can find me. I'm going to be at Colleen's, um, every Wednesday from seven to eight. I really, that's important to me that people have, uh, An in-person opportunity to just to talk to me or to share their concerns. So that's every Wednesday until election day I'll be available and That's that's pretty much it for now. Otherwise, you'll you'll see me at events. You'll see me around, you know I'll be I'll be glad to talk to any of you. Please feel free to come up and talk to me. I'm not You know, I'm not a like angry or avoidant person, so I see a lot of ice cream in your future, but Oh, yeah, I know. Well, that's another thing that I didn't mention before. There's a sandwich. I don't remember what it's called, though, at Collins. I try to get it fairly frequently rather than having the ice cream every week. But I love ice cream. I just want to say, Danielle, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it because, you know, I, no one agrees 100% with anyone, but like, I just appreciate you giving me the forum to clear the air and to for you to ask questions to give pushback and all that. I just, I just appreciate it. So thank you.
[Danielle Balocca]: Oh, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, good luck.
[Patrick Clerkin]: Yeah. Thank you.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. The Medford Bites podcast is produced and moderated by Danielle Balacca and Shelly Keshaman. Music is made by Hendrik Giedonis. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. You can reach out to us by email at medfordpod at gmail.com, or you can re-interview the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Medford Bites. Medford Bites. Good job.
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