At some point during the conventions, I inevitably think about my first: 1996.

Two weeks earlier, hours after the Republican convention ended, my father died of AIDS.

I worked in the research department at the DNC at the time. We weren’t essential at the Democratic convention, so we weren’t going to go. But our boss got us passes and let us drive overnight from DC to Chicago for the last day. (Thanks, Berm.)

I had a lousy upper-deck pass, but somehow made it down to the floor and pretended to belong in the Minnesota delegation in time for Clinton’s speech.

I figured the guy in front of me in a wrinkled, mustard-stained short sleeve shirt button down had snuck in, too. Then he turned around.

That’s Paul Wellstone in the lower left corner.

(Lesson learned.)

Anyway, the thing everyone else remembers about Clinton’s speech is “bridge to the 21st century.”

Here’s the passage I remember, two weeks to the day after my father died of a disease that might not have killed him if Clinton’s Republican predecessors acknowledged it sooner.

It may not seem like much — it’s literally just two sentences. But if you were a kid who grew up in the Reagan/Bush years, with a father you knew was dying of a disease that people talked about in the most hateful ways imaginable, if at all ... it felt like everything.

Over the years, I’ve had my share of frustrations with the Democratic Party; I often self-ID as a liberal, and as an anti-Republican more than as a Democrat.

But I was acutely aware that night in 1996 that one of the two parties generally gives a damn whether Americans live or die, and the other one very much does not.

And that’s more clear than ever this year.

Please vote for Joe Biden, as soon as you can.

If you're watching Joe Biden right now, you can see this. He's not perfect, and he'll frustrate the hell out of me, but he gives a damn if you live or die, you know he does. And that simply isn't true of the guy he's running against. You know it isn't.

Fuck who needs a drink