Maybe a better writer would start with how we met, about how it was explosive and surreal, like a movie about now from 20 years in the future, if we still have 20 years in the future. Maya Hawke plays Kat. A 115-year-old, reanimated Ernest Borgnine plays me. That would be smart. I’d get a big ol’ honkin’ book deal. We’d be rich.
But instead I want to talk about how we met our best friend, since it’s one of those stories where Kat does five little, brave things while I’m still digging through the laundry for an ironed-looking shirt.
Because to know Kat is to know Heater, or at least how we got her.
It’s three Christmases ago. I had just put in my notice at my job three or four days beforehand. I was off to “write a book,” which we both took to mean, since we’re not stupid, that I was about to burn through my savings while Kat kept the lights on with her job at Media Matters. She never once questioned if it would work out, even as my friends reassured her I was fully, functionally delusional. She operates on articles of faith that others can’t see. That’s what makes Kat Kat.
So for Christmas, before we started our Year of Not Buying Much, she had gotten me an hour at the Brooklyn Cat Cafe’s feline leukemia room.
“Are you sure you can do this?” I love cats more than anything, and she knew that, but she was almost comically allergic to them. She looks like a Snoopy parade float after about five minutes with one cat, let alone 15.
“Of course, and you need it.”
So Kat plows down three Benadryl and we trudge down there in the snow a few days after Christmas. They give you a little, shitty Lipton tea and the staff, all angelic, deliver you into this 7-foot by 9-foot room.
Feline leukemia, by the way, is when cats get weakened immune systems and have a hard time surviving kitty colds, kitty flus, other kitty diseases that sound adorable when you put “kitty” in front of them. Some can survive years and live big full lives, and some go quickly when they get a secondary illness. Feline leukemia cats can’t be around other cats who don’t have it, since it’s so contagious. So they pile the FeLV+ ones into this big Amazon delivery box of a room and let them play with danglies with fresh strangers every hour.
We’re those strangers and, after about 15 minutes, it becomes apparent to me that Kat hasn’t spent more than five minutes with a cat in her life. She asks me why one cat is vibrating on her lap. (It was purring.) There are probably a dozen in there and 11 of them are chasing dots and begging for treats.
Then, in the corner on a cat tree limb, there’s Heater. She is beautiful, and she’ll take a pat, but not many. She looks like she knows 80% of life’s secrets.
We check her page on the cat cafe website and it’s clear Heater Howard has been in that room for 18 months. She was found pregnant on a heating grate at the Howard Projects, thus the name, then put in the FeLV room. Every other cat has been adopted out of that room three or four times over. Heater, in the corner, remained.
We say goodbye, head home, then Thanksgiving Day Snoopy, also known as Kat Abughazaleh, says to me, “Heater. I think we have to get Heater. We have to give her a real home.”
“Real dogshit timing to fall in love with a rescue animal who’s going to need a ton of care,” I think to myself.
“You’re right,” I say out loud.
I text my friends pictures of an orange cat who won’t look at the camera, and they think I’m doing yet another delusional thing in a series of increasingly delusional things.
A couple weeks later, I snag Heater. The lady from the cat cafe handing her off to us cries. “She’s special,” she says to me.
“We both think she has some magic in her or something,” I tell her. “We couldn’t stop thinking about her.”
Anyway, no income incoming, we get this sick cat who one of us is actively allergic to and will not take a pat. Article of faith.
It turns out, of course, that Heater is not shy. She just didn’t want to be in a room with other cats for 18 months. She plays. She snuggles. She motors. Kat’s allergy wore off in a few weeks, something that can happen, but a big risk she took because she wanted to save this cat.
She just needed to feel safe somewhere.
Heater is Kat’s best friend now, a monument to bravery in our house. Every time Kat would get thrown down by ICE, or the time she got indicted, or the last week of every single candidate trying to attack Kat’s family and friends in what I’ve been calling Ratfuckfest 2026, while we remind each other we won’t reciprocate with personal attacks, we always come back to Heater.
“She’s braver than both of us,” Kat says to me almost every night. “Bravest girl in the world.”
After the last year, I know someone braver.
Big metaphor over.
As Kat was out knocking on doors, I was at home with Heater being extremely helpful by doomscrolling comments sections. This is what cool boyfriends with tons of great hobbies do. I came across someone who was canvassing for one of Kat’s opponents. It was a big thread of people who were calling her delusional, asking who she was to even run for Congress in the first place.
Have you heard? She’s not from here! She’s a rich oil baroness with a millionaire boyfriend! (If you can let me know who these people have confused either of us with, both glorious thousandaires, please tell me so I can shake them down for cash.)
One of the commenters had just doorknocked an older man and was astounded. The guy on the other side of the door was voting for Kat and he couldn’t get him to budge.
“Talked to a weirdo Kat supporter who looked dingy and like he hadn’t left the house in a while,” he said, and I’m paraphrasing here for 50 different reasons. Do not yell at this guy. “I guess that’s her people.”
Goddamn does that feel good, I thought. It’s working.
Do you remember the feeling? A couple of months after the 2024 election? The abandonment? I do. I had to do some public speaking around then.
I was invited to one of those conferences called Democracy Important or something. It was in Boston, it was an excuse for a nice trip to see my parents, mostly, and I was supposed to be there to talk about The Onion, to do my little funny guy dance, but I almost left before my talk.
All morning, the speakers, ostensibly Democrats, were talking about what and who we had to abandon to beat fascism. At this time, they were calling them “The Groups,” which to them meant trans people, Palestinian people, and minority groups they didn’t believe to be part of a winning coalition, as if that’s the only point of running for office.
Kat and I were relatively new to Chicago, but we had built a community, and unfortunately our community was The Groups. Our best friends are trans or nonbinary. Kat is Palestinian herself. And the political party that was closest to our values was having a contest to see how fast they could throw everyone we loved under the bus people and then into a woodchipper. They thought narrowing what a Democrat could be would signal “strength.”
So, full of piss and vinegar, I went on stage and I yelled at them a little, gave them the what for. I told them that the people on the street protesting Tesla, the trans people making common cause with the little old ladies who were forming alliances with the government workers laid off by DOGE, those are my people. I’m a lot closer to being one of them than to being someone who would trade their rights for a vote.
Strength, to me, is people with nothing to gain still looking out for the least among us, because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t think of anybody stronger than that. Being unequivocal about rights for literally everyone, not throwing people overboard because of some fictional median voter. That’s strength, I think.
This broke the seal at the Democracy Very Important conference, and people started to get a little rankled, a little hot under the collar about the Carvillian stuff from before. A fancy donor lady, who admitted it wasn’t great for her pocketbook to say this, was wondering why AOC and Bernie were in the streets while establishment Democrats were playing hide and seek.
She wanted fight.
I came home from that conference a bit of a pariah but alive. And I was alive because I wasn’t saying anything Kat hadn’t said to me first around the house, worried about our future, wondering if anyone else felt the same way.
I was alive because I knew that Kat, a week before, had decided to run for Congress to stick up for all of our friends. I knew she was about to speak for a lot more people than just herself.
In the weeks after the election, we asked each other, “Is it really up to us?” and we were shocked that the answer appeared to be yes. But after that week, I wasn’t surprised anymore. I knew she was the person to take this on.
Now I should talk about how we met, and how we met most of our friends, because I want the rights to the movie, the musical, and the ride at Universal Studios. George Clooney, buddy, call me.
Kat was at Media Matters and I was at NBC News. I had been in deep shit at my job for months. I was suspended from my job for reporting on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Weeks later, the lady who sold our ads, along with her deputy who had called to excoriate me about my coverage, became the CEO of Twitter. Hot dog. I saw the writing on the wall.
I had been in some hot water, too, for insisting that trans people are people, and that they were being targeted by a harassment campaign as part of a broader authoritarian electoral project, as they had been in every other fascist takeover in the past. This was basically verboten to say on the television at that time.
Specifically, I had reported that a man who shot up a drag night at a gay bar in Colorado in 2022 did so for the reasons already apparent if you read the earlier part of this sentence.
This led me to being the main character on the A-Block on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. This was a horrific night, in which Tucker’s fans attempted to dox and swat everyone involved in my life.
It also led to this chyron, which was captured by Kat, whose job was to watch Tucker’s Machiavellian descent into Nazi madness and try to recap his white nationalism for Media Matters. Any time I’m late to anything for even five minutes, my friends text me this:
I knew Kat, from then on, as the lady from the group chat made up of people who had been attacked by Tucker on his show. Yes, there was a big group chat of Tucker victims, each of whom got added as a way to defend themselves when his show would try to ruin your life. We shared tips on getting your friends and family’s identities off the internet before they were attacked, how to explain swatting to local cops, and, also, made fun of how big of a fucking dweeb and incel the guy had become.
Then, one day, I woke up to the funniest news I’d ever heard in my life. Tucker Carlson, without warning and without a chance to sign off, had been fired seemingly overnight from his White Power Hour at Fox News.
Walking on Sunshine began playing in my head automatically. Clouds in the sky were instantly declared illegal. My phone started ringing. For the first time, it was Kat, apparently calling with a tip.
When I picked up, I said this: “Kat, I know we don’t know each other, but I just want you to know this: One day, I might get married. I might have kids or something. I will say that day is the best day of my life. But that won’t be true. Today is the best day of my life. The Day Tucker Carlson Got Fired is the best day of my life.”
I did not know how true that was. Four days later, she asked me out. Months went by where we tried to pretend we didn’t want to be with each other, one of the most obvious failures of my life.
By June, I had won an award I had to apply for out of pocket without telling my bosses, having been basically abandoned at my job. When I won the award, one of my 72 bosses simply replied “wow” one day later, which I thought was very funny.
I saw the speech was going to be on C-SPAN, so I wrote a little thing, a little Howard Beale on Prozac moment. I said to Kat, “If I say this thing, that’s pretty much it for this job. They’re not going to be happy and I don’t have anything lined up after my contract’s done.”
I sent it to her:
“People with a lot of money and power are actively trying to kill the truth right now, as we speak. They believe that if they spread enough hatred and division, their crimes will go unnoticed. Some of them are trying to run a parallel ground war. Some of them are trying to sell cars, and so far the plan has worked. A lot of people in charge of news organizations are, for one reason or another, refusing to accept this reality.
I realize this is an uncomfortable question, but the next time you’re in an editorial meeting, and someone asks you to couch the truth with a lie pushed by a powerful person. What will you do? Will you help that liar, or will you fight? I hope you will fight.”
She said, “Is it the right thing to do? Are you standing up for the right people?”
I said yes, but I won’t have any…
“Then do it,” she said. “We’ll figure it out.”
We say around the house that Heater is the picture of strength, picked up off the side of the road and glanced over for most of her life, but it’s really Kat.
Kat is a force multiplier of strength. She just believes if you do good things, it will come back to you in return twice over. That kind of hope emanates like it’s visible, like it’s light.
So when that Commenter Man wrote dismissively about the bedraggled guy in his broken doorway who wouldn’t budge on voting for Kat, my eyes lit up like the Sickos Guy.
Yes! Give me your tired, your poor, motherfucker! Give me your huddle masses, yearning to be free! Give them to me, motherfucker! Give me all you got.
I want them all, and so does she. The shut-in, the cast-off, the written off, the ugly, the beautiful, all of it. That’s the America I like.
Man, I hope she wins.