She was thirty-eight years old. She came up to his collarbone. She looked at him the way she looked at things she had not yet decided what to do with.
Then Cleopatra Wallenberg walked onto a frozen football field in Bemidji, Minnesota and said eleven words to the boy who had just tackled her son - and four more to her son lying in the mud:
"Just don't lie there. Get up and score a touchdown. Don't quit."
Forty-seven years later, Alfred "He-Who-Would-Not-Quit" Wallenberg is the Governor of Minnesota - and the state he loves is in crisis. The aquifer is failing. The topsoil is blowing away. Democracy is eroding at the edges. ICE agents are arresting Walter Kingbird, Alfred's oldest friend, for recording a federal operation on a Minneapolis sidewalk while being visibly Native American.
Alfred has already been knocked down once. A catastrophic debate performance. A retreat to the North Shore. The worst polling numbers of his career.
He got up.
I'll Kick You in the Balls is the story of what happened next - and what you can do about it.
This is political fiction that operates as a playbook. Alfred Wallenberg is a fictional governor, but the crises he confronts are real: vanishing groundwater, the gun lobby's grip on Congress, climate migration reshaping the Midwest, the collapse of information integrity, and a federal government that has decided the Constitution is optional.
Alfred's response is not a position paper. It is a July Fourth Declaration of Emergency. A nuclear power compact with Michigan, Wisconsin, and Canada. A constitutional argument for gun regulation built from James Madison's own words. A capital moved from Saint Paul to Duluth - because that is where the future of Minnesota is.
He practices Tai Chi at five-thirty in the morning. He paddles the St. Croix alone when the decisions are made. He has a friend named Walter Kingbird who has known him since he was nine years old and who tells him the true thing without flinching.
He does not quit.
Written for the politician - Democrat, Republican, Independent, or none of the above - who is willing to pick up the football and run with it. Who has been waiting for permission to govern by truth at high velocity with maximum moral clarity.
Here is your permission.
