Author: Stagger Lee

One billion dollars.

Instagram has thirteen employees.  At their last round of funding, according to Om Malik, they were valued prospectively at $500 million.  Now it’s double that, and on paper, each employee just hit the lotto for about $77 million.

If you didn’t think we were entering a new tech bubble, abandon your misapprehension. Facebook is apparently going compete with Google to be the Microsoft of the new bubble – and they’re using their pre-IPO magic unicorn rainbow money to acquire their way to the top. Om Malik nailed it – Instagram figured out mobile in a way Facebook never has, and represented a legit threat.  He doesn’t say as much, but the Android client launch last week simultaneously made an acquisition more plausible and more necessary for Facebook.

I don’t have a lot on Instagram.  In fact, I think I took maybe one picture before the Android launch, which was enough to prompt me to go back and look again.  But it’s not connected to anything else – I certainly don’t use my Twitter or Facebook as a login credential – and I fully anticipate that Instagram will suffer a similar fate as Gowalla, or Dodgeball, or any number of other companies that get acquired, sublimated, and ultimately digested by their parent.  Without going into too many details, I’ve witnessed at fairly close range the process by which a startup gets eaten by a big company – and no matter how independently they profess to run it or maintain its existing culture and whatnot, the fact is that eventually that smaller company will get completely subsumed by its parent.  The founders invariably roll out before long – the kind of mentality that drives the person behind a startup is generally HIGHLY incompatible with living as one cell of a larger corporate entity.  So if you’re an Instagram fan who doesn’t care for anything about Facebook, you need to start planning NOW for life after Instagram.

Thing is, I think social networking is starting to peak.  I don’t know how much further Facebook has to grow if my mother is on it.  More to the point, the hip social-networking app in the Valley these days is Path, a sort of one-stop hybrid of Foursquare and Instagram and Twitter that explicitly caps you at 150 friends (go Wiki “Dunbar’s Number” for an explanation of why 150).  I can completely see Twitter becoming the mechanism of following athletes and bloggers and landmarks while Path (or a similarly-curated app) is the VIP room for actual two-way social networking.  Where Facebook failed – and where Google+ has yet to get traction – is in the concept of more granular social circles, which Facebook utterly failed to provide when it threw open the floodgates after tying one’s real name to the network.

More to the point, though, I think Facebook has crossed the line once too often with the bleeding-edge Valley crowd.  The number of people bailing out of FB (or proudly claiming they were never one it) seems to be growing, and Facebook itself is getting more and more of the AOL stench about it.  And lest we forget, AOL is selling off intellectual property to Microsoft to raise operating capital – a move Gizmodo compared to “selling sperm to make the cable bill”.  I’d be interested to know how much of AOL’s revenue comes from old dialup accounts that people forgot to cancel.

But then, maybe I’m not in the demo for social networking.  I was barely on the fringes of Friendster (except for one memorable interview), I never had anything to do with MySpace (hopelessly juvenile by the time it went big), and Facebook – aside from the “rolling high school reunion” effect – has only been of marginal interest in recent years when it’s not trying to whore my personal information out for cash on the sly.  Maybe I just don’t know what’s doing with social networking and I’m not the target.

I can tell you this, though: when a 13-man company with one product and no profit strategy is worth a billion dollars, we’re on full-tilt bubble watch.

When Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein launched their new sketch show in January of 2011, they teased it with a music video on YouTube with the clever hook of “The dream of the ’90s is alive in Portland.”  Which was an apt tagline for a town that I once described as “what if my (gifted alternative magnet) high school was its own city”.  And when you think about it – grunge and flannel and alternative music back when that label meant anything and the first Dr Martens company store in America – you could almost sort of make a case that it was true.

I’ve actually been vulnerable lately to a certain measure of my own 90s nostalgia, although it’s important to distinguish between the late 1990s go-go technology-boom era and the early half of the decade.  And that early part of the decade really felt different from what had come before.  The Berlin Wall was down, the Cold War was done, the Soviet Union ceased to exist on Christmas Day 1991- the principal motive force in our politics and foreign affairs was not part of the picture anymore.  We won the war, more or less, and there was a very real sense that the “peace dividend” – in budget terms, sure, but also in terms of mindshare and human effort – could be turned toward bigger and better things.  And then, to get a couple of mid-forty-something New South Democrats as a Presidential ticket – it felt like a generational shift, because it was. Things were going to change, we could reinvent government, we could preserve the environment, we could reduce the budget deficit, we could get health care for everyone, we could build the Information Superhighway. Basically, the new Jerusalem.

And of course, all that took exactly two years to fall apart.  Just like the Millenials a couple of decades later, Gen X got its Messiah and watched him run smack into a stone wall of unrelenting opposition.  At least Obama only saw one house of Congress lost – although you could argue that the Democrats lost control of the Senate once they dropped below 60 seats, given the Republican filibuster-everything approach.  More to the point, the “Contract With America” GOP is today’s GOP, which took a bow for the first time with Newt Gingrich as its forward sergeant and Rush Limbaugh as its philosophical lodestar.  Fast forward eighteen years, and Newt is running for President while Rush is still the guiding light of conservatism.

That’s really when it happened, if you think about it.  That’s when people started to try to turn back the clock. Bill Clinton won Georgia and Louisiana, for crying out loud – can you imagine any Deep South state voting for ANY Democrat now, let alone one of the wrong color?  Can you fathom Bush the Elder or Bob Dole running on the notion that paying for birth control was an undue religious burden on employers?

The notion of dreams is something that comes up in William Gibson’s books quite frequently.  He thinks that certain subcultures – bohemians, for instance, or the cosplayers of Akhibara and Harajuku – are how our society dreams.  I suppose you could point at the breakthroughs of alternative culture in the US – the early 90s or the late 60s or even the Beat age of the Fifties – as a species of dreaming, an expression of the collective subconscious.  And we all know what happens when that sort of thing runs up against the kind of people who experience pant-shitting terror at the thought that someone might be different.

What’s amazing, though, is that the changes get more incremental every time.  The boomers talk up the 1960s, but let’s face it, the notion of overturning Jim Crow and ending segregation and mounting a mass popular protest against an ongoing foreign conflict – that’s a pretty heavy lift, even before taking into account Medicare and the War On Poverty and the race to the moon and ending pollution and the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion and birth control.  Then in the 1990s, the dream was – health care for all and open the Internet and stop the hole in the ozone layer.  Now, the dream is get more people able to buy insurance and maybe do something to slow down carbon emissions – one side keeps scaling down its ambitions and running to stand still while the other hauls the boundary of plausibility ever further to the right, to the point that John Birch Society talking points from the 1960s are now part of regular Republican discourse.

I guess, politically speaking, that’s what I keep hoping we’ll wind up with – something technocratic, wonk-friendly, something less tribal and not rooted in whipping up redneckery.  I suppose in twenty years or so, if the country survives that long, everyone who has segregation as living memory will be dead and the rest of us might be able to shift a bit, especially if “white” is a plurality rather than a majority.  We just have to be able to hold out until then and avoid completely reverting to the United States of Alabama in the meantime.

Thing is, though, I’d love another crack at 1993.  Young, smart, charismatic leadership, and the idea that brains and creativity and fresh thinking might do some good at breaking through the calcified nonsense that plagues our existing politics.  And ideally, something that might shut down the fucking punditocracy and the cable-news blowhards and put an end to government-by-the-conventional-wisdom-of-the-green-room-at-Meet-the-Press.

I’d probably have better luck waiting for a switch to parliamentary government.  After all, we’ve got the parliamentary politics – sort of.

JACKET GLEE: Subsiding slowly.  As it turns out, my go-to ought to be the soft-shell known as Vandy III, as it is pretty warm, moderately water-resistant, mostly packable (well, stuffable), and can actually fit the iPad in the inside pocket (barely).  It doesn’t conceal very well at all, but it should be sufficient if I really need to go walkabout with just the iPad until such time as I can rig something up in a shoulder-holster sort of way (YES THIS IS HAPPENING SHUT UP).

CAR GLEE: Not serious at all, but having looked at the spec, I would (if forced tomorrow) replace my car with a Prius C, level 3.  City-car size, 50 MPG city mileage, and at trim level 3 has a sunroof and satellite radio access.  Plus I could sit in line at In N Out with a clear conscience.

GADGET GLEE: So it’s being reported that Google plans to drop a 7″ tablet of its own by the end of the summer, presumably running Ice Cream Sandwich and presumably unbranded in Nexus fashion.  Despite owning a Kindle 3 and an LTE iPad, I would seriously consider buying that tablet for a couple of reasons:

* It’s unbranded and not locked to a carrier, and thus is presumably going to be able to update to whatever Google rolls out instead of being at the mercy of a cellular company or a branded OEM for updates to whatever custom crap UI would normally be stapled over top of regular Android.  So I could be reasonably assured that I would someday be able to run a newer OS than what came with it.

* It’s presumably going to be straight Android, and I would kind of like to know the ins and outs of the other dominant mobile operating system. Because if I’m honest, I don’t know that “workstation support” will still be a viable career choice in ten years and I need to be ahead of the curve in one direction or another in case one of those sysadmin positions fails to open up by then.

* It’s theoretically going to be an open-source OS on standard hardware. Which is sort of what I was gunning for with the Dell netbook two years ago running Linux.  I suppose there’s some libertarian reptile-brain part of me that likes the idea of having a portable computing option that’s not dependent on the tender mercies of “Don’t Be Evil” or the corporate direction of an Auburn graduate – and if it’s really an open and unbranded tablet, the CyanogenMod options and the like should be plentiful.  Of course, then you’re at the tender mercy of whatever random hacker is willing to write OS updates and extend the feature set, which gets back to the whole point of open source: it’s only worthwhile if you’re willing and able to write your own code.  Otherwise you’re just in thrall to a different sort of entity.

* It’s a 7-inch tablet, a form factor I’ve never really had adequate opportunity to test out for viability, which if they bring the thing in under $200 is practical. Hell, if nothing else, maybe I can swindle work into paying for it.  That might be the move, actually.

ETA: One added bit of gadget glee – AT&T will apparently unlock iPhones no longer under contract from Sunday on. Which means that on June 25, I will have an unlocked iPhone 4, suitable for going to Europe…

SHOE GLEE:  Surprisingly nonexistent, as the Palladium boots seem to have taken over for regular wear – the waterproofs have worn well since Christmas and the ultralites will probably take over on May 1.  I knew the shoe glee was subdued when  a trip to Portland was mooted and I never even thought of the Dr Martens store.  Now, that said, I’m always in the market for a nice pair of Converse Chuck Taylors lookalikes that actually have arch support or something…

TRAVEL GLEE: Going abroad may not happen this year, but we’ve covered DC and NYC is later this month and there will be definitely one and possibly two trips to Disneyland, and I’m thinking of making it to Vandy Homecoming this year (complete with football game) as a way of going home with something else to do.  That might just be enough to cover it, although the spectacle of London 2012 will probably just make me want to go.  Meanwhile, I’m treating the NYC trip as a dry run for going abroad: travel garments, light loadout, no data service on the iPad to test viability of Wi-Fi only operation, and ideally one pair of shoes (until the wedding anyway).  Come to think of it, I really need to find my loafers – that probably goes under shoe glee…

SPEAKING OF LONDON GLEE: Seven years ago this week, we were on our honeymoon in London, dodging in and out of the easyInternet on the Strand to update our friends on how well married bliss was going.  Seven years on, I have to say it’s still the best decision I ever made…the marriage, not the easyInternet, mind.

The truly disturbing thing about contemporary American politics, to me anyway, is that for the last dozen years or so it’s been possible to win – or at least to prevail – without having the most votes.  Starting from 2000, when Al Gore lost the election on a 5-4 Supreme Court vote and a glitch of the Electoral College despite a popular-ballot winning margin of half a million.  George Bush never broke 50% approval his entire second term in office.  Somehow 60 votes has been normalized as what it takes to pass a bill in the Senate, with the record for filibusters being shattered in 2007-08 and then shattered again in the ensuing term.

But more than that, it’s the way things seem to be going in reverse.  Cap and trade on greenhouse gases and an individual-mandate health insurance plan were Republican ideas as late as 2008 – now they are suddenly beyond the pale wackadoo socialism, if you believe the cable news yukfests. In the last six months, some folks have suddenly decided that freedom of religion means an employer must be able to refuse contraceptive coverage to his employees.  And now we have a mall-cop wannabe who shoots dead an unarmed kid in his neighborhood after being explicitly told by the 911 dispatcher not to follow said kid – and “news” figures are saying it’s the kid’s own fault for wearing a hoodie?

What the fuck is going on here? How is it possible that we can keep jerking the country further to the right – and further back in time – when you can poll people and get majority support for almost all of the things being decried as liberalism run amok? Are we actually going to fight the 2012 election on the morality of a contraceptive that came into the world fifty years ago?

Or is this the Karl Rove offense on acid and steroids – amp up the venom and vitriol, whip your base into a frenzy, count on the indifferent middle being too turned off by the whole nasty process and then have just over 50% of whatever is left? Keep feeding the paranoia that the scary colored Muslim atheist foreigner is going to take away your guns and your daughters and bank on chaos?

This is some scary and irresponsible shit. Largely because there are a lot of rednecks out there who want to need those guns that they’re convinced Obama is taking away, and I’m not persuaded that they will accept a loss in November – enough hype about “ACORN” and “Black Panthers” and “voting fraud” and all manner of code words, and just like that, a certain segment of the population assumes that there is no way Obama could legitimately win re-election.  And if you take the Nixon-Bush “Anything goes” approach beyond just campaigning, that’s when shit turns ugly.

Twenty years ago, if you’d told me we’d be battling the 2012 campaign out on birth control pills and whether to help Israel bomb Iran…well, I would have laughed my ass off.  Not so funny now, is it?

Of which more later.

There was a brief period where I was actually holding up a cassette recorder to a clock radio to tape songs.

Seriously, that was the height of technology in 1984, before Christmas found me getting a dual-cassette boom box from Sears that would be my primary music machine for three years.  It did weird things when dubbing, and the speed was always just a little off with commercially-produced cassettes, but it got me through until Christmas 1987 when the CD age began.

I think that might have been a nodal point.  I had the big JVC boom box with detachable speakers, dual cassette (one with auto-reverse or whatever that was called when it could flip itself to play the other side), a remote control, and of course CD-ROM.  It was just the sort of system one would want for taking off to college – and it was an era when high school alternative meant “college rock.” It was the Age of Athens – REM, old B-52s, Indigo Girls, Love Tractor, BBQ Killers, the like.  And Hoodoo Gurus, Robyn Hitchcock, the Smiths, Gene Love Jezebel, the Smithereens and the Replacements…all the stuff they were playing on campus radio stations other than Birmingham, because nobody had one here.  UAB tried, and for their trouble wound up with a frequency that got handed off for another religious station.

I also went through a couple of Sony Walkmen – I got a very nice one for a summers’ worth of unpaid labor for a day care job that was damn near a permanent contraceptive, and it got replaced once or twice under Circuit City’s absurd warranty-return policy.  Got it toward the end of 1986, and it was a constant companion thereafter, especially on the bus to school and back.  With no car yet (and thus no car stereo) it was the only portable music I had.

And then there was the car, of course, the primitive car stereo that was installed specially RIGHT before the move to digital tuning.  Which would get replaced upon high school graduation with a Pioneer system that included auto-reverse AND music-seek, critical to the driving experience – but not yet.

So that’s where things were as I was on the edge of sixteen and thinking about college in a serious way for the first time.  And it was possible, with the door closed and the music up, to start visualizing what might be out there in the future.  Somehow I came by an MIT course catalog and would peruse not just the course offerings, but the extracurriculars and the campus map.  I started to imagine how things might be in college, and the music fed my dreams, even if my imagination seemed limited to the five-county metro area in other respects.  I definitely wasn’t imagining college anywhere in the state…which was part of the problem later on.  I neglected to put in college applications commensurate with my dreams and imagination, and things turned out about like you’d expect.

I replaced that boom box about the time I replaced the car, in 1993 – and while the Saturn had the stock cassette-based car stereo for its entire run, the boom box would also last over a decade.  The same sound system that woke me up to let me know whether it was too cold for tennis class on senior autumn mornings in undergrad is the system that woke me up to the Sports Junkies or NPR the last spring in DC. It sat on my dresser at Vanderbilt playing drivin’ n’ cryin’ that first week in Nashville, and it sat on the floor of my empty apartment the first week in DC playing Z104’s hourly repetition of Puffy’s tribute to Biggie at 7:30 to roust me out for work.

The first cassette single I ever bought was “Rhythm of Love” by Yes.  It was February ’88, and I kept buying them right up until I left grad school, which is about when I stopped making the mix tapes.  I was on twelve a year through high school and into college, but it tailed off to three or four thereafter, and my last mix tape trailed off halfway through in January 1998 – the last song I ever put to magnetic tape being “Life in Mono.”  So there I was in no-man’s land – and for obvious reasons I didn’t need much for music that summer and fall – until Christmastime, when I downloaded Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” – the first MP3 I ever went online to grab.

That was the transition point.  From then on, music meant the laptop for a year and a half, until I finally invested in a Rio mp3 player – which crapped out inside a year, to be replaced with a similar Nike model.  In the meantime, I would literally plug the tape adapter into the laptop to go for a drive with my digital music.  Ultimately, the digital music problem would be cleared up for good when I got my first iPod as an out-of-nowhere gift from the wife.  After that, it’s iPods all the way down, until the release of the iPhone.

Ultimately, that’s what it’s come to.  Music is stored at home on the central Mac mini, and only some of it is on the iPhone at any given time, but the iPhone is the only thing that plays the music anymore.  No car stereo (the iPhone plays through it), no songs on the laptop (work-only material), no home stereo at all.  My musical life is down to that one pack-of-cards device in my pocket that handles everything else – and with the connection to the iTunes store, I’m as liable as not to acquire my music through it, too.

Odd, how the shift points in my musical technology line up with shift points in my greater life as a whole.

* Where can I cash in all this stock I bought in “Keith Olbermann will part acrimoniously from CurrentTV?” I mean, the guy has amazing talent on camera but is legendary for napalming his bridges behind him at every stop. Besides, he was too big a fish for the pond – Current’s mission for “viewer-generated content” arrives five years too late, given that YouTube launched one year before they did.

* Now what? Tim Goodman seems to think Olbermann could wind up reprising his greatest role – SportsCenter 11 PM anchor – at the notional Fox Sports Channel. Having lost a lot of their regional nets to Comcast, and with NBC determined to turn Versus – sorry, NBC Sports – into a national channel, Fox is apparently going to roll the dice with creating their own ESPN, probably anchored by their copious international soccer rights. Let’s face it, ESPN is a farce, as I have declaimed in detail here, and having KO back doing what he did better than anyone – possibly even alongside Dan Patrick, clutch the pearls! – that would be appointment television, even if it does have a whiff of the Space Cowboys/Joe Gibbs II about it. Hell, I’d watch.

* Today’s iPad experiment: turn on LTE and leave it on and try to use the thing normally. As of 5 PM, and using the iPad for almost everything I’d use the iPhone for other than audio, I’m down to 57% battery and counting, and have burned through a whopping 4 MB of data – which is largely down to the ubiquitous Wi-Fi everywhere except Caltrain and the shuttle bus. And that’s almost an order of magnitude less than the daily limit with a 1 GB/month allocation. And it would mean that Find My iPad would work from about anywhere…but the battery drain associated with constantly pinging for LTE is probably a deal breaker there. Will test a typical day Monday with WiFi only and see how far we get…

* I’m not going to waste a whole post on jacketology again, except to say that I realized last night that the peacoat is basically the only piece of outerwear I’ve purchased in 15 years that wasn’t an outright impulse buy. Even the Saboteur Invincible – stylish and techno-cool but way too much money – was less than a week from find to buy. Maybe that says something about why I like the peacoat so much and why I want to find something else that just works for every situation – dress it up a little, commute in it, deflects mild rain and not be too much for when the sun comes out. Because direct sunlight, not temperature, appears to be the number one determinant of how comfortable I am outside in a jacket.

* The jacket thing has been a bigger deal lately because we haven’t had very much rain this winter. And the delta between low temp and high – hell, the delta between the temperature on the train platform at 7:30 and the high – has been pushing thirty degrees as often as not. Which is doable for a month, in spring, but rapidly becomes a pain in the ass when you have to spend all afternoon carrying the coat you wore against the 45-and-cloudy on the way to work. Of course, it completely explains the REI/North Face style of outer layer that everyone has…but dammit, I don’t want the “I will never ever wear this camping” look. Why does oilcloth have to weigh one Imperial fuck-ton?

* Just pulled this out of my bag on the train platform to finish the post. Which would be undoable in any meaningful way with the laptop or phone. And at a pound and a half, it’s half the weight of my MacBook Air, which combined with the iPad still weighs less than the old MacBook Pro all by itself. Welcome to the future. Again.

Somebody’s going to win about half a billion dollars tonight on that Mega Millions blicky. If all goes as planned, it’ll be a 50/50 split with us and the cousins, which after tax should put each couple on roughly $100 million. RACKS ON RACKS ON RACKS LAWYA.

The plan, obviously, is that the ticket goes in a safe deposit box while we line up our attorneys, accountants, private bankers and make security arrangements, and set up the health insurance we’ll need when we quit work.  Then, we go public, do the required appearance, and go straight from there to the airport, where we throw cash on first-class tickets and go directly out of the country.  From there, it should be pretty easy to stay out of sight for about six months.  No coming back to this country until the furore has died down (and honestly I might just wait until the elections are over).

So what to spend money on?

I suppose once I’m out of the country, I’ll need to splash out on my own laptop (MacBook Air 11!) and a beefy external hard drive (Thunderbolt!) to handle the media content that currently lives on the home machine.  And let’s be honest – I need to hire some nerd to clean up my massive cluster of an iTunes folder with my music and that of the wife, because it’s a mess and there are dupes and what the shit, I can afford to hook some kid with $300 to make it go away.  And then we go straight iCloud, son.  Other than that, I don’t really have that much to buy.  Probably get an unlocked iPhone 4S immediately in the new place, obviously, and a nice wallet of local SIMs for different countries.  Depending on the weather, I’m sure I’ll buy a new jacket because hell, I’d do that anyway.

But when I’m back in the US…that’s a tough one. I think we should move our legal residence to an apartment in Nashville – partly because Tennessee has no state income tax (not that it’ll make a big difference) and partly because I’ll need some place to crash before/after Vanderbilt games (oh yeah, buying tickets, good ones).  We should probably also buy something in San Francisco because we’re going to want to live there.  Everywhere else, probably just get a room.  Owning a rack of houses is bad arithmetic.

I’ll tell you what I want, though: I’m done with driving. Never mind a limo: I just want a London black cab and somebody to drive me around.  Actually probably better make it two somebodies – preferably big burly ex-SAS types with shaved heads and sunglasses and an unsightly bulge under each arm.  After all, somebody’s got to hustle you into the car while the other person returns fire.  I’ve seen the Secret Service in movies.

Really, though, it points up that I don’t need money for stuff. I need money to do things…

This time, I took the iPad to Washington. On the flights there and back, it gave us a couple of movies and a couple of TV episodes without missing a beat. It had all the reading material I needed. I turned on 4G for the first time and got faster speeds than the Verizon FIOS that our hosts have to the house. Battery life was always plentiful and performance was reliably amazing.

The two-year wait was worth it. This thing really is my new portable computer. I’ve pretty much completed the process of defining what goes on the iPhone and what on the iPad and paring down redundancies in media, and as a result I have a metric crap ton more music on the iPhone than I’ve had in ages. It’s easier to pull out of the bag and just go than any laptop, and the battery life is similarly impressive. The only thing I regret is that there’s not an easy way to just stick the thing in a jacket somehow. And even that might be surmountable with the right new piece of outerwear. Which you knew was inevitable somehow.

It’s the DynaBook. It’s the future. I’m glad I got there by 40.

This started out as a post about all the things that are in my life now that weren’t there in 2004 when I left the DMV to move to Silly Con Valley.  Things like iOS devices, or my Levis 501s, or my VW Rabbit, or the number-two crop where hair used to be, or Virgin Radio-turned-Absolute Radio, or actual steel toes in my DMs. Or the fact that I would consider running a 5K…for fun.

But after the past week, and realizing just how long I’ve been gone from DC, I started to think about how long I was in DC.  And there’s actually a fall line there too – you could make it between girlfriends, or you could make it Y2K, or the transition from OS 9 to Mac OS X, or even the rollover from Clinton to Bush II –  but there’s an early age and a later age and almost everything falls fairly simply into one or the other.  Even the 4Ps itself is a later-age phenomenon, for the most part – our first visit was sending off our redundant Y2K contractors.  The old EUS itself, the original band of brothers, were of the early age, along with lunches at Burger King or the Meeting Place, and after-work drinks meant Sign of the Whale or chasing Channels girls. Things like Norv Turner coaching the Redskins.  Or being in the same building with our end-users.  Or staying until 8 to play Quake and Unreal – the old video games went by the boards by the later era, except for the use of Unreal Tournament to demonstrate the power of the G5. In the early era, it was still very important to me to be able to telnet in and get at my personal email via the command line.  The early era was a swirl of different browsers and email clients and attempts to tune just a little more performance out of the computer.

The later years?  Surprisingly, the cigar-shop hangouts were of that age only.  Wi-Fi, too.  Actual MP3 players instead of literally plugging a tape adapter into the laptop for a drive.  Doc Martens with Hawaiian shirts and khakis.  JetBlue. GSM mobile phones.  The MVP year and the accompanying ego rush could only have happened in the later era. The second apartment, with the blue chair and the BBC World Service to fall asleep to – all part of the later era.  The Indiana Jones jacket was absolutely the later era, even if I got it toward the end of the early one. So was my late lamented Timbuk2 bag.  Guinness was a part of the later era – before that, it was all assorted weird cocktails or just Sam Adams and maybe the odd black and tan.

I left DC in 2004 as a very different person than the one who arrived in 1997, and that was a very different person than the one who first walked through the doors of Ireland’s Four Provinces in January 2000.  In a lot of ways, turning 40 means you’re finally old enough to see all these eras stretching out behind, and maybe I needed to have eight years out here to get perspective on how long seven years in the capital really lasted.

The night out itself? Well, I managed to stave off the realization that I might have just buried an old friend – that is, until I was back in bed at 2 AM.  At which point a lot of emotion came pouring out, for a lot of reasons (not limited to but probably including nine drinks).  Not the first time I’d cried over a night at the 4Ps, certainly, because that’s where all the important stuff went down for a very long time – and sure, there were tears because this might be all, but there were plenty of tears of joy because it all happened.  It was all real.  I have pictures, and video, and my ears are still ringing a little and my voice is shot to hell, because we were there. Against all the odds, I got the 40th birthday party I wanted, for one more night in Valhalla, and I will treasure it for always.  So for those of you who were there, in person and in spirit alike – thank you, one and all.

Totally worth it.

I.

Kedren Johnson saved our season with one play.

With that up-and-under layup with under two minutes to go in the SEC title game, the freshman point guard extended the Commodore lead and delivered the final blow of the battle that saw the #1 team in the country humbled – however briefly –  and Vanderbilt at the top of the SEC Tournament for the first time in 61 years.  A championship, a banner, a ring – history.  Proof that this team was there, that it happened, something to take pride in for the rest of their days.

If that game is lost – if the crowning achievement is merely reaching the title game for the first time since the Truman Administration – then the sole lasting accomplishments of this team would be that they finally reached Sunday in the SEC tournament, once, and finally won a game in the NCAA tournament, once.  Media and fans would have almost unanimously judged the season a disappointment.  And they would be absolutely correct.  A team that opened the season with a rank of #7 in the country would have only the equivalent of a participation ribbon to show for – on paper – the most loaded squad in Vanderbilt history.

There are different perspectives.  One camp holds that the amazing talent on hand was squandered by a coach whose in-game talents appear to be limited to drawing up inbound plays under his own basket.  Another holds that for all the talent, they lacked a couple of vital pieces – a premium passer, or any reliable ball-handlers in the clutch, or someone who could reliably break the press. Another holds that the team just had psychological issues that the coach either couldn’t break through or actually brought about himself. Yet another holds that the team was always overrated, that its accomplishments were overachieving, and that Vanderbilt should count itself lucky to have made the tournament three straight years, while a similar camp grumbles that no team can break through when forced to compete against schools with surpassingly congenial admissions standards – or in the case of Kentucky, a glorified NBA scout team.

And some people – by which I mean me – believe we were just plain fucking snakebit. How else to explain the NCAA’s inexplicable ruling that somehow Festus Ezili deserved a six game suspension – and that he injured his foot and served those games on the bench in street clothes anyway?  How else to account for Josh Henderson suffering an injury and leaving only Steve Tcheingang to cover the 5 spot, playing out of his natural power-forward position?  How else to explain losing double-digit second-half leads on multiple occasions and overtime losses to no less than three top-15 opponents?  Or the last three losses of the season all officiated by the very same referee, whose name is synonymous with “Basketball Officiating Random Event Generator”?  How do we get the cutesy draw against a Harvard team under-seeded at 12? How else does the leading scorer in the SEC suddenly lose his shot?  How do you explain a team that seems to have a black cat shoved up its collective ass, right before being thrown under a ladder and into a shattering mirror?

The final numbers: 21-10 in the regular season, 10-6 in the conference, ranked #20 in the country, a 5 seed and then 1-1 in the NCAA tournament.  In the abstract, shorn of all context, it’s not a bad season at all, made great by the addition of 3-0 and a championship in the SEC Tournament.

But the year before, they were 21-9, 9-7 in the conference, a 5 seed and then 0-1 in the NCAA tournament, with an additional 2-1 in the SEC tournament thanks to the divisional system and no bye.  Had that system been in place again, this year’s Vanderbilt would have found themselves playing on Thursday once again.  The bye – coupled with the upset losses of Tennessee and Florida – meant that Vanderbilt only had to play a feeble Georgia and a weakened Ole Miss to get to that one Sunday shot at a Kentucky team playing for a coach who scorns conference tournaments. Put another way, you can make a case that all the luck of the 2011-12 season was used up on one weekend in March.

Last year’s team had a way of blowing leads, famously against South Carolina and Tennessee.  Last year’s team had no answer for the run-and-gun Hogs of Arkansas.  Last year’s team was maddening in its inconsistency and left a cornucopia of “what ifs” in its wake. So you can argue that nothing changed; that this is a team which hit its ceiling last year and barely budged this year.  Or you can argue that this was a team of destiny – you think an uninjured Festus Ezili was worth two extra points against Xavier and Louisville to stave off OT?  And would those two wins have helped the momentum and overcome the sluggish performance against Indiana State?  Would a regular-season record of 24-7, with four wins against top-20 opponents, been enough to maybe scoot into a 4 seed instead and get to take on Montana or New Mexico State in Nashville?  And would a final record of 29-8, a Sweet Sixteen appearance and an SECT title been enough to fulfill the dreams we had for this senior class?

We’ll never know.  And that may be the cruelest fate of all as we stare into next year’s abyss.

II.

There are only seven men left.

John Jenkins has turned down the NBA for us once.  I wouldn’t expect him to do it again.  Nor would I blame him.  He’s given us three great years, he’s made All-American and put his name in our record books.  He doesn’t have to prove anything to us.  If he wants to chase the NBA dream, God bless him and please let him go to the Warriors. Looking down the list, then, here are our players for 2012-13 (the three incoming true freshmen indicated with an F):

Point Guard: Kedren Johnson, Kyle Fuller

Shooting Guard: Dai-Jon Parker, AJ Astroth (F)

Swing Forward: James Siakam, Kevin Bright (F)

Power Forward: Rod Odom, Shelby Moats

Center: Josh Henderson, Arnold Okechukwu(F)

That’s the depth chart.  The front three positions are all staffed by players 6-6 and under.  Kevin Bright is playing in high school in Germany and we have no idea what he’s got to offer.  Okechukwu is a two-star prospect who would be considered a redshirt candidate any other year.  Astroth is 6-6 and 180 pounds, which suggests he needs a few  cheeseburgers at Rotier’s and some quality time in the weight room (and why he goes on as a 2 rather than a 3).

And when I say that’s the depth chart, that’s exactly what I mean – that’s the entire roster. Right now, we have exactly enough players for a full scrimmage and not a single live body to spare, and two scholarships are going begging. Every single player on the roster arrived no earlier than autumn 2010.  There are no seniors.  Odom and Fuller will be juniors.  Three players are true frosh, assuming no redshirts.  The other five all have exactly one year of live basketball under their belts, three of those as true freshmen – only one of our notional front court starters has more than 75 career minutes on the floor. This team is raw. This may be the youngest team in the SEC next year – and unlike Kentucky, it won’t be top-heavy with NBA prospects who expect to go pro after only a year or two.  Put another way: all ten of the players on next year’s team have combined for a total of three career starts.

The only thing we’ll know about Kevin Stallings next year is whether he is the greatest basketball coach in human history, which is what he’ll need to be to eke out so much as a .500 overall record with this lineup. I don’t even want to think about the conference record in a league that’s adding Missouri and will still feature Florida, Kentucky, and up-and-coming teams with talented young coaches in Arkansas, Alabama, Auburn, and – painfully – Tennessee.  As it is, this could be worse than the 2002-03 team that imploded completely – the primary challenge will be to try to keep this team from quitting on the season.  I don’t think they’re the type, but there’s no predicting the effect of getting your brains dashed out night after night after night.

Ultimately, that’s why this season’s expectations were so high.  Including the walk-ons (and walk-ons matter; if you think otherwise look at that depth chart again), we are losing eight live bodies off this year’s roster.  Literally half our team is going away.  The future was now, and in the end, it looked a lot like last year’s version.  Our only solace – the one bone that Dame Fortuna condescended to toss us – was a paved road to a one-game matchup with Kentucky that just happened to have a title attached to it.

So was 2011-12 a successful year?  I suppose so.  Was it a disappointment? Yes.  Did this team underachieve?  Absolutely.  Did they leave a mark on Vanderbilt basketball history?  Absolutely.  It’s all there.  This team is large, and contains multitudes, as Whitman might have said.  And let’s be honest – it’s probably the only team in the league where all the players could tell you who that is.

III.

Look, here are the facts: we are the smallest school in the SEC.  We are the only private school in the SEC.  We are the only USN&WR top-50 school in the SEC.  We are also the only SEC school never to have an athletic program placed on probation.

The hard truth about the SEC is that this is a football league. Not a basketball conference, not a baseball conference, and certainly not an academic conference.  The SEC is about football.  Period. Paragraph. World without end, amen.  And this past season notwithstanding, we are as far from a football school as it’s possible for an SEC team to get.  Even Ole Miss has the Vaught years.  Kentucky went to an Orange Bowl under Bear Bryant.  Vanderbilt hasn’t had 9 wins in a year since 1904 – its last full undefeated season.

But more to the point, we’re not an SEC type of school.  We don’t have the vast army of sidewalk alums who never set foot on campus except for games.  We don’t have the regional merchandising. We don’t have anything remotely approximating the scenes Warren St John captured in Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer. When was the last time Vanderbilt was in a feature game of the week on CBS?As much as it pains me to say it, the move we need isn’t the ACC – it’s the Big Ten.  Consider that every member of the league is an AAU school – so we’re at least associated with academic peer institutions.  Consider that Northwestern has a couple of titles and Rose Bowl berths in recent memory – so it’s not impossible to think a school in our position could compete.  And the Big Ten isn’t sitting on its laurels – it’s got its own network everywhere in the country.

But that’s not going to happen.  The Big Ten seems content to sit on twelve for now – the only way they’d consider going bigger at this point would be for Notre Dame, and I don’t think ND wants to be the fourteenth team in the Big Ten (although I believe they might be the sixteenth…but that’s a wild-ass speculation for another time).  The ACC is already on 14, and while there’s always the possibility of a swap for Clemson or Florida State, I don’t see that as realistic.  And every five to ten years, somebody floats a new Magnolia League, bringing back Chancellor Heard’s 1950 idea of joining Duke, Tulane, Rice and SMU in a sort of pocket-Ivy League that would allow for major college football without the crasser excesses of the contemporary SEC – but that’s probably not going to happen either.

And you want to know why? Because we do very well financially out of the SEC. For years, we have cashed checks for literally millions of dollars from the eight or nine SEC teams in bowl games while we spend December eating turkey and watching ESPN.  Bowls, television, merchandise – we have made the bargain that we will get a certain portion of the loot in exchange for taking the regular beatdown and playing with one hand tied behind our backs at all times.  Which is just what we are doing.  We take our undersized stadiums and our exacting admission requirements and try to go head-to-head with Alabama and LSU and Florida in football, or Florida and Kentucky (and now Missouri) in basketball, or Florida (fucking Gators!) and South Carolina and Kentucky in baseball.  Sometimes it even works out. But most of the time it doesn’t, and we have to go like hell and compete for all we’re worth just to eke out a top-4 finish. Hell, this year we beat Ole Miss and Kentucky in football and swept our non-conference foes; that’s practically an undefeated season by our standards.

So what do we do?  Better to serve in heaven than reign in hell?  Can we be happy with “pretty good” as our ultimate aspiration?  Should we be?  We already get no respect from anyone else associated with the league – obviously you’re never going to get the calls against Bama in football or Kentucky in basketball or Florida in any damned thing, and for all the chants of “S-E-C” from the rubes, none of them really consider us a real SEC program.  We are in a weird space, and how well we can live with that will determine a lot of our athletic future.

Because the window just closed on basketball.  We’re a minimum of three years away from getting back to the kind of squad we’ve had for the last couple of seasons, and even that depends heavily on transfers or recruiting coups that won’t come in time for next year’s team.  The window slammed last year on baseball – eleven players drafted into the major leagues – and this year we’re struggling just to win one in a row, never mind get back to Hoover, and don’t even talk to me about Omaha.  Only football – football! – shows any sign that next year could be better than the last, and there’s no telling what the schedule will be like with the Missouri and Texas A&M add-ons.  Seven wins sounds eminently plausible – nothing suggests Tennessee will be materially better, for one, and you have to think at least one of those single-score losses could be turned around by the returning firepower on offense and a decent kicker.  Our losses were close and our wins convincing, which suggests that at least we’re unlikely to get worse.  Then again, Ole Miss didn’t sit still and Kentucky showed signs of life down the stretch, and Urban Meyer’s Ohio State team is waiting in the wings in 2013.

If you’re graduating from Vanderbilt in five weeks, congratulations.  Three trips to the NCAA tournament and an SEC tournament title in basketball, a College World Series berth in baseball, two bowl games for football, and that’s not even counting the women’s SEC tournament titles in cross-country and basketball. This has been the golden age for Vanderbilt sports.  But the sun is setting, and it’s going to take a whole hell of a lot to hold off the night.