Author: Stagger Lee

Once again, it’s not possible to bang out this from the device itself. But I could send it, because the Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid comes with a 3-month-or-3-GB wireless LTE hotspot, which is maybe the most unfathomable thing. Next to that, the touchscreen iPhone interface, the front and rear collision detectors, the blind-spot warning indicators and backup camera are all plausible, and the hybrid drivetrain and steering wheel radio controls and panoramic sunroof and keyless entry barely rate a mention.

It’s definitely a future jump. When I got the family’s old Monte Carlo handed down after five years and 125,000 miles, it still had an analog dial radio. The Rabbit had a custom stereo put in, but it was a couple of months before the iPhone announcement and only ever had a one-line display. This one effortlessly combines AM, FM and XM without distinguishing on the preselects and has not only a full screen display but Apple CarPlay, so plug in the phone and boom, there’s your Maps and your Podcasts and everything. And as a work colleague pointed out, making the car a dumb terminal and putting the smarts in the phone means that your car’s entertainment system is upgradable as your phone is.

The sensation of the hybrid ride is normal these days, having taken so many Prius trips since that first awkward moment in the airport lot in 2004 when I was trying to figure out where the key went and how to shift gears. Now, it’s nothing to walk up to the car, touch the button on the handle before pulling it, sit down and hit the START button and the car’s all ready to back up without a sound. It feels like a car in the future should feel.

But in many ways, this is a bet. This is the first Malibu Hybrid the dealership has sold. It was the only one on the lot, and providentially spec’d out just like we wanted, but because the true hybrid is new for 2016, there isn’t a lot of data to go by for comparison. We are the beta testers. This is a wager that Chevrolet, back from the dead with the rest of GM, has learned its lesson and gone to school on the Volt and Bolt development, and can produce a modern and contemporary car that will punch its weight with the Toyotas and Fords of the world that have been doing hybrid for a decade. (Don’t forget, Obama dumped his Chrysler 300C for a Ford Escape Hybrid once he started running for President.) This is that rarest of birds in Silicon Valley: an American-made sedan. My immediate family bought only Chevrolet from 1969 until 1993, I was raised on the bowtie as much as I was raised Democrat or Baptist, and this is a leap of faith that an American car company is something other than perpetually teetering on the precipice of doom – or worse, irrelevance.

But it’s comfortable and drives well so far.  I think this could work out. 

When I came out here, there were three conditions: stop in Reno so I could shoot some craps (which wound up with me losing the whole nut in about 10 minutes and learning a valuable lesson about trusting your gut), get DirecTV so I could get Sunday Ticket and keep watching the Redskins (officially terminated many years ago), and buy a new car to replace my 11-year-old Saturn, ideally the New Beetle I was so into.

Today, the last one is crossed off for good.

It wasn’t a Beetle by the time I got it – it was two years later and a Rabbit, built on the Mark V Golf platform (and in every way superior to the Mark IV underpinnings of the Beetle). I fit in it, even in the back seat. It was a hatchback of the type that captivated me on the honeymoon, it was actually made in Germany, it was a perfect “got nothing to prove” sort of car and it felt like a decisive break toward the future, with the blue glow of the dash and the satellite radio built in and the red lights always beaming down over the console.  And in its way, it was a trophy of the new job, because it was bought for 1% under dealer invoice on an Apple promotion. We picked it up in October 2006, and it was the capper of what was a really good year.

We called it Harvey (a name bestowed by my surrogate big sister) but it never really had the personality of my old Saturn. It would be tough to match up to the record; in ten years of ownership I think we maybe took it out of California twice (not counting the odd loop around Lake Tahoe) and never since 2010. It has 116,000 miles instead of the 205,495 Danny finished with, and those are almost all city miles, ground out in a 40-mile radius from home by a 2.5-liter 5-cylinder engine that was supposed to provide 4-cylinder mileage with V6 power but only ever worked the other way round. 2007 and 2008 were a bad time to find out your zippy little compact is only giving you an aggregate 24 miles per gallon.

On the one hand, you could argue that it didn’t deliver much in the way of excitement and adventure and really wild things. On the other hand, the adventures and excitement and really wild things are on other continents now, and I’m of an age and station where the car has only ever been registered at a single address, rather than in three different states in 13 years. And it’s not worth sinking the money that would be needed to fix the sunroof, fix the airbags, fix the transmission, sort out that annoying ticking that we’ll never know the cause of, and God only knows what else over the next three years, or five, or however long.  Better to just get an adult-sized car with a hybrid or electric drivetrain, optimize for comfort and mileage, and get on with life instead of trying to attach cosmic importance to a thing.

So long, Ploughboy Bunny. A good job well done, all in all.

* My shoulder hurts like hell. I strongly suspect there’s a pinched nerve causing it, and I need another MRI (ideally claustrophobia free) before I know for sure if the bulging disc is back, but it’s bad enough that I had an emergency visit to the chiro and got my shoulder taped eight ways from Sunday.  On a side note, add cyclobenzaprine to the list of drugs that stop working for me after 48 hours, alongside Advil, Aleve, diclofenac, Mobic, Celebrex and hydrocodone.

* My phone’s battery has gone to hell in the last couple of weeks. I don’t know if using the external battery pack managed to mess something up, but even after wiping it (twice), conditioning the battery (twice) and setting it up as new, with no backup restore, it still won’t get through an 8 hour day of normal use unless it’s in low power mode. Meanwhile, a top tip for everyone: if at all possible, change your 2 factor authentication to an SMS text rather than a code from an app, because it’s taken me three days to get into all my formerly 2FA services and there’s one I still can’t (the Chorus system at Vox Media, which appears to have no backup solution, so if I can’t restore data to my old phone I’m good and cooked).

* I probably would have bought an iPhone SE by now, except the backorder is still three weeks on every model. That may be enough to keep me on this sinking 6 right now, or at least force me to go through extensive troubleshooting to make sure it’s not the Apple Watch or the Bluetooth headset that’s causing the power loss. But oddly, the experience is making me ever more cognizant of how big this phone really is – when I switched to a borrowed 5S for a couple of days, it felt compact without being too small, and when I went back to the 6, it felt huge and ungainly. Tougher time with the keyboard on the 5S, obviously, but at the same time it seems like the keyboard in iOS 9 was a step backward generally.

* Speaking of mobile technology, it looks like we might be about to take the plunge on that Malibu Hybrid. We test-drove it, it handles well, plenty of pickup, sufficient room inside (barely, in back, but the legroom was better than the headroom), and the bells and whistles in 2016 are off the chart from where they were ten years ago. We’ll see if it comes together. While I’m not looking forward to a car payment again, it’d sure be nice to have something reliable that would go 500 miles on a tank of gas (and this will, believe it or not).

* I have made my commute a little longer in the morning, but in exchange I get a straight shot on the train, less crowding, none of the Palo Alto dickishness to deal with, and a good half hour to drink coffee and get my head together before getting into the office, and I can tell a difference between days when I do that and days when I have to just take the train straight in. Some forms of commuting are just more aggravating than others, and things go a lot better if I don’t have to kick against the bricks first thing on a Monday morning before even getting into the office.

* I’m hesitant to say this for fear of jinxing it…but things seem to be mostly going OK. Disney was great, Yosemite was great (a certain half hour or so in the morning notwithstanding), the long driving road trip portions were just fine, work is under control, politics is shitty but manageable now that we more or less know the score, my breathing is much improved, and maybe just maybe we’ve licked the allergy thing…it’s a lot easier to deal with life when all you have is a couple of obstacles rather than what looks like a straight path but a dozen pebbles in your shoe. It drives home the point: if there are things you do that make your life worse, stop doing them.

* Did I have the first and second place horses in the Derby? Why yes I did. Did I have them in some sort of parlay? Well…nope. Which is why I made a profit of $2 instead of something serious. Siiiiigh.

I stand by my remarks.

This was originally going to be a post about how Silicon Valley Millenials would rather die than get around solely by the use of their own legs and feet.  On any given day, walking down a sidewalk, I have to dodge some combination of bicycles, razor scooters, skateboards, motorized skateboards, so-called “hoverboards” that don’t actually hover for shit, and – in at least one case – a guy with his feet on either side of a single wheel and both hands on the smartphone he was staring at instead of avoiding ramming me. I kind of feel like explaining to these people that the last mile problem is about the last mile, not the last fifty feet, and that it’s the height of dumb shit to ride your bicycle through the automatic doors and into the elevator – but the more I thought about the millenial mobility scooter, the more I drifted back to a very real issue.

“…I just now discovered the word Rejuvenile, based on the book of the same name. “Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes and the Reinvention of the American Grown-Up.” Huh. I don’t mind the cupcake as such, but the cult of obsession around them is a little odd…It was bad enough when my generation was tarred as a bunch of slackers en route to skipping right over us so that the children of the baby-boomers could be painted as the Next Big Thing (that would be the generation of Britney, Paris and Lindsey, FYI), but now apparently we’re all entering our second childhood…and that’s a good thing? Put me down as a Harrumphing Codger if you must, but I’m not sure I see the appeal. I spent my whole life desperately waiting for my chronological age to catch up with my mental age (yes, I was one of those poor cursed SOBs who was “gifted”). I went through eight yards of hell to get to be an adult, and I am not particularly interested in going back…”

That was nine years ago on this blog. In the meantime, that generation that rose up on their cupcakes and electric remote-control skateboards to become the darling of brands and marketing has developed an issue that may have been a problem at other times, but has become even more pronounced as a whole: the most affluent subset of the cohort has become the synecdoche of the whole. Or to put it even more bluntly: you may have forgotten Trayvon Martin was a millenial. So was George Zimmerman.

The screwing Generation X took in the wider world has become part and parcel of The Way We Live Now. The labor market is tight, student debt is crippling, the Boomers still aren’t retiring and the American Dream is reduced to being able to pick two out of the three of financial stability, home ownership and children. This is the New Normal, and it blows. And yet, to look at the popular media, the archetype of the generation born in the mid-80s is one of helicopter-parent-enabled affluence, self-absorption, and an inability to cope with the difficulties and tribulations of living in the real world. You know…rich kids. Same as it ever was.

And that’s rather the insidious bit of it: you can now get all the same 90s-style slacker abuse we got while starting even further in the hole in debt. Set against that, Snapchat frivolity seems like the least of reactions; no wonder the push for marijuana legalization is on in earnest. A dozen years ago, when I first saw Rent, I was in complete sympathy with Benny – who was obviously being screwed by his bohemian pals who didn’t have the scratch to pay for an apartment but were somehow downing all the beer and wine at the Life Cafe. Now, I listen to Pitbull and Ne-Yo and nod in approval – “I knew my rent was gonna be due a week ago/I worked my ass off but I can’t pay it tho/But I got just enough to get off in this club/Gonna have a good time before my time is up” rings true when saving that fifty dollars isn’t going to make a dent in three thousand a month in rent.

Maybe that’s my beef with Silly Con Valley and the city – it’s not millenials as a cohort, it’s the fact that we are a disproportionate magnet for the worst among them, just like the Wall Street gold rush in the 1980s with Stanford standing in for Wharton. A generation ago, kids wanted to be Alex P. Keaton despite the fact that he was supposed to be a parody; now we’re flooded with youngsters who think Silicon Valley on HBO is aspirational instead of satirical. And now you have managers in Utah complaining that people there want to go home at the end of the workday and see their kids and have work-life balance. You have to wonder whether the Valley won’t implode in its own lack of perspective or self-awareness – and you have to hope that it’ll happen before everyone, everywhere, decides that everything should run like a startup.

Because it’s really starting to feel like that’s how it ends up. The Boomers get made whole, with pensions and retirement and Social Security from age 65, and everyone who comes after – everyone born after, say, 1965 – has to rely on 401Ks and the long-term mercies of the stock market (and whatever happens with financial planners or doing it yourself) and the presumption that you’ll have to work until you’re 70, because after all you should be following your bliss and it’s your own fault if you’re not doing what you love. If this truly is The Way We Live Now, we might be in serious trouble.

So it looks like Hulu is making a series out of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s landmark novel of religious-patriarchial dystopia. It was written in the 1980s, if memory serves, and was an obvious reaction to a Reagan presidency and the rise of the Religious Right in a world where Roe v. Wade was only ten years old or so and restricted access to legal abortion was living memory. So you would think it’d be kind of dated now…except that in 2016, we have not only states attempting abortion restrictions by a thousand cuts but prominent businesses and Republicans fighting against birth control on the grounds that a corporation’s religious liberty is infringed if they’re forced to pay for their employees’ slutty slutty slut pills.

This is where I pull another block quote from a prior post on this very blog:

 

…The House returned to a Democratic majority, the Senate to an essentially Democratic majority, and then both majorities were expanded as a Democrat was elected President. The GOP, as constituted for the last two decades, has been taking it square in the face for two electoral cycles.

So how is it possible that the Republicans are steadily becoming ever more conservative, ever more redneck, ever more extreme? How is it possible that we can have Republican candidates for Senate openly talking about “second amendment solutions” to “domestic enemies” in Congress? Or saying “climate change doesn’t exist” as decades of data pile up and the average temps rise? Or saying that rape and incest exceptions for abortion aren’t permissible? Or turning over Social Security to some sort of privatization plan – less than three years after the stock market implosion wiped out billions of retirement dollars in 401(k) accounts? Or talking about all the bits of the Consitution they’d like done away with – things like entire amendments like the 16th and 17th? Or doing away with the entire principle that if you’re born here, you’re a citizen?

I’m not talking about message board wingnuts or isolated basement bloggers, I’m talking about duly-elected GOP nominees for high Congressional office. How – when a “liberal” President is pushing things that were the GOP alternative to Democratic plans twenty years ago – how is it possible that they can keep going further off the crazy end?

And since the economy is still stalled, and the wind is at their back – what’s going to happen if they win? What’s going to happen when you get a bunch of Birchers, birthers, tenthers, and other assorted teabag lunatics actually placed in office, convinced they have a popular mandate to do everything they’ve yowled about?…

 

That was almost six years ago. Since then, the GOP has gotten its Congressional majority, shitcanned its Speaker of the House for insufficient conservative fealty, shut down the government twice, almost defaulted on the national debt while breaking the USA’s AAA credit rating in the process, refused to allow a vote on or even meet with a Supreme Court nominee so they can run out the clock, and is now on the verge of nominating for President a blowhard, self-contradicting, delusional reality-TV windbag with no political background, multiple bankruptcies and divorces, and an openly and avowedly racist fanbase. And here’s the thing: even if Hillary does get elected and kicks Trump’s ass up between his shoulderblades a la 1964 or 1972 or 1984, what’s going to prevent the GOP from saying that Trump was a mistake, Trump was a fluke, Trump wasn’t a real conservative, and now we have to double down and get even more conservative to fight that harridan in the White House? Well, I’ll tell you what’s going to prevent them: Nothing. At. All.  

This is the dream scenario for the modern GOP; putting their A-number-one-gold-medal-super-bitch-empress-devil in the Oval Office will let them raise hell and raise money for at least four years. They know what every wrestling promoter knows: the money isn’t in the good guy winning the belt, it’s in the chase. Nothing but good times ahead for the usual Beltway Bandits and their amen corner in the Very Serious Sorrowful Evenhanded Press. Meanwhile, you can expect a lot more suffering from real people, and not the “real people” strawmen of Thomas Friedman or David Brooks. Real people with real needs who are struggling to get by in a world where every effort at recovery for people making less than $200,000 a year got killed by Republican obstruction.

This is the inevitable result of the GOP’s mainlining of Southern-ness for fifty years. They’ve graduated from prescription pills to morphine to heroin, and after decades of courting Wallace voters and rebranding their base as the Tea Party and engaging in a systematic dismantling of things like political norms, basic logic and empirical fact, they’re finally on to the last stage. Donald Trump as their presidential candidate is the krokodil stage; they’ve smoked so many cleaning chemicals out of foil that the party’s very body is decaying and sloughing off dead tissue.

The risk is that the stupid has finally metastasized beyond any opportunity to heal. Maybe we get Hillary, and maybe we flip one house of Congress on the way, and maybe we stop the bleeding and maybe what’s left of the non-mental-defective GOP comes to its senses and we go on somehow. But maybe we don’t, and this is the beginning of the end.  But it does make you wonder who’s the more stupid: the Trump voter, or the self-righteous prick who insists there’s no difference between Trump and Clinton.

Either way, well, it won’t be my problem anymore in forty years or so, assuming we don’t get nuked before then.

So reading through the old blog, I found a post from six years ago that could do with an update. Therefore:

NOTE: “Then” equals 1991-96, roughly the peak of my sporting obsession. “Now” is 2010.

BASEBALL THEN: Obsessive. Atlanta Braves every day, Birmingham Barons twice a week, on top of all major developments and dialed into the minor league situation for the Braves and White Sox alike.
BASEBALL NOW: Eh. Will look in on the Giants once or twice a week, but rarely for a full game. Vaguely aware of the A’s, esp. if it’s a long night and there’s nothing on TV. Will look at the World Series if the Red Sox are in it. Not really sure who the Giants farm teams are. Barons connection limited to a cap.

BASEBALL, 2016: Will watch the Oakland A’s anytime Sonny is pitching. Will go to the San Jose Giants anytime for any reason. Will probably root for the SF Giants again once Tyler Beede is in the rotation, but not until (because it’s getting to be like rooting for the dealer). Very interested in the fortunes of Vanderbilt baseball and its many alumni in the big leagues. Own a Vandy Sunday jersey (red white and blue America themed).

NFL THEN: Everything, all the time. Redskins obsessive, though unable to see every game. Also a vested interest in the fortunes of (deep breath): Chargers, Saints, Jets, Chiefs, Packers, Raiders, and (later) Jaguars and Titans. Watched every preseason game, every instance of Sunday and Monday Night Football, damn near every playoff game. Obsessive scribbling of plans for realignment/expansion of NFL (including something approximating the actual 8-division 32-team form that finally came to pass in 2002).
NFL NOW: Redskins, either on satellite radio or at my dive bar up the road, plus every time they’re on national TV. General interest in the welfare of the Saints (because of my high school connections) and Chargers (family connection or two). Unadulterated loathing for the NFL as an organization and firm conviction that the Super Bowl is to football what St Patricks Day is to real Irish bars.

NFL, 2016: I get angry if I have to actually watch. One Redskins ridearound per year. Mostly only pay attention to the Skins inasmuch as it informs the escapades of the Sports Junkies.

 

NBA THEN: Everything, all the time. Suns fan, Blazers fan, could name the starting five of almost every franchise, never missed a playoff game or an NBA on NBC Sunday double-header. Could do a passable Marv Albert impersonation. Had Barkley and Majerle jerseys. Obsessive scribbling of plans for realignment/expansion of NBA with an especial eye toward an eventual team in hometown.
NBA NOW: Vaguely aware of Warriors. Even more vaguely aware of Wizards (via podcast of DC sports show) and Kings (because I know Sacramento is in the area and I know people who root for them). Unable to get stuck into actually paying attention, especially with hated Lakers and hated Celtics in prominence.

NBA, 2016: Thanks to Festus Ezili, I became a Warriors fan in the fall of 2012. I’d have to say it worked out OK. Hands down my top local sports affiliation these days.

NHL THEN: Watched Stanley Cup playoffs to conclusion annually. Also regular attendance at minor-league ECHL games in hometown. Occasional scribbling of realignment/expansion plans to include team in hometown (and possibly maximize presence in Canada along the way). Missed half of own college graduation party in 1994 hunched around TV with friends watching “MATTEAU! MATTEAU! MATTEAU!!!” game.
NHL NOW: (crickets)*

NHL, 2016: (crickets)

 

SOCCER THEN: Watched US team in World Cup.
SOCCER NOW: No longer have access to Celtic, but DVR’d every available game when possible. Still casting about for a team in English Premier League. Watched entire 2010 World Cup obsessively thanks to streaming video at work.

SOCCER, 2016: Will attend San Jose Quakes at any opportunity. Regularly DVR games from Tottenham Hotspur and Everton even if I don’t always watch. DVR and watch Men In Blazers weekly. Considering taking in a game in London this August…somewhere.

 

COLLEGE FOOTBALL THEN: Alabama Crimson Tide obsessive. Would watch any D-I game turned on in front of me. Schemed up plans for bowl-based playoff system and conceived experimental “Division IV” for major powers to field non-scholarship one-platoon football teams to replicate old-style football and experiment with rule changes. Wanted Keith Jackson to provide running commentary on my life.
COLLEGE FOOTBALL NOW: Season tickets for Cal, faithful follower of Vanderbilt, vested interest in Alabama if not full attention. Will watch any D-I game turned on in front of me.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL, 2016: I’m out. Will attend Alumni Band Day at Cal, or if they have the Grambling Band coming in to play, but now avoid games wherever possible, including Alabama and Vanderbilt. Gave up a regular Sunday postmortem column on Vanderbilt football at a prominent Vandy blog. I just can’t do it anymore with the game as it’s currently constituted. That said, I will support Alabama in national title games if it’s against a team I dislike.

 

COLLEGE BASKETBALL THEN: Hardcore supporter of undergrad team – pep band, alumni booster club even before graduation, sports editor of campus paper, known as “SF” (for “Super Fan”) by players living in same dorm. Would watch any D-I game turned on in front of me. Obsessive interest in NCAA tournament and NIT.
COLLEGE BASKETBALL NOW: Obsessive follower of Vanderbilt, including alumni gatherings in the city and even a live game vs St Mary’s in 2009 in Moraga. Will be distracted by any D-I game turned on in front of me. Obsessive, all-consuming interest in NCAA tournament, up to and including foolish decisions about buying tickets and attempting to ditch work at the appropriate times to maximize viewing opportunities. Want Gus Johnson to provide commentary on my life.

COLLEGE BASKETBALL, 2016: Tough call.  Kind of punched out, but dragged back by March Madness and an exciting new young coach at Vanderbilt. Stay tuned. This might be a harder one to shake.

Sic transit the GOP.  After a convincing sweep of the “Acela primaries” last nigh, it seems there is very little standing between a reality TV star-slash-thirty year figure of fun and the nomination of a major American political party for President of the United States. This is only possible because of the final meltdown of the GOP, succumbing to the drug overdose of Confederacy that they started getting high on in the Nixon Administration and started mainlining in the 1990s.

The Republican party is without form, and void. If there were any sort of effective leadership available to the party, there would never have been 17 candidates for the nomination running at once. Ciphers and jokes like George Pataki or Jim Gilmore or Bobby Jindal would have been shown the door with a quickness. But as long as there were over a dozen candidates, it was possible for anyone pulling 6 to 8 percent in the polls to believe they had a shot up until Iowa, and sure enough, everyone stayed in, which only worked out for those candidates who already had name recognition.  Only two did, and while the name Trump was its own sort of joke, the name Bush was shorthand for disaster, and a lot of money and resources were wasted in the service of the delusion that what America really craved was a third ride on the Bush-Go-Round.

So. In the absence of any real leadership or guidance, the teabagger elements of the GOP – which were always the base, never some independent entity; the Tea Party branding was a remarkable feat of identity-laundering for Republican base voters – went with what they always wanted anyway: the person who could most effectively sling the shit.  No need for experience, no need for coherent policy, just an endless barrage of talk-radio-style bullshit and a personality and track record that could only be described as a moron’s idea of what a rich person is. No one ever broke the momentum, because the field never consolidated – and even if it had, around whom could it? Ben Carson, another political zero whose entire claim to fame was being a black doctor who told off the President at a prayer breakfast once? Carly Fiorina, whose claim to power revolved around two X chromosomes and a stint as the worst CEO in Silicon Valley and the most inept losing candidate for Senate in California history? Ted Cruz, whose own GOP colleagues hate him worse than being caught in bed with a dead girl and a live boy at once? Too late, the party seemed to realize that John Kasich was the only viable candidate with a sufficiently conservative record – made much less risible by his surroundings – but that ship had already sailed by the time they figured it out.

So now we get Trump. Which is a handy out for the GOP again: if he gets his ass kicked up between his shoulderblades in November, they can write him off as a fluke, a one-off, a freak accident, and not a true conservative anyway – and double-down to the right. The GOP’s big money donors, many of whom may actually believe in Never Trump, will probably stack their money behind congressional candidates in a Stop Hillary movement, ensuring that even if they get a second Clinton in the White House they’ll be able to keep everything tied in knots as they have for most of the last six years. And come 2020, we probably get another Ted Cruz run or something else, because this is all the GOP has left anymore. Had Cruz been the nominee, and gotten keelhauled by the Dems in November, it might have finally broken the back of the Confederates and convinced the GOP that they needed to go a different direction – but just as with Romney and McCain, Trump can be written off as a bad candidate and not a Real True Authentic Conservative, and they’ll keep going down the same road.

The wheel is still spinning, but the hamster’s dead.

April, for me, somewhere became a very reflective month, and not always in a good way. So much is bound up in April 1997, knowing that my career was coming to an end with no plan B to speak of (of course, on April 1 1997 you could have told me “six months from now you’ll be living in the suburbs of Washington DC and taking the Metro every day to your job at National Geographic, when you aren’t spending the weekends driving to see your girl in Akron Ohio” and I would have burned you for witchcraft before you could say “and if you think that’s a show wait until ten years from now”). Of course, ten years on in April 2007 I was suffering from the knee trouble and stress anxiety that would contribute to my leaving Apple. In April 2013 I was suffering the after-effects of the wrong turn work had taken, and by April 2015 I was going to Japan just to get away from the nonsense.

But April 1989 found me in Washington DC, because I spent something like six weeks that semester in out-of-town academic competitions. Jacksonville, Tuscaloosa, and all of a sudden in DC knowing West Point and Orlando were coming. Staying in the hotel where Reagan was shot, going back and forth between the Mayflower and the Omni Shoreham and who knows where all else, and a big dance party at the Old Post Office pavilion where between the band sets, a DJ was spinning tracks. And there’s one song that even to this day captures all of that – the whole sense of “my life is going crazy out of control and there is no limit to the future, and I am doing everything I ever wanted in life with more to come.”

It was “Baby I’m A Star.”

Thanks, Prince.

The run-up to the New York primary was basically the last straw. The spectacle of so many Bernie Sanders supporters screaming that having to be registered as a Democrat to vote in the Democratic primary was somehow a crime of unspeakable proportions – when their own man wasn’t registered as a Democrat this time last year – was an instructive spectacle, as is the proliferation of “Bernie or Bust” types – the millennial equivalent of our own Gen-X and Boomer morons who genuinely thought there was no difference between Gore and Bush and that voting for Nader would only hasten the onset of the revolution.

That isn’t how this shit works.

We go through this over and over. One side commits itself to its deepest true belief, supposedly brings in a lot of new participation and energy, convinces its stalwarts that they’re going to change the world – and then they go out there and get their ass handed to them. Goldwater. McGovern. Jerry Brown in ’92. Ralph Nader in 2000. Barack Obama is no exception; had he gone out there as a white guy named Barry O’Brien, he would have been acclaimed as an inspiring yet pragmatic alternative to a cripplingly-flawed candidate.

“So what changed since 2008?” I hear you ask. A couple of things. For one, there’s less of a Lurleen Wallace feel to the Hillary crew this time: they are not running the same 1990s DLC playbook, they are not in thrall to the white working class Southern vote, Mark Penn is far away from the controls. For another, four years as Secretary of State gives HRC real honest foreign policy credibility of a type you can’t get as a mere Senator, especially in the New York Senator Pothole seat once held by Al D’Amato (not to demean that spot, because the emphasis on local issues and constituent service made it possible for Clinton to establish real workhorse-not-showhorse bona fides and experience). And honestly, it was chastening and a learning experience. She’s not relying on inevitability this time; she’s going out and hustling.

But the thing that really tipped it for me was the hot sauce.

Hillary Clinton is a hot sauce fiend. Famously, for anyone paying attention the last twenty-plus years. She had hot sauce in her bag when Beyonce was still filling her diapers. And yet, because it plays into the meme and the narrative, no sooner had she mentioned it on a trip through Harlem than it became yet another convenient excuse for a lazy media to club a woman they’ve had it in for ever since the 60 Minutes interview and the “standin’ by my man” remarks that happened while I was riding a bus in Central Europe waiting to hear the results of the Redskins’ last Super Bowl appearance. That long.

And for me, something snapped.

And comes now Bernie Sanders, self-avowed socialist from Vermont, reliable Democratic vote but not a Democrat until he decided to run for President, whose most eager supporters seem intent on turning into the 21st century Ralph Nader: the last honest man, the only alternative to an undistinguished mass where Democrats and Republicans are the same and there will be no difference in electing Trump or Hillary.

Horse. SHIT.

I’ve said it so many times it hurts, but I’m going to scream it again: POLITICS IS THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE. IF YOU WANT DREAMS COME TRUE, GO MAJOR IN THEATER.

There is no finish line. There is no place where the lion lies down with the lamb, there is no land of milk and honey and fried catfish for all. It never ends. Election day isn’t the end, it’s the beginning, and the disappointment with Obama about which people are crying crocodile tears is the precise result of thinking that a successful Presidential election means we can all go home because the war is won. The war is never won, because that’s what politics means. People get out there and say they hate politics and politicians so don’t vote for Hillary – the alternative to politics isn’t fucking Kumbaya, the alternative to politics is Somalia.

It’s a job, and a thankless one. You go out there and grind away at the coal face day in and day out, and at the end of the day, your arguing and horse-trading and blood and sweat and tears gets you half a loaf, and then you come back the next morning and punch the clock and do it again – forever. That’s how the political system works, in this country and in every other that isn’t some sort of autocracy. Maybe you don’t get everything you want, maybe you have to take some stuff you don’t want to get some of what you do – that’s how it works. That’s the reason why the people screaming bloody murder about the 1994 crime bill are so full of shit – yes, there was bad stuff in there. There was also good stuff in there, and taking the bad stuff you didn’t want was the price of getting the good stuff you did. That’s why the people complaining about Obamacare are full of shit – yes, it would have been nice to have single payer, and yes, it would have been nice to have a public option, and yes, it would have been nice to have Medicare For All, but the fucking votes weren’t there. You take what you can get, and you come back the next day and fight for more.

Bernie Sanders may understand this. He may not. Increasingly, his supporters sure don’t seem to. I don’t know how many of Hilary’s understand this, and the Democratic party establishment has its own set of issues and could use with a good mucking out (and to be honest, I wouldn’t mind giving Howard Dean the controls again, because his 50-state planning is the reason Obama even had a majority to work with for as long as he did). But you know who does understand this?

Hillary. Rodham. Fucking. Clinton.

I’m with her.