Month: December 2025

I’ve spent a year going into the office to sit at a desk, stare into the middle distance, and then do exactly what I would have done from the front room, or the sofa, or the bed, or the shed, or Gulf Shores, or Nashville, or Prague – because I did. And nothing ever slipped, nothing ever failed for lack of my physical presence. In fact, since returning to the office? Half the support staff has been laid off and incompetent three-ring-binder phone jockeys have been given the keys to the kingdom. I’m still waiting for a review, still waiting for anything but the same across the board raise as everyone else, waiting for promotion, waiting for acknowledgement that we do a good job, waiting for acknowledgement that we even do a job, waiting for the axe to finally come for the oldest system administrator because why do we need an administrator for someone else’s system.

I just about survived the first year of Trump 1 because that was all I had to deal with. There was no work misery as such, or at least no more than the traditional frustrations. Nothing like the second-class citizenship that came from being outsourced. I could just about handle that. And then when we were outsourced, we got a break from a worldwide pandemic and then a ghost of hope that the world would stop getting actively worse, so work was the only real issue. But then the seesaw broke. Now look, both sides are on the bottom.

The attempts to punch out and get some separation from reality aren’t going too well, if the stress dreams are anything to go by. When you dream that the most incompetent part of your org has set fire to your Corvette because they were proactively trying to fix something they imagined necessary, it’s to a point you can’t even rely on going to bed as refuge.

If 2026 is anything like 2025, bugger all, I might take the whole Christmas fortnight off and see if we can decamp to Santa Cruz or something. This is unsustainable.

And that is my Grievance, Aired. Now give me a ball bat for these Feats of Strength.

Anyone who’s seen a loved one deal with stroke can see what’s happening here. The current occupant of the Oval Office is almost certainly taking blood thinners to prevent – or remediate – a TIA, or worse. He can barely hold his head up, his public utterances are the stuff that gets Papaw’s car keys taken away, and the press continues to act as if nothing is wrong at all by comparison to how Joe Biden was branded a senile half-corpse a year and a half ago. The question of whether any one person can take charge of the MAGAtsis going to be a serious concern sooner than later, and it’s the same problem that’s existed for a decade: the Republicans don’t have one person who can take the torch from Trump but at least half a dozen who believe they can.

This is an old old story – half a century, at this point. These things happen when the GOP and the mainstream press can’t accept that they were wrong – about Vietnam, about Clinton, about Iraq, about Trump. So the people who were *right* have to be discredited – because otherwise the press would have to acknowledge their wrongness. And right now, with three-fifths of the country out of patience with the bullshit, the white house press corpse [sic] is as hapless and helpless as ever.It’s going to take so much. The power of billionaires has to be broken, ruthlessly and without ambiguity. A billion dollars has to be treated like a rogue nuke, and as equally unsafe in private hands. the Supreme Court has to be expanded and packed with people who respect the rule of law and reject a blank check for one party. There are entire layers that have to be peeled back to remediate what’s happening here. And it will take the rest of our lives. And it won’t work until enough people are fed up – you need 2/3 of the country to be mad enough to back a change. And while the numbers may be there, or close, the numbers of people willing to take action to turn things over aren’t where they need to be. You need enough people to elect 250 in the House, 54 or 55 in the Senate, a President who can hold their feet to the fire and make it plain they need to vote right, and a public mad enough to let them do what has to be done to clean up the rules and the process.

And we’re going to have to tear down the ballroom, rip down the tacky gold shit, make an affirmative rejection. It happened, and nothing can undo that, but we also need to make it clear that it has been rejected. The bullshit they build in an attempt to gain the continuity with some imagined great past – like all fascists do – has to be hosed down and washed away, and those who made it happen tarred for life. That’s the biggest piece of all: we are going to have to bring back shame, properly targeted and mercilessly pressed, and the kind of people who advocated for revoking women’s suffrage and repealing birthright citizenship need to be more radioactive than David Duke in 1991. “Republican” needs to be synonymous with “pedophile” for the rest of our days. The last decade – hell, the last three decades – need to be looked on like the Gilded Age or the Know-Nothing era, an age of kakistocracy and corruption without parallel.

I’d like to see things on the way back up before I die. It’s not much to ask.

There really aren’t words.

Vanderbilt won 10 games for the first time in the 135-year history of the program. They hung the most points on Tennessee since 1923. They only lost two games, both on the road to ranked opponents, and went undefeated at home. They beat four teams that were ranked when we played them. They are currently the #14 team in the country.

Diego Pavia may be going to NYC for the Heisman ceremony. I have no expectation of him winning it, but he should absolutely be there. And he deserves a statue on campus, because he believed in Vanderbilt football more than we believed in ourselves. He sued the NCAA to keep playing football for Vanderbilt. Read that sentence again.

We are playing with house money. Even if we lose whatever bowl we go to, we won 10. No real difference between 10-2 and 10-3, and 11-2 would be incredible. Owing to the bullshit farm that is the College Football Playoff, the games where a similarly-ranked SEC team might normally expect to play are now off limits (the Cotton, the Peach) or are not on the board because of the overexpansion of the SEC (the Citrus, possibly even the Outback or Gator Bowls). It’s entirely possible we could wind up in the same bowl we got with eight wins. Or six. It will suck, but only a fool expects the SEC to do right by Vandy in any instance.

But it happened. We all saw it. They went out there, fought Tennessee to a draw for a half in Neyland Stadium, and then ran them out of their own house in the second half. It would have been ashes in the mouth to tie our record for all-time wins and then lose to the Vols when history was in the balance, but it didn’t happen.

And now, Jared Curtis – by some measures, the #1 prep prospect in the country and certainly in the top five of five-star recruits – flipped at the 11th hour to Vandy. The kind of player we would never have gotten, the kind of player I said we should just cheat and open the checkbook for, a player who opens at least the tantalizing possibility that this is not a fluke, not a flash in the pan, not entirely down to Pavia, but a real change in Vanderbilt football and a new floor of seven wins and a competitive future…

This could be the beginning of the age of gold. Right now, Vandy men’s and women’s basketball are both ranked and both undefeated – but not ranked as high or with as many wins as Vandy football. If there was any doubt whether Candice Story Lee had made her bones, she is now the Goldmother and no disputing it, and well earned.

But the bigger thing for me is that I got pulled back in, in a way I never expected to. I was done. I had accepted that our future consisted of being a feeder team for bigger programs to fleece. I never expected that they’d find the money to make payroll against the rest of the SEC, let alone find guys willing to stay a couple years and close the deal. It’s hard to be invested in something when you can’t tell if the people in charge care about it or not, and that was an open question for decades at Vanderbilt. But for better or worse, you’ve got to make uncapped salary and unlimited free agency work for you…and we did.

I bought a #2 jersey. First current Vanderbilt jersey I’ve purchased in twenty-plus years. But I will treasure it because one undersized spitfire from New Mexico believed in Vandy enough for all of us until we came around to his way of thinking.

Diego Pavia, the greatest football Commodore of all time. Well done young man.