Author: Stagger Lee

The Supreme [sic] Court ended its term today with the capper on two days of predictable rulings. Affirmative action in college admissions (for people who aren’t donors or legacies or athletes): gone. The Biden administration’s attempt to make it easier on people who had to take out loans to get through college: gone. The right to discriminate against someone just because you say it’s your religion: enshrined, based on what turned out to be a fictional scenario.

After decades of decrying the Warren Court as some sort of unelected superlegislature for daring to enforce the law as it was written, the Roberts Court – which is really the Alioto/Thomas Court – is merrily shredding the entire concept of stare decisis and wiping their ass with the fragments. The Warren Court established over and over that the power of government cannot be used to shit on people who are different than you, and the R/A/T court has established that the government has no power to prevent private institutions from shitting on people who are different than them. Soft secession again: the Confederacy re-established without giving up the federal sugar tit, and California and New York will foot the bill for Tennessee and Florida to maintain white supremacy in perpetuity. That’s the plan.

But then, that’s the legacy of having handed over the reins to a racist criminal because the people were too stupid and indifferent to prevent it. Utter shamelessness is no longer disqualifying. Criminality is not disqualifying. Demonstrated fraud and falsehood is no longer disqualifying. Outright racism is no longer disqualifying. And the fact that none of those things is disqualifying means that the value system of this country is broken beyond repair, and broken by the people who cried crocodile tears longest and loudest over “values.” In the end, the only thing they valued was keeping power from anyone unlike them. And it shows. Because now the goal isn’t to get more people to vote for you, it’s to disenfranchise and disempower anyone who won’t.

Every election is now about containment. Hold the boomers at bay until they die, and re-write the world without them. And then, take the power from the rednecks and the car dealers and the venture capitalists until they accept that everyone has to pay the freight and everyone has to be allowed in.

We might not get away with this one.

So there is a research firm out there that was willing to pay me $400 for four and a half hours of opinions on electric vehicles. These people are fools, because I have opinions for a lot longer than that for no charge whatsoever (as the almost 17 years of this very blog will confirm…and the notion I’ve recorded a third of my life here is a whole lot of “Of Which More Later”), but it took very little time for me to turn around and hand that cash over to American Giant for a fleece zip-up and three of their new Everest T-shirts.

The fleece has been on my list for a while since it was announced. My employer has given me damn near half a dozen fleeces in the last four years, and I have given them all away to the homeless wherever possible. But this one is American made and does not come with any branding from an employer with whom my relationship is charitably described as “troubled”. I did enjoy the North Face fleece that was my first garment from them, and the last one I disposed of, and I think that’s why I took the plunge to buy this one. Good extra layer, goes under the M-65 or can be stashed in the trunk, whatever. That’s not the big thing.

The Everest T was advertised in the paper catalog months before it became available to order. It is a loosely-cut crewneck T, optimized as a main shirt rather than undergarment later. But the unique selling point of the Everest T is that it is 15.2 oz cotton. By comparison, a typical “heavyweight” T is about 8 ounces per square foot. The super-hardcore manly-man “cotton armor iron wear” sort of work T generally tops out at 10 or 11 ounces. Fifteen ounce cotton is usually associated with terms like “canvas”. It is, hands down, the heaviest T-shirt I have ever owned and arguably the heaviest shirt by fabric weight I have ever owned.

And it is magnificent. The white one – which I bought when I thought no other colors were on offer – looks like something off the cover of a Springsteen album. I only need the one; the other two in a sage green and a light rye color are far more suitable for daily use. They wear like a weighted blanket for the torso. It feels like the T-shirt that’s been missing my entire life, the final replacement for those couple of American Apparel Vermont Army T’s bought back in the Apple days and jealously guarded ever since. It sounds insane to pay $60 for a t-shirt, but when it feels like a T-shirt you can genuinely wear and have for the rest of your life…there you go.

And that’s been the metric for quite some time. I don’t have any problem spending money on something I plan to have and use for the rest of my days. It’s what makes me antsy about buying the Nokia 2780, no matter how tempting it is to have a modern LTE flip phone – because it can’t possibly last more than four or five years until LTE frequencies start getting replaced with 5G, and it’s a random gimmick. It would make more sense to save that $90 and put it on an Apple Watch Ultra, which would have a bigger screen, a bigger battery and the kind of cellular connectivity to use it as the shutdown-night phone…which would itself only be good for what, five years? Tops? My Apple Watch Series 6 is not particularly long in the tooth, and a battery replacement would see it working well for the foreseeable future, so how can I justify dropping that kind of cash? Against that, $500 for a custom lightsaber seems less frivolous than $800 for a five-year watch.

And this is what made me think about Star Wars, and how Star Wars is basically a scarcity economy. Things get repaired, get mended, get used for decades or centuries. They have advanced technology, but they don’t have plenty, and it shows. Rey is using a lightsaber her mentor’s father built fifty years earlier. Han and Leia are honeymooning on a three hundred year old starship. I can’t buy a damn phone without being required to replace it in five years because I either can’t get the frequency coverage I need or can’t plug it into the new laptop or because it’s not getting operating system updates any longer.

Now if someone wants to give me a flip phone with a removable battery and a replaceable cellular module to keep up with 5G, 6G, whatever it takes, and it could be made up-to-date for shutdown night for ten, fifteen, twenty years as the phone of last resort? Then we could talk. But for now, that’s money that could go on another Everest T that will last me the rest of my life.

Go back to 1999, the era of the Golden Convergence, when everyone was convinced that the PC on your desktop and the TV in your living room were going to combine into one big push-stream information furnace. Tell them there that in 25 years, the PC and the TV will converge into a headset that weighs a pound, fits over your eyes, and gives you utterly realistic windows hanging in space with your work in them or screens that can be as big as a house to watch movies on. It would seem like the most natural evolution of things in the world and the obvious next step.

This is why that 2007 rollout of the iPhone is up there with Doug Englebart’s 1968 “Mother Of All Demos” – Steve Jobs and Apple shifted the paradigm and moved the epicenter of the computing experience to the palm of your hand, and made the smartphone the default computing experience for the whole world. The only things we don’t use the phone for are for actual productivity work, or for kicking back and looking at TV and movies on a big display.

Hm.

It’s a mistake to think that the Vision Pro, publicly unveiled yesterday in an event Apple clearly intended to be in lineal descent from the Mac and the iPhone, is supposed to do everything. It is not. They did not show it being used for anything you’d routinely do with a phone other than maybe taking pics of the kids and looking at them. All of the things the Vision Pro does are things that you don’t want to have to do on a 6 inch screen. In so many ways, the Vision Pro is an attempt to take a desktop computer with you.

I mean, think about it. Most of us plug our laptop into a larger display for actual work work. More than one, sometimes. I hate having to have a laptop bigger than 13”, but that’s simply not enough screen at my age when you need to have Zoom and Slack and a browser open with the Jamf console and maybe CodeRunner and Terminal, never mind Outlook or (spits) Teams. Put this thing on, and all of a sudden, you are surrounded by the vision of computing that really began with Minority Report and tool full form in every Marvel movie: multiple virtual screens hanging in mid-air with everything you want surrounding you on top of your normal environment.

Facebook’s approach to VR has been to ship a minimum viable product and rely on hype that someday it will be useful for more than avatar chat with legless torsos. Their plan is to create a Yugo, sell it cheap, and hope people will snap it up on the promise it’ll get better. Apple is selling the Cadillac experience, something you can actually look at and say “ooh, that’s kind of cool” and “wow, that would be neat” and then implying that the price will come down to Ford Escort levels sooner than later (did I just date myself again? Woof) – and on current form, if you look at the iPad and Apple Watch experiences, it stands to reason that you should be able to get the equivalent of today’s Vision Pro for a price closer to $2000 by Christmas 2026 at the very latest.

And the thing is: everyone who looks at the thing in person and uses it says the same thing – it’s a demo, yes, but an exceptional one that quite frankly kicks the shit out of everything else in the AR/VR space. Yes it’s too expensive now for mass market, yes we don’t have an obvious killer app that makes this a must-have in the spirit of Pagemaker or Uber or Instagram, but even the most hardened cynics in the industry with the highest expectations have conceded that Apple has not gone frog-sticking without a light. There’s something there, even if we won’t know exactly what for a few years.

And quite frankly, they need the next thing. The smartphone crossed the finish line a decade ago, and while so many of the tweaks and gimcracks added to iOS in 17 are genuinely welcome and useful, they’re tweaks and gimcracks. If it weren’t slow as balls and riddled with bug vulnerabilities, I could pull out my old first-gen Moto X and have a satisfactory phone experience using Slack and Instagram and Reeder (okay maybe not Reeder) and play back music and podcasts and never be bothered. There’s nothing I need from my iPhone 13 mini, other than compact size, that I can’t get from the five year old iPhone X that is being sawn off by iOS 17. The only existing Apple product that intrigues me is the Apple Watch Ultra, and that’s mainly because it’s bigger and has a huge battery (cellular would be Very Nice To Have but until one of my phone carriers can support it, there’s no point).

Which brings us back to the other problem: my AirPods Pro were bought in October 2019, replaced under warranty in March 2022 (probably with refurbs, let’s be honest) and don’t have the battery life they had. My Series 6 Apple Watch was bought in September 2020 and benefits nontrivially from the addition of low-power mode. I’ve had the iPhone 13 mini a year (bought six months after release) and am already contemplating a battery replacement – and although I still intend to ride it into the ground, I suspect that by 2026 I’m going to need a bigger phone just for ease of reading, never mind battery life. If you have to replenish the ecosystem every five years, there will be a certain urgency to try to bring the price down on all of it if you can (which is a big part of how people end up buying a new $200 Android phone every 18 months). At some point, you’re going to look at the ecosystem and say “is there a piece of this I can drop” – for me, it was the original Series 0 Apple Watch, and I got by fine with a Fitbit for two years instead. If I were to wind up on a Vision Pro, that would probably be the death knell for the iPad, and the next iPhone would just have to be bigger. Apple was more than wiling and able to cannibalize its own products when it was just a question of migrating from iPod mini to iPod Nano, but will they be able to convince people to add that much to their every-X-years Apple rent?

I mean right now, the goal is to get at least three years out of every device and four out of everything with a touchscreen. By rights, there shouldn’t be a new watch on the horizon until next fall, there shouldn’t be a new phone on the horizon before fall 2026 and there shouldn’t be a new iPad in the mix…well, maybe ever at this rate, but definitely not before 2029 or so. We’ll see if Apple can make the Vision Pro indispensable…and if so, at whose expense.

I have way too many Yeti drinking vessels. I started with a 20 oz tumbler, which was appealing because it was insulated and dishwasher-safe (unlike many if not most insulated tumblers). One thing led to another, and sometime lately I realized I had eight different Yetis, including one I bought by accident and one I forgot I had. So this is just a Keltner list in inverse order of utility.

10 OZ TUMBLER: this is the one I bought my work teammates as a gift when we successfully deployed Jamf during the pandemic, aka “how we caught the snipe”. It’s endlessly versatile: cocktails, coffee, cold drink, an overflow cup, a go cup, fits in a pocket or the car cup holder. The only real disadvantage is that size: even though it’s actually 11 ounces, I’ve done shots that size. It is in fact ideally suited for travel, whether for morning coffee or “I’m going to discretely empty the rest of my pint into this before I walk back to the lodge.” For all that flexibility, though, it’s not the best thing for home, because you have to constantly keep refilling it. Still, if you keep refilling, you don’t have to wash.

16 OZ TUMBLER: this is my daily driver, the one I have worn to a frazzle. Like the 20 oz tumbler that preceded it, it actually holds 18 ounces, a comfortable half-liter, which is the perfect balance of size: good for a beer, good for morning coffee, good for iced tea or soda in human portions (learn, Euros). And the tapered stackable profile means it fits any cup holder, which the 20 oz version didn’t (at least in the Malibu). Ironically, being the one I can’t do without means it gets surpassed by more specialized other ones in regular use, especially in warm weather…

35 OZ MUG: Also known as “Veronica II” or “the Redneck Guzzler.” This replaced the 30 oz “Veronica” that I bought when I first tested positive for COVID-19 and needed to minimize my trips inside. I’m not being funny: 35 ounces is a lot. (It’s closer to 34, a comfortable bang-on one liter). The post-COVID role for Veronica was meant to be as a travel mug for long hauls in the car, and this does the job well: you need that handle and straw to make it easier to handle something of this size. When not traveling, it’s just the right size to throw in one family-size tea bag before bed and let cold brew overnight in the fridge, and with the coming of summer, it has become the principle iced tea vessel. The gaping maw makes it easy to hand-wash as well.

10 OUNCE ROCKS: actually holds 12, which makes it perfect as a rocks glass or as a serving size for a brewery growler or coffee cup. I forgot I had it because it was in with the camping supplies for a couple of years, but it is better suited for home use than its counterpart above. For one thing, it’s easier to scrub out, which is important with coffee residue. For another, it doesn’t fit in a cup holder, and you’d probably want more than that anyway. But its greatest utility to me is as a bedside cup of something (usually iced tea) to gulp in the morning when I’m too parched to work my mouth. It’s also the chosen instrument when you need to pour out the tailings of another Yeti to repurpose it as during the morning coffee-to-iced-tea transition.

18 OUNCE BOTTLE: this was bought when I wanted a water bottle to go back and forth to work. It’s good for that, and for other things besides; as long as you leave the cap off, you can use it for most anything you’d use the 16 ounce tumbler for. it’s basically uncleanable by hand, though, so you’d better make sure you don’t crud it up with stuff the dishwasher can’t handle. And while its screw top makes it the only thing that can go in a backpack, it also means you shouldn’t try to put carbonated beverage in it (as I learned, to my cost. Hercules couldn’t have got that lid off.) Even though it’s less concealable than the 10 ounce tumbler, I feel like it would make a very good keep cup for travel in its own right, and I would probably go on a road trip with it and the 35 as my only drinking utensils. It may wind up on my next Disney trip, whenever that is, especially since I do have a belt holster for it.

24 OUNCE MUG: Now we get to the limited utility stuff. This was my late mother-in-law’s, and I am loath to get rid of it for just that reason, but it’s mostly been used as the thing where I brew two family teabags into enough concentrate for a 64-ounce pitcher. It doesn’t fit a cup holder, and I won’t put alcohol in it, but it’s a nice bonus size for coffee in the morning if necessity requires (and means it could be part of substituting for the 16oz daily driver, although I find it significant that it would take three or four things on this list to replace the 16.)

14 OUNCE MUG. This was bought in a moment of mental abstraction during the pandemic, when I thought I might someday be back in the office. It’s meant for office coffee use: too wide to take a standard V60 dripper, it’s meant to be poured into from pot or dispenser and then wide-mouthed enough to cool quickly, while still having a lid that can be popped on to take down the hall to meetings without spills. I would probably have given it away by now except that it has the old star-V Vanderbilt logo on it, and they don’t make those anymore. So now it reposes with the camping gear, where it can be useful for coffee or whiskey or oatmeal alike.

10 OUNCE WINE TUMBLER: the least useful of them all, this one actually holds only 9 ounces of liquid. Great for wine, but as the husband of a teetotal wife who myself gets heartburn for red wine, this is unlikely to ever see a lot of use. It was ordered as the maquette for the 25th anniversary EUS commemorative markings, though (which appear on the Redneck Guzzler), so to give it away would feel a bit awkward especially in the wrong hands. Still, i don’t need EIGHT Yetis, so I suspect it may wind up re-homed at some point.

Phew. That’s a lot. That’s actually too much. I could almost certainly survive with just the 16 oz tumbler, then maybe the rocks glass. Still, it’s nice to have options, especially with Veronica II. But the fact that I could give away three tomorrow were it not for sentimental attachment seems like a significant data point.

I dumped the Ivory app off my phone this week. I can still access both my Mastodon accounts over the web, if I need to look, but there has been no uptake for Mastodon from the people I needed to move there. Too many friends have replaced Twitter with nothing at all, for better or worse, and my friends are of an age where that makes more sense than looking at Bluesky or Picnic or whatever the latest alternative is.

Part of the problem, honestly, is that Twitter’s engineers built a system that failed mostly safe. There are numerous technical issues with the site, but it can be kept limping along in day to day use. It’s only when they try to do something exceptional – like the DeSaster – that things conspicuously break. There has been a steady slow degradation, but if you have a private account following only friends and make a conscious effort not to click on the For You tab, you can still approximate a reasonable experience for now.

Outside that bubble, of course, it’s a disaster. If I use a VPN to Europe, or Safari, it’s mostly dog pictures and soccer news, but for whatever reason, going to Twitter with Firefox on a US IP address offers you a cavalcade of anti-woke zombies, crypto hustlers and general shitposting before you even try to log in. Twitter’s target audience is the well-off fifteen year old boy with no positive male role model and plenty of time for gaming, because that’s who runs it.

The wild card in all this is Instagram, which I crawled back to for want of a viable alternative. It’s still where’s it was in 2016: the safest social network, thanks to only accessing it through the mobile website to cut out the preposterous avalanche of ads. What’s interesting is that Facebook is apparently serious about “Instagram for text”, aka Barcelona or P92 or some such, which would basically be Twitter but using your Insta account for credentials.

And this is a huge deal, simply because people already have Instagram. People already know who they follow on Instagram. The people I miss on Twitter – Greenock Morton Football Club, the San Jose Giants, Vanderbilt University – they’re all on Insta and would have very little trouble migrating their text posts there as well. That might be what it takes to dislodge Twitter: just shift into something else you’re already using. And if people were to do that, I’d be hard-pressed not to pop the app on my phone and call it a day.

And then there’s the wild card, one I described with Announcements ™ last year. People on Signal have not really taken up Stories, but I have a lot more people on iMessage than Signal, and if Apple is adding a journaling app to Health, it’s a short hop to tying everything together in some kind of sharing service. Maybe I’m just desperately trying to will Pal About into existence, but that Cocoon app is sitting out there untouched and un-updated and could probably be bought for a song as part of the framework. It would be nice to have some way to have an ambient presence of friends in your life, especially at an age and in an era where the effort required to maintain the ties can be more than you have in the tank at day’s end.

In any event, it’s important to keep eyes open here. Just because Twitter is Trump and Facebook is Bush doesn’t mean the latter wasn’t a disaster. It’s just the the former turned out to be even worse. And we won’t get better until we wrench the wheel away and demand better.

It sounds like we might have a deal on the debt ceiling that also sorts next year’s budget and takes the next debt ceiling threshold out into 2025. It also sounds like Biden played his hand about as well as could be managed under the circumstances – say what you want, but the old fella has been at this for a while and knows what he is doing. There’s something to be said for experience.

See, Uncle Joe was holding a bad hand. There were options, like the 14th Amendment declaration (which would probably wind up in front of a known bad and hostile Supreme Court, and who knows how quickly a ruling would come) or minting the platinum coin (with completely unknown results; akin to Phil Coulson holding the Destroyer blaster and saying “Even I don’t know what it does”). But there was nothing that could definitively stave off default, because it’s the market that decides how bad a result that it. And who knows what the market will do – but given that America’s credit rating was sandbagged in 2011 just for coming within 72 hours of default, it’s safe to assume the worst.

The other thing – and the one that still has me worried – is that Kevin McCarthy is the weakest Speaker of the House in history, with no ability to deliver his own side at all. Any deal is at the mercy of support from Democratic votes. His army of car dealers, racist realtors and prophetic rednecks doesn’t actually know what the debt ceiling is or care about the consequences, they just want to own the libs. And cutting a deal is not owning the libs, especially when there’s a very real chance they could tank the economy and prevent Biden being re-elected in 2024. Republicans don’t care about the consequences for others, even for each other, or else we wouldn’t have had a million dead from Covid-19.

And the deal still hasn’t passed. A few people are weakly making noise, but if the former guy starts braying again, who even knows if there are ten GOP congressmen to vote with the Democrats to close the deal. We are five days out and everyone seems confident that matters are sorted, but that’s the problem with situations like this: they don’t fail safe. That is the key flaw in American democracy: it has been damaged and sabotaged to the point where it no longer fails safe. If there is no debt ceiling vote, we default and destroy the economy. If the electoral college does not reflect the popular vote, there’s no alternative. If one party abandons all concepts of shame and responsibility, there is no way to hold a violent insurrectionist to account.

I’ve written before about the minimal steps necessary to restore something approximating democracy – expand the House of Representatives to ten times its size, expand the Supreme Court to a minimum of 13 and work up some form of mandatory retirement – but at the heart of the process needs to be restoring an American system of government that doesn’t set the world on fire if it breaks. The lesson of the 21st century is that decades of deferred maintenance has left us in peril, and I’m running out of room to run further.

Another debt ceiling crisis, twelve years on, brought on by a House in the hands of mental defectives and a press unable to articulate what the debt ceiling is and what default would really mean. It occurs to me we might not get away with this one, because the GOP is too fucking stupid to care whether the hostage dies, and the public is too damn dumb to know who to blame.

The thing that annoys the shit out of me is that the Democrats have given ground every single time. Obama actually negotiated with terrorists, to our cost, and now they are back – to face off with a genial old Washington hand who still believes that we live in a world where bipartisan comity can be achieved in the face of the evidence of the last thirty years. No one who served in the Obama administration can realistically think that the teabaggers and their even more explicitly racist heirs can be good faith partners in a compromise.

But in the end, he’s all we have. Because we had to have a candidate who didn’t frighten Ed Earl Brown. Sure, plague and economic disruption and who knows what, from an administration more corrupt than any in history and probably in thrall to Russia, but if the alternative is a woman? Or someone of color? So because the median voter is ignorant and thick and kind of racist, we had to bring on the safest most unthreatening white man we could expose to the rust belt.

And the thing is, we have to do this because we didn’t excoriate the Republicans who forced an impeachment on Clinton despite being repudiated at the ballot box when they had their finger on the trigger. We didn’t come down like a load of bricks on a Bush who won with fewer votes than his opponent, and then we didn’t do anything to hold his party to account for endless war in Iraq and indifference to economic calamity. We didn’t demand that Mitch McConnell and his minions account for every redneck racist in the party, hang them all around his neck and demand that the GOP answer for every white supremacist the way Democrats had to answer for every minor league rapper or every Berkeley city councilperson. We didn’t treat Texas the way Fox treats California, or Florida the way they regard San Francisco.

In short, no one ever told the Republicans that it’s not okay to rely on the votes of the Klan, that there are consequences for picking a senile reality-TV rapist as your champion, that we live in a society and some things are beyond the pale. Our idiot limp-dick media stuck to all they know how to do, which is sports reporting. And now we live in a nation with cancer too bad to easily remove. All we can do is treat it, slowly and painfully, and hope it’s enough to stave off the advance of the Reaper another month, another year, another two years. And now every election feels like the one where if we lose, we lose forever – but if we win, we have to come back all over again in two years. We have to win every time, or we die. The cancer only has to win once.

We were two weeks exploring the vast geography of the American southwest. It’s not the first time. I’ve passed through some combination of Utah, Arizona and Nevada three times before – once on a 9000-mile three week family odyssey in 1988, once on a cross country jaunt in a grief-fueled fugue state in 1998, and once on my way out here for good in 2004. This was a COVID-delayed road trip, something we’d wanted to do for a while, a less expensive and easier-to-manage alternative to a big trip abroad that would preserve our flexibility to maybe meet up with friends later in the year. Of which.

We took the hybrid, not the EV. For good reason. There is a realistic ceiling on how far you can reasonably drive in a day and it’s around 400 miles or so. While the EV is a fine vehicle in its own right, its maximum range is about 270 miles, and that’s not freeway mileage either. Which means you have to be able to start from a full battery every morning, drive about three hours, and then be prepared to stop and power up to full again. I can’t see doing this kind of trip with an EV until charging is extremely fast and very ubiquitous – and in places that can only be very charitably described as purple, don’t hold your breath.

Honestly, I was expecting a lot more foolishness. I only saw maybe half a dozen Trump shrines, almost all along I-40 between San Bernardino and Kingman, in exactly the sort of meth-desert you’d expect to find the hardcore. Then again, Utah doesn’t seem like the kind of place that is all in on TFG anyway (I have my opinions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and they do not reflect well on my tolerance or equanimity, and I am working on that, but I will allow that they are not the Trumpy sort). In any event, we managed not to disappear into Ameristan for two weeks, and that’s not nothing.

The big mistake, though, was that I predictably overpacked. You have a little more wiggle room with a car – take the extra pair of shoes! You can have more than one ball cap! – but when I’m emptying the enormous duffle bag and finding things I forgot I packed, I clearly overpacked. I could have and should have cut my loadout in half and I would have been bang on perfect. As it is, I have once again managed to rack up several things that are 90% of what I need in a failed quest to find something 100% (in this case, the blue Uniqlo blazer from NYC eleven years ago that went missing. Would that I’d lost the white one instead.)

I was expecting more trouble from my bad shoulder with all the driving, but I think having a new mattress at home helped. There were also a couple of really nice beds. Then again, there were some very not nice beds, including one at a Best Western near Bryce Canyon that provided me arguably my worst night’s sleep in 40 years. After that, I almost felt entitled to the 60th floor of the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas with its cushy bed and whirlpool tub. But all that is neither here nor there: I survived two weeks on the road in better shape and at an older age than my parents handled that three weeks in 1988.

That’s another thing: that trip was two-thirds of my life ago, and I spent most of the trip playing classic alternative on SiriusXM that evoked memories of those long-ago days. And I remembered how I finished reading “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” the day before we reached Little Big Horn, and remembered how I got to be the way I am. That length of drive gives you too much time to reflect, something I’d forgotten in the last twenty years or so, and I don’t think I’ll be behind the wheel for more than three or four hours at most for the foreseeable future if I can help it. (Or wearing socks. It’s summer now.)

As for the trip itself, the two best parts were the train into and out of the Grand Canyon (if you’re not a hiker, the canyon itself is an overnight at the very most, and it could just about work as a day trip from Williams) and the experience of Zion. Springdale Utah is a delightful little tourist town of maybe 500 residents, amply equipped with everything you need to spend a day or two drinking craft beer and riding your e-bike up the canyon and back, and it’s like an alt-version of Yosemite Valley. Of everything we saw, it’s the one place that I immediately decided I would go back to no questions asked. Everything else was very nice – Moab, Bryce, the Grand Canyon itself – but is mostly meant for people with abs more washboard and calves more cantaloupe than I am ever again likely to possess. I am not a particularly outdoorsy person, and my idea of camping these days involves one of the wood cabins at Yosemite – or better yet, the Ahwanee.

To be honest, though, the best part of the trip was just being away for two weeks. Away from all the stuff of the last six months or so, able to call time out on a world where concrete goals seem to be turning into fizzled-out letdowns one after another. Of which, as I say, more later.

Three weeks.

Three weeks seems to be about the maximum time we can handle an interruption to normal service. March Madness. the World Cup. By the third week of the Olympics, people were calling the local affiliates to complain about not being able to see their stories. And in 2001, it took about three weeks after September 11 before white women were complaining about having to go through the bag search at the airport.

This came to mind recently because of two separate bits of British media. One is Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Kitchen Disco”, a radio show based off her Instagram broadcasts with her kids during the early days of lockdown. The other is “Staged,” a mostly-two-handler wit David Tennant and Michael Sheen and their families made with iPhones and Zoom in the first three months of the pandemic. Both capture that feeling of the days when the streets were empty, grocery shopping was a commando run, sports had vanished from TV other than Korean baseball and the World Series of Bags, and normal service had been most decisively interrupted.

One of the reasons we failed after the attacks of September 11 was that we said we were at war without doing anything to reflect that. In fact, we were told not to change our lifestyle in any way. No cutting back on our gas use to take the money hose out of the hands of our Saudi enemy (who we refused to acknowledge were our enemies). No push for national service, let alone a draft. We were supposed to act as though 9/11 changed everything while simultaneously changing nothing. (When in fact, the only thing that was intended to change was to adopt the belief that only Republicans were fit to hold power. How you square that with being the ones on watch when we got bushwhacked I am keen to hear.)

By contrast, the pandemic was very much a war, and required wartime sacrifice. You can’t go where you would like. You can’t get everything you want whenever you want it. Normal service is very much interrupted, and we do not have a date certain for its restoration. Survival and victory are absolutely dependent on whether we can all pull together in a common cause against a foe that cannot be negotiated with, cannot be reasoned with, must be thwarted, and hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance. Covid-19 was the real 9/11, and once again, we absolutely blew it because no one was willing to live in wartime.

Well, the war is over. We lost. The wife and I have both shaken our bouts with the virus (hers worse than mine, although mine was worse than my first asymptomatic exposure last year). And yet, on April 11, California will formally surrender. The US as a whole follows in May. Even the elderly Asian folks at the Sunday morning farmers market aren’t bothering to mask up any more. We have given in and we have given up.

Which…I mean, my wife and I have had five shots apiece, and the SARS-COV-2 experience was no worse than a bad cold. Which was the point, I guess – use the vaccines to beat it back to the point where it was no longer a life and death situation. On that front, we succeeded, and I suspect the death rates for the unvaccinated are not dissimilar to flu deaths if we were to look back at this winter in a couple of months. So maybe we did manage to turn it into just another seasonal virus, but not before we clocked a million or more surplus American dead since 2020.

We lost something vitally important at the turn of the century. We had one political party revert its entire reason for being to preach that “you don’t have to care that there’s other people.” If something big enough and serious enough comes along, it can hit us hard enough to know better, and in our panic and bewilderment we’ll so what we’ve done since the cavemen: try to huddle along with our fellows and help each other grope out of the darkness for a bit.

But the bit only lasts three weeks.

The trackless vehicle has revolutionized Disneyland. One thing that struck me on this last trip was how we didn’t get to ride Temple of the Forbidden Eye, because the Indiana Jones attraction is constantly breaking down and has finally been subjected to long-deferred maintenance. But if there’s no track, all that can break down is the vehicle, and then you just pull it off the grid and carry on. In theory. But everything from Luigi’s Rollicking Roadsters to Rise of the Resistance to Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway is trackless now, and that seems like a significant nodal point.

World of Avatar was the first pass – and a safe one given that nobody cares about Avatar as an intellectual property – and then Galaxy’s Edge was the realization of the next stage: immersive. Batuu, Avengers Campus – those are meant to make you feel like you are there, more so even than World Showcase. Obviously it’s tough to make Batuu feel like Batuu when you’re surrounded by a bunch of yahoos from Arizona, but first thing on a cool June morning before it’s overrun…yeah. It feels like the real thing. And that’s clearly the direction for things (especially for the Harry Potter fans over at Universal), so what else is needed?

Interactivity. That’s a huge thing. It started with stuff like Astro Blasters and Midway Mania, then Web Slingers (which is really just a very advanced Midway Mania) and hit its peak with Smuggler’s Run, which is a very simple video game that you just happen to be inside. That whole “you’re inside it” thing really hits even harder with Rise of the Resistance, and even with Runaway Railway – the closest thing ever to being inside a cartoon. It’s a transformative experience, even before you realize that the voice of Mickey Mouse is the actor who played Rus Hanneman on Silicon Valley.

But now we come to the real trick, the thing that changes everything: variability. Luigi’s Roadsters gives you a different song each time and a slightly different “dance.” Mission:Breakout mixes and matches six different songs. Star Tours is a virtual slot machine with fifty-four different payout combinations and growing (I’ve seen at least five different people tell me we have to deliver the rebel spy alone).

The magic is really going to max out once you can add variability to the immersion and interaction. When Smuggler’s Run can send you to different planets with different objectives. When some notional future Avengers Quinjet ride can have you taking on different missions while you blast away at Chitauri or Necro-craft or Ultron clones or whatever. And part of that is going to depend on phones or magic bands or something so that what you do in one space carries over to another – something that may already be happening with the bounty hunting exercises in Black Spire Outpost.

The future of Disney Parks – and everything like them – is the ability to lose yourself in them in a unique way every time. Crack that and you own the future of theme park entertainment. I just hope some part of it lands in a free state and not in Redneck Hungary.