Are my eyes really blue?

“Fear God and give glory to Him for the hour of His judgement is come.”

-Rev. 14:7

40-35.

Think about that. The last time Vanderbilt football had a sweat like this was probably…1996? Maybe? When a 3rd and 37 pass for a 4th quarter touchdown gave us a lead over Notre Dame 7-6 with minutes left? I am sure everyone in that stadium was just waiting for the hammer to fall on Saturday, and yet…it never did. 60 minutes of SEC football and Alabama, undefeated and ranked #1 in the country, never led once. Not once. If you told me a Vanderbilt football team at any point in human history would give the Crimson Tide a 40-piece in the snotbox, I would have burned you for witchcraft.

And yet…it was not a brick fight, it was not a fluke, it was not a dick-tripping, in Spencer Hall’s words – Vandy just came out and beat that ass at the point of attack for 60 minutes. They played toe to toe with the top ranked team in the country, with THE football power of the last 15 years, a Mount Rushmore program in the history of college football, and the night ended with Vanderbilt fans (including several of my friends) parading the goalposts three miles down Broadway to throw them into the Cumberland River. Where the next day, the Nashville fire department helpfully fished them out and returned them to campus so they could be cut up and sold for souvenirs to defray the conference’s $100,000 fine for rushing the field.

This doesn’t happen. Vanderbilt had never beaten a top-5 ranked opponent ever. The biggest win I can remember like that was when the Dores got over on then-#6 South Carolina in 2007, and didn’t even finish the season with a winning record. Yes, the 2013 team tore ass through Florida, Georgia and Tennessee in the same year, but it was the second of five wins in seven seasons over the Vols, and Florida after Meyer and Georgia before Kirby. And yes, this is Bama after Saban, but it’s a Saban roster and a team that beat #1 last week to be #1 this week.

More to the point, it was the Death Star. It was the game you could write down a L in ink every year. Bama was a permanent opponent in the division days for 20 years, and it was a guaranteed loss, with the only question being “blowout loss, or brick fight loss with a back door cover.” The last time Vanderbilt won, I was 12 years old and on the other side of it, sitting with my dad in his old silver truck in Gardendale in disbelief as Paul Kennedy and Doug Layton called a desultory and lifeless defeat in Ray Perkins’ losing 1984 season while Vandy was still riding the fumes of the McIntyre renaissance. And my dad said “well that doesn’t happen very often,” because I think the last Vandy win had been 1969.

This should not have happened. This should have been inconceivable. A Vanderbilt team that could get handled on the road at Georgia State should never have been in the same ballpark with Bama.

And yet.

Something feels materially different. It isn’t just taking then-#6 Missouri to double OT before losing in heartbreak, or beating Virginia Tech in OT to open the season, or handily defenestrating Alcorn State in a way that doesn’t usually happen (it took miracle stuff to get by Tennessee State a couple years ago, if you want a straight HBCU comp). Not only are the Dores mostly handling business, they aren’t getting blown out and blown away. Hell, you make one field goal in Columbia and pick up the first down one more time in the 4th quarter in Atlanta, and this Vandy team is 5-0 and probably in the conversation about making the 12-team playoff.

But the bigger difference is that it doesn’t feel real – but it does. Vandy had success during the Brigadoon era, but it always felt like smoke and mirrors – we weren’t dragging teams we should beat (well, other than 2012 Tennessee), we were taking advantage of mistakes and still getting destroyed by power foes. The wins were close and the losses were not. This feels like it’s legitimately happening, somehow – we’re not backing into it, we’re not fluking into it, we are somehow going toe-to-toe with top teams and trading blows at equal strength. Diego Pavia doesn’t know it’s a damn show, he thinks it’s a damn fight.

And that’s another thing. This was achieved by basically opening the checkbook and purchasing the entire New Mexico State offense, players and coaches and all, and it is working. It’s not sustainable, and the question will always be, what happens next year when hipster CFB’s favorite quarterback is not around. But that’s not a now problem. Instead, Vanderbilt is America’s darling, other SEC programs are openly cheering for us to beat their hated rival, people are happy for us in a way that I never felt from anywhere under Franklin. Hell, there will probably be 49 and a half states rooting for us to do the same thing to Auburn in a month.

But it also feels uncomfortable. Ominous. You stack it up against things like finding the perfect Nerf blasters after all these years, or USMobile finally announcing Apple Watch support, or American Giant finally bringing back the fleece in the size I need, or stumbling across three 12-packs of Baja Blast Zero Sugar at the grocery store, and it’s hard not to feel like God is trying to throw me a bone and give me some last fleeting moments of joy before the end of the world arrives. Like we’re settling all family business before the onset of the darkness. I do not like this feeling, I wish I didn’t have it, but the Cubs finally winning in 2016 is my precedent. Joy may cometh in the morning, but it gets to be night fast in the autumn.

So the lesson, such as it is, is this: embrace the now, live now, enjoy today, don’t defer happiness. And worrying means you suffer twice.

More details are creeping out about the notional SE4, and they are not encouraging. Looks like the iPhone 14 form factor and display with a single iPhone 15 camera module. Which is consistent with previous SE versions, honestly. But the thing is – they will all be too big for what I want. And if you have to take the size, you may as well take the best possible battery and display, and if you’re gonna pay for that you may as well get the best camera. So it’s going to be the iPhone 16 Pro when the time comes.

But when does the time come? Not for a while. I’ve been doing an absurd amount of travel in the last 13 months, but barring one drive to Yosemite, it’s over – the whole Seattle – Austin – Denver – NYC – Tahoe – Prague – Dublin – London – Amsterdam – Pensacola – Disneyland – Sonoma – Minneapolis whirl. I don’t know how we did it back in the old days, but for now, things have settled down. One trip on the list for next year, possibly two, but it’s all on the other side of the wall for now.

And with no serious travel plans, the iPhone 13 mini – especially with the fresh battery installed – is still perfect in every respect. Sure, a full day on the run will take 130% of the battery, but I’m not on the run that much and I have the booster pack ready to go if needed. And I have a one-handed phone that belongs to me, not my employer, and has my work and personal lines alike. I fully intend to ride this phone into the ground, and there’s no reason I can’t get another year out of it. And I can let somebody else go first with the nonsense of Apple’s 5G modem or Apple Intelligence or the like.

Honestly, the next phone will probably be a pivot point back to “one device for everything.” And that’s fine. But if I’m not trying to do serious work on it – and I’m not, especially now – there’s no reason to give up my favorite iPhone ever. In fact, I don’t even own another phone at the moment, which I think is a first in…20 years? More? Certainly in the GSM era. Now all I need is for USMobile to support the Apple Watch so I can leave the phone at home on pub night, and we’ll call it square.

It’s the age old search for just the right thing: I’ve begun paring down anything that’s not a keepsake in hopes of reducing the amount of stuff I’ve accumulated. We’ll see how it goes.

I guess it began with Ken Burns’ Country Music. Seeing that in autumn of 2019, visiting Asheville almost immediately after, and then being limited to home for a year gave me plenty of time to resonate with the old-timey music. Which in turn reminded me of cold nights driving around Nashville listening to WSM, the thing that led to me riding around the DMV listening to Eddie Stubbs on WAMU. And then I started listening to Bluegrass Country again, and watching Country Music again in the autumn in times of stress.

Well, here we are. I haven’t pulled on the show itself yet, but what started off as a subset of the soundtrack to help me doze off to sleep has become a three hour playlist. Because that static scratch like a 78 RPM record rebroadcast over AM hundreds of miles away sounds like a black and white prairie night that could be almost any night of the last century.

It’s another species of escape. It’s a ticket out of the world, out of time, permission to forget about a world falling apart and a job I’m trapped in and wondering if there’s any way to get out of half my remaining life expectancy being stuck in a bad situation. It’s a species of meditation, like the series that inspired it or the drives I took twenty and twenty-five and thirty years ago or the pub nights I play it on now – the mantra, the vision, the focal point that lets me shut out everything else.

So the Great Mentioner has ramped up talk of the iPhone SE4 again, with a predicted date of next spring. It would be three years since the SE3, which was only a couple of years after the SE2 but was necessary because of the coming of 5G. Similarly, the notional SE4 is necessary because of Apple Intelligence and the need for 8 GB of RAM and a chipset to match, and the repurposing of the iPhone 14 body style recapitulates the use of the 5 form factor for the original SE and the 8 for the SE 2 and 3.

The thing is, I have been thinking for a while that next year might have to be the year. Four years is a good run for a phone, and I don’t regret replacing the battery and pushing on through, but at some point you need to get new hardware just to stay ahead of the OS, and there’s only so much you can get out of a physically smaller battery without counting on a battery pack. In fact, that’s probably the main inducement of four in considering the 16 series at all:

1. Sufficient battery life to make a full day possible without ever resorting to low power mode, similar to the Apple Watch Ultra 2.
2. Larger size means a larger battery, but it also means a bigger display for aging eyes. And there are some advantages to the new always-on wide-brightness-range high-framerate displays, assuming the battery can keep pace. Of course, it also means it’s not really a one-handed device, but it also means it’s capable of the kind of gaming and reading and viewing I normally rely on the iPad for on the road.
3. The physical camera button is a nice thing to have, especially when traveling and looking at things that pop up quickly without warning. It’s a nice-to-have.
4. The satellite SOS and texting function – because after seeing the aftermath of Helene, it seems that it would be useful to be able to contact someone after the Big One so they can spread the word we’re all right.

So what of these are you likely to get from the iPhone 14?

1 is almost a given because of 2. The 6.1” size means bigger battery than before, and if it’s using the same 3nm processors as the iPhone 16 series for Apple Intelligence, the battery life should be similarly improved. But will it be a 120hz display, or an always-on, or have the ability to dim down to 1 nit at night? Unlikely, one would think. It won’t have the camera button, for sure, and may not even have multiple cameras. And while the satellite SOS was present on the 14, is it something that could get dumped to save cost?

The whole point of the SE is to use last generation’s body type and less impressive cameras to put current processing power in a phone that’s cheaper enough to bring down the threshold of iPhone ownership. It’s meant to be perfectly good, or good enough. And it was, originally, and might be again depending. But I don’t want to give up night mode on the camera. Absolute dealbreaker, especially to get less in a larger package.

But the 16, and the 16 Pro, mean no compromises that way, and a guaranteed 35% or 50% battery bump depending on which. Plus the likelihood of another four year device. The only question, at this point, is whether the prospect of Apple Intelligence is something worth buying into or something worth avoiding even if it means squeezing a fifth year out of a one-handed phone.

The other noteworthy thing is that when I was using the work-provided iPhone X from 2017-2020, my use of the iPad mini dropped to practically nothing. I suspect something similar would happen for travel, although the iPad at home would still be the ideal reading device on pub nights and shutdown times when I wanted to lose myself without the temptation of social media or input from the wider world. There’s a certain appeal to one device to rule them all, but there’s also a certain appeal to horses for courses.

The only loophole would be if the iPhone SE4, so-called, comes with the elimination of the older non-16 phones, in which case the SE4 is the cheapest thing going – and then might be possible to swindle out of an employer that hasn’t updated my work-provided phone in seven years and counting. You gotta make your own bonus in this life. Otherwise, I guess we’ll wait and see.

It’s been twenty years since Black October, when a power outage on the day we had to ship an entire trade show with handwritten airbills kicked off weeks and weeks of running to stand still. No good inventory, no idea what our stock was, just figure it out in order on a daily basis and ship as far as you can down the list. I’ve written before about how I was able to hide myself behind a wall of Pelican cases, put on Virgin Radio and just disappear out of time in a way that hearkened back to those early days hiding under the bleachers at day care. At some level, I think that’s why I still want to work remotely, or at the very least be in a place where I can hide myself from a big open crowd of nonsense (which is not possible in my current formal workspace at the office, where nothing actually requires my presence).

I don’t remember what I thought about the incoming election, although I’m pretty sure I had given it up for lost by the end of the month. But the damage was already done, and the sense was “well things won’t get any better” rather than “well things are about to get worse.” Which is why I feel like it’s going to be a difficult run in these last five weeks, with no more direct confrontations and another war breaking out in the Middle East and no reliable polling information and a national media salivating at the prospect of bringing back their drama queen meal ticket. Unlike twenty years ago, I don’t have the prospect of earning a permanent spot with a desirable employer if I keep making my best effort, and I don’t have the excitement of a new world and a new life propelling me.

I just want to be left alone. I’m willing to contribute to making the world a better place, I’m willing to give way to the younger generations and their aspirations, I just want to mind my business and see out my days without things getting any worse. But that’s what aging is: increasing the speed with which you have to run to stand still.

So much of this year has felt like a bucket list run. Do everything you wanted to do one last time. Disney. London. Dublin. Yosemite. Take in the most important things while you can, before the world ends. I’ve been a little too loose with the money, I’ve had the extra pint, I’ve used the PTO days. Maybe we make it, maybe things work out okay, but if they don’t, I don’t want to have wasted my wishes.

And then, if we make it through December, we have to change the rules. Things won’t go back to how they used to be. Like baseball. If you want to undo analytics optimization that works the system, you have to change the system. No more shift, bigger bases, add a pitch clock. Expand the Court, eliminate the filibuster, end venue shopping in federal cases. It will not be quick, and it will not be simple. The tasks are great, the work is hard, and we are going to labor all night knowing we won’t all see the sun rise.

But we thank God for the work. We’re lucky to have the work.

I finally caved, mostly because I’m on my third eye doctor (they keep retiring out from under me) and she told me I should consider the progressives if I’m tired of pushing my glasses up on my head. And I am, although part of that is probably because I’ve been wearing Warby Parker frames that suggest “launching an Apollo mission at 6 and raiding the Klan in Indianola at 9” and almost require a short sleeve white dress shirt and tie. And the earpieces aren’t long enough for my dome, and and and.

So I blew out the flex spending. Zeiss optics, high-index progressive lenses. High-sensitivity transitions coating to make them dark just by looking too long out a closed car window. Black Oakley frames with straight earpieces that are flat and close to the head for hat wear, and which suggest the futuristic version of what I had on my face 35 years ago when the other defining characteristic was braces rather than facial hair.

These are meant to be The Glasses. No going back and forth for sunglasses or computer or reading or driving or what have you, put these on and call it a day. I’m still getting used to tilting my head to focus, and the wobbly countertops when turning left to right are comical, and there are times when everything looks blurry if I don’t stare directly at it. But it’s not terrible, and I suspect I’ll be able and willing to stick with these for the foreseeable future.

I started wearing glasses again almost by accident. I wanted the ability to wear sunglasses more than anything, but I also wanted the freedom to not be bothered, and during the pandemic shelter and beyond it turned into “I’m only bothering with the contacts for college football game days or the like.” And somewhere in there, it got too hard to read the phone with my contacts in. And so here we are.

I don’t expect that before I die I’ll have the ability to have the time in one corner, or have caller ID and text messages come up with a click of my teeth, never mind actual AR-type stuff. But I wouldn’t hate it. And in the meantime, it’s nice to finally unambiguously have The One Thing.

That used to be the happiest phrase in my lexicon. It means that summer jobs were no longer there, that college football was back, that the worst of the heat was behind us, that I would soon be in a familiar environment where I could at least do well at what I did, even if I was exhibiting a distinct failure to thrive a lot of the time.

Slowly, all those things got whittled away. The job never ends now. College football has been ruined to the point where it takes far more off the table than ever it brought. I now live where 90 degrees in late October is not only possible but largely expected in a changing climate, and what I do – even if I do it well – now happens in some sort of weird limbo where calling attention to myself only brings the possibility of harm, but making an effort will either go completely unnoticed or be appropriated elsewhere without recognition or acknowledgement.

Which would all be enough by itself, but things have changed. For the third straight cycle, the end of summer means the beginning of the long slow slog of dread until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, as we wait to find how how many Americans are stupid enough to vote for the end of democracy and whether it’s enough for a rigged system to let them win without getting the most votes. And the sad thing is, I don’t feel as bad as I did the last two times, although that’s less a measure of hope and more a measure of the efficacy of Zoloft. At some level there is still the fear that even if the most votes go to the people against racist dumbfuckery, it won’t be enough to overcome the structural obstacles, which have been made higher than ever now with the seizure of courts and state administrative bodies. And this time, we know that it’s not enough to win at the ballot box, because the other side feels entitled to win every time in perpetuity no matter what.

It’s hard, knowing that even if you prevail, things are about as good as they’re ever going to get. Sure, maybe sixteen years down the line if we all keep grinding, I’ll find myself safely retired with enough money to survive in a country that has rejected the Confederacy as an appropriate model for government and society. But it requires a lot of things to keep going right. As with any terminal disease, you have to win every day. The enemy only has to win once. We only have to be stabbed in the back by one more property tax adjustment, only have to have one more random health issue step backward out of the fourth dimension, only have to have one bean counter decide my job is superfluous to requirement and leave me looking for 5-day-a-week in-person contract help desk work for a fraction of the salary. I don’t dwell on it, any more than I dwelled on the prospect of nuclear annilhation from childhood on, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Instead, succor comes from the little things. Retreat to the woods or the cabins or wherever to eat terrible junk food and day-drink among familiar faces for three days. Put on stormy video or tiki room music (or both!) and light a candle to create that “I’m not really here” ambiance before disappearing into a good book for three or four hours on a Sunday night. Cuddle on the couch watching the latest streaming thing. Or just make the effort to walk out and pick up dinner makings on the way back from a cup of coffee or an overpriced lemonade popping boba thing or even a quick pint at the local spot. Or, in an extreme moment, get in the electrified car and drive over to Pacifica for breakfast at Taco Bell, looking out over the fog and the waves and the dawn patrol surfers, and marvel at how you got here from there, all those theres ago.

Year 18 is in the books, with the hope that if I take care of the days, the years will somehow take care of themselves.

I’ve written before about how the Olympics serve as a signpost for my life. The weird thing about the 2020 Olympics was that they were in summer 2021, during that weird interregnum where we hadn’t moved into the new house yet and had just lost both my parents-in-law and where the Biden era hadn’t found its groove yet (but hope was already going away) and I was actively seeking employment elsewhere. So from that standpoint, my own life is more stable and arguably better (even if work is no more fun than before).

But these Olympics will always be tied up with what I can only think of as the emerging Kamalanomenon. I cannot explain how it is that defenestrating Biden in favor of a Black woman has lit a fire under the party, nor how her selection of a midwestern Ted Lasso has kicked it into high gear, but it’s happening. The numbers are no longer terror-inducing, even if they aren’t as good as they ought to be in a sane world (Harris-Walz should be up 70-30 at a minimum), and the success of American women in the Olympics – and the pushback against spurious anti-trans bigotry of Russian origin – just pays into the HW message of “women are great, America is great, foreign misinformation is bad, and our opponents are not just bigoted, but weird.”

It’s hard not to feel like the scales have fallen from the Democrats’ eyes, and they’re finally ignoring the rules on the inside of the game box lid and fighting fire with fire. No more adhering to the expecations of the Sunday Gasbags, no more cowering at the reproof of the New York Times. Just one big wave of “fuck it, we ball.” It’s entirely possible that the GOP has finally disappeared up its own deranged ass beyond a point of no return, and it sure looks like Ed Earl Brown might just no longer be willing to tolerate the extremely online conspiracy shit when faced with a reasonable sounding gal that his kids love and a man literally called “Coach Walz” who can hunt pheasant and break down why the 4-4 defense was the best route to a state championship.

I want to believe. I want to have hope. The Zoloft probably helps with that, but I don’t feel inherently doomed. I’d sure rather be on our side than theirs right now, with their creepshow VP candidate and their mentally deteriorating bag of orange goo at the top of the ticket who’s just trying to stay out of tennis prison. I’m sure “22-time club champion” is very very relatable to Ed Earl Brown. Probably a lot more relatable to the owner of the dealership who keeps screwing him on the service on his F-150.

It doesn’t take much. Reagan’s 1984 blowout was 55-45. Obama’s success was 53-47. Geographical sorting has made it a lot harder to get the big electoral college numbers, but there are multiple paths to 270 – and the important thing is to use more than one of them, so one state’s bad actors are not enough to screw things up. If this is going to work, HW really needs to win every state Biden did in 2020, because if the margin of victory turns on a purple state with a GOP legislature, there’s no telling what shenanigans they will gladly perpetrate to get their way.

Clock’s running. For the first time in who knows when, we actually have a compact sprint of a campaign. It’s time to lace ‘em up, tie ‘em tight, and run like Hell to the finish, because everything hangs in the balance.

Thoughts on Kamala Harris:

1) it’s good to have at least one person in the race who isn’t gonna eligible for Social Security before the next term is up.

2) I would rather stand in the way of a Caltrain than an AKA from Howard.

3) I am amused that the right is calling her a radical militant while the left is calling her a cop. I am less amused that every ticket with a woman on it has always lost. And if we’re honest, the people voting against her because of who she is would probably approve of a white male with the same record of what she’s done. The streak has to break sometime, right?

4) In my lifetime, every race until 2008 had one person on a ticket from a state with a star on the Rebel flag. Since then, Tim Kaine is the only one. This is a good development, if only because…

5) …she’s the first Californian on the ticket since Reagan. The Golden State probably has reason to feel hard done by these last thirty-six years. In the era when California was a safe Republican state from 1968-88, they had two Presidents. It’s been a stalwart Democratic vote ever since, and this is the first time they’ve had a look in.

6) It’s absurd that Kamala didn’t make it to Iowa when the likes of Yang and Bloomberg did. Error corrected.

7) To all accounts, Biden’s advisors tagged Harris as too aggressive and too ambitious, and he deliberately chose her anyway. He chose a person who went right at him in debates. He’s not afraid to be questioned and not afraid to be corrected. That cannot be overrated at this point.

8) One of the reasons I liked her for the ticket originally was because I knew the existence of a smart, sharp, attractive woman of color would cause Dolt 45 to experience a blue screen of death. Based on the first presser, this is clearly the case. I’ll be interested to see if it continues.

9) I’ve been dreading this pick, despite hoping for it, for the same reason one sits curled on the couch in the late 3rd quarter with a lead, afraid to move for fear of a jinx. But for whatever reason, I feel…hopeful? This is a ticket with two punchers. And it’s time to start swinging.

– 11 August 2020

Well here we go. The month-long campaign of pants-pissing insiders and media whores desperate for drama finally bore fruit, and Joe Biden has decided that he cannot be President and run for President against Trump and the entire mainstream media. And he chose to finish being President instead.

Is it the right decision? Not important any more. The decision is made, and the oxygen has been taken out of the whole “can he, will he, won’t he” debate. Instead, we get what the system rather points to: when the president can’t do it, his vice president takes over. This is reasonable and logical.

And it better be obvious to everyone. There is no other way to go. Like it or not, this is an incumbent ticket that faced the general electorate and was elected, then was re-elected to run again because that’s what an incumbent does. To say that there should be some kind of “blitz primary” or “brokered convention” or fill in whatever Aaron Sorkin fanfic wankery gets your juices going – that’s all bullshit. This was an insider coup, born of panic, and when we get to 2025 – win or lose – it’s officially time to read out of the Democratic establishment anyone who was there for McGovern or Mondale and get leadership in charge whose default posture is not submissive masochistic crouch. No more boomers. No more Sixties casualties. No more appeasing the mythical white working class and pretending like the only real Americans are halfwitted bigots who believe only what they see on Fox News.

This is an existential election. Every election is an existential election until the last boomer is choked to death on the entrails of the last “Reagan Democrat.” Until then, to the last moment, to the last person, to the last chance, we fight. We fight like Hell. And we fight to win.

Kamala Devi Harris, age 59, of Oakland California, Howard ’86, Hastings ’89, Alpha Kappa Alpha…you have less than four months to save the world.

I thought about calling this entry “The Seven Year Itch.” Seven years ago, I was just coming off a stint in higher education which lasted- wait for it – seven years. It’s difficult to imagine that I’ve been in DC as long as I was at Birmingham-Southern and Vanderbilt combined. It feels like at least two lifetimes. And yet, as I sit here tonight on the floor of my apartment, with absolutely no furniture and only a TV and cable box to go with my computer, I can’t help feeling that it hasn’t been that long since September 1997, when I lived my first month in Washington with nothing at home but clothes, a boom box, a TV, an air mattress, and a computer set up on an empty pizza box on the floor.

It’s an awful long way from a terrified kid, just months removed from prematurely ending a 20-year academic career, nursing literally thousands of dollars in credit card debt and whose Mac knowledge was largely limited to “trash the prefs and rebuild the desktop.” I barely had a pot to piss in, I barely knew anyone here, and I signed a six-month lease to start with so I wouldn’t have to pay to break the contract if it didn’t work out.

I had a plan, too, though I didn’t realize it at the time. It was based on my dad’s credo of “do the best you can and don’t be a horses ass.” It was based on an offhand remark from a teammate at the bar my first year of grad school, and it was appropriate for someone whose life had just fallen out from under him. My plan was to reach the point where I could prove that I didn’t have to prove anything.

I think I did all right. Nobody’s ever going to mistake me for Warren Buffett, but I’m paying the bills as they come in and in the same month at that. I did my last help call today, for the #2 or 3 guy in the company, with an intuitive fix for something that another so-called “tech” person outside our group had botched. And I have my crew, my friends, the kind of people you wait your whole life to be able to claim as your own.

And yet.

A few years ago, I read a book by Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift. It was written at the height of the tech boom, after I’d had a couple years in the business, and it dealt with everything from the tortuous route of an IPO to the pressure of developing web apps for major media companies to the concept of the hockey-stick sales pattern. But the part that was excerpted for Wired magazine was the story of half a dozen people who had picked up their lives and gone to Silicon Valley to find their fortune.

I had two thoughts after reading it, largely at once: “These people are out of their hyperventilating minds” and “What if…do I have what it takes?” To pull up stakes, pack the bags, and chase the big dream…and as the years rolled by, I realized that if I’m going to do it, it has to be soon. I’m so incredibly burned out in my current situation, the tech sector is starting to rebound…if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen now.

Seven years ago, I wouldn’t have tried it. I would have clung to what was safe and known until it forcibly dislodged me, no matter how miserable I was. The way I did in high school. And college. And grad school. I don’t *have* to leave…but I’m ready, and I want to, and I can. I can do this. I can take the plunge. I can make it happen.

I don’t know whether it comes from being Southern or Celtic or what, but I’ve spent an awful lot of my life being fixated on the past. Of wishing things could have been different, trying to figure out what I did wrong, as if by hoping hard enough and finding the solution, I could change what had happened in my life. But that’s not possible. I’m never going to quarterback Alabama to a title. I’m not going to drink and snog and hack my way through college. I’m not going to pick up a doctorate in political science. My high school dream girl isn’t walking through that door. The one that got away isn’t walking through that door. My father is not walking through that door.

There comes a time in your life – and if you haven’t felt it yet, trust me, you will – when you have to make the decision to stop trying to be the person you were, and let yourself become the person you are.

I’m going west, and I’m going to reach. Because if you don’t reach, you don’t get. And even though it’s going to hurt like hell to leave my team behind, even though it’s going to be terrifying to start over in a strange place with no job and no certainty, despite everything – I’ve never in my life been more convinced I’m doing the right thing.

Let’s go chase the big dream.

– 30 June 2004

Twenty years on, there is no questioning it was the right move. It worked. I found myself working for Apple by August 9, later hired on staff and promoted. We managed to buy a house, which more than doubled in value by the time we sold it sixteen years later. I eventually got my VW, albeit as a Rabbit rather than a New Beetle. I had TiVo and DirecTV, I had friends, and by the end of 2006 there was no disputing it was a triumph.

Part of the story, though, is that there’s no “happily ever after” where time and history stop. The years roll on. Other people move along with their lives. The biggest story for me in the last decade is just how many people moved away – some no further than Burlingame or Santa Cruz, but many more to Texas or Seattle or even abroad, and that had a meaningful impact on how my life changed after 40. Looking back through the old blog contents of the early days, it feels like my life 2004-06 was a natural extension of my DC days, just with better climate and more money and fewer places to smoke.

I wish I could explain what happened in 2007. I don’t know if it was purely chemical, triggered by homesickness, manifested by a toxic work environment or what, but the wave of chronic depression caused me to make the second biggest mistake of my life: rather than seek accommodation for my knee, I chose instead to find a more technical job elsewhere, afraid that I would wind up half secretary and half dockwalloper and permanently behind the curve on actual IT. Instead, I wound up a subcontractor with no benefits, working in an environment far behind the curve on actual IT, and when I finally crawled my way out of it, I was working at a different place with a 10% pay cut that took three and a half years to catch back up to…and I never got away from that place. And then that place outsourced me and carved up my benefits just as COVID struck…and now?

Now I live in a different house, with a yard and a shed and a hot tub, in a quiet pleasant neighborhood where I can walk to the grocery or the Starbucks or the local burger-brunch-or-beer place. I can easily bike downtown, and we’re close to the better freeway for getting up and down. Transit has ceased to be a viable option, though, which is a shame since Caltrain will finally deliver electric trains in September. I have achieved the dream of 1997: I can work from anywhere with internet access, from my front room to Gulf Shores to Prague, in a job that is not customer facing. The cars are a hybrid Chevy and an electric VW. I have become the person I am instead of the person I was.

I’m happy with my life right this instant. I like being able to start work from my phone before getting out of bed, padding to the kitchen to grind my coffee, walking out to happy hour at 3 on the odd Friday, building bits of community through church or civic service or just attending the downtown markets and festivals. It’s the bits of a cozy life, and that’s all I need for the next twenty years, if I can keep it. But that’s the real trick. There’s another existential election on the way. The high temperature has hit 100 degrees four times since Independence Day. I look in the mirror at the sun damage on one temple or how long a cut on the arm takes to heal or the dark circles under my eyes and see that even if it doesn’t feel like twenty years have passed, my body says otherwise. And there’s nothing that says my employer won’t absently strike a line item on the budget and I find myself having to get another job sitting a help desk somewhere for half what I make now, because over-50 in this place and industry is basically a death sentence on the job search market.

And I wonder about the next twenty years. Will I be retired by then? Will that even be possible? What happens to democracy? What happens to people I care about if things turn ugly and the worst people in America get the controls? Never mind hoping for twenty good years, can I expect twenty years total? I’m sure my father did, at some level. Twenty years ago, all I wanted was one more chance at a fresh start. And now, all I want is one good chance at a graceful finish.

I guess that’s what it means to get old.