Are my eyes really blue?

It’s so fucking dumb. It’s the inevitable result of impeachments without conviction, and filibuster without having to show up, and blocking appointments without consequence – the MAGA movement has decided that since nothing has consequences, rules and laws mean nothing. We’ve basically fed Article I of the Constitution into a chipper shredder and allowed the President to allow a drug-addled shaved monkey billionaire to stage a leveraged buyout of the federal government.

It’s not even a proper reduction in the size of government, executed by passing laws through a Congress that the GOP ostensibly controls. It’s more like going through a person and saying “you don’t need an appendix, you don’t need toes, you definitely don’t need TWO kidneys, look at all this small intestine, nobody needs a small AND a large intestine, it’s woke to give women separate holes for pooping AND giving birth when it’s all pushing stuff out” – there is absolutely no actual knowledge behind the decision-making.

The more frustrating bit is this: Trump got 49% of the vote. His margin of victory in the popular vote was smaller this time than the margin Hillary Clinton beat him by in 2016. And yet, the press treats this as the Mandate of Heaven and a sweeping triumph, and the Democrats flop around as if 48% of the electorate didn’t vote against this exact thing. The Democrats cannot muster a tenth of the pushback against Trump that the Republicans did against Obama in 2009, and that is an absolute disgrace. They need a wartime consigliere, too young to remember black and white TV, who has actually fought a competitive election since the invention of the World Wide Web and isn’t living in trauma of Reagan in 1984.

Democrats can’t fix this. They can’t even appreciably ameliorate this. What they can do is make sure everyone knows whose fault it is and give the appearance that they’re strewing glass in the path. They need to get on that right now, or find someone who will, because otherwise we are done for my lifetime.

If I could obtain a job and citizenship in some other EU-or-equivalent country right now, I’d be off like a shot. But that’s not on offer. After all those years, I’m back in Alabama without ever leaving California, and help isn’t coming.

I added a new country to my list and revisited three of my favorite cities in Europe. I accumulated almost everything I could imagine wanting – outerwear, drinking vessels, footwear, hats. I drank at two of my favorite tiki bars. I finally got the shed with the string lights as the Sunday night retreat. I was working from home without any issues, able to walk to the local, an active participant in a spiritual community and relatively happy with how things had landed…with one eye on the approaching meteor.

And then, it hit.

Now we live in a foundering country that is speedrunning the “we’re going to be the next Russia” plan. The rule of law is being abandoned with barely a whimper from the press and no interest from people whose lives are about to turn much worse, because some people won’t know the circus has come to town until they’re crushed beneath the piles of elephant shit. Our financial situation has taken an unexpected turn and now there is a non-zero chance we will have to sell the house and move as a result. And as insult to injury, after almost five years of doing tremendous work and going completely unrecognized for it, I’m back in the office five days a week, which was not the base condition well before the pandemic, and there has been no attempt at a justification for why.

Life took an irrevocable hard turn on November 5, 2024, and at this point in history it’s hard to argue that it’s going to be possible to ever get back in my lifetime. I have, at best, maybe 30 years left for America to claw back any of the 50 years of progress that have been attacked in the last month and a half. And the Zoloft that made 2024 possible and enjoyable is now apparently in the crosshairs of the snake-oil purveyor in charge of American health. Who is not to be confused with the drunk rapist at the controls of national defense, the foreign billionaire whose interns are shredding the civil service or the convicted felon at the top of it all, whose handpicked Supreme Court has paved the way to make him king.

I would love to get out, to decamp for some other English-speaking country and retire and see out my days. But I don’t think that’s possible any more. Even if we could cash everything out, it’s not enough to finish our lives on, let alone endure if the markets implode and take out our retirement savings. Retirement, at all, is suddenly a lot less plausible, and the odds that I’ll be doddering along at a help desk at 70 are only reduced by the likelihood that first level tech support will all be AI and second level will all be in Hyderabad by then.

The odds are very high that right now, things are as good as they will ever get again. There is nowhere to go but down, and the only hope is a controlled descent as slowly as possible. That would be different at 60-something, when you don’t have that long a life expectancy anyway, or at 30-something when there’s still a prospect of making a fresh start somewhere else. But 53 is no-man’s-land. It’s too late to begin anew from scratch without giving away a lot of income and accumulated wisdom that has no value in a new career. It’s too soon to start Medicare or Social Security, so you have to have some sort of job that will provide health care – and sufficient health care, in case you have some prior condition.

I enjoyed pre-tirement. Even though the job was annoying and frustrating, being able to do it entirely from home meant I could empty the dishwasher or move the laundry into the dryer or bring in the trash cans during a dull moment instead of staring out the window across a sea of cubicles for five minutes. I didn’t waste a half hour or more every day putting unnecessary miles on a vehicle. I could have stayed pre-tired long enough that I could have staved off actual retirement for a long time. But now, we don’t know what life holds in the next year, and even pre-tirement seems as unlikely as retiring.

The only thing left now is to play out what’s already on the board as best we can. See friends one last time before they head for a better country. Visit London on airline miles and hotel points while it’s not coming out of our cash reserves. And then, a whole lot of learning to love what we’ve got and being satisfied with a couple of cans of Guinness in the shed or by the fire pit instead of going down the pub, or watching endless British and Irish television on Prime Video and trying to get lost in books instead of counting on another international trip, and reconciling to the notion that you have to live in the moment, enjoy the moment, and be grateful for the moment, because nothing is promised. Not even tomorrow.

Find all the little blessings and immerse yourself in every one. A sausage biscuit, a comfortable sweater, the grippy socks, a new book, an extra half hour cuddled up in the morning without having to think about the world. If putting a D-ring on your lightsaber, or skiving off to work from home in the afternoon, or rewatching QI, or wearing your East Belfast GAA shirt – if anything can bring you contentment for the day, do it without hesitation.

That’s the plan for 53.

In the MCU, we think it’s 2026 at this point. Pretty sure anyway. And the Avengers…do they even still exist? We know that there’s some connection between Bruce Banner, Carol Danvers, Wong and Shang-Chi now, but Steve’s gone, Tony and Nat are dead, Thor is on the other side of the galaxy, who knows where Wanda and Vision are, everyone’s forgotten Peter Parker, Rocket and Nebula are back with the Guardians…who’s left at this point?

So, people who were members of the Avengers (i.e. on the team at the end of an Avengers movie or part of the Time Heist) who still exist and are active and on Earth: Sam “Captain America” Wilson, Scott Lang (and we’ll throw Hope Van Dyne in there fo historical purposes, you can’t have the Wasp and not have her an Avenger), Bruce Banner, Colonel James Rhodes (with the enhanced Iron Patriot armor), and…that’s it and that’s all. As far as other super-people on Earth go, you’ve got Shuri, Wong, Stephen Strange, Shang-Chi, Jennifer “She-Hulk” Walters, Cassie Lang and Kamala Khan who are known to at least one other active Avenger. There’s also a smattering of others – Riri Williams, Matt Murdoch, Moon Knight, King Valkyrie – and the handful of folks who are going to be in Thunderbolts, almost none of whom are “good guys”.

Basically, the Avengers as previously constituted are dead. It’s a similar situation to the end of Civil War when all you had available on the official roster was Tony, Rhodes and Vision. When Tony said “the Avengers broke up, we’re toast” he wasn’t kidding, given that there were more of them tooling around with Steve than actually in the lineup.

So you’ve got Nick Fury in orbit doing whatever he does to try to stave off another interstellar threat, Wong (and presumably Strange) fending off mystical threats, a couple of random menaces completely unaccounted for in Namor and the Super-Skrull (and doesn’t the MCU need to completely punt and disavow that Secret Invasion ever happened, what a load of shite), the beginnings of the Young Avengers…we’re three years since the Battle of Earth and there’s not really anything in place to substitute for what the Avengers were 2012-2018. And that appears to be the main driver for the first two MCU movies this year – what is going to be done about the fact that we don’t have that any more?

It’s still kind of weird that we don’t really have a good look at the world on the other side of the Blip. The only movies that have taken place primarily on Earth in the post-Blip era are Shang-Chi, Eternals, the third Spider-Man, and the second Black Panther, and the events of those movies have not been revisited since in any case. That’s the weirdness of the Multiverse Saga: whereas Phase 2 was all about building on top of Phase 1, Phase 5 has seemingly no connection whatsoever to anything in Phase 4. To this point, everything since Endgame has been a firehose of new stuff with occasional involvement from existing characters in ways that don’t really engage with where the world is now. And that lack of focus, more than the amount of homework, is to me what undercuts the MCU.

It’s time to get back on track. Soon. We’re going to need all the escape we can get. Of which.

I don’t know why, but…no let me explain. Last night, I went to Trials, where I’ve been seeking solace for a third of my life, only to find the cask ale was empty and the big leather chairs have been removed. But instead of sinking into misery, I rallied and decamped to Dr Funk’s, a tiki establishment where I enjoyed several drinks without ruining myself – and along the way, Vandy beat Tennessee in men’s basketball and Washington upset Detroit for a berth in the NFC title game for the first time since I was touring Central Europe.

And then, after a lovely foggy day, I walked all the way into town for dinner with church folks, floating on the high of Vandy repeating the Tennessee win with the women’s team. And under a socked-in 6 PM sky, waiting out in the cold, I listened to Enya sing the old hymn “How Can I Keep From Singing.” And I felt myself filled with…hope? Determination? The Holy Spirit? I don’t know what it is, but I’m more optimistic right now than I have been since the weekend before Election Day. And I have no reason to. It’s grim. It’s going to be bad. It’s gonna be worse before it gets better and a lot of people are going to suffer and there’s so little we can actually do about it right now.

But even so…

As long as we hope, as long as we are not afraid, as long as we believe, we have a chance. They want us to give up, to surrender, to submit. And as long as we don’t, we’re still in it.

At a minimum, it’s gonna take 1,461 days of endurance to get through this. Maybe more. And who knows how much it will cost, or whether we can get away with this one. But giving in and giving up are not options.

Do you reject Satan and all his works and all his pomps and all his empty promises? With God’s help, I will.

I don’t think I believe in America any more.

Everything I learned, everything I was told growing up. The Great American Melting Pot. The land of opportunity. I’m Just A Bill. Democracy. Individual responsibility and the equal chance to make it. Like God, the vision which I was sold all my life was a lie, one honed and polished by those who benefited most from it. And I don’t – can’t – believe in that any more, for the same reason: the people pushing that vision know it’s bullshit, and act in ways they would never consider if they actually thought it was true.

So now what happens?

It took the better part of a decade to come to a way of seeing God that made sense, and finding a tradition and a community that were on board with that way of seeing. I suppose in ten years or so, it might be possible to see my way clear to an idea of America I could believe in, but it would take a lot. It would take a massive mid-term rejection in 2026, followed by a re-aligning election in 2028, affirmed in 2030 and 2032, and resulting in an extinction-level event for the Republican Party as it exists today. Then, by 2035, I’d feel like I could exhale, and maybe – maybe – still be able to retire and have ten good years.

It’s not lost on me that retirement is not on the cards before then. It’s not lost on me that retirement might not be on the cards at all, depending. I need an employer for health care, I need income to feed the retirement account to the point we can still afford the house, I need the economy not to collapse and I need those accounts to grow somehow. And I need it all to happen in a world where a 50 year old in this Valley is un-hireable.

We didn’t care enough about America to defend it. We let things fall apart in the twenty years between “9/11” and “January 6” and by then it was too late. The unwritten rules were shredded by one side and the other thought if they just kept playing by them, everything would work out eventually. Turns out when you lose with class, that just means the other side wins.

In a perfect world, this wouldn’t have happened. In a better world, I’d have the resources and means to decamp to an actual democracy and retire there and see out my days in a village near Galway (or maybe on the Oregon coast of an independent Pacific Empire, who knows). But we only get the one world, and we have to make our own best way in it. I and my loved ones are positioned about as well as we can be, under the circumstances, so now we just have to protect each other and help fuel the fight, and learn to love the struggle.

What had happened was, in typical fashion, the end of the Y2K project meant laying off everyone they could. And one of our techs was a Kildare man, and said he’d gone to this Irish bar in DC called Ireland’s Four Provinces where there were live musicians, and they’d asked where he was from and played a Kildare song, and that it had the finest pint of Guinness he’d had outside of Ireland. And we agreed, and so all went up there Friday after work at 6.

We left at 2 AM, having drunk ourselves senseless and bought all the tapes from the selfsame musicians as our man had seen previously (and they played his song again). And the next night, Saturday, we were back again at 6 PM and stayed until closing time again – and in between, I drove through the residual snows to Tyson’s Corner and bought my first pair of Dr Martens 1460 boots, in brown leather, while the McTeggarts’ version of “Whiskey In The Jar” played through the speakers of my old Saturn. To this day, there is one chord in that song that puts me right back in the humidor of Georgetown Tobacco, looking at Domain Avo or Padron 3000 cigars and new Zippo lighters.

It became a regular stop. The 4P’s was where it seems everything in my life happened from January 2000 until June 2004. Everything was celebrated there, mourned there, it’s where we brought friends, and in my mind, if I do as I should in life, Valhalla will be the front table at the P’s at 11 PM with the third set of five just striking up as more friends come through the door and a fresh round of pints are sat down and “On The One Road” begins…forever.

But it wasn’t just limited to that bar and that time. I found myself supporting Celtic FC for the better part of a decade. I got up at stupid o’clock in the morning to go to Bethesda to watch the 2001 All-Ireland Final in football. Five years later, I did it again, three hours earlier, in Millbrae California for the same thing. When I moved to California, I immediately found an Irish place down the street from that first apartment, and then spent years trying to find any place that would have the music (the closest I came was the trad sessions at O’Flaherty’s in San Jose, and when I sang along with the Fields one night, Mr. Ray O’Flaherty of blessed memory pressed a complimentary pint into my hand and asked where in the Holy Land was I from myself). And I never really found it despite my best efforts.

But then my cousin began to date a gal who was living in Galway. And they picked the lock for me to finally spend two weeks in Ireland. And what I found was a country that operated at a human scale, felt warm and welcoming, was conscious of the price of sectarianism and warfare and acutely aware of the demands of modernity and moving beyond the old ways. It felt like what might have been in Alabama had Folsom been re-elected in 1958 and the Birmingham Community Chest’s racial efforts actually borne fruit and Reagan never happened. It felt like home.

And I delved into the history books, watched my fill of Cheap Irish Homes and Derry Girls and London Irish, listened to podcasts from RTE and Virgin Media, learned to appreciate the Irish spots in the Bay Area that were just as authentically Irish even if they weren’t wall to wall trad and rebel songs like I thought. And when I was there last April, Dublin felt like the most obvious and natural place in the world to be. And I felt like I could see myself easily spending the rest of my days there.

It won’t happen, of course. Unlikely in any event. Maybe if a giant bag of money hit us on the head, we could afford the requirements to retire there and split time. But the slogan painted over the stage at the 4Ps has stood up in my mind for 25 years now, and I’ve never had reason to question it, because I have always felt a hundred thousand welcomes.

The kings are the VC billionaire set, convinced of their divine right to rule and their mastery of all the world. The things they know are the only things worth knowing, and their primacy is the deserved, natural and inevitable result of a well-ordered world, and in no way connected to luck, inheritance, regulatory arbitrage or financial manipulation.

The barons are the “founder” class, who get their money from the VC kings and thus give a share of ownership in their lands. In return, they get the resources to pursue their own goals, with the tacit promise that they too will become as kings if they succeed…assuming they aren’t just bought out or plagiarized out of existence.

Below them are their vassals – the full stack developers, 10x engineers and the “thought leaders” who drive the serfs to produce the value that can go back up the line. They’re kept going with the belief that somehow they can become founders and ascend to the ranks of the most high…eventually.

And at the bottom are the serfs – not only the coders and the infrastructure of sysadmins, operators and back office staff that support them, but the actual drivers, delivery runners, TaskRabbits, content screeners and Mechanical Turks who actually do the last mile interface that makes the thing go – just. Thanks to regulatory arbitrage and loopholes, they’re not employees, they have no stake, they get none of the protections labor fought for a century to obtain. Because that would be expensive, and insufficiently agile and future-facing, and also woke, so hustle harder!

Which is kind of the point – this is the natural end stage of “bigotry protecting wealth.” It’s not democracy, or even much of a republic, it’s the Morlocks stuck in place and distracted by the Eloi telling them who to blame (not the Eloi, that’s for sure). It’s the constant drumbeat that the poor person across the border might undercut your job if you don’t take a 5% pay cut, and that’s why you’re bad off – not because 50% of the national wealth is held by eight people, or because health care costs double what it does anywhere else, or because you have to play against the pros to have retirement money (or else cut them in for a percentage and hope they’re actually good with it and honest to you).

And they will keep getting away with it as long as Ed Earl Brown hates colored people more than he hates billionaires, even as the billionaires wring him dry day by day. I don’t have an answer, because there isn’t one. We just have to protect our loved ones and hope that maybe bird flu will wipe out enough of the other side’s voters to give us a chance someday.

Much like the first Civil War, the Confederates won the Civil Cold War today. The people who invaded Congress to stop the democratic process were handed the reins of power through that democratic process. It brings to mind Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men: “if the rule you followed brought you to this point, of what use was the rule?”

We’re in for a long dark stretch. Maybe people will react. Maybe not. There is clearly a majority in this country that is all right with every bit of this, or we wouldn’t be in this spot. Business is complicit, the press is absolutely complicit, the Republican Party is what it has been for years: the Confederacy writ large. Now we find out who is OK with it when the reality starts to hit.

If there is one rule for Democrats here, it must be: No. Always No. Scorched earth. Do not save the Republicans from themselves. If it means a government shutdown, so be it. If it means a national default, so be it. The Republican Party has been spared any consequences for its actions other than to lose power long enough for someone else to clean up the mess. Being the bigger person has failed. Hoping for a return to sanity has failed. Appealing to “norms” has failed. Focus on protecting people locally, but don’t think you can “moderate” or “work with” or “find common ground.” Because you can’t split the difference. You can’t throw trans kids or DACA kids under the bus and say “that should be enough for them.”

There is no going back. This is the world we live in now. Stop appealing to what was and fight against what is, and maybe in a generation or so we’ll be able to think about what can be.

There’s something to be said for one device to rule them all. As nice as it is to have the iPad mini for reading and music, especially in flights or on Sunday nights, it’s very convenient to only need to take one thing when traveling. It’s doubly convenient not to feel like a full day out demands a battery pack. And when you have a 6.3″ display, you’re functionally in Kindle territory.

It’s nice to have the latest of everything for my personal area network: newest Watch Ultra, newest AirPods Pro, and now the newest pro iPhone. It’s great to have the best available camera, and that 5x optical zoom is a difference-maker. The Apple Intelligence stuff is nice to have in theory, even if it’s not yet particularly practical (I am convinced the marching orders for Apple Intelligence were “create the minimum AI product that will get the Street and the tech press to STFU”). I still have my questions about game mode, but they won’t be solved until I can start playing something other than Balatro+ on here (never more than one run at a time, that game is crack). And I have deliberately and specifically set it to only charge to 80% in current use, because if this is going to be a four year phone, it needs its battery protected.

I still need to do the satellite and hearing-aid setup. I don’t know where my hearing is, but I’m keen to have our audiologist friend’s opinion of the AirPods Pro as hearing support. And with Siri supposedly making a big jump in 18.4, the more I can do with voice and earbuds, the less I have to keep grabbing the phone for stuff. Which is probably going to be a resolution for 2025: nothing on the phone that can’t be done as effectively elsewise. Watch, earbuds, voice, iPad on Sunday nights, laptop during the workday – now that the phone can do everything, try not to make it do everything.

This phone’s name is Darksaber. It’s an homage to how my first iPhone was called “Lightsaber” after all my previous phones had the Bluetooth ID “Sidearm”. When I was able to go to a smaller phone, with the SEs or the Minis, I went with “Sgian Dubh” because it was the device I always had on me even if I did my work with something bigger. But this is a full sized phone, black in color, and it’s going to be a year for adhering to the creed, so may as well go in properly.

This is the way. Of which.

Somehow I managed to delete a post from a couple of years ago in which I posited that Apple should introduce Annoucements – a notification-free stream of self-deleting posts from people in your Address Book that you can dip into or out of at will, with the choice whether to receive what someone offers or not and the choice to post to some groups and not others. It seemed like the most obvious possible thing, especially as things like Find My and Journal and the like pointed toward Apple developing all the components of a social network without actually starting one.

And then Signal added Stories, and I realized that was 90% of the way there. You could have group chats with notification turned off, self-deleting after a certain period of time, and using the Stories functionality for media that didn’t make sense to paste into multiple group chats. It made all the sense in the world, especially given that Signal was for people in your contacts already,

Well, two things have happened since. For one, Signal added user names that made it possible to create a chat without having to give out phone numbers. And for another, the world took a twist that made it suddenly much more attractive to have a cross-platform, cryptographically sound means of sharing without relying on the likes of Twitter or Facebook or their fellow subservients. For all the potential that Bluesky has (and which Mastodon may yet have), they haven’t licked a way to do federated social media without making locked or private accounts functionally impossible.

But then, there you have it – the thing I posited all those years ago. Bluesky becomes the RSS follow feed, and Signal the private Twitstagram. It’s to a point that Signal has taken the pride of place on my iPhone dock that once belonged to Twitter, and then to Slack for the better part of a decade. I’ve been trying to will Signal to happen for two years, and we might be on the verge of getting there. If I could get that going in 2025, I would consider it a successful year…assuming we can prevent everything else going to Hell along the way.

The real trick is getting people to use it, though. Outside the US and Asia it’s all about WhatsApp, and good luck prying people off it. The lack of security in RCS might make Signal attractive to people who need cross-platform messaging in the States, but that would take a lot more awareness. So if you’re not it, get on it. And if you’re on it, get your friends onto it. And maybe we can save our bacon from Musk and Zuckerberg yet.