Are my eyes really blue?

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.

1987 was the beginning of a new era. The previous year was, to date, the worst Christmas of my life: I knew everything I was getting before I got it and the magic was utterly gone, the perfect capper on an absolute shit sandwich of a year.

1987 was different. I had, over the course of a year, found my first girlfriend (and subsequently gone through my first breakup), been added to varsity scholars’ bowl, and begun actually building friendships at my high school for the first time rather than being torn between the old place and the future. For the first time in memory, I was looking ahead. And that was reflected in my Christmas gifts, the only thing I asked for: an MIT sweatshirt and T-shirt, because for the first time, i was thinking about college. And where did I want to go? Somewhere that was smart and where complicated pranks were a way of life.

Welp.

The other big thing that holiday season was the New Years’ Eve party, at the colossal Mountain Brook home of one of my newer classmates. There must have been fifty people at least at this party, from all different schools, and at one point I was actually knocking out tunes on the piano while some gal I’d never met was grabbing Dr Pepper to keep me fortified (which in turn would lead to one of the few memorable moments of senior year two years on).

Oh, and another thing I got: the boom box with a CD player that would carry me through until my senior year of college. For the first time, I had laser-crisp digital music and the ability to borrow a CD from anywhere and turn it into a better quality tape than I could have bought. That was very nearly the end of taping songs off the radio, because a month or two later I would buy the first of what would become over two hundred cassette singles.

You could make a good case that 1987 was my first adult Christmas – when it stopped being about what you could get and became about who you could be with. And as we piece together what it looks like in a world where we’re older than our parents were then, that’s an important thing to remember.

Lot of disappointment this year. Well, that’s not entirely true – lot of disappointment the last two months of this year. A few deaths thrown on at the end just to drive home the point, including a dear friend’s parent and my own aunt who in her own fashion lit my way to California almost from the beginning.

The vast majority of Americans didn’t object to returning to the stupidest era of American political life. Including the entire Washington press corps (press corpse, more like), which as always focused on the odds rather than the stakes. Now matters are worse, and a country that works like Alabama is exactly what we’re in for with no higher authority to appeal to than God. And God, in all likelihood, will be away on business.

“First as tragedy, then as farce.” The thing is, laws are made up. Rules are made up. Apparently all you have to do is say no. You’re already seeing the beginning of this. The reason people are bricking it at how much people are celebrating the death of the UHC CEO is because there were finally consequences for something bad. We tried to fix health care at the ballot box, but it never gets any better, because someone’s always there to kick the slats out from under it. If you can’t rely on the soapbox, the jury box or the ballot box, that only leaves one box. And people whose lives are free from consequences will provoke celebration when they finally face some.

That’s the great disappointment of 2024. No consequences. You can be convicted of a crime, you can be found liable for felonies, you can be doddering and deranged, and the press will cover for you and the judiciary will shield you and the stupidest people on earth will sing your praises as if you are Jesus’s big brother. The worst people in the world continue to get away with being the worst, and no one lifts a finger to stop them, and then someone finally does and we were inundated with how bad this is without stopping to think about how it got to that point.

Protect my found family. Stay alive. That’s pretty much all that’s on the horizon at this point and that might be doable, with God’s help and a little more self-awareness on the part of the public. Don’t count on things getting better, don’t even count on keeping what you have, just throttle the loss as much as possible for as long as possible.

It’s called life. Best just to get on with it.

It’s pretty obvious where this is headed. An entire government of billionaires, sex pests, and vindictive ideologues. I know exactly how this works, because it’s where I grew up. Bigotry defending wealth is exactly how the Big Mules ran Alabama for…well, ever.

So what does that look like? Well, for starters, you’re in trouble if you’re wrong. The constant bashing of trans people is an easy hook for them, because there are so few trans people and they don’t have the legal protections or allies that helped fight the civil rights battles of the 50s and 60s. But that’s the easy target. Other people and institutions on the hit list include gay people, especially ones who got married or want to. Women, especially ones who want control of their own bodies. Anyone who relies on Social Security or Medicare. The whole point is: the rich get richer and no one thwarts them.

So if you’re rich, it will be easy. Especially if you’re white and male. If you’re a racial minority, if you’re any sort of minority that isn’t white, if you’re a woman, if you are in any way different, it’s going to be varying degrees of bad. The problem is, in Alabama, in my lifetime, there was always at least the possibility of the Feds stepping in when things became excessive. But that’s been torched too – the Supreme Court has basically seen to that, and the incoming administration is content to act with impunity because there is no one to judge them. God’s away on business.

So how shall we then live? Well, look at Birmingham. Black folk made it. They endured. They protected their culture as best they could. They suffered and had to look over their shoulders, and they took blows on multiple fronts, but they also supported each other and their culture and communities. And those who had – like AG Gaston, who became a Black millionaire in Birmingham during the Great Depression – used their money and power on behalf of those who had neither. We need to remember this: it’s not going to be easy, it’s not going to be pleasant, and a lot of people are going to hurt. We just have to protect everyone we can, never give an inch of ground, and always be on the lookout for opportunities to fight back.

This is our new normal. The kind of society I ran from for thirty years has caught up to me, at least until there’s a good plan for affordable foreign retirement in a more committed democracy. California may be Birmingham, the Bay Area the Southside, and San Francisco the Five Points South, but those are all still in Alabama. We’re all in Alabama now. I know what it’s like to live in this, and I don’t want to, but I have some sense of how. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to be constantly thinking about the alternatives.

It’s nice to be able to click “iPhone Mirroring” on my work laptop and quickly bring up my phone. It means things like Signal, personal Slack, even this blog can all be handled from the trackpad and keyboard. All my personal stuff can live on the phone and I don’t have to keep anything on my laptop pertaining to my life outside of work. (I’ll still have Firefox loaded with bookmarks for my soothing background video, obviously, but that’s a lot more innocuous than keeping my personal mail or encrypted messaging and the likes.)

It’s bigger, certainly. Especially with the silicone case on it, which is really the only option to start with. But as much as it pains me to admit it – and it absolutely does – it was time. At some point between late 2017 and early 2020, I transitioned to needing the slightly bigger display, and when I switched back to a smaller device I found myself raising my glasses and holding the phone up to my face a lot closer than I had before. My hope is that with the progressives and a 6.3″ display, that will be less of an issue going forward.

So far, so good. I can do work stuff on it much more readily. I can even plug a USB-C thumb drive into it and do some work. The battery is a lot bigger, and I need to see how well it works to leave Low Power Mode turned off. I’d love to be able to get through an entire day without relying on low power or running out of juice – if I could have this phone top up to only 80% and still be good, like the watch, that would be a big step in the right direction. I still need to figure out the camera – it should theoretically be quicker to bring up and use than ever, once I get the hang of the button, but I don’t have it yet and I missed stuff fumbling for it all weekend. But you can shoot feature films on this thing, in theory, so I can get out of the way and let it do the work.

It does feel like the one device – like the iPad can be saved for shutdown nights when I really need to separate, or kept just for games and video conferencing. Don’t have to tax it any more than I have and it should be able to last another three or four years, maybe longer as just a reader. And if this phone can be made to last for four years – as it should; I don’t need to make another purchase until 2029 on current form – then who knows what will be out there next.