Are my eyes really blue?

Somehow in the last couple years, I accumulated four short-sleeve henley shirts from American Giant, purveyors of almost everything that goes on the upper half of my body for the last decade or so. And in sorting through the closet, it occurs to me that the last time I had even one of those was thirty years ago.

It was a different worls altogether. One where “mobile internet” meant you had a laptop with a PCMCIA modem card in it capable of 14.4Kbps dialup and a provider you could connect with, and “mobile phone” meant something that if you were lucky could fit in a coat pocket and wasn’t that much larger than a checkbook. And more than that, it was an era where my friends were still the ones I knew in person, such as they were, because I hadn’t yet subscribed to that email list. I knew it existed, but that’s about all, and I was circling it slowly like a porch cat before taking the plunge. 

“Such as they were” is a load-bearing term. My few high-school friends were scattered to the winds, from Charlotte to New Orleans, and my college friends…well, there weren’t any, really, save for the problem girlfriend I was still too weak and scared to cut loose. And she was slowly poisoning my career, my ability to connect with other people, and ultimately doing me a favor, I suppose – steadily tearing down the old world  so that when the time came to step into the new one, there wouldn’t be anything for me to cling to. 

Thirty years ago, More than half a life. It’s a lot to wrap my head around, especially with the world so completely transformed. Even the stuff I carried in my pockets when I left DC is reduced by more than half thanks to the iPhone (okay, and no longer smoking a pipe routinely) and I could arguably go to the pub with nothing but my watch and a house key under the right circumstances. Which is pretty close to what I would walk to the Overcup with in days gone by.

It was a smaller world, a simpler world, a world at a more human scale. I miss that. It’s something I look forward to in retirement, something I enjoyed in my brief spell of pre-tirement. I hope the world lasts long enough to give it another chance.

I wish I could remember the first time my dad brought an Apple II from his school home for the Christmas break. But for years, the Apple II was what a computer was. Then my local frenemy got a Macintosh, and that was interesting, to say the least. And then there was a whole lot of nothing until my senior year, when someone I knew at college had a Mac and said that the Power Macintosh was coming, and by that time I was looking at PowerBook flyers from every serious college bokstore I could get into. And then, when I got my fellowship, I went to the Vanderbilt computing store and bought a Power Macintosh 6100/60 AV, and that was the beginning of one of the longest relatioships of my life.

That’s the amazing thing about the Mac – it was possible for me to start almost completely cold in the summer of 1994 and three years later, I had taught myself to manage the thing to the point that I wheedled myself into a job. And ever since September of 1997, every dollar I’ve ever earned has been connected to the products of Apple, inc of Cupertino, California. Including a stretch of three years when those dollars came directly from Apple itself, in which I had the assorted privileges of being gifted the first edition iPhone, getting a group email to remind us of the Apple alcohol policy, and talking shit about hockey to Phil Schiller before I realized I was chopping it up with my great-great-great-great-grandboss.

The thing about Apple’s products is – they’ve always been good at getting out of the way of what I want to do. None of the learned helplessness of Windows, the expectation that it will only kind of sort of work and might fail for no reason, and none of the DIY satisficing that goes along with Linux. Not that I’ve put much money into the Mac myself in those years. In all that time, I’ve only ever bought four desktop Macs and three laptops (one for my wife, on which I’m writing this). Most of the time it’s been work’s Macs. Now as for other things…three Apple Watches, half a dozen iPhones of my own, couple pair of AirPods Pro, couple of iPads. Because Apple launched another personal computing revolution from 2007 to 2010, for better or worse, and gave us truly personal computing. What’s on your iPhone is you. It’s your familiar, it’s your cyberspace interface viewer, it’s an extension of your hand and an extension of your brain.

A dent in the universe. Over and over. It’s been something to see.

It started with Windows, frankly – and the learned helplessness that went along with it, the notion that things just broke for no apparent reason and that an ordinary person couldn’t be expected to understand what was happening.

Then Y2K, which people reacted to not as disaster averted, but as hype for something that wasn’t a big deal, thus giving them license to say that anything that didn’t affect them wasn’t a problem.

Then Sept 11, when Republicans trained the American people to believe that no sacrifice was required and that the only necessary response to calamity was to act as if nothing had happened.

And then there was the onslaught of “reality” television, in which manipulated triviality was presented as documentary if not aspirational, feeding the conceit that everything was done for show and nothing was sincere or meaningful – everything became performative. And then it took over politics, fed by years of talk radio bigotry brushed off with irony and “what, you can’t take a joke” bullshit.

And so here we are. We have built a 21st century where nothing is real, nothing is provable, and whatever you want to believe is your own truth. It’s healthy to lie in the sun all day as long as you smear beef tallow on your face. Tanning your ballsack is the key to restoring your potency. The majority of the federal budget goes to illegal immigrants, not Social Security and the “Department of War.” And a senile, deteriorating 79 year old bigot is a viable President, not a decompensating idiot who is no longer capable of functioning as an adult, let alone as one of the leaders of the free world.

We have met the enemy, and it is everybody else.

I don’t know why I am focused on spending money. The best thing I did this year was decide that I couldn’t buy things online during Lent, which has spared me from impulse purchases and forced me to consider how much of my wanting stuff is just trying to perfect things I already have, in that eternal quest to have The One Perfect Thing. I am good on lightsabers, on computing equipment, on outerwear. So why do I still want these things?

As always, I think it goes back to wanting to need those things. I want to be somewhere I’ll need the linen blazer, or the charcoal wool Crombie coat with a custom gold lining. Somewhere I will have need of my own MacBook Neo. Somewhere I have an excuse to have a personalized lightsaber on my hip at all times. Basically I want to be able to work remotely from Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland Galway, is what it feels like.

It’s another flavor of escape. Same reason I have the “False Trip” playlist full of songs that replicate the sound of the lobby and lounge room music at the Park Lane, or the candles that approximate the smell they pump in there. Same reason I now have a purpose-acquired Yeti just for work and a separate one with a different texture that never leaves the house so that I’ll know I’m not on the job when I sip from it. I even loaded up big on the Nitro Emerald Cliffs dry stout from Athletic so i can have as many pints as I want without ruining my health.

You can’t assume the world is going to get any better. You have to accept that things will never go back to how they used to be. You just have to make the most of what there is now – whether it’s the unlikely return or regular trad to the nearest pub, or the presence of a dive bar and a cocktail lounge less than three miles away, or the walkable village, or the candles and purple light in the shed. Or the saber you have, or the family laptop (even if it doesn’t have your stickers), or your new linen blazer that can stand up to even 80 degrees. FInd a reason to need the things you have, and then use them.

The unthinkable happened today: Apple dropped a $600 laptop. The MacBook Neo is more or less what was predicted: no frills, A18 processor, only 8 GB RAM, none of your fancy Center Stage camera or MagSafe plugs or the like. It’s basically a drop-in updated replacement for the original M1 MacBook Air, or for a Chromebook that doesn’t suck, or for a mediocre Best Buy Windows laptop.

It certainly feels like a contender for the “blogger’s delight” spot first filled by the 12″ PowerBook G4 over twenty years ago. Small, cool-running, and far more useful with a keyboard and mouse than trying to make an iPad into a laptop. And thanks to a cunning discount, I could score the higher-end model for that same $600, which would give it 512 GB of storage – same as my phone, twice that of my work laptop – and the added convenience of TouchID, which has turned out to be kind of a must-have in a world of passkeys and ApplePay. Blogging, Signal, proper shopping, maybe streaming and Zoom – and more importantly, all of that stuff NOT on my work computer. There’s something to be said for making it possible to just pull out the work laptop, click “Erase All Content and Settings” and leave it on the desk.

In any event, I’ve already thought through it, so now it’s just a question of deciding whether it’s worth my while.

The All-Mess Olympics are finally concluded, to my chagrin. I don’t know why this seemed like so much fun – perhaps because we were finally back in a Winter Olympics area instead of trying to cram it into the same totalitarian capital that hosted the Summer Olympics 14 years earlier, perhaps because it was finally possible to watch everything on the global feed if you didn’t need to be live, perhaps because I just needed a little more light in the darkness.

The last Winter Olympics wrapped up just as I was about to turn 50, and then we had the invasion of Ukraine, and there we were in London for three weeks. And in so many ways it felt like a high point, in retrospect. It felt just fine to be 50, it felt alive, it felt like maybe we had made it through the dark of the last three or six or ten years and come to a new equilibrium we could live with. And then we got home and things started to decay within months.

The winter games always resonate more with me than the summer games. It’s that glimpse into another world of ice and snow and speed and grace that we wish we could live in, the same way it’s special to disappear to Tahoe every year (when we aren’t snowed out of being able to get there). I have the markers of memory in 1980, 1988, 1994 and almost every Winter Olympics thereafter. I don’t know what I’ll look back and remember from this middle fortnight of February 2026, but I’ll remember it as light enough to push back the dark for a little while, and as always, I’m grateful for the opportunity to escape again.

So for about a year, the Great Mentioner has been kicking around the closest thing to a surefire recession indicator: a cheap Apple laptop. What makes this interesting is that for the first time in almost twenty years, it would be a purpose-built inexpensive laptop rather than last generation’s base model for the low. In fact, if the Great Mentioner is to be believed, it is built around the chipset of the iPhone 16 series – in other words, the same A18 SoC that drives my mobile phone.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it suggests that’s the minimum RAM and firepower required for Apple Intelligence, which is the table stakes for Cupertino hardware these days: 8 GB RAM (or a thousand times as much as my first Mac) and processor performance somewhere between the M1 and M3 (which in turn would make it comparable with my work laptop). Not to mention the economy of scale that comes with having been punching this chipset out for two years already, although one wonders how it scales up to a larger display. The Great Mentioner has it on 12.9”, slightly smaller than the MacBook Air, which means that we are looking at that most unexpected of things: a return of the Scottish Laptop, the MacBook, only with far more firepower than a Core M and with a price point commensurate with that power. And possibly even more than one single port, an undersupported USB-C, which meant at the time that there was no way to buy a MacBook and an iPhone and connect them.

I don’t really need and can’t justify a personal laptop. That said, a personal laptop would not have to do that much – Signal, MarsEdit, Safari for streaming, maybe Zoom or Facetime, and Kentucky Route Zero – assuming that there’s any way to run it when Rosetta support for Intel code goes away in two years. It would also mean, once and for all, the complete obliteration of any personal data on my work laptop for good. And the A18 in the body of a 12” laptop should have functionally infinite battery life.

Basically this would be the iPhone 16 in laptop form. Which…you could do worse, especially for less than the price of the iPhone 16. My only concern is that the notional price point will suffer from the AI-driven hyperinflation of RAM costs, and then, do you really want to invest in a laptop with only 8 GB of RAM in 2026? Especially when it has to run macOS and not iOS? If this is really the plan, shouldn’t the plan be a 10” iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard? And yet, that was a clearly inferior solution to an actual laptop in Prague two years ago.

Something to mull over, anyway.

For the second year in a row, I am giving up buying stuff online for Lent. Because that has again become a distracion, a form of self-medication and an expensive one. I don’t even really have justification for the moleskin trap blazer, except that it’s part and parcel of my search for 100% the right thing that ends up with my owning half a dozen 80% things.

Thing is, I have so many of those things that I don’t actually use, some of which I didn’t even get out of the packaging for a while. I have Nerf blasters that need to be shot. I have modular 3-d printed Nerf blasters that can be made new with a different $4 barrel. I’m finally down to one “everyday” lightsaber, although it’s no Mace Windu. I ordered a handful of stray Nerf parts and added them to the refuse of my advent calendars to craft my own little creation, complete with a Lego version of myself at 60 trying to recapture my youth in DC. I have more Yeti stuff than I could possibly use, mostly limited to two in regular use: a 25 ounce mug for work and short range drives and bringing home ice in the evening, and the 16 oz moon dust that is my at-home go-to because of the way the tactile feel reinforces the feeling of not-at-work. It adds to the escape.

Because you have to make a hole in the night to hide from the world. I keep trying to pare it down – the nearer dive bar downtown is a cheaper night out than the pub in Cupertino, and walking to the local and back for one pint is cheaper still, and cheapest of all is home in the shed on a Sunday night. There are plenty of books to get through, the fire pit is replaced and works, the Olympics are back for mess and distraction for two weeks…

I’m bearing down on 54. Next year is another step into the transition – one with more discounts, perhaps a couple more legal protections (for as long as those last), the age at which I was prepared to decamp to Cañada Cove and work remotely for the rest of my career. Which, honestly – if they’d just let me go back to working remotely even three days a week, my quality of life would be so much improved. If allowed to work from home permanently, I would almost be willing to keep this job to the end. And that is the frustration: it would have taken so little to make this the life I have grown to want, and instead we have to struggle through this madness. 

so 54 is about learning to make a hole in the world and hide from the misery. Not escape, because as i said once before in this space, it’s not escape if you have to come back. There may be no escape, but there is a way to live deliberately in spite of everything. And that is what I hope to craft in the next year so that when it’s time to start clicking the 55-64 category, I’ll have things to do there.

I don’t know quite how to reckon with the extent to which we are traumatized and exasperated through being terrorized by the stupidest shit on Earth, flung by the stupidest people on Earth. You think about how dull-witted the average American is these days, and then think half of them are as bad or worse, and it all starts to make sense.

My lovely bride is fond of saying “the question isn’t how smart are you, it’s how are you smart,” and I find no fault with that. I’ve known people who would struggle to read this post aloud but know how to manufacture a semi-automatic firearm from bare metal, who would struggle to balance a checkbook but can instinctively do the calculus required to drain ten 3-pointers in a row, who can single-handedly take down an entire pub on trivia night but cannot make it past day two of any in-person programming course ever. I absolutely endorse her position. However, it comes with a contrapositive, which is “how are you stupid,” and we are afflicted with multiple overlapping stupids. Always have been, honestly, but it goes a long way toward explaining how we got here.

There’s the “I don’t know anything about politics/I don’t care anything about politics” form, which is absurd when you consider how many of those people have opinions on how the BCS should have worked or how the College Football Playoff should be constituted. There’s the people who treat politics as spectator sport, assuming it will never have a material effect on them. There’s the generation of boys with failed parenting who think entirely in Call of Duty, Joe Rogan and racist Twitter accounts with Roman statue avatars. And there’s the Democratic consultant class permanently trapped in amber in 1995, convinced that the mythical white working class male vote is the only thing worth winning and trying to run back the business-conciliatory New South Governor as the sole hope of the Democrats.

But there’s one particular brand of stupid that is driving me out of my mind, and it’s the stupid of Republicans who think they can keep shaking hands with the devil without consequence, that this will all go by the boards when Trump is gone, that normal service will return and there will be no consequences or any repercussions for what they have done. It’s just business. All in the game, yo. It would be unproductive and unseemly to hold anyone to account. The American people want us to move forward.

Horseshit.

The reason we are in this position now is because we never move forward. We never completed Reconstruction, in the 1870s or the 1970s alike. We never held anyone to account for the Iraq war and the credit crisis of 2008. We never held anyone to account for January 6 and the malfeasance that followed. We never held the media to account for harassing Joe Biden off the ticket because of age and incipient senescence, only to pretend nothing was wrong with a transparently worse case. We never held Big Tech to account for the things they enable.

We never paid the price, never asked anyone to, and as a result the bill has grown astronomical. And it might well cost us a nation. We cannot flinch from making this right if we ever get the opportunity. We can’t shrug off a mob of paramilitary killers sent to wreak havoc on an American city. We can’t wave away the kidnap and deportation of American citizens. We absolutely must not allow “mistakes were made” to be the extent of the repentance. No forgiveness without contrition and reparation. Red America, in its lands and homes and minds and television networks and blogospheres, must be occupied and de-MAGA-fied or else we’ll be right back here and worse in another decade. Just long enough for the Democrats to struggle to pull together a fix and then lose.

Because that’s the stupidest stupid of all: the memory of a goldfish that says why should we worry about measles, or polio, or Y2K, or anything else that we once fixed and hasn’t been a problem for so long that people assume it’s the natural condition and doesn’t require constant vigilance.

You know, like democracy.

How many more citizens will have to be publicly murdered by government thugs before the “pro life” and “Second Amendment” and “government tyranny” and “All Lives Matter” people admit it was never about any of those things and always about white supremacy?

Every Democrat in Congress needs to shut down regular business until something happens to stop the American Stormtrooper Squad. Not one penny for ICE. Not one penny for DHS. Not one penny for the functions of the American government as long as this is what it does.

We cannot stop this with a flip of a switch. That’s what elections make possible. But we cannot stop throwing things into its path. If they want our blood, we have to make those bastards work for it.

We have friends everywhere.