Are my eyes really blue?

I started this blog at a high point of my life, even if I didn’t know it at the time. It was September, college football was just starting again, Cal was riding high and Vanderbilt was showing signs of life (and I had decided to go all-in on them). I was working at Apple, in an office with a couch in it and a door that closed, and my boss thought I was doing a whale of a job. I had a company Amex, I was trusted to do work in Chicago or at MacWorld, and I was collecting employee stock purchases and using the new black MacBook as my daily driver. My surrogate sister had moved in with us, though I didn’t realize at the time who she was, and we could routinely smoke cigars shipped from Washington DC where my old gang was still mostly assembled at National Geographic. My in-laws were still alive, my Alabama relations hadn’t gone seven bubbles off plumb, and the bloom was squarely off the George W. Bush rose and a Democratic ascendancy seemed imminent. Social media meant Vox, the replacement for LiveJournal. My knee was tweaking out but not enough for surgery, my brain was occasionally wonky but not enough for drugs, my wife and I had our home and were just starting to get ahead of the mortgage payments, and my new car was almost ready to replace the Saturn with two hundred thousand miles on it. Honestly, at that point, the biggest problem in my life was that work wouldn’t provide data service for my cell phone.

Then, as we say, time happened.

Deconstructing the last twenty years is a tall order. There were waves of depression in 2007-08 that led to my leaving Apple, out of fear that I was falling behind career-wise and losing pace technically, and again in 2010-11 as a result of my Alabama relations acting an ass more than usual. And then there was a run of three bad years at work that overlapped with 2014, the year that we all realized something was wrong and we might not be in for a happy ending, and then GamerGate became everything and time became “well at least.” At least I’m not doing field support any longer. At least Trump doesn’t have control of Congress any longer. At least I still have a job. At least I can work from home during the pandemic. At least Biden won the election. At least my mother-in-law will get some time to live her life without having to worry about my father-in-law. At least Trump’s going to jail. At least we can still afford the mortgage on this house. At least…

The story of the last twenty years is the struggle to hang onto what I have. To give up on the things that can’t happen, to seek solace and comfort and meaning in the things that can be kept and sustained. Being able to avoid getting out of bed as long as possible on weekends. Being able to retreat to the shed for four or five hours on Sunday night under string lights and a cloudy sky. Watching old Ken Burns series on PBS, keeping up with Star Wars or Marvel stuff on Disney+, being able to take a day off to drive over the hill to experience a day under the marine layer in Pescadero or Half Moon Bay. The quiet background rhythms of baseball, or British soccer. The opportunity to have people come over and hang out in the back yard. And even those mainly depend on being able to keep this house, this yard, this shed. If we can’t keep the jobs we have for at least ten more years, things will get very complicated very quickly.

There’s been a round of layoffs at the end of August at work, this year and last. It almost feels like it’s going to be the annual Hunger Games, only you don’t know who’s playing and there’s absolutely no connection between what you do and whether you’ll go. Incompetent people, malcontented people, absolute brown-nose party-line people, it doesn’t make much difference – except if they’ve been looking for a chance to get rid of you, you’ll catch a stray irrespective of whether you were germane to the ostensible purpose of the layoffs. It’s hard enough to think of starting over somewhere else, no matter how pleasant the prospect of not being there any more – but the fact is, no place is looking for a 54 year old Apple specialist who can’t keep his mouth shut, certainly not at my current level of pay in this economy. And then, see above. What I have built around me suddenly becomes very tenuous.

And yet, occasionally you’ll get something good. When I started this blog, I certainly didn’t expect Vanderbilt to beat Tennessee six more times in the ensuing 20 years, or a Vanderbilt QB to finish second for the Heisman, or to win ten games and become the darlings of the college football hipster world. I didn’t expect that the comic books of my childhood would get turned into a cinematic universe that would conquer the world. I certainly didn’t expect three more Star Wars movies, let alone six, or multiple live action series and entirely new takes on the world of my childhood imagination. I absolutely had no idea that I would own this many lightsabers, or that baseball would take pride of place as my favorite sport (or that Vanderbilt would win two national championships in it). I had no notion that Birmingham-Southern would cease to exist, giving me some measure of closure on my college fiasco, or that the city of Birminigham would become a place I took pride in, actively wanted to visit and spend time in. I certainly didn’t think I would ever eschew going down the pub in favor of relaxing with a moon-dust indigo Yeti full of craft beer and a book about the history of early Christianity. (Although if you’d told me I would finally come out to myself as an Episcopalian, I wouldn’t be surprised, just quietly pleased.)

Live in the moment. Want what you’ve got. Be open to unexpected delight. At least somewhere in the last twenty years, I did a smidge of growing up.

My mother saw her whole career.

She saw the woman who was a global icon. She saw the woman who brought Nashville to Hollywood. She saw Porter Waggoner’s girl singer become too big for his vision, too big for his show, too big to ever again be constrained. But she also saw a ten year old mountain girl on the Cas Walker show in Knoxville on KBIR, making her television debut in 1956. And she has never not been proud of another East Tennessee hillbilly girl who came to bigger things.

Of course, it’s been a long time since Dolly had one of those hits take over the chart (though I’m sure Spotify and Apple Music’s data centers that handle the PA- section of artists are about to burn to the ground), but she didn’t have to. She had done her music her way, charted her own course to the mainstream, become an icon of second-wave feminism on the silver screen and carved her own face on the Mount Rushmore of Nashville’s greatest songwriters – easily the equal of Tom T, or Hank, or Kris, or the Bryants, or Willie, or… and beyond that, she had parlayed her wealth into an even greater fortune – enough to just do whatever she wanted.

And what she wanted to do was…whatever she wanted. She put a theme park in East Tennessee, she took her royalties from Whitney’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” and turned it into support for Nashville’s Black community, she launched her own basic income program for forest fire victims, she quietly invested in and became an uncredited co-producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she sent out a third of a BILLION books to kids between the ages of 0 and 5 so they could learn to read as her father never did. She amassed an engine of tremendous fortune and then spent her life emptying the money cannon at the deserving. You can hardly throw a rock in Tennessee without hitting a majority-Black school whose band uniforms or choir robes hadn’t been paid for, on the low, straight cash, by the little old white girl from Sevier County High.

And of course, there’s the million dollars she gave to a research team at Vanderbilt University, desperate to know what she could do to help, and her funding spearheaded Vanderbilt’s contribution to what became the Moderna virus. A million Americans were killed by COVID, which people have already forgotten, and the reason it’s treatable and less lethal and people mostly don’t get it and survive if they do, five years later, is in part because of the girl from Pittman Center. She underwrote a miracle.

We all loved Dolly, and I don’t say that idly; the response on Blacksky has been a plaintive a “NOOOOOOO” as anywhere else, it’s the first item on the world news in Ireland and London, the most hated man in the word actually gave an appropriate response, she was the least probematic white woman alive in the 21st Century. The queen of Appalachia, the willing icon of drag queens the world around, the one single musical artist that literally everyone I’ve ever known would ride for. In the end, I think we loved her because she was what we wished everyone was: solemn but sassy, talented but humble, self-depricating and silly yet fully aware of her worth and her truth, tremendously kind and surpassingly generous, always ready to bless your heart and hug your neck with empathy and sincerity. The website for her Imagination Library is crashing constantly tonight as people pay tribute by pairing their generosity with hers, because Dolly was someone who made you want to be a better person in the ways she was.

A person of divine gifts, who used them to make the world a better place, and was an exemplar of what the Bible demanded of us all: kindness, justice, walk humbly with your God. I know it will be 2076 before it could even be considered, but if we start venerating now, it’ll make the case easier for our grandchildren.

“O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered: Accept our prayers on behalf of thy servant Dolly Rebecca Parton, and grant her an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.”

– Conrad Elliot

“And for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

-William Gibson, Count Zero

 

My favorite author was on top of it forty years ago. He’s not the least bit wrong, either. If you look at the venture capitalists of Silly Con Valley over the last twenty years, the transformation is insane. I don’t think it’s an accident that at the core of the cohort are a bunch of white Africans who came through Stanford in the 1980s and 90s: the mental orientation is “entitled colonizer”: we are here to bring the light of our civilzation to you benighted abroginals, and your only appropriate response is subservient gratitude. From Peter Thel’s armada of Stanfurd undergrad blood boys, to Y Combinator as the new credential, to the “old dude hanging around the high school” vibe that Theo Baker’s outstanding book skewers in “How To Rule The World”, to the arrogance and inevitablity of “A.I.” and the demand that “it will” be treated as the equivalent of “it already can” – these are people who have enough money to foist their worldview on a world that has little opportunity to push back. There is an assumption that they are entitled to purchase their own government, coin their own money, carve out their own cities or states (Tim Draper will not be happy until California is in pieces and one of them is an autunomous 415/650) – that the world is obliged to conform to their demands.

And they can get away with it, because they have money. Lots and lots of money. Mostly through the circular dealing of passing it among themselves, investing in one another’s projects at grotesquely inflated valuations that then make their own holdings worth even more. Phony Stark himself made most of his money on government subsidies, used it to buy himself Twitter at an excessive price, and then have Twitter acquired by SpaceX to give himself another source of phony money with a government backstop. If it weren’t for Uncle Sucker, Elon Musk would be the most obnoxious has-been around the braai in Jo’Burg. As it is, he’s the bankroll of white supremacy around the world. It’s not a coincidence that white South Africans and Indian Brahmins are overrepresented in the VC class, because the superiority oozes out of them all.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. We were supposed to be working twenty-hour weeks by now. We certainly weren’t meant to be working twelve hour days six days a week, like the VC masters demand is necessary to stay ahead of “the Chinese menace”. Instead, the productivity gains of the last forty years have flowed uphill, and Ed Earl Brown is doing about like he did when he entered the workforce. Old-timers grouse that a homeless guy has a cellphone, when that phone’s service costs 20% of what a landline used to, or that their blue-haired grandkids have a 65” television when it costs a fraction in real dollars of what that wooden console set cost in 1984. Meanwhile, college tuition that once could be paid with minimum wage for 20 hours a week now means starting work with $100,000 in debt – but if you don’t take on the burden, you’re not allowed to have a job that offers you the carrot of eventually paying it off. Meanwhile, we’re being told that AI will replace everything except the most senior people – when the truth of the matter is, your garden-variety CxO could be replaced by AI much quicker than your typical junior developer. And the COVID-19 pandemic showed us who the essential workers really are – for the most part, they’re the people with their name on the front of their shirts. AI isn’t going to repair your toilet on Christmas Eve, or change the oil in your hypercar, or actually flip the burgers on the griddle. But the Eloi are convinced that they can abstract the Morlocks away, that the actual labor that makes things possible is fully fungible – as the word goes, unskilled.

The problem is, that kind of money buys you freedom from consequences. If your new company turns out to be shit, so what? Someone else will pick up the pieces, you just lost a bunch of funny money, you have plenty more. The investors who bankrolled you can spare the cash. Or maybe they can’t, but that’s their lookout. We have a class of people with wealth and power who have no fear of God, of the guillotine, of confiscatory top marginal rates, that someday the remaining 99% will realize that the 1% have all the stuff, and if they ever want any stuff, they have to take it from the 1%. And we owe it to that 1% to protect them from themselves. And the easiest way to do that will simply be to say that we’re taxing wealth, and as soon as you’re a billionaire, we’re going to take everything over a billion. Everything. If you don’t want to lose it, better start giving it away quick. In the golden age of the 1950s that the white supremacists want to return to, 1/3 of workers were in a union and the top marginal rate was 91%. Bet. If you want to bring back the old days, we aren’t starting with segregation or male chauvanism, we’re starting with that.

It’s past time to make being a billionaire a capital crime. If you want to live, you can’t take it with you. 

Almost two years in, I’ve made my peace with the six inch phone. The iPhone 16 Pro will get most of the good Apple Intelligence stuff in iOS 27, I like having the telephoto camera, the battery life is still mostly manageable, and most importantly, it serves just fine as The One Device. My iPad mini is mostly for Sunday nights in the shed now, to be used for music and radio streaming, and while the iPhone 13 mini is still dearly missed – and has a special case on it so I can plug it into USB-C instead – the fact of the matter is that the rest of the world has long since moved on to Big Phone and there’s nothing to be done about it. 

As I approach the two decade mark on this blog, I am struck by how much of that time has been the chase for the One True Thing – the quest to stop having three or four of everything that each do 80% of what I want and have the one thing that does 100%. With the phone, it finally settled on the iPhone 16 Pro. With the pen, it finally settled on the Machine Era brass field pen, retrofitted with a navy-ink Pilot G2 refill. With the watch…well, you can’t expect an Apple Watch to last forever, but the Ultra 2 that I got almost three years ago performs like a champ with no signs of stopping or losing support. I haven’t been able to pare down the raft of blazers, but if I’m not trying to nice it up, my gray American Giant chore coat and the black fleece that goes under it can be mixed and matched for 90% of my workaday outerwear needs (if only I needed outerwear more than four months a year!) and after years of being all over the place, I mostly use only two Yeti tumblers any longer: a 16 oz at work and the Moon Dust 20 oz at home, where the textured handfeel is a reminder that I’m not at work and can unclench for a bit.

It’s remarkable the difference metal makes. Won’t shatter if you drop it, won’t leach microplastics into your testicles, and that 20 oz size is perfect for morning coffee, evening pints, or refilling with Coke Zero from one of the 3/$5 bottles on sale at Safeway right now. The metal watch feels better on my arm. The metal pen is a comforting weight in the hand. Even the Swiss Army tool, souvenir of Switzerland even though I didn’t buy it from there, is gold-toned Alox and has only the three things I ever really need: bottle opener, scissors and box ripper. And when one of the metal lightsabers goes on my belt, for whatever reason, it’s hanging from a simple piece of aluminum that slides over the belt and holds a Covertec wheel in place. 

It was probably fifteen years or so ago, after reading William Gibson’s Zero History, that I became fixated on the idea of having things that last. In the case of the mechanical watch and the Machine Era pen, the originals would still be doing fine if I hadn’t lost them through neglect and inattention. (For that matter, so would the first Moon Dust Yeti.) It drives home the point that even when you defeat planned obsolescence, you have to take care of your stuff and be mindful of it and not lose track of it, like the perfect blue Uniqlo casual blazer that I paid $30 for in NYC in 2012 and have since bought half a dozen other blazers trying to replace. I know I probably can’t buy the one phone for the rest of my life, but it would sure be nice to try.

And when you’re done spending money on stuff, you can put it into experiences, whether that means a plane to Kenya or a jug of a new cask mild or a new book of history. Or at the very least, if things start to go south, you already have all the things you need to get by. Of which…

I saw my first and last episode of Real Housewives tonight. Well, I say I saw it. I lasted about 63 seconds before realizing I only wanted to see these people getting devoured by sharks. Or maybe Galactus. Anyway.

It struck me that these shows have been running continuously for twenty years. That there are so many variations (yet just the same) that I never want to hear a word about superhero fatigue ever. That there is an audience for this, and worse, that there are people who consider this aspirational. And even worse, there are people who consider it real.

And this is the world we live in now. This is the same ethos that sits in the White House and drives the government and is busily engaged in driving America into the blades of the wood-chipper. This is what you have to work around if you’re lucky, and what’s making your life hell if you aren’t. And it’s all because 49.6% of the voting electorate affirmatively believed that reality is whatever you insist it is.

Think about it. Four years of constant cringe. Four years of incompetence. Four years of shameful fiasco capped off with a pandemic that ran wild and killed 400,000 Americans before we could change leadership and ended with a mob invading the Capitol to overthrow the results of the election that made that change. And yet within a month, the GOP was lining up to offer their distended red buttocks in submission, and a little over three and a half years later, people had completely forgotten about it all and were willing to believe it would somehow be different, or even better, despite absolutely no material evidence it would and tons that it wouldn’t.

Maybe you can blame racism. Maybe you can blame sexism. Maybe you can blame a press in thrall to spectacle (you absolutely can). But in the end, it doesn’t matter at all. One-third of the US voting population chose to run it back with an older, more senile, more racist, more criminal, more incompetent version of a President who had already failed once.

One of the first gifts my wife ever gave me when we started dating was a fridge sticker that said “You Can’t Fix Stupid”. It was a reference to my IT career at the time, but now it’s a sign of the world at large. We are at the mercy of the affirmatively, aggressively stupid, aided and abetted by the people dumb enough to believe that it didn’t make a difference who they voted for or that staying home was anything other than surrender. And the problem is, you can’t reason with stupid. You can’t lead it to the light. You can’t show it a better way, because if they could see a better way, they wouldn’t have been stupid enough to do this in the first place.

So the big question now is: can you assemble a majority coalition? One that is willing to vote to contain the stupidity, and to prioritize containing the stupidity over any other individual issues for a generation.? One that is willing to hash out its issues in the primary, but vote the straight coalition ticket every November until the damage is remediated and the harm is constrained?

Because that’s what it’s going to take. You have to lock it down forever. A lot of people will not get what they want, and maybe we don’t move the ball as fast as we should in some areas, and maybe the “mainstream Republicans” just have to suck it up and eat shit for a decade as penance for thinking they could make a deal with the devil.

But there’s no going back to how things used to be.

Om Malik entered immortality on June 24th, after a couple of months in the Stanford ICU – from which he continued doing what he does. His last blog post, other than to say he was stepping away for a bit and might be some time, was a teardown of Anthropic, Mythos, and how the current state of Silly Con Valley is all about indulging myth rather than fact, and it was classic Om all the way down.

I was not lucky enough to know Om, except through his writing, which was always vital and always incisive. The first picture I ever saw of him was outside some event in Palo Alto, ever-present Yankee cap on head, with a cigarette and a Nokia 8800 in one hand, and my immediate thought was “this is a guy who will know where all the bodies are buried.” And he did, for a long time, first at Red Herring and other magazines and then at GigaOM, which was an indispensable source of industry news and opinion for years. And when he gave up being the 24/7 news guy, he became the incisive commentary guy, always experimenting with one format or another for his writing and his pictures and his conversations. And now he is gone, and this godforsaken Valley is far poorer for the loss of a teller of truth with institutional memory and no one to keep happy.

I thought for a long time that was the career arc I would follow – hot young firebrand turned wise elder – and until seven years ago it felt possible. But now it doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to happen, because institutional memory is not valued anywhere any longer and even my day-to-day work is an afterthought to the people who make decisions about whether we even need system administrators. When genuine Business Idiots (h/t Ed Zitron) don’t understand what AI can’t do and are always chasing buzzword compliance, stupid decisions will get made and ordinary workers will catch the shrapnel when it blows up in their faces. Sam Altman will probably be just fine when ChatGPT fails to be worth the money and OpenAI collapses like a flan in a cupboard, but will the people who patrol his buildings be all right? Will the people forced to retool their workflows to rely on burning as many tokens as possible for the sake of looking like they’re up with the times? Will the people who lost jobs because their managers were completely assured that AI could do what they did?

At some point, we as a society lost the ability to call bullshit what it is and cast it aside. Now, if someone says their ratchet chatbot will drive creation of data centers in space and address a larger market than the GDP of the United States, or if someone says Helen Keller never existed, or if someone says that terrorists are gouging the pool lining out of a reflecting pool, we are somehow obliged to engage with that as if it is valid, let alone important, and the energy necessary to refute bullshit remains an order of magnitude greater than it took to create it. And bullshit is the sea we swim in, the dank brown miasma that darkens the world and against which we have to constantly struggle just to stay upright.

Om was a light in that darkness. Now that light is no longer with us. I hope there are more lights like his and that we just haven’t seen them yet.

Switzerland isn’t cheap. Upon getting home, there was a realization that the spending needs to be cut down for a while. And for the most part, it has. Looking around the house, I have craft beer and highball makings to last the month. I have all the American Giant I need for the time being. I even have two unworn pair of LC King jeans in reserve, which is good, because apparently they went out of business two years ago.

And the urge for new stuff has subsided. I’m content with the Yeti situation at the moment, the hat situation is fine, the MacBook Neo is no longer on the board now that we know Apple Intelligence wants 12 GB of RAM for best results, and with a heat wave on the way, buying outerwear for winter seems like the height of foolishness. Even the brief bout of lightsaber glee has subsided. The “souvenir” knife-but-not-a-knife is as tactile a satisfying fidget as I could have hoped for, and feeds my need for metal things that will last the rest of my days in a world where my watch and phone have an expiration date.

At this point, honestly, the only thing I want is the chance to step back from the world. I take it every chance I get, for however long I can manage it. Sunday night, maybe fifteen minutes in the morning, every evening before a chance to work from home, wherever it can be found. And I always appreciate it, no matter how brief. That in and of itself might be the best new thing I’ve gotten.

Honestly? Not that many. There’s a slowly diminishing return on new and different things to bring back from abroad, especially when you’re visiting a country for the second time. The biggest takeaways from Switzerland, for me, were less about Switzerland and more about travel in general. I learned that I’m just fine with premium economy on the return trip, but trying to actually sleep on the eastbound flight is a pain. I learned that SAS is a fine airline to fly with. I learned that the best part of flying is the airport lounge (more on this in a minute).  I learned that I really miss not having the Bonvoy lounge in the hotel when it’s not there (more on this in a minute). I learned that you’re better off planning to stack multiple light layers in a pinch than bringing more than one Legitimately Warm Garment (I had three, a huge botch on my part, sadlling me with surplus bulk under tight packing conditions). I learned that if you’re going to carry a day pack, you’d damn well better bring a bigger bottle than 12 ounces, especially if you’re trafficking ice around.

The lounges have been revealed as the apotheoisis of going out, because it feels like you’re at home – comfy chairs or sofa, you’re not paying for the booze in the fridge, and it’s quiet – but you’re not. You’re in a unique liminal space, nowhere exactly, but on the way to somewhere in the case of the airport and definitely away in the case of the hotel. The feeling suggests a private club more than anything, which is sort of a “duh” observation, but it drives home the idea that we don’t really have that club space in the modern world (outside of London, probably). I think membership of the Diogenes Club would suit me down to the ground.

But the other thing is this: I have realized how much of my relaxation comes from not *doing* anything. Just the chance to be sat in a cool place (temps and atmospheres alike), drink to hand (of adequate size for its potency, as it turns out), nowhere to be and no schedule to keep. Like on the patio at Grutschalp, just gazing out at the mountains under the shade of the umbrella with my Coke Zero and the music in my earbuds.

And the kicker: this is easily replicable at home. We have the palm tree in the yard, the string lights in the copper beech above the outdoor sofa, I have the space I carved out of the shed (and can see the palm tree out the open door, and in the morning when the sky is gray and the air is cool, it’s a vacation all of its own. Almost every year brings either a trip to Tahoe or to camp in the woods, either way just lounging in nature quenching my thirst and maybe reading. It’s not unlike what we used to do long ago, hanging out on the patio of the Ritz in Half Moon Bay, and if I could do it on a workday in the nearby downtown, it would be perfect.

Oh yeah, and the “huustee” of the Swiss restaurants, everyone’s own bespoke blend of fruits and herbs to make iced tea. Gimme that.

The last time we were in Switzerland was three whirlwind days sixteen years ago, which makes this trip a weird bookend to a thoroughly emotionally complicated month of May. Aside from the trains in and out and the scenic run to Montreaux and back in a day, we were entirely in the Berner Oberland and mostly in Mürren – which we did visit again, but this time as part of two weeks through Lugano, Luzern, Bern and Wengen. We saw the top of the Jungfraujoch in person on a sunny day. We took the train from Grutschalp to Murren and hiked down to Gimmelwald on a sunny day. We rode bikes a good twenty kilometers plus from Murten on a sunny day and saw a two thousand year old amphitheater on the edge of a medieval village.

If it sounds like there’s a theme here, there is. The monkey-paw wish for a clear day in Zermatt to see the Matterhorn came true, accompanied by a heat wave for the ages. I packed for a mean daily temperature a good 10 degrees Celsuis closer than what we experienced, and actually had to buy a couple of short-sleeve shirts in Bern to make up for the fact that I couldn’t layer undershirts or count on my fleece or quarter-zip. And it drove home my biggest problem with Europe: yes trains everywhere, yes a committment to democracy despite the state of the world, yes beautiful old towns and old world charm, but try getting more than 12 ounces of soda at once or getting any ice at all in it. Given how successful our use of a day pack was, I think I could (and should) have brought a bigger Yeti than 12 ouces for ice on the run during the day. The 18 oz bottle is back on the menu for the next trip, wherever and whenever that happens to be.

And that’s kind of up in the air, things being how they are. The world has gone shit-shaped and America is the biggest culprit, and even if we can afford a big trip next year it’s not unreasonable to worry about how we’ll be received. Everyone in Switzerland was…well, it wasn’t Ireland. Toward the end of the trip I saw a post on Bluesky that called it “the Marin County of Europe” and the precision and accuracy of that remark made my wife laugh out loud. Don’t get me wrong, we had a great time and enjoyed it, but we were also happier than usual to be heading home (the heat is the biggest part of that, certainly, but not the only part) and it did rather feel like we don’t need to hurry back. One of the nice things about living in California is that we have mountains at home, and the mountains at home are in Tahoe and Yosemite.

But it was also a reminder that I miss the simple things. My own bed (everything in Switzerland was firm to the point of Spartan). The feel of the 20 oz Yeti’s stone texture in one hand. The use of something other than the phone for every bit of reading or Intenet access. The ordinary pleasures of the life we’ve painstakingly assembled for ourselves over the last five years while the world burns itself down rather than turn away from the flames. There are other things, not for discussion here yet (if ever), that suggest the future still has hope, if we only live to see it through. And in a dark living room, looking out the back window to the sun on the palm tree, the gift is living in the moment and appreciating what we have around us. There’ll be time for work tomorrow.

I. 

It’s been sixteen years since my last Decoration Day. The last time I was there, I was happy with my job, happy with my government, happy with most of my family. The 3G was still all the iPhone I needed, and with Steve Jobs in control, things tended to ship when they were ready rather than because it was the third Friday in September. We were finally starting to get on top of the mortgage, we were headed back to Europe for the first time in three years, and Facebook had put me into a rolling high school reunion that was fishing some of the past out of the black hole for the first time, polishing it off, and making it worth more than I thought.

Things have changed. The world has gone backward at jig speed. Stupid has taken over the nation, and Alabama has very nearly the worst case of it. And the completely unrelated matter that cause my mother to tear the family apart would break open that autumn and make it emotionally impossible for me to go back. It was a problem I didn’t have the power to solve, which meant I wanted no part of it. Still don’t, honestly, but it turns out that when you stay away for that long, and don’t spend more than a few hours, there’s no time for anything but being polite and pleasant. It was good to see my aunts, uncles and godparents, however briefly, and it was a necessary connection. If something were to happen tomorrow, I went back. I made the gesture.

It wasn’t awful, all in all. It’s not like the place was swimming in MAGA gear on everybody and yard signs and bumper stickers. The presence of $4 gas probably counted for a lot of that, if I had to guess, but it’s also hard not to feel like they don’t feel the need to advertise their allegiance for the same reason humans don’t advertise that they need to breathe air. The state legislature took the opportunity to gerrymander away every Black Congressman within hours of the Supreme Court paving the way. A couple days later, a state legislator was openly hoping the Supreme Court would somehow throw out the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. And naturally, the church service was thirty minutes of praise choruses on a Humbletron followed by a sermon on the rich man and Lazarus whose point was that Hell is real, with nary a syllable spared on what got the rich man to Hell in the first place. So despite appearances, nothing has really changed in the Heart of Dixie.

II.

The hometown has changed.

About half of it has been bought by a dubious cult church with strong January 6 links, and it feels like a lot of people are not happy about that. The streets are empty, as are half the storefronts, and it doesn’t exactly suggest growth is on the way. But there’s a handful of things I never expected. There’s a new development close to mine, with newer and nicer houses and a clubhouse with a pool and things…and everyone I saw walking and talking and playing ball there was Black. There’s a sports bar and pub in the old natural gas building. There’s a coffee roaster and cafe in the old TV repair shop, and it’s damn good coffee, and they have mental health resources listed on the same wall as the prayer request board. Hell, you go down the road to the last exit, and there’s Taco Bell and Hardee’s and Sonic and McDonald’s, none of which existed in my era. And close to the Sonic, there’s a cigar lounge, with leather chairs and brown liquor by the drink.

Birmingham, of course, is Birmingham. Dining Room of the South, the best craft beer variety in America, baseball history, Special Dogs, and full of people who know what it means to fight. Because they did. And their parents. And their grandparents. Black Birmingham is better prepared for the world in 2026 than almost anyplace in America that hasn’t already been made a battlefield, and whatever I can do to help, I’ll do. We could all be taking lessons, given what it’s going to take.

Every chance I get, I’m promoting Birmingham. I’m proud of what it has become, to the point where I feel awkward about stealing valor from the people who stayed, and fought, and spend the last 30 years making it the kind of place I would move to in a heartbeat if it were only located on the San Mateo coast or something. They put the work in, and I didn’t, and all I can do is promote what they did. But I also had a conversation with three guys who stayed, and in the course of talking about City Stages, and the Birmingham Grasshoppers, and the old spots of Five Points South, they helped me see that doing my time helped fertilize the ground for the people who did the work that followed me, and it made me feel a little better. There is value in remembering when, remembering the Before Times, knowing how far we’ve come and the value of preserving what has been built and not taking it for granted. Which is a lesson we could really have stood to internalize as a nation. In any event, it’s a city I would not hesitate to go back to for another visit.

III.

This was the last visit.

For the better part of twenty years, my mother has been pestering me to come home and go through stuff. I thought I had, honestly, but this was the last call. Everything I had in the old house I grew up in has been touched, evaluated, and separated into tranches of “I am taking this now/I need this shipped to me/I need this kept for the nephews and niece to have first crack at it/this can be donated somewhere or just thrown out”. This was last call. Everything I still want to keep from the house is in my old room, on or next to the bed, and could probably all fit into an overstuffed SUV.

The house is only superficially the same. Some trees are gone, some have grown beyond measure, the garden and the swingset and the dog lot and the grapevines and the cane patch and the chestnut tree are gone, as are the magnolia and the two basketball goals. The driveway sits empty by default, and there’s a house on what used to be the empty lot across the street that served as the closest thing to a park for touch football or riding BMX bikes or what have you. And inside the house, almost all the furniture and furnishings of consequence are down in Baldwin County, and the visual contextual clues that made it my old house are few and far between. To the point that when my mother talks about selling it, and selling her house down south, and moving into an assisted living community, it sounds like a grand idea rather than the loss of my childhood home.

Home is a loaded word. Home is safe. Home is where they have to take you in. Home is a place where you don’t need a bubble, or a blue dot, or the ability to pass. Home is belonging. I know I said that no place felt like home on day one like Nashville did in 1994, and that was true, but Nashville in 2026 is different even if you were a freshly-minted University Graduate Fellow. Arlington and DC felt like home, because that was where I was rebuilt, but that job isn’t there any more and the people are scattered to the winds. This place now? This feels like home, when I’m pulling the garbage cans out to the driveway on a Saturday morning or walking the dog under the blanket of marine layer, walking into church on Sunday, having a pint down the street or in downtown. But Silly Con Valley doesn’t feel like home the way Northern California does. And I am too close to the Hellmouth of everything that drives us toward the Apocalypse at ever more acute angles to feel safety or belonging or comfort in Silly Con Valley.

Home is a state of mind. And that’s why Jason Isbell’s lyrics resonates with me. “Somebody take me home, through those Alabama pines.” Through. Home isn’t in those Alabama pines, never really was, but the way there runs through them and it took me a long time to accept that. You don’t have to remain, but you have to go through. Maybe this is me finally coming out the other side.