Author: Stagger Lee

When I get up, she swears that she don’t hear it

Says that I’m as quiet as a mouse

I comb my hair and throw some water on my face

And back out of the stillness of our house

Lately, my patience is in short supply

Nothing good seems to ever come from all this work, no matter how hard I try

You know I believe in the Son, I ain’t no backslider, but my people were told they’d prosper in this land

Still, I know some who’ve never seen the ocean or set one foot on a velvet bed of sand

But they’ve got their treasure laying way up high, where there might be many mansions

but when I look up, all I see is sky

Maybe it’s the getting by that gets right underneath you

It’d swallow up your every step, boy, if it could

But maybe it’s the stuff it takes to get up in the morning and put another day in, son

That holds you till the getting’s good

Green ribbon front doors, dishwater days, this whole town is tied to the torso of God’s mysterious ways

Maybe it’s the getting by that gets right underneath you

It’d swallow up your every step, boy, if it could

But maybe it’s the stuff it takes to get up in the morning and put another day in, son

that keeps you standing where you should

So put another day in, son, and hold on till the getting’s good

When I started this blog, it was supposed to be the public-facing option. It was going to be an adjunct to LiveJournal, which was locked down and private and only for friends. And then, as my wife says, time happened. And social media happened. And I made some bad decisions around the incipient world of social media in an attempt to make more happen in the real world, and I know now that all of that was part and parcel of the depression incident of 2007 and the last thing I needed was to sever parasocial ties in hopes it would lead to social ones. More fool me.

Well, I think I’ve built up enough backlog of content now. There’s the misery of four election seasons, there’s a decade of suspicion of Silly Con Valley and all its pomps and all its works and all its empty promises, there’s the complete history of the iPhone starting from my perch inside Apple for its debut, there’s the rise and fall of Vanderbilt athletics that aren’t baseball or women’s bowling, there’s travel abroad on half a dozen occasions. There’s the story of me, age 34-49, constantly fighting to stay what I am and resisting becoming who I probably could or should be.

It’s security through obscurity. I make no effort to promote this, nor do I really want to. But maybe it’s time to see if more than four or five people ever look at this, going forward. And maybe I need to see if I can do this on a schedule sometimes, address some broader topics, hit some word counts, see if I can communicate to a requirement. Because who knows, that might be next on the list if work doesn’t pan out the way I need it to.

And when I do need to put up a publicly identified known online presence, I’ll keep this air-gapped, because sometimes you need to erase a dot without leading people to wonder what was under the dot. But for now, if you’re just now here…welcome.

That’s a wrap on year 15. Here’s to better days coming.

I stand by every vowel, consonant and punctuation mark of this.

There are no good answers now.

The good answer was in 2002, when the Taliban were pushed into a corner. The good answer was to accept NATO’s invocation of Article V, make this a multinational effort with the singular objective of overthrowing the Taliban, and then allow a drawn-down multinational force to supervise humanitarian reconstruction. But no, we had to go it alone and then take our eye off the ball before the job was done so that Bush the Dumber could work out his daddy issues in Iraq, with predictable results.

For the last ten years or more, there have been two choices: stay forever and slowly bleed out, or give up and come home and accept the consequences. There is no national will to stay, so the only thing to do is come home – which was not a controversial notion at all until two weeks ago when people realized What That Meant. Now the Republicans are desperately hoping everyone will forget all the tweets and posts and press released about how Tr*mp actually ended the war in Afghanistan so that they can paint this as Biden’s Saigon (timely reference, well done, why not compare Hillary to Maude again).

The fact is, Biden wants out. He wanted out in 2009-2010, and had to sit by as the Pentagon mau-maued Obama into going along with another “surge” in order to [FILE NOT FOUND]. Given the opportunity, he has refused to go along with it again, and the Pentagon has a lot to answer for – mostly “how come this army you trained and equipped for eighteen years fell over like a Big 12 football defense at the first sign of combat?”

It’s going to be ugly, and my heart breaks for everyone stuck there, and we’re probably ten years away from another mob of expat Saudis launching terror attacks around the world from their safe haven (and it’s past time to hold Saudi Arabia to account for the last twenty years, but good luck with that), but at some point, you just have to accept that band-aids don’t fix bullet holes and we don’t have the will as a country to do anything else, and that the time to save Afghanistan was three administrations ago. Let’s just try to make a little bit of an effort for once to put the blame where it belongs this time.

There are rules that weren’t there to begin with. There were no scholarship limits in college football until Bear Bryant started signing guys to sit on the bench for four years just to keep them away from Auburn or Georgia Tech or Tennessee. There was probably no icing in hockey until it was realized that you could just keep dumping it down to the other end and never actually get any action in front of the mount. The spitball was perfectly legal in baseball until a guy got hit in the head and died. A rule is generally there to maintain order and keep things fair, and as soon as someone figures out how to abuse it to their benefit, it generally has to be changed.

California is spending millions and millions of dollars, in the middle of a pandemic and a protracted fire season and god knows what else is around the corner, in order to hold a recall election. This election is to turf out the governor, Gavin Newsom. Never mind that there are elections next year, or that Newsom was convincingly elected with almost 62% of the vote first time out, or that there is nothing in particular that he has done that is out of bounds with what any other governors have done in the last three years, especially as regards the pandemic. Newsom was elected to be governor of the capital of the Resistance, and has mostly handled his duties without incident.

But.

If you can get 12% of the number of voters who voted in the last election to sign a petition, you can initiate a recall. And if the recall is successful, then there is a list of replacement candidates, and whoever gets the plurality of votes there wins.  About 60% of the state voted last time out, which means that in theory, you only need 7.2% of eligible voters in the state to call for a recall.  And since the incumbent can’t be on the ballot, whoever comes first on the list is governor, no matter how low a percentage of votes they get so long as no one else’s is higher.  Meaning that with 46 candidates on the ballot, it’s very possible that someone with a quarter of the vote or so will get to become governor.

This is happening for one reason and one reason alone: because the Republican Party knows it is too weak to win a fair election in California. They could barely muster 40% of the vote for their candidate in 2018 – but they only have to round up half of their own voters to have enough signatures to force a recall, at which point they get another bite at the apple for the low low price of a quarter of a billion dollars.

I’m sure the recall must have seemed a valuable tool at some point, but like the proposition system, it has become a way to buy and finagle what cannot be won fairly at the ballot box or through the political process. Both are past their sell-by date, and it’s insane to leave sharp objects lying around where the ignorant and willfully malicious can use them to hurt someone. Or the state.

A new app dropped a couple weeks ago, called HalloApp, which appears to be an attempt at a do-over by some of the WhatsApp founders and big wheels. It seems as if someone took WhatsApp and tried to engineer it closer to a social media tool than a messaging app – you can still do individual messaging, but the focus largely appears to be on group chats with the added ability to post “publicly” to everyone on your contact list or a fixed subset of same.

This is intriguing. Sure, it’s relying on your contacts, but at the same time, the world is only as big as your contact list. If you immediately go in and set it for “only these people”, you’ve essentially created an allow list that you can then expand. Anyone who wants to follow you needs to be in your phone book. This is not unlike what WhatsApp did with its “status” feature – you know, when Facebook decided that everything they do has to rip off Snapchat – but this time it’s built in from the start and those “public” messages are no different in content from the group texts.

Couple of thoughts here.

1) It would be the easiest damn thing in the world for Apple to slap this over top of Messages, or Signal to do the same, but it’s difficult to square “truly secure messaging client” with “public social media app”. Especially since…

2) This requires you to have each other’s phone number. One prospective user of this app was wary of this, since anyone she’d ever given her number to would be able to see her on the app (and thus would require the allow-list focus above). And I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to upload their contacts to match against everyone else’s in some as-yet-unknown application, but then, I’m not sure how else to make this work. Which means…

3) …that this app is not for parasocial relationships, where you’re following The Rock, or Rebecca Lowe, or the local pizza and beer joint – this is for people you actually know. Which is fine, kinda sorta, but it also makes it difficult to make those casual acquaintances or friends of friends. I don’t know how you’re meant to allow for the serendipity of meeting people without opening the floodgates for abuse and toxicity.

Which brings me back to…Twitter. Because without really meaning to, Twitter has made it possible to do this, kind of sort of, as long as you’re willing to lock your account and be judicious about who you allow to retweet into your timeline (so you don’t get overloaded with a ton of political stuff that you totally agree with but which is wearying to digest daily)…and as long as you use Tweetbot, which means you don’t get the worst of Twitter. You know: ads, promoted tweets, a non-linear algorithmic timeline and the constant intrusion of what your friends liked or followed even without retweeting. At the end of the day, as much as I moan that I can’t quit Twitter, I don’t yet need to, because these specific tools make it feasible.

The other thing is…I’ve been on Twitter in some form since 2007. Their shitbaggery has forced me to jump through some hoops from time to time, but the practical upshot is that most everyone I would need to see my updates can – only a handful of people from my high school or from DC are not there. And the other problem is that you’re never going to get people to move to a new app, not now. Unless we put a torpedo at the waterline of Facebook, because let’s be honest, what was the last thing everybody ran out and signed up for? Instagram. And that was a decade ago. It’s singular that the only two things that have cracked the shell since then are Snapchat and TikTok, both of which are explicitly targeting a far younger generation than mine; the people who I want to stay close to are never going to be on what is essentially an even more do-it-yourself YouTube. And that’s not how we do things. Text, still pictures, occasional rare video.

I was told previous that at my age, the easiest way to make new friends is to connect with your old ones. Similarly, the only way to get the new social media app you want is to engineer an old one into working for you. And to be honest, that Twitter account and one Signal group chat can just about cover everything, if I’m being honest with myself.

Now if only those sons of bitches would give me my original four-character name back.

It really began my senior year of high school. I needed a cap to advertise where I was going to college. I bought a white circle-pattern Vanderbilt cap by The Game, which was the standard for hats at the time…and promptly flung it out of sight in the closet when things didn’t quite work out that way. For years afterward, the quest for a decent Birmingham-Southern cap would vex me to no end, especially given the shitty bookstore options for an NAIA institution. But that was the era in which I discovered sports, and it didn’t take long before I was accumulating headgear for every and any team I could claim the slightest interest in or affiliation with. Alabama. The Braves. The Chargers. The Padres. The Redskins. And then as the expansion hit, I started buying stuff that I just wanted, like that teal Marlins hat. (What? It matched my Saturn.)

Then I washed out of grad school (after three years of piling up even more hats) and suddenly I was living and working in DC where a hat was not really a viable thing – partly because I didn’t have the hair to come to work and take one off, and partly because it was just hotter than Hell too often. I’m sure I still had a few, and I did famously buy a Cal hat in black-on-black after a fateful wedding in Santa Cruz in 2000, but I don’t recall routinely wearing anything other than a Boston Red Sox batting-practice hat for strategic softball purposes – which in turn was replaced by a San Francisco Giants batting-practice hat in spring of 2002. Even after I cut my hair down to nothing at the end of 2005, you still have to go almost to mid-2009 in my photo album on my iPhone before you see me routinely wearing a ball cap on a routine basis.

The accumulation in recent years was largely driven by Vanderbilt, and the constant quest for the Best Possible Vanderbilt Hat (a quest which was only satiated when Ebbets Field Flannels brought out their throwback wool flannel Vandy cap, which I bought directly I found out about it). In addition to all the official Vanderbilt caps, there were Vanderbilt-adjacent caps, mostly of teams with VandyBoys on them (there is a black and gold A’s hat and a black and gold Braves hat, for instance) and a steady buildup of lids for the Giants (SF and SJ), Cal, the Warriors, and the like. There were a couple or three Nats hats over the years, as I tried to find a way to keep a hand in with the District without perpetuating the merchandising of an unsavory nickname or enriching the worst owner in sports. There was a Barons hat or two, as I tried to maintain a connection with my past.

And then there was a pandemic, and things got a little out of hand.

Suddenly, I had two or three hats for every team. I looked up and I had bought a San Diego Padres hat that was, if anything, an artifact of a life not chosen. I had three or four Barons hats, trying to pick something that seemed like an appropriate match for the connection I now had with my birth city. I had a hat for every occasion with the Giants: the 4th of July cap, the Pride cap, the St Paddy’s cap. I had two or three of the plain gray Philadelphia/Oakland A’s hats. I had the New Hampshire Fisher Cats lid with the leering top-hatted donkey on it, and the Louisville Bats cap with the cheerful mint julep on it. And on top of all that, now there’s the charcoal-gray Kangol flat cap for cold weather, because…

Well, let’s look at the because of why I’m wearing some of these things in the current rotation.

The Kangol is only really suitable for cold weather, but my father had one (which I also have) and I never found it until years after he was gone. Mine is darker and made in the US rather than the UK, but it’s very suitable for the times and places you need a hat to take off when you go inside.

There’s a Birmingham Black Barons cap that I ordered from the stadium in Alabama. Flex-fit, little more snug than I’m used to, Willie Mays’ first team and the only major league ball team in the history of Birmingham. The sort of thing that lets people know you aren’t the wrong sort of 50 year old white guy with a goatee, Oakleys and a Southern accent. And by people, I mostly mean me.

The San Jose Churros hat has been alternated with the San Jose Beer Batter hat. Both have more orange than I’d like, but they are both relevant to the nearest professional team, and to aspects of that team with which I am well familiar (and which speak to the local connection and traditions more than a block SJ does).

Lately, the current hat is an XXL fitted New York Giants replica, which is the pro hat Willie Mays wore between the Black Barons and San Francisco. It feels as old and out of place as a Brooklyn Dodgers hat, a reference to an era when the Giants were a glamour team in New York that counted Frank Sinatra and Tallulah Bankhead as fans, a team that had Mel Ott and Carl Hubbell in the age between McGraw and Mays. It reflects the team I’ve settled on as my major league team, while still reflecting a certain East Coast loyalty and sensibility which I will probably never shake. Now if only I could do something about the damned orange…

Which brings up another point. There isn’t really a Vanderbilt hat in the rotation at the moment. I don’t exactly know why that is, especially when they just had two pitchers drafted in the top ten and finished national runner-up again. Maybe it’s to do with the current nightmare unfolding around the SEC (of which more later), but it’s just as likely that once you take away the sidewalk fandom, it’s the school I washed out of after trying to launder my degree and which I primarily cling to now in order to hold it up against Shallow Alto the way you hold up a cross to a vampire. If that particular burden on my life were alleviated, would I still need Vanderbilt in my life as badly, as dissociated as I am from college football (like I say, of which) and as little connection as I feel with the alumni in town any longer?

Ultimately, I think the hat has become another one of those things where I end up with a dozen that are 80% right trying to find the one that’s 100% right. I need the hat that feels like it’s been missing from my head, and I don’t know what that is. And if I had to guess, that’s a symptom of something else. Of which, again, more later.

The blazer first became a thing in high school. I’m sure it was required for church for years before that, at diverse times, but my first recollection of the blazer being A Thing was in 1988 when I went to the county Scholars Bowl tournament for the first time. Almost immediately, that single-breasted blue blazer became a regular part of my life – paired with jeans, a white Oxford, and a necktie that reached to the belt buckle. Not the greatest look, if I’m honest, but it was essentially my uniform, as much as any football jersey. It was not only Scholars’ Bowl, it was Constitution Competition and scholarship interviews and anything that required me to pass as a grown-up.

Maybe that’s where it started. I didn’t have a lot of utility for coat and tie in undergrad, not being in a fraternity, but as soon as I was accepted to grad school, I went out and stacked up three or four new blazers. As often as not they were remaindered from TJ Maxx, but there was a vaguely linen-look thing that suggested Miami Vice, a brown woolen thing that looked like an old professor coat, a grayish pattern that wasn’t quite tweed. Put it with jeans, a button-up, no tie at all, and I looked like the junior faculty I was aspiring to be.

And then, for a long time, nothing at all. We wore ties for my first year at National Geographic, but if we had any outerwear on it was for weather not fashion. I had a blazer for weddings and funerals, and that was about it; all my jacketology at the time was about functionality and climate, and I was more likely to top a shirt and tie with my Indiana Jones leather jacket than a blazer.

Things only shifted in 2012, when we were in New York City, and for some reason I was moved by the spirit to purchase a $30 cotton blazer from Uniqlo – and the look worked so well I bought another one immediately without even leaving the store. One blue, one white – definitely casual, but the sort of thing that you could throw over a T-shirt and immediately feel like you’d stepped it up ever so slightly. The blue one immediately became my chosen instrument for travel – Japan in 2015, London in 2016, Ireland in 2017 – and when it came up missing, I took the white one to Chile in the southern-hemisphere summer of 2019. Meanwhile, I was given the long-desired Harris Tweed blazer in 2016 and picked up a casual linen number at Muji in 2019 right before it closed and bought a seersucker one from Uniqlo for hot weather.

And then, out of nowhere, a month or two ago, I bought an Eddie Bauer Travelex travel blazer. Two, actually, one in blue and one in black – a little synthetic and a little static-y, but full of pockets and rumple-resistant. Those, at least, I understand – something that looks presentable while still turning rain and giving you a zippered alternative to the money belt for your passport and phone while running through the back alleys of Neal’s Yard or Bankside.

Maybe that’s part of it – the blazer has come to be identified with travel. But there’s more to it than that. I’d come to think of it as “Vandy mode” just because of the seersucker, but also because I’d be up in the city at one alumni event or another, and the blazer is the shortest route to feeling like a grown-up. It contains the imposter syndrome, somehow makes me feel more like I’m actually as I present myself. I wouldn’t go to a Vandy game without one (and honestly, haven’t, not since 2012; it’s practically expected of me). I can be slouched around the house in jeans and a T-shirt, and as long as they’re clean, all I have to do is throw on the canoe mocs and a blazer and suddenly I’m a functional adult who can absolutely be trusted with your Jamf instance or your cell phone decision making or your choice of stouts and porters.

And part of the problem, honestly, is that I’ve lived the last sixteen months in t-shirt and jeans and plastic Birkenstocks, with the occasional flannel shirt or work shirt for the rare cool moments. I need a blazer right now not at all, and maybe that’s a conceptually complex piece of information given everything above.

Well, here we go again. San Mateo County has just restored the mandate for masking indoors in public places. The Delta variant has become the dominant variant nationwide, and while the vaccinated are testing positive – and in some cases symptomatic – the bad sickness and deaths seem to be reserved for those who have refused the vaccine. To the point where the Enemy establishment feels compelled to tell people that the vaccines are good and they should get them – albeit sandwiched between conspiracy theories and reassurance that you’re a very good person to refuse it.

Naivete, hope and appeals to logic versus performative redneckery weaponized in bad faith. Welcome to 2021. Actually welcome to the 21st century in general. I don’t know why anyone is surprised at this point; every time the Enemy loses, the response is to double down and go even harder on delusion and fascism. In 1998, the GOP was batting around impeachment, got their clock cleaned at the polls, and rammed through an actual impeachment while they still could. In 2009, after America looked at Sarah Palin and chose Team Obama instead, the GOP elevated Palinism to its only belief system. And now, with Trump decisively thrashed and his followers discredited by an actual attempt by force to derail the transition of power, the Republican party has nailed its colors to the mast as the party of Trump. 

This would be different if the Never Trump GOP would accept defeat, accept that they cannot ride the tiger any longer, and supply the votes to rebuke Trumpism at every turn until it’s dead and buried at midnight with a stake through its heart. That appears to be too much to ask of anyone in office other than Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, though. It also appears to be too much to ask the American news media to call a spade a fucking spade, but then, the New York Times’ self-loathing is always enough to green-light another safari of the “economically anxious.” 

Why is this? Why are we stuck with this seamless garment of bullshit as the Republican shibboleth? Part of it is the inherent reflexive loathing of “politics” – the only field where people seem to think amateurism is the most desirable state. Do you want a pilot who’s never flown a plane of any kind? How about a surgeon who’s never handled a scalpel? Hell, most people wouldn’t go to a mechanic that had never lifted the hood of a car, but “not a politician” is supposed to be a positive endorsement for a candidate for high office? We don’t want to acknowledge that politics is the process by which we order our society, and so people lie and call themselves “independents” and swear they vote for the man, not the party label (always the man, though) – and that’s why Democrats almost invariably have to produce the most centrist-looking white male they can churn up, because anything darker or more X-chromosomal causes the dullard masses to recoil at “politics”. And then things get worse, because Republicans will ride the Trump turd bomb to the ground, but Democrats bail out the second their feelings are hurt.

None of which is a consolation. We’re hanging onto the Senate by our fingernails, and if you can’t shift the moral defectives in Arizona and West Virginia – and you can’t, especially in West Virginia, where a Democrat-in-name-only is the only kind that can win – then you don’t have the votes. The main thing at this point is just to ensure that they don’t either, because if the GOP suddenly gets 51, the Biden administration is over. So get what you can, now, as quick as you can, and hope against hope that maybe you can change the picture a little in 2022. Diplomacy, especially in the Senate, is the art of saying “nice doggie” until you can find a rock.

Nothing has changed in our politics. We wrenched the nuclear button out of the hands of a weak, senile, stupid man, but his followers are unbudged from where they were five years ago, and we have done nothing to make them anathema or circumscribe them from political power. “Trump voter” needs to garner the same public reaction as “child molester” and until it does, we will be cursed. All we’ve done is pull the knife out. We haven’t stopped the bleeding at all. I don’t know how we can unless people agree that what happened since 2016 was wrong and they’re willing to accept a mild tax increase or two to fix it.

But if you had hope after January 20, it’s probably time to think about wising up.

Vice my previous musings about sports, one of the things that occurred to me is that sports is made worse by social media. You are connected to your fandom…half of whom are probably reprehensible. You’re connected to all the other fandoms…half of whom are definitely reprehensible. You’re exposed to the effects of social media, which magnify the worst in society and amplify their path to your door. And ultimately the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

I take no small stick from my wife about not being on Facebook and thus having to hear about distant friends from her. But it’s a conscious decision based on experience. The fact is, I don’t have enough people I’m close enough to in order to make it worthwhile to be there, and I’m willing to accept hearing nothing in exchange. Social media in general – and Facebook properties in particular – slide down the slope from a chronological timeline, to an algorithmic timeline, to dry-snitching things from your friends’ timelines, to ultimately serving you content you never asked for and prioritizing it over that of people you follow. And then, there you are, wading through two hundred feet of horseshit in hopes of maybe finding a pony.

Thus Instagram, which Fuckerberg et al are intent on turning into TikTok For Olds when it’s not being repositioned as the replacement for the electric Nazi ranch he currently operates. I still haven’t reinstalled the app, and while I have one more pic posted than last time, I’m beginning to realize I only ever see content from four or five people I might miss if I bailed out altogether. The real life folks I miss don’t do enough to make it worth digging through the cruft.

The problem is, the only “social media” I’ve managed to make work is a locked Twitter account, mediated via Tweetbot, which means I have no ads and no unsolicited content other than friend retweets and a chronological timeline. It’s not much, but it’s enough to let me pretend I have a bustling group chat of my own without hounding all my pals into Signal. The abortive attempts at an Insta alternative last year proved that sort of thing doesn’t really work for fast casual interaction where people don’t want to be inundated with notifications.

Cocoon hasn’t really worked out. Slack is…fine, for the one group that uses it, but I only have one group that does. I have never yet taken to Snapchat – I’ve downloaded it three times and every time deleted it within a half hour. Nobody checks Flickr any more. Tumblr is kind of flexible and is part of WordPress now, but it’s also a decade old and mostly associated with porn and the squealing side of fandom. I don’t need much, honestly, and at this point, I can make Twitter work…for now. I don’t know how long that will last.

But there’s every possibility that in a globalized world, where the people you care about are scattered across multiple time zones if not continents, this is just the price of keeping in touch. You can either swim in the sewer in hopes of finding the occasional gold nugget, or you can try to do the impossible and try to make some new old friends.