Author: Stagger Lee

It’s been twenty years since Black October, when a power outage on the day we had to ship an entire trade show with handwritten airbills kicked off weeks and weeks of running to stand still. No good inventory, no idea what our stock was, just figure it out in order on a daily basis and ship as far as you can down the list. I’ve written before about how I was able to hide myself behind a wall of Pelican cases, put on Virgin Radio and just disappear out of time in a way that hearkened back to those early days hiding under the bleachers at day care. At some level, I think that’s why I still want to work remotely, or at the very least be in a place where I can hide myself from a big open crowd of nonsense (which is not possible in my current formal workspace at the office, where nothing actually requires my presence).

I don’t remember what I thought about the incoming election, although I’m pretty sure I had given it up for lost by the end of the month. But the damage was already done, and the sense was “well things won’t get any better” rather than “well things are about to get worse.” Which is why I feel like it’s going to be a difficult run in these last five weeks, with no more direct confrontations and another war breaking out in the Middle East and no reliable polling information and a national media salivating at the prospect of bringing back their drama queen meal ticket. Unlike twenty years ago, I don’t have the prospect of earning a permanent spot with a desirable employer if I keep making my best effort, and I don’t have the excitement of a new world and a new life propelling me.

I just want to be left alone. I’m willing to contribute to making the world a better place, I’m willing to give way to the younger generations and their aspirations, I just want to mind my business and see out my days without things getting any worse. But that’s what aging is: increasing the speed with which you have to run to stand still.

So much of this year has felt like a bucket list run. Do everything you wanted to do one last time. Disney. London. Dublin. Yosemite. Take in the most important things while you can, before the world ends. I’ve been a little too loose with the money, I’ve had the extra pint, I’ve used the PTO days. Maybe we make it, maybe things work out okay, but if they don’t, I don’t want to have wasted my wishes.

And then, if we make it through December, we have to change the rules. Things won’t go back to how they used to be. Like baseball. If you want to undo analytics optimization that works the system, you have to change the system. No more shift, bigger bases, add a pitch clock. Expand the Court, eliminate the filibuster, end venue shopping in federal cases. It will not be quick, and it will not be simple. The tasks are great, the work is hard, and we are going to labor all night knowing we won’t all see the sun rise.

But we thank God for the work. We’re lucky to have the work.

I finally caved, mostly because I’m on my third eye doctor (they keep retiring out from under me) and she told me I should consider the progressives if I’m tired of pushing my glasses up on my head. And I am, although part of that is probably because I’ve been wearing Warby Parker frames that suggest “launching an Apollo mission at 6 and raiding the Klan in Indianola at 9” and almost require a short sleeve white dress shirt and tie. And the earpieces aren’t long enough for my dome, and and and.

So I blew out the flex spending. Zeiss optics, high-index progressive lenses. High-sensitivity transitions coating to make them dark just by looking too long out a closed car window. Black Oakley frames with straight earpieces that are flat and close to the head for hat wear, and which suggest the futuristic version of what I had on my face 35 years ago when the other defining characteristic was braces rather than facial hair.

These are meant to be The Glasses. No going back and forth for sunglasses or computer or reading or driving or what have you, put these on and call it a day. I’m still getting used to tilting my head to focus, and the wobbly countertops when turning left to right are comical, and there are times when everything looks blurry if I don’t stare directly at it. But it’s not terrible, and I suspect I’ll be able and willing to stick with these for the foreseeable future.

I started wearing glasses again almost by accident. I wanted the ability to wear sunglasses more than anything, but I also wanted the freedom to not be bothered, and during the pandemic shelter and beyond it turned into “I’m only bothering with the contacts for college football game days or the like.” And somewhere in there, it got too hard to read the phone with my contacts in. And so here we are.

I don’t expect that before I die I’ll have the ability to have the time in one corner, or have caller ID and text messages come up with a click of my teeth, never mind actual AR-type stuff. But I wouldn’t hate it. And in the meantime, it’s nice to finally unambiguously have The One Thing.

That used to be the happiest phrase in my lexicon. It means that summer jobs were no longer there, that college football was back, that the worst of the heat was behind us, that I would soon be in a familiar environment where I could at least do well at what I did, even if I was exhibiting a distinct failure to thrive a lot of the time.

Slowly, all those things got whittled away. The job never ends now. College football has been ruined to the point where it takes far more off the table than ever it brought. I now live where 90 degrees in late October is not only possible but largely expected in a changing climate, and what I do – even if I do it well – now happens in some sort of weird limbo where calling attention to myself only brings the possibility of harm, but making an effort will either go completely unnoticed or be appropriated elsewhere without recognition or acknowledgement.

Which would all be enough by itself, but things have changed. For the third straight cycle, the end of summer means the beginning of the long slow slog of dread until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, as we wait to find how how many Americans are stupid enough to vote for the end of democracy and whether it’s enough for a rigged system to let them win without getting the most votes. And the sad thing is, I don’t feel as bad as I did the last two times, although that’s less a measure of hope and more a measure of the efficacy of Zoloft. At some level there is still the fear that even if the most votes go to the people against racist dumbfuckery, it won’t be enough to overcome the structural obstacles, which have been made higher than ever now with the seizure of courts and state administrative bodies. And this time, we know that it’s not enough to win at the ballot box, because the other side feels entitled to win every time in perpetuity no matter what.

It’s hard, knowing that even if you prevail, things are about as good as they’re ever going to get. Sure, maybe sixteen years down the line if we all keep grinding, I’ll find myself safely retired with enough money to survive in a country that has rejected the Confederacy as an appropriate model for government and society. But it requires a lot of things to keep going right. As with any terminal disease, you have to win every day. The enemy only has to win once. We only have to be stabbed in the back by one more property tax adjustment, only have to have one more random health issue step backward out of the fourth dimension, only have to have one bean counter decide my job is superfluous to requirement and leave me looking for 5-day-a-week in-person contract help desk work for a fraction of the salary. I don’t dwell on it, any more than I dwelled on the prospect of nuclear annilhation from childhood on, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Instead, succor comes from the little things. Retreat to the woods or the cabins or wherever to eat terrible junk food and day-drink among familiar faces for three days. Put on stormy video or tiki room music (or both!) and light a candle to create that “I’m not really here” ambiance before disappearing into a good book for three or four hours on a Sunday night. Cuddle on the couch watching the latest streaming thing. Or just make the effort to walk out and pick up dinner makings on the way back from a cup of coffee or an overpriced lemonade popping boba thing or even a quick pint at the local spot. Or, in an extreme moment, get in the electrified car and drive over to Pacifica for breakfast at Taco Bell, looking out over the fog and the waves and the dawn patrol surfers, and marvel at how you got here from there, all those theres ago.

Year 18 is in the books, with the hope that if I take care of the days, the years will somehow take care of themselves.

I’ve written before about how the Olympics serve as a signpost for my life. The weird thing about the 2020 Olympics was that they were in summer 2021, during that weird interregnum where we hadn’t moved into the new house yet and had just lost both my parents-in-law and where the Biden era hadn’t found its groove yet (but hope was already going away) and I was actively seeking employment elsewhere. So from that standpoint, my own life is more stable and arguably better (even if work is no more fun than before).

But these Olympics will always be tied up with what I can only think of as the emerging Kamalanomenon. I cannot explain how it is that defenestrating Biden in favor of a Black woman has lit a fire under the party, nor how her selection of a midwestern Ted Lasso has kicked it into high gear, but it’s happening. The numbers are no longer terror-inducing, even if they aren’t as good as they ought to be in a sane world (Harris-Walz should be up 70-30 at a minimum), and the success of American women in the Olympics – and the pushback against spurious anti-trans bigotry of Russian origin – just pays into the HW message of “women are great, America is great, foreign misinformation is bad, and our opponents are not just bigoted, but weird.”

It’s hard not to feel like the scales have fallen from the Democrats’ eyes, and they’re finally ignoring the rules on the inside of the game box lid and fighting fire with fire. No more adhering to the expecations of the Sunday Gasbags, no more cowering at the reproof of the New York Times. Just one big wave of “fuck it, we ball.” It’s entirely possible that the GOP has finally disappeared up its own deranged ass beyond a point of no return, and it sure looks like Ed Earl Brown might just no longer be willing to tolerate the extremely online conspiracy shit when faced with a reasonable sounding gal that his kids love and a man literally called “Coach Walz” who can hunt pheasant and break down why the 4-4 defense was the best route to a state championship.

I want to believe. I want to have hope. The Zoloft probably helps with that, but I don’t feel inherently doomed. I’d sure rather be on our side than theirs right now, with their creepshow VP candidate and their mentally deteriorating bag of orange goo at the top of the ticket who’s just trying to stay out of tennis prison. I’m sure “22-time club champion” is very very relatable to Ed Earl Brown. Probably a lot more relatable to the owner of the dealership who keeps screwing him on the service on his F-150.

It doesn’t take much. Reagan’s 1984 blowout was 55-45. Obama’s success was 53-47. Geographical sorting has made it a lot harder to get the big electoral college numbers, but there are multiple paths to 270 – and the important thing is to use more than one of them, so one state’s bad actors are not enough to screw things up. If this is going to work, HW really needs to win every state Biden did in 2020, because if the margin of victory turns on a purple state with a GOP legislature, there’s no telling what shenanigans they will gladly perpetrate to get their way.

Clock’s running. For the first time in who knows when, we actually have a compact sprint of a campaign. It’s time to lace ‘em up, tie ‘em tight, and run like Hell to the finish, because everything hangs in the balance.

Thoughts on Kamala Harris:

1) it’s good to have at least one person in the race who isn’t gonna eligible for Social Security before the next term is up.

2) I would rather stand in the way of a Caltrain than an AKA from Howard.

3) I am amused that the right is calling her a radical militant while the left is calling her a cop. I am less amused that every ticket with a woman on it has always lost. And if we’re honest, the people voting against her because of who she is would probably approve of a white male with the same record of what she’s done. The streak has to break sometime, right?

4) In my lifetime, every race until 2008 had one person on a ticket from a state with a star on the Rebel flag. Since then, Tim Kaine is the only one. This is a good development, if only because…

5) …she’s the first Californian on the ticket since Reagan. The Golden State probably has reason to feel hard done by these last thirty-six years. In the era when California was a safe Republican state from 1968-88, they had two Presidents. It’s been a stalwart Democratic vote ever since, and this is the first time they’ve had a look in.

6) It’s absurd that Kamala didn’t make it to Iowa when the likes of Yang and Bloomberg did. Error corrected.

7) To all accounts, Biden’s advisors tagged Harris as too aggressive and too ambitious, and he deliberately chose her anyway. He chose a person who went right at him in debates. He’s not afraid to be questioned and not afraid to be corrected. That cannot be overrated at this point.

8) One of the reasons I liked her for the ticket originally was because I knew the existence of a smart, sharp, attractive woman of color would cause Dolt 45 to experience a blue screen of death. Based on the first presser, this is clearly the case. I’ll be interested to see if it continues.

9) I’ve been dreading this pick, despite hoping for it, for the same reason one sits curled on the couch in the late 3rd quarter with a lead, afraid to move for fear of a jinx. But for whatever reason, I feel…hopeful? This is a ticket with two punchers. And it’s time to start swinging.

– 11 August 2020

Well here we go. The month-long campaign of pants-pissing insiders and media whores desperate for drama finally bore fruit, and Joe Biden has decided that he cannot be President and run for President against Trump and the entire mainstream media. And he chose to finish being President instead.

Is it the right decision? Not important any more. The decision is made, and the oxygen has been taken out of the whole “can he, will he, won’t he” debate. Instead, we get what the system rather points to: when the president can’t do it, his vice president takes over. This is reasonable and logical.

And it better be obvious to everyone. There is no other way to go. Like it or not, this is an incumbent ticket that faced the general electorate and was elected, then was re-elected to run again because that’s what an incumbent does. To say that there should be some kind of “blitz primary” or “brokered convention” or fill in whatever Aaron Sorkin fanfic wankery gets your juices going – that’s all bullshit. This was an insider coup, born of panic, and when we get to 2025 – win or lose – it’s officially time to read out of the Democratic establishment anyone who was there for McGovern or Mondale and get leadership in charge whose default posture is not submissive masochistic crouch. No more boomers. No more Sixties casualties. No more appeasing the mythical white working class and pretending like the only real Americans are halfwitted bigots who believe only what they see on Fox News.

This is an existential election. Every election is an existential election until the last boomer is choked to death on the entrails of the last “Reagan Democrat.” Until then, to the last moment, to the last person, to the last chance, we fight. We fight like Hell. And we fight to win.

Kamala Devi Harris, age 59, of Oakland California, Howard ’86, Hastings ’89, Alpha Kappa Alpha…you have less than four months to save the world.

I thought about calling this entry “The Seven Year Itch.” Seven years ago, I was just coming off a stint in higher education which lasted- wait for it – seven years. It’s difficult to imagine that I’ve been in DC as long as I was at Birmingham-Southern and Vanderbilt combined. It feels like at least two lifetimes. And yet, as I sit here tonight on the floor of my apartment, with absolutely no furniture and only a TV and cable box to go with my computer, I can’t help feeling that it hasn’t been that long since September 1997, when I lived my first month in Washington with nothing at home but clothes, a boom box, a TV, an air mattress, and a computer set up on an empty pizza box on the floor.

It’s an awful long way from a terrified kid, just months removed from prematurely ending a 20-year academic career, nursing literally thousands of dollars in credit card debt and whose Mac knowledge was largely limited to “trash the prefs and rebuild the desktop.” I barely had a pot to piss in, I barely knew anyone here, and I signed a six-month lease to start with so I wouldn’t have to pay to break the contract if it didn’t work out.

I had a plan, too, though I didn’t realize it at the time. It was based on my dad’s credo of “do the best you can and don’t be a horses ass.” It was based on an offhand remark from a teammate at the bar my first year of grad school, and it was appropriate for someone whose life had just fallen out from under him. My plan was to reach the point where I could prove that I didn’t have to prove anything.

I think I did all right. Nobody’s ever going to mistake me for Warren Buffett, but I’m paying the bills as they come in and in the same month at that. I did my last help call today, for the #2 or 3 guy in the company, with an intuitive fix for something that another so-called “tech” person outside our group had botched. And I have my crew, my friends, the kind of people you wait your whole life to be able to claim as your own.

And yet.

A few years ago, I read a book by Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift. It was written at the height of the tech boom, after I’d had a couple years in the business, and it dealt with everything from the tortuous route of an IPO to the pressure of developing web apps for major media companies to the concept of the hockey-stick sales pattern. But the part that was excerpted for Wired magazine was the story of half a dozen people who had picked up their lives and gone to Silicon Valley to find their fortune.

I had two thoughts after reading it, largely at once: “These people are out of their hyperventilating minds” and “What if…do I have what it takes?” To pull up stakes, pack the bags, and chase the big dream…and as the years rolled by, I realized that if I’m going to do it, it has to be soon. I’m so incredibly burned out in my current situation, the tech sector is starting to rebound…if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen now.

Seven years ago, I wouldn’t have tried it. I would have clung to what was safe and known until it forcibly dislodged me, no matter how miserable I was. The way I did in high school. And college. And grad school. I don’t *have* to leave…but I’m ready, and I want to, and I can. I can do this. I can take the plunge. I can make it happen.

I don’t know whether it comes from being Southern or Celtic or what, but I’ve spent an awful lot of my life being fixated on the past. Of wishing things could have been different, trying to figure out what I did wrong, as if by hoping hard enough and finding the solution, I could change what had happened in my life. But that’s not possible. I’m never going to quarterback Alabama to a title. I’m not going to drink and snog and hack my way through college. I’m not going to pick up a doctorate in political science. My high school dream girl isn’t walking through that door. The one that got away isn’t walking through that door. My father is not walking through that door.

There comes a time in your life – and if you haven’t felt it yet, trust me, you will – when you have to make the decision to stop trying to be the person you were, and let yourself become the person you are.

I’m going west, and I’m going to reach. Because if you don’t reach, you don’t get. And even though it’s going to hurt like hell to leave my team behind, even though it’s going to be terrifying to start over in a strange place with no job and no certainty, despite everything – I’ve never in my life been more convinced I’m doing the right thing.

Let’s go chase the big dream.

– 30 June 2004

Twenty years on, there is no questioning it was the right move. It worked. I found myself working for Apple by August 9, later hired on staff and promoted. We managed to buy a house, which more than doubled in value by the time we sold it sixteen years later. I eventually got my VW, albeit as a Rabbit rather than a New Beetle. I had TiVo and DirecTV, I had friends, and by the end of 2006 there was no disputing it was a triumph.

Part of the story, though, is that there’s no “happily ever after” where time and history stop. The years roll on. Other people move along with their lives. The biggest story for me in the last decade is just how many people moved away – some no further than Burlingame or Santa Cruz, but many more to Texas or Seattle or even abroad, and that had a meaningful impact on how my life changed after 40. Looking back through the old blog contents of the early days, it feels like my life 2004-06 was a natural extension of my DC days, just with better climate and more money and fewer places to smoke.

I wish I could explain what happened in 2007. I don’t know if it was purely chemical, triggered by homesickness, manifested by a toxic work environment or what, but the wave of chronic depression caused me to make the second biggest mistake of my life: rather than seek accommodation for my knee, I chose instead to find a more technical job elsewhere, afraid that I would wind up half secretary and half dockwalloper and permanently behind the curve on actual IT. Instead, I wound up a subcontractor with no benefits, working in an environment far behind the curve on actual IT, and when I finally crawled my way out of it, I was working at a different place with a 10% pay cut that took three and a half years to catch back up to…and I never got away from that place. And then that place outsourced me and carved up my benefits just as COVID struck…and now?

Now I live in a different house, with a yard and a shed and a hot tub, in a quiet pleasant neighborhood where I can walk to the grocery or the Starbucks or the local burger-brunch-or-beer place. I can easily bike downtown, and we’re close to the better freeway for getting up and down. Transit has ceased to be a viable option, though, which is a shame since Caltrain will finally deliver electric trains in September. I have achieved the dream of 1997: I can work from anywhere with internet access, from my front room to Gulf Shores to Prague, in a job that is not customer facing. The cars are a hybrid Chevy and an electric VW. I have become the person I am instead of the person I was.

I’m happy with my life right this instant. I like being able to start work from my phone before getting out of bed, padding to the kitchen to grind my coffee, walking out to happy hour at 3 on the odd Friday, building bits of community through church or civic service or just attending the downtown markets and festivals. It’s the bits of a cozy life, and that’s all I need for the next twenty years, if I can keep it. But that’s the real trick. There’s another existential election on the way. The high temperature has hit 100 degrees four times since Independence Day. I look in the mirror at the sun damage on one temple or how long a cut on the arm takes to heal or the dark circles under my eyes and see that even if it doesn’t feel like twenty years have passed, my body says otherwise. And there’s nothing that says my employer won’t absently strike a line item on the budget and I find myself having to get another job sitting a help desk somewhere for half what I make now, because over-50 in this place and industry is basically a death sentence on the job search market.

And I wonder about the next twenty years. Will I be retired by then? Will that even be possible? What happens to democracy? What happens to people I care about if things turn ugly and the worst people in America get the controls? Never mind hoping for twenty good years, can I expect twenty years total? I’m sure my father did, at some level. Twenty years ago, all I wanted was one more chance at a fresh start. And now, all I want is one good chance at a graceful finish.

I guess that’s what it means to get old.

The watch alone isn’t sufficient. I didn’t realize how frequently I need the camera, especially when I need to confirm something at the grocery store or get a pic of that thing on the road. There might be a little more utility with my own phone number, rather than a test number, but Signal is too much a part of my routine for the watch to stand alone.

The Apple Music piece works great, but I also find myself dependent on SomaFM and RadioGarden, neither of which is on the watch. And honestly if I’m out doing pub night stuff, I need reading material, which probably means the phone anyway. In short, the use case for cellular on the watch is for when I’m away from home, without a phone, with access to public transit or other people and no WiFi. Which is a mighty thin reed.

I think in the grand scheme of things, what I want is a world where I don’t need the phone. Having the Internet on my person at all times is an invitation to be too much in this world in a way that becomes more untenable with every passing day. The trick is going to be to put aside the need to see it coming, the anxiety of being caught unawares, just long enough to remain sane.

And if at any point the cellular is a $5 add-on, then sure, why not. But at this point it’s a $25 add-on and that’s not going to work. Still, better to have paid $35 to get it out of my system and be done with that glee.

Well, if that was what we can expect the rest of the way, we are deader than fucking fried chicken. A press that does not push back on lies at all, that embraces the framing of bad actors, that has spent the past thirty years somberly reporting that opinions differ on the nature of the Emperor’s new wardrobe and who is to say what is true – that is a media that will carry a liar around the world while the truth is trying to get a word in edgewise.

The structure is broken. Thanks to 1929, we are fixed at 435 Representatives and thus 538 electoral votes. If the Congress expanded at the rate it should have in order to remain proportional to population, we would have a couple thousand members of the House, and the gerrymander afforded by the Senate would be reduced. But then, the Senate itself would be less of an issue if the filibuster were properly done away with – which couldn’t happen because the Democratic majority hung on two senators who have since left the party to huff their own righteous farts.

The problem isn’t that Biden is old, or sick, or too moderate. The problem is that the structural issues in our government skew things one way in the favor of those who lie, those who trade in bad faith, and those who benefit from keeping a broken system that puts a thumb on the scales. And their commitment to keeping it broken has gotten them a Supreme Court whose “NOT TOUCHING YOU” jurisprudence is allowing states to secede in everything but name and keep pocketing blue-state tax dollars while they establish theocratic bigotry – and then point the finger of blame at the victims for fighting back, with the willing compliance of a docile press.

The time to fight back was 2001, when the Court gave defeat to the candidate with the most votes. The time to fight back was 2009, when there were enough votes to break the filibuster and end the obvious practice of using it to defeat legislation that would have won on a majority vote. The time to fight back was 2016, when the Senate refused to allow a vote on a new Supreme Court justice with no pushback from the press or the electorate. The time to fight back was 2021, when one side used actual physical violence to try to undo the result of an election.

The time to fight back is now. But there are too many people who will roll their eyes because Joe doesn’t give them tingly feelings in their chicken parts, too many people who will say that Trump is good for the markets, too many people who will shrug and say there’s no difference really, and the indolence and malice of the stupid will deliver a body blow to American democracy that we might not come back from this time. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

The courts are rigged. The Congress is broken. There is no plan B. It’s Joe or nothing. And when the public doesn’t grasp and act on that, we will all be absolutely fucked.

Everyone has two apps.

It’s mostly WhatsApp and Spotify, because that’s what the rest of the world runs on outside the United States and China. But as I look through Reddit forums and reviews of “feature phones” and blog accounts of “going light,” the recurring theme is always that if I just had [APP] and [OTHER APP] this phone would be perfect.

In my case, for the Apple Watch, the two apps are Lyft (or some other ride sharing option) and Triode (or some other streaming radio app that can handle SomaFM, Bluegrass Country, Arctic Outpost Radio and Radio Siamsa). But in a pinch I could actually try calling a cab, and Apple Music will cover most of the music options in some other form. So it’s not a dealbreaker.

In fact, a quick Sunday test down at the local proved that any WiFi you’ve already saved credentials for will still work with no phone present. I didn’t need the cellular while there. Which means if I could only harvest the WiFi credentials for the Duke, or the local downtown bars, or the San Jose spots, I might well obviate the need for wireless altogether. Which is devoutly to be wished when it looks like the actual cost of moving to Visible full time will be an extra $25 a month, and that ain’t hay.

Because really, where am I going with just the watch and no phone and no WiFi (or WiFi that depends on an interstitial page)? Pub night out once a month? Disneyland in another year or two? Maybe biking down to the farmers market? Church? Not a lot of use case under those conditions. If it were $5 a month to add it to USMobile, sure, it’s no big deal and a nice thing to have, but not for $35 a month sack and all, not while work is still floating the bill for my primary number.

Still, it’s interesting to have a thing on my arm that would use the same phone number and give me everything I need and absolutely nothing I shouldn’t have. I’m still trying to will a slightly better future into existence. Of which.

I don’t know exactly when I first gravitated to the idea of the shutdown-night phone. I assume it was in those dark days of late 2010/early 2011 when I needed to detach from the world, and it became a thing as social media and news and everything else crept into my space. Sometimes you need to filter it all out, put it all away, force the world to leave you alone – but at the same time, you don’t want to cut yourself off from absolutely everyone and everything. You still need music in your ears, something to read, the ability to be contacted in an emergency especially if you go out to do this, possibly some way of getting a cab back, etc etc and so on and so forth.

Some amount of this could be put down to phone addiction and FOMO on my part, certainly. But I think something has shifted in society. The phone is barely a phone any more. A contemporary iPhone has about as much in common with a Nokia 3310 as a virtual reality headset has with a pocket calculator, and that’s not a comparison I make lightly. Cyberspace is now the sea in which we swim, and the phone is the flippers, the wetsuit, the oxygen tanks. You can splash around on the beach, but if you’re going in, you won’t last long without it, and people expect that you will be in the sea now. Boomers act like a cell phone is a sign of wealth and luxury, and in the meantime, going to the San Francisco Farmers Market without one would entail finding train schedules somewhere, buying a ticket from a machine, taking cash for payment and finding a book or Walkman or something on the ride up. Do you need a phone? No, but modern life without one is a much higher degree of difficulty.

Which is why I had the shutdown phones – simple dumb phones first, later superseded by the Moto X or the iPhone SE, devices that I could pare down to just the Kindle and Wikipedia and music apps and maybe Lyft if needed and…that meant another SIM card and another phone number or having to constantly move between. It was preposterous and ultimately pointless, especially once the Downtime controls in iOS meant you could lock out all the offending apps and notifications for the duration of a Sunday night. And that’s when the separate phone stopped being a thing.

But the temptation to bypass those controls is occasionally too much to overcome, especially when one is not in a great frame of mind. And you’re back to “I want to set the degree of isolation higher, but without having to give it all up.” Make it possible to leave the house and go to dinner with just one phone, a dumb phone with the same number, be able to contact people if need be but without having to delete a bunch of apps.

I say all this to say: I have temporarily activated the cellular feature of the Apple Watch through Visible, the Verizon MVNO. I could not do it through my work account, because they won’t allow it to be activated, and if I’m going to have a second line it should be on a different network than my main line, so Cricket and Consumer Cellular (both AT&T) are out, and Visible is the only other MVNO that supports Apple Watch.

Because the watch then becomes the dumb phone: leave the iPhone at home and you can still place and receive calls and texts on the same phone number from your arm. You can pay for things. You can get transit and walking directions, you can look up when the next bus is coming, you can even pop in your earbuds and listen to your music. But you can’t get into a doom scroll, you can’t go numb surfing the web, you can’t stare into the watch display for hours on end. That’s for the book you bring with you (okay, probably the Kindle this day and age).

The question then becomes: where are you going with your watch that you aren’t going with your phone? Church, sure, and pub night, and maybe a quick run around the block or to the gym or down to the market and back without needing to grab your phone. But the cellular only kicks in when there’s no connection to the data of the phone itself or to the WiFi. Which means it’s a very occasional fallback at best, one my wife has already test-driven for months and found no use for.

But then, she’s a lot better at putting down her phone than I am.

I guess we’ll see. On the second attempt, I had a blowout on my e-bike, and had to wait for help with no phone and no earbuds. So the immediate limitations are of a piece with, say, the wee little SonyEricsson Z520 that the old Apple lab crew standardized on in 2006. But the functions of a phone from back then, albeit with modern processors and networks, are sufficient to have all alone on one arm. So at some level, it’s worth asking: is it enough to leave the phone at the bedside and venture out with a device you can’t get lost in?

We’re going to find out.