Author: Stagger Lee

So in a moment of mental abstraction, I managed to leave my teal 16 oz Yeti tumbler behind at Union Station in Los Angeles. I’m bummed, too, because it was a limited edition color that suggested the best days of high school and was a sort of birthday present to myself. I have since replaced it with an 8 oz Yeti tumbler that has the California graphics on it, which is the perfect size for cocktails or as an overflow/keep cup and might be a better size for bedside use and portion control. Because I already had the 16 oz stackable Yeti that was actually closer to 19 ounces and is sort of an all-purpose size, which was going to just be the cocktail shaker going forward…and of course there’s all the other ones I already have, even though many of them are not going to be regularly used. (The Vanderbilt ones are going in a drawer just because the logos are no longer obtainable, the work one is in the bag, and the water bottle…we’ll see. It has not been great for travel purposes so far.)

I say all that to say this: I am starting to accumulate stuff again. A couple of American Giant resort shirts. A Yeti flask, of all things, which I definitely can’t justify (at least the California keep cup is sort of a memento of 20 years in the state). A new black and gold lightsaber, and the black and red one probably going as a present to someone before long. And I keep looking for hats from the Birmingham baseball this summer even though I need another hat like a hole in the head…

What the Hell am I doing?

I know what tomorrow is (of which more later) and I know it’s 2024, and I think that despite how much better and less anxious I feel on the Zoloft, at some subconscious level I am acutely aware that tomorrow is not promised and the end of the world rests upon the edge of the knife, and this is no moment in history to defer any joy no matter how slim or ridiculous. The sucker punches are lurking in the shadows, and you never know when something you put away months or years ago will rear up and try to whack you in the back of the head.

I think part of it also comes back to my eternal quest to find the 100% right thing. Even though it is just a hair too small, that Yeti was just right in terms of hand feel, balance, and versatility – I wouldn’t have taken it on the train if it weren’t. Problem is, the one I already have isn’t quite right in the hand or quite as easy to clean, but at just over 0.5L it splits the difference perfectly for coffee, soda, beer, what have you. (Although all the coffee goes in my mother-in-law’s old 24 oz mug now, to keep the staining confined to one thing, and I don’t brew tea concentrate any longer, and large-scale consumption of cold beverages is now in the 35 oz which is also the road trip vessel…)

Maybe this is a sign that even though I feel materially better (and people notice), there are still underlying things gnawing at me that I need to come to terms with. Which, like I said, of which and all that.

The Disney park experience is complicated these days, to say the least. Bob Chapek’s plans to monetize every drop of blood that could be squeezed from the turnip is still reverberating through the experience, and that’s even before taking into account the complexity of running parks in totalitarian states like China or Florida. But having done both parks within 12 months for the third time in my life, I finally feel like I have some thoughts on why I like what I do.

Walt Disney World, quite frankly, is just too big and too spread out. You basically have to stay on property, and it’s difficult to things in more than one park per day (barring perhaps a quick hop from Hollywood Studios to EPCOT or vice versa). Lightning Lane and Genie+ are mediated through a terrible application interface that drops you into a browser as often as not, and trying to coordinate activities for a large group is very nearly impossible, to the point that I don’t think you could visit WDW with a group larger than six and hope to do things together routinely. If we hadn’t had our own team coordinator booking things on a nightly basis, I don’t know how we would have pulled it off.

The Disneyland Resort – comprising Original Disneyland and Disney California Adventure – is a lot easier to work with. While there are on-site properties, and nice ones, you can stay in the Sheraton at Harbor and Katella and be just as close to the main gates, and bopping back and forth between both parks is pretty straightforward – even running all the way to Trader Sam’s for a drink or two is not an insurmountable addition to the day. It just feels like the locals’ park, a sensation made stronger during the early days of 2022 when it reopened solely for California residents. Honestly, at this point, I don’t think I ever need to go back to WDW for anything other than Guardians of the Galaxy and maybe a few drinks through World Showcase.

But for best results, you need to hold it to a group no larger than six, just because if you don’t have previously booked reservations, it’s going to be tough to find sit down food (one of the problems with WDW is that you basically have to schedule everything you’re going to do weeks in advance) and more than six makes impossible to find walk-in seating. It also feels like best results can be achieved with a three day park-hopper, taking one day to tag all the must-do in DCA and one for ODL with a third day for mop-up. And you’ll need mop-up, because the number of mechanical ride failures is creeping up. Rise of the Resistance, possibly the best Disney attraction of all time, is routinely down now, but we also ran into issues with Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Pirates of the Caribbean, and of course the closure of everything from Critter Country to Haunted Mansion for construction purposes.

Which brings me to the past thought: we wouldn’t have made this trip if we weren’t going with friends. We have done the Disneyland experience almost once a year on average going back to 2009, even adjusting for the pandemic outages, and honestly if it’s just us, there’s no incentive to go other than to ride Soarin’ repeatedly if it’s the California version, pick up new content in Star Tours, and (for me) attempt to spend a whole immersive day in Galaxy’s Edge, which honestly is not compatible with doing anything else in the parks.

But I was reminded that we were there in June in 2014 and 2019 (at least those visits presaged Vanderbilt baseball championships) by the thick gray skies in the morning. Which are just the best, whether entering Black Spire Outpost from the Resistance end or lounging on the patio at Trader Sam’s. This is the time to be there, honestly, and it was a delight. Again. (Made even better by taking the train down and back. Bring on the high speed rail ASAP.)

Happiest place on Earth? Hard to say. Highly satisfying, though.

It looks like Alma Mater, not content with its current ignominy, is on the verge of dropping out of NCAA Division I and going to non-scholarship sports.

This is a bad idea on a lot of levels, but here are just a few of the problems:

1) Not to put too fine a point on it, but if it weren’t for scholarship athletics, the campus would be a lot less diverse. I mean, a *lot*. I mean, there was ONE non-white guy in my entire graduating class who wasn’t varsity.

2) BSC averages something like 94% graduation for athletes, which is several dozen percentage points above the campus as a whole. Never mind college athletics as a whole. Clearly, you cannot make the case that academics are suffering from too much sport.

3) We have a couple of first-rate coaches in basketball and baseball who won three NAIA national championships between them from 1990 to 2001. They went through the move to Division I, including several years where we were ineligible to compete for postseason honors. (Basketball came within an eyelash of going to the tournament the FIRST YEAR IN…except we weren’t eligible.) Are these guys really going to hang around to coach glorified intramurals?

4) We’ve been down this road before: in 1939, BSC scrapped ALL its varsity sports in favor of “Sports for All,” the intramural program. It took sixty years before we got back to the same number of sports…hell, it took sixty-five years to get to the same number of WOMEN’S SPORTS that we had in the 1930s. You would be hard-pressed to make the case that BSC was a better school from the 40s to the 70s thanks to the absence of every sport but men’s basketball (and a pretty crap team at that). And the much-vaunted “Sports for All” is basically nothing but an organizing framework for fraternity leagues.

5) Speaking of which – if they can find the money for new sorority townhouses AND new fraternity houses, they can goddamn well cough up the money to keep a campus entity running that a) actually unites the student body and b) doesn’t fucking embarrass the alumni on CNN in front of God and the nations.

6) Those blasted Baptists over the mountain at Jesus A&M manage to keep a full slate of sports and a football team too. If they can, and we can’t, I respectfully suggest the Methodists of the United Conference of North Alabama and West Florida aren’t doing their part. 

7) So there’s a cash crisis and we have to make the money up somewhere? And enrollment’s down? Maybe they should pay less attention to the drain of the sports teams and more attention to THE FUCKING RICH PRICKS WHO ARE BURNING DOWN CHURCHES FOR FUN. It is possible – just barely slightly possible – that seeing these kids packed off campus in cop cars on every news show in America MIGHT have had a deleterious impact on new applications and alumni giving! I mean, call me crazy, but you don’t miss your enrollment goal by 25% because you had too much money in the conference-champion women’s rifle team…

8) I do not have a lot of happy memories of my time on the Hilltop. It was insufficiently Hobbesian – it was poor, nasty and brutish, but it sure wasn’t short enough. I have very little good to say about my time there that doesn’t involve basketball. But I joined the alumni booster club with two years of school left to go. I wailed on a trombone in the band for three years. I took over as sports editor of the campus paper my senior year just to make sure it acknowleged that we *had* a team, let alone that they were contending for a national championship. I have kicked in God knows how much money to keep the basketball team at the top of whatever level they play in, be it NAIA, transitional, or Big South. After I threw in my Black Tie Club money every single year – including some years when I didn’t have a pot to piss in – I will NOT be happy if the college decides to pull a Brave Sir Robin with the only entity on campus that doesn’t make me want to stick my head in the fucking oven every time I remember I went to school there!

In fact, if they pull the plug, I’m done. I am now taking applications for a new alma mater. If you can whip up a convincing story of how I went to school at your institution for four years, Photoshop up some pictures and arrange for post-hypnotic suggestion, I will gladly throw in my lot with your school and bestow my support on it for the remainder of my days. Provided, of course, it’s not just as embarassing as my own. If you went to Auburn or Tennessee, don’t even bother.

One of these days, I’m going to get around to posting about the utter dysfunction of my college experience, from age 5 to the present, but this will have to do for now. Gah. Also, gah.

-May 18, 2006

The Board of Trustees announced that they intend to pursue a move to Division III, beginning with the 2007-2008 academic year. One lame-duck season in Division I, followed by an end to scholarship athletics.

In addition, they announced plans to start football in Division III, complete with an on-campus facility.

In related news, the Birmingham News reports that the NCAA was approached in February by an institution, requesting anonymity, seeking to explore a move from Division I to Division III.

So the question is twofold:

1) If we don’t have the money to stay in Division I, exactly where in the FUCKING FUCK do we have the money to start up the most expensive sport a college can play, and build it a new stadium to boot?

2) Has this move been in the works for three or four months now, and if so, why has so much effort been made to keep it secret?

I can answer both of those in one: because Birmingham-Southern College is a garbage institution with a garbage administration.

I’d really appreciate it if you could all forget I ever went there. I know I’m starting right now.

-May 26, 2006

I knew what a four-year scholarship was before I was five years old.

I say this to illustrate the pull exerted on me by the concept of college. As a child, the notion that I would go to college one day was a fact as self-evident as the color of the sky or the wetness of water. As an adolescent, I was fed a steady diet of lies by the likes of Val Kilmer in Real Genius. By the time I reached high school – and especially when things weren’t going well, and ESPECIALLY my senior year – I was told over and over how great things would be in college, how I would thrive once I got to college, how the college experience would be exactly what I needed.

I didn’t do too much to get ready, though. I applied to only three schools: Vanderbilt (main aspiration for any southerner), Alabama (more or less guaranteed and affordable) and, in an odd twist, Birmingham-Southern College. Those who have paid attention know what I think now, but at the time, I knew it only as the place where I took piano lessons for the better part of twelve years and where I first set foot in 1977 for a piano recital. 

And they came after me HARD. I got some sort of correspondence just about every day for most of the year. Senior Days, an overnight stay, homecoming basketball tickets (in fairness, Alabama did come across with three different non-conference football games in Tuscaloosa, and far from the worst seats you could ask for). but nobody sweated me harder than BSC. And like an idiot, I stopped at three schools.

Come the spring, and BSC offered me full tuition. Vandy did not. Until they didn’t, I hadn’t realized just how much my heart was set on going there, and I was devestated. It only took a couple of days after that for me to call BSC and accept their offer.

Summer came, and I started to get the invites to the various summer fraternity rush parties. I didn’t think anything of them, couldn’t really envision myself in a fraternity – and then my mother did some calling around. (In my life, my mom has done two things I didn’t really think highly of at the time but which, in retrospect, were sound. One was insisting I go to RLC for high school, and the other was pre-investigating the rush business at BSC.) Come to find out that 85% of the day program students at BSC (i.e. not Adult Studies or masters’ program) were in fraternities and sororities.

Well hell, this changes things.

So I went to all six. I still remember the order: ATO, Sigma Chi, Sigma Nu, Theta Chi, SAE, and KA. I met some of the guys I would share a dorm with that fall. I met a lot of guys, for that matter. Ate a lot of overcooked hamburgers, fell off a sailboat, flipped an inner tube, heard some of the worst garage bands in Birmingham. And while I didn’t really feel it from these people, I figured, well, what the hell, might as well give it a shot, this is a big part of things, right? And I was assured that yes, it was a VERY big part of things. Right up until the beginning of school, the first week of classes, and the formal rush week. So I stooged around between the houses for a couple of nights, went to my dorm, and waited for the invite for the next stage of the process…which never came. And just like that, the end of the fraternity experience. 

A few of the usual counselor and administrator-type people immediately began a big song-and-dance about how the Greek experience wasn’t really all that critical a part of life at BSC, and I nodded in all the right places, but this was my formal introduction to the only real tradition BSC has: the blowing of smoke up the ass. Students, faculty, teams, clubs, buildings – they all come and go from the Hilltop, but the blowing of smoke up the ass of everyone from students to parents to alumni to media – that is forever. I probably know more about the history of BSC than anyone who hasn’t written a book on it, and I can tell you that it lacks for any kind of tradition. There’s no statue that crumbles if a virgin graduates, there’s no brass panther with its nose rubbed bright for luck, there’s no bicycle race in your underwear every March, and the fight song doesn’t even have words. The one tradition at BSC is that things will be handled in the dark, without your input, and you will be deceived about it for as long as they can get away with it.

It became apparent rather quickly that if you weren’t in one of the Greek organizations, your social life was going to be a bit limited. There was a band party in the fall and another one in the spring, and occasionally a movie on a screen up on the dorm quad. That was it. That was the full extent of college-supported social life. There was a gameroom in the basement of the dorm-quad eatery…that stayed locked up all the time. There was a ten-foot fence around the campus and dire warnings about leaving it after dark. And there was a city that I already knew better than the back of my hand from my high-school days…one whose under-21 entertainment options had long since been tapped to dry. As for the other students – well, they retreated into their pledge groups and pulled the ladders up behind, and in a perverse parody, so did the theater students, the fine-arts majors, the soccer team, the baseball team, the basketball team, the international students, and just like that, the music stopped and I was looking for a chair. That was early September, 1990. A mere three years and eight months until graduation. No problem.

I knew this one girl from Governor’s School the previous summer. We had a bit of a fling, that sort of adolescent fling where you don’t actually make any physical contact or even speak to each other for a week and a half out of the two you’re in school. But hell, I was grasping at straws, and she had a roommate, and she said her roommate had a crush on me. And I looked around me, and thought that this might well be the only shot I got at having a girlfriend for the next four years, and I gladly bought the line she was selling…We were together for three years, and I was miserable for two and eleven-twelfths of them. But I stayed with her, because just about everyone I knew, I knew through her. I built a little rapport with some of the guys on my floor, but at the end of the semester, everyone moved around to bunk with one of their pledgemates. (I ultimately wound up with 6 different roommates in 4 years.) I got to know some other people, but she got increasingly clingy and took up more and more of my time.

If I could travel back in time and speak to my freshman self, I would open my remarks by smacking him HARD across the face and explain to him that poor self-esteem and defective social skills were NO excuse for staying in a dysfunctional relationship, and that if he was miserable, he should either get out of the relationship and make his life his own and make a fucking EFFORT, or else transfer. Obviously that didn’t happen.

What I eventually had was basketball. Somehow, somewhere in the midst of my senior year of high school, the “raging sports maniac” gene that had been supressed for eighteen years lit up like a Christmas tree. Everything in the world of sports that wasn’t Alabama football was new to me, and I devoured it voraciously, just like I would the Macintosh in 1994 or New Wave music in 2002. (Let’s overlook how long it took me to arrive and just celebrate that I made it at all, okay?) And BSC was just coming off their first NAIA national championship in basketball. A huge deal, a massive win…and an empty arena, for the most part. One fraternity regularly delivered a full-throated cheering section, and the band wailed like maniacs, but for the most part, you could hear the scoreboard tick. As the season wore on, it got better, and in February, the two rivalry games brought a decent crowd (if mostly from the other school sometimes), but for the bulk of the year, it was band, friends, family, Sigma Nu, and yours truly.

But I loved it. I found out the Pep Band wasn’t all that picky and would train you to play the music, so at the beginning of my sophomore year, I signed up, and next thing you know, I had a bumblebee-striped shirt and a bottle of Gatorade for the breaks. I found out that you didn’t have to be an alum yet to join the alumni booster club, so at the end of my sophomore year, I signed up, and have done so ever since, even when I thought that the check might bounce if it arrived too soon. My junior year, I found myself on a hall with half the team, and started putting up scores and highlight notes on my wipe-off board (I can’t say whether they paid attention, but one player greeted me one night with “SUPA FAN IN THE MUTHA FUCKIN HOUSE!” and I was “SF” for the rest of the year). And my senior year, I approached the editor of the campus paper about covering the team, only to be greeted with “I was meaning to talk to you…our sports editor flaked. Would you be willing to take the entire section?” Which is how I became a sportswriter for one short year. All things I had for myself, things I could call my own, things that didn’t entail standing around awkwardly through another sorority formal with my girlfriend or another rehearsal night with my girlfriend or another hysterical wailing fit with my girlfriend. I got two spring break trips to play at the NAIA national championship tournament. I got hospitality-room food after every game. I got space to myself, something to take pride in, something I could call my own – the program gave me things I didn’t have the nerve or the brains or the skill set to make for myself.

I remember the last week at BSC vividly – my last paper turned in, my last exam skipped in favor of talking NBA with the professor in his office, the realization that those four years were done. It was a dagger. All I could think was “There’s so much I still have to do.” I would do some of it at Vanderbilt, which had made me a University Graduate Fellow in political science with the goal of a PhD, but using grad school to fill the gaps in your undergrad life is a really really bad idea. Trust me on this one.

In 1999, I got a letter: an anonymous donor had poured literally millions of dollars onto the athletic department and they were going to NCAA Division I. Not only were they going to finally offer a full slate of varsity sports, not only were they finally going to offer women’s sports on an equal footing, but they were going up against the big boys. Samford – the ancient Baptist rival! UAB – the crosstown power! Alabama and Auburn – the Death Stars! We were going to compete on equal (well, sort of equal) footing. We would be the next College of Charleston, the next Gonzaga, the next Bucknell or Holy Cross or Hampton – a giant-killer, the team nobody wanted to see on the 15 line in the tournament. I was thrilled. I actually wore my BSC ring the next day. The challenge had been laid down, and we were rising to meet it.

That was seven years ago. The transition took four full years, during which time we were completely ineligible for postseason play. Entire classes came and went without even a chance to compete for postseason glory, knowing they were building a foundation for the future. Students actually started to show up for games. I went to a basketball game the night before Thanksgiving in 2001, when we were still ineligible for the tournament, when classes were out and the dorms were closed. The place was packed, with a full student section and a raging band. The band director looked at me and grinned, “We’ve got more band for this one than we used to have fans.”

We played SEC schools and scared the shit out of them. We played Texas A&M and beat them by double-digits on their own court. We saw our name on the front page at ESPN.com as their basketball writers campaigned for us to get a berth in the NIT. We won the Big South title in our first season of eligibility. Not only basketball. In three years, BSC teams have won seven conference championships, and the baseball team has played (and won) in the NCAA tournament.

The first time I saw Avenue Q, off-Broadway, it was hysterically funny and true to life, right up to the song “I Wish I Could Go Back To College.” And it hit way too close to home, right up to the line “I wish I had taken more pictures.” Ain’t no need of lying. It wasn’t dusty, or misty or anything. I was crying. Hard. I was blubbering like a wronged mistress in a Mexican soap opera. Not because I wished I had taken more pictures, but because I wish I’d had more to take pictures of. I was young and stupid and I pissed away what should have been some of the best years of my life with nothing to show for it. But I had one thing: as long as the Panthers were clawing their way forward, I could feel like I was part of something special, like I had been there at the beginning of things. They were saying “Here we are, we’re too small and not good enough and we shouldn’t be here, but to hell with you, we’re staying and we’re going to prove we belong.” They were doing exactly what I couldn’t or wouldn’t or just didn’t.

Now they can’t anymore. The trap door just opened up. This year’s incoming freshmen are not guaranteed scholarships after two years. This year’s rising sophomores will have to find some other way to pay for their senior year. In its infinite wisdom, the NCAA has opened the door for anyone who wants to leave to transfer without penalty to another Division I school…but we still have to play next year in a Division I conference with a Division I schedule and, in all likelihood, with Division III talent.

That’s what makes me absolutely fucking insane about this. If it were really about the money, if our situation were that dire, they would do what they always do and start shaking down the donors like crazy. But my phone never rings, the e-mail isn’t any more frequent than once a month or so, the campaign for Panther Athletics doesn’t exist. So they’re jerking the rug out from under our teams for some other purpose, and trying to do so under cover of darkness without a full airing of facts. Smoke, ass. Same as it ever was.

To paraphrase a line from elsewhere: We don’t blame BSC for obfuscating, deceiving, lying, and doing what they do with no apparent goal or purpose, any more than we blame a dog for humping our leg. It’s just the way they’re programmed and they can’t help themselves. But when the dog doesn’t stop humping our leg, we cut his balls off.

That’s why I’m not a Panther anymore.

-May 28, 2006

Eighteen years later, it’s over.

I was right. I was absolutely right. David Pollick was blowing smoke up the ass of everyone. A bell tower, an on-campus lake, a football team and a stadium, all paid for with money they didn’t have and miscalculated the return on – and which my old computer science professor figured out from publicly available data, just before it was too late.

The irony is, if they’d decided in the mid-90s that they were going Division III, and been honest about it, and gone through some kind of evolution – would I still have been alienated? Would I have burned the bridges and then napalmed the ashes the way I did? Because I surely did. The athletic programs at BSC were the one thing that gave me any sense of belonging the whole time I was there – the one thing it turns out I needed more than oxygen – and without that, there was no point clinging to a bad time.

The last graduates are done and gone. The college will wrap up its affairs on May 31, and that will be the end of the story.

Except.

The baseball team is still going. They won a super-regional in two games despite having multiple players down with food poisoning so severe that two were hospitalized and a reliever had to pull an IV fluid needle out of his arm to go pitch almost three innings of relief with the bandage still on. But they are going to open the D3 College World Series on May 31, the last gasp. There is no school behind or beneath them. There is no money to fund and support them other than what can be cadged from GoFundMe. There is no future but what they make themselves. Just a bunch of Panthers, all that’s left after all this time.

So I paid into the GoFundMe. I dug out the hat and put it on. I dug out the ring and put it back on my finger. Because now, with nothing else left, all that remains of BSC is the bit I was able to belong to. And then, win or lose, I have an undergraduate degree from an institution that no longer exists. Nothing they can do any more to embarrass me or make my life worse. No chance of people burning down churches, of camping in trees for years, of hosting blackface frat parties or putting faculty on TV to advocate for idiocy or constantly smashing themselves into a sports brick wall in a college environment that is anarcho-professional now. The last thing BSC might give me is an off-ramp to gracefully get away from college sports for good.

But if they’d been honest, if they’d been realistic, if they’d stayed the course in D-1 and been in Coastal Carolina’s spot in the mid-2010s, or just gone straight to D-3 and followed a path like the city itself to become the kind of place I wouldn’t be sorry to have attended…

Wouldn’t that have been something.

I found out on the evening of February 28, 1994 that I had been accepted at Vanderbilt for grad school – complete with a prestigious fellowship with more money associated than any other offer I’d had. The next day I ditched all classes, got in my car and drove to Nashville to ram-raid the bookstore and have lunch at Old Spaghetti Factory. And at that point, I was basically done with undergrad in my mind except to play out the string.

For thirty years, I’ve said that attending BSC was the biggest mistake of my life. I stand by that. But only slightly less a mistake was the misapprehension that somehow, graduate school would launder my undergrad experience – that it could actually be what I’d been told college would be from the time I was five years old, the place where I could pursue my interests and feel belonging and be self-actualized as a person. Grad school can be many things, but a do-over on college is absolutely not one of them, as I learned to my cost.

But that was in the future. To me, it felt like a second chance, like vindication, like being received at last. If I’d had the sense God gave a golf ball, I would have taken the opportunity for a completely fresh start and a total do-over, but I didn’t. I was going away for school to a new city with different interstates and different TV and radio stations, but I was staying together with a girlfriend who was already showing signs of serious mental instability. Which might be why I stayed with her, because heaven knows BSC was not great for my mental health, and I thought I owed her that much. So it goes.

But all those regrets and recriminations were also in the future. What I had instead was a quiet spring, full of humid orange sunsets through fresh green leaves and leisurely drives in my barely-year-old Saturn. Classes were more an afterthought than ever. Vampire’s hours were in effect. A handful of people would go to the grocery store at midnight for ice cream. Once, we drove up to Jasper to the 24-hour Walmart just because it was there and we needed something to do. And as graduation approached, I was increasingly gripped with regret – that I’d never actually pursued starting that college bowl team, that I’d spent three years with my first girlfriend instead of trying to build a life of my own, that there hadn’t been any evenings out on the dorm quad patio hanging out with friends. And as I was walking back to my room alone on that last night before graduation, I blurted out to the night “there’s so much I still haven’t done.”

That, honestly, is when it began. That was the seed for three decades of angst and despair and wishing for a better past and endless hours and days and years of trying to find a way to make the pebbles have been worth counting. And yet, the next day, when I walked into Boutwell Auditorium to the soaring organ strains of “Pomp & Circumstance” and saw the blue and pink lights behind the college seal on stage, it was with a tremendous sense of mission accomplished. The job was done. Now I could do what I want with my life. And maybe if I’d cut all the ties then and moved on completely, that feeling would have stayed…but that took another three years, by which point I was done forever with Birmingham. Or so I thought.

It was in 2006 when I finally cut ties for good, after the David Pollick fiasco which I correctly predicted would come to no good end. A growing sports program, one in Division I which had won a Big South men’s basketball title and sent a baseball team to the NCAAs to beat an SEC team, was axed in favor of Division III because it was “unaffordable” – then they added the most expensive and problematic sport a school can play and built an on-campus stadium for it and then dug a lake for no apparent reason and built an all new fraternity row. They couldn’t have given me a bigger middle finger if they’d come to my house and shat in the driver’s seat of that old Saturn. And thus did BSC finally disappear down the black hole, the same as everything in my life before 1998 (and soon, it seemed, everything before 2007).

I started to get things back. I exhumed Vanderbilt and turned it into most of my personality for the better part of a decade and a half, mostly as a way of coping with being squeezed between Stanford and Berkeley. I recovered my high school, thanks to Facebook, at least until Facebook turned to shit. But there was never any attempt to go fishing for the remains of my time on the Hilltop, because there wasn’t anything to fish for. No friends. No connection. Nothing from those four years I wanted to relive or remember that hadn’t been done more effectively in the 21st century in Arlington or California. And honestly, it was not difficult to draw a line from 1990 to 1997 that would deposit me on the steps of National Geographic after seven years of a life lived on offense rather than defense, where I’d actually had the experience I had been told since kindergarten would allow me to be myself and thrive and be validated as a human being.

But in kicking BSC down the well, I set myself up. Once I had only Vanderbilt as a touchstone, a reset, I was forcing myself to start from a higher bar. It was as if I’d hit a double, stolen third, then decided I was born on third base and kicked myself for never making it home. Thirty years on, sat in the courtyard of U Fleku where I’d been in 1992 and enjoying the dark beer instead of staring at it in dread and intimidation, I realized just how far I’d come. That kid who still had so much left to do had no idea how much, and how far. Four continents, a half dozen more countries, National Geographic, Apple, marriage, California, home ownership, electric vehicle ownership, the Internet in my pocket. From this end of three decades, it’s a lot easier to feel like it all came good eventually, even if it took longer and went rockier than it could have.

I’m not going to say “it was all worth it,” because it really wasn’t. Just because you can walk on the leg you broke once doesn’t mean it was never broken. There were lessons I would have been just as happy not to learn, especially since I didn’t seem to learn them until I was flat on my face. But I made the best of it. I learned I could write a little bit – the basketball team never included the campus paper in their annual media scrapbook before I became sports editor. I learned my way around computing a little, enough to know I would really rather have a Mac, and we know how that turned out. I clung to Chapel at Six, which thirty years later would be the first step toward realizing I was actually Episcopalian. And I learned to value those times when you do get to hang out with other people and have a good time, and conversely, to value those times you have to yourself with no obligations. And if you plug BSC back into the gap between RLC and Vanderbilt, suddenly the trajectory looks a lot more impressive, and I have a complete 22 years in and around Birmingham – a place I will claim now in a way I didn’t have time to wait for then.

And the rumblings are that Alabama A&M – the historically Black land grant college that so many of my brother’s teammates attended – is offering $52 million to buy the campus, retain much of the faculty and staff, and open a Birmingham campus. A public HBCU in a residential college setting in a city defined by its Black history. And if that’s the fate of my undergraduate alma mater, I will be thrilled, because that would mean it was reincarnated as a place that genuinely fits its city, fills the needs of its people, and engenders pride in one of its forsaken sons.

Maybe it conquered me once, but at the end, I prevailed. Maybe that’s what I did eventually win in the end.

It’s weird not to have your phone. My beloved 13 mini is getting a badly-needed battery replacement, and hopefully the next one won’t be as urgent because Bluesky has fixed their app to cut down on power drain, but for a window of two hours during a workday I am away from home with no phone. It feels like time has rolled back about 20 years, as I wander around with a backpack looking for sufficient free wifi to get online and work. No podcasting, no streaming, just bouncing back and forth between windows and trying to stay in the shade.

Apple ignited the personal computing revolution twice: once with the Apple II, and once with the iPhone. That’s what caused cyberspace to evert; now we don’t go online, online is all around us. I have everything I need for work on my laptop, other than 2FA. I have everything I need for personal use, other than a phone number, on my iPad. But only my iPhone can cover both. The phone has become an extension of my brain, the appendage I use to see into the parallel universe around me. It is the reason I can walk off in a random direction in a foreign city I’ve never visited without hesitation or concern. It is the reason I can stay stretched out in bed until an hour into the workday without missing a beat on actually doing my job. It’s where most of my social life is. Apple’s old PowerBook advertising slugline is far more appropriate for their most successful product: what’s on your iPhone is you.

And this is why that iPad ad is worrying: absolutely tone-deaf given the present situation of tech. Made in-house where nobody thought to say “hang on a minute” first. Symptomatic of a company that in the last twenty-seven years has gone from the brink of extinction to the richest company in tech, the prestige brand in hardware, and ironically the only company at the forefront of technology whose profit stems from goods and services rather than advertising and data mining…other than Microsoft. And lo and behold, here comes the DoJ to break up a monopoly, and irrespective of the merits of the case, the fact remains: Apple has become The Man.

But that’s because technology has become The Man. The Silicon Valley ethos was allegedly a reaction against the mainframe IBM do not fold bend spindle or mutilate computing culture. But at some point, that got completely swamped by the get rich quick ethos pouring out of Sand Hill Road and Stanford and washing along a tide of the kind of people who would have been junk bond traders from Wharton rather than CS50 dropouts in Shallow Alto if it hadn’t been for the 2008 financial crisis. And just like then, the money decided it must be the brains, and now we have what we have now: a cult of VC awash in ayahuasca, eugenics, freshman-dorm-pothead philosophy and the rock-solid belief that they are the highest caste stood on the edge of paradise if only their lessers would have the decency to submit.

Tim Cook isn’t a bad guy, Auburn and Duke affiliations notwithstanding, but he is a logistics guy. He makes the trains run on time. Under Tim, you know what’s coming: there’s going to be a new iPhone announced on the second Tuesday of September every year and it will be in stores on the third Friday of September, and a new upgrade version of iOS will be released on the third Wednesday of every September not because it’s ready, but because the new phone drops in two days. The process is a fine tuned machine, the envy of the industry. But he outsourced taste to Jony Ive, and as a result, everything crept up to become ever thinner, ever more expensive, ever an expression of design rather than design for life. Pace William Gibson, being able to tell that something was designed is a sign it wasn’t designed well, and one decision after another – USB-C only for everything on the Mac, flat design on iOS with a minimum of visual cues, a smaller battery in the phone to make way for risible 3DTouch technology and then the removal of the headphone jack to get the battery back up to snuff – suggests that actual utility was trumped for a decade by Jony Ive’s vision.

Now the wolves are at the door. The Vision Pro is the first AR headset worth criticizing, but it’s also $3500 and selling like hemorrhoid cream. The creative community that sustained Apple through its darkest years is genuinely pissed off and not without reason. And the Silly Con Valley fixation on AI as the new blockchain, the new Bitcoin, the new get rich quick scheme that doesn’t require actually making anything, means that now Apple has to either keep up with producing bullshit as a service or craft a meaningful story as to why their vision for machine learning is actually better and more sensible and safer and reliable. And there are rumblings that like so many head coaches in the age of NIL, Tim Cook is looking at the changed landscape and thinking “this would be a lot easier if it were someone else’s problem,” and at that point, who knows. It’s not hard to see a new Amelio or Spindler running the company into the ground – after all, their dominance is largely American; the rest of the world runs on Android and WhatsApp. I could get by without Apple on a personal level – it would be less elegant, more of a pain in the ass, and my whole life would be constantly filleted for advertising and training large language models, but I could get by. (The Google Pixel 8A is actually a very attractive device that should be lighting a fire under Apple in the $500 space, but who even knows if they want to sell a phone for less than four figures any more.) But my entire professional livelihood for that entire 27 years has relied on the Mac and other Apple goods, and I have probably fifteen years before I can retire.

I really need Cupertino not to fuck this up.

I went down to the local at 2:30 this afternoon, just in time for happy hour. A pint of robust porter for $7, cheesy bread, and a pleasant hour and a half of just sitting around in the neighborhood bar and grill. Assorted folk on the rail, a couple of tennis moms at a bar table, a gang of high school bros congregating around fries in a booth. It felt like the neighborhood spot, the place where folks come for everything. It doesn’t hurt that it shares a parking lot with a Starbucks and a grocery store, all within walking distance.

And then, two miles away and easily bikeable, is the actual downtown. Alternately in another direction two miles away is the actual downtown of the next town over. There is a cozy village here, as materially accessible as Shepherd Market is from the Park Lane. And if I’m willing to hop a Lyft, there’s the Duke. Or Trials. Or O’Flaherty’s and Dr Funk, the latter of which is the closest thing to Mr Fogg’s without going up to the city.

Walkable is a big part of it. I need to be walking more. I need to be going to the gym again, doing something to get the kind of exercise I did on this trip. But I also need to embrace the cheeky pint. Yes, bird never flew on one wing, but instead of depending on an afternoon or evening, I need to be willing to pop out for an hour for just the one, the way I would (and did) in London or Amsterdam or elsewhere. And if I’m going to do that, then I need to be downtown more, availing myself of the no less than four perfectly good options for “just the one.”

I have my stuff. I have all the stuff I could need. I have books, podcasts, fresh earbuds at last. I even have some stuff I didn’t have after the 2022 trip, like an indoor pub night space at home and a local church community to connect with other people. The lesson from this trip is that until they run a light rail down Foothill Expressway or install a canal next to the back patio at Fibbar Magee’s, I have all the pieces I need to live locally the way I want to in Europe. The trick is just to do it. If a few bucks is the price of perfecting the illusion, find someplace else to skimp and spend that few bucks.

Break out the lightweight blazers, the cotton caps, and put the socks back in a drawer until November. Spring has sprung.

Dublin and Amsterdam had more in common than you think. Both acutely aware of their history, both served by trams down the middle of main thoroughfares, both dominated by an iconic beer brand in their taverns and restaurants, both places where you could get by entirely in English without a bit of bother, and – on this trip at least – both gray and rainy almost the entire time bar one morning and early afternoon of pleasant sun without being too hot.

But Amsterdam, for all the novelty of the canals and the road system they create where pedestrians, bicycles and tiny speck city cars can occupy the same space, felt to me like English-speaking Paris. It came off as a bit smug, a bit spiky, a bit “oh it’s you,” and this was not helped by the preposterous light rail system where you are obliged to tag on AND off while also entering and exiting the car through different doors. More than once the doors were slammed on us before we could get out of the train and in one case they actually pulled out while we were still trying to disembark, and we had to make our way back on foot.

And the other thing that was hard to square was that you got that “oh…Americans” that almost everyone gives you in Europe (there’s a reason I always identify myself as Californian), but Amsterdam – for all the pot and prostitution – is the country that gave us colonial capitalism, chattel slavery, the Orange Order in Ulster and Boers in South Africa. It was tough not to have a snarl of “we learned it from you.”

Ireland…well, I’ve mentioned before Pete Brown’s like about how most countries have a motto like “God and my right” or “Get off my land” while Ireland’s is “a hundred thousand welcomes” and it certainly felt that way. The person behind the counter will give you what you need, whether it’s a pharmacist sizing you up for decongestant and cough suppressant or a barman offering you a cup of coffee to space out those pints. Every time I’m in Ireland, all I can think is how human the scale of life is – I know my cousin and I joke about the Irish retirement plan, but whether it’s Dublin (larger than San Jose) or Galway (the size of Mountain View) or Ballyferriter (the size of a peanut butter sandwich), every Irish place feels like somewhere I could be comfortable and not feel like the world around me is going to Hell. Which is probably why I need to spend two and a half weeks living in Dublin so I can see the downsides and have some perspective, or at least find some more political podcasts to see what’s wrong there.

The other thing that sticks out to me from this trip is the specialization. There were drugstores, but they weren’t all purpose like a CVS or Walgreens, they were strictly selling medical stuff. There weren’t any big box stores, just clothing stores or electronics stores or grocery stores. It felt like a throwback to the main-street pharmacy of my small town childhood, which coupled with everyone’s personable nature…well, it’s hard to explain, but it feels like what Alabama could have been like if the state had made better choices for the last hundred years or so.

So that’s pretty much the story. The obvious question now: lessons learned? Things to bring back? Of which.

The last time I saw Prague was in January 1992, only a little over 2 years past the Velvet Revolution. I was 19 years old, able to get by with barely-passable German far more easily than English, and in my memory the 700 year old beer hall was serving a giant liter mug of midnight-black beer with a head you could set a quarter on and too strong to contemplate.

When the lady behind the counter at the hotel asked us if we’d visited Prague before and I said “32 years ago,” she got a look I couldn’t place and then said “well…welcome to the new Prague.” Which, I get it – today Prague is the Nashville of Central Europe, the home of wild drunken stag nights, a place where the car service from the airport includes “lap dancers” on a list of offered amenities, a reasonably-priced party town for the young and wild-spirited, very much in the spirit of its Belle Epoque past as the spiritual capital of Bohemia.

Prague feels European. By which I mean to say, you know you are not in an English-speaking or American-influenced country. The fact that they don’t use the Euro adds to this; converting koruna to dollars and back took me most of the week to figure out (although I’m not going to lie, beers for $4 or less is magical). Forty-some years of Communism didn’t bother taking down the art nouveau architecture, with the result that it feels like a less expensive and more accessible Paris. After a couple of days in the nice hotel, which I ruined with the worst bout of food poisoning in my life (never eat “shrimp quesadilla” in a landlocked country), we wound up in the Flora neighborhood, and thus began one of the stranger weeks of my life.

It’s a weird dynamic to wake up, eat breakfast (something I only seem to do on vacation), kiss my wife goodbye as she heads for the office, and then be left to my own devices to kill time from around 9 to around 4. I was working remotely, on the sly, and 4 to midnight approximated 7 to 3 in California, which was enough to fake out the company and play it off as though i were still in the front room of my own house. So I had six or seven hours to kill with random perambulations, after which I had to come back to the room and go to work – after which I had to lie down and try to fall asleep, which proved impossible. I don’t think I fell asleep before 2 AM any day i was working, because you really do need time to let your mind wind down.

The other quirky thing is that when you wake up on Central European time, you have a bunch of stuff to get through on your phone from the day before – and then you basically have five or six hours of radio silence before the East Coast wakes up. For someone who refreshes his phone more or less constantly all day, this was unsettling. Everyone I knew was asleep or at work themselves and I was left to my own devices – a sense that hit me in Budapest in 1992 when I woke up at 2 AM all alone in the Hotel Ifjusag. But three decades on, I had resources I didn’t have back then – an iPhone, Internet access, and a much better sense of urban exploration.

So I set off, on foot, secure in the knowledge that Apple Maps could get me back where I needed to go and my transit pass on the phone could be my magic carpet for trams and buses and metro alike. I sought out that 700 year old beer hall, which turned out to be a little over 500 years old, and the giant intimidating pitch black beer turned out to be a half liter of brown lager with a typically Czech head and only 4.7% ABV, and it was delicious. I drank Pilsner at the first bar that ever served it, and while I will never be a Pilsner drinker, I get how it managed to conquer the world. I took a tram up past Prague Castle and found myself in the tiny neighborhood of Novy Svet, with its winding medieval cobbled streets and a coffee shop a step down into a centuries-old building. And I walked through Flora, a pleasantly quiet mostly residential stretch that nonetheless had bars and trams and plaques commemorating resistance fighters in 1945.

It was quiet. It was pleasant. It was far from the worst place to be an expat working remotely for a company back in the US. And in a lot of ways, it felt more normal – the Atrium Flora mall across from the hotel was like a mall from days gone by, with a cleaners and a McDonalds and clothing stores and a newsstand and a tobacconist and a toy shop. Not like the “everything is geared toward the Chinese luxury tourist” malls in the Bay. It felt like a place I could spend a lot of time and be all right, language barrier notwithstanding.

And this is crucial: I wore a BSC hat out in public, willingly, for the first time in at least 18 years. Because I was closing the loop. I was there for the kid who didn’t know that in three decades, his biweekly take-home would be more than what it cost to send him on that trip back then. For the kid who didn’t know anyone, who felt as completely lost in Birmingham as in Bratislava, who was too callow and too Baptist and too scared to know his way around a cheeky half. I always reply to anyone who says “it gets better” with “when and how”, but if it actually does, sometimes you have to take a moment and acknowledge it.

Of which.

It was in a random neighborhood in Denver last October where the thought first occurred to me: brick is what I key on. There’s precious little brick left in the Bay Area, thanks to 1906 and 1989 and the unsuitability of unreinforced masonry as building material in earthquake country. But the neighborhood of early-20th century low brick buildings of two or three stories reminded me of Asheville, or of the bits of the Southside of Birmingham that first tipped my notice back in 1985. And then a walk through the France section of EPCOT in November confirmed it.

The neighborhood as urban village: that’s the thing I always seem to imagine. The confluence of old brick buildings, some centuries old, the presence of canals from an era before rail, the presence of streetcars or trams for anything that’s too far to do on foot.

The apotheosis of this, of course, is Shepherd Market. A tiny square with a couple of side streets in and out and a couple more pedestrian passageways. Inside: restaurants, barber shops, a couple of corner shops with soda and magazines and knockoff phone chargers, no fewer than four pubs, a tobacconist, a pharmacy, a hardware store. Apartments over almost all of them, many associated with centuries of practitioners of the oldest profession until only a couple of decades ago.

We’ve stayed at the Park Lane four times now – five if you count the one-night stopover at the end of the trip – but I only realized Shepherd Market was there at the end of a previous trip. These last two times, it has been where I get my haircut and straight razor shave, where I grab my first pint of the trip at Ye Grapes, where I can be assured of grabbing a couple bottles of Coke Zero to take back to a hotel that seems to have a deal with Pepsi in every country. It is a place of imagination: that perfect other realm where there is no job, no American politics, nothing to think about other than where shall we go today and what do we feel like doing.

In William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard thinks of London as “mirror world” – different plugs for different electricity, different light switches, different weight to the coins and different denominations. I feel that, big-time. A world where a pint of beer is a hefty and generous measure, but where as likely as not it’s barely 4% alcohol by volume. A place where fountain soda is basically unobtainable other than at American fast food chains, and God help you if you want a portion larger than a half liter even there. A place where coffee means espresso and is served in a thimble, a place where ice in a beverage is one piece at best the size of a Monopoly die. A place where I eat more vegetarian food in a week than I do the rest of the year in America, because it’s plentiful and better. A place where the wheat doesn’t put my wife’s immune system on monkey tilt. A place where instead of dealing with rideshare apps and their casual exploitation of distributed servantry, you put your hand up to hail the best cabs in the world – or climb to the top of a double-decker bus and enjoy the view from the front.

And yet, even as London is our own personal Disneyland, our friends there are contemplating getting out. Because just as Austin and Nashville and Birmingham can’t escape Texas or Tennessee or Alabama, London is trapped in England, in Brexitland, in a tabloid press culture and a non-urban population incapable of relinquishing imperial pretensions, A city that was the financial capital of the planet and the greatest cultural melting pot of our time until voters outside the M25 decided that they could vote themselves a British moon on a British stick. I know about all of this, thanks to BBC Sounds and Londonist and the sardonic remarks on BritBox panel shows, but when I’m in London it feels like something that never touches me, like what it must be like for people who don’t know or care or think about politics. I can just be. (Especially since for all its own bigotries, English conservatism doesn’t seem particularly hell-bent on ending abortion access or burning books. Their attitudes toward trans people are desperate, but that’s another post.)

London is what I think of when I think of getting away now. The Palm Court of the Park Lane, indie-chill music overhead and a glass of Auchentoshen on one big rock to hand, memories of our honeymoon or the time we just decided to live in London for three weeks and pretend we were wealthy and retired. Winding cobbled streets, a cheeky half of cask ale literally around almost every corner, the entire Mr Fogg’s chain of delightfully immersive cocktail parlors. A mirror world. Work doesn’t matter, politics doesn’t matter, we have no obligation but to enjoy ourselves and take lots of pictures. Sit in the club room with a fizzy clear lemonade (and maybe just the least splash of cognac on top) and use a big piece of hotel stationery and my favorite blue-black pen to write out what we want to see tomorrow.

But there was more to this trip than London. Of which.

Birmingham-Southern College is shutting down.

I don’t know how to feel about this.

I stand by my previous remarks: BSC was the biggest mistake of my life. Fortunately, years of drugs and therapy have helped me understand how I made that mistake, and how much of it was not of my doing, and how much harm I did myself from years of trying to go back and keep fixing that mistake and the others that spiraled out from it. And I suppose thirty years after graduation, it’s far enough in the past that I’ve learned to walk around the broken step that leads to the black hole.

It’s hard not to feel weird about seeing a big chunk of your past detach itself, like a calving glacier, and disappear beneath the waves. The only people I can really talk about this with are one or two folks on Bluesky, people whose government names I don’t even know. When I left BSC, it was with essentially no friends but my psychotic girlfriend, and when she finally cost me my Vanderbilt career – or caused me to cost myself said career – I was left with a void that I spent literal decades trying to either fill with meaning or retcon into something else. At some level, I think I hoped that somehow BSC would do what Birmingham accomplished, and evolve into a place I would again be happy to claim and be associated with. I think they could have, and they were on the right track, but they had too far to come and started far too late to make it.

After hearing the news, I found myself out in the shed digging for some stuff I’d boxed up. A sweatshirt. A pennant. The ubiquitous opaque container. A few caps. The pewter engraved flask I bought myself because I didn’t have anyone else to buy it for me. The football jersey I had made for myself at a point when transitioning straight to Division III with football would have been a fun and interesting swerve and not a blindsiding comedown based on a fraudulent vision. And the class ring – not the bespoke design that was yet another dose of Vanderbilt envy, but the stadium-top 90s style with its degree that I never used adorning one shank. Except I suppose I did use it to get into Vanderbilt, do the resume laundering and collect an MA that would give me a leg up at NGS and Apple.

I mean, the things I was taught at BSC pale next to what I learned, and how I fell into a life lived on defense rather than offense, and how that manifested itself for a quarter century. And when I disavowed it in 2006, I felt none the worse for disclaiming it. And at some primal Celtic level, I am grimly satisfied that bad conduct has had consequences, even thought a lot of people are going to suffer as a result. I hope Miles can move in, or UAB can take the opportunity to establish a presence and a residential college, or something at least happens to preserve Yeilding Chapel and the planetarium.

The fight song didn’t have words, the alma mater was a direct word for word lift of Vanderbilt’s, and the only campuswide traditions were getting thrown in the fountain by your friends and having smoke blown up your ass by everyone in authority, but it was a thing that happened to me for four years and now it’s not there anymore, and will not have an opportunity for redemption.

So it goes.