Author: Stagger Lee

This is the thirteenth year of the blog. In that time, I’ve had four primary cell phone numbers, six different Twitter handles, been all over the place with other social media services from Path to Mastodon to Peach to Tumblr, and had three different work email addresses. All piped through ten different smartphones and who knows how many computers.

It irritates my wife and friends to no end that my number has changed as frequently as it has. But in a way, it’s almost for the best, as is my erratic Twitter presence. It’s made it difficult to have a consistent online history, especially as I’ve spent years staying away from Google and Facebook services (yes, I have Instagram and WhatsApp, but neither ever connected to the other and neither ever connected to Facebook proper). On my personal iPhone SE, with its US Mobile SIM on prepaid, there is not one byte of Google code and no Facebook app other than Insta. And it runs through a VPN at all times which makes it appear I’m online from somewhere in London.

The Internet changed the rules about what is possible. As a result, a digital world has different imperatives and different issues around everything from copyright to speech to harassment to advertising to what is reasonable to expect from asynchronous communication. And because we live in a world where norms and unwritten rules mean nothing, we haven’t established any around this new world. In the past, if you ordered something from a catalog, you’d get their catalog every month from now on. Now you get email from them every day. No one in the old days would have dreamed of requiring you to conduct business on your home phone; now it’s nothing for a company to say they don’t have phones and expect you to use your own mobile phone for work. And there’s no planet on which South Central Bell could have said “we want to monitor your conversation so we can advertise to you” but now that’s more or less exactly what Verizon and Comcast and AT&T are arguing that they should be able to do “just like Google” without seeming to grasp that they’re the phone line, not the correspondent on the other end.

Add this to the long list of things that need repairing…someday. Assuming the world is still here and generational inertia hasn’t set in with everyone under 30 who has no idea or expectation of online privacy. Meanwhile I’ll be over here plotting to get a 669 area code for the personal line somehow.

It’s hard to think about given how 2016 and 2017 went, but for me, personally, it all sort of went to hell for good in 2014. The slide started almost immediately, with the first of ultimately seven ER visits for my in-laws that year as soon as I got back from Birmingham. That was when their health took a turn for the worst once and for all. Lost in the aftermath was how Vanderbilt’s most successful coach in the last century chose to go help Penn State get right, functionally taking a huge shit on everything he’d said for three years about “build don’t rent” – and sacrificing our best success in football history so that the Nittanys could speed their recovery from having harbored a child molester for years. That’ll sour your outlook.

But once you get away from the more purely personal, you see the real shit emerge. Ferguson, when some white people finally began to catch on that a huge swath of law enforcement is fundamentally lawless. GamerGate, where it became apparent that social media is a fundamentally negative force and that its operators are utterly unwilling to control or contain when bad people weaponize it.The GOP leveraged six years of blind obstruction to capture the Senate and elevate that obstruction to genuinely unprecedented levels. And the rest of the world finally began to catch on to how Silly Con Valley is sexist, ageist, kind of racist and the functional equivalent of Wall Street in the 1980s, and how its regular business was submerged under the get-rich-quick chicanery of companies whose business model was built on the tripod of “forgiveness not permission,” “do this for me like Mom used to” and “send nudes.”

We more or less live in the world that 2014 made. Just as Waterloo set the tone for the 19th century and the outbreak of World War I did for the 20th, 2014 showed us the shape of things to come. Retrograde populism, harnessed in the service of destabilizing any threat to unbridled wealth. And here in Silly Con Valley, we have a better view of it than most, because this is where your future comes from. So…wanna know what’s coming?

Consider the primacy of technology in the American marketplace. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, to a lesser extent Microsoft – the big dream of wealth now runs through high-tech, more so than the Alex P. Keaton stockbroker fantasy ever did in the 1980s, because tech convinced people that it was all about “making the world a better place.” The cliche got to be a cliche because tech believed it was inherently virtuous. With that fallacy plainly dismissed, we can look a little closer and see that in a LOT of ways, it’s about reordering society to ensure continued privilege for the tech elite. Things like “everyone should learn to code” aren’t about trying to lift all boats, they’re about wrenching away the oars for themselves. Beware the man (reliably a man) who thinks the one thing he knows is the only thing that’s important to know.

People are starting to figure it out. That’s why we resemble Wall Street 1986 so much; the same dickbags are in search of the next pinnacle of power and this is it – with the added bonus that heretofore at least, tech CEOs have gotten the uncritical praise not afforded to finance in the post-crash era. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Zuckerberg and Kalanick and Y Combinator are this era’s Boesky and Milken and KKR. And the insidious thing is that they’re facilitating a slide toward an economy where the ultimate luxury good is financial stability. Think about it: a rental model is the key to the 21st Century indenture. Don’t own music, pay every month for Spotify. Don’t own movies, pay every month for Netflix or HBO. Don’t own a car, pay for Uber or Lyft or Limebike. Don’t own a home, pay…well, pay whatever the market will bear, in Silly Con Valley anyway, where starter homes cost easily $1.5 million.

And you can’t afford to accumulate the wealth needed to make bigger purchases, because on top of the rent you have to pay the college loans…and by making a college degree the gatekeeper credential, they’ve ensured that you start in enough debt to be stuck on the wheel. After which – well, odds are you’ll probably never get rich, but it takes on the psychology of the lottery. You can’t win if you don’t play, and if you don’t play, you save a pittance while ensuring the winner is Not You. You can ensure that you’ll be driving Uber and running TaskRabbit on top of your hourly day job forever, or you can indenture yourself to Sallie Mae for twenty years…and drive Uber and run TaskRabbit on top of your hourly day job. Meanwhile, the wacky loan packages that used to make home ownership at least broadly feasible in a distorted market are gone, and now you’re going to need at least 15% or 20% down – which, as mentioned above, now means that you have to cough up something in the six figures all at once, and around here do it in the face of people sailing in with cash offers so they can buy investment properties. Which leads to the quasi-feudal practice of writing your begging letter to the seller in hopes of convincing them to take your deal. Downton Abbey by the Bay. Which actually dovetails quite nicely with the distributed servantry of the gig economy. No wonder everyone’s into British period drama. It’s our own Back to the Future.

And the thing about it is, when all this wealth only flows to the top, you would think the obvious solution is “soak the rich.” But the mythical white working class has gone right along with the course of things, perfectly happy to be living on a slab of cardboard underneath an overpass, cooking a dead crow on a wire coat hanger over a fire in a tin can, so long as the brown people on the next slab over don’t even have a dead crow. It’s the same trick played on white people in Alabama for a century, and it worked a treat there. It just so happens that the cracks in the system made it possible to take it national. And now, because of that 2014 Senate campaign, the Supreme Court goes from possibly having six Democratic appointees for the first time in decades to having the most stalwart conservative tilt in a century. Which means the refs are permanently biased for the foreseeable future, and misconduct like gerrymandering or voter suppression will be even harder to get over on, and changing course will be ever more difficult. When the GOP hasn’t elected a new President with the most votes since 1988, but controls all three branches of the federal government, something has broken. Possibly beyond repair.

Heads Greenock, tails Galway.

So having pushed up everything that was queued (including one five year old draft buried in the console), I think normal service is restored. The blog now plays nicely with the newest version of MarsEdit, which is nifty, and I can easily and cleanly post from the iPhone app (like right now), which may be a useful thing abroad rather than waiting and doing a big travelogue dump at the end. Being on the latest WordPress should also work a treat for performance and security, which I’m sure will make our host happy.

But one thing I did change was the theme. There was an updated version of the basic black text on white background that I’d been using more or less forever, and it was fine, and I reserve the right to go back to it. But the 2017 theme had room for a header picture. And I thought, well, why not.

The header is San Gregorio beach, on a day when the fog is up. Around here, it’s the place where you take that special someone you’re getting serious about. For at least a couple of years now, the whole San Mateo coastline has been my refuge, my place of peace, where I go to get my head together. It’s where I idly dream of retiring someday as I drift off to sleep at night. If I went down tomorrow, it’s almost certainly where I’d want my ashes scattered. It feels like a right place, and a safe place, and a saner place.

Which means it’s a good header for here. Twelve years of journaling here has made me acutely conscious that I spend a lot of time bitching and woolgathering and raging against the storm to no good end. Maybe hanging this over the front door is a good way of reminding myself that there’s a better place and a better aspiration and it’s a half hour to get there…unless I stop at Taco Bell in Pacifica first for a loaded potato griller and some Cinnabon delights with an extra large Baja Blast.

Year 13 is begun. Onward.

In the beginning there was eWorld. I knew the internet existed, and that I would have access to it when I got to Vanderbilt, but having just bought my Power Mac 6100 my thinking was “get online as quick as humanly possible” and that meant the short window in which Apple had its own private-label version of America Online. It hadn’t been up and running more than a month when I got on, and while it didn’t really have internet access, it did have an email gateway. And so history will record that my first email address wasn’t @vanderbilt.edu, but @eworld.com.

I got my Vanderbilt email within hours of arriving on campus, of course. It took a while for me to figure out how to get my computer dialed in with Apple Remote Access and then configure the necessaries to telnet in from there, and then it took me a while to figure out how to actually use Eudora. But for the first three years of my online life, email was something that I had to find a computer with a command line to access unless I was at home. So telnet became the indispensable thing, from any one of half a dozen places around campus. Being home meant being without access. Which was painful.

The big shift occurred when I got to Washington and realized I needed to be on IMAP rather than POP. Vanderbilt was just engaging in that shift as I left, moving from telnet and POP to an actual IMAP client. Webmail existed – I had a burner Hotmail account almost as soon as I found it existed, and that was potentially transformative – but Vanderbilt didn’t, and neither did my new ISP in DC. In fact, I specifically chose them because they had command line access, and that remained my essential backup solution for years after, Sure, there was Eudora – or Outlook Express, or whatever alternative client I grasped at before Apple Mail in Mac OS X ended Email Client Glee for good – but I felt naked without the ability to just telnet in and use pine.

And it stayed that way. I had POP mail clients on my phones from 2000 on, with varying degrees of success – mostly only useful as an enhanced pager of sorts, or to see “oh shit I have to get back to my computer and look at this for real”. My early smartphone attempts – the Sony Ericsson P800, the Nokia 6620 – didn’t handle it much better. It was only once the iPhone landed in my hands in the summer of 2007 that I realized that email was no longer something you got at over the terminal or through a web browser: email was now something that lived in your hand.

And here’s the remarkable thing: through all this time, email remains the only thing you can set up yourself, on a server in the closet, and make work on any platform or interoperate with anyone else’s email. If you could drop back through time and send something from that @eworld.com account, it could be received and read equally well on Gmail, on the mail client of the iPhone, on Outlook at work, through pine at this very host. Nothing, not even SMS, has been as robust and as interoperable for as long. And that’s why I still persist in keeping up my personal addresses and doing the work to train away the spam, because after almost a quarter-century, I still perk up at that “unread” indicator.

During the blog outage, I was messing about with the Nokia 3310 and decided to compare it to the Nokia 6620 or Motorola V635 via phonescoop.com, which used to be an everyday visit once upon a time. Sure enough, for a $60 burner phone in 2018, it could go back in time to January 2006 and it would be a killer. Everything I wanted in a phone twelve years ago except possibly iSync (and let’s be honest, iSync was crap): quad-band coverage for home and abroad, Bluetooth AND speakerphone, an equal-or-better resolution display and a battery 50% larger than anything else I had, and all in a package half the size. A memento mori of the time when your cellphone went in the change pocket of your jeans and manufacturers were competing to get smaller.

But then, there’s a lot of things I don’t have the same glee for anymore. Time was, I was on the eternal search for the perfect bag. Constantly looking at Timbuk2 and Rickshaw and Chrome for all manner of what have you. Messengers, backpacks, the One True Bag that would sort it. And then about five or six years ago, it stopped. Partly because I didn’t need to carry a laptop every day any longer, but partly because I ended up with a small backpack that was just what I needed for work and no more, and because I had a Rickshaw messenger for an overnight bag and a Timbuk2 that could go for two or three days (in fact, I am actively contemplating a Monday-through-Friday with nothing else). 

There was jacket glee. That mostly passed as a result of eventually accumulating everything I could have wanted. The Filson/Levis trucker jacket. The long-sought-after Harris Tweed. The seersucker blazer. The Buzz Rickson, imported from Japan in person. The peacoat, after all that time. And the thing that kills me is that thanks to climate change, I rarely need anything heavier than a rain shell. I’ve gone from a world where I defined my look by my outerwear to one where outerwear is superfluous to requirement.

Well, how about shoes? I accumulated those too. I eventually got my British-made DMs and DM-alikes. The quest for American footwear got me some canoe Mocs and the Alden Indy boots, both of which will be remanufactured for the rest of my life as required. And by a weird stroke of luck, I fell ass-backward into a $35 pair of plastic Birkenstocks which fit and wore so well that I bought two more pair to have stashed in the closet for when the time comes that the first ones wear out.

Which is a recurring theme. It seems that for the last two years, almost, my clothing purchases consist of “stockpile more of the basics.” The Pointer Brand jeans from LC King of Bristol, TN, basic American workwear for a century. The black T-shirts from American Giant, with their slubby cotton weave. The overbuilt work shirt from AG that became almost an everyday garment when I wasn’t in the office from January to June, every chance I could get when the temps were going below 66 degrees. (And yes, there’s a spare still sealed in its plastic in the closet.) I suppose you could make the case that Hat Glee overpowered all other clothing fixations, but the two wool flannel caps and the tweet flat cap from Ireland very nearly put a sock in that as well (special souvenirs like the San Jose Churros lid notwithstanding). 

I didn’t learn not to want stuff. Not at all. This is not me moving past material concerns. But there’s a chance that I’ve accumulated as much stuff as I need or want. I really like the car, I really like the work shirt, I really like the three pair of footwear that do for most everything anymore. If allowed, I would just wear the same five black T-shirts and same three pair of jeans until they wore out. My three wool caps – two flannel baseball, one tweed flat – obviate the need for any of the others. I have everything I require or desire to get through life, and at this point, the money is all for plane tickets and lodging and bar tabs. (And Kindle books and iTunes content, to be honest, but that’s not taking up any more space.) It’s possible that the things of the world finally dovetailed neatly with the life I’d like to lead.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t have that many great memories around my time at Vanderbilt. Not that the ones I do have aren’t great, but there just aren’t that many of them, because of how I wound up spending way too much time back in Birmingham indulging my toxic relationship. I can only remember attending two actual football games in three years, even though I know there must have been more. I remember a handful of departmental team outings – to the movies once or twice, to the Oak Room, bowling, two or three random house parties or dinners. Mostly I just remember being –  whether on campus at the Overcup Oak or the computer lab at Payne Hall, or walking distance at SATCO or Boston Market, or at one of the malls or just wandering around the Opryland Hotel in search of that Disney World vibe. It was just the fact of being in Nashville, being at another school, feeling like I had found this alternate world that wasn’t bounded by Jefferson County Alabama. One where I was happier than I’d ever been in undergrad. Like I’d stepped out of my own time into a better one.

I know in the past I’ve said that Nashville felt like home on day one in a way no other place ever did, but upon further review I’d like to extend and revise my remarks. See, it was Vanderbilt that felt like home on day one. It just happened to be in Nashville, which added to the novelty of it all because I was on a college campus I hadn’t already been visiting weekly since 1978 or so. But Vanderbilt was a highly-regarded academic institution where I’d been awarded a scholarship and was being left to my own devices without the burden of being in the same town or having felt like I flopped to my second choice. It was, simply put, the fulfillment of my life’s work. No wonder it felt like home. 

So when the bubble burst and I came back to earth – and then had to start all over and be rebuilt completely anew somewhere else – Vanderbilt sort of went by the boards. I was vaguely aware of them getting off to that great start in football in 2005 (only to come back to earth hard) or reaching his-and-hers Sweet Sixteens in 2004, but my actual undergrad and Alabama football held at least as much of my attention throughout my time in DC. (When the Skins weren’t soaking it all up. Or NASCAR, how the hell did that happen. For that matter how did I never make it to one Skins game in seven seasons in Arlington?) It was only once I’d spent some serious time in Silicon Valley, caught between Berkeley on one side and Shallow Alto on the other, that I gravitated back toward my consolation-prize M.A. as something more than just degree laundering.

Thing is, my Vanderbilt stuff in recent years has been tangentially related to my time there at best. I’m not in contact with any of the Herd, my old colleagues and cohorts, or any of the faculty I kinda sorta not-really worked with. I’m not involved with my field of study at all, never have been since leaving. I’ve been sporadically involved with the San Francisco alumni club, though I’m largely out of the demographic for that, and of course there’s the blog-and-Twitter content which has become more sparse than ever. I’ve been back since graduation, obviously, but for the first couple or three times it was just a bookstore run with someone else in tow. That 2012 football game was my first trip back alone since I left alone in 1997, and I think it was the echoes of that which I felt more than any real “it’s like I’ve never been away.” Or more accurately, it was as if, having become a devoted fan of some foreign soccer team, I finally got to visit their stadium in their own country for an actual game. Except for the ring on my finger, I could just as easily have been one of those rare precious sidewalk alums, someone who picked Vanderbilt out of a hat with no connection other than wanting to support them.

Which has always been kind of a tough nut to crack. I’ve never settled on any team I wanted to root for without some sort of connection. I think that was what made the ten-year search for a Premier League team so inconclusive; it required me to have a nagging attachment to Fulham, attend an actual home match, and see their ultimate promotion back to the PL to give me a confirmed rooting interest. I had my wife for Cal, I had the Irish pub and its song connections for Celtic, I had political science and my then-girlfriend’s grandfather for the Skins before I ever landed in DC. Vanderbilt was something I went back to at the moment when Bama was a steaming pile and I’d finally entirely disavowed my undergrad, a time when I needed some connection to which I could feel like I had a legitimate claim.

It’s gone kind of sideways in recent years. It doesn’t help that the general toxicity of Twitter has bled into that account as well, but my billet on the blog was football, and it’s become intolerable to be a regular correspondent for a team that has absolutely no shot in its conference, in a sport that embodies the worst of college athletics and may be on the same course as boxing for what it does to the health and welfare of its participants. In a world where the Dores can field three other legitimate national championship contenders in other sports, there’s no percentage in signing up to get your brains beat out in hopes that maybe this is the year football can maybe reach .500 somehow.

I mean, if you think about it, how much of my Vanderbilt life nowadays actually existed when I was there? There was no Twitter. There were no blogs. There was barely a USENET presence. No one had ever heard of “Anchor Down” or “Who Ya Wit” and the three-finger gesture didn’t exist except as a Serbian nationalist sign. Vanderbilt, for me, since 2007 – and especially since 2010 – has existed mainly as a way for me to have something to claim to belong to, something I can point to when people say “tell me about yourself.” It’s become an attempt to reach back and fish something out of the black hole, to built some kind of ersatz college experience that could stand in for seven years of trying and failing to have what I’d always wanted and twenty more of chasing behind it. And somewhere in the last year, the college thing became something I learned to stop really caring that much about. College happened, it didn’t work out like I hoped, and there’s nothing for it but to walk on and do whatever is next.

In fact, there’s an argument to be made for Vanderbilt not as college-laundering, but as the first job out of college. Sure, it was a job as a grad student, but they were paying me to do it and giving me a salary and health care, I could have lived anywhere in Nashville, grad students weren’t remotely tied to what you think of as student life…and the thing is, viewed from that angle, the arc of my career path is FAR more impressive if you launch from just a failed four years at a nothing school in Alabama and get all the way through Vanderbilt and DC to Silly Con Valley. I don’t have to tether myself to it as some bulwark of identity. I don’t have to keep forcing myself to fit someplace that is honestly not that great of a fit for the sake of filling a black hole that I can just plank over and walk around.

Vanderbilt was something that I settled on at the exact moment when I was casting about for an English soccer team, and I think in retrospect it was for many of the same reasons. It was something new, unique, novel, a rooting interest I could claim anew somehow. It has been its own variety of cosplay, its own sort of invented secret identity to let me pretend to be something more or different than I actually am. It was something I salvaged out of the old wreckage, slapped a couple coats of paint on it, and used to try to prove I was something else. And we may well be approaching the day when my Vanderbilt identity, as currently constituted, will be a casualty of my lifelong ambition not to have to prove anything…which began at Vanderbilt.

So about a month ago, Thanos snapped his fingers, and half the server was destroyed. Fortunately it was the OS half and not the content half, and thanks to the diligent genius work of Mine Host, we are back in business just in time to start the 13th year of this blog. Which is kind of crazy to think about. It’s my longest continuous online presence at any one address other than my iTools mail account. I’ve been using this URL longer than any cell phone number (to my wife’s endless chagrin).

We have so much to catch up on. Remedial posting begins tomorrow.

The official cutover is summer of 1983. A summer with the teenage babysitter converted my brother away from being an Alabama fan and me away from a reliance on country music. From the time WZZK came on the air, giving Birmingham an FM blowtorch to beat any of the AM stalwarts, the countrypolitan sounds of the early 1980s were all I had to listen to. But a summer listening to top-40 flipped the switch on my musical preferences just in time for sixth grade. Not even three years in Nashville would send me back to contemporary country, ever again.

That’s not what this post is about.

Two summers ago, I stumbled across Sirius XM’s “Yacht Rock.” It coincided nicely with the acquisition of the new car, and my commute was soon filled with Christopher Cross and Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers and, let’s face it, everything that ever had a Michael McDonald vocal on it. It was a smooth ironic throwback to an era of champagne and teak and Quaaludes and General Hospital, an era when Hall & Oates could top the R&B chart and Herb Alpert could be considered Top 40.

And the thing is, that whole era of soft rock was the last era before I arrived. It’s been mentioned before how I missed out on New Wave and the second British Invasion, but I wasn’t really around the first time for every song with a boat in it. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t hear it. On the contrary, it was always there in the background – at the swimming pool, on the tape players of other kids (and adults) at day care, out the windows of passing cars. WZZK might have been the Death Star of Birmingham radio, but it certainly wasn’t the be-all and end-all of music in town, and there were plenty of stations, AM and FM alike, still busy pumping out the adult contemporary sound of the early Reagan years.

And at some level, I retained some of it, because it’s not like I was hearing Toto or Rupert Holmes for the first time two years ago (well, I’d definitely heard the Pina Colada Song before, but not the entire Rupert Holmes Cinematic Universe; you can’t tell me the gag-gift-of-the-Magi story of “Escape” doesn’t begin with the kind of couple who would propose and accept via answering machine message and end with him finding her side piece’s cigarettes). There are in fact a few songs that I would swear had appeared on WZZK as well; the confluence of soft rock and folk influence with the post-Outlaws version of the Nashville sound in the Urban Cowboy era meant you were as likely to hear Boz Scaggs on country radio as Michael Martin Murphey on the pop station.

Maybe part of the appeal is that I’m just in the demo now for “adult contemporary” – hell, this is the music that was around when the “Easy Listening” chart changed its name, and I’ve got the “beautiful music/easy listening” channel on SXM fixed on button number 5 in the car. Smooth, soothing, the sort of thing I need to help ease me out of the world a little. But I think part of it is that there’s a section of my life that has been locked away for decades, as if my real world began in 2004 or 1997 or 1983. If I’m going to be 46 years old, I should have something to show for all 46.

Besides, the beach and the boat shoes have become a much bigger desire in recent years. Why not indulge them?

Not a good month for the high and mighty of Silly Con Valley. First, Phony Stark made an ass of himself again when his toy sub was not the chosen instrument of rescuing a bunch of trapped kids in Thailand, and he may have left himself wide open for a legit libel suit. And then, Ol’ Fuckerberg thought he could go one-on-one with high tech’s cranky bullshit-proof lesbian aunt and coughed up the notion that Holocaust deniers were just misinformed in good faith (which, if nothing else, shows that the Jewish experience at Harvard must ain’t what it used to be). And I’m going to assume someone at Twitter is apologizing for something galactically stupid, because it’s a day that ends in Y.

I once said something to the effect of “beware the man who thinks the one thing he knows is the only thing worth knowing.” Thus the fallacy of “everybody needs to learn to code” (of which more later) because if all you know is code, then obviously Full Stack Developer is the only meaningful aspiration for anyone in society. There are way too many guys (and Elizabeth Holmes) who have mistaken the warm tongue-bath of an utterly credulous press for complete irreproachability in the wider world, and then flip out when the wider world confronts them with the holes in their thinking.

Take Zuckerberg. Please. He somehow got in his head the notion that to deny Facebook’s platform to the likes of, say, Infowars would somehow be an infringement on free speech. Thing is, there are other platforms out there – like the San Francisco Chronicle, say, or KTVU channel 2, or KCBS radio. They don’t routinely broadcast Alex Jones and his spittle-flecked insanity, and yet nobody sane thinks they are abusing free speech. Time was, we were circumspect about radio and television and the press because the opportunity cost of access to the airwaves was enormous, and distribution of media was expensive. Nutters had to mimeograph their conspiracy theory and pass it out on the corners. Nobody considered that somehow the rights of the Klan were being abused because they weren’t freely given a half hour on NBC at 6 PM.

And comes now Mark Zuckerberg with the notion that somehow he is obligated to let the mental defectives who are destroying Western civilization run rampant on his platform. Which completely misunderstands how free speech works. They are entitled to their speech. No one is obligated to provide them with a soapbox, let alone the opportunity to monetize it. I have this blog through the good offices of a member of my family, and if he had concerns about how I was using it, I would certainly be obliged to take them under consideration, but I could also up sticks to some other hosting provider, set up shop there (albeit with some difficulty), and carry on with no regard for his opinion whatsoever.

It’s the same reason I have no objection to bloggers with no comment section, like John Gruber at Daring Fireball. The logic is that you’ve built this sandbox to broadcast your own speech and opinions, and if someone else wants to broadcast their speech and opinions, they are entitled to build their own sandbox. You are under no obligation to share your printing press with someone else. That’s where Zuckerberg, and Dorsey, and all the other “free speech wing of the free speech party” assholes run on the rocks. Twitter loses nothing by throwing the Nazis off the site tomorrow; they have their own elsewhere. Neither would Reddit, but then, if you were to give the Internet an enema, you’d feed the tube into Reddit. You’re entitled to your free speech, but nothing says I have to let you sit in the front seat of my megaphone truck and drive you around town and then defend you against the people you pissed off.

At some point, Silly Con Valley will have to re-learn these lessons, the same way they are with other forms of regulation. Too much of the tech sector in the 21st century has built itself on loopholes and dissembling about the obvious. A correction is way past overdue. As the Commander said, sooner or later the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done any more. And come soon Lord. Meanwhile, we run the very real risk that Facebook will do for the First Amendment what the NRA did for the Second: abuse and misuse it to the point that enough people start to think that other countries get along fine without it and maybe we should too.

Back in 2003, I bought a Moleskine notebook for the first time. It was another aspirational artifact, something I wanted to need for the life I wanted to live (which seems to be a recurring theme, as we will shortly see). That first Moleskine is an odd artifact, as it’s one of the things that actually bridges my time in DC and my time in California all the way past Apple and into the NASA contract. Which means it also covers my engagement, marriage, honeymoon, and the search for a new car to replace my beloved Saturn…and runs all the way into the beginnings of this very blog.

Like the Livejournal archive, it’s been a good thing – if a little unsettling – to have the record of days gone by suddenly dropped back in my lap. Not unlike the Christmas break when I had everything from about 1984 to 1996 dropped in my lap, this is a record of time that ended about a decade ago but covers a lot of eventful periods all at once. And there’s a lot in there. Not just about the previously-mentioned phone obsession, the quest for One Device To Rule Them All that only ended with the iPhone – when I finally got a device that had two-band coverage AND high-speed 2G AND Bluetooth AND speakerphone AND synced with my Mac – but about other things I was keying on. Like my eternal search for the perfect pen or lighter or shoes or jacket. Or how I could replace a laptop for travel purposes with the right phone and iPod combination. Or about the first attempts to clean up and consolidate my presence online.

That notebook was followed on by a bunch or Moleskine Cahiers or Field Notes – thinner paperback notebooks suitable to slide in a pocket, at a time when the contents of the phone’s Notes app were purely limited to the phone itself and didn’t sync with anything. It was also a time when I was actively tracking my work obligations in one such notebook (in the absence of any kind of actual ticketing system for help calls), and it was easy to just take one such book to London in 2007 and use it as a travelogue – a practice that has continued ever since with a separate book for visits to Europe, Japan, London and Ireland in the last eight or nine years. As early as 2007, I was wondering how I’d ever deal with flying abroad in steerage class ever again.

But I kept domestic notes as well.

One thing I was looking for was a pub to settle on. While I started with both “Irish” establishments in Mountain View, I never knew about the dive bar across the street and down the alley from them – which has since come and gone a couple of times as a viable solution. Ironically, the one I dismissed out of hand for want of phone or music has become the one I prefer to pop into on the way home from work when time and circumstances allow for the indulgence. I was already settled on my favorite place – with cask ale and no TVs – as early as 2007, even though it was (and remains) a pain to get there and back. Oddly enough, in the two-year period where I forgot to go back there, I also forgot they had no TVs and what an appeal that was. In fact, it’s a consideration that would have saved many an attempted pub evening since.

In 2008 specifically, you also see a flood of notes about my mental state, my unhappiness with work, and maybe the first serious attempt to struggle with the black cloud in a meaningful way. It was obvious that I was so close to getting it – I knew that in the past, many of my problems stemmed from an inability to stop being the person I was and let me be the person I was becoming. But I couldn’t see that happening in the moment, and I was still trying to make those pebbles worth counting in a way that would take a decade to let go. I suppose this very post is part of that.

There are also lists. Constantly updated and scratched out and rewritten. Lists of stuff. Boots, jackets, things I wanted, things I wanted to need. A new pair of Solovairs, a tweed jacket, a netbook, an iPad. I might have licked the phone glee, but by 2012 I was struggling with battery life and trying to figure out how to make the phone last all day, because iOS wouldn’t have granular battery information for two more years. (Spoiler alert: delete Twitter. Although the combination of Verizon, iOS 7 and the iPhone 5 was legitimately a documented bad combination from the get-go.) There were positively aspirational lists of goods, lists of destinations like Switzerland or Ireland or Japan. Or Portland or Disneyland again. Or a football match the next time I went to London. And a quote from that trip in 2010, despite the burden we were dragging around with us: “don’t you feel cooler just for being here?” Which is actually a complex bit of information about me and travel.

The funny thing is, looking at those lists, so many things are ticked. I have an American-made wardrobe, complete with a couple of pieces I never anticipated having and enjoy more than any of the others. I have the tweed jacket at long last, and the Buzz Rickson bomber and surplus peacoat and the Filson trucker and an entire seersucker suit and two seersucker blazers of varying weight. I have Alden boots and Quoddy canoe mocs and Blundstone steel-toes and gray Chuck Taylors of two heights. I have an iPad (or two) and a Kindle (or two) and my beloved iPhone SE and Moto X, even if the latter isn’t working anymore. I have phone numbers in five different area codes (and need to pare down ASAP). I’ve stopped caring about pens, or lighters, or laptops, or bags and backpacks altogether. My FrivoList of stuff I might want on a whim is down to three minor things I’ve quietly wanted in some form for a couple of decades in some form or another. I’ve been to Tokyo and Murren and Dublin and Galway and to Fulham FC and Trader Sam and the Riptide.  One could argue I’ve even more or less sorted out my online presence, abandoning Facebook and Tumblr and Livejournal and watching Vox disappear and damn near ready to cut off Twitter for good. 

Through it all, there are themes and motifs that recur over and over. At root, it’s all about trying to assemble the life I want. Where it happens. How it happens. How it’s accessorized. The atmosphere, the setting, the theme. The larger meta-setting for who and what I wish I was, how I want my life to be. The same things over and over: cool, fog, a quiet pub, a comfy chair, or travel that leads to all of the above, and dressed up like I want to feel – whether that’s the tweed or the bomber or just the work shirt. And on reflection, looking at nigh on fifteen years of occasional scribbles, it looks as if I’ve almost arrived where I wanted to be – the wider world notwithstanding. Maybe that’s what makes me crazy about politics now: the notion that but for a hundred thousand votes in the right three states, my entire life could be 99% of the way to where it could realistically max out. Something I recognized was going to be a problem as early as 2014. Of which more later.