Author: Stagger Lee

One side-effect of last weekend’s Great 2018 LJ spelunking was looking at my phone obsession. It’s worth remembering that until about 2005 or so, most phones were on 1-year contracts, not 2, and it wasn’t unreasonable for people to get a new phone every year – because that was really your only window to upgrade, and since you were paying that subsidy whether you got a new phone or not, why wouldn’t you? 

For all my obsession, the phone glee didn’t really become A Thing until 2003. Because it couldn’t. You had to pay full freight for anything you bought out of band, you had to get the carrier to register your ESN to activate on your network – the only time you could get a new phone at all is if you broke the contract somehow, either through fiscal insolvency or moving to a different place. And you can track my phone changes that way. Phone in Nashville in 1995, phone in Nashville in 1996, phone in Nashville/Birmingham in 1997, phone in DC in 1997, phones in DC in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001. But then in 2002, when AT&T finally switched to GSM, the gloves were off.

Because, as I mentioned elsewhere, I couldn’t get a reliable signal at work. Nobody could, except for T-Mobile. It’s not like we were underground – we weren’t, we were on the sixth floor of an office building in Washington DC – but the weird overlap of signal and coverage and who had what where made it a challenge to use the same phone everywhere. At the time, there were six national carriers on FOUR different standards, and only two of those had low-band 850Mhz coverage – the ones lucky enough to have the original AMPS licenses. So Bell Atlantic becomes Verizon and Cellular One becomes Cingular, and one goes CDMA and the other TDMA, while Nextel uses iDEN and Voicestream uses GSM on the old Sprint Spectrum network, and meanwhile Sprint has CDMA and AT&T has TDMA and both only have 1900Mhz…

It was a shitshow. And I had a Siemens phone with TDMA and GSM both…which would shut off in times of low signal. Which was annoying. So in early 2003, I made the fateful decision to switch out for a rock-solid Nokia 3590…and the race was on. I would buy three phones and change carriers in 2003, then buy another phone and change back in 2004 when I moved to California (which, traditionally speaking, made sense). But by that point, the gloves were off, and between Expansys and Wireless Imports and all the dodgy Chinese cellphone shops in New York and Silicon Valley and the ability to just take the SIM out and pop it in another phone, I was enabled to develop the syndrome we now know as Phone Glee. It was about finding the most capable device possible, completely separated from service, with the promise of complete separation between hardware and network and not being dependent on either. Over the years, it would come to include things like number portability and maximum international viability as well. Phone Glee, in short, was just one more attempt to forcibly live in the world I wanted to live in.

Phone Glee lasted pretty much straight through without interruption from 2003 to 2010 and was only truly stifled for good by the coming of the iPhone 4. Since then, there have been occasional outbursts, like when work forced a Bold onto me for a couple of months or my one foray into Android with the Moto X or the need to have a working burner phone for shutdown night (like the F3, ultimately replaced by the new Nokia throwback). But mostly, it’s been waiting to see what the iPhone will do next, because that iPhone 4 was the last phone I spent my own money on for four years. Since then, I laid out for the original Moto X in 2014, the iPhone SE in 2016, and the Nokia 3310 3G last November. I went from an average of buying two phones a year from 2003-08 to buying one phone every 2.5 years.

And why’s that? Well, mostly because – as I have said ad infinitum – the modern smartphone has long since crossed the finish line. Once you accept that the phone has to be plugged in every day, everything since 2010 is just gimmicks and spec sheet bumps. The iPhone 4 had front and back cameras and could more or less replace a point-and-shoot for road trips, and the iPhone 4 was the beginning of my photo collection because I finally had a phone worth using for pictures. The iPhone 6 was a little too big, but the Moto X and SE were not, and the SE became my daily driver until I got the iPhone X. Which is as I have said a little too big to be a little too big, and which costs way too much for what you get…

…but here’s the thing: that screen is amazing. And it obviates the need for an iPad in pretty much every particular. And it idles low; I’ve pretty much confirmed it only draws battery power when I’m actually using it (aside from Slack, which does more background processing than any phone app should have to, what the hell Slack). And the processing horsepower isn’t bad either. I’ve used it in place of an iPad, in place of a laptop, in place of a Kindle, all with reasonable success. And then there’s what happens when I pop it into Google Cardboard, fire up Street View, and put myself on the Stage Road somewhere between Pescadero and San Gregorio…and find myself looking around a foggy day on the San Mateo coast in the middle of my living room.

The iPhone X is the necessary leap into What’s Next, into the world of One And Only One Device. It’s worth making the jump from an SE in a way that every other iPhone is just not, where the tradeoff for the ridiculous size of the Plus or the battery sour spot of the non-Plus is more trouble than it’s worth. The SE is everything you need and nothing you don’t, and the iPhone X is tomorrow’s phone today, and there’s no percentage going in-between. Which makes me a lot less enthused about spending money on the notional SE2. If it were the SE-X, that might be different – a 5” version of the iPhone X would be the perfect device – but that looks a lot less likely than an LCD 6.1” phone, which sounds like the worst of all worlds. But that increases the possibility that I slap a new battery in the SE, get the performance improvements of iOS 12, and make 2018 the fifth year out of the last eight that I don’t pay for any phone at all.

And that’s kind of a profound thing. The Moto X was purchased at a time when I was fixated on the prospect of owning an American-made phone, and also thought I was going to be seeking out another job and would have to give my work phone back. $300 on a phone for the new hotness on Android – for the first time in four years – seemed like a good move both financially and in terms of professional flexibility. The iPhone SE was bought two years later with the ill-gotten gain of the legal settlement against Apple, and using that particular found money for the perfect phone felt right and natural. It was the contemporary current chipset in a one-handed device that had killer battery life and was perfect for everything. And the Nokia 3310 last fall was just for fun, to have a shutdown device and phone of last resort that would still work once 2G started to go away. Sure, I still have my SE as unlocked insurance against going abroad or unplugging, but “my phone” has become something I get from my job, which as I’ve intimated elsewhere I don’t see departing anytime soon.

Problem is, the only way I could have justified paying for the X myself would be if I were replacing the iPhone SE *and* the iPad mini 2. Which…there was a good case that I could justify replacing the iPad until the iOS 12 beta, which looks like bringing it ever so slightly back to life. Couple that with the $29 battery replacement on the SE and I’m just as glad I didn’t have to buy the X myself, because it would be $1000 to replace things that don’t really need replacing at present. Which is why it’s a good thing Phone Glee ended, because Phone Glee was about trying to get what you want. 2018 is more about wanting what you’ve got. If nothing else, it’s a lot less money to spend.

So a few days back, I had occasion to forget how many times I’d flown to California in 2003. Which led me down a Livejournal rat hole spanning from the beginning of 2003 to the end of 2007. Obviously this blog started during that time, and largely replaced LJ because people could syndicate this into their friends feed (what a novel concept!), but there’s a good case to make that LJ was my primary blog for 2003-06 inclusive, and there’s a lot there that had slipped my mind.

For starters, it was three times. March (right on the eve of a return to Iraq that hasn’t ended), May (because my wife’s production cycles in California were longer for some reason and I had to visit over Memorial Day if I wanted to see her) and November (for my second Big Game and second win). That’s after coming out FIVE times in 2002 (March for Tahoe, June for atmosphere and World Cup and the discovery of public wifi, October for a wedding, November for training/my first Big Game and December for my first Christmas with her family). And that doesn’t include FOUR trips to Alabama in 2003 or a weekend at Myrtle Beach with the DC gang or the annual New York run at Christmastime or the family excursion to Disney World and the side trip to Nashville to break up two weeks around them. 

It’s more apparent than ever why 2006 felt like a dull moment. It had to. I was down to one phone number, even if I kept whipping through phones (about which more later), I had a wife, I had a house, I had a staff job at Apple with an office, and I had no money to do anything else. We did go up to Portland briefly in ’06, and my surrogate big sister moved in with us, but 2006 was a lot quieter than usual, and it would be difficult for it not to be after the whirlwind life I led from the time I started dating my future wife. And to be honest, it’s hard not to feel like I was shot out of a cannon when Vanderbilt imploded under me, what with a summer in Ohio with occasional trips to DC or Boston before finding myself permanently in Arlington working for NGS, and then and then and then. 

I remember those days a lot more fondly than the journal indicates. I had forgotten just how personal it all was, dueling with antagonistic users on a regular basis. Not all of them, but enough of them, the ones who were departmental gurus or just “power users” and refused to acknowledge that the IT department might have a valid role in administering the company’s computers. The failure of upper management to support us in any way – and their frequent kneecapping – makes it ever more clear why I was so miserable here 2013-15, because it was very similar to my struggles to get systems onside for security compliance in the face of recalcitrant users and interference from other IT units and the complete absence of any sort of enforcement mechanism from upper management. All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again.

I remembered other things as well. There was a lot more in-person stuff, whether for football Sundays or last-minute 4P’s trips or, famously in 2005, just flying to LA and back without even leaving the 80 gates so I could keep the status I’d earned from the honeymoon flight in 2005.  I was apparently way more into NASCAR for a couple of years there, and was obviously still all in on the Washington Redskins. I was much more conversant with the fortunes of Alabama football than I remember being, although that was the era of the Franchione-Shula drama and the struggle to get over on Auburn or Tennessee; I clearly had far less interest in Vanderbilt for anything football-related (in fact, my running gag was that they should get out of the SEC and license the name and colors to the Tennessee Titans). And – maybe most poignantly – I was still devoted to the basketball prospects of Birmingham-Southern in a way that would end badly soon after leaving DC.

I was also similarly enraged at politics – not at the same scale and not with as much abject panic as now, but you could see the beginnings of it. Not just in me, in the actual politics. By 2006, it was apparent that the future of the GOP rode on making gays and immigrants the 21st century version of the South’s dusky menace from the Jim Crow era, and I was angry about it. But after the Congressional wave in 2006, and then presumably after the Obama election, I guess I must have thought the tide had stemmed and we could switch to containment.

But I was also a lot less secure online. This wasn’t yet the social media era, although I did put my first Twitter handle on LJ in late 2007 so people could see where I wound up (and which is defunct now…of which). I was putting our phone number and address in LJ – not necessarily public-facing, but certainly into their servers whilst being followed by a bunch of people whose real names I didn’t know. Which tempers my indignance at people who fed Facebook all their data blithely. In fairness, I did go first and risk the slings and arrows, and I probably dodged a few bullets from having that much out there at a time when I worked for Apple, so I learned better without necessarily paying the price for it.

In fact, you could argue that this blog belongs to the person I regenerated into at the end of 2005 when the ride came to a complete stop. The LJ belonged to the person I was between 1998 and 2005 – someone who definitely wanted different things and lived a very different sort of life. That person would never have even considered a cottage on the San Mateo coast in the fog belt as his highest aspiration. There might not be signal there, after all. (In retrospect, I went through eleven phones on two carriers during the LJ era, basically a new phone every six months, and almost all in service of being able to get a reliable signal at work – something I wouldn’t get until 2009, two years into the iPhone era. I also recalled why I ever ditched my 703 phone number in the first place: there was no porting it into Apple and I couldn’t justify $800+ a year for a second line for data service when we’d just put our whole ass into a mortgage. I’m sad I lost that number, but I don’t regret it. We couldn’t afford that $800.)

The practical upshot of all this is: there is an old cliche that nobody ever journals about the good times, much like no one ever asks to speak to the manager to say how good their experience was. But it’s important to note the good times too. And I have made my peace with work – I’d love it if it were almost anyone else’s name on the door, but I have reasonable job security, a ton of vacation time, I get all the equipment I need, I can work from home, I’m project driven and not user-facing, and there is an identifiable career path if I do choose to go elsewhere and professional development happening in the meantime. I would have gladly killed any number of people to get to this point for most of the past 12 years, and much of the seven years preceding that. So let me record that I am duly grateful that for the first time in God knows how long, work is (mostly) not a constant contributor to my stress or depression. Cheers.

This article right here frames a lot of what I’ve been thinking about how we look at work and income in the new era. It seems pretty damn transparent that the Jetsons future means we all have to work less, but somehow that turns into “everybody has to have two side gigs through apps in order to make ends meet because we’re not going to give everybody a cut of the benefits that come from making work go away.”

The Democrats needs to be having this conversation right out loud, because a lot of the jobs like coal mining that people are rallying to a) were always shit jobs and should be done by robots, and b) aren’t ever coming back no matter how many brown people you treat like shit, rednecks. It’s not enough to say you’re going to retrain people, the work itself is going away. We need to see what that looks like and the people who are reaping the unexpected windfalls from work going away have to foot the bill for those getting left behind until we come up with a better scheme.

How hard is that to sell?

“The Democrats don’t have a prayer until they can make the GOP pay for every wingnut they have. Every last racist, absurd lunatic, religious bigot – they have to be front and center, and not just on the Daily Show at 11 PM. The GOP is living off the assertion that ANSWER is the Democrats’ base. That has to change.”

-2004

—

Spoiler alert: it didn’t change. The GOP managed to run against Obama for eight years as the bastard son of Malcom X and George McGovern, and then got the most openly racist candidate for President in forty-plus years into the White House. And at no point was the GOP ever made to answer for being a cesspool of white supremacists and wackadoo conspiracy theorists, and unless there’s a tsunami election in 2018 it doesn’t look like they ever will be. 

You could pin it on an American media in love with the golden mean fallacy, but the uncomfortable fact of the matter is that much of America isn’t what we wanted to think it was. Every time someone tries to say “we’re better than this,” the appropriate reply, like a slap on the face, is “apparently not.” Because we’re not. 

Because the GOP tolerated the crazy. Hell, the GOP embraced the crazy, took it around behind the middle school and tried to get pregnant by it. GOP members of Congress shot watermelons in their yard. GOP Senators pledged their troth to talk radio lunatics. Republicans mounted a six year fishing expedition that started with allegations around a shady land deal and eventually impeached a President based on perjury in testimony about a civil suit completely unrelated to the land deal which somehow got bound up in the same investigation. (At least Robert Mueller’s investigation is wholly focused around the matter of Russian interference, until he gets fired anyway.) There were eight years of screeching about whether a Democratic President was actually born in the United States or secretly in thrall to some foreign power. Then he was replaced by his loudest antagonist, in thrall to a foreign power.

And nobody ever made the Republicans pay. Not for Glenn Beck, not for Alex Jones, not for Dan Burton or Louie Gohmert or Steve King or Donald Trump. The Democrats were made to answer for everyone from a fringe rapper to a former preacher to fictional characters (I hear Murphy Brown is coming back, though) and the GOP had to apologize for none of its nut jobs. Which is how one ended up in the White House. And now gets to add a second member to the Supreme Court. 

So: there is no price for crazy, the side with the most votes loses repeatedly, and the institutions lock these results in. That’s a broken system. There are consequences. I may not be glad I lived to see them. I’ll tell you this free of charge, though: the decision not to have kids was the right one.

I grew up in a subdivision about two miles outside of “downtown” (caveat: there were and are approximately 3000 stories in the naked city of MyHometownVille). Needless to say, this being America in the 1970s and 80s, that meant we drove everywhere. I never rode my bike outside of the subdivision, not even once, and trips to church or the grocery store or anything else local meant a car. (That, coupled with the fact that I only ever had one friend in the neighborhood and that only until about 3rd grade, meant that I never snuck out as a kid. Not even once.)

And then, in 1995, one summer off from grad school, I got a wild hair to take a walk. I’d never driven point-to-point anywhere on campus in undergrad or at Vanderbilt, except occasionally for softball when I wanted to go eat first. So for whatever reason, I thought “it’s only a couple of miles, that’s less than an hour walk, I got nothing going on, let’s go see what’s up” and set out on foot to see what I could see.

It was strange, seeing everything at foot speed instead of whizzing by in a car. There were no sidewalks, obviously, but there was precious little traffic anyway. I took a circuitous route that added almost an entire mile to the walk, so it was nearly an hour from my driveway to “downtown”, going first through the subdivision and then through a backroad or two that called to mind a stretch of pavement laid down and forgotten entirely. I saw moss on the rocks under the interstate overpass, I saw weeds growing through the blacktop behind a National Guard armory, I walked all the way to the library which I hadn’t patronized for a decade at least. (A year later, I would repeat the walk and steal a coupon for a free Arch Deluxe out of their copy of Time magazine. You can take the boy out of grad school…)

But the thing that stuck out to me as I walked all that way was…I was committed to walking it out on foot. There was no question of catching transit at any point, because it didn’t exist (not that I’d ever used transit in my life at that point anyway). I had no cell phone, and wouldn’t have for another six months or so. It was me, floating in space untethered in a place that I thought I knew perfectly well but looked far different on foot at 2 miles an hour.

I hadn’t thought about that in a while, until I found myself walking in Cupertino last week at certification training. Cupertino is not a pedestrian town. There’s VTA bus service crossing in a couple of places, but by and large it’s pure suburb. There’s no such thing as “downtown” and never had been, although there’s a flashy new strip-mall “town center” development trying to be that. And for some reason, crossing Stevens Creek Boulevard on foot where there was no crosswalk and walking toward a Target that’s really more of a CVS with notions, I flashed back to twenty-some-odd years ago and thought about what it means to be on foot in a strange place, even if it wasn’t that strange when you were just driving through. About stepping out into an unknown that you thought was a known.

And it made me think some more about those days in the 90s, and about the course of your own life relative to the wider world, and how sometimes, the depression comes not from how shit the world around you is turning, but how good the rest of the world is going…and leaving you behind. But that’s an analysis for another time.

“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is Nazi. Nobody cares about their motives anymore.”

– Julius Goat

 

“Why can’t we be nicer? Well, here’s the thing. We’ve tried being nicer, and it didn’t work….Fuck it. They were warned.”

– Laurie Penny

 

There’s so much insidious shit flying around that it’s tough to keep it straight – the FCC as a subsidiary of Comcast and Verizon, the Sinclair shit trying to build a new Fox out of local stations, the ongoing shenanigans around the Mueller investigation, the continued horseshit of gun worship, the constant postmodern meat grinder, the appointment of Fascist Captain Kangaroo to the NSA and the mutilation of a half-century of North Korea policy to no good end, the NFL’s performative jingoism, Elon Musk’s entire life, the ongoing madness of Silly Con Valley, the continuing impact of the GOP’s quarter-century of abject surrender to racism and conspiracy theory, and now actual concentration camps for children –

There’s no cleaning this up. Things are going to slip through the cracks, and there’s so much to remediate that it’s going to take half of forever to do it even if you don’t get active pushback forever from the GOP like Obama got. We already know the Trumpshakers will never acknowledge a Democrat as a valid President – Clinton and Obama are proof of that – and we already know the GOP is willing to break every norm of American politics to hold the line on behalf of racists and fascists, whether it’s the Clinton investigations and impeachment or the scorched earth for 8 years under Obama or the filibuster record and appointments held open forever.

The reason I keep thinking about emigrating is because I’m not going to live long enough to see the Confederate virus purged from the American bloodstream. Every move they make is further to the right – from the Bushes to anti-Obama-ism to Trump, from Limbaugh to Beck to White Power Barbie and Heart Attack Jones, the insanity only gets worse. And yet, the right continues to ride it out for—what? The prospect they can make time run backward? The possibility of locking everyone born after Jim Crow out of the political process somehow? The notion that if they just stall long enough, they can live forever?

I mean, an abbreviated list of things that would have to pass – and not be overturned as soon as the Democrats lose 60 seats in the Senate or the White House – in order to remediate just some of what’s gone wrong:

* Actual oversight of the police, federal and otherwise, and probably just dissolve ICE outright and return DHS agencies to their original 2001 departments

* Statutory net neutrality with meaningful enforcement so you get a choice of broadband providers

* A doctrine of antitrust and “monopoly” that isn’t just based around “it’ll be cheaper for consumers” (spoiler: it almost certainly won’t)

* Restoration of the Voting Rights Act with actual federal standards and enforcement of same

* An end to mandatory arbitration and signing away your rights just to be able to do business with a corporation

* An end to “carried interest” and the other things that let the 0.1% get away with a pittance in taxes while you can get caught on AMT just by owning a house in California and filing jointly

* Some kind of superficial minimal effort to prevent every limp dick redneck owning more firepower than a Marine platoon

* Something that will put a cork in Facebook and its peers to make it harder for them to be used as tools of electoral manipulation

 

Basically, a return to the state of the law six months into the Bush 43 administration. This isn’t some kind of wild liberal fever dream, this is how life was for most of the 1990s under a Democrat who was to the right of any of his own-party predecessors going back to — Wilson? Maybe? Never forget that Obama’s health care plan – what finally passed – was the Republican plan fourteen years earlier and had already been implemented by a Republican in Massachusetts.

And yet, we have a political system that provides one actionable moment to affect the incumbent government every two years. There’s no vote of confidence, there’s no snap election, there’s no get-out-of-botch-free card. Frustrating as it is, you have to pace your outrage, because we haven’t yet had a way of effecting meaningful change and won’t until November. The crazy party has the White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. All you get in that minority is the filibuster, for as long as the majority remains willing not to blow it up. And even if any of that does change in November, remember that no President has ever actually been voted out via the impeachment process, and even if this one is, all you get is a holy roller freak in his place along with a party and a media that will proclaim the job is done and normal service is restored and why you bringing up old shit.

All you have is containment, and waiting for them all to die. So if you’re never going to get rid of Trumpism in my lifetime – and you aren’t –  I’d love to be somewhere that has less cultural poison, less of a wealth gap, while I still have health enough to enjoy it. If I look up ten years from now and we’re living in Galway somewhere, that’s a far better scenario than where I expect to be in America in 2028. Even in California. Assuming some rich asshole hasn’t bought his way into splitting up the state by then. Of which.

First there’s the sick sensation that creeps out of your stomach and crawls through your entire body as you realize they’re leading you into the room with the dim lighting and the soft chairs, the one unlike every other waiting room in the hospital, the only one that has a box of Kleenex on every table. This is the room where they bring you when they’re going to sentence your loved one to death, when they’ve run out of options, when you’ve reached the end of the line. The Grim Reaper is undefeated, and the game clock is about to hit 00:00 for the last time.

Then you’re overwhelmed by the enormity of it. Because there’s no getting over it. There’s no getting around it. Death has come for your loved one, and that’s all there is to it. Maybe you’re in a position to say your good-byes, maybe you aren’t, maybe you’ll never know if they even heard you. Maybe all you have to go on for the rest of your life is what looks like a tear forming in the corner of one eye after they pull out his breathing apparatus. And then they bring in some chaplain you’ve never seen to say a prayer over someone he never met in words you don’t even hear, and you grasp for something, anything to anchor you, and you have somebody call work for you so you can tell your boss that you won’t be in for a week or so, because you have to feel like you have some agency over something, anything at all.

And then it begins, the great numb conveyor belt. Funeral home. Cemetery director. Casseroles. Funeral home again. More casseroles. The church, the service, the graveside, shake hands with the pallbearers, leave so the gravediggers can bring in the backhoe to cover the hole. And then go home to stare into a different hole. You don’t know it now – and if you do, you don’t get it yet, how could you – but that hole will be there for the rest of your life, and you’re just going to have to figure out how to build a walkway around it and put up the plywood and the guardrails to keep from falling in. You can’t fill it, you can’t cover it, you wouldn’t even necessarily want to – you just need a way to safely navigate by.

The dreams start a couple weeks later. Always the same – you realize too late that he’s actually gone, and that this is a dream, and you wake up before you can say anything or ask anything or remember anything that would give you even the illusion of a few more moments. They grow fewer and further between. You find yourself an uncontrollable puddle at the strangest things, like the cellphone bill a month later that shows where you called them for their anniversary for twenty minutes. You spend the whole summer walking on a wire, barely able to push yourself through your routine. What you don’t grasp at the time is that this was a pivot point for your whole life. That having been plunged into a deep dark place, the person that eventually surfaces with your name and face won’t be the same person who went down. Won’t relate to other people the same way. Won’t want the same things out of life. Won’t be on the same path as before. This will potentially damage your relationships with other people, in ways that will not be repairable and which will linger for decades.

You’ll change your signature. You’ll change your facial hair. You’ll keep both pretty much the same from then on.

The years will go by. The first anniversary will be a scheduled day off so you don’t go to pieces in front of everyone, and you’ll find yourself in the office anyway to do a favor for one person and spend your planned mental health vacation day making sure a non-standard laptop can call into an AOL number in Budapest. Eventually you’ll think you’ve stopped dreading the approach of the day, consciously at least, but it’ll be bound up in a parade of other dates – with Mothers Day and college graduations and your parents’ anniversary and Father’s Day, always fucking Father’s Day, Dads and Grads, in what amounts to an annual six week orgy of everything in your life you’re most conflicted about being paraded right through your subconscious, every single year.

You wonder things. Would you have felt differently about having kids yourself if he’d been around? What shtick would he have come up with for your wedding? How much worse would his health issues be given another twenty years to deteriorate? Could he somehow have staved off Fox Geezer Syndrome, or would a long retirement of slow days with cable TV have eventually driven out the time spent on fishing shows and Andy Griffith reruns and made him as unpalatable as so many others? What would he have made of Nick Saban, of Barack Obama, of Donald Trump, of Roy Moore? Of hybrid cars and iPhones and Facebook and Railroad Park, of a world unrecognizable from 1998?

Would he have been proud, and would that still even matter to me?

It says something about the world we live in now, in 2018, that so many of those instances of “I’ll never know” have been replaced with “at least I’ll never have to know”. It also says something that back in November of 2016, I felt exactly the same shock and pain all over again, right through the grieving process and disorientation and surfacing as a different person with different priorities and different goals. In both cases, it was the same thing: your world has changed and you can never go back to how it was before, and now you just have to learn how to walk forward again.

If you’re anything like me, though, you’ll dread every “new normal” that ever comes along. Forever.

(OBVIOUSLY THIS POST IS MADE OUT OF SPOILERS)

 

First things first: there was no way this movie wasn’t going to be a huge hit. It’s almost literally an all-star lineup of acting talent, given that it’s got at least half a dozen black actors you’ve heard of right off the jump and some more you’ll be hearing about for years to come (take a bow, Letitia Wright) AND that it was directed by Ryan Coogler, who might be the 21st century Orson Welles at this point. (Fruitvale Station, Creed and now a Marvel blockbuster that’s going to crack $2 billion worldwide? Are you serious?) Even the Tolkien white guys, Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis, are proven rock stars of genre media. And of course there’s the Marvel-Disney vault to pay for the whole thing. This wasn’t the little movie that could, this was the cinematic version of Coogler’s beloved Golden State Warriors. We’re gonna run Curry and Thompson and Green out there and then add Durant and then come and get it.

No, this movie worked because it was real and it had depth and it hit a bunch of different levels and hard questions. What do we owe to the rest of the world? What do we owe to our less fortunate brothers and sisters? What do we owe them at risk to our own lives, our own safety and security? What do we do when the sins of the past step backward out of the fourth dimension and ram a blade through our shoulder? All tough and profound things to think about, none of them with clear and obvious answers.

But the one that jumped out to me is this: this movie is the most valid artistic commentary yet on the Electoral College and the election of Donald Trump.

Think about it. Wakanda is a modern 21st century country under the veil, with unbelievable technology and prosperity. On what grounds does it make sense to have a system of ritual combat by which anyone can show up, get a lucky break with a spear, and suddenly be the unconditional ruler of the country? Granted, there is (presumably) a winnowing process through the various tribes where they say whether or not they want to challenge, but what sense does it make to say that if the Omega Psi Phi in the furs (don’t front, M’Baku is absolutely the Ques, I will die on this hill) can sweep the leg, they’re suddenly the most suitable king?

Well, it makes about as much sense as the Electoral College, in that: it’s an old practice, it was handed down hundreds of years ago, it tends to work out most of the time, and we’re willing to overlook the times it hasn’t and say “well that isn’t going to happen” right up until it fucking happens and now you’re up there and it’s a hell of a lot higher than your dumb ass thought it was, ain’t it? And then you have some decisions to make, because your process has just put the worst person in the world on the throne. Now: do you accept that leadership and go along with the plan? Do you break off and reject it and rebel? Do you vow your loyalty is to the throne, the office, the title, the Constitution or the country rather than to the man and try to finesse things?

And then, what happens next? What happens if you don’t manage to renew the challenge through the loophole of “not actually dead yet” and the guy stays on the throne and starts implementing his plans? At what point do you change your mind about going along to get along, or about saying you’re staying to prevent something worse? Where do you draw your line and what happens when it inevitably gets crossed? Then what happens?

Sadly, we don’t get time to delve into this in the movie or in Avengers: Infinity War. But the dynamic duo of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze have delved deep into this in their run on Black Panther in the mainstream Marvel Comics line (and some of their design and philosophical DNA is absolutely in this film) and it poses a difficult question: what does it mean the entire system that put you in a position of leadership is irreparably broken, and what happens then?

And that’s the question this country has to grapple with: what happens now? What happens after that? And after that? You can’t turn back time, you can’t undo what happened, you can’t hit the reset button or ask the rest of the world for a do-over. This is now, this is real, and we might don’t come back from this. It’s way past time to be thinking about what we do now beyond just try to hang on and survive and hope that this was a blip. Because it’s not. Because sadly, Wakanda isn’t real. Neither are Infinity Stones.

After the genesis of my last post, Mountain View finally caught up with Birmingham, Alabama by launching an electric bike share. Actually, they launched two bike share programs, one electric (Lime) and one not (ofo) on a six month pilot program. Very strict rules about not leaving them on the sidewalk (like the plague of electrified scooters currently afflicting major cities) and dire warnings about the kind of “forgiveness rather than permission” that has been the hallmark of Silly Con Valley for years now.

Mountain View had a few docks for the Bay Area Bike Share program, which have all since been removed. It was an annoying approach, simply because those bikes were only useful in a dock-to-dock pattern. Great for getting down Castro from the train station to El Camino, for instance. Less great when they put docks at light rail stations…which were connected by light rail already. So the solution, apparently, is dockless bike sharing. Which presents its own set of issues.

See, Mountain View has had an unofficial free dockless bike share for years now, courtesy of Google. The shitty single-speed bikes they have for riding around campus have a way of finding their way off campus and winding up places they probably shouldn’t be, like the end of the train platform or on their side in a parking spot or in the median of Central Expressway. And while you could grab one if you saw it lying about, and even ride it all the way to, say, Murphy Avenue in Sunnyvale behind the pub, you could pretty much rest assured it wouldn’t be there when it came time to ride back.Not a lot of utility in one way disposable transit.

But that drives home the dockless bike problem in general: you take one somewhere, you want to know you can get one back. In China, the solution was just to dump one imperial shit-ton of bikes everywhere, with the result that a lot of companies went big and went bust and left literal mountains of waste bikes behind. Not a particularly good idea. Here, the bikes are being “redistributed” by their vendors (not least because someone’s going to have to make sure those Lime electrics get charged up). Hopefully they’re taking assiduous notes of where the bikes go and where they end up at day’s end and are adjusting the pattern accordingly.

Because here’s the thing: they’re actually quite handy, especially the electrics. If I’m willing to cope with either the problem of two solid upslopes with only a mild electric assist (or alternately take a chance on a surface expressway), I can easily bike home from downtown for only a couple of bucks. If it were possible to take one of these to the next town over, I would gladly go one-way to the pub and catch a Lyft back. And the thing is…the electric bike is just so damn effortless. To the point where I’m looking at one from a UK manufacturer that looks almost maintenance free, belt drive, no gears to mess with, just get on and go, for £1000, and wondering how to get it back here.

Of course, at the same time, Mountain View is considering changing their sidewalk rules downtown. Which is asinine. If it wasn’t safe to put bicycles on the sidewalk before, how is it safe to do it now and throw skateboards and electric unicycle dickwheels and God knows what else out there? At present, there are spaces for cars and pedestrians, and lightly electrified vehicles are in a sour spot where they won’t do well in either space. And God forbid you put them in the bike lane…

Hold up.

Downtown Mountain View is basically unnavigable by car from lunchtime on anymore. Parking is already a disaster, traffic is a mess, it’s hardly worth the effort. Why anyone thinks building office space there is a good idea is beyond me, but they keep doing it. So here’s the answer: take all the street side parking on Castro street and turn it into a physically separated lane for bicycles and electric hipster things. You want to park, go in one of the lots or decks, but Castro is gonna completely separate motor vehicles and pedestrians and everything that’s neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. And to be honest, that’s going to become even more of a problem when the crossing at Central closes for good with the long-overdue remodel of the third busiest train station on the Caltrain line.

And at that point, you’ve made downtown a much easier place to be. You don’t have to keep your head on a swivel on the sidewalk because some techie  who thinks he’s Lance Armstrong or Marty McFly has somewhere to be. You don’t have to worry about getting clotheslined off your Lime bike by a parked car. You don’t have to worry that the asshole on his hoverboard is going to stray in front of your car because he can’t take his eyes off his phone. Easy peasy. And you’ve made it much easier to choose a Lime or an ofo instead of a car for just popping downtown for dinner or a pint or to restock at Ava’s or Jane’s.

And ultimately, that’s kind of a thing. If you have reliable access to reliable electric bikes point-to-point, you never have to worry about wrestling your own bike onto transit (and using up space that could be earning ticket revenue). If the light rail runs every fifteen minutes or more, you never have to cut things short and time your outings to make sure you won’t be stood around the platform in the dark for twenty minutes. I basically never needed a car for the last four years I lived in Arlington, Virginia – because the job and the bar and the mall were all on the train, and the train and the other mall and the grocery store and two drugstores and a movie theater were all walkable distance. If you want to make a place walkable and bike able and reduce the traffic, you have to reduce the need for traffic. Dense housing without dense everything else is 180 degrees the wrong direction.

We’ll see how long it takes the geeeeeeniuses of Silly Con Valley to figure that one out.

My whole life, I had the feeling that Birmingham was specially cursed to die for the sins of the South. Atlanta got a free pass because they were “too busy to hate” – not too Christian, not too decent, not too kind, but just didn’t have the time. And for that, Atlanta got the pro sports and the subway and the airport and the Southeastern headquarters of everything. Meanwhile New Orleans got to be New Orleans. Florida turned from a swamp into Miami and Orlando and Disney World and South Beach and god, even Jacksonville got an NFL team. Memphis had the blues and got the NBA and turned into the Oakland of the South, culturally. And then there’s Nashville.

It’s impossible to dispute that pretty much anything about the South that’s actually good or cool or desirable were either created by, perfected by or inextricably bound up in the African-American experience. Barbecue and grits and greens. Gospel music, blues, rock and roll, Dirty South hip-hop. Family reunions and small-town familiarity and half or more of the players that make college football any good. So start with that. Then consider that Nashville didn’t have a population of color on par with other Southern cities, so didn’t have nearly as much Civil Rights drama as other places (not to deny Z. Alexander Looby and Diane Nash and James Lawson and Perry Wallace their rightful place in the constellation of the righteous). But beyond that, Nashville was always a thing apart – Redneck Hollywood, the Protestant Vatican, the origin point for the white South’s Saturday nights and Sunday mornings alike.

When I went back to Birmingham in 2012, or 2013, or 2015, I would look around the coffee shops and tapas restaurants and craft beer bars and Railroad Park and ask myself where are the black people. And as a rule, they were there. Maybe not in proportionate numbers, but coming from Silicon Valley, where you can’t remember the last time you saw two African-Americans, it was enough to be reassuring. Now before I make my point: I do not believe Nashville has done this deliberately, any more than I think Taylor Swift actually tried to cultivate an image as an Aryan princess. But sometimes through no conscious fault of your own you get tangled up in stuff that you weren’t expecting. And I feel like Nashville – with its endless bro-country patriotism and Insta-fueled murals and bach-and-brunch food scene – has accidentally fallen into being Red America’s new Baptist Vegas. All the excitement of a glamorous getaway party town without the hassle and inconvenience of people who aren’t Just Like You.

It’s not purely my imagination. Jefferson County, Alabama (which includes Birmingham and many of its white-flight suburbs) is 42% African-American. Metro Nashville (which is to say, the Nashville-Davisdon County hybrid entity that has existed since 1963) is 28% African-American. Hell, at the time of the merger in 1963, it was under 20%. This is in no way meant to imply deliberate action by Nashville or pin the blame on them. Honest, it isn’t. Nashville felt like home to me on day one in a way that Alabama never did, that DC didn’t, that even NorCal didn’t. But I suspect that Nashville has inadvertently become a desirable destination for a certain demographic in a way that, say, Birmingham is not – and could not be.

And maybe that’s the thing that keeps me hanging onto that Barons jersey and buying the new hat and clinging to a 205 Ruben Studdard jersey and a 205 prepaid cellphone number. Because there is a Birmingham in there that I would claim, that I want to claim. Fred Shuttlesworth and AG Gaston and Frank Stitt and Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires. The Tired Texan and Rickwood Field and Good People Brewing and Railroad Park. City Stages and Celestial Realm and Dave’s Pub. Five Points and Pepper Place and the Botanical Gardens, McNolia’s and Charlemagne Records and Special Dogs and Legion Field and Grapico and Buffalo Rock. Willie Mays and Jerry Wolak and Carson Fulmer and Jerome Bechard and the GAS Line and the UAB Blazers (and a certain two-time NAIA champion, once upon a time). Dr. James Andrews and the Jimmie Hale Mission and Yeilding Chapel and 16th Street Baptist Church. The Alabama Theater and the McWane Center and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Negro Southern League Museum.

But hovering over all of that is Alabama. Bull Connor and George Wallace and Selma and four little girls dead. A state that went 2-1 for Trump and elected a holy-roller publicity hound and likely statutory rapist to the the state Supreme Court twice and almost put him in the US Senate. Paul Finebaum and Harvey Updyke and SEC headquarters. Gardendale First Baptist and Scott Beason and “Go To Church Or The Devil Will Get You.” The Cradle of the Confederacy. The Heart of Dixie. The most crimson of red states.

Austin gets a free pass for being Texas, whether it deserves it or not. Nashville is getting toward a free pass for being Tennessee, for better or worse. I don’t know that Birmingham will ever get a pass for being Alabama. I don’t know why it shouldn’t; most everyone who tries to keep it Alabama has already fled to Hoover or Trussville or Gardendale. You can get better local craft beer or electric bike sharing in downtown Birmingham than you can get throughout Santa Clara County in the heart of Silicon Valley. But nobody seriously thought for a hot second that Amazon would ever site its second headquarters in Birmingham. Nobody is out there trumpeting Birmingham as the new “It City.” Even as mild an appellation as “Redneck Portland” is probably more likely to get turned to Nashville or Chattanooga.

And yet…the problem with moving away is you don’t get to see things shift, you only perceive the change as a sudden slam from what was to what is now. And I left for good after 1994 – back only at summers, then only at holidays, then not at all. So even if I was born there, even if I went to school there, even if I was stuck almost entirely in its orbit for twenty-two years – I couldn’t claim a hand in its revival even if I wanted to. My school isn’t there any more. I don’t have any college friends. The relations are tenuous at best.  Sure, now they have stuff just as good as we have here, but I’m already here.

Maybe the facts on the ground are different. Maybe the city of Birmingham really is going blue-bubble instead of just tiny bits here and there. As long as my mother is alive or Trump is President, though, I don’t think I’ll ever be there long enough to find out for myself. Which is a shame. It would be nice to have a past before 1996 or so. Of which.