Author: Stagger Lee

It was about halfway through undergrad that I formulated the notion of “the black cloud.” I don’t know if it was related to weather – the cold, humid, rainy winter of the Deep South might have lent itself to that – and I certainly didn’t have the toolbox to characterize what I now recognize was a gigantic banner hung out to say “DEPRESSION HERE”. All I knew is that there was something in the very air and earth of the place that reverberated with a constant refrain of “this place is not for the likes of you.”

That, ultimately, was the difference between my struggles at National Geographic and the late struggles around Silly Con Valley. Make no mistake: NGS had some really rough stretches, and I did rage-quit more than once (only to turn up a day or two later and resume as if nothing had happened). But if DC and Northern Virginia were never the “home on day one” the way Nashville felt, they certainly never radiated “you don’t belong here” the way my undergrad did…or the way Silly Con Valley would come to after 2012. And I had my gang around me shoulder to shoulder. There were bleak times, there was grief, there were challenges and difficulties and some problems I would never get to solve, but there was never the black cloud.

But then, there was no black cloud here either. Not at first. My first eight years in NorCal varied from highly adequate to quite awesome to absolute perfection, and while the second-biggest mistake of my life did put me down a hole for a couple of years, it was still a work problem and a worry over my future rather than the kind of existential crisis the black cloud implied. And I battled through the obstacles and kept going best I could. And then the black cloud returned with a vengeance sometime around late 2012, such that by the time work turned to shit three months later and stayed there, it was easy to be swamped, be overwhelmed, wonder how it was ever going to be possible to escape my job, escape the Logan’s Run atmosphere of Silly Con Valley, escape a place and a time that rejected the notion that there were, you know, other people. And I was just getting close to sorting that out and digging out…and then the election happened.

So it’s been a long time getting out from under this particular cloud. Over five years, if I’m being honest, and five years where I struggled to grow as a person. Five years of running to stand still, five years on defense, five years just trying to stay alive. But not all clouds are bad, as I learned during one of those cognitive behavioral therapy exercises where you breathe in the good color and exhale the bad one.  And I was purging all that bad orange by breathing in…gray. Fog. And visualizing myself being quiet and safe and at peace…on the cliffs above the Pacific shore. And I realized that all I want from the black cloud is to replace it with the gray one.

The gray cloud has many advantages over the black one. The gray cloud is shelter, keeping away the harsh light and prying eyes. It’s a blanket, cozy in all directions. It’s cool temperature encouraging my new favorite wardrobe with the heavy work shirt and the slubby T-shirt and the wool flannel ball cap. But it’s not just climate, it’s a mindset. A way of thinking that approves of one long Imperial pint of ale nursed all evening. Or quietly assembling the pieces of the meal kit to more-or-less cook dinner. Or to move all the social media apps off the phone and take time to just read books, and listen to podcasts, and try to learn the patience that’s required when you can’t just set the world to rights. The gray cloud rewards quiet, patience, calm…baseball instead of football, the minors instead of the majors. Empty bars, quiet pubs, nighttime walks. Early mornings before the crowds arrive. A compact phone, without work or social media apps, and a monochrome Kindle, both with ridiculous long battery life, and a mechanical watch that isn’t doing notifications or fitness tracking or asking to be charged every night.

The gray cloud reminds me of being in Ireland, or England, or some place with a long view of history and a more human scale. A pace and a perspective more suited to being mindful of the world around you, yet equally suited to leaving the world beyond your grasp safely out of reach and not letting it intrude. The sort of thing that makes me think that when I go, maybe reduce me to ashes and then scatter them somewhere on the San Mateo coast in the fog belt where it can be 56 degrees with marine layer…forever.

Wouldn’t that be something.

My wife just replaced the battery on her iPhone 6s. She got it shortly after it shipped in 2015, replacing an iPhone 5s whose camera had gotten a bit dinged up. I don’t think she cared much for the extra size, she never used the 3DTouch, and I’m sure she would have just as happily taken the iPhone SE had it existed at the time (and to this day she finds the 5-series form factor preferable for most everything except maybe movie-watching at the gym.) A combination of age and work MDM did for the existing battery, which was famously smaller than the one in its predecessor to make room for the gimmick 3D Touch technology (which I am almost certain she has never used and neither have I.)

Thing is, that phone is pushing 3 years old. But if you look at what is out there to replace it in the Apple-sphere…what is there that’s worth spending more than $29 for a battery replacement? Moving to the 7 from the 6S gets you…slightly better processor, water resistance, and no headphone jack. Hardly worth it. Okay, so spend the money and move up to the 8? That gets you…the same as the 7, plus wireless charging and a glass back, so now you have twice as much to shatter if you drop it. Okay, so move all the way to the iPhone X, and pay $1000 for…the same as the 8, plus Animoji and no TouchID so you actually have to pick up the phone and stare into it to unlock instead of just absently resting a thumb on it. And yes, AMOLED screen and a bigger battery, but is it really worth paying a thousand bucks for all that instead of twenty-nine?

And that’s the point I’m at myself: work bought the iPhone X, but if they took it back and Apple fails to replace the iPhone SE, I’m going to put a new battery in mine for $29 and ride that bomb to the ground. Apple had to make a bigger phone, because the market demanded it. But the iPhone 6s that dropped in 2015 had a 4.7″ display,  NFC payment capability, 2 GB of RAM, could listen for voice commands and shoot HD video or take double-digit-megapixel pictures – just like the original Moto X two years earlier. And since then, Apple’s “improvements” have either been the sort of gimmicks we mocked Samsung for, or else decisions that actually make the phone more difficult to work with. More glass to break, fewer useful ports, unintuitive UX modifications – and to what end? Higher margins and flat unit sales.

Apple is content to become Tesla. And that’s a problem, because the only other game in town on smartphones means letting Google have free rein to gallop through your privacy and personal data while you accept that the version of Android that came with your phone may be the newest one you ever get. But then, if the best use of your money is to replace the battery in your three-year-old iPhone instead of wasting twenty times as much on gimcracks and reduced compatibility, you may not have that many more iOS updates to look forward to either. How well do you expect iOS 12 to run on an A9 processor, given that my iPad mini 2 and its A8X struggle like hell with iOS 11?

I say all that to say this: it’s past time for Apple to decide what it wants to be. If the plan is to disappear up Jony Ive’s asshole, then go on and do it so I can figure out what plan B is.

The first time I remember seeking out actual caps was in my senior year of high school. Because you wanted to represent your future college, or at least that’s what I was thinking of at the time. I had a white cap from The Game, with their standardized circle-logo, for Vanderbilt – which got tossed to the back of the closet and replaced with the bar-style logo for my undergrad. Then, after I discovered sports, the floodgates opened. I accumulated four or five Redskins caps, at least two of which I still have. I bought a Braves hat, my first foray into fitted hats. An Alabama cap or two.

Then things really jumped off and I started buying stuff like a teal Florida Marlins hat or a red and black Atlanta Falcons hat, teams I didn’t even like. I had to have the latest Barons hat every year. I bought a 1938 Hollywood Stars cap from Ebbets Field Flannels. I finally got my mitts on an actual fitted undergrad baseball team hat and thought “this is the final hat”…until I got to Vanderbilt and hit reset. And they just piled up and up and up.

Then in my second year at Vanderbilt, I got a decent haircut for the first time. Cheri at SalonFX was able to use the scissors in such a way that people would stop me to tell me how good it looked. And that was mostly it for caps, not least because once I hit the real world and had to work for a living, the ball cap was no longer a viable item of clothing. The heat and humidity of Washington DC seven months a year was enough to keep me away from them for a long time, even as I occasionally picked up a Boston Red Sox batting-practice hat that became the de facto lid for softball or a cheap $3 replica Washington Senators cap that barely fit.

And then, like a harbinger of things to come, I bought a black-on-black Cal cap at Pier 39 in San Francisco to cover a sunburnt scalp. A couple of years later, whilst dating the inspiration for the purchase of said cap, I bought a Giants batting practice hat. And then, in 2005, when I finally gave in and chopped all my hair off, a cap suddenly went from a style choice to a functional necessity in the nine months of sun in NorCal. A year later, with the full embrace of Vanderbilt, a Vandy hat of some kind became the go-to, with occasional allowances for Cal or something to pay tribute to DC. And then…

The rise of Vanderbilt baseball meant a rise in Vanderbilt alums going to the bigs. And a rise in the amount of attention I paid to baseball. And suddenly I needed a new Giants hat. I needed an Oakland A’s hat. I needed a San Jose Giants hat. I needed to avoid orange in two of those three, and obtain black and gold where I could. And then the A’s had a retro throwback that was just a plain solid gray 5950, low profile, size 7 5/8, and I bought a box of them for future use. And then Vandy switched to a Nike Dri-Fit cap suitable for warm weather. And then it became possible to easily get a St Patricks Day themed cap, or a 4th of July themed cap. And then, and then, and then.

We joke about my wife’s accumulation of scarves, but it’s nothing compared to my hat collection starting to resemble Tony Stark’s wine cellar at the climax of Iron Man 3. There’s a Chicago White Sox BP cap, suitable for hot weather, a salute to Carson Fulmer and Barack Obama and thirty-plus years of Barons who went on to the bigs. There’s a gray Yankees cap, for Sonny Gray’s inevitable rise to glory in New York. There’s a Brooklyn Dodgers cap, because the farm system is chockablock with Vandy boys and there’s the legacy of Jackie Robinson but I’ll be damned if I put an LA on my dome. There’s a Boston Red Sox BP hat, both as a salute to David Price and a memento of those days in the late 90s when I had a shelf full of books about the Sox and identified with the hard-luck tradition. And also because Vanderbilt baseball is Fenway South, from the Green Monster in left to “I’m Shipping Up To Boston” and “Sweet Caroline” during the same and a Yaz patrolling the outfield.

There’s my 1960 Vanderbilt cap by Ebbets Field, too warm for summer but the final triumphant Vanderbilt hat for good. There are Irish and American-flag Giants caps, and a red-white-and-blue Barons cap against the day I want to be from Birmingham again, and there are so many Vanderbilt caps I can’t keep them straight. There are at least a couple boxes worth of caps with sentimental value that I’m unlikely ever to wear but will never get rid of, like the Tired Texan BBQ gimme cap or the one from my dad’s old hunting club or the 2014 College World Series hat or the 2012 SEC Champions hat or…

I think it’s starting to become apparent that in addition to the horses-for-courses hat for every occasion, the drive for the One True Hat is of a piece with my eternal quest for identity. Magnum had the Tigers cap. Indy had the brown fedora. The Bear, of course, had the houndstooth. I think the parade of hats is a trail of breadcrumbs toward being content with who I am and needing a signifier that yeah, I arrived, I made it. 

It’s good to hope.

I never cared for Captain America. Ever. I was always an X-Men guy, not an Avengers guy, and I was as surprised as anyone else when Marvel Studios spun a world-beater out of the latter after selling off the film rights to the former. Even among the Avengers, I was definitely more in the Iron Man camp than anything else (it was 1985, I figured I’d have my own armor within thirty years, right?) but Captain America was a big red white and blue Boy Scout who seemed like the most likely cop/narc/whatever to a teenage mind that identified far more with mutants than the government’s sanctioned superhero team.

The MCU portrayal softened that a lot, to be honest. I wrote about how seeing Cap starting his life over in DC as a man out of time rang true to my own experience. I appreciate the difficulty that comes with seeing things crumble under you and finding out that people – and employers – are not what you thought they were, or worse. I get it. I’ll buy it.

And then along comes Civil War. In which Steve Rogers somehow manages to take the eulogy for Peggy Carter – in fact let me just block-quote the whole thing, because this is what made me snap:

I asked her once how she managed to master diplomacy and espionage at a time when no one wanted to see a woman succeed at either. And she said, “Compromise where you can. Where you can’t, don’t. Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right. Even if the whole world is telling you to move, it is your duty to plant yourself like a tree, look them in the eye, and say, ‘No, *you* move’.”

So…what Steve Rogers manages to do is take a riff on how tough it was to be a pioneering woman in a male-dominated field and fight for your own worth, and turn it into “I’m going to do what I want to, in the face of opposition from my friends, my teammates, and the government and country I was pledged to defend, and instead I’m going to substitute my own judgement for the law and my obligations as an Avenger.”

What. A. Dick.

Seriously, Tony Stark has some pretty major personality flaws, but he’s seen the results of his arrogance, and paid the price, and realized that there have to be controls and checks on what he and his fellows do. He’s reacted out of a place of fear and trauma, and paid the price for doing so, and been humbled as a result. It’s a reckoning that should be coming for Steve Rogers, but I don’t know if it’s going to. I don’t know how much Captain America is meant to be an allegory for the country as a whole, but damned if they didn’t nail just exactly that. And now, with the fate of the universe hanging in the balance, it might be time for Steve to take a seat and let someone else do the heavy decision-making for a minute. Because I don’t trust him at all to think of anyone but himself.

Right now? Giant purple strength coach threatening the world? Put me on Team Tony.

Now…let’s see where it goes.

Proving once again that their messaging apps are the Silly Con Valley equivalent of the Spinal Tap drummer, Google last week announced their plan for something called “Chat” – which basically means unifying the competing standards for Rich Communication Services (RCS) around a single profile and getting carriers to adopt this. So instead of backing a specific app, Google’s plan is to take a ten-year-old standard and try to get carriers to actually standardize on it and adopt it and then just support that in Android rather than trying to compete with the message solutions that are out there.

In theory this is not a bad idea. RCS is supposed to be a clean-and-clear standard for the sort of things that messaging has evolved into since SMS took over the world outside the US. It’s a data service like MMS, not carried on the control channels of the GSM implementation, but since all cellular service is basically just data now that’s less objectionable than it might have been. RCS is meant to incorporate standardized support for file sharing, video calling, group chat, presence and location info – all the stuff that you expect now from a mobile messaging app like WhatsApp, only you could (theoretically) use any manner of application to communicate using RCS.

But.

Every major company has at least one white whale that it chases forever with no success. With Microsoft, it was digital music. With Google, it’s social media. With Facebook, it’s mobile, although Zuckface finally learned his lesson and just bought companies that did mobile better than he did. It’s not coincidence that I use both Instagram and WhatsApp, despite their Facebook ownership, because each was independently developed to do what they do and do it well. Instagram – assuming you’re not a FOMO-crippled twentysomething measuring yourself against a Kardashian – is far less obnoxious and awful than Twitter or Facebook. WhatsApp, meanwhile, delivered what RCS promised: a data-based featureful chat standard that works across platforms and national borders alike. If I want to talk to someone in, say, Norway or Kazakhstan or Australia, and they’re on an Android phone, WhatsApp is the only real solution. And not least because everyone on those countries is already on WhatsApp. America didn’t go in big on WhatsApp because the iPhone’s own implementation – iMessage providing multimedia and read receipts and extended services between iPhones and SMS/MMS for everything else – made additional apps superfluous for most users. 

It’s also encrypted end-to-end. The one huge red flag that’s missing from the RCS spec is encryption. In 2018, that’s a massive hole in the spec. Five years ago, when RCS was being branded as Joyn and just starting to roll out in parts of Europe and South America, that might have been less of a big deal. But now that Signal is the gold standard for consumer secure messaging, and now that WhatsApp has become the dominant presence as a cross-platform solution using Signal’s encryption, it’s hard to make the case for an open standard that has no encryption offering of its own and no obvious way to piggyback one on there.

But then, just letting WhatsApp be the answer for everyone isn’t a big help either. Yes, it’s featureful and cross-platform and encrypted and used everywhere in the world except China (of which more later, probably), but it’s also a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of Facebook, the world’s most untrustworthy tech company. They were doing pretty good and actually charging money for their service, a slick $1 a year, but now they apparently have no clear plan to monetize…although you know Facebook isn’t going to let that lie. 

So what happens? Now we have an open standard – albeit one being driven heavily by a single company trying to patch its one big flaw – but missing the thing that makes it most reliable. But having an standard-based approach not controlled by a single company – even if it’s Apple or OpenWhisper – is far more desirable. But encryption is indispensable in 2018.

If ifs and buts were bros with nuts we’d all be running vasectomy clinics.

Speaking of things kept safe in the groin region, this is where I reluctantly admit that while the iPhone X has been mostly successful, and capable of displacing most every other device, it’s still just too unwieldy to use without both hands. Which is annoying. Until the iPhone 6 was foisted on me in 2014 to replace a thoroughly-compromised Verizon-spec iPhone 5 (never ever get a mobile phone from Verizon, the end), mobile phones meant a one-handed device, even my bulky Nokia 6620 or SonyEricsson P800. But the iPhone 6 was just a hair too big, which is why I raced to the SE as soon as I could and never looked back. A one-handed phone means you don’t need the Apple Watch for a remote control; it’s small enough that you can pull it out for ApplePay and notifications and such. 

And now my attempts to wish an iPhone SE2 into existence seem to be coalescing – right now, today, the Great Mentioner seems to think the iPhone 7 chipset (complete with no headphone jack) will find its way into the body of the SE. Same camera, same TouchID, same 4-inch screen. Maybe more waterproof. Maybe (MAYBE) wireless charging. Almost certainly a larger battery. Almost certainly no FaceID or 3DTouch or Animoji. The battery life from the 6S to the 7 was about the same, so not expecting any great improvement there, but the SE had fabulous battery as is. A price point a little higher is being kicked around – maybe $500 or so, maybe by Memorial Day sometime.

And I think I would go for it, probably trading in my existing SE for credit and just eating the rest. Warranty refreshed, probable lifespan of updates refreshed – it’s all about the promise of needing a one-handed travel-ready phone able to go off to London or Bangkok or Geneva at the drop of a hat, a phone that needs to have WhatsApp and Signal enabled and work with Oyster card readers as readily as the touchless payment terminal at Boots. It’s another artifact of the life I aspire to have, someday, when there’s actual retirement and ready money. Which makes it a figment of my imagination, obviously…but it’s a figment I can actually purchase and pull into the real world, like my Ricksons or the Ebbets Field cap.

So…I’m gonna.

So I spent the better part of an afternoon working on the timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Amazingly, almost everything fits on a relative scale and is pretty easy to figure out, but connecting it to an actual chronological date is a tougher lift. 

More or less, it looks like this, where variable X is the year in which Avengers takes place: 

So here’s the thing: 

1) Despite when it came out, Doctor Strange has to take place fairly early on. For one thing, Stephen Strange is mentioned as a person of interest by Jasper Sitwell in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and one arrogant neurosurgeon with nothing else interesting about him probably wouldn’t rise to that level. For another, it defies logic that he could go from wrecking his car to Sorcerer Supreme in a year. My theory: the “powered armor accident” mentioned on speakerphone toward the beginning of the movie is the guy who wrenched himself (but survived!) in the video shown during the Congressional hearing in Iron Man 2.

So Zuckbot 3000 has gone before Congress to attempt to impersonate a human being, and after two days of testimony it’s hard to shake the impression that some kind of regulation is coming sooner or later, if nothing else to ape the EU’s new requirements. Good, and long overdue. I’m still trying to think of a good reason to hang onto my barely-used Facebook account other than the fact that it’s probably the only means of contacting people from high school or the NGS days. I went nuts locking it down back in 2011, and that looks like a good move in retrospect.

People are talking about paying for an ad-free version of Facebook, which I don’t see happening for one simple reason: that would impede growth. Free shit propagates much more quickly than paid versions, and attempting to pay for the use of a social network – whether it be app.net or micro.blog – isn’t a valuable option when everything depends on how big that Monthly Average Users delta is. This was at the heart of Facebook’s original sin – offering a walled garden in exchange for your real identity, and then tearing down the walls to monetize it at the first opportunity.

But then, part of the problem is just scale itself. Take Ireland, for instance, which was a lovely country that I would go back to in a heartbeat…and where there were only two towns bigger than Mountain View. Or the San Jose Giants, the Advanced-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants, with their WPA-era park that seats a few thousand and discounts beer by half when the Beer Batter strikes out. Or any cozy alley dive bar anywhere.

Or consider representative democracy, where we have 435 Congresscritters in the House. (Never mind the Senate, the least representative body in the Western world, and I include the House of Lords in that metric.) At current population, every member of the House represents roughly 800,000 people. Up from 565,000 when I was younger, and the staff hasn’t grown to match. Full time staff for a Congressperson is 14 (up from 9) plus four part-timers. To update PJ O’Rourke, you’d think a company with 800,000 customers would have more than fifteen full time employees. And that 435 number was fixed at a time when the US population was just over 92 million, so every notional representative has quadrupled his or her area served.

Scale.

The problem that most social media options use – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – is that eventually the stream is too big to keep up with, so they start using algorithmic methods to show you what you need to see instead of just giving you the firehose in order. Because of course the stream will be too big to keep up with, because you have to add everyone. It’s not just friends, it’s friends of friends, or sports teams, or beer brands, or things your friends choose to repost, or eventually just things your friends liked. And then they decide what you should see “in case you missed it”.

There was a time when there were horses for courses. Twitter was basically a blast group text. Instagram was a mobile photography solution designed to make the best of the shitty cameras on early smartphones. Facebook was a cleaner version of MySpace or Friendster, which themselves were basically blogging solutions with nothing but a profile page. And Twitter added faves and retweets, and Facebook added the News Feed, and Instagram got bought by Facebook and somehow managed to avoid some of the stupidest modifications while being repurposed into a part-time Snapchat ripoff, and we got to where we are now. Every couple of years someone tries to roll out Path, or Ello, or Diaspora, or Peach, or whatever that thing was last month that was basically a Russian-flavored Zack Snyder promo, but nothing ever takes. Because we’ve got Facebook and Twitter and Insta already, and nobody wants to move to another service when everybody’s already on one.

And the thing is, Facebook grasped this, and then went out and bought the next thing. Which is why they have Instagram and WhatsApp now. Any sane solution to getting Facebook under control would force them to divest those two apps – engineering, advertising, they don’t have to be sold off but they have to be firewalled as if they were. Ideally, though, the Facebook fix involves portability of data and the ability to federate it. The web wasn’t a single company’s product. Neither was email. They were a set of standards that could be implemented in interoperable fashion. I’ve ranted about this before, and now it seems more obvious than ever: you can’t let your data be dependent on a single company, whether it’s Facebook or Google or Hooli or whatever comes next. No regulations meant unlimited consolidation meant imperatives to drive growth meant base emotional manipulation meant “we accidentally the election.”

So maybe that’s the solution. The urgency to grow, the need to achieve scale at any cost, has driven most of the bad behavior at Facebook and elsewhere. Google might have become the dominant email provider, but it doesn’t stop you using Hotmail or Yahoo or iCloud or your ISP’s service or your brother-in-law’s secure IMAP server. Nothing prevents you popping up a website or a blog on any number of free services which anyone with a web browser or RSS reader is free to access, to syndicate into a feed. Microblogging options like Tumblr or Typepad Micro can be thrown into Feedbin or Feedly. There are ways to do this by separating publishing tools and reading tools and hosting service. We did it for years, if not decades. We can do it again. We should do it again.

Too big to fail? Facebook might be too big to let live.

Maybe it would have been different if I’d left sooner. Maybe it would have been different if my dad hadn’t died. Maybe it would have been different if I had gone away and gotten to see what the world had to offer from a position of strength, and then come back to see high school friends and indulge in a city slowly growing into modernity. 

But the chain of events was wrong. I stayed for college, the biggest mistake of my life. When I left, I was still anchored to the bad stuff in Birmingham, and when my world fell apart, I started over from zero in a faraway place, and was rebuilt as a different person. And Birmingham wasn’t home for him, could never be home for him.  As it stands, half my heart is on the Orange Line Metro at 9 AM Monday morning, and the other half is watching the sun set on San Gregorio beach from the shoulder of Highway 1. Alabama doesn’t enter into it.

And yet.

Set me down on I-65, with puffy white clouds in the sky, somewhere between Montgomery and Huntsville…and I feel something. I don’t know how to describe it. It feels familiar, like something from another life, maybe the set of a movie I saw once, like another world that a previous incarnation lived in. Not deja vu exactly, because I know I’ve been there before, but it’s not really what I remember. I think the apt comparison is to Vanderbilt: I’m a fan and a supporter, but everyone concerned is completely different than when I was there and I haven’t had any contact since graduation with the people who were there when I was. Similarly, there are a handful of people in and around Birmingham who might remember me from way back when, but my family is a mess and what friends I had are scattered. And what makes Birmingham attractive now? Railroad Park, the new Barons stadium, half a dozen local breweries and a thriving foodie scene and Revelator Coffee and electric bike share?

I mean, think about it…that which makes someplace the “it city” is usually a smear of some kind of gritty authenticity on which is suddenly plopped a melange of craft beer, bike sharing, artisan bakeries, Instagram-friendly scenery (ALL THE MURALS), that sort of thing. And the “authentic” things of the place slowly get overrun by their commercialized imitators. Saw’s instead of the Tired Texan. Hattie B’s instead of Joe D’s Hot Chicken Club. Sure, there are great things to see in Birmingham, but do the list – local craft beer, like Good People or Avondale? Bike sharing? Neighborhoods with their vintage architecture and business street intact? And old theater with a Wurlitzer organ and old movies? Foodie dining? What is there in Birmingham that wasn’t already long established in Silicon Valley before the iPhone was invented? I’ll tell you: special dogs, Dreamland ribs and the Civil Rights Trail. That’s the list.

Again, there is an edit that sends me away for undergrad – not even necessarily to Vanderbilt, but maybe to Tulane or Columbia or Brown or Stanford or UCSD – in which I don’t even go to grad school, because I don’t need to launder my undergrad experience. And because I got out of Birmingham for college, I can go back home, instead of already being “home” as the black cloud grinds it into a fine misery. It’s tough to go back when most all the things that make it worth going back to are things you already had in 2006 where you live now.

I just don’t have the draw. I can make my own barbecue, I can drive three miles to Popeye’s, I struggle to get good collards but they never cooked collards in my house anyway. I don’t have the sidewalk alumni crowds that turn my college sports into a religious practice. I’m the only member of the family still carried on the rolls of our ancestral church, whose doors I haven’t darkened in twenty years. I can’t stand the humidity, there’s no one around that I’m legitimately close to, and you have to change planes to get there.

God bless whoever stayed in the blue dots, holding them down and trying to build for a better day. Whatever it is they found, whatever it is they have there, is something I just don’t have and maybe never did. And if that were ever going to happen, it would have happened by age 46.

March 1985. I put my birthday money into two purchases: a paperback copy of The Hobbit (so I could stop taking the one from the school library over and over) and TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game. The original yellow-box edition. I had only really gotten into comic books in any meaningful way the year before, as Star Wars faded from view after the third movie (with no eminent prospect of more), and I was already well-versed in Dungeons & Dragons and Star Frontiers, so to have a full-on role-playing game for Marvel stuff? Count me in.

The really attractive thing about it was that it offered a much more flexible mechanic than the other RPGs. You could actually run a more D&D-style setting, or a more Star Frontiers-type setting, because it’s comic books – so you have to have all the elements of fantasy and sci-fi and magic and all sorts of stuff. It was more than a game, it was an organizational framework for my own creative impulses. And it let me create my own characters – naturally, the most horrifyingly awful Mary Sue creations imaginable, as befits a frustrated 13 year old gifted kid – and actually write about them. Badly, and usually more a matter of assembling things cribbed wholesale from that month’s comics or TV reruns or what have you, but you have to start somewhere.

Thing is, though, I became trapped by the system. I had to make things work in the framework of the rules, or find some loophole that would let me bend the rules, because I couldn’t just go off and make up whatever I wanted. It had to make sense, it had to fit the system, and I think buried deep in there is the fullest expression of my Enneagram 6-ness, because I had a lot more flexibility of imagination when I wanted the game and was privy to some of how it worked but hadn’t actually purchased it yet.

In retrospect, I think that may be how I gravitated to sports so readily after high school. Sports have rules, and while their interpretation may be cause to cast aspersion on a ref’s visual acuity and carnal knowledge of sheep, they are pretty reliable – a touchdown is always six points, a free throw is always one, and a ball that goes over the fence on the fly is always a home run. You have statistics and can pretty reliably gauge one player against another, one team against another. And while I rarely if ever actually played any of these RPGs with anyone else – I can’t think of a single gaming session with MSH that ever occurred with more than two people involved – sports were something that allowed, nay demanded a communal experience. Thus my enthusiasm for going off to college, where everyone would be attending football (except there wasn’t any) or basketball (except few people actually showed up) or baseball (except even fewer people showed up).

But back to MSH. At one point, there was a canonical reference book, the Ultimate Powers Book, which contained every single documented super-power in the Marvel Universe and how it worked in the game. And I. Wanted. It. But with no dedicated gaming store anywhere in the Birmingham area, it was impossible to find at a time when I actually had cash money in my pocket. My parents certainly weren’t going to buy it for me, not in a world where the Baptists had thrown Dungeons & Dragons into the same Satanic pig-pile as heavy metal and horror movies and feminists and all the other stuff that suddenly becameHorriBadAwful after 1980.

And the thing is, for twenty years that book haunted my dreams. One of my most common recurring dreams was that I found it somewhere and was unable to buy it, or lost it again, or couldn’t read what was in it, or some such – probably because at some unconscious level, I was thinking that somewhere there must be rules for this life that I could use to crack it if I could only get a chance to read and learn them. And that dream kept after me for literally two decades…until one day at Apple, in an idle moment surfing around in my office, I stumbled across the whole entire book online as a PDF. Which I downloaded and backed up in about six places, because it’s a rare thing that something comes back from the black hole.  And then, the next year, they released an actual live-action Iron Man movie…and you know the rest.

I don’t know what the point of all this is, aside from maybe “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood”, but thirty-three years on, it’s nice to remember that liminal moment before I cracked the box, before the rules and processes were laid down, when everything was still protean potential. As spring returns in force, it’s good to believe that sort of thing is still possible.