Author: Stagger Lee

Thirty years ago, amid the disappointment of Ray Perkins and the uncertainty of going to Bill Curry as head coach and losing twice to Auburn which clearly had the upper hand, the notion of “thirty years from now, Alabama is coming off five national championships in a decade under a coach who is even greater than Bear Bryant” would seem like the stuff of Star Trek time travel, the same My Weekly Reader-As We May Live nonsense that promised us self-driving cars and pocket computers and video phones and a potato baked in five minutes…

Well don’t I feel like a jackass.

I didn’t watch it, obviously. I kept apprised of it, but you don’t actually have to watch Alabama football these days. It is as ruthlessly efficient as a hard-eyed casino blackjack dealer, as joyless as a tidal wave, impossible to root for unless you’re a devoted glory-hound or a long-time loyalist. Alabama is the rake, they are the don’t pass line, they are the house – even if their kickers are the 00 on the roulette wheel. Just as Vanderbilt in 1994 prized my interest away for the first time, the Brigadoon era at Vanderbilt took me away for good. I could easily claim the Crimson Tide, because I suffered through the years after the Bear, through the bricks in the window and the Memphis State homecoming loss, the Jelks-Langham debacles and the Dubose-Franchione-Price-Shula parade of ineptitude (while noting that all of those coaches who made it to a regular season did turn in at least one 10-win performance…which Vanderbilt has never done). But I don’t, not really, because you don’t emotionally invest in the vacuum cleaner.

I like to think this would have been enough to keep relations up back South. Although maybe not. At least I was given the grace to lose my father a decade before the term “Fox Geezer Syndrome” passed into currency. I’m under no delusions about what would come of leaving someone at home to watch cable news all day for over two decades, especially when they already owned a couple dozen guns in Alabama. Although I like to think he would have drawn the line at a Trump or a Moore. At least I don’t have to know for sure.

Something broke in the last couple of months. I think I may have let go of the college thing and just accepted that, like Kimmy Schmidt said, you’re never going to not have been kidnapped. I’m never going to have not gone to Hilltop High or suffered the consequences and repercussions of that. It ultimately wasn’t necessary, there was a path to get everything that matters to me now without going through Mordor, but it just didn’t work out that way and there’s nothing to be done about it. Yes, there is a gaping hole in my life. It will always be there. Nothing for it but to go around and try not to keep falling in.

And if I’m honest, maybe part of it was seeing Luke Skywalker up there again at last. Older, paunchier, angry at how things didn’t work out. The kind of people pissing and moaning about how that’s not real and shouldn’t be canon have never been over 40 and had to live with a life that didn’t go the way you were promised. There is a certain enormity in giving up trying to will yourself a better past, to stop trying to squint at the dots until they become a schooner, to stop trying to make the pebbles have been worth counting.

There are a lot of things in this world that we’ll never make unhappen. The trick is what do we do about it now, knowing that it’s not going to be the same and that matters may be worse and we just have to battle through. I think the fact that I finally saw Ireland last year proved that there could still be new things, new discoveries, that there are still opportunities out there for the person I finally aged into being and may have wanted to be all along. And it gave me a frame of reference by which to gauge: can I live here like I’d want to live in Galway?

Take the bus. Take the walk. Work remotely. Have a pint. Put away the phone and read. Plan to travel. Go to Tahoe in the winter. Go to Hawaii in the winter. Make a list of the things you enjoy doing instead of a checklist of things that have to get done while you’re on leave. And when the place you live gets to be too obnoxious to live with, refuse to play the game. Sidestep it. Do your own thing instead. Of which more later.

The original sin was thinking we could buy and sell human beings. The next one was thinking we could make a deal with that sin to get ourselves a country. And when we went to war, it wasn’t to end that sin, but to fight the ones who broke the deal in the name of continuing that sin. And when the threat was past, we looked the other way while they got as close as they could to returning to that sin. And whenever they got close to the line, eventually we shook a finger when we should have brandished a stick, and brandished a stick when we should have swung it. We never stood up to correct the sin. Somebody always backslid. Somebody was always willing to make a deal with sin for their own benefit. The bill for our sin gets a little longer every day, and the day will come when we have to settle up. And it will cost. It might cost us a nation.

-Dec 18, 2012

With an engaged and educated population, the Internet could have been a useful tool of political discourse. But we don’t have that. We’ve venerated the stupid for a decade and a half, and instead, what we got was an electronic force multiplier for willful ignorance. Facts and lies on equal footing, and you’re entitled to your own reality. And an entire party went along with this because Donald Trump is an even more egregious version of what George W. Bush was meant to be: a matador with a signing pen so the GOP in Congress could loot the country for itself.

-Dec 23, 2016

Sixteen years ago, Osama bin Laden made Stupid Americans shit themselves. Then we spent every year after validating stupid. And after a wihile, Russia figured out how to exploit their fear. And Twitter and Facebook both lay back and allowed them to do it. The confluence of public stupid and technological free-for-all destroyed the 21st century before it could start. And now, because we didn’t push back on an electoral college that make the person with the most votes lose, because we didn’t push back on conspiracy theorists as “news”, because we decided the Internet was the free-speech wing of the free-speech party (whatever the fuck that means other than something to let tech bros get erect), we wound up where we are now. Comcast and Verizon have free reign to carve up Internet access like cable TV. There is no free market in broadband anymore. The budget is such a freakin’ disaster area that we don’t even know whether to pay off the property tax now so it’ll still be deductible on our federal return.

The really disturbing thing is…how do you come back from this? Elect a bunch of Democrats and then see if you can get away with impeachment, which will only put a bigger holy roller in the Oval Office and convince Ed Earl Brown that the job is done because Trump’s out? Run the table in 2020 and start trying to put things back like they were, only to get smeared by the catamites at the New York Times and take an ass-kicking in 2022? Do we have the time to wait for demographics to fix things or are we going to be too far gone by then?

So this is where I explain how you’ve disappointed me this year, America. Although it’s really been the last twenty years if we’re honest. I never want to hear “we’re better than this,” because mathematically we’ve kind of proven we aren’t.

For a couple of releases now, there’s been a problem with iOS. Either it clings to bad wifi like a Demigorgon to a peripheral character’s throat (of which more later) or it won’t connect at all, especially where an interstitial page is concerned (the pop-up pages you have to click through to connect at Starbucks, or Whole Foods, or basically any hotel, or…) – and then, iOS 11 added cellular support for areas of poor wi-fi coverage, which is meant to help, buuuuut…

I pulled my numbers from work, where my cellular service is provided gratis as one of the few perks this job can offer. And sure enough, coincident with the release of iOS 11, my cellular data usage spikes by 25% and stays spiked. It’s not a function of the device, or going out of town, or anything else I can pin down – the shift happens with iOS 11. Which couldn’t be more annoying, because it’s not like you can easily stay on an older OS without compromising your security or your ability to interact with other users at some level or another. And obviously there’s no going back once you take the plunge.

But it brings up another point. My data use jumped from 8 GB and change to 10 or 11 GB and change. Which is enormous, because once you get over the 8 GB mark, you don’t really find inexpensive prepaid solutions for mobile phone data in this country. As little as a year ago, you could still get a 5 GB prepaid plan from T-Mobile for $30 a month. US Mobile will let you pick and choose, and if I throw 300 minutes and 100 texts on top of it, I can get 5 GB of data on VZW’s network for $37 a month or 8 GB on T-Mobile’s for $44 a month. But as soon as you go past 8, forget about US Mobile or Cricket or T-Mob…you’re in the realm of “unlimited” plans and your baseline just jumped from somewhere in the $45 range to somewhere $70 and north.

And here’s the thing that’s really problematic: I don’t stream on the phone. So many people rely on Spotify or Apple Music, or constantly watch YouTube or Netflix or what have you, but I don’t. I do download a bunch of podcasts, and that’s gotten more difficult now that the Junks post them as hours rather than segments so I have to download more data to get the same content (thanks for nothing, donkeys), but that’s a development in the last week. The bigger issue is this: combine the FCC’s neutering of net neutrality with the increase in data usage across the board, and we’ve basically given AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter and everyone else free reign to squeeze the shit out of us. The baseline cost of what it costs to have a smartphone is greater than it used to be with no appreciable change in usage or consumption, and it is now free to go even higher.

Because let’s face it, there’s not a lot of competition. There are four cellular networks in this country, constantly trying to merge into three, and the MVNO dodge won’t save you any money if you can’t use it. And although phones are getting better, there’s still a lock-in where if you’re on Verizon’s network you can’t roam onto the lower-speed GSM options once LTE runs out, so (as I proved from 2012-14) if you fall off LTE you’re back to a battery-killing 1X network. Conversely, if you’re on AT&T or T-Mobile, maybe you can roam onto Verizon’s LTE, maybe you can’t (spoiler: probably not). But since this country went on multiple tracks instead of standardizing on GSM, and still sells mostly locked phones, you don’t have nearly the flexibility to move back and forth.

And here’s how it shows: when I went to Ireland, I laid down 20 Euro (at the time, about $23) and got unlimited calling for a month and 15 GB of data. Read that again. $23 for unlimited calls and 15 GB of data in Ireland vs $44 for 8 GB of data in the US via T-Mob or Cricket.  Twice the data for half the money. Go across the water to the UK and EE is offering 16 GB and unlimited texts for £30 (which today is about $40) while Three is offering 12 GB, 3000 minutes and 3000 texts for £20. Because phones are separate from service, and because all service uses the same technology, you’re actually in a competitive market and can go back and forth.

But in this country, the companies will actually argue that your cell phone is competition for your home broadband, which – unless you live somewhere with fiber – is a choice between The Baby Bell and The Cable Company if you’re lucky and one or the other if you aren’t. If you live someplace like Chattanooga, Tennessee (!!) you have cheap municipal fiber that can actually offer competition for the local duopoly, and if forced to compete they’ll bring down the price. But if they aren’t, you wind up paying ridiculous money. It wasn’t like this when the phone lines had to be free and open and you had dozens of dialup operators to choose from and the likes of Earthlink making $20 unlimited ISP service a routine thing, or when the incumbent local carrier had to open the loop to competitors and you could get DSL from other providers (like the late and dearly missed Speakeasy.net). But noooooo…now, somehow, the phone in your hand is somehow competition for the line in the wall. Maybe you want to squint at Stranger Things on a 5.5” phone screen, but most people would rather lean back and look at the big screen (without streaming it through the phone, because if one hour of HD video takes up 4 GB of data, that’s your phone reduced to dialup speed halfway through the first season).

The brutal fact of the matter is that everything that comes to your computer is just some sort of data over a dumb pipe. Bits are bits are bits.. The massacre of Net Neutrality is about allowing your cable and phone companies to slice and dice that data and charge you more for the stuff you want. It should be called the Middleman Protection Act of 2017. But then, when you let a Verizon shitpile determine what should be the policy for internet use, you should hardly be surprised that a dumb pipe company wants a nickel on everything.

OK. In the cold light of noon, let’s have a look at this thing.

There will be plenty of analysis about how this was won: enhanced turnout among Democratic voters driven by a sustained and repeatable GOTV effort fully funded by the DNC and external donors, leveraged against a compromised candidate – and there will be a case that this cannot be done again barring the nomination of yet another holy roller pervert for statewide office by the GOP. I’m here to tell you it’s wrong. Roy Moore came within the population of Gardendale of a mandatory recount. His issue positions are not materially different from any other Alabama Republican. His voters were not that dissuaded by the allegations, because they already reject any reality that doesn’t fit their views. And his voters are dying. Old white men who remember life before desegregation are sinking sand on which to build a voter base.

More to the point, contra my remarks yesterday, the fact that Doug Jones won suggests there is a path to statewide Democratic victory in Alabama. Hang Trump around the GOP’s neck, get black voters to the polls, and get young voters mobilized and active. It will take extra effort to overcome the structural obstacles Alabama has spent years if not decades placing in the path of likely Democratic voters, but we now have the existence proof that it can be done. And if you can do it once, you can do it again – for the right gubernatorial candidate in 2018, and then beyond.

But more to the point…

Last night, the fans of Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires were crossing team lines on Twitter to exult in their victory, with Auburn fans posting Rammer Jammer cheers and Tide fans gleefully showing off the toilet paper fluttering in the trees at Toomer’s Corner. Grapico and special dogs and Milo’s were invoked and great oaths were sworn about how “We Dare Defend Our Rights” now means everyone’s and all of them. And I contemplated the fact that of all the places I’ve ever lived, 13 years in California and 7 more in the NoVA suburbs of DC, the only place that ever stereotyped me as a white man from Alabama was Jefferson County, Alabama…which went 3-1 for Doug Jones last night. 

That’s not nothing. That’s a meaningful marker laid down, that what was once a tiny blue dot in Southside in a sea of red is now a burgeoning and reliable blue county driven by African-American voting power. That in addition to baseball and wi-fi and recycling and craft beer, Birmingham is developing a politics that looks like America and pushing it ever outward toward the rest of the state. And the ones who resist, the ones who fight hardest to keep things like they are, the ones who are so wedded to how it used to be that they might as well be Vol fans…they’re dying. Every day.

I still don’t see ever moving back. But being able to visit, being able to enjoy it, being able to take pride in everything from the Barons to Avondale Brewing to Top Hat BBQ to a 205 area code? This morning, there’s a path back to the light that wasn’t there yesterday. And I am grateful for everyone who trod out that path and who fights to clear it today and tomorrow and the day after that.

It raises the possibility that before I die, I could live to see the state of my birth not showing its ass to the world. That for the first time in my life, it might just extend a hand and say “y’all come home.” That there’s a path back to Birmingham that doesn’t involve looking out the bay doors of the bomber during the Second American Civil War. That who I am, what I am, could actually be part and parcel of what the city and the state and the South is. That I wouldn’t have to hang my head and make excuses and disavow a state that disavowed me…because it wouldn’t, not any more.

Wouldn’t that be something.

Well don’t I feel like a jackass.

Never been happier to feel like one. EEEEE TO THE AWWWWWW, Y’ALL.

 

…this shouldn’t be close. It shouldn’t be within screaming distance of close. Roy Moore shouldn’t be able to see Doug Jones with binoculars. This should be about a 50 point spread, and in a sane state, it would be.  Instead, it’s 50-50. Instead, we’re back to hoping that a turnout of 25% and a third of the white vote will be enough to vote in a bog-standard blue-dog Democrat, a lauded federal prosecutor about as radical as buttermilk, so that we don’t get a literal religious fanatic who believes in Christian-flavored Sharia law and has literally been thrown out of office twice since 2000 because of it.

The man is manifestly unqualified for office. He sits far outside the mainstream of conservative thought, as difficult as that is to imagine in Alabama in 2017. He is manifestly unpopular with elected Republicans who view him as a show horse and a glory hound. He is a repository for the kind of performative redneckery that leads most people in Alabama to point and howl at New York City and California for slandering their Southern culture and heritage. Listen here, hilljacks: the libel is coming from inside the house. No one is stereotyping Southerners more than the Southerners who run on those stereotypes and get votes from them.

This, too, is exactly why Democrats write off Alabama. It’s hard, and it’s harsh, and it’s unfair on the nonwhite population or those precious few Caucasians who actually want better for their state. But this should be a layup. This should be a fish, a barrel and a smoking gun. Money has poured into this race, national help has poured into this race, everything that can be done has been done. Who knows, the Democratic Socialist purity flowers may even find a way to hold their nose and bubble in for Doug. This is throwing everything that can be thrown. If it doesn’t work now? If the bastard child of Boss Hogg and Yosemite Sam as sired out of the love scene in Deliverance can win through anyway? Then tell me exactly where the percentage is in throwing money into a Senate race in Alabama ever.

Win the districts you can until the VRA lines get redrawn. Maybe pour some of this money into trying to retake the state legislature and work your way up from there. But give up on turning it blue. Retake the Congress and the White House by other means and then use the power of the federal government to do for those who deserve it despite the state’s best efforts. You know, exactly as we’ve had to do for the last fifty years, and will have to do until every white person born before 1970 lies dead in the cold red dirt.

If you can Argo the other folks, do. Rescue the ones who deserve better. But forget about the Roy Moore voters. They deserve nothing less or more than the consequences of their actions, and I have better things to do with my life. You see that sign outside my house that says Captain Save-A-Neck? You know why you don’t see that sign? Because saving necks ain’t my fucking business any more.

Dashing through the stores, people every place

Up and down the aisles, sneezing in my face (achoo!)

There’s so much to choose, there’s so much to see

Wonder if what I got you cost more’n what you got me?

 

At Christmas in 1983 it was sixth-grade choir. We learned a number of songs and then found ourselves bused here or there to perform in December, one time at Western Hills Mall before it was written out of the pantheon of “acceptable white people shopping districts” in greater Birmingham. I remember the choke of the necktie, the pinch of the dress shoes, the discovery of the heretofore-unseen Discs of Tron standalone game in the mall’s arcade afterwards. And that Jingle Bells parody was, in fact, one of the songs we actually performed. And the bus rides to rehearsals, with that parody as the most popular song while other people chimed in with ripoffs of the Toys R Us jingle or similar, and a realization that something was happening.

 

Wrap your presents nice, pretty bows that shine

Take ‘em out to mail, gonna wait in line

Fight your way back home, and if you’re like me

Maybe by the twenty-fourth you’ll get to trim the tree!

 

I wasn’t in any sort of organized choir the next year, seventh grade, but I remember doing the same thing again somehow. This time I think it was Century Plaza, wearing more or less the same getup that I had sported as Chief Elf in my playwriting debut, “The Elves Go On Strike” – a Luddite celebration of anti-automation and industrial sabotage, in Alabama in 1984. (Never say the signs weren’t there.) And the van ride back, Duran Duran blasting as the girls all mockingly sang “Boys On Film,” and me more conscious than ever of…something. The obvious answer ought to be puberty, but that wasn’t it. It was the sort of moment that appears in memoirs as “when I realized I was gay,” but that isn’t it either. Just an awareness that there was a social structure here, and that I was on the outside of it – and for the first time, I was suddenly and acutely conscious of What That Meant.

I already knew I was different. I knew I didn’t have a hell of a lot of friends. I knew I was not exactly held in high esteem by most of my peers – awe at the freakish smarts and disgust at the smart freak, but not esteem – but leaking through in those Christmas seasons was the first ever realization that this might be turn into a problem for me sooner or later. That there were other things in life than just bringing home a report card full of A’s, and I had absolutely no idea how to do them. I had to learn to interact socially with people, and I had absolutely positively no idea how.

I learned. Slowly and painfully. I figured out that I had to sometimes just stop talking, swallow the point I had planned to make and let it go. I had to find things other people were interested in, which led to a decade of sports obsession out of nowhere. It took a long, long time, and if I’m honest it probably only really started to kick in at Vanderbilt, when I was thrust into a small clique that kind of had to take me in and willingly did so, and when I had the opportunity to hone my wit and repartee in a form that demanded cleverness at 70 words per minute and 33.6 Kbps minimum.

So now I can go out to one holiday party after another, with people I barely know, and I can find a way to hold my own. Find a hook, remember a name and a fact, spin a tale out of it or pull one out of someone else. Hop from pain management to the tax and finance issues around vertically integrated cannabis production to pedestrian tours and tales of band larceny, and in a pinch there’s always the ample ineptitude of American football, college or pro alike. I learned to finesse away that I must have met you at some point previously, it’s always nice to see you and not nice to meet you just in case, and years of trivia give me something to work with…

But it’s still a chore. It’s an effort. It’s something that I had to work at and struggle with and it doesn’t come easy at all, especially as I get older and ever more introvert, and it makes me wish I’d had this skill set in 1983 or 1984 or 1989. And it makes me ever more grateful for years like 1994 or 2006, when somehow I either magically had it or magically didn’t need it, and a glorious Christmas season just happened. But sometimes you can work your way into one too. I’m pulling for it.

“It’s too damn big. In every particular, it conveys SIZE like a Texas pickup with horns in the hood. I know intellectually it’s thinner than the Moto X, but it’s definitely taller and I suspect wider, with a top bevel that really doesn’t need to be that size…”

It’s too big. The bezels are gone, but they just stretched the screen awkwardly into them. And yes, there are UI conventions to try to work around it, but the swipe-down-on-the-bottom is far less reliable or responsive than the double-tap-the-home-button was to bring the top of the screen down, and having different swipe-down-from-top is incredibly awkward, and having the keyboard scooch itself to one side or the other is problematic even if the keyboard were reliably responsive and not the dog’s breakfast it’s been for several releases now.

No, my complaints of three years ago about the iPhone 6 are even more valid for a slightly larger device. The iPhone X is just too large to be anything but a two-handed phone. In that respect, Apple has clearly capitulated to our computing future: everyone is stuck with a two-handed phone at all times and you’d better have a jacket or a purse. I don’t like it, I don’t appreciate it, but then, it wasn’t my money and I still have the iPhone SE in a pinch. So get over that. What else?

Well, iOS 11 hasn’t shook the uncomfortable sense that Apple’s QA department all died in a tragic blimp accident. While it doesn’t have the gargantuan security nightmares of its Mac counterpart, iOS 11 is downright rickety in its UI choices (I still don’t get why the control center can’t just fucking turn off the Wi-Fi if I said so) and it’s still frequently easier to just turn Wi-Fi off altogether in favor of one bar of LTE, because it clings to bad Wi-Fi like a Demigorgon to a peripheral character’s face. FaceID works most of the time, except when the phone is laying on the table and you have to pick it up to look at it to unlock it or else tap in the whole code, neither of which was necessary with TouchID.

I alluded earlier to the fact that Beleagued Apple Computer presented itself as something like Mercedes or BMW, and that by the time they became Apple Inc they had become Volkswagen, and that now they’re aiming to be Tesla. And I think this exemplifies how they have done so. This new phone finally adopts a bunch of other tech other folks had, but does it in a sleek and sexy way, with superlative integration and flashy design and an absurd price tag and if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it. Meanwhile, Nokia and Motorola are over there grinding out perfectly serviceable devices for less than half the money (hell, Nokia just dropped a bare-Android smartphone for a hundred dollars at Best Buy. It’s practically an Android burner) if you’re willing to…

That’s the real trick, isn’t it? You either give your ecosystem over to the Beast of North Bayshore, or you pay through the nose to stay with Apple. The privacy of your personal data is now a luxury good. Sure, you can still get the iPhone SE for $350 and have a phone that doesn’t make you put your coffee down to use, but for how much longer (given its innards are two generations behind current now)? And with Tim Cook over there making nice to a Chinese government that has the kind of control over the Internet the FCC would love to give Comcast and the Baby Bell Twins, you have to ask if having your personal data vivisected for profit is just The Way We Live Now.

Anyway.

The other experiment is: if the phone is so damn big and unwieldy, can it actually be used in place of a Kindle or iPad? Well, I haven’t pulled the iPad out of its case since I got the iPhone X set up, and I can’t remember the last time I drew on the Kindle. The actual Kindle app for iPhone could use an update because it can’t take advantage of the whole screen, but even the iPhone 6-equivalent is slightly larger than what was available on the Moto X, and the combination of AMOLED and white text on black screen means I can read for an hour and only burn 5% of battery with no other remediative power solutions in play. So that’s nice, for what it’s worth. Only one device to carry. The downside is, when you’re down the pub and trying to read yourself out of the world for a while, your primary phone – with all its apps, and all its notifications, and all its empty promises – is not the best tool for the job.

Of which more later.

I first heard of Kentucky Route Zero in late 2012, as its latest trailer appeared online and suggested a radical shift in the nature of the game. While it had started out as some sort of side-scroller and turned into a point-click game, the fundamental story seems to be similar. It looked haunting and magical-realist and very atmospheric, for lack of a better word.

Act One of a planned five first appeared in early 2013, just as I was hitting rock bottom at work and experiencing the kind of existential despair I hadn’t felt in years. The game turned out to be just what I sensed, and just what I needed: not really a game so much as a meandering novelistic story that the player immerses into and shepherds along. Originally, all five acts were supposed to be done in 2013, but almost five years on, we’re only up to act IV, which came out in the summer of 2016.

Kentucky Route Zero is the story of a strange and mysterious sort-of-underground road and those who travel on it. It intersects with the normal world in a fairly surreal fashion, and as you continue, you go from playing one character to several. The first trailer described them as “lost souls” and that’s as good a sense as any; they all find themselves in circumstances and happenstances that are somewhat their own fault, somewhat not their fault, somewhat nobody’s fault. Things just sort of worked out this way.

By the fourth act, the action had moved to a river, rather than the eponymous road, like some kind of dark and vaguely ominous version of Huckleberry Finn. Act IV is the only one so far to take place entirely underground, and I found it more affecting than any of the three acts preceding, because…you’re always concealed. It’s always dark. There are places and people you see and meet, things as strangely diverse as a gas station or a research center or a tiki bar, all along this river in the caves. And this hit home hard with me a year ago, as I was sick of the world around me and sick of dodging the bikeholes of Palo Alto, and I found myself using the tunnels at work to go back and forth. And they were quiet, uncrowded, maybe warmer than I really needed, but along the way you’d find a side door into a taqueria. Or a rarely used restroom. Or, surprisingly, the basement lounge of a building with an open four-story atrium that was nonetheless frosted over so the light was never direct, with a vending machine and some comfortable chairs – the perfect place to escape in solitude, if not privacy.

KRZ is art not unlike Hopper’s Nighthawks – it evokes an emotional response for me, twangs a chord that I feel sympathetically in my bones. That need for not so much light, for feeling like you’re safely stashed away under the ground or under the fog or under the night sky. That sense of solitude even if you aren’t by yourself, and that even if there are a handful of other people around, you are let to go on your own way as they go on theirs. A moment to step out of the world, to get away from the claustrophobia of the crowd and the news and the creeping distant horror, something like a smoke break from reality. It’s something I hadn’t thought about for a long time, but which in retrospect I’ve craved and sought from the time I was six years old right on through undergrad and ultimately to work last year. Sometimes, you just need that five-space and five-time, you just need the universe to let you be for a moment and not think about it.

And so, into the laptop, and a drink at the Rum Colony before a long float down the river that ends up with a meal at Sam & Ida’s, and wondering what is to become of our lost souls now. It’s been years if not decades since I could say this of a video game, but…it’s a masterpiece.

In the last six months, I’ve been intermittently listening to a podcast my wife’s cousin recommended. It’s called Expat Sandwich, in which a woman called Marty Walker interviews one American living abroad in one country or another. And two things recur as a theme, no matter whether it’s France, Japan, Berlin or Antarctica: one, everyone misses Mexican food and can’t get any where they are. And two, after a while as an expat, you still don’t feel entirely at home in your foreign country, but now you feel out of place in America too.

When I arrived on campus at Vanderbilt, it felt like home on day one. I managed to screw that up. Northern Virginia was nice, but it took some time for me to feel like I fit in (in fairness, part of that could have been down to my disappearance and regeneration after my dad died). Northern California felt incredibly different when I first moved here, and once the chaos settled down, I got comfortable – 2006 might still be the best stem-to-stern calendar year of my life – but the recurring bouts with the black cloud have made it incredibly difficult not to feel out of place, made worse by the deterioration of Silly Con Valley over the last five years.

And then I heard this podcast, and something clicked. I’ve lived in my current address for longer than I’ve lived in any one place in my life since graduating high school. But from birth to age 22? I didn’t feel any less out of place than I do now. In fact, in some ways, it was worse. At least in California, I’ve had the experience for a couple of years of sort of feeling like I fit in before Silly Con Valley turned into 1986 Wall Street. I never fit in when I lived in Alabama, aside from a roughly two year stretch in high school (and only at high school).

So if I’ve always felt out of place…why?

“To betray, you must first belong. I never belonged.”
-Kim Philby

There is a whole world of the alternate South right now. A world limned by the Bitter Southerner and by Scalawag magazine. A world where college football is defined by the almost surreal stylings of Every Day Should Be Saturday rather than the illiterate howling of the Paul Finebaum Show. A world where “Southerner” isn’t always defined as “white” and where Atlanta is the city of Outkast and Migos instead of Gone With The Wind. One where Nashville is the It City and Birmingham a culinary Mecca on the way up.

And in theory and on paper, I should be ideally fitted for it. I grew up in Birmingham. I attended Vanderbilt. I was out there trying to be part of the alt-South before it was fashionable, before Billy Reid and Good People and hot chicken. And the thing is…it was never enough to pull me back. Still isn’t. When I look around Birmingham, I see a place that I wouldn’t have been sorry to be when I was twenty, if it were still the early 90s and we had a downtown ballpark and this huge public space and bike share and…the thing about this new South is that in a lot of ways, it’s getting stuff I already had in the DMV or have now in California. Yes, I could get all the same stuff down South now that I could get in Silicon Valley, bar light rail and decent tacos. But I can get all that stuff in Silicon Valley too, and not have to wade through Vols or Tide fans or the kind of people who would literally rather vote for a statutory rapist than a Democrat. No amount of gentrification seems like enough for me to work through the humidity, the institutionalized ignorance or the past. Time is supposed to bring growth and modernity, but down South, it just brought the necks more to hate.

I think it’s pretty easy to tell why I felt out of place in Alabama – because I was. From the time I was old enough to read above my age level, I was officially different, and that’s the worst thing you can be in Alabama. Recent events have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt just how messed up a place that state can be if you aren’t on the correct side, and despite having all the necessary markers – white, male, Southern Baptist (notionally), heterosexual and reasonably middle-class and thoroughly Crimson Tide – I was still different, and never mind how; different is all that mattered. I basically never had friends in the neighborhood, school was always ten miles away in another town, and huge chunks of my social life all the way through tenth grade were carried out mostly over the phone with the same two or three people. Most of the high school friends I made were all a year ahead of me, and when they graduated, I was adrift, but I figured college would take care of that. One biggest mistake of my life later, nope, and then you get to grad school for the wrong reasons, and this story is so old I’m sick of it myself.

So I guess there’s a question of when ever have I felt comfortable within myself – when have I been happy to be who I am and what I am? 1988-89. Maybe in 1994. Probably 2000-2006 inclusive. I was this close to coming to terms with who I am in 2016…and then the wheels came off the world. Now I just keep asking myself if this kind of despair, this kind of rage, this kind of uncertainly and fear of the future is normal. And the thing that kept bugging me over and over is that…I used to be interesting. I mean, when you go from a top-15 university to National Geographic to Apple, and Nashville to DC to NorCal, and you’ve driven cross-country twice and been to NYC and London and proposed to your wife in a TV star’s apartment and lived through blizzards and droughts and terrorism and have friends all over the country – after all that, it’s tough to go through a stretch where you don’t leave the US for years and you never even take your car out of state and you have the same mind-numbing job for six or seven years and all you get is more stress and more angst.

But..

We rented a Skoda Octavia in Ireland, with right-hand drive. If you get in the car like you would in America, you’re sitting on the passenger side instead of the driver’s. And there’s no pedals and no wheel, and when you look up at the mirror, you’re looking somewhere completely other and have no view of what’s behind you. You’re left with a completely different perspective and have to change the way you look at things.

And I look at 45. And I look in the mirror at the paunch beneath the fisherman’s sweater and the jowls below the tweed flat cap, and I look back at twenty years in Macintosh IT and its ancillary professions, and I look at things like my hybrid Chevrolet and my iPhone that are straight out of some futuristic fiction or maybe Popular Science in 1988 or so. And I think how comfortable I am at home in the recliner with a pint of something dark and a good book, or taking a leisurely drive up PCH, or being able to cuddle the same girl since 2001. And I reflect on being able to say that I remember when this happened 10, or 20, or 25 or 30 years ago.

Through no fault of my own – or creditable effort, if I’m honest – I’ve aged into being where I kind of wanted to be all along. The birth certificate is catching up with the soul. I don’t need to be 45 pretending I’m 25. I have the advantage now of distance and perspective, and the ability to appreciate what I outlasted. And not coincidentally, enough income to actually do the things we want to do, whether that’s London or Ireland or seeing long-lost friends. I still have problems with the geography of belonging – the constant exodus of friends and the bad energy around the Peninsula – but I’m remarkably close to being OK with me, myself, who I am, in a way I haven’t been for a long time. And that’s progress not to be dismissed or diminished. Now it’s just a question of holding the world in macro at a distance and acknowledging and fighting the horror without letting it diminish me in micro. Which is not a small undertaking, but it’s one worth trying for.