Month: December 2023

I accumulated a lot of stuff this year. The old friv-o-list is empty, more or less. I bought a new pair of loafers, my first new pair of cowboys boots in two decades, a jersey-knit blazer suitable for cooler weather without having to revert to tweed, a summer-weight cotton version of the new Barons hat (and was sent two), a neopixel lightsaber, a stealth plaid version of my beloved work shirt, an actual hoodie from American Giant, a one-liter Yeti mug, and – earlier than I wanted, thanks to legal encumbrance – an Apple Watch Ultra 2, which will become the shutdown night phone as soon as USMobile implements support for it sometime in Q1 of 2024 (allegedly). And that doesn’t count a new work laptop or the flannel robe-and-pajama set my wife bought me or any actual gifts (three different Ken Burns series on Blu-Ray, against the risk of losing Internet connection again). Oh yeah – we also finally got fiber service to the house this year.

I have realized that all I want out of 2024 is to be typing this post again in a year knowing that I have not lost anything I had. Still have our jobs, still working remote, still securely in this house, able to afford it, and still living in a democracy with a known good President being sworn in come January. I have assembled as many pieces of things as can be done. Buying stuff is not going to get me through the next thirteen months. But I have everything around me to create my bubble, to live the kind of life I want to live, barring something coming along to change that.

There’s a good case to be made that for most of my life, that’s what happened – I didn’t have any particular ambition or aspiration, I was good with just what I had until circumstances changed. You have to graduate. You have to pass your prelims. My big decisions to make my own change have not exactly been great since 2006 or so, and for someone who relies on the devil he knows and has lived his whole life on defense, this coming year feels like the last goal-line stand. Which is what 2020 felt like, honestly, and even if everything works out for the best, I suspect it’ll be more of the same in 2028 and 2032 and for the rest of my days until the last boomer is choked to death on the entrails of the last Reagan Democrat. The idea that I could make my own change for the better…well, as with most things, it would entail making things worse before they get better. And I don’t have it in me right now to deal with worse.

So on to 2024. Go to the gym. Do the weights. Get on the meds again, whatever is required to help me function. Keep pursuing this spiritual development and see if I can find peace and perspective. Somewhere, some way, find the strength to muddle through somehow until next year we may all be together if the Lord allow.

Onward. The only way out is through.

One big thing this year, my great Airing of Grievance: too many people have forgotten that there is such a thing as right and wrong and that the difference is not very difficult to see. One country invading another is wrong, even if it began two years ago. A terror attack that kills hundreds of people is wrong. Indiscriminate bombing of civilians is wrong. Singling out a minority of less than one percent and building your entire politics on shitting on them specifically is wrong. Making no distinction between the people who cause a problem and the people who solve that problem is wrong. And biggest of all, in this last ten years, lying is wrong. It just is. You can’t have a post-truth society for the same reason you can’t have a wire mesh ferry boat.

This was supposed to be a year when I could try to focus on the now, live in the moment, enjoy life before another miserable election season. Instead, people who insist on their own false reality made it a misery almost from the beginning of the year. Thanks to them, we incurred legal fees, battled COVID infection, rearranged plans one after the other, and got a crash course in adjusting expectations and radical acceptance.

Because the biggest lie of all is “oh you don’t need to worry because it will all work out somehow.”

The first blue Christmas was 1986. I was 14. I was too old for toys, but I didn’t have any idea what I actually wanted for Christmas. I had started high school four months earlier and still hadn’t found the space I fit in, and was homesick for the misery of junior high. And as it happens, by the time the 25th rolled around, I already knew every gift I was getting before I opened it. A very 80s gray leather jacket, an electric razor that i didn’t actually need, and that’s about it. And I was so miserable by lunchtime that my mother actually noticed and tried to sympathize, which should be a sign how bad off I was. It was a rotten capper on a rotten year.

I suppose you could argue the bluest Christmas since was 2007. Sure, in 1998, my father was newly dead, but the shock and grief of that blotted out anything specific to the festive period. There were some intermittently tough ones in between, but nothing so bad as this – I had left my job at Apple, which in retrospect was an incredibly stupid thing to have done, and was working two part-time jobs slapped together into a single federal subcontract. No benefits – even less than I have now, which is saying something – and no prospects for any sort of growth or development. Just sat in the blockhouse of a building, alone in a cold room, staring at the display of a laptop that Apple had discontinued before I’d even left for California that had been handed to me as a workstation three and a half years later, with partial internet access that meant I couldn’t stream anything or surf where I wished. And for the first time in my life, I was depressed enough to say “yes, I need the medications now.”

I suppose in a way 2008 was the last genuinely good Christmas – things in Alabama mostly all right, before the great family disruption, the traditional California festivities with Mass and bourbon slush and white elephant exchange, enhanced by Vanderbilt in a bowl for the first time in a quarter-century and me finding a new job just in time to celebrate. A sense that life was on the way up, that better days were possible.

Then the family trouble. Then the beginning of a bad decade of work. Then the bad years leading to the election of 2016. Then we lost my in-laws, four months apart, and then trouble within our found family, and so we come to 2023, in which we are alone in this house for the holidays for only the second time. In 2020-21, there was the overarching presence of recent death, and last year, the uncertainty of the situation drowned out everything else (and the Christmas party took the edge off it) but this year, it’s just the two of us, staring down the barrel of 2024 from the precipice of dubious health, dubious employment, never quite enough money to feel secure and a world on fire that teeters on the brink of the unthinkable.

Someone remarked about the coming of Hannukah: “they didn’t know the oil would last for eight days. They didn’t know how long the oil would last at all. But they lit it anyway.” The whole point of Christmas is that it represents the coming of hope into the world. The reason why the early Church dropped it on top of the winter solstice is because the light is coming back. This is a time for hope where there is darkness. The problem is, it’s not easy to imagine sunrise at midnight, and when you don’t have a watch and no way of knowing how long the night is going to be, it seems impossibly far away.

The final four team college football playoff has been set and no one is happy. In: undefeated Michigan, champions of the Big 10 [sic], undefeated Washington, champions of the PAC-12, and two 12-1 teams, Alabama, (champions of the SEC who lost only to Texas) and Texas (champions of the Big [sic] 12 [sic] who lost to…I dunno, Oklahoma or somebody). Out: Florida State, 13-0 undefeated champions of the ACC, who for their trouble will now face Georgia, coming off back to back national titles and sour at being the first team in God knows how long to be undefeated, lost the SEC championship game, and not back into the playoff anyway.

Inasmuch as any of this is actually a problem, it will go away next year. A 12-team playoff will be enough to take every power conference champ, every near-miss team with name ID (get ready for Bama and Ohio State in every playoff), and still have one spot left to throw a sop to Central Florida or Boise State or whatever lesser undefeated team is clamoring for a place at the table. Then you can expect the bitching and moaning to turn to who got a bye and who deserved to be in the picture because their three losses were better than someone else’s.

Two things.

First, as always, if this were 1991 we’d have an obvious national title game: Michigan and Washington in the Rose Bowl. (In fact I’m not sure that wasn’t actually the game on 1 Jan 1991.) Florida State would still be left out, partly because of the bowl tie-ins but largely because of the uncomfortable but true fact that Florida State was champion of what was the weakest of the power conferences this year. They would have a case if they beat whoever wound up in the Orange Bowl with them convincingly, and meantime you’d have Texas-Georgia in the Cotton Bowl and Bama-Ohio State in the Sugar and everything would be just fine.

Secondly, the battle lines have already been drawn, and they are obvious. Next year, Washington will be in the increasingly-innumerate Big 10 and Texas will be in the increasingly geographically illiterate SEC. The Committee has hung out its shingle: these are The Two Best Conferences, and teams with a better record in lesser conferences will not be held equivalent. And Florida State – which joined the ACC three decades ago specifically to have an easier path than a 12-team SEC would have afforded them – now finds itself locked in place through 2036 unless they can find some way to buy out their grant of rights to the ACC, which I can assure you all the best lawyers in Tallahassee are currently engaged in finding a way to do.

The problem the ACC has is largely perception: for the last decade or so, it’s been Clemson’s private playpen, and an undefeated Clemson won two national titles in that span, so they had to be taken seriously, but as long as Florida State was down, there was no other team in the conference to make up for the impression of Clemson and the Twelve Dwarfs (or however many teams they’re on now). Now Florida State is hot again, and the bottom has fallen out of Clemson. In the last 20 years, the PAC-12 had alternately had top-10 performances by U$C, Cal, Oregon, Stanfurd and Washington. The SEC has produced Bama, Georgia, LSU, Florida, and occasional flashes from Auburn or Tennessee. The Big 10 [sic] has mostly got by on Ohio State, with recent efforts from Michigan and sometimes big years from State Penn or Iowa. But the ACC has yet to produce two simultaneous contenders, and the Big [sic] 12 [sic] has yet to turn out anyone beyond Texas and Oklahoma (who are decamping to the SEC).

So next year, we will have a 12-team playoff, to be populated by two first-tier conferences, two second-tier conferences who will be lucky to get a second team in, whatever legally remains of the PAC-12, and a pity slot for some G5 team, while Florida State desperately looks for Gulf oil money (no, seriously) to try to buy their way into something else. And within about 5 years, Texas will be whispering to Bama and Georgia and LSU that they shouldn’t be carrying all this dead weight of Vandy and Kentucky and the Mississippis and why don’t they form a real super conference with Clemson and Florida State, and before you know it, boom, the college football premier league is a reality.

I look forward to being left behind. At that point I think it might be possible to enjoy this sport again.