Are my eyes really blue?

Anyone not trapped under something heavy knows what went down with last night’s Monday Night Football – the avalanche of botched calls ending with the complete clusterfuck in the end zone at the end, which to all the world looks like a missed decision that flipped the outcome of the game. Golden Tate apparently committed offensive pass interference and then failed to gain simultaneous possession of the ball from M. D. Jennings, who for all the world appeared to have the pick (which one official signaled before evidently being overruled). And Seattle got a measure of revenge for Super Bowl XL, when shaky officiating probably cost them a trophy.

Golden Tate is making no apology for how things came out, and is catching abuse for it in some quarters. Horseshit. There are people responsible for calling fouls against Golden Tate, and they are not one of them named Golden Tate. If players flagged their own fouls, we wouldn’t have officials at all. We’d be playing out on the sandlot after church on Sunday afternoon. Hell, don’t forget Seattle luck-boxed into a home playoff game at 7-9 because nobody took into account that a team with a losing record might get home field over one with 11 wins, and they didn’t rush to bail out of the playoffs or give back their win over the Saints. We have officials, like we have government, because we need higher authority than our own judgement.

But the NFL, in its infinite wisdom, has declared that officials are fungible and are going with the absolute dregs of the football officiating world, all for the sake of a sum well south of a million dollars per year per team. One estimate pegged the amount of money that would represent complete capitulation to the original refs as roughly fifty cents per game ticket. Which is literally a rounding error on the daily take of an NFL franchise. So why? Why on Earth would a multi-billion-dollar business risk the health of its players and the integrity of its competition for money that could be found in the couch cushions?

Part of it is about breaking the refs’ union, to be sure – ironic as hell that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker was agitating on Twitter for the return of the real refs – but in no small part, it’s because they can. As Steve Young famously raged, demand for pro football is inelastic. The contracts are signed, the TV rights sold, the season tickets already paid for. As long as people keep watching, the NFL has no incentive whatsoever to back down. Meanwhile, at this point, if I were leading the union for the refs? I would pull all my current proposals and concessions off the table and say “Fuck you, pay me.” After all, this is not a strike. The refs didn’t walk out, just as the players didn’t walk out last year. Once again, the NFL is flexing its muscle as the 800 pound gorilla of American sport and demanding its own way simply because it can. And its owners have bought into the Randian myth wholesale: they are the elite, the job creators, and we should count ourselves blessed to walk in their shadow and question them not.

Fuck. That.

The NFL is what it has always been: bloated, arrogant, hidebound, a league of assholes operated by assholes, a garbage organization with human garbage at its helm. The one good thing to come of this fiasco is that now the emperor’s clothes are in a flaming pile in an end zone at Quest Field, and everyone knows it.

It’s the big story of iOS 6, apparently, drowning out everything else: the maps suck. Apple’s new built-in mapping application, using a mishmash of data and its own 3D rendering, appears to be sorely wanting in comparison to the Google-based Maps app it replaced. And the usual suspects are crowing about Apple’s hubris in kicking Google off the platform.

Which to me sounds like horseshit. Look, Tim Cook (despite his Auburn pedigree) is no idiot. Neither are Phil or Scott or Jonny. They know they’ve got to sell a 1.0 product and they’re putting the best face on it, but like so much of iOS 6, this is a change that had to happen and they’ve made the decision to take the bullet now, while the stock is still at $700 and the market share is dominant and the court’s decision is still against Samsung.

Why did it have to happen? Because Google wanted it this way too. Look: Gmail is still in the automatic config options for Mail/Contact/Calendars on the iPhone. Every iOS device at the Apple Store tonight was still set for Google as the default Safari search engine. The YouTube standalone app was approved in the Apple Store before iOS 6 was even released. Apple – who OEMs a lot of chips from Samsung – is more than willing to do the frenemy thing with the Beast of Mountain View. They’d be idiots not to.

And yet – Maps hasn’t materially changed since iOS 2, when it got GPS support and traffic view. The much-vaunted turn-by-turn navigation in Android’s Maps app never made it to the iOS version, and you’d be a moron to expect it ever would. Similarly, the YouTube app – originally meant to obviate the need for Flash on the world’s hottest video site – hasn’t been updated, well, ever. And critically for Google, it doesn’t serve up ads.

If I had to guess, there was a contract with Google for licensing Maps and YouTube, and once it expired everybody was content to go their separate ways. By doing their own thing, Apple can finally offer native turn-by-turn (and for all the howling, a superior 3D rendering experience overall to the iOS version of Google Earth), and by breaking off separate, Google can go its usual route n monetization with YouTube and make Maps a party piece for Android – and, for now, a clearly superior offering on their platform exclusively. I’m sure we’ll be getting Google Maps for iOS beyond the web app, but I suspect they’ll be content out on Shoreline Boulevard to watch the Colossus of Cupertino twist in the wind for a little while.

This is a bet by Apple – that by lumping all the transitions together, they can get over the hump and back to normal service quickly. If they guessed wrong, though, this could be the point where they make the stumble that lets Android catch up – and lets Microsoft back into the game. Much depends on the iPhone 5’s battery and LTE performance, and how quickly iOS 6.01 and later can improve Maps. Will Apple get it sorted? Sure. Quickly enough? Maybe not.

So while out in the wilds of the Ancestral Lands last week, I more or less completely missed the announcement of the iPhone “5.” Which let’s just start with the obvious: this is an appallingly stupid name.  This is the sixth iteration of the iPhone and it doesn’t have “5G” whatever that may turn out to be someday, so there are no logical mathematical grounds on which to call this the iPhone 5.  There’s a certain measure of dumbing-down there that is of a piece with my ongoing concern about the future of Apple (as evinced by the doings of the new head of retail).  But I digress.

The early reviews indicate that the phone feels thinner and lighter than ever, thanks to a return to a metal back for the first time since the original phone.  And since that original phone was near and dear to my heart (and reposes to this day in my “grab this running out of the burning house” box of keepsakes), I’m happy to think that the new phone will reflect a nice degree of professional sturdiness.  I suppose the stretched screen will be useful, although like John Gruber I’m mildly concerned about the one-hand-ability of the phone at a larger size.  I’m less bothered about the change to a new connector, especially since I’m syncing wirelessly, but I’m sure it’s going to mean a handful of adapters (come to think of it I need to start adding up how many and where)…

And then there’s the elephant in the room: owing to AppleCare, I just took possession of an iPhone 4S not long ago at all.  May, perhaps? In any event, I’m no longer replacing a phone that’s two years and change old, I’m replacing one that was the most current iPhone available two weeks ago.  And since my aim is to change carriers and go through work for it, the prospects of getting it immediately are slender at best…which means loading up iOS 6 today and seeing how long it lasts for me.

Then again, there’s also the matter of LTE to consider.  The LTE speed on the iPad has been amazingly quick and efficacious; I’ve pulled almost 50Mbps in downtown Mountain View which is quadruple the best speed at home on UVerse. 3G on AT&T (and don’t give me that bullshit “4G” about HSPA+; it was bullshit when T-Mobile first pitched it and it’s bullshit now) is just not a patch on LTE on Verizon in the Bay Area, and having that speed coupled to the faster processor on the phone might just be transformative.  And I certainly wouldn’t object to gaining $40 a month back from paying my own (partly-subsidized) bill, especially depending on the data package work’s willing to float…

The bulk of the tech press seems to be unimpressed, the lines are already forming out front of stores, and the Mac blogosphere is gleefully pointing out the dichotomy.  One UK radio personality last week pointed out that in your pocket, you now have a phone, a hi-fi, a television, a movie collection, an encyclopedia, a web browser, a bookstore and music shop, a camera, a camcorder, and all your email – what else do people expect at this point?  For me, that’s the point: I don’t need new and flashy and different, I need faster and longer battery life.  If everything it currently does just works a little bit better all around, that would be enough to justify making work pay for it…

So for my birthday, I pooled some of the gift money and some cash I had stuck in an old lighter (no, seriously) and bought myself this watch.  Why, you ask?

* Mechanical automatic watch.  As in, you can wind it if you want, but the motion of your arm will keep it wound, too, and store enough energy to go over 24 hours off your arm.

* No branding.  No name, no logo, no nothing, just the 12-hour time and a second hand in its own sweep wheel.  Clean, unornamented, basically if Gabriel Hounds made a watch this is it.

* Heavy steel, mineral crystal, and water-resistant to 10 ATM – so I can shower or splash with it and not worry about it.  And because I’m not changing a battery, I’m not compromising the seal by taking the back off, so as long as the crown stays screwed down it should be just dandy.

Think about that.  I’m basically on the schedule of new phone every 2 years, new laptop every 3, just picked up an iPad and who knows how long that will be viable,  and will almost certainly be getting the iPhone 5 through work sooner than later. (Of which more later.)  Our house is chockablock with old electronics that need e-cycling. Yet here on my wrist sits a device that will more or less give me the correct time, without any other maintenance or support, for the rest of my life.

Also, no flashy features – no timer, no alarms, not even the date.  The phone can do all that. This is just “what time is it right now.”  Which, if you live in the moment, ought to be sufficient…

The famous Romney video doesn’t add anything new. All it does is confirm the Atlas Shrugged mentality of the 2012 GOP, which is one step removed from divine right of kings: if you have money, then by God you deserve it and earned it no matter how you came by it, and anyone who doesn’t is a parasite grasping for what is rightfully your own.

The reason Ayn Rand is so seductive among a certain adolescent segment is because it tells them the elite are better than anyone else – and said adolescents assume they are obviously among the elite. The problem is, too many don’t grow out of it, and we get what we have now.

I honestly expect the tail end of this race to look like Wallace vs Brewer in 1970. It’s all Romney has left.

(NB: Everything posted under these four “The search for time lost” posts was composed in real time as noted.)

Standing in the Conservatory of the Opryland Hotel, I understand the fascination now. It’s everything I wanted from Disney World back in the 1990s: the artificial reality, the vast open space, the surreal sense that something different could happen here. And I’m glad we stayed here, the wife and I, the first time I brought her to Nashville nine years ago. Especially coming straight from a Disney resort. And the fact that it’s only about a fifteen minute drive from West End means I would totally and absolutely do this next year. Pick out a good home game, plan for at least three days, stay at the Opryland hotel, see all of Nashville, tailgate like I mean it and hopefully for more than three hours.

This weekend was a test. 15 years after leaving under my own ignominious circumstances, what does Vanderbilt mean to me now?

One thing I learned is that I’ve matured. I bought no jerseys, sweatshirts, hats, nothing I didn’t actually need. My big splurge was a new polo shirt (in gold dri-fit suitable for Cal games), a new lanyard, a new book about the history of Vanderbilt football, and one utterly superfluous scarf. I guess I already own all the things I need to make me feel I belong to Vanderbilt.

What I got out of this weekend was what almost every other SEC fan who never attended their school has. I was a fan among fans. I tailgated, I drank, I cheered, I had a great time. My fandom, my authenticity as a Vanderbilt supporter, has finally been confirmed beyond question for me. And really, I’m the only one who needed to prove it – absolutely nobody else doubted it.

I don’t want to make too much of this, but it’s entirely possible that for the first time, I may have actually retrieved something from the black hole and brought it back. It doesn’t have to be what it used to be, it can be what it is now. Which has been what I’ve struggled to learn for years now: stop trying to be who you were and just become who you are…

(NB: Everything posted under these four “The search for time lost” posts was composed in real time as noted.)

Fifteen years ago I walked through the malls looking at things I wanted to need and couldn’t afford. Now I don’t even recognize them. No more music stores or bookstores, and I don’t feel like I need every piece of Vandy merchandise on offer. Whatever it was I used to find here, it’s not there anymore.

So many things are just not there anymore. The Rand bookstore, the lockers in the bottom of the student center, the Overcup is different, my old apartment is gone completely. Tower Records, Bookstar, Davis-Kidd. The Boston Market where Vaughn and I would eat before seminar. The intersection where I got T-boned is a 4 way stoplight now.

And yet…the colors are still black and gold, the nets are still at the ends of the basketball court, and tacos on the patio at SATCO are still the best thing ever. It’s okay there’s so much changed. I’ve changed so much. The school is like me – the forms are still there, the fundamentals are still there, but in so many ways I’m not the same person who left here and this isn’t the place I left. And maybe in the end that’s what matters. I recognize that I’m still the same person, and learn to live with the person I’ve become. And if that’s what I get out of this trip, it was a hell of a good trip.

It’s good that I didn’t – that I couldn’t – keep coming back. It forced me to regenerate fast in DC, to stop trying to be who I was and become who I had to be. If I had kept coming back and seeing the old places just the same, it would have been that much harder for me to go on to the next stage. Instead, I see that it’s as different as I am, but the same, and in a way that makes it easier to accept and validate that I was here and what I did still counts.

(NB: Everything posted under these four “The search for time lost” posts was composed in real time as noted.)

15 years. Let’s try to put that in some kind of perspective.

The amount of time since I last set foot on campus, in 2006, is twice as long as the entire time I was here as a student. Put another way: a quarter of my life ago I’d already been gone almost twice as long as I was here. I’m standing on a bridge over 21st Ave. that would’ve simplified my life if it had existed then.

As best I can calculate I’ve been back on campus maybe four times since graduation. Without fail, it’s always a Christmas or some other holiday or sometime when there are no students around and the whole place is dead. When it’s like that, it’s easy to imagine this is the set of a movie that I saw once and was very emotionally involved in. But now, it’s the eve of the game. The campus is full, students are buzzing, and I’m standing out on Peabody Esplanade in front of the building that used to have the computer lab where I first started to really learn the Mac.

As soon as I walk past Payne, though, I realized this is not the same place. The munchie mart has been replaced with what I can only assume is the Commons cafeteria. And my car is parked across the street from where my car would’ve been parked 15 years ago, but where my apartment used to be there currently repose half a dozen new freshman dormitories. I remember standing under this very same sky on this very same lawn, wondering what was going to become of me, wondering where my life was headed, wondering if I had any future at all. Somehow, I got pulled through some fourth dimensional hole that deposited me in a science fiction future, 15 years later. And I’m dictating what I say – what I write – into something in my hand the size of a pack of cigarettes which interprets every word and gets the text about 95% accurate.

Somebody else went to school. Somebody else was a university graduate fellow. Somebody else walked these lawns, took these classes, tried to live this collegiate life. He’s been gone for 15 years now and he doesn’t exist anymore. I just pay my taxes in his name.

I’ve come back to Vanderbilt as a veritable sidewalk alumnus. My connections to the school, to this institution, to this life are more tenuous and different than anyone else’s I know here. The name, and the team, and the colors, and the general sense of what this place means are the anchor to which I attempted to tie myself when the old life collapsed beneath me.

18 years ago this autumn, this felt like a place that was always home from day one. That was true. It really was. But it was somebody else’s home. And this weekend, I’m just a guest of the people who moved in after him.

(NB: Everything posted under these next four “The search for time lost” posts was composed in real time as noted.)

I’d never flown into Nashville.

I didn’t need to in the old days. Three hours tops to drive it, which makes air travel ridiculous to consider. And then, I didn’t have any reason to. So when the undersized plane banked over downtown, the city lights sprinkled against the dusk were shining like diamonds and Vanderbilt Stadium, the first purpose-built football stadium in the South, was lit from all sides. And it was gorgeous. Everything I ever imagined in another life.

Then the rental car and that drive South – and once again, just like the old days, heading to Alabama to deal alone with a badly mentally-unbalanced Southern female. But there’s time to worry about that in the morning. For now, just like before – a dark night, an open road, a full tank of gas and a full bottle of soda.

“Saturn Parkway.” I got a bit of a lump in my throat at that – the car company whose name christened the new road to Spring Hill all those years ago no longer exists. And I’m not driving that Saturn this time. It’s dark, darker than I ever remember it being. In my memory, it was always a full moon and a clear sky full of stars. This time, it’s positively black in every direction. Maybe it’s the hills and the trees and a late-rising waning moon, but for whatever reason, the nighttime dark is more than I expected. The road winds more in the hills approaching the state line. I still laugh at the signs for the World Famous Boobie Bungalow, which apparently has competition from an Adult Book Store across the interstate with faux fireworks over their sign. I wonder if the same economics that affect firework sales across borders apply to vibrators.

I see signs for US 31. I always wanted to do that drive up, instead of taking I-65, but I never did. And this isn’t the time to start. So it’s interstate all the way, across the Alabama border, past the rocket towering in the dark by the welcome center, to stop at the same old Shell station at exit 351 halfway there. Then the bridge over the Tennessee River, the cluster of lights in the distance that suggested some futuristic city or casino or something…even though I’m pretty sure it’s just a refinery of some sort. Then the gas station off the Decatur exit where listening to KMOX on one late-night drive gave me the news that the Los Angeles Rams were relocating.

After that, it’s just a drive. Billboards every mile, no more darkness – the billboard is practically the state tree of Alabama – and I can feel my chest tighten ever so slightly thinking of what the next three days hold. And that’s when the Melissa Etheridge song on the CD of nostalgic 1994 songs comes on, and makes sense to me for the first time.

…this town thinks I’m crazy, they just think I’m strange

sometimes they want to own me, sometimes they wish I’d change

but I can feel the thunder underneath my feet

I sold my soul for freedom 

it’s lonely but it’s sweet…

I’m fifteen years late.

Had fate been different, I would have returned to Dudley Field in September of 1997 for an easy win over Texas Christian.  Or maybe for the Alabama loss.  Instead, I heard the bulk of the Alabama game on the radio and the rest at my uncle’s apartment on ESPN, because I was en route to Arlington to start the next phase of my life.  Somewhere in Chattanooga, I absent-mindedly put my window down for a second, and my Vanderbilt flag went hurtling onto the interstate behind me, never to be seen again.  And the Tide shut out the Dores, 20-0.

Life has a way of being ham-fisted in its symbolism sometimes.

The transformation was rapid and it was complete – and it was disorienting. Now I could follow the Redskins as closely as I’d ever followed the Tide or the Commodores – and easily following my college teams was out of the question.  Riding around listening to a game would mean Sundays.  And there’s very little national run for a team that wins two games a year…so Vanderbilt had to go.  It was Widenhofer, it was VBK, and it was an age of darkness for the black and gold, and I’d just flunked out.  No more homework. No more looming exams judging my future. No prospect for literally writing a book, for making the obligatory original contribution to the literature.  No immortality for my forecasts about the Southernization of American politics.

More to the point: no more late nights in the Overcup Oak, with milkshakes made with three shots of espresso and the grounds dumped right in.  No more steak fajitas and Rolling Rock on the patio at SATCO. No Monday Night Football at the Villager with one of Henry’s po-boys, no more drive-thru McDonalds en route to squatting awkwardly behind the plate at an intramural softball game, no more wandering through the Opryland Hotel in an attempt to clear my mind and escape the growing reality around me.  

And crucially, no more psychopath lurking in Birmingham, keeping me ensnared with guilt and obligation and fear.

It was a pretty clean break, for better or worse.  I would come back to get my diploma (and see my dad for the last time, as it turns out) and get my hair cut by Cheri at Salon FX one last time, but after that, I don’t think I returned to Nashville for five and a half years.  When I did, it was as a thirty year old, established in my new career (and quite successfully) and in the company of my fiancee (in everything but name).  A completely different person walked around campus on that trip, one who was born in DC and forged in a completely different fire, and I felt more awkward than ever about claiming the legacy of the school whose ring sat on my finger as an exercise in advanced degree-laundering and self-validation.

Three years later, over a prolonged weekend and in the wake of some serious nonsense at my undergraduate school, I had a long drawn-out think about who I could legitimately claim and the extent to which I could truly think of myself as a Vanderbilt alumnus.  And I got there in my mind, somehow, and decided that I would embrace it.  Which meant another trip up to buy some more gear, eat at SATCO, and walk around some nine years later convincing myself that it was real, that it actually happened.

That was six years ago.  Only now am I getting back to Nashville. In the meantime, we’ve turned into a top-25 program in many sports, won several conference titles, and I have over four hundred Twitter followers willing to testify to the fact that yes, I am a Vanderbilt man through and through.  And I guess I am.  Not in the way most people get there; mine is a hybrid of sidewalk-alumnus and half-assing my way through grad school attempting to relive college. But I staked myself to it, I have an equity stake in the tribal enterprise, and I’m fully invested – financially and emotionally – in my alma mater.

Now I have to go back. Get to go back, really, with as near to a guarantee of a winning game as exists in college football today.  But I won’t see any of the people I knew back then, with one possible exception that had nothing to do with academia.  Instead, I’m meeting up with a bunch of folks who know me as a Twitter avatar, a paragraph of shtick at Anchor of Gold, a hat-and-sunglassed Instagram picture.  They don’t even know my real name, and I don’t particularly know who they are.  But fair’s fair, because I’m still trying to figure out who I am, too.

I can tell you this for a fact, though : it isn’t the guy who would have shown up in 1997.