Are my eyes really blue?

I can’t control it.

The year after it happened, when the anniversary came round, I planned on taking the day off work.  I ended up going in for just a couple of minutes to help get a writer set up for Eastern Europe, making sure the laptop had dialup numbers in Budapest and could use the right voltage.  A couple of minutes turned into nine hours, and in a way, I was oddly comforted, because I’d put in a good day’s work and done the best I could and not been a horse’s ass, and that was all the old man would have wanted as a memorial.

The next few years were turbulence incarnate. There was enough free-floating ambient rage that any other emotions around that date kind of got swept up and burned in the same fire that was propelling me forward.  The first seven or eight years were surpassing chaotic – hell, the eighth year after is more memorable now for being the day I sat on my bachelor party glasses in the course of moving my surrogate big sister in with us.

By the next year the darkness had started.  I don’t know if it was a byproduct of the year-or-so spent under the black cloud, or the assorted health nightmares of that summer, or just an increasing awareness of my own age, but it seems like every passing June is worse than the last.  It took a couple of days to catch me in 2008, but it got there.  In 2009, it salted an open wound of work issues and knee troubles.  In 2010, I was actually in Germany, with my mother and her new husband (about whom I have ranted elsewhere) and the days were fraught with enough peril that any angst about the date was tough to separate out.  And last year, I thought I was fine, right until the mere act of biting into a strawberry caused me to have a complete breakdown right in the middle of the farmer’s market.  And where did I go to be alone and clear my head? Oh, how about a movie theater showing Thor, because a film about family issues and lost fathers is exactly what I needed that day. Fucking brilliant.  A lot of people say I’m smart, but I say the evidence is suspect.

And now.

I’m going in for an MRI tomorrow, to see what’s going on with my neck.  Two years ago, there was a pinched nerve and a bulging disc, and there was a brief discussion of surgery, and then some painkillers and some prednisone (and isn’t THAT drug emotionally triggering for me), and eventually it more or less went away, right up until the day last month when I lost my shit at work – and it’s been bad ever since.  Post hoc ergo proper hoc, although who knows which one caused the other or contributed to it.

The cloud is always there this time of year. I never seem to think about why I feel like this in June until I’m already under its spell – which doesn’t make any kind of sense, but these things never do.  It doesn’t take much to start pushing the buttons, as the last couple of posts probably make clear (although being the son of two public employees will probably contribute to the snapping).  That’s the insidious thing about this…condition. It doesn’t adhere to any rules that make sense, it doesn’t respond to things that would make a person of ordinary circumstance feel better, and you can never tell if the drugs actually work – you can only tell when they’re not working.  And it’s hell on your loved ones, who can do literally nothing to help, so you end up spreading the badness around without actually ameliorating the symptoms in any way, and maybe get a nice soupçon of self-inflicted guilt to go on top of everything else.

So in the end, ride it out. Seek out some distraction. Try not to drink, or at least not too much. Try not to watch or read or think or dream anything that’ll set you off.  Just tell yourself that it’s only for now, that this too shall pass.

Then, for fun, try to believe it.

Miss you, pops.  You sure left us in a hell of a fix.

It’s been obvious for a while that when the GOP pines for the good old days of the 1950s, they’re thinking about minorities and women.  Segregation, the coloreds in their place, the fruits in the closet, the little woman at home with dinner and a pitcher of martinis for her man when he gets home, the works.  It’s nothing to do with things financial, because in the 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was 91%.  And more important, one in three American workers belonged to a union.

The union was the safety net, in a way.  It was the lookout.  It made sure that businesses didn’t balance the budget on the backs of the workers, that you couldn’t be pink-slipped just for the sake of making the stock bounce next quarter, that your working-class job would pay enough that you could put food on the table and a car in the driveway and send the kids to college.  And unions took the same thrashing as every other institution took in the 1970s, what with the mob ties to the Teamsters and the Nixonland encouragement of the politics of resentment.

But most of all, the nature of work changed.  Work moved into offices, to desks, in front of computers, and the people in those jobs forgot they were workers.  You’re indoors at a desk, you’re not blue-collar, you job doesn’t need organizing, unions aren’t for fine upstanding middle-class folk like yourself.

Horseshit.

This idea that the working world is somehow full of white-collar professionals is absurd.  Doctors?  Lawyers? Engineers? Probably.  But look at the tech sector, for instance.  My first boss had a marketing degree.  My tag-team partner had a doctorate (!) in psychology.  My wife’s degree is in environmental science, and famously, I have two degrees in political science that only get used in the service of blogging and trivia night.  We took jobs in the tech sector based on what we were mostly self-taught, and worked our way up through the ranks and learned as we went. And unless we were in management, many if not most of us were filling out an hourly timesheet.  The senior contractor at my first job, who was essentially the top non-com and the senior enlisted man, was typically sardonic: We’re bit-janitors, he proclaimed, we’re on the same level as general services and security and the maintenance guys.  They don’t put our names on our shirts, is all. 

He was right.  We had college layered over top of high school, but it was for show – when it came time to get a job, we went out and got a job, resemblance to our degree field not required, and played out our careers just the same as if we’d been down at the plant like our grandfathers.

Problem is, people don’t want to think they need a union.  They do if they work for the likes of Wal-Mart, but they don’t get it, not anymore.  You can be a warehouse picker and basically get wrecked, or do manual labor and have the threat of a truckload of illegals who’ll work for half held over you, or you can take an office job with two weeks’ vacation and sick leave combined and a big chunk out of your paycheck for your HMO coverage, which will get changed next year to whatever’s cheapest for the company, and you’ll get told that there’s 8% unemployment, you’re lucky to have a job, so shut up and get back to work.

The only place that still has unionized labor in any quantity is in government, the last employer that has to play by the rules and observe the letter of the law.  It’s not that union labor in government has special privileges, it’s that they’re the last ones to have to give up what everybody used to have.  And for the longest time, that was part of the deal if you worked for the city, or the state, or Uncle Sam – you’ll never get rich, but you have the benefits and security of the union to protect you.

And now, that’s going.  You can expect Wisconsin to open the floodgates for GOP-controlled legislatures and statehouses around the country: time to break the public-employee unions.  Partly because it’ll save money if you can slash salary and benefits without consequence, partly because it’ll hurt traditionally-Democratic organizations, partly because they’re government workers so they’re not REAL Americans, and partly it’s just the dog scratching its nuts.

The greatest trick the Republicans ever pulled off was convincing American workers that somehow they weren’t actually working class, and that they should take the side of the bosses.  Social issues may have prized them off, but now it’s just loyalty to the tribe – vote for the Big Mules if you want to be on the side of the Real True Job Creator Americans.  And it worked, because there’s an amazing number of Americans who are happy to live on a slab of cardboard under a leaky bridge cooking a dead crow on a car antenna over a fire, just so long as the wetback/homo/feminazi/spade next door doesn’t even have the car antenna.

Don’t get me wrong, I love America.  But I pretty much fucking hate Americans.

 

…the theological deconstruction of the legend of Stagger Lee brings a smile to my face.

I have an appointment to look at my retirement money setup next week.  Prompted by my ongoing problems with my neck and shoulder and the realization that I really don’t want to do this job for another twenty years, and made worse by the realization that my rollover IRA from my last two jobs is basically making no money at all.  I mean, theoretically I have control over it and could have put it all on AAPL and rolled the dice, but that’s not supposed to be my job.

I mean, look what happened: they blew up conventional pension plans (I actually have one from my first job vested on seven years’ employment – not much but maybe it’ll pay for a monthly Coke in the retirement home) and replaced it all with 401K plans.  Hey look, you save your OWN money and we’ll match it, and you can invest it however you like! You have the power! You have the control!

Unfortunately, it’s the same power and control a 15-year-old boy has the first time you give him a set of car keys.

I forget whether it was Amarillo Slim, or Doyle Brunson, or maybe just Matt Damon in Rounders, but the nugget of poker wisdom is true: if you’ve been at the table for thirty minutes and haven’t spotted the sucker yet, the sucker is you. The whole 401K stock-based retirement system works on two levels: either you’re the sucker and have to figure out how to make money playing the market against people who do it for a living, or you can trust your nut to one of those people and hope they work in your best interest.

And you can’t even count on that.  401Ks are basically a license for the financial system to go to Vegas with our bankroll.  They’re going to get paid on the transaction fees and the percentage off the top no matter how the trades go, so there’s very little incentive for them to play smart or fair.  Exhibit A: the London Whale, who managed to lose literally billions of dollars for JP Morgan while trading as part of their safe investments group.  This is the safe money, the widows-and-orphans money, the reliable sound been-here-for-a-hundred-years stuff, and the biggest bank on Wall Street is putting it all on red and letting it ride.

But hey, they’re sick of playing it safe!  How can you be a big swinging dick if all your money’s in government bonds and index funds?  The biggest scam of the last quarter century was Wall Street swindling America into letting them play No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em with our old-age security.  And just think, seven years ago, George W. Bush thought it was the best idea ever to 401K-ize Social Security.  Wonder how that would have worked out three years later?

They skated. They wrecked the world economy, got bailed out, and promptly poured all their time and energy into fighting hard against the people who saved their asses. And it’s increasingly starting to look like their kept man might just wind up in the White House – and even if he doesn’t, Big Money’s kept catamites in Congress will continue to ensure the Whiffle Life continues for the chosen ones.

Or, to quote Charles P. Pierce over at Esquire:

“The nation is in crisis now, and The Deficit is not it. The nation is in crisis now because an irresponsible and unaccountable money power ruined the economy, and the political system was unwilling or incapable of either fully repairing the damage, or fully holding to account the people who caused it. Half-measures were the order of the day, and too many of them were based on the mostly unreasonable assumption that American corporations are in any way patriotic, and on the entirely unreasonable assumption that the American government today responds to all of its citizens, and not just to the ones who write the checks. We are, most of us, just one bad turn away from being part of the long-term unemployed. We are suckers, we are. We’re playing in a rigged game.”

We cleaned out the garage this weekend, as you tend to do on Memorial Day – at least, I assume that is what people tend to do judging from the line at the Goodwill truck on Sunday afternoon. Lot of stuff went away, including a television and a sit-up-in-bed pillow, both of which are significant in their way.

See, I bought the pillow the summer before going off to grad school – I had envied them in college but never gotten it together to find one myself, especially since they always seemed to be offered in some sort of nasty corduroy. Then I decided one day to just get in my Saturn and drive up to the big-ass 24 hour Wal-Mart up US 78, because I could, and because I’d take any excuse to go for a spin in my little aquamarine compact. It was simple green fabric, and I snapped it up and immediately began using it to sit back against the chest of drawers as I fooled around with my new Power Macintosh 6100. And it stuck around, in varying degrees of cleanliness, for the next eighteen years.

Meanwhile, the television that I’d used throughout grad school suddenly and inexplicably bit the dust a month after moving to Arlington. It died without warning or explanation on the very weekend of the Alabama-Tennessee game, when my folks were up to visit me. Since they refused to sleep on the floor, they bought a bed; since they refused to sit on the floor, they bought a futon, and since they refused to miss the game, they bought a simple 19″ RCA television.

That was my TV for the next six years. When the wife-to-be moved in with me, she brought her larger television, and the RCA was relegated to the role of bedroom television, where it served more or less uninterrupted for the next eight years (barring our one year in a California apartment where it was stashed in the office rather than the bedroom, for want of appropriate furniture or a cable drop). And for seven years after moving into our house, the pronounced tick followed by the sound coming on was the regular alarm in the morning from which it was impossible to fall back asleep.

Then the cousins moved in with us, bringing their bigger HDTV, and our flat-panel 37″ became the bedroom television, and the RCA went into the garage and sat for a year.

Now it’s going to go find a new home with somebody who will actually make use of it, and I wish them luck with it. Some of the channels still have the manual labeling when you tune to them, from the days when it was a cable-ready set on Cable TV Arlington in the late 1990s. And being the pack rat I am, I thought I’d be sorrier to see it go – after all, it’s fifteen years old and a tangible reminder of those strange impossible days at the end of 1997 while the world was still set on “Flash Blend”.

But it’s kind of a preposterous keepsake when you can get a 46″ 1080p120 LCD for $700 at Costco. Nevertheless, I do wonder sometimes if there’s a single electronic device in the house now that will ever reach the 10-year mark without breaking or becoming unusably obsolete.

The last good summer before coming to California was 1990. I was out of high school, the whole promise of college lay before me, I had no girlfriend or trauma to deal with, the future was perfect. And then summer became an endless sea of heat and humidity and no escape for my life (and made doubly worse after 1998)…until 2002, the first California summer.

I’ve written about it endlessly, but 2002’s vacation week in California – cool, green, not humid, days spent among Apple stores and GSM cellphones and free pervasive Wi-Fi – was what really started the clock on “yes, I need to be here.” And summers here have been better ever since. There was 2004, where I arrived halfway through and had all the fun/terror of exploring my new home. There was 2006, also known as the dull moment, which in fact turned out to be a pretty damn good year top to bottom. The summer was spent in my office, out of the sun, doing a desk job with no manual labor required and banging my work out on a fast new black 13″ MacBook, when I wasn’t watching the World Cup or the Premiership. Lot of pub searching, lot of finally using the light rail, lot of enjoying my excellent new house. There was 2009, where the cousins came out to start the process that ended in summer 2011 with them becoming our new housemates. In between, there was 2010, loaded up with a 20th high school reunion and two weeks in Europe.

This year feels like it’s going to be a good summer. There’s European Cup soccer at one end and the Olympics at the other. There’s fog over the hills and it’s pleasant all day (for the moment). The job is manageable, Vandy baseball is in the postseason again, we have friends here and more moving in, and if I could just sort out my damned shoulder everything would be actually pretty cool.

Still, with the breeze from the open patio and live Irish music strumming away as I type this on an iPad with a pint to hand, it’s hard not to think that this is, in fact, the life.

The Donald just can’t help himself.  The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness, and everyone’s favorite squirrel-headed failed property mogul-turned-reality TV whore is back beating the same drum he was thumping last year, going full-retard on Birtherism.

This is not a bad thing.  Donald Trump has a way of showing who the real idiots are.  Last year, he exposed Birtherism for the delusion it is, and as a side effect brought about an excellent video for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (soundtracked with “Real American”, Hulk Hogan’s old WWF intro music).  At the time, he was pretty well shut up by the simple expedient of doing what the Bush team failed to do: nail Osama bin Laden.

Now, the Trumpster’s back and doing the world a service by exposing the real problem with Mitt Romney: his absolute lack of identity.  The danger of Mitt Romney as President isn’t anything he would do, because he is without form, and void.  The problem is that he would essentially serve as the turnstile attendant for the modern GOP – sitting in the Oval Office rubber-stamping whatever the Confederates serve up.  Since 1994, we’ve seen exactly what’s on offer with the modern Congressional GOP.  Clinton stopped it.  Bush didn’t want to, and Obama’s been hamstrung by the Bully Party’s indifference to decades of Senate norms and folkways (and further sandbagged by Harry Reid’s sullying the good name of pussy as Majority “Leader”).

Enjoy the Trump spectacle.  That’s exactly what you can expect life to look like under a Romney administration – send in the clowns, 24-7-365, and watch Multiple Choice Mitt hold the door.

God, what an asshole.

The thing I most frequently tune to on the house televisions these days is channel 1800 on the UVerse dial, “UVerse Showcase.”  It shows a 20-minute HD loop followed by some promotional material.  But the 20-minute loop is the sort of thing they use to demo HD televisions – long sequences of sunsets, or tropical views, or Antarctica, with vaguely NewAge-y ambient music.

And I get sucked in.  I sit with that on for literally hours at a time, losing myself in 1080p vistas of something in the Caribbean.  I don’t even like tropical beaches, and yet, I stare at the crystal blue water and the thatched huts and am just absorbed.  Maybe this makes me 40 going on 65, I don’t know.

But it’s a meditation of a sort.  Not unlike those Saturday mornings where I get up earlier than I like, stopping by Starbucks on my way to unload two bags of assorted meat and accoutrements in front of the smoker.  Then I fire it up, get the meat in the pans and into the hotbox, get the temperature around 180 degrees from smoke…and then it’s just nine or ten hours alone in the back yard with my pile of wood and my poking-stick to try to manage the fire.

The first three times, I did the whole job on my own, with only Absolute Radio’s “Rock And Roll Football” to accompany me the first couple hours.  And I seriously wondered whether I could get away with this in Britain -stack a load of wood by the shed in the back garden, pull the fire box smoker out and load it up, and spend the whole day until dark tending a couple of pork shoulders in the native style of my ancestral land – in a place with nothing of the sort for hundreds or thousands of miles in any direction.

After that, it’s just reading and maybe a little music in the background.  And it occurs to me that I don’t do this anymore. Years ago, when I first came to California, my old tobacconist in DC would send a care package with some of my favorite sticks, and I’d park my stadium-tailgate-camping chair by the car and rest my feet on the bumper. And I’d have a 2-liter soda and a tumbler of ice, and I’d sit and smoke a couple of cigars for a couple of hours. Maybe have the laptop there for Wikipedia purposes as my mind wandered, but otherwise just sit under the stars and clear my head.  But now the only place you can really smoke is in a tobacconist’s or in your own home – and the only time I can really get away with it is out by the firebox where I’m going to smell like a forest fire no matter what I do or don’t puff in the meantime.

But that’s what the cigar shop was in DC, in retrospect – sit, relax, detach, maybe hear the surrounding conversation but just as easily tune it out.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I needed that time to just clear the mechanism – different from the “5-space” where I need solitude to recharge.  I thought they were one and the same, but in many ways they aren’t.

And that’s where channel 1800 comes in – anytime, day or night, I can stretch out on the sofa or on the bed and turn it on and disappear.  Nowhere in particular – just something to clear my head for a while.  I need to make a better effort to do that, because I think we’ve conclusively proven that living too much in my own mind and dwelling on the present tends to lead me down a bad road.

And if you think this is a tacit concession that yes, I need to go back to unplugging on Tuesday nights…well, you got me.

And so it is, two weeks after the anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams, that we celebrate Towel Day and the magnificently insane world he created with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  it doesn’t hurt that it’s the anniversary of the release of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back as well, if I remember right.

But here’s the thing: the new iPad, with its wicked-fast 4G and amazing screen and your ability to speak to it – and the iPhone 4S with Siri – have come damn close, in conjunction with Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha, to giving us just that.

Actually you could sort of do it with the Kindle, as xkcd famously spoofed, thanks to its own pervasive 3G, but the speed and UI issues of the regular Kindle are damn near insurmountable and they kind of don’t offer that anymore.  Plus Douglas Adams was famously the biggest Apple fanboy in the British Isles – Stephen Fry only really inherited that title when Adams passed in 2001 – and I think he would have been tickled pink to have a roughly book-sized-and-shaped device that offered the whole galaxy from its screen.  I envision a very nice “Don’t Panic”-embossed SmartCover being offered as a limited edition – say, at WWDC or similar.

Because I still get that feeling, occasionally – I pull out the iPad and dash off something quick and grab myself a copy of The Great Gatsby instantaneously, then an hour later pull out the iPhone and literally tell it to update me on the weather and dictate a text message before picking up right where I left off reading on a different device.  And then, on the train, I pull out the iPad and spin around the diagrams of the new workplace so people can laugh at “Collaboration Harbor,” which is consultant-speak for “there’s not room to put another cubicle here so we’re going to drop a couch and see if anyone uses it despite the fact it’s surrounded by cubes on all sides”.

Seriously, the iPad is the Hitchhiker’s Guide, with Tony Stark’s earliest UI.

(And yes, I need to see The Avengers for the third time.)

So Eduardo Savarin, who came to this country from Brazil, and stands to make $3 billion off the Facebook IPO, suddenly goes before the American consul in Singapore to declare a renunciation of his American citizenship, then tries to backspin and say he’s been living there a while and considers himself a citizen of the world?

Pull the other one, fuckface, it’s got a bell on it.

Eduardo Savarin needs to have every last dime possible wrung out of him on the way out the door. If he ever sets foot across the US border again, he needs to go to Gitmo and have a highly trained team of professionals investigate the entire length of his bowel for any hidden monies.

You don’t get to become a citizen of the United States, make a fortune off the back of a network system invented on the taxpayer’s dime by Uncle Sam, and then suddenly decide that you don’t want to be a citizen anymore as soon as the bill comes. $67 million? That’s two and a quarter percent of $3 billion.

On the other hand, I would be happy allowing him back in the country, on the condition that the $67 million be made up by charging $1 a head for anybody in the United States making under $50,000 a year to take a free shot at this douche’s nutsack. With a pipe wrench.

He can’t be the only dickbag trying to get away with this. Is Seal Team Six busy?