Are my eyes really blue?

One thing I have learned in the last few years is that whenever I blurt out “so tired” to myself, it is actually my way of saying “I am unhappy with the state of my existence in this world as currently constituted.” Could be depression, could be anxiety – although I think we have established that my problem is more anxiety than anything else.Specifically, the reaction to a nebulous threat that I cannot see or effectively game against.

To wit: I expect that the Democrats will lose formal control of at least one house of Congress this coming week. To lose control of the House is more likely and probably to be expected, and while losing formal control of the Senate is bad, the combination of the filibuster and the intransigence of two specific “Democrats” makes as little difference as can be imagined. The bigger issue, honestly, is that loss of either house increases the odds of a default on the national debt, thanks to the Republican willingness to hold the debt ceiling hostage (as exemplified in the near miss of 2011, which cost the country its AAA rating).

The problem is, the Republicans are fundamentally a stupid party. Theirs is a cult that worships stupidity. Hooked up to a lie detector and shot full of sodium pentathol, Mitch McConnell would probably freely admit that a default from debt ceiling failure would be a disaster for the American economy, but the majority of his party does not understand and does not care, and if they did, would probably be confident that it could be pinned on Biden. And the sad thing is, with the incompetent catamites of the press, they are probably correct.

We are at war. We have been at war for eight years now, ever since GamerGate. We are at war with the kleptocracy, we are at war with the Jackpot, we are at war with the manifold arms of international Neo-fascism whether in Brazil, Russia, Israel, the UK or the Deep South and Middle West. We need to be on a wartime footing, economically as well as morally and ethically. We have one party in this country that is an avowed foe of democracy as a concept, and the only moral position is to oppose them at all costs. Maybe it means you have to accept higher taxes. Maybe it means you don’t get a public option for national health insurance. The only thing that matters at this point is that we not lose our democracy to a minoritarian force of bigots defending unbridled wealth.

Losing Twitter is a bit on the nose. A system in which an apartheid trustafarian can simply buy out a major social network is not a healthy system – although it looks like he’s already sinking under the weight of his own incompetence and indifference to law. Would that others of his ilk could be similarly encumbered- the big question of the next two years will be “are we willing to let criminals slide because it would look political to prosecute them.”

It’s a lot to deal with, even in a world where unexpected threats and troubles aren’t waiting to step backward out of the fourth dimension without notice to try to slit your throat. I can hardly be forgiven for experimenting with CBD (which as it turns out is no help whatsoever) and meditative deep breathing (which only works for as long as you keep doing it). Better to try to focus into escape – into Lego Star Wars Castaways, into Watched Walker, into anyplace where reality can be shut out for an hour or four and you can imagine yourself in a world without an unpleasant surprise around every corner.

And yet…Mastodon is taking off. Signal will release Stories publicly within a week or so. Christmas is on the way. The cool and damp and dark of winter are upon us, and for three or four months it will be possible to go into a bar and not worry about still being daylight when you come back out. If I can just hang on until I turn 51, somehow, maybe there will be some hope at the next checkpoint.

Wouldn’t that be something.

The spectacle of the last month or so of UK politics has been something else. Liz Truss becomes prime minister, is immediately put on hold for a couple weeks because of the Queen’s death and mourning, and then sends her handpicked Chancellor out to deliver a budget that looks like the wet dream of a Mises Institute freshman at Auburn – and naturally, the markets reacted as any moron would expect. Massive tax cuts financed by borrowing at a time of runaway inflation – for the second time in as many decades, the Tories have looked at an economic crisis and run 180 degrees the wrong way with it.

And now, after a round beating, the much-reviled Jeremy “Rhymes With” Hunt (as he is known to half of Parliament) ones on as the new Chancellor, basically to serve as Acting Prime Minister while Truss sits quietly in the corner, saved only by the fact that yet another leadership contest – the second in a year and third in three – would be a calamity. Projections right now suggest that if there were to be a general election tomorrow, it would be an extinction-level event for the Conservative and Unionist party, with a real risk that Labour would have over 500 members and that the official opposition would be either the LibDems or the SNP, numerically speaking. In short, Liz Truss has shat the bed so hard and fast that it created a sonic boom.

And yet, there is no accountability for at least one year and maybe two. No general election is required before the end of 2024, and by rule, the Tories can’t challenge the leadership for twelve months – although that rule can certainly be changed. Which points up the fact that Truss was chosen not by the electorate, but by the membership of the Party – which is to say, a country and economy the size of California had its new leader selected by the population of Sunnyvale.

This is no way to run a democracy. Which is a Hell of a thing to say coming from a country where the Senate is inherently undemocratic – a place where 41 Senators from states with a combined population of maybe a fifth of the country can sink anything they don’t like beneath the waves, where 58-42 is a loss for the 58, where a state with a smaller population than San Jose can have more Senators than Representatives. Never mind the ways the Senate has been used to corrupt the Supreme Court almost beyond recognition, or roadblock the policies of a duly elected administration – the only window in which the Democrats have been able to work their will in the last two decades without resorting to reconciliation was a tiny window in autumn 2009 when they had sixty Senators. And even then, you’re limited by what will pass one guy from Nebraska.

This is no way to run a democracy. The rules are supposed to be “one person, one vote”, and that is what the 14th amendment more or less dictated and the Voting Rights act tried to enforce. The enthronement of the states as individually sovereign facilitated gerrymandering for centuries, and as it becomes apparent that the current model of bigotry-defending-wealth Christian nationalism does not enjoy popular support, we are watching in real time as its adherents in the South and elsewhere work to openly bend the rules to preserve their power in the face of popular opposition.

The late Jean-Bethke Elshtain, who I had the privilege of studying under at Vanderbilt however briefly, wrote a book while I was there called Democracy On Trial in which she decried the evolution of politics from opponents to enemies. Once can practice politics with opponents, she argues, but only war with enemies. The events of the last 30 years have basically served to put American – indeed, global – democracy on trial, as everyone from China to Russia to Hungary to Donald Trump makes a case for oligarchy, for prejudice and racism harnessed in the defense of the wealthy and powerful, and we are losing that fight. Badly.

There is only one issue on the ballot. Do you want to live in a democracy or not? If you do, vote for a Democrat. Vote for all the Democrats. Any other choice, in 2022, is a white flag in the face of the enemies of democracy.

It took a couple of Lego Star Wars games and a work policy modification to make me realize the extent to which the iPad has become my personal computer. The security configuration was changed to allow Universal Control to work at last, with the result that there is no personal anything on my work computer any longer – my RSS, Slack, Twitter, etc etc are all on the adjacent iPad mini and I can just mouse over. Then, after hours, it’s Lego Star Wars Castaways, which is a simple MMO probably aimed at a younger audience, but which hits all the marks for me.*

The thing is, this is such a more useful combination. I could have the 6.1” iPhone, a hair bigger screen than my iPhone X was, but it’s too much for a phone and not enough for an iPad. Instead, the iPhone 13 mini is perfect for everyday carry, but the iPad mini is ideally suited to travel in a way an an actual laptop would not be. I can do desktop-style browsing on it, up to and including actual work (I have done things from a tiki bar that prevented having to run right home, or worse, try to muddle it out on a 5.4” screen). And in a pinch, it fits into many of my jackets, and that ain’t hay.

The main thing, I suppose, is that I don’t pull up the laptop after hours. And I mostly don’t take the phone out on the couch either. I said a while back that it feels like the iPad has become Apple’s default solution, with the iPhone a subset and the Mac a superset that adds the command line layer – and lately, it feels like the iPad is the computer in a way that fits the same future-feel as the electric crossover in the driveway. Not for nothing, I can’t remember the last time I needed to get on the old iMac to do anything at all. (Having the ability to print wirelessly from the iPad is a significant thing.)

And the 8-inch display is big enough to be immersive. I’ve watched television on it without a fight. It’s easy to read with or without the glasses. It is the home pub night device for sure, with all the music and reading options available without the temptation and distraction of the phone. All by itself, it obviates the need for the phone and the Kindle and the scratch pad in one awkward heap.

So yeah, this was a good present. From London to Pismo to Disneyland, it’s gotten the job done and I’m grateful for it.

* Castaways is a Lego Star Wars game that takes place in what can only be described as a seaside village on a beach planet, in which you can run around doing simple tasks or play recreations of major settings in the original Star Wars trilogy – and you can do it alone or with ad-how groups, rather than needing the laborious “this is just a second job!”-type stylings of Work of Warcraft. You can’t beat two or three forms of escape at once, especially when it’s free with your Apple One subscription.

In the summer of 1997, after flunking out but before getting a permanent job, I had a temp gig at a large fossil fuel company in Birmingham, Alabama. One of my duties was to walk to Bromberg’s, the most prestigious jeweler in Birmingham, to collect a paper bag that contained Rolex watches for presentation to employees who would be marking their 25th anniversary with said company that month.

A couple of months later, after a sojourn in Akron, Ohio of all places, I found myself in my unfurnished apartment in Arlington, Virginia, on the night of September 14, 1997. And I looked at a map, and realized for the first time that I didn’t have to take the orange line to Metro Center and change for the red line for Farragut North, I could just get out at Farragut West and walk one extra block and save fifteen minutes and ten cents. That’s how clueless I was on the eve of my first day of work as an IT professional at the National Geographic Society.

I don’t know where I expected to be after 25 years. As early as a month before actually starting the job, when it was still a wisp of hope, I thought about the prospects offered by Apple’s acquisition of NeXT and the move to a net-centric computing world, and fleetingly thought that maybe some day I could do my job by remote control from a laptop in the woods somewhere. As it happens, my first attempt only took five years, and for the last 30 months I have done my entire job from a laptop in my house. So that much, at least, came to pass.

I hadn’t thought that far ahead, really. Just as grad school happened because I didn’t know what else to do after college, once I had the first permanent job, I didn’t think about where the next one might come from. it certainly never occurred to me that it would be Apple itself, let alone in Silicon Valley. But then, it never occurred to me that I’d spend a decade in the same employer only to find myself reset, laid off and rehired for the same job by a different payroll operator, and then be functionally abandoned during the pandemic.

I know no one stays at the same job for 25 years any more, but I look around at other people my age who have managed to stick to only a couple of jobs, who have risen to be managers or directors or vice-presidents or best of all, indispensable individual contributions who are compensated accordingly. I have no idea whether my employer values the work I do at all, and ample reason to think it hasn’t occurred to them one way or the other, and that in a pinch I could find myself unemployed as an accidental reflexive shrug of cost-cutting by someone who hasn’t looked at what the line items actually do.

It’s times like this that I regret not having completed the PhD. A masters’ degree is largely a waste of time because it doesn’t really come with any sort of recognition. If you have a doctorate, people are obligated to at least take that seriously, which explains why the hucksters and con artists are always rushing to show off their degree-mill credential. If I’d accrued some sort of military rank, or had a title of nobility that didn’t come via mail order from Sealand, or at least had the eye and ear of the CEO and the gushing approval of their assistant, I might feel like I was on more solid ground and that my work was worthwhile.

As it is, it feeds the Enneagram 6-ness of it all. “I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE! (I am, right?)” as the gag went in DC, where I never once questioned who I was as a person or how I was doing professionally. Even when it was unheralded by the powers that be, I knew I was doing a Hell of a job, as was my crew. Now, who knows. When the only people who get recognition are the same half-witted service desk phone operators who can’t read a knowledge base article or remember a procedure for three days running, you begin to wonder if maybe you’re not the one who isn’t up to snuff somehow.

I do remember that about a month in, I told a group of students at the University of Iowa that my job was as easy and rewarding as picking up money in the street. There were harder days for sure, days and weeks where I swore I was going to quit, and all because everyone above my manager was lined up attempting to vanquish him, me and us – despite the fact that the CEO and almost all the users swore by us. but for seven years, we were the lords of the earth, and we feared no evil.

In some way, everything I’ve done professionally since has been an attempt to capture some of that again. I’m way too old for running tickets, in a world where desktop support can be done from the end of a phone unless the computer is on fire, but I still need to be The Man, still need to prove that I do know what I’m doing and you should listen to me and afford my crew and myself the respect and consideration we’ve earned.

But I can say this: I’m definitely not five years away from being able to retire, which is something I absolutely would have believed in at the time. Not even ten years, and I would have sworn I would be able to hang it up at age 60 after a long and distinguished career at…something.

I’d hate to think I’m going to end up doing 25 years at this place.

That’s what it is, honestly.

Elizabeth II came to the throne in the aftermath of the Second World War, burn into an era where the British Empire bestrode the world like Colossus, linked by the Red Line telegraph and the undisputed master of the seas. She leaves a United Kingdom that barely rates the name, where Scotland and Northern Ireland are both edging toward the door, where Brexit has severed the links to Europe, where the 52/48 dynamic and twelve years of ossified Tory rule has combined with plague, economic distress and political upheaval to produce a sense that this really is the end of the line.

The Queen was a coelacanth of an earlier era: an age of deference, respect, tradition, where she knew from a young age that she would spend her entire life as the main employee of Monarchy LLC. Her greatness came from the fact that she faced her duty without complaint or shirking, something that is unimaginable in the modern era. It’s something her heir was unable to manage – the divorce and the death of Diana was arguably the greatest peril for the institution of the Royal Family since Oliver Cromwell, and as for Charles—

Actually, spare a thought for Charles, who finally has the job he never wanted and had to train and wait for his entire life, and has to assume it at a moment of utter grief in how he got it, and whose history – the outspoken opinions, the troubled personal life, a life in tabloids – suggests that the Crown under his rule will not enjoy the same residual respect his mother clung to from the war era. Indeed, it’s hard to see anyone bringing that sort of gravitas any longer in the 21st century.

This is a hard blow for the UK, to be certain, and it might be a diminution they don’t come back from. It’s going to be a very tough winter – real 1970s style – and the confluence of so much at once does rather shake the foundations. The 21st century has finally fully arrived for Britain. They might not be happy it has.

If anything an even less consequential Apple event than the year before. Like the iPad mini last year, though, the one thing that I might be in the market for in future was shown: the Apple Watch Ultra. It’s not something I need right away, by far, but when the time comes to get a new Apple Watch, why wouldn’t I go for the biggest screen and the biggest battery by far? Especially given how battery life has always been the Achilles heel of the Apple Watch.

Other than that, nothing of consequence. The non-Pro phones have the same base processor as my beloved iPhone 13 mini, so there’s no incentive to upgrade whatsoever. If the only options are 6.1” and 6.7”, you may as well get the Pro at this point. The AirPods are an incremental bump, one unnecessary since I got my warranty replacements in London in March. When you have a mature product line, improvements are incremental at best.

The nice thing is that four months on, I still love my iPhone 13 mini. I even love the silicone case. It’s the perfect device, my favorite phone since the original SE six years ago. If I had it to do over, I’d’ve bought it in time for London, but as it is, I intend to ride it directly into the ground, especially if the notional SE4 turns out to be based on the iPhone XR as is threatened.

Now all I need is for Apple to integrate Announcements ™ into Messages sooner than later, if Signal isn’t gonna shift Stories in 2022…

Everyone gets safe passage across the Styx.

Although this feels like the final ending of the 20th century once and for all.

If you go back on the web forums, bits and pieces of the Stories functionality in Signal were cropping up on the GitHub back in March. This has been in the works for over six months, seems like. But it might be imminent. Four weeks ago, the release notes for a bug fix release included “more exciting changes on the horizon” and this past week, changed to include “plans for the future.” This seems like it might be, if not imminent, at least close enough to allude to.

That’s going around, honestly. Another example is the breakfast and lunch place that’s been “coming this spring” for eight months now – it would be nice to have a spot walking distance from home and not bike or driving distance, but there’s no date certain associated with it. Then there’s Pixelfed, which might be a viable Instagram replacement but needs something to precipitate uptake. Then there’s the open-ended question of whether Twitter is going to have to go away depending on whether the courts hold Phony Stark to his waived due diligence for the purchase of a company that appears to be burning down in its own shit.

And then there’s work. Which, in the last couple of months, has turned a corner. I’m finally able to actually do the job instead of just talking about what we would do if we were allowed to do the job. And we’ve been rolling. And the result is…crickets. No recognition. No acknowledgement. Nothing to say our current work arrangement is permanent or even open-ended. We don’t exist to the powers that be, and there’s no guarantee that pushing back would even get us anything other than trouble.

It’s a difficult way to live. It was always possible to believe that we only had to somehow survive through 2020 and we’d have a chance. It was possible to get through to the new house and new car because there were deals signed and papers exchanged, even if the precise dates were nebulous at times. My sister is fond of saying that you can endure anything that comes with an end date. But the open ended promise of something that may never show up, let alone by a date certain – it’s like the experience as a kid of being told that maybe we can go to the mall today, and never actually going.

In a lot of ways, it feels like we’ve crossed a nodal point, at least as much as was ever promised. We have a Democrat in the White House, for the time being. We are mostly on the back side of the pandemic, at least enough to go to London or Pismo or Disneyland. We are moved into the new house, with the EV in the driveway. I’m still 100% remote for the foreseeable future, and I’d even be willing to take that down to 95% in exchange for permanence. I’ve made it to 50, enough to be very self-conscious of Being Fifty and trying to be honest about what in life is realistic at this point. For the first time in fifteen years or so, the dull moment might actually be possible – so long as you focus on the moment.

But there’s still a lot to “radically accept.” The biggest thing is, as William Gibson said, time moves in one direction and memory in another. The toughest thing was radically accepting that the college thing is dead and there is no point trying to remediate it, and giving up on things that no longer sparked joy in an attempt to reinvent that. There are things that have become less essential now that they are harder and more expensive to do – the default pub night is at home, even though there won’t be a way to combine a comfy seat and low light until late October at the earliest. The old options – the comfy leather chair at Trials on Sunday evening, or the live trad at O’Flaherty’s at the same time – are simply no longer available.

There is a thing I told myself years ago about the importance of stopping trying to be who you were and let yourself become who you are. The addendum I would throw on there now is not to try to force it too much. At fifty you have to accept some of the dictates of reality and ask why you would even want to live like you did at 30 any more. Or, to borrow a line from the franchise that has defined my life in so many ways, “the belonging you see is not behind you, but in front of you.”

And let’s be honest – half a life on from the beginning of my IT career, I have the things that seemed aspirational at the beginning. I’m a system administrator who never has to wear socks and can do all my work remotely. I took for granted that under such circumstances, my employer would value my work, but that might be too much to ask. But for as long as I can make it happen, I’m going to try to enjoy it and use it to make possible the rest of a life I want to have.

That’s a wrap on blog year 16. Next year, a third of my life in one place. That’s…something.

Onward.

It came to me in a dream, honestly. The notion that one would walk the mall with one’s friends is not something I got from popular culture, because popular culture didn’t reach the exurbs of Alabama in 1983. I literally had a dream that I and some of my classmates (notice I don’t say friends) were at Century Plaza, in an era when that was still the premier mall in Greater Birmingham. Western Hills Mall, Eastwood Mall – both still broadly feasible, but neither as equipped as Century Plaza for my needs, which in the early era meant a toy store, an arcade, a bookstore and a music shop.

Three years later, the Riverchase Galleria opened. And it blew every other place away – a quarter mile long, skylights and atrium with neon lights, aBanana Republic with a Jeep sticking through the window, two bookstores, two record shops, a Macy’s! – to the point that I stopped going anywhere else. Inasmuch as I could, obviously – I was two years from a drivers license and on the wrong side of Birmingham to get there without begging my parents. But it was something that approximated a future life – it was walkable. You could go from shop to shop to dining to just hanging around, all day and all night. I fantasized about the kind of wealth that would let me live in the top floor of the attached hotel or office tower (I was getting through a lot of Fantastic Four at the time).

There was one other smaller mall, closest to school and with a 70s Brutalist feel that was almost subterranean, but once I could drive it was the easiest stop from school. It was an obvious hangout, albeit a solitary one. It and the Gal were the only malls I frequented through the end of college. Largely because there was little enough else to do.

In Nashville, the malls were at the cardinal points of the compass, and diverse in audience – Green Hills, my local, was most posh, and Rivergate was a touch downmarket, but the others all covered a pretty broad array (with the additional novelty at Bellevue) and I could find most anything I was looking for – which by this point was mainly hats, jerseys, Nikes and outerwear. Music came from Tower Records and books from Davis-Kidd or Bookstar, and hanging out was for the Overcup Oak or SATCO.

By the time I was in DC, malls like Tysons Corner or Pentagon City were mainly for movies or dinner. It didn’t take long for music stores to become irrelevant in the digital era, and a good tobacconist was as important as anything else. It didn’t hurt to have the very first Apple Store open in Tyson’s either. Once I got to California, the mall was only interesting for a couple of years, and only out of habit.

Which brings us to today. With one exception, there are two types of malls in Silicon Valley: upscale luxury malls and demolished malls. Valley Fair, Stanford Shopping Center and Santana Row are all explicitly dialed in on big money, especially the Chinese tourism market. Sunnyvale Town Center, Tanforan and Vallco are closed or rubble. Hillsdale is going upscale. The lone holdout, so far, is Oakridge Mall in San Jose, which has gone broad church: Target as an anchor store, a food court and a movie theater, ethnic shopping and local ownership alongside more major national chains, and a willingness to cater to customers larger than size 4 or poorer than a quarter-million a year.

The Amazon bomb did for the malls. Did for most retail, honestly. I never thought I would be willing to shop for clothing online, but between American Giant and LC King, it’s gotten pretty simple. Socks from Bombas, drawers from Made Here, and as much as I don’t want to use Amazon, it’s basically the search engine for commercial goods. But more than that – I’ve spent most of a quarter century living with public transport, major cities, walkable downtowns of varying sizes. If all I get from a mall any more is lunch or coffee, there are plenty of options in Menlo Park or Mountain View or San Jose, and much better loitering.

The mall, in the 80s, was a set of training wheels for a bigger world. The problem was when I didn’t have anything else in Birmingham for years and years to provide the grown-up version. I suppose one of the reasons I have a hard time feeling fifty is because I didn’t accumulate fifty years’ worth of living. Maybe when I say it’s not the years, it’s the mileage, it’s because the mileage is lower than it ought to be. And more highway miles than city, to my cost.

There is too much. July hasn’t been much of a posting month, partly because of…well, reasons, but let’s try to take out the trash before July ends:

• Boris Johnson goes, far too late. On the bright side, the Tories are at least capable of realizing they made a mistake in ways the GOP is not. But now we will see how much they are in thrall to the ERG, the DUP and the alphabet soup of reactionary assholes intent on ruining the world if they can’t stay in charge forever.

• The real pain in the ass in all this is the DUP. They are holding Northern Ireland hostage to get results they could not obtain at the ballot box – and a coalition of Sinn Fein and non-sectarian parties is being kept from office because they are not willing to endure a world in which someone else has the upper hand. This plays perfectly into Tory hands, seeking to use Northern Ireland to extort from the EU what could not be had in negotiation and hold 25 years of the peace process hostage in hopes of achieving full cake-ism and a permanent back door into the EU. To be protected but not bound, while others are bound but not protected: it’s the definition of what it means to be a conservative in the 21st century.

• We’ve been a long time getting to this point. It really began in the 80s, when Reagan and Thatcher teamed up to say that there is no such thing as society, nothing we owe to other people, and it is perfectly all right to act as if such is the case. Forty years later, with no one having ever successfully pushed back against it, we now have an entire generation or two that has internalized this as the normal state of things, and a cohort of assholes pushing ever harder in the direction of “I must never be responsible to anyone ever.” To a large extent, the internet has made this worse, especially a generation whose parents weren’t online or were misguided enough to think that the internet wasn’t the real world. Meanwhile, “I don’t have to know or care there are other people” is the driving value system of America despite never seeming to have the most votes.

• I don’t have an answer, because there isn’t one. All there is any more is trying not to think too hard about it and desperately trying not to invite tomorrow’s trouble in before today. If there’s nothing you can do to stave it off, the best thing to do is save your powder, not soak in it, and preserve your strength and sanity until you can do something about it. Which was easier in July than in June, for obvious reasons, but it didn’t hurt that I had two major life incidents along the way. Of which.