Are my eyes really blue?

When I was in grad school, I had a pager. It was a cheap little Motorola thing, which if memory serves was free with something like ten Mountain Dew bottle labels (which I could easily produce in, like, an evening) and it was meant to be the key to some sort of promotional program. As it happens, it was also keyed to the local area (as most such devices were at the time) and was no good outside of Nashville. I didn’t give the number to my then-girlfriend, because the last thing I needed was for her to be able to ping me anywhere, but I didn’t really have anyone else to give the number, either.

I mention this because I’m still keeping Tuesday night as shutdown night – turn off the laptop, put away the iPhone, switch off the wireless on the Kindle, and limit myself to whatever’s on TV or what’s in a book or magazine or (gasp) actually go out and do something. And for those nights, I have my backup phone and my Google Voice number, which only a couple of people have so that I can be reached in an emergency. And the thought went through my mind last night that an actual pager would be a handy thing to have for such evenings – nothing even that complicated, just numeric paging and maybe voice mail. And then it occurred to me that while the old black plastic Dew Beep pager was nice, it might be even nicer to have one of the sleeker translucent-colored-plastic Motorola models from later in the 90s, or the elusive one-line-text Motorola Jazz…

And then I look at my Moto F3, or my Nokia 1112, and it occurs to me that there are things I used to covet which I still DO covet, despite the presence of technology that’s far in advance of them which I already possess. I mean, with an iPhone 4, there’s very little need for a Sony Ericsson K710. And the iPhone will run freakin’ rings around any old Blackberry-style keyboarded device like the $100-ish Nokia I was looking at for an emergency iPhone replacement when I thought my wife had lost hers. And hell, the iPhone pummels the old second-gen metal-case iPod Nano (or the original gold-metal iPod Mini). But I still would jump at the chance to grab either of them.

Actually, now that I think about it, there are bits of me that still perk up at the notion of the PowerBook 1400, the first “low-end” PowerPC-based portable Mac (which replaced the nightmare-inducing PowerBook 5300 series). Or the shiny silver Siemens S40 phone that I saw in a Cingular shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto, in June 2002, which really tripped my “I must get to GSM as quickly as possible” urge. Which in turn points my mind back to PowerTel, in the days when GSM was wildly new and unheard of – the notion that you could pop this credit-card out of your phone and put it in ANOTHER phone and carry right on? MADNESS.

Maybe this is what passes for a mid-life crisis for me. Other guys run out and get hair plugs, motorcycles and Hooters waitresses – yer boy slumps in his chair and covets a pager.

[T]rust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked…

The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday…

Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself…

Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s…

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young…

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth…

When Mary Schmich’s column in the Chicago Tribune was published in June of 1997, I didn’t see it. In fact, I first ran across it when Baz Luhrmann remixed the Romeo + Juliet version of “Everybody’s Free” with the whole column spoken over it, and Lou Brutus played it one morning on HFS in the spring of 1999.

It was too late, of course. Those were things I needed to hear then, and still need to remind myself now – but when I really needed to hear them was in 1990, and again in 1997. In one case I was headed into higher education, and in the other I was being cast out of it. When I first walked the aisle in a mortarboard and gown, it was secure in the knowledge that I was headed to bigger and better things; when I left my old apartment for the last time – fourteen years ago this week – it was staring into an abyss: 25 years old, academic career prematurely terminated, six thousand bucks in credit card debt and no prospects for employment beyond “office temp”.

It staggers me to think that I’ve now been out of higher ed twice as long as I was in it – hell, that I’ve been out of it longer than I was preparing for it. You’d think that pushing 40 (or reeeeeally dragging 30) would mean that your college years were no longer definitional, but in some ways I’m still living in the shadow of decisions that were made in 1989, for better or worse. In one way, fourteen years doesn’t seem like nearly enough for how long it’s been – but at the same time, when the light’s right and the wrong song comes on the iPhone, I tend to forget I’m not twenty-something years old.

The point of all this is that graduation is completely the 180-degree-opposite time to be offering advice for the future. College is the real world, even if it’s not the whole world – and it’s a warning you need well before you arrive, not an admonition once you’re departing.

Yes, I have the same shirt on I had that day. It’s a nice shirt. Durable. Also has the logo in the old font, which I like better. Classic.

The funniest thing ever would be if Seth Meyers opened Weekend Update with a graphic of Bin Laden and said “Well don’t I feel like a jackass now.” and waited for the 3-minute crowd pop to die down. Come on, it’s NYC. You had to know they would go batshit. DC too. Hell, I wish I could have been there.

My big hope out of all this is that maybe it’s going to be an end to the September 12 mentality. No more pants-shitting terror, no more blind panic, but a calm, reasoned evaluation of the threat and the response. Terrorists are not Magneto, they are not vampires or zombies, and they can be handled in a rational manner by government and public alike. I have to say that the most gratifying thing about this operation was that it was a long play with the CIA and military working hand-in-glove, something that hasn’t happened before – and instead of rushing in on the eve of the elections in November to score points, they took their time and waited until they could do it right.

That is how you get to say Mission Accomplished.

As I said on EDSBS last night, this isn’t the championship, this is just one win in a long and grueling season. But it’s a big win, and we’re going to take a day to smoke and lift a glass to absent friends. We can get back to grinding tomorrow when the moment’s over.

Every September 11, I’ve dinged the President for unfinished business. Today the loop is closed.

The damage is done, obviously. Thousands dead on September 11, thousands more dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a pretty dismal decade in terms of response. What with the kid-chasing-a-soccer-ball approach to airport security, the quagmire of Saddam Hussein, the overwhelming stench of fear that fed the Stupids for years…it’s not the solution to all our problems by a long shot. But it does provide a pivot point – if the administration decided that we could start drawing down troops in Afghanistan now, it would be a hell of a lot easier to get away with. Maybe we can move on that – it would be nice.

But right now, all I can think about is Ann and Joe, who we lost on the plane that hit the Pentagon, and my friends, who all got up on the morning of September 12 and posted on time and on target while the Pentagon continued to burn, and my wife, who moved TO Washington less than two months later despite everything.

It’s a really good night.

The last time I was in New Orleans was for a wedding in February 2006. It was two months delayed because of the big K, when the bride and groom evacuated with the dress safely tied up in a trash bag. The streetcars weren’t running, the only people in our hotel besides wedding guests were SBC workers restoring phone connections, and I was able to walk up to Arnaud’s in jeans at 8 PM without a reservation…and get seated immediately.

The only repeats this time, I believe, were Cafe Du Monde (of course) and the Carousel Bar. I have come to the conclusion that most Sazeracs outside New Orleans are far too unsubtle about the bitters and the absinthe (or Herbsaint or Pernod or whatever). It’s a rye whiskey cocktail; you should be able to taste the rye, and both Carousel and a new-to-me place called Cure did a phenomenal job. (Although I think a trip to Bourbon and Branch for a refresher drink is in order soon.) New pickups included Crabby Jack’s for po-boys, Port of Call for burgers, and Cafe Atchafalaya for Easter brunch, complete with build-your-own-Bloody-Mary bar. A success, even if the bartender couldn’t tell what’s in a Cuba Libre.

Perhaps it helped to be primed by Mobile, but New Orleans – especially in and around the Garden District – felt old. More than in years past, I felt the reason the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland is in New Orleans Square – or why Blue Bayou is the opening of Pirates of the Caribbean. The image of a big old house, with the gaslamp still hanging and flickering in front of the door on one side, with porches top and bottom – yeah. That was cool.

New Orleans strikes me as a place where socializing is critical. Yes, there’s amazing food, phenomenal drink, awesome music – but you are clearly meant to go out and do these things with people. A solitary sort of person, I think, is going to struggle with the lifestyle. By contrast, I think I would do remarkably well there as long as I knew plenty of people, because if your favorite principal form of recreation is hanging out, you could hardly do better than the 504. Not for the first time did I wonder how things would have been different if I’d done as many of my high school fellows did and decamped for the city that is both the South’s Las Vegas and its San Francisco at once.

Easter Sunday itself was interesting. Holy Name, on the campus of Loyola University, has learned a great deal more than many places I’ve been when it comes to handling large crowds for Holy Communion on the big days. I’ve never seen a church that size turn over so many parishioners at once. But even more than that – and more than the impressive array of big hats and seersucker – the whole Mass had, well, a triumphal feel to it. Exactly the sort of feeling that you should have expected from what is essentially Christianity’s Rose Bowl national championship moment. It was…uplifting.

Even the heat and humidity didn’t bother me as much, largely because I knew damn well I was going to New Orleans. 85 degrees and sticky is acceptable for a city built below sea level on the Gulf Coast, especially in late April. It’s NOT acceptable in the Bay Area when I pay a ridiculous amount of money to avoid just that sort of thing, which is probably why I’m indoors right now with the lights off to avoid the beating of the direct sun from a cloudless sky. Yes, DSC-in-law, it will get plenty hot out here, fear not.

I have to say, too, it looks like getting fully stuck into supporting the New Orleans Saints is going to be an easy jump, now that they’ve added a Heisman winner from Alabama and a Cal sack machine in the first round. Throw the satellite radio into the mix, add the fact that my Redskins bar is no more and consider the possibility that Sonny and Sam might not be on the mike when the football starts up again…well, I already own plenty of black and gold. While there is no cure for Redskins herpes, adding a football team that’s having some success to the current crop of WTF in the house might make the autumn easier to take (since that’s the real warm season in these parts).

Would I go back? Yeah, I would. I could think of a lot worse places to winter…

I don’t know why Tuscaloosa always seems to be in the path of the worst spring storms in the state, but they got pretty much nuked a couple days ago. Our friends at the Magic City Post are curating links and information; in the meantime, the simple expedient of texting REDCROSS to 90999 will put $10 where it can do some good in a hurry. Meanwhile, Nick Saban handing out drinks and Gene Stallings flipping burgers for relief workers proves that Alabama spirit is frequently good for more than just talk radio and unfortunate taste in home decor.

Roll Tide, 205. Stay strong. At least four of your sons are better able to contribute than they were yesterday morning, at least. =)

Fortunately James Fallows has spared me the hassle and inconvenience of writing the definitive breakdown of Obama’s impromptu chat this morning. The point he makes – which is entirely accurate and without error – is that this wasn’t about the birthers at all. This was about administering a restaurant-quality smackdown to the idiots of the press who let themselves be led around by the nuts by a reality TV character with a dead animal stapled to his scalp.

The key line for me is in the opening graf, where the President mentions the fact that Chuck (presumably Chuck Todd of NBC) commented that he couldn’t believe the President was going to be out there not talking about national security (on a day when Leon Panetta moves to Defense and Devid Petraus becomes CIA director). Obama’s reply? “I would not have the networks breaking in if I was talking about that, Chuck, and you know it.”

Okay, now show me on the doll where the President BITCH SLAPPED YOUR NETWORK, SON.

NBC has not shirked from feeding the beast, because Donald Trump is a featured part of their “entertainment” programming. I say “entertainment” because nobody remembers the last time NBC produced anything entertaining that didn’t involve Aaron Sorkin or Tina Fey. But sure enough, there goes a guy whose presidential aspirations were a joke two decades ago – and he’s getting treated as if his opinions were somehow more germane to American life than, say, that bouffant-ed orange traffic cone on Jersey Shore.

Trump is NBC’s baby. They put this jackass on our screen. And they allowed this nonsense to run, and fed it themselves, because they needed the attention. Which is what makes it entirely appropriate that Chuck Todd – who is and always has been in over his head as an actual political correspondent – got the back of Obama’s hand today.

But this is not the end of it. Trump’s not going away. He’s got attention and people taking him seriously despite the fact that anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows that Donald Trump cannot and will not be President, ever. And as long as people continue to do so, we will continue to have nonsense like this – today, tomorrow, and forever. Because our media validates stupidity. Our media treats stupid as a legitimate point of view. Our media caters to stupid. And until this changes, we are going to continue to be plagued by the kind of people who make it impossible to ever take the word “retarded” out of our vocabulary.

Hello, everybody. Now let me just comment, first of all, on the fact that I can’t get the networks to break in on all kinds of other discussions. I was just back there listening to Chuck. He was saying, “It’s amazing that he’s not going to be talking about national security.”

I would not have the networks breaking in if I was talking about that, Chuck, and you know it.

As many of you have been briefed, we provided additional information today about the site of my birth.

Now, this issue has been going on for two, two and a half years now. I think it started during the campaign. And I have to say that over the last two and a half years I have watched with bemusement, I have been puzzled at the degree to which this thing just kept on going.

We’ve had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican, every news outlet that has investigated this confirm that, yes, in fact, I was born in Hawaii August 4th, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital. We’ve posted the certification that is given by the state of Hawaii on the Internet for everybody to see. People have provided affidavits that they, in fact, have seen this birth certificate.

And yet this thing just keeps on going.

Now, normally, I would not comment on something like this, because, obviously, there’s a lot of stuff swirling in the press at any given day and I’ve got other things to do.

But two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week, the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re going to have to make as a nation, it was about my birth certificate. And that was true on most of the news outlets that were represented here.

And so I just want to make a larger point here. We’ve got some enormous challenges out there. There are a lot of folks out there who are still looking for work. Everybody is still suffering under high gas prices. We’re going to have to make a series of very difficult decisions about how we invest in our future, but also get a hold of our deficit and our debt — how do we do that in a balanced way.

And this is going to generate huge and serious debates, important debates. And there are going to be some fierce disagreements. And that’s good; that’s how democracy is supposed to work.

And I’m confident that the American people and America’s political leaders can come together in a bipartisan way and solve these problems. We always have.

But we’re not going to be able to do it if we are distracted. We’re not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other.

We’re not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.

We live in a serious time right now, and we have the potential to deal with the issues that we confront in a way that will make our kids and our grandkids and our great grandkids proud. And I have every confidence that America in the 21st century is going to be able to come out on top just like we always have. But we’re going to have to get serious to do it.

Now, I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest. But I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press.

We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do. We got big problems to solve, and I’m confident we can solve them, but we’re going to have to focus on them, not on this.

Thanks very much, everybody.

This was the shortest run through Birmingham in years. No Dreamland, not so much as a Chick-Fil-A nugget, and less than twenty waking hours spent in the presence of my relations. Instead, the feature piece of this excursion was dinner and lodging with a friend from the old days at Redneck Hogwarts.

Dinner was at Little Savannah, the sort of hole-in-the-wall establishment that has transformed the 205 from a nightmare realm of meat-and-three cafeterias and Waffle Houses into the sort of food destination that rates travel articles in the New York Times. The proprietor came out, shook our hands, asked where we were from, and I politely demurred when she extolled our mutual connection to my undergraduate institution. The cocktails, though, I will claim in a heartbeat – one specific concoction called “The Sound and the Fury” included housemade allspice syrup and a stout reduction made from boiling down a locally-made beer that legally couldn’t have existed ten years ago. And it was a cocktail I could have carried into Bourbon and Branch, or Clock Bar, or Alembic, or singlebarrel, or Scratch, and placed on the bar and said “Your move, boys.”

Lodging was at a grand old house pushing eighty or ninety years of age, with a commanding view of downtown and all the potential that goes along with a grand old empty house. My friend knew the history of the place, of the whole neighborhood, and it’s always interesting to remember that Birmingham existed before Bull Connor and his cronies made it famous for something other than steel. Indeed, the old streetcar system was one of the biggest in North America at one point, and there are plenty of neighborhoods with their origins in “streetcar suburbs” (which, ironically, are now all considered far too urban by today’s suburbanites).

There was also plenty of reminiscing about the old days at Redneck Hogwarts. It wasn’t just my own team – it seems that everyone from the delegates to French Convention to the math competition nerds to our own varsity Argonauts were all of one mind: we will not be thwarted by a bunch of rich white kids in pleated khakis and Bama bangs. We had kind of a chip on our shoulder – both from being the public school’s weirdo rejects and from the spectacle of a bunch of seg-academy kids thinking they could buy their way into being smart – and we essentially became the academic competition world’s Oakland Raiders. Or Miami Hurricanes, come to that. And we’re still proud of it – anyone who was there during the transition from the old setup to the new one in the late 1990s will tell you with certainly that Alma Mater jumped the shark at that precise point, and some of us are still wearing high school rings instead of college. Even if we have more than one to choose from.

Breakfast on the way out was at a place called Over Easy – yes, a breakfast joint, and one that sat within yards of where a typical Waffle House-style establishment once did. But the new place offers hash baskets – a poached egg as the lid on your hash-brown-basket of organic local sausage – and such curiosities as blue corn grits and locally roasted coffee.

It’s not the same city as it used to be. Not by a long shot. And dropped out of a clear blue sky from 1990, I would have been happy to carry on there. But I didn’t have twenty years to wait for the future to arrive – and when the chance came, I didn’t think once, let alone twice.

Mobile was first settled in 1702. It was the capital of French Louisiana before New Orleans. It has the oldest Mardi Gras tradition in America. It’s the second largest metropolitan area in Alabama, and at the time of the Civil War was the fourth largest city of the Confederacy. And it was the first stop on the vacation excursion this year. It’s also as low in Lower Alabama as you can get, the spot where the coastal plain becomes the coast, and an exemplar of the historic, geographic and cultural divide between North and South Alabama.

I’ve described Mobile before as “methadone New Orleans,” and it’s an apt comparison. Our outpost there is garrisoned by displaced residents of the Crescent City, and they will concede the point. Mardi Gras aside, there’s a whole hell of a lot of antebellum architecture, not to mention more Catholicism than anywhere else in Alabama by a long shot. And seafood is a non-trivial concern, especially given the “jubilee” phenomenon when sea life spontaneously beaches itself in the early morning and you can walk off with bushel baskets of crabs and oysters for nothing more than showing up.

Mobile has also taken its licks from hurricanes. In my lifetime, the storm to swear by was Fredrick, in 1979, but Hurricane Ivan in 2004 didn’t do the city any favors either. Dauphin Island is the principal barrier island of Mobile Bay, and its hotel and condo construction seems to be rebuilt and smashed on about a 20-25 year cycle. Still, on a sunny weekday afternoon, it’s not the worst place to squish your toes in the sand and watch the water roll gently back and forth while defying Mary Schmich and Baz Luhrmann’s advice about sunscreen.

Mobile also seems pretty low-key and accessible – we just sort of free-rolled into VIP at “Club Insanity” (and then had to negotiate a bouncer to leave, WTF) – and the hipsters do the best they can with the beards and the earwear available to them. Still, downtown on a Saturday night seems a lot more San Jose than San Francisco…with some notable exceptions. (Here’s a hint: if you’re standing in line at a club and wearing a headband as a skirt so short I can see your soul from here, you need Jesus.) Still, there are plenty of spots where you can kick back with a beer and/or a burger and be just fine for hours on end (thinking of not only Esquire-Top-50-In-America bar Callahans, but the understated and exceptionally well-equipped O’Daly’s Pub). The utter lack of zoning also means that you’re as likely to walk into the next block and see an antebellum mansion, a quiet coffee shop, an exceptionally dodgy shuttered store, or a bar suitable for staggering home of an evening.

Mobile has a lot of money, and a lot of old money. Not surprisingly, it was the heart of GOP Alabama for decades at a time when such a thing was unthinkable (the vast array of Episcopalian churches calls to mind the description of that denomination as “the Republican Party at prayer”). Also not surprisingly, it evolved with two parallel and segregated Mardi Gras umbrella organizations – and the royalty of one race only began calling on the festivities of their opposite numbers in the past few years. And like too much of the South to this day, it’s the sort of place where someone like me would have to work hard to build the kind of bubble that would let me survive for very long. Which at some level explains why every move has been further away.

But then again, I know I always say the next move is New York or London, then Tokyo, then Mars – but I remember full well what it was like living in the ancestral lands without benefit of that bubble for the worse part of five years. (Of which more later.) It damn near finished me off, and I can’t fathom doing it now. So a useful object lesson for the times I think I might be happier in New York or London or the valleys of Switzerland – how badly would I need the bubble there?