Are my eyes really blue?

It turns out I wrote most of this article over a decade ago. I may as well pick up where I left off. Not long after the 0.38 G2 became a thing, I drifted into a Japanese stationery store at Santana Row and found a Uni-Ball retractable in 0.38mm, featuring a never-before-seen blue-black ink. And that immediately became my pen. Granted, I rarely actually needed a pen, but I snatched it up anyway – to the point that when I went to Japan in 2015, I raided Tokyo Hands for over a dozen of them, in both retractable and non-retractable varieties (including a couple of 0.28mm, which frankly are only good for tearing the paper, you may as well write with a razor blade).

And sometime in the last four years, I found a very agreeable stick rollerball at Muji, in the same blue-black and 0.38, for $1.49 each. I bought a handful of them, and good thing, because Muji seems to have gone by the boards. And in the meantime, my everyday carry pen became a brass retractable from Machine Era, an American company specializing in the kind of mechanical manufacturing that doesn’t often get done in the country any more. I have a bolt-action retractable in stainless steel that uses any Parker refill, and the smaller brass one that takes the mini-refill, and is optimized for travel abroad with a Moleskine notebook – and which incidentally works out ideally in a pandemic world as a germ-resistant means of poking buttons. After all, in a world where there’s one cup of pens or pencils that says “SANITIZED” and another that says “DIRTY”, how much better to pull out your own writing instrument where required?

I still keep the Moleskine notebooks for travel, but mostly haven’t used them domestically for years. Time was, that was how I did a brain dump, and in some ways I still do – my desk needs a legal pad and a pen for me to work out thoughts, make lists, diagram the flow of how I want things to work. It’s easier to make notes on the fly with Evernote or the Notes app on the phone, but for some reason, my brain just processes better if I have the weight of a pen in one hand (thus the particular appeal of the Machine Era pens) and a broad blank page to work with.

It still feels like a necessary implement. The world has worn the contents of my pocket down to keys, wallet and phone, plus my AirPods and handkerchief, and so many of the things I needed to carry in the past are either by the boards (headphones, iPod, lighter, pipe, Swiss Army knife) or no longer particularly useful (no need for the Leatherman on you when you never leave the house, and the pen can stay on the desk, and honestly for most of the past year everything but the phone could be left on top of the dresser most days without incident). 

But taking up that pen and pad feels like readiness. Like i’m preparing to think, to figure things out, to make notes, to create. I need a pen because deep down, who I am is someone that has need of a pen. 

Like any American kid, I were tennis shoes for years. Well, trainers, in the UK sense… because tennis gave way to cross-trainers to basketball high-tops. The only exceptions were the Rockport boots I wore to Central Europe in 1992 and a pair of cowboy boots gifted to me in 1995. And that was that, for the most part. But the 90s were the era of “Casual Friday” when you needed a smart step down from the suits and coats and ties of traditional business, and that meant something nicer than Nike.

I spent a good chunk of 1996 and 1997 looking for a suitable pair of brown shoes… Screw Frank Zappa, I needed adult footwear, and I genuinely don’t know what I did at work for the first couple of years before I was gifted my first pair of Dr Martens at Christmas of 1998. Somehow I had in mind that it was the appropriate footwear of an aspiring system administrator, and that I needed to make up for lost time in the 1980s. And that. began the streak – for over a decade, it was all Docs all the time. I ended up with over a dozen pair – high, low, sandals, square-toed, steel toed, you name it. They carried me from DC to Apple to NASA and beyond.

By 2012, I was wondering whether I needed to turn over a new leaf. Thus began a whole slew of new options over the next five years. I got Alden Indy boots for my birthday. I bought my first pair of chukkas, which were my last pair of Docs. I brought back Solovair and Lokes from the British Boot Company in Camden Town. I bought two pair of boat shoes for the first time in decades.

But in 2017, I grabbed a pair of steel toed Blundstones. I didn’t need them for any industrial purpose, but it felt necessary. In a world where the assholes had the upper hand from the train platform to the White House, I needed to touch some of what I had possessed in my 30s. And that’s when I realized the boots mean something.

But I haven’t had the need for a long time. For a year and a half, a pair of black plastic Birkenstocks have been all the footwear I require. And I feel the absence of the boots, because I want them propped on the rail of the bar. Or on the cobbles of a London backstreet. I want reason to need the boots, and I want to feel like I did in the old days when they were part of my uniform. Because back then, I did things. There were things to do. More than sitting around in circles waiting for life to begin again.

Hopefully it’s almost time to get on your boots.

There is no bottom. The modern 21st century GOP sinks ever deeper into militant redneckery, and in 2021 it’s worse than ever. And the alarming bit is that there is a common thread. On January 6, they attacked the Capitol in mob force in the belief that somehow they could stop the result of the Presidential election. In some Southern states, they have removed any legal obstacle to carrying concealed weapons. Most of the month of August was spent with crowds shouting down school board meetings and hospital emergency rooms. And then, Texas passed a law that essentially banned abortion, but enjoined the state from enforcing the law – instead empowering anyone else in the state to sue to enforce it.

The Republican party is now organized around the principle that mob rule by whites is the most valid form of government, and that the methods and process of electoral democracy should be subordinate to the demands of white mob rule, empowered by the threat of violence. The number of elected officials threatening a re-run of January 6 should be an alarm bell, as should the frequency with which quotidian local political operations are being disrupted by gangs of hyperactive Fox News consumers. All protected by the most prominent feature of white privilege: freedom from summary justice, the same protection that took Dylan Roof to Burger King but gunned down Elijah McCain and Trayvon Martin. To paraphrase PJ O’Rourke in another era, if this mob were criminals, they’d be poorer and darker skinned.

By contrast, imagine that we knew a batallion of ISIS were coming to attack the US Capitol on the day of the Electoral College vote count. Would they have been allowed to mass together up the street? Would they have been allowed a parade of speakers to agg them on? Would they have been let to fill the steps of the Capitol without resistance? Would they FUCK. The DC National Guard and active-duty military would have turned the west front into a sea of human gazpacho.

The GOP exists to legitimize violence by whites only. It’s past time to call them on it and do whatever is necessary to break it.

“try to remember the kind of September…”

2012.

For all my life, the arrival of autumn was the new beginning. Football season, back to school, the restoration of normal service after the abnormally hot and humid interlude of a Southern summer. And for most of the last ten years, it hasn’t meant anything but more heat, more misery, fires over a third of the state, and a reminder that things aren’t what they used to be.

But 2012 was actually a pretty good year. I made a trip home on short notice and hammered out the beginnings of, if not a peace treaty, a cease-fire with my relatives and first exposure to a new Birmingham that still intrigues me. I made a return to Vanderbilt for a football game for the first time in fifteen years, at a time when it felt like Vanderbilt football might improve to a seven-win program without having to compromise our values or sell our souls. We had friends nearby, close enough to call for dinner downtown without notice. I had a blood relation within fifty miles, for crying out loud. I had an out-of-band raise and recognition at work, even if it was starting to get a little annoying. And Cal had a newly remodeled stadium and the promise of “root hog or die” for Jeff Tedford, who as it turned out was way past his sell-by date.

The world was saner, too. Osama bin Laden was dead, the Senate was safely in Democratic hands, and there was no reason to feel like Obama could’t win in 2012. No virus. No Trump. It felt like 2000 could still be an anomaly, and that maybe a Presidential election going to the candidate without the most votes was a one-off rather than a permanent structural disadvantage. We hadn’t had Sandy Point yet, the proof that nothing will move the needle for the GOP, and Moscow Mitch wasn’t yet embarked on the permanent destruction of the norms and folkways of the US Senate in the name of preserving white supremacy for all time. And Washington had an exciting quarterback and a football team worth paying attention to for the first time in years. Technology wasn’t in a rut yet. It would take another year or so for the mobile phone to cross the finish line. LTE was coming, as was NFC and AMOLED and other nice-to-have technologies, but the iPad was a dream and the iPhone 4S was as perfect a device as I could ask for, having been handed it as a warranty replacement for a flaky 4. The iPhone 5, while intriguing, wasn’t a have-to-have yet. Facebook was bad, but hadn’t yet destroyed an election, and Instagram was new and interesting and fun to use.

And I was 40. That was kind of a problem, but it felt like things were moving the right direction. I certainly didn’t think I was in a rut, even though my health was taking a few knocks. I wasn’t under any therapist’s care, because I didn’t need to be, and even though my shoulder was twinging there was the hope that a quick epidural would fix it. Blue Shield hadn’t yet tried to screw me on the coverage.

I started my fifth decade pretty damn well. And then time happened. Progress ground to a halt, stupid graduated from valid to dominant, and we learned the hard way that the unwritten rules are meaningless and only cultural obstacles protect our established practices. Someone sufficiently shameless can do anything they want just by brazening it out, and they proceeded to do just that, over and over, until we landed here.

I know I’ve said before how much it felt like I wasted the decade of the 90s, but the decade of my own 40s has been a bust too – stagnant, depressed, running to stand still and still losing ground. I am in the middle of some fairly drastic changes in hope of breaking out of the quagmire, and I don’t have a lot of hope for anything wildly better, but if we were to end up safely in our new home, and I were to find my way to a job that could be done 100% remote, and done from anywhere, and that would at least pay enough to keep me fed and clothes and housed if I were left alone in Alabama, and that I could be assured of keeping for fifteen years or more as long as I worked hard and did a good job–

That would be enough, wouldn’t it? I don’t need the world, I just need the assurance that I will somehow be able to get by for a good twenty years. But this September, that seems like too much to ask for.

When I get up, she swears that she don’t hear it

Says that I’m as quiet as a mouse

I comb my hair and throw some water on my face

And back out of the stillness of our house

Lately, my patience is in short supply

Nothing good seems to ever come from all this work, no matter how hard I try

You know I believe in the Son, I ain’t no backslider, but my people were told they’d prosper in this land

Still, I know some who’ve never seen the ocean or set one foot on a velvet bed of sand

But they’ve got their treasure laying way up high, where there might be many mansions

but when I look up, all I see is sky

Maybe it’s the getting by that gets right underneath you

It’d swallow up your every step, boy, if it could

But maybe it’s the stuff it takes to get up in the morning and put another day in, son

That holds you till the getting’s good

Green ribbon front doors, dishwater days, this whole town is tied to the torso of God’s mysterious ways

Maybe it’s the getting by that gets right underneath you

It’d swallow up your every step, boy, if it could

But maybe it’s the stuff it takes to get up in the morning and put another day in, son

that keeps you standing where you should

So put another day in, son, and hold on till the getting’s good

When I started this blog, it was supposed to be the public-facing option. It was going to be an adjunct to LiveJournal, which was locked down and private and only for friends. And then, as my wife says, time happened. And social media happened. And I made some bad decisions around the incipient world of social media in an attempt to make more happen in the real world, and I know now that all of that was part and parcel of the depression incident of 2007 and the last thing I needed was to sever parasocial ties in hopes it would lead to social ones. More fool me.

Well, I think I’ve built up enough backlog of content now. There’s the misery of four election seasons, there’s a decade of suspicion of Silly Con Valley and all its pomps and all its works and all its empty promises, there’s the complete history of the iPhone starting from my perch inside Apple for its debut, there’s the rise and fall of Vanderbilt athletics that aren’t baseball or women’s bowling, there’s travel abroad on half a dozen occasions. There’s the story of me, age 34-49, constantly fighting to stay what I am and resisting becoming who I probably could or should be.

It’s security through obscurity. I make no effort to promote this, nor do I really want to. But maybe it’s time to see if more than four or five people ever look at this, going forward. And maybe I need to see if I can do this on a schedule sometimes, address some broader topics, hit some word counts, see if I can communicate to a requirement. Because who knows, that might be next on the list if work doesn’t pan out the way I need it to.

And when I do need to put up a publicly identified known online presence, I’ll keep this air-gapped, because sometimes you need to erase a dot without leading people to wonder what was under the dot. But for now, if you’re just now here…welcome.

That’s a wrap on year 15. Here’s to better days coming.

I stand by every vowel, consonant and punctuation mark of this.

There are no good answers now.

The good answer was in 2002, when the Taliban were pushed into a corner. The good answer was to accept NATO’s invocation of Article V, make this a multinational effort with the singular objective of overthrowing the Taliban, and then allow a drawn-down multinational force to supervise humanitarian reconstruction. But no, we had to go it alone and then take our eye off the ball before the job was done so that Bush the Dumber could work out his daddy issues in Iraq, with predictable results.

For the last ten years or more, there have been two choices: stay forever and slowly bleed out, or give up and come home and accept the consequences. There is no national will to stay, so the only thing to do is come home – which was not a controversial notion at all until two weeks ago when people realized What That Meant. Now the Republicans are desperately hoping everyone will forget all the tweets and posts and press released about how Tr*mp actually ended the war in Afghanistan so that they can paint this as Biden’s Saigon (timely reference, well done, why not compare Hillary to Maude again).

The fact is, Biden wants out. He wanted out in 2009-2010, and had to sit by as the Pentagon mau-maued Obama into going along with another “surge” in order to [FILE NOT FOUND]. Given the opportunity, he has refused to go along with it again, and the Pentagon has a lot to answer for – mostly “how come this army you trained and equipped for eighteen years fell over like a Big 12 football defense at the first sign of combat?”

It’s going to be ugly, and my heart breaks for everyone stuck there, and we’re probably ten years away from another mob of expat Saudis launching terror attacks around the world from their safe haven (and it’s past time to hold Saudi Arabia to account for the last twenty years, but good luck with that), but at some point, you just have to accept that band-aids don’t fix bullet holes and we don’t have the will as a country to do anything else, and that the time to save Afghanistan was three administrations ago. Let’s just try to make a little bit of an effort for once to put the blame where it belongs this time.

There are rules that weren’t there to begin with. There were no scholarship limits in college football until Bear Bryant started signing guys to sit on the bench for four years just to keep them away from Auburn or Georgia Tech or Tennessee. There was probably no icing in hockey until it was realized that you could just keep dumping it down to the other end and never actually get any action in front of the mount. The spitball was perfectly legal in baseball until a guy got hit in the head and died. A rule is generally there to maintain order and keep things fair, and as soon as someone figures out how to abuse it to their benefit, it generally has to be changed.

California is spending millions and millions of dollars, in the middle of a pandemic and a protracted fire season and god knows what else is around the corner, in order to hold a recall election. This election is to turf out the governor, Gavin Newsom. Never mind that there are elections next year, or that Newsom was convincingly elected with almost 62% of the vote first time out, or that there is nothing in particular that he has done that is out of bounds with what any other governors have done in the last three years, especially as regards the pandemic. Newsom was elected to be governor of the capital of the Resistance, and has mostly handled his duties without incident.

But.

If you can get 12% of the number of voters who voted in the last election to sign a petition, you can initiate a recall. And if the recall is successful, then there is a list of replacement candidates, and whoever gets the plurality of votes there wins.  About 60% of the state voted last time out, which means that in theory, you only need 7.2% of eligible voters in the state to call for a recall.  And since the incumbent can’t be on the ballot, whoever comes first on the list is governor, no matter how low a percentage of votes they get so long as no one else’s is higher.  Meaning that with 46 candidates on the ballot, it’s very possible that someone with a quarter of the vote or so will get to become governor.

This is happening for one reason and one reason alone: because the Republican Party knows it is too weak to win a fair election in California. They could barely muster 40% of the vote for their candidate in 2018 – but they only have to round up half of their own voters to have enough signatures to force a recall, at which point they get another bite at the apple for the low low price of a quarter of a billion dollars.

I’m sure the recall must have seemed a valuable tool at some point, but like the proposition system, it has become a way to buy and finagle what cannot be won fairly at the ballot box or through the political process. Both are past their sell-by date, and it’s insane to leave sharp objects lying around where the ignorant and willfully malicious can use them to hurt someone. Or the state.

A new app dropped a couple weeks ago, called HalloApp, which appears to be an attempt at a do-over by some of the WhatsApp founders and big wheels. It seems as if someone took WhatsApp and tried to engineer it closer to a social media tool than a messaging app – you can still do individual messaging, but the focus largely appears to be on group chats with the added ability to post “publicly” to everyone on your contact list or a fixed subset of same.

This is intriguing. Sure, it’s relying on your contacts, but at the same time, the world is only as big as your contact list. If you immediately go in and set it for “only these people”, you’ve essentially created an allow list that you can then expand. Anyone who wants to follow you needs to be in your phone book. This is not unlike what WhatsApp did with its “status” feature – you know, when Facebook decided that everything they do has to rip off Snapchat – but this time it’s built in from the start and those “public” messages are no different in content from the group texts.

Couple of thoughts here.

1) It would be the easiest damn thing in the world for Apple to slap this over top of Messages, or Signal to do the same, but it’s difficult to square “truly secure messaging client” with “public social media app”. Especially since…

2) This requires you to have each other’s phone number. One prospective user of this app was wary of this, since anyone she’d ever given her number to would be able to see her on the app (and thus would require the allow-list focus above). And I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to upload their contacts to match against everyone else’s in some as-yet-unknown application, but then, I’m not sure how else to make this work. Which means…

3) …that this app is not for parasocial relationships, where you’re following The Rock, or Rebecca Lowe, or the local pizza and beer joint – this is for people you actually know. Which is fine, kinda sorta, but it also makes it difficult to make those casual acquaintances or friends of friends. I don’t know how you’re meant to allow for the serendipity of meeting people without opening the floodgates for abuse and toxicity.

Which brings me back to…Twitter. Because without really meaning to, Twitter has made it possible to do this, kind of sort of, as long as you’re willing to lock your account and be judicious about who you allow to retweet into your timeline (so you don’t get overloaded with a ton of political stuff that you totally agree with but which is wearying to digest daily)…and as long as you use Tweetbot, which means you don’t get the worst of Twitter. You know: ads, promoted tweets, a non-linear algorithmic timeline and the constant intrusion of what your friends liked or followed even without retweeting. At the end of the day, as much as I moan that I can’t quit Twitter, I don’t yet need to, because these specific tools make it feasible.

The other thing is…I’ve been on Twitter in some form since 2007. Their shitbaggery has forced me to jump through some hoops from time to time, but the practical upshot is that most everyone I would need to see my updates can – only a handful of people from my high school or from DC are not there. And the other problem is that you’re never going to get people to move to a new app, not now. Unless we put a torpedo at the waterline of Facebook, because let’s be honest, what was the last thing everybody ran out and signed up for? Instagram. And that was a decade ago. It’s singular that the only two things that have cracked the shell since then are Snapchat and TikTok, both of which are explicitly targeting a far younger generation than mine; the people who I want to stay close to are never going to be on what is essentially an even more do-it-yourself YouTube. And that’s not how we do things. Text, still pictures, occasional rare video.

I was told previous that at my age, the easiest way to make new friends is to connect with your old ones. Similarly, the only way to get the new social media app you want is to engineer an old one into working for you. And to be honest, that Twitter account and one Signal group chat can just about cover everything, if I’m being honest with myself.

Now if only those sons of bitches would give me my original four-character name back.