Are my eyes really blue?

At 12:01 am this morning, seven Bay Area counties went into Shelter In Place. From now until April 7, you have to remain at home indoors unless going to get food, going for medical reasons (including care taking duties) or going to a designated essential job. Which, well, my employer may be essential but my role is at best “the guy behind the guy behind the guy”, and we are doing everything 100% remote until made to do otherwise. Which seems to be working, as I have already been remote for almost two weeks at this point owing to trying to be sure I could have my corticosteroid injections on time.

For a long time, when asked for my vision of what I would like life to be like, it was that whole small town where I could work 100% remote, walled off from the bullshit of Silicon Valley and the real world. Now, through no fault of my own, I’m almost going to be test-driving that vision for a minimum of three weeks. Which is sort of a “careful what you ask for” thing…I don’t know how much longer the closest purveyors of takeout food and sorta-groceries will continue to be open, and the restaurants further out that are doing curbside takeout pickup may not have that long to function without some kind of financial relief. I suspect there’s a real chance this will trend less wish-fulfillment and more slow-motion apocalypse, but that’s not a right-now problem.

At least we’re acting. It’s difficult not to feel like this crisis interprets the Tr*mp Administration as damage and routes around it. California has been ahead of the curve on scaling down gatherings, and if putting the Bay on lockdown is going to bend the curve, then let’s !-ing go. I’ve got beer and snacks enough to last two or three days, in confidence that we’ll still be able to go get groceries and the like. Which may be foolish, because it’s who knows where this thing could go from here, but we have some canned goods and the usual earthquake supplies. Our 72-hour quake planning was sound, so now we just have to keep outrunning three days.

So now we work remote, we Zoom and FaceTime with friends and family who need contact, we watch Ken Burns documentaries and brew coffee and wait for Sunday when it’s probably going to be farmers’ market time again, and we see what’s doing tomorrow. And tomorrow. Win the day, keep going. That’s where we are right now in 2020, which is honestly where we’ve been all along.

Well, I’m scratching my head for what ESPN is going to show for the next six months. Darts? Bags? Sumo wrestling? Bass fishing? With the five major North American pro leagues shut down, minor league baseball and basketball as well, and the NCAA basically cancelling the rest of the academic year including the cash cow of March Madness, we are looking at a time in America without sports – and while I am not the sports fiend I was in the 1990s, by far, it’s still weird to not have the background noise of baseball as the rhythm of spring.

I’ve been working from home since Wednesday night, initially because of a doctor’s appointment but since then to avoid anyone who might get me sick before my latest round of epidural steroids tomorrow. Like 2012 and 2016, election year means pinched nerve and shoulder pain, so here we go again. It’s been mostly in my arm this time, though, so maybe one round will be enough instead of two. And it would be even less of a big deal if being laid off hadn’t wiped out my sick and vacation time. Having the payout check from vacation isn’t much good when you actually need days off.

Then again, I’ve had to rethink a lot without vacation time. When you don’t have any prospect of seeing two weeks in London before sometime in 2021 at the earliest, you make do. The kind of money it takes to be abroad for ten days will easily fund three hours at the local British-style pub every Saturday night for a year – or, more likely, several years at home on a Sunday night with a jug of pub ale and a Peter Ackroyd book while RTE in Irish plays through your headphones. It’s affordable, it works, and if you do it just right – with the lights dim, the iPhone SE to hand instead of the X, no extra apps on the phone to distract you with Twitter or Insta or the like, and wearing comfy clothing heavy on the flannel and slubby cotton – you can almost imagine yourself in another world, another life, vacationing from reality.

And that’s really become a thing, these last few years. Even the pub isn’t an escape; refuge comes from not having to engage with the world at all on any terms but the ones you dictate. Thirty minutes in an underground lounge at work, earbuds in for mediation. An afternoon or evening driving down the coast. A weekend with nothing on the agenda but to recover from a medical procedure, maybe augmented with a short trip on an empty light rail that puts you in front of a bar or a market that you can then train back from in short order, or even a walkable trip to the taqueria or the coffee shop. Vacation has always been about escaping to the kind of life you wish you had. Now it consists largely of carving that life out of the surrounding world as much as you can get away with.

I mean, maybe things will get better? You definitely won’t get any younger. Life isn’t going to stop taking things away and start giving them back. The move is to find joy now, wherever you can, and if it can be manufactured simply and at little cost, do it. The world’s on fire, and yet the ability to work from home for a week feels as good as retirement. Pitcher of iced tea, flannel shirt over a gray T that suggests nothing so much as someone who hasn’t changed his wardrobe in almost 30 years, stay out of the spouse’s way and take turns having your meetings without headphones, and try to be at peace while everything is in full on chaotic neutral mode.

Of such is our life made in 2020. 

Here’s the thing: Bernie failed to grapple with the fact that like Obama, he got an easy ride from a press that hated Hilary Clinton. Once left to his own devices, well, it doesn’t matter how popular you are with voters under 30 if they only make up 15% of the electorate that shows up (as was the case in Michigan). Yeah, Bernie may be big with the young people, and he may be moving the window on Democratic policy goals in future, but when it’s down to two candidates, your viability as a candidate gets marked to market pretty quickly.

Because it looks like it’s gonna be Joe. Once he proved he could win South Carolina, it’s like everyone said “okay, let’s go” and that was that. He thinks he can win, and he’s not the only one, when you consider that Trump literally just weathered an impeachment that came about as a result of efforts to sandbag Biden out of the race. This is a single issue race, and the issue is “get that orange asshole out of here.”

I mean, of course it is. We’re seeing the consequences more than ever now. Stock market is officially back in bear territory, and I don’t mean Berkeley. It turns out that slashing the CDC’s budget for pandemic response in 2018 has consequences in 2020. And ironically enough for a solipsistic dementia case who thinks he only has to be the president of the people who voted for him, he’s paved the way for COVID-19 to run riot through the precise demographic that put him in that office to begin with. I mean…buy the ticket, take the ride.

Which is a warning and an imperative at the same time. This is what we signed up for by not packing our bags and fleeing the country in January 2017. We knew it was going to be harsh, and ugly, and we might not all make it, but there was a chance – one – that the old ways could work one more time, that an election in 2020 could stop the bleeding. And this intersects nicely with Joe Biden, who absolutely should not feel any guilt for not running in 2016, who had every reason to pack it in, but who apparently needed to give it one more run – and who now finds himself as the guy.

So this time, we know the mission, we know the stakes, and we know what happens if we lose. And the excuses are gone – there’s no speculating about what it might be like for Trump to be President because now there’s four years of economic stagnation outside the NYSE, four years of children in camps, four years of lighting our foreign relations on fire, and now, four years of destroying our defenses against a literal pandemic. 

We’re out of excuses. This is last call. It’s Joe or go.

Cops used to have revolvers, not automatics AND plate carriers AND tasers AND tear gas AND automatic rifles in the car. Mall security didn’t use to have MA-1 jackets and bloused BDU pants and jump boots. The chance to go out and see the country and the world from Alabama used to be a good thing. You could have Ed Koch lip-sync in a country music video. Your Southern Baptist music minister could get a job at Opryland and wind up on a soap opera and it was impressive, not scandalous. You could trick-or-treat and your parents would roll their eyes at the people handing out religious tracts. You had opponents, not enemies. 

Then the middle hollowed out, and it became okay to use rage and hate to keep them that hadn’t from ganging up on them that had, and them that had wanted more and more and could never give any back, and and and. Three decades of “anything goes” from one side, and a political culture and media that would never call them on it, is how you can have the kind of deterioration that has a bankrupt racist reality star giving a State of the Union address.

And the problem was made most obvious by Robert Muller, who did an investigation for two years, uncovered an ocean of malfeasance, and then issued a strictly-limned report on only what had been asked. No fishing expedition or ancillary investigations like Ken Starr. By the books, with the narrowest possible remit. And it sank like a stone, and the buffoon in the Oval Office took it as clearance to do it again. Which led to impeachment, which failed in the same Senate that defanged the gravity of impeachment twenty years ago, and which will clear the way for even more misconduct without fear of reprisal or consequence. Because consequences are for younger and browner people.

Some people actually want to blame Obama for this, as if he somehow failed to deliver something that was in his power. It wasn’t. Even if he were unconstrained by a Republican Party that made 218-60-5 a mandatory formula for passing anything – a majority in the House, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and a majority on the Supreme Court – he was constrained by history and circumstances to play by the books, above board, never be angry, never fight dirty, against an opposition that had spent fifteen years normalizing the very worst of Southern politics. The current GOP isn’t Obama’s fault at all, it’s Newt Gingrich’s and those who went along with him.

It’s all been mainstreamed. We’ve been slow-boiled for years and years. The effect of the 1998 impeachment, at a time when the public was resolutely against it, was to permanently tar it as a political maneuver – and thus nullify it for a time when an actual crime would be the subject of an impeachment. And so it has been. The race to be the 46th President is led by four septuagenarians and one callow youth who’s never won an election bigger than mayor of a college town. The spayed and neutered media will chase any grasshopper, equivocate about everything, and the odds are strong that the Democrats will lose again, even if they have the most votes. The general consensus seems to be that the Republicans can lose the popular vote by as much as 3% and still prevail in the electoral college.

And that’s a risk. Mayor Pete was too young and too gay. Warren was too old and too female. Bloomberg was too old, too rich and too Republican. Biden is too old and rickety. Bernie is too old and socialist. (I will swallow my misgivings and support any of them, even Bernie, despite my suspicion that if the shoe were on the other foot I couldn’t count on his followers to do the same. If Sanders is the guy, you’d better fucking know you can either swing Ed Earl Brown or bring out enough of the base to outweigh him.) There’s not some perfect opponent out there to do the deed, not that there ever is. And I know that right now, they all beat Trump in a national poll right now before the press goes in the tank, but we don’t vote right now and we don’t vote in a national election. The Electoral College was made for just this purpose: to preserve the opinion of the rural elites against the depredations of the public and the cities. Whatever grand notions you have about what the Democrats should do will be dust and ashes if they lose, and for the third time in six tries, they could easily lose with the most votes.

And at that point, I honestly don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe in future, you could fix the Electoral College, if only with the National Popular Vote machinations. Some people still think that demographics will prevail in the long run – you know, when we’re all dead. But the Senate will always be with us, and the smaller and rural and whiter states will always have disproportionate power over the urban multicultural majority for as long as I can expect to live. And if the Democrats don’t prevail in November, the judiciary will be locked down for a generation and more with the kind of know-nothing Patrick Henry-Bob Jones-Hillsdale-ACLJ types that have flooded the vacancies ever since Merrick Garland was stonewalled.

I don’t want to live in the United States of Alabama. I left there because, pace Carvell Wallace, I could not stay and be human – and which state returns Trump his highest approval ratings? I know that California will hold the line for as long as it can, and that might be enough to see out my days, depending. I don’t have any children, which in retrospect was absolutely the right decision even if it’s going to be painful in years to come. But we don’t have the kind of reliable retirement our parents could count on – instead of pensions, we have the same 401(k) and 403(b) stock market roulette wheels that could see us done about half as we prepare to retire. And looking around the Valley, as everything turns temp-to-hire-only and vendor-contractor and 1099, it’s hard to shake the sense that you’d better hang onto whatever job you have with both hands, no matter how miserable and soul-sucking, because without it you’re going to be driving Uber. The Amazon bomb is killing the Wal-Mart greeter. And it’s all the worse because Silly Con Valley is where your future comes from. Gig economy, Tesla worth more than any of the Big Three automakers, you can’t afford to move here, you can’t afford to stay. Corporate power without appeal or resort to governmental action, the constant petty tyranny of private associations from your “employer” to your HOA, selective application of law and policy – bad enough that’s what’s coming, but I’m already living it, where the only law that matters is the one that gets enforced. Dodging bikes and scooters on the sidewalk is on you, but heaven forbid you park on the street in front of your own home.

The hardest part of all this is experiencing it again. To wake up once and realize that the place where you live taught you a values system and way of life that it doesn’t actually believe in and actively works against? That’s bad enough. But to experience it a second time, when you left that state and moved as far as you could, only to have the country turn on you – and on itself – begs the question of where’s left to run to. Even if you could afford it, even if there were visas and work permits and all the bric-a-brac involved in finding a safe place to wait out your days. Six years ago, I said that “if the Old Scratch himself appeared before me, offering to jump me ahead to age 60, but I’d be retired, with my wife and a healthy pension, and a cottage in a cold seaside town where the cops still carry revolvers and the coffee shop is still where you go for bacon and eggs and gossip, and where the one dive bar in town has a fireplace and doesn’t sell anything more exotic or complicated than Guinness, and where the sputtering air-cooled VW can get us around without the hassle and strain of walking on a bad back…I’d have to think long and hard before turning it down.  Assuming I would.”

Well, I wouldn’t. I would give away the next decade in a heartbeat if it meant the prospect of twenty good years of retirement, someplace sane and simple and more human and humane than 2020 America. Apart from a slightly smaller iPhone, I don’t need any more than I have. So many of the things I want aren’t things, and the ones like that which I do have, I want to keep instead of having them slowly whittled away by an increasingly awful world.

Pandora opened the box, but I’ll be damned if I can still see hope in the bottom of it.

(15) Kentucky 64

Vandy WBB 70

FINAL

OH OH OH IT’S MAGIC, YOU KNOW, NEVER BELIEVE IT’S NOT SO…

“I posited a theory that something happens at some point in adolescence, and whatever we see in ourselves at that point we are stuck with for the rest of our lives. You can win an Oscar, a Nobel prize and three straight Sugar Bowls, but deep down you still feel like the nerd/fatso/zit-face/beanpole/whatever you were way back when. I think a lot of the stuff that bugs me yet has its roots in those days when I came back to Earth, as it were, and found myself on the outside looking in on what was supposed to be the big moment. It would certainly explain the obsession with not being left out, with having my team and my crew, with needing the constant stream of feedback to assure me that yes, I am doing a good job by objective and quantifiable metrics…”

-March 2, 2009

I cite myself from eleven years ago just to show that I was onto something. If you go back to the 1980s and look at my life from second grade to college graduation – less a short stretch of two years and change in high school – you see a life in Alabama defined by “peer group rejection”. You could be arrogant and argue “well I didn’t have any peers in Alabama” and you’d be dead wrong after about seventh grade, but that’s not the point. The point is, peer group rejection is a primary indicator for the development of the DSM-V’s code 301.82, “Avoidant Personality Disorder.”

I was not diagnosed with that the first time I saw a mental health professions in 1991. Or the second time in 2000. Or any of the myriad times from 2007 to the present day, until a couple months ago. And I wasn’t diagnosed with it now, because AvPD requires a diagnosis of underlying general personality disorder. But the full psychiatric evaluation did yield a formal diagnosis of depression and anxiety, a pretty poor sense of self-worth, and an extremely high marker for “avoidant”.

Nothing on the spectrum. No Asperger’s. Some aspects of ADHD, ones that are exacerbated by anxiety and coupled with the high level of intellectual function might give the impression of Asperger’s, so you could see how someone would get there. But  nothing obviously developmental, unless you want to count the scarlet G and the consequences of pinning it on a kid in exurban Alabama in 1978. It was two years later, after I’d been promoted two grades after a month of elementary school and then inexplicably dropped back to my own grade level the following year, that I wrote in what I thought was a private survey and filled in the blank for “Secretly I wish” with “that I was somewhat normal.”

That never happened, not for a long long time. I did get to spend four years in a preserve for those like me, although it took most of the first year to click with anyone and I spent most of the last year openly feuding with my senior class, dating as far outside the perimeter as I could and counting the days until college – which in turn bombed spectacularly. And because it bombed spectacularly, I wound up in a grad school program for all the wrong reasons and wholly unprepared, and crashed out to Washington DC of all places – where through a low-grade miracle, I found myself in a peer group where smart was welcome and useful and not utterly alien. And despite missteps and tragedy, I managed to thrive there, for years, and continued to thrive even after leaving for Silicon Valley. But the underlying damage was always there, unrepaired. It’s why I couldn’t ask for accommodation at Apple, and instead took a path that set my career back another four years, and ultimately led to the tar pit I find myself in now. 

The traffic sucks, the tech bros are unmitigated scum, the breweries produce nothing but ever more dank stank IPA, and the summer gets hotter with every passing year. But the bottom line is that I live in a place and a moment when here, there’s nothing wrong with being smart. That’s not nothing. To be in Northern California in 2020 is a gift, especially when you consider that the last four years spent in DC would have had me dead or in prison with no door number three. If I were in a different job, one that felt secure and paid adequately and made me feel borderline competent, I’d be more ready to face the guns on all the other fronts. But I’m not. The health of others is a constant worry even when my own shoulder (and now arm) haven’t been hurting for a month waiting on various health providers to be available. The constant stress of politics is hardly worth bringing up, not that I won’t, and the shadow it casts over my relations in Alabama and elsewhere is impossible to ignore even if you don’t get lost in the black hole of “what if this doesn’t work out”. 

But I still have someone to snuggle in the mornings. I have a doable drive to mountains and redwoods and beaches and fog. I’m a surmountable distance from the better of the Disney parks. Baseball is back, and my affiliations give me something to be proud of. Who knows, I might have a more modern iPhone of my own by Easter. As long as I’m willing to live my own values, focus on the moment and shut the world out, it’s a life I can live with. The question, obviously, is how long that life is sustainable under the circumstances. Of which. 

The iPhone 9, so called, has the body of the 8 with the guts of the 13. Including the 13’s single camera (no tele or ultrawide) and lack of 3D Touch. Also presumably lack of 5G. But as an 8, presume no Photo ID (who cares) or Animoji (OK that hurts). No dual or eSIM (could be a problem later).

But also: proven components, no 5G, no possible USB-C, no radical new tech. For better or worse. And based on current offering prices projected forward, I can get a 128GB, which is all I need. Otherwise I’m paying the not-inconsiderable premium to go from 64 to 256 with no stops in between.

And the iPhone 12 has 5G, which is poorly distributed and not pervasive or proven. With, apparently, Apple’s antenna of their own design rather than Qualcomm’s. Which suggests, chillingly, that the phone has to be thinner than 8mm. And given that people are now mentioning a new side-mounted TouchID, that’s an ever-growing number of new parts.

Too, think about the changes. The 4 famously had antenna issues, while the 4S added Siri and a better camera. The 5 through work, first LTE device, turned out to be a dog on Verizon – and the 5S went 64-bit and added TouchID. The XS got a newer, more efficient processor than the X. The new style hardware has a world of issues the first time out, it seems, and the legacy of Jony Ive seems to be “never buy the first iteration of an Apple product”.

Why not get an unlocked phone that I know will be a step up from what I have now (by my lights), get myself onto the long-desired personally-owned device again? In a year when I know I have to buy the new Apple Watch to replace my Fitbit, is there something to be said for just paying $500 for the new phone now instead of $1200 in September? And then maybe in a year and a half, justification for the 12S or whatever it turns out to be, once 5G is pervasive and the technology is worked out?

It sounds like the iPhone 9 is coming in March, just like my favorite iteration ever, the iPhone SE. Four years on, maybe it’s a sign: save your money, get the known goods, and when the new hot fire comes out? Let somebody else go first.

California actually has a primary sooner than June for once. I don’t remember the last time California was in a position to have influence on the primary race, an odd spot for the largest of blue states. Which means I actually have to think about it.

I have.

Let’s start with this: it is preternaturally fucked that Iowa and New Hampshire are still allowed to have a voice in this process at all, let alone be the dispositive first states that winnow the field. Too small, too white, too demonstrably conservative, and Iowa in particular with their wackadoo caucus scheme that is less historically traditional than the Super Bowl. No. In 202X, when next we have a competitive Democratic primary season (if ever), Iowa needs to ride the fucking bench and New Hampshire needs to be close behind.

Next, it’s absolutely shameful that there are four – FOUR – candidates over the age of 70 in this race. No one will rid us of the boomers, the worst generation in human history, and it’s unconscionable that we have a very real chance of yet another proxy fight over Vietnam in the Presidential race for who knows how many times in a row. But here we are, in all likelihood.

It’s not a great crop, but let’s take a look.

STEYER can fuck right off. President of the United States is not an entry level job in politics. Ditto to the late unlamented Andrew Yang. A strong party would never let either of these clowns near a debate stage, and it’s risible that they were there and Kamala Harris and Cory Booker were not. If the last three years aren’t proof enough, write it on the Washington Monument with a fucking laser beam: NO MORE AMATEURS.

BLOOMBERG is also right out. Sure, Manhattan is the 7th largest state by itself and mayor of NYC is uniquely positioned in American politics. But Bloomberg is a Republican who is only in this race because he’s choosing to spend a billion dollars instead of enter primaries for the first month. That should be unconscionable for anyone all by itself, but it speaks to another issue: the GOP was never held to account for Junior Bush. Ever. And then it was all “well Obama has to reach across the aisle to these people who want to spit in his eye”. Now the GOP has given us Trump, and the argument for Bloomberg is “the Democrats, especially voters of color, need to suck it up and elect a candidate that Ed Earl Brown is comfortable with because you have to coddle Trump supporters with an old white man so they don’t get scared.” No. Fuck that noise. For some reason, unity always means that the left has to give in to the right. The right in this country has never been asked to give anything. Fuck Bloomberg and fuck his shitty news org.

BIDEN breaks my heart. I know why he didn’t run in 2016, and I know he feels like he could have stopped this, and I know he wants to try, and God bless him, but the moment’s past. He had a good run, he was a loyal teammate, and he has borne as much tragedy as anyone should ever have to bear, and if it turns out he is the guy I will do all I can for him. But he feels more like a desperate grab for a do-over more than anything else.

SANDERS shouldn’t be on the podium for one reason: the nominee of the Democratic Party should be a member of the Democratic Party. Setting that minor quibble aside, I question whether the “Bernie Beats Trump” crowd has grappled with this: like Obama in 2008, Bernie got an easy ride in 2016 because He Wasn’t Hillary. A press corps that has salivated to preach the death and burial of the Clintons for two decades and more was never going to sandbag the closest competitor. And now, a seventy-something Jewish atheist socialist thinks the press isn’t gonna tear the bark off him? Made worse by the fact that his campaign has drawn a whole lot of the worst assholes of the left, an army of sentient Caucasian dreadlocks who dismiss concerns of sexism or racism because all politics is economic and all’s fair in love and war, and the enemy isn’t the right, the true enemy is the insufficiently left. It makes perfect sense that his most hardcore fans think he’s the savior. Jesus is a good dude but his most hardcore fans are horrible too.

BUTTI- BUTI- BU- PETE. Set aside the question of whether a gay candidate can win. It’s not a small question, but set it aside. Because if he weren’t gay, you’d be looking at a McKinsey alum who’s never won a race bigger than mayor of a Midwest college town and who’s too young to have seen The Empire Strikes Back in the theater. It doesn’t pass the laugh test. Young men in a big hurry get elected President because in their young life they’ve wound up in the Navy and then into the Senate, or they’ve been a multi-term governor of Arkansas by the time they were 40, not mayor of South Bend, Indiana. They say Pete is doing big in Silly Con Valley, and I believe it, because shooting a giant firehose of money at underqualified young white men is what this place does best.

KLOBUCHAR is someone I don’t know as much about as I should. I know she’s supposed to be on the moderate side of this field, and I know she was supposedly mean to her staff, and I know she supposedly ate a salad with a comb once (which is some damned good adaptability if you ask me) but she only seems to have got hot after finishing third in New Hampshire. The fact that there are supposedly three tickets out of Iowa and she finished fifth means that somebody’s conventional wisdom is wrong. I would like to know more, but if someone like me is asking to know more in February of primary season, I worry about whether they’re ready to contend. Honestly, this feels a lot like “we’re going to bet the minimum, wait to see the flop, hope Biden folds and be ready to bet big when he does” and it feels to me like that’s the kind of thinking that got Jeb Bush rusticated from the GOP race four years ago.

All you need to know about GABBARD is that I was in Honolulu during the 2018 ballistic missile alert, and she tweeted that it was a false alarm, and I said to my wife “I need to hear it from someone who’s not a nutter.” When there’s a chance you can be nuked, and you can’t trust someone who offers you a lifeline of hope, you sure can’t trust them in the White House.

God, what a pile of rocks. Anyone left?

Oh.

Ah.

Yes, the candidate is 70 years old. Yes, the candidate has some problems around their disproven quantity of Native American heritage. Yes, the candidate has had some staffing issues. Yes, the candidate was probably wrong to come out for Medicare For All as a viable policy option, especially since it’s unlikely that we’ll see 218 Representatives and 60 Senators to pass it and 5 Supreme Court justices to defend it in my lifetime.

But Elizabeth WARREN is the best of a bad lot, and a bad lot doesn’t mean every piece of the lot is bad. She has credentials academic and political. She has a signature issue of punching back against the financial shenanigans and house of cards that collapsed in 2008 and at the perpetrators who skated free. She has done the homework, in excruciating detail, to the point where “Warren has a plan for that” is a groan-inducing cliche. Well, cliches don’t get that way for being false.

More important is that she seems to enjoy being out there. It’s not a chore. This was one of Hillary Clinton’s problems: unlike her husband, she could never make it seem like she’d rather be on the campaign trail than anywhere on Earth. The Warren selfie lines are the stuff of legend now, and she is as bright eyed and bushy tailed at the end of them as at the beginning. That’s not nothing, especially for a 70 year old candidate.

And I get how Native voters have a beef. I am not saying they are wrong, nor that they should suck it up and vote for her anyway (in the primary, anyway, more on that in a minute). But a woman who was raised in Oklahoma in the 1950s and 60s could absolutely have been told things about her heritage and taken them at face value. I did. Although it was certainly never enough for me to attempt to trade on, by a long shot. I’m not saying it’s right, because it’s not, but I can see how it would happen, and I have real issues with it being weaponized against her by people with no standing to do so who plainly do not have Native interests in mind (cf. “Pocahontas”).

I also acknowledge that the campaign has had stumbles and flaws in other areas, some more meaningful than others, and those are all fair too. But go up the list. We don’t have any flawless candidates. We had some candidates who were better than the ones on that list who didn’t make it to Iowa. Republicans always fall in line, but for some reason, Democrats have to fall in love. I don’t. I need someone who can win.

And that is the real conundrum. The most important criterion for a candidate is “Must Beat Trump.” But how do you know? Can you balance homophobia against sexism and figure age for weight and say “this is the most likely winner”? Can you move the balance between what lures back supposed Obama-Trump voters and what brings out the biggest base turnout for the Dems generally? Is the most likely winner the one who would make the best President? Does that even matter if the one who would make the best President can’t win? There comes a point where you’re talking yourself into eleven-dimensional chess.

But it’s not. It’s simple. Pick the one you think would make the best President. And then, whoever wins the primary, support the shit out of them in November. I have my doubts about some of these candidates and their hardcore ultras, and what would happen if some third party interloper backed wittingly or not by Russian ratfucking jumped into the scene in July. (It’s not lost on me that a lot of the Sanders-Gabbard types were screaming twenty years ago that there was no difference between Gore and Bush.) But after finishing third in Iowa, fourth in New Hampshire, and having her political obituary written with fewer than 10% of the votes cast, Elizabeth Warren was on the podium last Tuesday shouting out her rivals, congratulating them, urging everyone on to the fight. That tells me a lot.

Look, I will pull the lever for the Democrat in November. I will vote for Bernie and his band of Twitter dicks. I will vote for Bloomberg and his thinly veiled brand of corporatism with a human face and no guns. I will vote for Eddie “Pete” Haskell despite the fact he would never get that reference with fifty years on TikTok to look it up. I will cringe and cross myself and pull the lever for Joe one more time. I will figure out who Amy Klobuchar is and give her my support. I would suck it up hard, mark the ballot for Tom or Tulsi, and see about liquidating our house to buy into the Malta Sovereign Wealth Fund to obtain EU citizenship because we might have to do that anyway.

But of all of them, the one that might put a flicker of hope in my heart, the one who I think can start on January 20 to do the most to try to crawl this country out of hell one inch at a time toward daylight, is my vote in the California primary on March 3, Elizabeth Ann Warren.

What the hell. You gotta die of something.

MEMORIAL MAGIC 2020 SIGHTING #1

(18) LSU 90

VANDERBILT 99

FINAL

OH OH OH IT’S MAGIC, YOU KNOW, NEVER BELIEVE IT’S NOT SO

Pace Macklemore and Ke$ha, I wish somebody would have told me then that someday these would be the good old days. Twenty years ago, in the snow outside Ireland’s Four Provinces, a new pair of Dr Martens and a new obsession with Irish music and a new home away from home for what was rapidly becoming Our Gang.

I don’t think I realized until years later that it was an anomaly to have television. They would pull down a screen and run a projector during the World Series, or on an election night, but on a typical Saturday, you only had the musicians or the jukebox. I don’t think I ever ordered any beer but Guinness, although I did have a weakness for the occasional Blackadder, Guinness cut half with cider. (Which is apparently a Black Velvet anywhere outside DC, but I go with what I was told first, and besides Black Velvet is Guinness and champagne.)

The pub would ultimately come to stand in for DC, I think. I missed the pub, and came closest to reproducing it with a mixture of two bars in San Jose, but what I really missed from 2007 on was that sense of purpose, of camaraderie, of being on the one road – north men south men comrades all. I had my troubles in DC, and there’s no diminishing them, but I don’t remember ever questioning my purpose or who I was as a human being from 2000 to 2004. I was a loyal specialist in the Rifles of the EUS, and that was sufficient. And I went looking for a California pub at a time when I was adrift in identity and purpose, and you can make a case I never really figured it out in the same way.

And I’m reminded of this, seven years on from the encryption debacle which I never really recovered from, as the same left shoulder hurts bad enough for me to go to urgent care and the workplace management spins its wheels fecklessly while the rest of us wait for the penny to drop. The values I developed then are the ones that sustain me now, and as before, it doesn’t matter that they can’t ride to my rescue. It’s enough to know they would.

And meanwhile, the world spins. Of which.