Are my eyes really blue?

It feels so familiar. Like I’ve worn it for years. I feel like there should be a liter soda bottle in one of the big pouch pockets, and a whole jumbo bagel with cream cheese brown-bagged in the other. And then I remember that almost a quarter century ago, I did just that with the Elk, the ridiculous oversized leather field coat that I bought in a fit of madness my first year in Nashville and wore in the coldest weather until I left DC for California.

This is also brown and hip-length, if NyCo rather than leather. It’s also a little too big with its liner removed. The hood is zippered up in the collar, not snap-off detachable. But the sleeves are generous enough to go over a sweater, and there’s a specific heat on the neck when wearing it in unexpected 67 degree weather, and it feels…

It feels correct, for want of a better word. It feels like my black AmGiant work shirt, or my plastic Birkenstocks: like something I’ve had all along, should have had all along. It feels like it fits, the way the rare cigar feels in my hand, or the equally-rare pie beer feels on my tongue or the iPhone SE feels when you pull it out: this is the natural order of things. As if there’s another edit where this brown Army surplus jacket is my companion through snow in the District and fog in San Francisco and London drizzle and Patagonia winds and twenty years of pictures.

And the more I think of it, I realize this is an anomaly. I had a coat this length for a couple years in undergrad, a Helly Hansen parka meant for Central Europe and lost before grad school. I had the rarely-worn International, the never-worn CERT coat, and the too-stiff and too-slim “engineer’s coat” bought with AmEx points from Land’s End and subsequently donated. But as natural as the hip-length field coat seems in my memory, the Elk is the only one I wore for any length of time, and it stopped being a thing once I got to California altogether.

Maybe that’s why I was casting about the last few years. Barn coat, Barbour coat, some kind of horse-poop-colored British waxed cotton thing or blanket-lined duck workwear. All I know is, I’m none too quick to take it off at work – or when I get home, for that matter. It’ll probably be too warm by February, but all the more reason to enjoy it now.

Labour was always going to be damaged by Brexit, because it split them in two: the urban cosmopolitan liberals for Remain, the Northern working class for Leave. And ironically, Leave was a reaction against David Cameron’s austerity – and now those voters have gone for Boris Johnson’s Tory party in what is far closer to a Trump election than the Brexit referendum was. This was the second referendum, and it was a bloodbath. And for its trouble, the Tories have now been thoroughly Republicanized. 

Corbyn’s old style Labour was forty years out of date and not credible, setting aside that he was a personally execrable candidate.The accusations that he was a closet Leaver may or may not have been on target, but his was a Labour socialism of the 70s, when Michael Foot was campaigning against continued membership of the then-EEC. There was no way to split that baby; he had to either go all-in on Leave and try to sell a “Better Brexit” or find a way to sell the North on pulling the plug. He did neither, and the inability to stand up one way or the other on Brexit was his final undoing.

It wasn’t enough to say “Not Boris”. Boris was the UK’s Trump: a rich toff who could make enough of the working class think he was on their side. He had to stray from the Tory faith, distance himself from austerity, and promise a moon on a stick which will not be deliverable if Brexit leaves the UK economy in worse straits than it is presently occupying. But at the heart of it, “Get Brexit Done” – beaten to death without ever explaining what that actually meant. Simple and stupid beats complex and clever, and the Tories won on simple and stupid.

Because that’s really what happened. The Tories are the party of Brexit now, more even than the actual so-called Brexit party (which ended, like UKIP before it, with exactly no seats again), and they own the future of the UK – above and beyond the Brexit votes, for the next five years as well. They successfully bought the ticket and now have to take the ride; the problem is who all will be harmed as they ride this bomb to Earth. And with unionists shelled in Northern Ireland, and the SNP ascendant in Scotland, the future of the UK on Friday the 13th looks to be on mighty thin ice.

Jeremy Corbyn tried to have it both ways. In an election that was essentially the second referendum on Brexit, he tried to split the difference and ignore the fact that the 2019 split in the UK is not left-right, but Leave and Remain. He was a bad call in 2015, was artificially kept alive by the Tories’ 2017 omnishambles, and now should rightly be for the drop tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson finally grasps the brass ring: a commanding win as PM. However, he has now caught the car, and the Conservatives are the Brexit party now. They own the whole shooting match, and the opposition parties are under no obligation to go along with it or provide any help. And they will be holding the bag when and if Leave voters start to recoil in 2020 at what Leave actually means. Couple that with what looks like a tremendous showing by the SNP, and it’s hard not to argue that David Cameron will go down in history as the man who lit the fuse on the demolition of the United Kingdom.

Long night ahead.

It’s an Alpha Industries M-65 field coat, military spec but in a civilian brown without the velcro attach points for name and unit patches. 50/50 nylon-cotton to repel water, concealed hood in the collar, buttons for a quilted lining for real warmth in a pinch – but the most striking thing is that if the copyright date on the tags is anything to go by, this jacket was manufactured in Knoxville, Tennessee sometime in 1997. Which means that it and I rolled out of the Volunteer State at roughly the same time.

It’s wild to think about this thing sitting on a shelf for two decades or more. It’s an artifact from a time when the WTO hadn’t turned China into the world’s discount manufacturer, and when Appalachia still had plenty of textile operations that hadn’t been outsourced to the cheapest Third World OEM. I doubt it was on sale for the $100 I got it for on eBay, but I’m not sure I would have had even $50 to snap it up with, and besides, I already had the Elk – that ill-advised leather coat bought as a callow first-year grad student that would be my cold-weather apparel of record through the end of the DC years. But it’s not inconceivable that I could have pulled this coat off the rack at Friedman’s Army-Navy in Hillsboro Village, and worn it for the ensuing two decades. It would have worked a treat in Edinburgh in 2005, or Paris and York in 2007. Perfectly suited for the rain in Kanazawa or in Puerto Natales. Just the right combination for a dozen wet and windy too-short California winters.

It’s a garment out of another era, a fifty year old design. Big pouch pockets, suitable for a cell phone the size of an all-in-one remote control and a Discman the size of a dessert plate. Surplus to the era of the peace dividend, when the American military was more likely to be coming to the aid of Muslims in the Balkans than be bogged down endlessly in Iraq and Afghanistan. When a vending machine meant a 12-ounce can of Coke for 65 cents, not a plastic 20 ounce bottle for $2.10 (and ten cents off if you use money and not a credit card or a smartphone). 

I tend to go through jackets in bursts. I was mostly sorted in DC with what eventually came out to three leather jackets, but after coming West that was plainly not going to be necessary. At the end of 2004, I bought a freakin’ suede trucker jacket and a longer synthetic sort of field coat with a zip-out fleece lining, and the latter became the international travel jacket in 2005 and 2007. And I didn’t look at jackets again until 2009, when I was suddenly commuting by train again and needed to stand around waiting outside. So I went on a four year binge. Plain cotton zippered thing, canary-yellow CERT jacket from work, Vandy soft-shell fleece, an ill-fitting Gap peacoat, a better-fitting surplus peacoat, a weird sort of “engineers coat” bought with AmEx points through Lands End, a cotton blouson from Uniqlo (and a couple of cotton blazers with it which are more casual wear than “outerwear”), and ultimately, my wife’s gift of a Levi’s-Filson collaborative trucker jacket in waxed tin cloth – and by that point, I was driving to work again and it was less of a big deal. 

Since 2013, I’ve bought the William Gibson Buzz Rickson bomber as a souvenir of Japan, and was gifted my Harris Tweed at long last, but there hasn’t really been any new routine outerwear for five or six years. I don’t know if I was just bored, or looking to regenerate, or what, or if this is another piece of the mop-up. I’d looked at an M-65 back around 2006 as a good all-purpose jacket, but it was superfluous to requirement with the International jacket in hand, and besides, it was about that time that I started to realize that most of the surplus showing up in the Army-Navy store was Chinese, not government contractor overruns. And I pushed it to the back of my mind and forgot about it until a month or so ago, when I was looking for something longer than the trucker jacket, lighter than the peacoat and heavier than the rain shell, nicer than “smeared with wax” but sturdier than “smells like a damp sheep in the rain”.

And so here it is. Proper mil-spec, but the same sort of British waxed-jacket brown as a Barbour. Waterproof without being covered in chemicals or requiring re-waxing. Blended fabric that doesn’t look polyester. Roomy enough for a sweater, and (so far) warm without getting hot. I was comfy outside in the drizzle and cold, and haven’t felt the need to pull it off at my desk. It’s probably not one jacket to rule them all, but it feels right, somehow – and feels like another loop closed.

Well, Vanderbilt has reverted fully to Same Old Vandy. Alabama is probably out of the title picture again. Only Cal, with the Axe retrieved and Furd vanquished for the first time in the 2010s, offers our house a good outcome. Part of that is down to Alabama being a disappointment any year they don’t win it all and make everyone else miserable, but most of it is down to Vanderbilt being back to where it was for most of my life between 1997 and 2010: an afterthought.

The NFL has been kicked to the curb for years, honored only with the ridearound once or twice a year (and with no Sonny or Sam any more, I wonder how long that will continue). This year is the closest college has come to that. No games attended, nothing watched except for a few stray Army or Navy or Ivy League games. Because that’s really it, isn’t it? Teams where the players are definitely doing something else after college, teams that have deliberately opted out of the big-time. All that matters at Army and Navy is that you beat each other. The Ivies win the league, in the regular season. No playoff, no bowls, no title game. No interaction with the system.

Because the system is what ruined the game for me. The problem of facing a whole league of teams that have a university on the side. The problem of having to meet the financial demands of staying in the big time. The problem of not being worth anyone’s notice unless you were a year away from getting into a playoff that never has anyone in it but four of the same six or seven teams. And sure enough, this year, it looks like Clemson, Ohio State, $SEC_CHAMP and $OTHER_SEC_TEAM again.

Football could spark joy, if it were possible to be competitive on a regular basis and not be drowned out by the power teams. Who cares who you’re playing; if you could play ten games a year and be reasonably sure of winning six, and beating your arch-rival at least once every three years, and have the opportunity to tailgate and make a day of it, that would be enough. But that’s not enough for college football. It has to be the developmental arm of pro football first and foremost, and that’s what has helped destroy the college football experience.

Which is difficult. College football was somewhere between a hobby and a religion for decades in my life. Getting shut of it altogether is a big ask, and there’s a hole in my life it leaves that is not adequately filled by English or Scottish soccer. It was a social outlet, continuity with my past, the one thing I could always connect with my Alabama relations over. And inasmuch as I have been unable to quit it, it’s because of other people, whether friends or acquaintances or just those strange people in my phone. When your past has swallowed up everyone behind you, it’s hard to voluntarily push more people into the black hole.

Maybe next year – or the year after – I wake up to find that Vanderbilt is a member of the Patriot League, and we’re going to go out there and smash through Holy Cross and Lehigh and go option-to-option with Army and maybe have a non-conf against Princeton or somebody, and watch the games every week on NBCSN or CBS Sports and never have to think about the SEC ever again.

Wouldn’t that be something.

I don’t know anything about Stephen Vogt’s religion. 

I can make some guesses. His walk-up is a Christian rock song, and he played his college ball at Azusa Pacific, which is a religious institution. All I know about Azusa Pacific other than that is two things: Christian Okoye, the Nigerian nightmare, and the fact that Jack Gilbert taught screenwriting there.

The most religious thing I ever saw from Jack was signing off his Christmas letter with “God bless us every one.” But after his death, talking to people after his service up in the LA hills, I learned that he’d been involved with various Christian programs in Hollywood – when he wasn’t running the writer development program at Warner Brothers or teaching at Azusa Pacific or just making himself available for people willing to trade lunch for a read or a polish or just good advice. I met Jack through the same gang of Internet maniacs as everyone else in my circle in the 90s, but I got to know Jack when there was drama in the group, two or three people were alienated, and Jack – despite not being involved in the least – took it upon himself to make amends. He was given my name, reached out to me, and persuaded me to act as his agent. That’s how I learned that Emma’s was the industry florist in Nashville, and how Jack became our man in Hollywood.

I don’t know what’s in the water at Azusa Pacific, but I thought about this when I heard the story of how Stephen Vogt knocked on some doors while the Giants were down in LA, and told three rookies – including Vandy’s own Mike Yazstremski – “come down to the lobby at 9 AM, we have a suit fitting.” Because when Vogt was a rookie, some veteran took it upon himself to take him out and fit him for a nice suit, because now that you’re an adult and a major leaguer, you need a nice suit. And Vogt took it upon himself to pay it forward, because that’s what you do. You take what you have and use it to help other folks along the way. I mean, it’s not like an MLB rookie can’t afford a suit – but sometimes there are things you don’t know you ought to do, and you need a guiding hand or a mentor to coach you up in the little things that make a grown-up, and provide an example for how you ought to do in future. I’m sure Yaz and Beedah are going to be buying some rookie a suit at some point in the future now, and another little ripple of making the world better goes out.

This is not the easiest time to call yourself a Christian in America. The popular vision of Christianity is the one I was raised in, the one that has demeaned and diminished itself in a forty-year race to the bottom in pursuit of worldly power. One that can’t sing “red and yellow black and white, they are precious in his sight” without a knowing head-tilt of no they aren’t. One that has made it impossible to square what we learned in Sunday school in the 1970s with what comes out of the pulpits of 2019. One that basically drove me away from religion altogether for years and years.

And yet.

There was a hole in my spirit that was always filled by Chapel at Six on Monday nights in undergrad. It was occasionally filled in the ensuing years by the odd Sunday evening at All Saints’ in Homewood or St. George in Arlington. I’ve made an effort to find something that fits at different times – cathedral here, Evensong there, a conscious effort to make a pass through three or four different institutions in search of something that clicked. The only thing I can conclude is that there’s a chance I might be some sort of Episcopalian down deep, because it feels like I get all the liturgical ritual I need without being tied to a hierarchy and organization that clashes with my Baptist priesthood-of-the-believer sensibilities.

I don’t know what I’m looking for. I don’t know what I actually believe. But there are a couple of people who lived by the doctrine of show, don’t tell, and what I saw makes me wonder if there’s some part of that I can connect with. I don’t know how this is going to work, but it’s got to be worth a try.

It’s been three weeks and I haven’t even thought about my SE in that time. Which makes sense, because you really can’t have more than one phone these days and the AirPods Pro make me feel like I have a new angle on the whole ecosystem. Plus having decent battery life is everything, although I have to admit, I’m curious to know whether the RAM issues that finally got fixed in iOS 13.2.2 might have fixed the battery on the SE. But it’s not really worth going upstairs to sort out the drawer I chucked it into.

No, the thought process now is back to the Apple Watch. Because the news that Google is buying Fitbit has made the Charge 3 untenable in future: a vector for the exfiltration of personal health data into an ecosystem and a company that is absolutely not trustworthy of it. And despite the plethora of flaws in Apple these days – manufacturing indentured to China, Cook cozying up to Trump, the complete failure of anything remotely resembling QA in Cupertino – having an Apple Watch to charge every damn night beats shipping your step count, heart rate and sleep cycle to the Beast of Mountain View.

The problem here is that my Series 0 was a colossal bust. I wanted it for the heart rate monitoring, at a time when there wasn’t really a good alternative and I was panicked after what was arguably a panic attack at a time of great stress (and boy was I a wuss about what constituted stress in 2015, in retrospect). And it was slow, almost useless with third party apps, and stopped getting updates, and there’s very little to suggest that the delta with the Charge 3 is worth paying. Or was, anyway, until Google.

But the experience suggests to me that you can’t necessarily expect five years of watch updates. You don’t know when it’s going to get cut off (unlike the iOS ecosystem, where five years sounds right; my iPad mini 2 from Christmas 2013 did not get the 13 update at age six). Looking at the Watch options, the Series 3 is right out; pre-aged two years is a bad investment. So it’ll have to be the Series 5 (or more likely 6).

What gets interesting at this point is that i have thought in the past that an Apple Watch with LTE service would make a fine shutdown night device and alternative to one of those limited-use phones. And it would! But the problem then becomes “how do I add this watch to work” and I don’t know if such a thing is possible. And it’s not time yet for me to pay for my own phone service. (Although I have almost decided that maybe I should get this iPhone from work unlocked in case of spontaneous travel to London at some point. Hell, if Brexit puts the pound on par with the dollar it would be foolish NOT to go.)

Maybe this is going to happen next year. Maybe I’m at risk of laying down close on $2000 for new Apple gear in late 2020. But I’m not gonna lie, having 2FA and temperature on my wrist would be kind of cool again. And maybe the iPhone 9, so-called, would be phone enough. But the only thing I can say for sure is that in retrospect, crunching my SE in the first class seat was the hand of God and I was foolish to spend money to replace it.

When the AirPods came out, I was highly intrigued. But they were pricey enough that I was uneasy about paying that kind of money for something I couldn’t be sure would fit my ears, especially after having settled on a pair of corded over-the-ear headphones for a long time beforehand. I’d used other bluetooth headsets of different sorts, none of which ever had particularly good sound or particularly reliable battery life, and I had given up and just accepted that there would be badge and sunglasses entangled with my cord forever. And then the BeatsX arrived, with the same wireless chip for pairing, and they showed up for $100 on Amazon briefly, so I pounced. I got the ear tips right, and I had the cable around my neck and the wingtips in my ears for security, and it more or less worked for two years.

Then the battery started to go. Badly. And then they flaked out in other ways and I could never get them to stay on longer than five minutes without crashing and needing a hardware reset to pair them again. And it occurred to me that the wingtips had broken off months earlier, so maybe they would be fine without…and then the PowerBeats Pro came out. Everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t. No wireless nonsense, absurdly long battery life, but…a case too big for a pocket. The principle problem with wireless headphones is that you need to know you won’t have to plug them in all day, and in a world where I actually want to use my Ballpark Pass for the Giants, I’m not convinced that even 9 hours would be enough to get me by without having the case at work or in the office or or or. Plus, it was crazy money.

But then, the rumblings began. New AirPods in October, that would split the difference and be the sweet spot for me. And sure enough, they were announced last Monday and available last Wednesday, and in a rapid strike, I rolled the dice and spent more money on a pair of earbuds than I’d spent on any cell phone but two ever, because it was worth it to me to have an Apple product on launch day for the first time since the iPhone 4 (or iPhone X, but I didn’t pay for that). I was going to be able to test these things under travel conditions and see if they were worth it.

Reader, they are worth it.

The noise cancelling is up to the task on the plane, easily. But the miracle thing is that with a squeeze of the stem, they go from noise-cancelling to letting the sound through. Transparency mode has been described elsewhere as “AR for your ears” and it’s true: you hear pretty much the world around you AND your audio. And the earbuds’ charge went up by 50% after about 15 minutes in the case, which means that buds and case combined should be good for all day every day. 

But more than that, I have the option to use one at a time without dangling cords. I can pocket them without something hanging around my neck. I can finally invoke Siri without having to so much as pull the phone out of my pocket. They make me want to figure out voice control on the iPhone and the Mac alike. They give me a feel I haven’t gotten from a new Apple product in a long time: the feeling that I’ve actually stepped forward into a new and exciting future of personal device use. 

And with a new battery in the X and these in my ears, for the first time in a while, I can go without range anxiety and maybe start being kinder to the battery and not constantly charging in bits and bobs, and maybe extend the lifespan of my devices until it’s time to pay for another phone again. Which would be awfully nice. But having these and iOS 13 make the X feel almost like a new phone. Now if only they would fix the album art bug…

The documentary snuck up on me. I don’t think I realized it was a thing until less than a week before it debuted, but everyone from my in-laws to my Vanderbilt tailgate crew to my Alabama relations asked if I was watching it. And I spent a good chunk of the spring re-watching the entirety of the Ken Burns Baseball documentary, so sixteen hours on the history of country music? Sure, I’ll give it a whirl.

This is a masterpiece.

I was raised on country music, obviously. WZZK, the powerhouse FM country station, was the soundtrack of most of my life from the time it went on-air until 1983 or so, and three years in Nashville sent me to WSM-AM occasionally, and when I was in DC I often found myself riding around to Eddie Stubbs on WAMU, sending a bluegrass show back to his old patch from Nashville, but I hadn’t really been plugged into it in any meaningful way for a long, long time. Not least because the current state of country music is kind of dire, what with bro-country as the newest Nashville Sound. Insert generic pickup truck dirt road cutoff jeans beer drinking here.

But in the background of everything is the fact that country music is what my family was raised on, from the forties to when I was born. I knew that it all went back to the Carter Family, and that a Vanderbilt professor once told me that if modern media existed in the 1930s that Elvis Presley would have spent his career as a third-rate Jimmie Rodgers impersonator, but I don’t think I ever grasped how Ralph Peer was basically the midwife of the popular music recording industry – or how the Bristol sessions were the Big Bang of country music. But I didn’t see the line of history. Jimmie Rodgers gives the world the singing cowboy as a concept, and thus Gene Autry, but also inspires Ernest Tubb (far more influential than I realized) and Hank Williams. I had no idea what a star Roy Acuff was in the 1940s, the bridge between the hillbilly Opry of Deford Bailey and Uncle Dave Macon and the cementing of Nashville as the capital of country music. I don’t think I’d ever heard of the Maddox Brothers and Rose, let alone that they were from Alabama and made their way to California during the depression – through the Bay Area, natch. 

And you could see the path. The Irish music I gravitated to these last twenty years, colliding with the songs of African slaves and freedmen. Fiddle meets banjo meets mandolin and guitar. You could make a case that the proto-American music first divided into hillbilly and jazz, based on whether it was rural or urban. Then hillbilly went west, found drums and electricity and the Mexican border, and became western and then honky-tonk, while hillbilly carromed off the black blues and became bluegrass, and then when that western music washed back up on the blues in Memphis, became rock and roll. Hank Williams Jr isn’t wrong when he points out that “Rock Around The Clock” is basically “Move It On Over.”

The funny thing is, as early as a few days before the series started, I glanced right past the “Boot Liquor” channel on SomaFM for “Americana” and roots music. Now it’s at the top of my favorites list. Willie’s Roadhouse on SiriusXM is in the preset where Yacht Rock was all summer. And I’ve rewatched the first two episodes over and over. It took me ages to get around to the final episode (which my wife still hasn’t seen) just because I didn’t want it to end – and because the seventh episode, all of which is basically living memory for me, was kind of a wrench in ways I wasn’t expecting.

Because this is the music of my people. This is the music that came down from the holler in East Tennessee and up from the cotton patch in north Alabama. This is music that came from the whole of the South, white and black alike, music that spoke of sin and redemption, of the assurance of better days in the middle of hard times. This is my patrimony. This is my inheritance. This is something that I didn’t realize was missing from my life, a part of the puzzle, something I can call my own – and something that makes me wish I’d gone to the Bluebird more than once, or the Ryman more than once (and for an actual show, not a play), or the Exit/In or the Grand Old Opry at all. 

I don’t even have to engage with the new stuff if I don’t want to. There are plenty of people still making it in the old ways, bluegrass pickers and Neo-traditionalists and Old Crow Medicine Show and a talented young woman from North Carolina named Rhiannon Giddens fronting out a band called Carolina Chocolate Drops who I’ll definitely be playing now. And there’s something as simple as Jimmie Rodgers singing from ninety-one years in the past, about hanging around a water tank waiting for a train, that still hits the nail on the head about being a long way from home and slowly finding your way back.

It’s a good thing to have again.

I know I said a while back that it felt like I had crossed the finish line on wanting stuff. And yet, in the last six months or so I have gone on a truly ridiculous binge. Setting aside the replacement of things under warranty that were no longer working – in some cases on vehicular scale – I have gone out and bought a bunch of things that were on the frivolous list for years, things which might have previously been reconciled to the “maybe if someone gets this for me for Christmas” scale. Things like an Ebbets Field Flannels Vanderbilt jersey, or a pair of LL Bean Chelsea boots, or a couple of Yeti containers. To the point that I don’t think there’s much left on my wish list any more.

I think there are a couple different phenomena at work here. One is the whole notion of “look, we could be nuked tomorrow, why would you defer joy at this point.” I’ve been eyeing the Bean boots in some form or another for almost thirty years, an Ebbets jersey of some sort for twenty-five or more, my first attempt at Birkenstock-a-likes was in Nashville for godsakes. To some extent, going through and checking those things off is a matter of closing the loop, of collecting the trophies of a lifetime of patience and saying “screw it, treat yourself.” Jimmie Rodgers did say that money was no good until after you had spent it, for then it had furnished you and your loved ones with the fine things of life, and it’s hard to quibble with that. (More on him in a while.)

But the other stuff – like an 18 oz Yeti bottle that fits the cupholder and has a bag-safe drinkable lid option, and is dishwasher-safe and features two different California state emblems on its blue surface – feels like an attempt to purchase the artifacts of a life I wish I led and use them to try to obtain that life. I’ve never yet been able to carry a water bottle the way my wife does, but this thing seems to be close. I have a belt holster for it so that I don’t have to carry a bag to make it work, and there’s a bottle-filling fountain down the hall at work on the way into and out of the office. So long as I don’t do anything dumb like fill it with soda and pressurize it shut to the point of being inoperable, it’s good at keeping cold things cold until I drink them. And it serves as a talisman against buying something in a plastic bottle, which in turn cuts down the amount of random soda and bad things I’m likely to buy.

In a way, it feels like I’m whittling back. I have a pile of caps, but I wear maybe three of them. Everything is drunk out of the Yeti bottle or one of the two Yeti tumblers (one of which is devoted solely to coffee because of all the residue that resists any amount of hand scrubbing or dishwasher action). I wear more or less the same two pair of jeans, the same five T-shirts, the same flannel and the same work shirt, and if I could get away with it, the same pair of Birks every day. There’s actually a small pile that needs to go to Goodwill, and I strongly suspect at least half my closet could be dropped on top of it if I took out the stuff I actually wear and the stuff I actually need for future use.

Maybe I’m getting ready for a life where the can’t-part-with keepsakes live in a storage unit and the daily necessities live in a shipping container. But for now, it feels like “don’t shirk from spending the money on the one quality thing you’re going to use every day for three years running.” So bring on the 5.4” iPhone. And maybe some noise-canceling earbuds to go with it.