Are my eyes really blue?

We left Galway after five and a half glorious days and headed south to Dingle. It was the beginning of a long stretch where every night but two were spent in a different town – two in Dingle, one in Kenmare, two in Kinsale, one in Kilkenny, one in Wicklow and one in Dublin before the bird home. The problem is, I always have a certain amount of mild gloom and difficulty in a new place until I get oriented and get my wits about me. Changing towns every day makes it difficult to get through that, and more to the point, almost every one of these towns would reward a two-day stay. Dingle itself probably calls for about three: one night at the pubs, one day driving around the Dingle Peninsula, one day exploring the high street and the village generally, and then maybe an excursion to the Blaskets or similar. And this is a town of two thousand people. It’s smaller than the town I grew up in, and there’s three days worth of things to see there.

Halfway around the Dingle Peninsula, amidst the medieval beehive huts and stone forts and hairpin turns on single-lane roads, there was a village called Ballyferriter. There are two hundred stories in the naked city of Ballyferriter. And four pubs. We stopped into one that said it had a Star Wars Viewing Platform, intrigued – and found that its back patio looked across the water to where a huge set for Episode VIII had once stood last winter. Apparently the offseason last year saw the Lucasfilm crew spend four weeks building a replica of Skellig Michael, four weeks filming on it and four weeks tearing it down, and among the amusements it offered, Chewbacca turned up in person to visit a school full of kids playing the John Williams score on their tin whistles. Now the whole village is Star Wars fans, even people who cared nothing for movies or sci-fi. I told the friendly barmaid pulling me a glass of Beamish that “you folks better be ready for more crazy tourists than ever before.” As a pilgrimage site for the Comic-Con set, you could do much worse.

We also visited the famous Foxy John’s Pub in Dingle, which is a public house and a hardware store. It serves both as long as it’s open, so if you need a hammer or to get hammered, as long as the door is open you’re fine. Huge crowd in the front room with the saws and nails and such, and then a pleasant space with tables and chairs (big comfy chairs!) near a roaring fire, and then yet another covered patio outside for the smokers. And the thing in Ireland is…everyone goes down the pub. Men and women. Young and old. Every demographic. You smoke, you don’t, you drink, you don’t – the public house in Ireland dates from a time when you needed that common space not just for social interaction, but for things you didn’t have in your own home. Like television. Or electricity. Or heat and light, if you go back far enough. (Some parts of Ireland weren’t electrified until the 1970s.)

The other notable thing in Dingle was the distillery. It opened five years ago, started making whiskey, and laid it down to age – and then kicked off making gin and vodka in the meantime. If you want to be a craft distiller, but don’t have three years and a day to wait before making profit, gin and vodka is the way to go, and Dingle’s gin is a rare old spirit indeed with tons of local botanicals (fuchsia, bog heather and the like. I also had a taste of the raw whiskey before it’s cut and barreled – it was roughly 164 proof, the strongest thing I’ve ever tasted in my life, and amazingly even at 82% ABV it still had a certain richness of taste that let you know “there is a very smooth whiskey waiting under here for you in 2020.” And to see a genuine Irish distillery – not an exhibition center, not an “experience,” but actual stills and rickhousing and mash tuns – was a great experience even if I don’t drink that much whiskey any more.

Kenmare was a delight in its own way – an amazing snack dish at one pub with the softest pint of Murphy’s you’ve ever tasted, followed by a dinner at the Coachmen’s with Ireland’s best accordionist, so-called, followed by a diversion into yet another pub with a full pint of Smithwick’s to watch Ireland take on Wales with a bunch of other folks riveted to the screen. And Ireland won through, 1-0, with the kind of more-guts-than-goods victory that you used to expect from the United States. If we can pillage Martin O’Neill to rebuild US Soccer, I will pay whatever it takes. And then the walk home by the river with no streetlights…and it was quiet. Dead quiet. No light but the night sky, no sound but a gurgling brook, and you start to realize just how rural the West of Ireland really is to this day, and how much I apparently do have a predilection for running water nearby.

Kinsale was another picture-postcard-perfect town of what, maybe 2500 in town and 2500 in the outlying areas? With five churches, five bookstores and twenty-five pubs. I lined up Guinness and Murphy’s and Beamish and sampled all alike (sadly my palate isn’t sophisticated enough when they’re all fresh from the local brewer. THEY’RE GOOD BEERS BRENT.) and we wound up buying deep-cut crystal worthy of the bottle of Yellow Spot on my drinks cabinet. But this is where my wife’s genius kicked in: we’d booked a room at a spa hotel instead of yet another B&B, because by this point we needed a vacation from the vacation. A couple nights of room service and a huge bed were perfect. (Ireland likes a firm mattress, too firm in many cases, but the weird electric shower thingy definitely gives you hot enough water.) And I was able to watch a little TV. I saw the Angelus rung before the Six One News on RTE. I saw wall to wall coverage of the 2018 budget interrupted by news of the California wildfires. And I was persuaded more than ever that what passes for “news” in the United States has a lot to answer for in how we got to this point…of which, as they say.

As an aside, now I will discuss the beer scene in Ireland. One of our stops in Dublin, obviously, was the Guinness Storehouse, a giant Disneyland of history for any aficionado of The Black Stuff. It may be Diageo now and they may be making a dozen different brews, but the iconic Irish dry stout is still mother’s milk to millions of fans around the world, myself included. So here’s my first blockbuster revelation of the trip:

(glances around furtively, whispers) It wasn’t that different.

Guinness in Ireland is like Cuban cigars: the quality threshold is a lot higher, and you’re more likely to get the good stuff, but if you know what to look for in the States – that is, a place that goes through a LOT of Guinness, sells it as fast as they get it in and keeps it impeccably with a good nitrogen system and clean lines and knows how to pull a proper pint – the experience is almost as good. The 4P’s did this, and I can vouch for a place or two around here. Nevertheless, my first pint of Guinness was drunk in the Gravity Bar at the top of the Storehouse with a 360-degree view of Dublin’s fair city. The experience alone made it remarkable. Thing is, in Ireland, you’ll get a five-star pint almost everywhere you go, and if it isn’t, it’ll be a four-star pint, whereas in the US, you have to scuffle some to find a four-star pint. But it can be done.

A little more about the beers of Ireland. I mentioned earlier that Guinness is on two taps if not three everywhere. Smithwick’s Red, with a different logo, is almost everywhere, and many if not most places also had their newer blond and pale ales. Carlsberg was the most pervasive lager, with Heineken a close second, but a lot of places were selling Guinness’s new Hop House 13 lager – which was rich and flavorful and better than most lagers I’ve ever had, and was a perfect accompaniment to fish and chips. Bulmers (sold as Magners abroad) was the universal cider, on tap most anywhere. The only American beer with any penetration, shockingly, was Coors Light, which brings us to the next point:

Irish beer isn’t generally all that strong.

This is the whole point, to be honest. Guinness is 4.2% ABV. Smithwicks is around 4.5%. Coors Light, as it happens, is around 4.2. When you drink beer in 20 ounce servings, 7% ABV American IPAs turn into a ballbreaker pretty quickly. The various craft beers I tried – like the delightful Buried At Sea milk stout by Galway Bay Brewing Company – were all around 4% ABV, as are the other dry stouts in the Cork area like Murphy’s and Beamish (both owned by Heineken now). Beers like that, sold in the 10 oz “just a glass” size (aka the Cheeky Half) are perfect for a quick bend of the elbow.

Ireland also knows how to balance an IPA. The hops are sharp and flavorful, piney and citrus, without overwhelming the malt of the beer or being too bitter to sip. The Galway Hooker (it’s a fishing boat, you perverts) session IPA is crisp and refreshing, not a stunt beverage with a ridiculous IBU count. Franciscan Well in Cork or Sullivan’s in Kilkenny will brew you a red ale that tastes like the best of autumn in a glass. And I did find Kilkenny Cream Ale, which I’ve now only had in two pubs ever: one in Kilkenny and one in Sunnyvale. But more on that later.

The thing that saved me, though, was Guinness Mid-Strength. It looks like Guinness, but it’s only 2.8% ABV. I spotted it on the taps at the Merry Ploughboy, locked in and tried it, and it turned out to taste exactly like Guinness tastes after you’ve already had eight pints of Guinness. I had been warned not to keep pace with one of our Irish compatriots, and rightly so as it turned out – but thanks to the Mid-Strength, I did it, and got home at 1 AM just fine and up and out the next morning without harm. And then, looking at Wikipedia, I saw that “Guinness Mid-Strength was test-marketed in Limerick and Dublin from 2008.” I don’t think that tap would be there if you went back today. I think God or Loki or St Brigid or someone put it there to protect me that night, and I am thoroughly grateful.

The moral of the whole thing is that on this trip, by various instruments, I re-learned that you can have a whole Imperial pint of a flavorful beer that you pull at slowly for an hour and a half and be just fine. I intend to pursue this at home with my 20 oz Yeti tumbler and a jug of the brown ale from the local brewpub, because Ireland has figured out how to drink smart and drink well. Now if only I could find a pub around here with a flagstone floor and an open fireplace and live traditional music and a comfy chair…

The thing about driving in a British-influenced country is that it’s not driving on the other side of the road that gets you. Ireland has extremely well-marked roads and signage, and if you keep your wits about you and follow the flow of traffic, it’s pretty difficult to screw up. What throws you is driving on the other side of the automobile. All your instincts about where the mass of your vehicle is are wrong. Your sense of where to be in the lane is completely thrown. You reach with the wrong hand for seatbelt, for gearshift, for where to rest an elbow. God be with you if you didn’t have the presence of mind to reserve an automatic, because manual shifting with the wrong hand is insane-making. You will hit about four curbs the first full day of driving. Now on top of the wrong side of the road and the wrong side of the car, add the wrong side of sundown, and you’ll see why my nerves were shot directly we rolled our Skoda into Galway on Sunday evening.

That was a problem that resolved itself almost immediately.

Galway is the fourth-largest city in Ireland. It’s about the size of Mountain View, California, barely hitting eighty thousand souls. It is generally regarded as the capital of the Gaeltacht, the Irish-language preservation region, and is a center for traditional music. The Latin Quarter is the traditional medieval city, with winding cobbled streets and shops and pubs cheek by jowl, but the West End has its share of similar attractions on the other side of the River Corrib, and walking between them was the work of fifteen minutes, tops. 

Among the things I learned in Galway was that my genetic predilection for fog and mist also extends to stone buildings and urban waterways – the river and the canals alike and the buildings that back up to them. Strolling through the West End – here a pub, there a restaurant, there your quick-stop grocery and there your laundromat – made me realize that density isn’t just about housing, it’s about everything being close enough to walk. You wouldn’t need a car if you lived in the Claddagh except for major shopping expeditions, because it’s an easy ten minute stroll to everything from the posh department store to the greengrocers to the pharmacy to ALL THE PUBS. And the smoke in the air – there was some debate whether it was coal or peat, but somebody was always burning something that wasn’t wood for heating. It added to that sense of otherness, especially making your way from apartment to B&B along the Sea Road, walking past the Crane Bar and hearing the traditional music drifting through the air at half eleven at night. 

I had to go into Supermac’s, because of course I did. Like Jack’s back in Alabama, it’s a fast food chain that does a little bit of everything (they have the Papa John’s concession in Ireland on top of their usual burger and fries and chicken) and it’s also literally the only place I found a fountain soda for two and a half weeks. It’s also a huge Galway GAA supporter – the shirt sponsor, in fact – and it made a nice alternative to just going into the McDonalds in desperate search for a Coke and wi-fi. Not that the wireless was a problem; I think we went into maybe one or two establishments the whole time that didn’t have their own free public wi-fi. And a third of the time there wasn’t even an interstitial login page; it was just connect and go. Not even Silicon Valley is that seamless with public wi-fi anymore, and certainly not in pubs.

And the pubs…I heard music in the Crane Bar, in Monroe’s, in O’Connors, and the thing it drove home to me at long last is that I wasn’t imagining things. The Four Provinces, from 2000-2004, was as legit and authentic an Irish pub experience as you could get in the States. The same blend of traditional and American songs, people sat right next to the musicians, apple pie on the desert menu and a pint in every hand – I was trained for this fifteen years ago and was right at home the minute I scrounged a seat. The only real difference is that I don’t remember anywhere in DC serving halves, which are crucial to have if you’re trying to pace yourself. Then again, there were people promoting Outcider by Bulmer’s in Monroe’s, and when I agreed to try it, did they bring me a half? Did they bring me a shot glass or some kind of sample size? Did they bollocks, they put a WHOLE FREE PINT OF CIDER in front of me. At which point you just have to be very cool about it and accept their hospitality and try not to die. The music always starts around 9, just like it did in DC, but fifteen years has made me wish for a 6 or 7 PM start (which the two music-equipped Irish bars of my frequency in the Bay Area will afford me, thankfully, so that’s nice).

We took a couple of side trips from Galway. One was out to the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher, which was breathtakingly scenic and yet oddly reminiscent of Alabama, only this occurred naturally instead of having to render the land barren with strip mining for coal first. The other was into the hills of Connemara, the capital of moonshine – which was bright and clear and sunny, a happenstance that I am assured is virtually unobtainable and amazed everyone we told. Once you get outside Galway, the size of the villages drops way way off – places like Cong or Kinvara have maybe a thousand people in and around the whole municipality but still have half a dozen pubs. It made me wonder what we would be in for going forward…but there’ll be more on that later.

Seventeen years ago, I started going to Ireland’s Four Provinces with the old gang. We drank what our Irishman called “the best pint you can get outside Ireland” and sang all the old songs and carried on into the wee small hours. It quickly became home, and everything important either happened there or was celebrated there. And more than once, it was only the lateness of the hour and my inability to walk a straight line that prevented me taking my passport straight to the Aer Lingus counter at Dulles and climbing onto a bird for “the Holy Land.”

About three weeks ago, it finally began.

The notion that you can take a direct flight from San Jose to London is like something out of science fiction, made more so by the comfort of business class and the fact that Heathrow is the closest thing I’ve ever visited to a legitimate space port. It’s like the crossroads of the world (at least until I visit Dubai or something). There’s also a certain futuristic vibe to having my iPhone SE work everywhere with just a change of SIM, bought prepaid at the WH Smith, and the seamless nature of international business class making it possible to stroll into the lounge and mix yourself a whiskey ginger, gratis. Less futuristic is the fact that “European business class” just consists of bodging a sort of tray into the center seat on an A320 and  nothing else (which is actually worse than normal if you’re traveling as a romantic couple). But despite being wired and tired after the voyage, we still had enough juice to go out with our family for those first-night drinks in a pub with a sofa and a perfect milk stout microbrew (yes, the craft beer movement has hit Ireland with a vengeance, of which more later).

Dublin is a city of 1.3 million. So a little bigger than San Jose or San Francisco, depending on how many of the suburbs you want to count, and includes the benefits of being a world capital and a thousand years old. My cousin compared it to Nashville, and by comparison to Dublin you can see the Nashville vs LA relation. It’s smaller, the transit is far more bus-based (there’s one light rail and it’s slow as balls, and one commute train system that isn’t bad), but it’s also more accessible – nearly everything we wanted to see was within a few miles and anything was either on the tour bus loop or easily walkable from same. 

It also has a lot of the history. You can still put a finger in the bullet holes at the GPO and walk into the cells at Kilmainham Gaol. The Easter Rising was in 1916, the Irish Civil War in 1922 and the Free State not fully transformed into the Republic until after the Second World War, so while it’s been a while since the British yoke was (mostly) thrown off, it’s still not appreciably more distant than, say, unchallenged Jim Crow in the American South. (Of which more later.) Eastenders still comes on the telly at 6 PM, though.

Dublin was a great place for pubs. I made it into Kehoe’s, last year’s Dublin Pub of the Year, and half a dozen others besides, all with two taps for Guinness at a minimum and frequently three varieties of Smithwicks (in addition to the red ale that comes to the US, there’s a pale ale and an Atlantic Blond as well) to go alongside the Carlsberg and Hop House 13 lager options and the Bulmer’s cider in its own mushroom-shaped glass to hold the ice for those who use it. But the standout establishment was a place in the foothills of the mountains outside town, called – of all things – the Merry Ploughboy. It was dinner and a show, with the musicians playing all the same sorts of things I heard in that pub in DC all those years ago. And I was prepared, and I belted out the Fields to the amazement of our whole traveling party (including the woman who I was specifically told NOT to try to keep pace with. Of which.)

Here’s the thing about Dublin, though: it’s an anomaly. The second city in the Republic of Ireland is Cork, the rebel city, which has a population around 200K. No other city in the south of Ireland, aside from those two, is larger than Sunnyvale, California. Ireland was never meaningfully urban – the ecclesiastical framework was built around the abbeys and monasteries rather than cities, and despite the first Norman invasion coming before Magna Carta, England’s control of the country barely extended past Dublin until the 1600s. It’s hard not to shake the sense that there’s Dublin and there’s everything else (and Cork, the Texas of Ireland, does nothing to dissuade you from that opinion). So when we picked up the rental car on Sunday, it was to plunge headlong into the real thing. And that is when the real story begins.

Heading abroad again. After seventeen years I’m finally on my way to Ireland. There will be pubs. There will be pints, although they will almost certainly be taken a half at the time. There may or may not be singing. There will be very nice accommodations in transit and we’ll almost certainly have a room booked for every night before we leave. There will hopefully be no 90-degree heatwaves or sudden-onset sinus infections to confound us as in years past. And hopefully the GlobalEntry registration will make it a lot simpler coming and going and avoid making a scene with the Border Patrol.

Because there’s no getting around it: this is a difficult time to be an American in the eyes of the world. I’ve said it elsewhere, but it bears repeating: America, in 2017, is the Alabama of the world. How you feel about that and how you react to that probably says as much as anything about what kind of person you are. I’m no stranger to being vaguely embarrassed about whence you came and feeling like you have to demonstrate that you’re not about what your home patch screams to the world “this is what we’re about.” My one hope is that I can point to California on my hat and at least get the benefit of the doubt – hopefully our state’s branding is strong enough to say “if there’s one part of America you can count on being Never Trump, it’s the Golden State.”

I’ll be honest: the last trip to London, problematic as it was, still had a nasty undercurrent even after correcting for the heat and the sickness. It wasn’t “what if we could move here,” it was “what if we had to move here?” and I would be lying not to acknowledge that there’s a lot of that weighing on me right now. There are a handful of folks whose fortunes we have to worry about in America and 2017; if they were going to be all right and/or we could take them away with us, I’d be all in on decamping to this place where they speak English yet are still in the EU, where some of the politics are iffy but there’s no actual Nazis involved in governance, some place out of the front line of fire of a North Korean maniac where you don’t have to spend days begging the government not to blow up health care for millions of people to line the pockets of rich assholes, where there’s a burgeoning tech sector that hasn’t taken over the entire local economy and caused it to disappear up its own ass while ordinary non-Eloi have to work twice as hard and rent their rooms and drive side hustles and the like just to keep what they have. Some place where unlimited talk and text and 15 GB of data will cost you $24 a month prepaid with no commitment. Some place where the national motto is literally “a hundred thousand welcomes.”

In other words…if I go to Ireland, will I be willing to come back?

Much is being made of the fact that there aren’t the first-day lines for the iPhone like there used to be. And it makes sense. For one, the improvements to the iPhone have been highly incremental – the iPhone 5 got a bigger screen and LTE in 2012, and since then only the larger sizes in 2014 have been an appreciable change. If you had last year’s iPhone, there’s no call to run out for this year’s; the days of leaps and bounds are basically done. But for another, the iPhone X has ruined the iPhone 8’s appeal. The 8 is basically a slightly improved 7; the X is the Next Big Thing (and pronouncing it as “ten” does the 8 no favors either), and since the X doesn’t arrive until November, where’s the incentive to run out and stand in line for an incremental upgrade, especially when Apple manages to drop-ship on launch day so effectively and you can just hang out at home to get it?

I’m more convinced than ever that I’m out on the 8/plus. I reluctantly concede that if someone else (say, work) were to pony up the $1000 for the iPhone X, I would be intrigued just to see what the impact of a 5.8” screen is on my life. Given that my precious Kindle Paperwhite is only a 6” display, and that I could use white on black to limit the battery draw thanks to AMOLED, and that video is probably actually useful on a screen that size relative to a 4” display, the iPhone X would be a legitimate contender as One Device To Rule Them All, even if it’s still a hair bigger than a hair too big. But at that price point, the incentive is still: let somebody else go first.

I still hope against hope for the prospect of an iPhone SE2, with the processors of the 8 and maybe a camera improvement while eschewing the space-wasting of 3D Touch and wireless charging. Or an iPhone X-Minus, with a 5-inch AMOLED display in a package roughly the size of the original Moto X – a hair bigger than the SE but smaller than the 6/7/8 line. Either would open my wallet. But as it is, I’m going abroad again with the SE (and maybe the Kindle for the plane trip). Of which…

About five months ago I first kicked around the notion of “distributed servantry.” Then, last week, I heard a couple of very sharp women discussing how the future of retail was in the experience, rather than just the purchase of goods, and they confirmed for me that this was the original department store model in the 1800s. It wasn’t about piling it high and stacking it cheap, it was about the personal shopping and the individual attention to Madame’s interest and curiosity and the refreshments and possibly spa treatments.

And this then kicked me back to the aforementioned distributed servantry. We wouldn’t think twice about trying to hire a cook, a chauffeur, a lady’s maid – but Doordash and Uber and Taskrabbit allow us to do just that. The running gag for years has been “Silly Con Valley invents ways to do what your mother doesn’t do for you anymore,” but the telling bit in that is that in the past, ‘all mod cons’ meant you had assorted modern conveniences to make it easier for you to do the dishes, do the laundry, whatever. Contemporary distributed servantry isn’t about making it easier for you to do these things, it’s about making it easier for someone else to do it for you.

And at that point, we’ve established a split between Eloi and Morlocks. Worse, in a way, because servants had to be housed and fed and generally provided for. Your Fiverr person or Lyft driver is out of your life forever soon as the app closes. No problem. Except they aren’t an employee of the little glowing square on your phone either, so it’s not like they’re guaranteed benefits or even a proper living wage. Permanent hustle, always scuffling to keep up, and the perversion of the Protestant work ethic means that that in America, any leisure moment is a moral fault if you don’t have enough money to enjoy it. 70 hours a week is “worth ethic,” 80 hours a week and loving it gets crossed out for 90, and a woman giving birth in the car-share she’s driving to make ends meet is a story of heroic dedication rather than Dickensian horror.

This all works because of a dirty little secret that a lot of people would rather you did not look too closely at. And that is this: the fundamental ethos of the 21st century GOP is exactly the same as the fundamental ethos of Silly Con Valley, and it’s “I GOT MINE, FUCK YOU.” It is the normalization of the absence of empathy. It’s the moral position that it’s okay not to know there’s other people. Hashtags and pieties are a perfectly good atonement for “we accidentally the election” while the tools of social media continue to feed the Nazis, and “the best cure for free speech is more free speech.” Just like the best cure for a hurricane is more water. Racism and sexism coupled to weaponized ignorance and pushed through the internet as a force multiplier might have bent an American presidential election, but holding Twitter and Facebook to account in any way would be bad for the First Amendment. That’s the kind of thinking that will ultimately cost us freedom of speech, but if it’s not a Y Combinator problem, then it’s not a problem here.

It’s disappointing, because from 1999, it looked like the 21st century was going to be a new and exciting and promising place. Then something went horribly, terribly wrong – and you can see the dry run for glorifying ignorance and dismissing knowledge and experience happen all through the Bush campaign coverage of 2000 – and we wound up with eight years of America being consumed by the stupid, followed by eight years of America fighting like hell to stay consumed in the face of reality. And instead of going forward to the 21st, we’re going back to the 19th. We just have apps now.

This is how raw I was: the night before my first day of work, I finally got hold of a real map and realized I didn’t have to take the Orange Line to Metro Center to change for the Red and get out at Farragut North – I could in fact just get out at Farragut West, walk across Farragut Square and save ten cents each way. Not a minute too soon, because on that day – September 15. 1997 – I started my first day of work at the National Geographic Society.

First, though, jet back: five months earlier, mid-April, I was still with my girlfriend of three and a half miserable years. Trying to keep her sane and do what I thought was my duty had left me three weeks out from my prelim exams with no realistic hope of passing. If I bombed out, my options were basically to go back to Birmingham, tail between my legs, and see what kind of life if any I could piece together. In all likelihood, I would have wound up staying there, trying to spin a temp job into a permanent office gig, maybe somewhere in the bowels of SONAT where I might even now find myself only five years out from a Rolex – or a suicide attempt. But that tale has been told before.

No, this began in a one-bedroom apartment in Arlington, with a boom box and an air mattress and a week’s worth of clothing, and my computer set up on top of a pizza box with a hole cut in it for ventilation. On the first day of work, I was introduced to the guys, and they took me in without hesitation. In fact, before the day was over, the ranking contractor had pulled me aside and handed me two 32MB SIMMs to take home and upgrade my computer from 24 MB of RAM to 72, and a disk to install Mac OS – was it 7.6.1 or were we on 8 by then? Work was still standardized on 7.5.3 rev2 and would be for months. 

I was issued a pager, which was handy as I couldn’t afford to turn on the cellphone I insisted on buying and carrying anyway. If I got a page that said 4663, that means FOOD and it was time to check in with the guys. In those days we were most likely going to see the King, walking down 16th Street NW to the Burger King in a crowd of six or seven. And at the end of the day, about a week on, I was given a P5-90 Pentium Gateway PC with the ticketing software and Quake installed so I could hop on the two-hour LAN battle that seemed to close every workday – and then train home on the Orange line Metro in plenty of time for Monday Night Football. We weren’t close – well, they were, but I wasn’t yet. But it didn’t take much time. After a week of shadowing the other Mac software guy, I solved my first ticket on my own – predictably, a weird printer issue – and once I’d demonstrated that I could and would do the job, we were off.

The big layoffs the year before had left us with a bunch of people waiting out their retirement and a bunch of young feisty guys just happy to still be there. Contractor reductions continued apace – it seemed like someone had a leaving lunch every Friday for most of the fall. There were maybe two women in the IS department that I ever came into contact with in those early days – one was my notional grandboss, trying to navigate the waters around the new VP, and one the office admin and sister of my boss, who bonded with me over women’s college basketball and our shared loathing of the Tennessee Lady Vols, and who was always there with Red Vines or a dab hand altering the time card to preserve my tiny increment of sick leave in a pinch.

It became obvious that we were in a challenging environment. All the VP wanted was for the calls to go away, and once there were no tickets we wouldn’t need desktop support, so contractors were ruthlessly purged to the point where two staff techs were handing all PC software support calls for a user base of 1200 – in a world where some had NT 4 and some had Windows for Workgroups, some had Token Ring and some had Ethernet, some had BeyondMail and some had Lotus Notes and TCP/IP access depended on what floor you were on – and there was a nine business day wait between tickets, which meant we had to escort these guys to lunch like Red Tails or Secret Service. The remaining contractors started showing me the ropes on Windows, getting familiar with NT and Ghost and the things I would need to do to contribute.

And then, one day, a server administrator – who was a server admin only because he had been a mainframe guy, and the Towers Perrin study said he had the salary of a server administrator, so you’re an NT admin and here is a book – came down to take possession of our server. Our NT box that was used as a repository for quickly-needed files, and incidentally our Quake server as well. And the contractor who administered it barred his way, said it wasn’t a server, it was an archive, and hastily typed a line to show up on the screen saver:

EUS_Archive

End User Services. That was our group. Technically it would become more like an English football firm, or maybe an Irish mob. As the ranks were thinned above us, our lead found himself reporting directly to the VP, who was out to get rid of him. But he fought back like hell on a daily basis. Beneath him, a couple of the guys acted as consigliere and caporegime to the rest of us, who were basically under orders to be a quart in a pint pot – do the impossible, but thread the needle in such a way that the powers that be would know we didn’t have enough people and couldn’t run at 275% of maximum forever.

One new bigwig after another was brought in to tame us. A new director. A new manager. Every one tasked with managing our boss out the door and somehow ending help calls in the meantime. In one of the last conversations I ever had with my father, I described the nonsense, which recalled the chaos of his own last year or two in the workforce, and he sighed and told me “well, just do the best you can and don’t be a horse’s ass.” And I’ve lived by that ever since. Most days I was a lot better at the first than the second. And there in the foxhole – hiding our contractors to keep them out of sight and out of mind, training a callow Mac tech with two poli-sci degrees to add printers on Windows NT and switch Token Ring cards for Ethernet and troubleshoot a Netware connection – we changed. We weren’t doing these things for a paycheck, or for the greater glory of the National Geographic Society, we were doing them because we depended on each other and nobody wanted to let down the guy beside him.

Staying late for Quake turned into staying late for Quake and then going to grab prime rib any way for $9.99 on Thursdays at Sign of the Whale. Prime Rib led to attempts to holler at the girls in the Channels International office and things like hookah lounges and karaoke bars. Solidarity took us to paintball courses and softball fields. One new bigwig after another, brought in to tame us, found themselves taking our side and defending us. And every time I wanted to go ballistic, to take the fight to the enemy in a major way, my boss would take me aside and give me the same advice Patrick Swayze gave the coolers at the Double Deuce: “I want you be nice. Until it’s time to not be nice.”

The Y2K remediation finally gave us all the personnel we needed, some of whom we marked out and made sure to bring into the fold as staff as soon as the opportunity presented itself. And that led us to a public house in Cleveland Park, and for four and a half years, anything that mattered in our lives either happened at or was celebrated at Ireland’s Four Provinces. Then, on September 11, 2001, we lost a friend of the program, the director of the travel office, who was on the plane that hit the Pentagon. And on September 12, 2001, with armed troops in the street and Humvees on every street corner, we reported in for work bang on time. Every. Single. One. Of. Us.

When my father died, they were there to cover my calls and doctor my timesheets. When my then-girlfriend needed a job after moving to DC, they slid her into the org chart and made a tech of her, then a help desk manager. When I broke up with said girlfriend, they were there to load my stuff into a van smelling of garbage and unpack the TV first so we wouldn’t miss the Redskins game while we emptied the rest. When I had a rotten Christmas at home in Alabama, they were waiting on December 26 with a table at the pub and pints of Guinness on the way. And seven months after I’d left and moved to California, when it was bachelor party time, they were there with a house for a poker party and a van to Atlantic City and a shady rented-out resort for us to crash in, and all thirteen of the traveling party came back at least even-money if not up over a thousand because they stood on 12 at blackjack.

The callow kid who started that job twenty years ago tomorrow had not one day of professional Mac support experience. The one who left seven years later was the senior Mac technician, Apple-certified, running the rollout of new machines and acting as the in-case-of-energency-break-glass tech of last resort. And I was able to take that resume to Cupertino and get a job at Apple without so much as a by-your-leave from anyone else, no references or inside help or shady okeedoke, because those guys in DC rebuilt me from the ground up as capable, confident and willing to do whatever it took to finish the job. My life has always been existentially iffy at best, but those last three years in DC, I never once questioned who I was, what I was doing with my life or whether I was any good at it, because I knew.

They took a man barely alive, and rebuilt me faster, stronger, smarter, funnier, in every way better than I was before. The Tara harp superimposed over the yellow rectangle on my shoulder will for the rest of my days be the marker of what they accomplished. I will always be grateful to those guys, because in every way that matters, they saved my life and made me who I am today. We few, we happy few…

Deeds not words, brothers and sisters. The password of the EUS is forever victory or die.

So after seeing some of the commentary online, I’m trying to rethink the whole iPhone announcement from yesterday. There are a couple of particular things that stick with me as a result of trying to look outside myself and think how other people are using this device, which is something the rest of this Valley could stand to do once in a while.  Therefore:

* Yes, $1000 is a crazy price for an iPhone. I’ve been fond of saying “that’s laptop money.” And then, consider this: what do I do at home on a regular basis that happens on the computer rather than on the iPad? Not much. And if I’m doing these things on an 8” iPad, how many could be done just as well on a 6” iPhone? There’s a very real case that for some people, the iPhone X (or other phone) is their home computer in every way that matters. At that point, $1350 for 256 GB of storage and two years of AppleCare for your sole computing device is a number you wouldn’t think twice about if it were a MacBook and not a phone.

* The accessory ecosystem is starting to make a difference. The phone is the hub, you get the audio through your synced AirPods, you get the notifications on your arm, and – at some point, mark my words – you look at the AR world through some sort of glasses that can be lighter and less obtrusive than Google Glass because all the heavy lifting of processing is staffed out to the phone in your pocket rather than balanced on your earpiece. The old argument of the Mac as the hub of your digital life is replaced with the iPhone (and iCloud) as the hub from which everything else runs. And if you have a television and an Apple TV, all you need is a Bluetooth keyboard and you’re able to bang out these very blog posts just the way you’d do it on a laptop. Apple has inadvertently (or not) made the personal computer more personal than ever, and all these various bits contribute to the sublimation of computing into a presence around you rather than a thing you do at a desk.

* In a world where people watch everything on Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime and listen to everything via Spotify and SoundCloud and Apple Music, you don’t need that much storage on the phone. I suspect a lot of folks will be more than happy with the 64 GB option, which is the max available on most of the Android phones in the “good enough” space. So you don’t really need to splash out the extra hundred bucks or more for the sake of carrying more around.

* In a world where everything is streaming – including visual media – you stumble into needing the bigger phone, just for the battery. Yes, a 5.8” screen is better than 4” for watching the new Spider-Man on the plane, but when all your audio is streaming and going over Bluetooth headphones, every extra mAh you can pack into the phone is crucial. So the big battery plus the fast-charging (50% in 30 minutes? For serious?) means you should be able to make it through the day fairly easily.

* If you’re going to pay $800 for an iPhone 8 Plus, may as well splash out the extra $200 for a bigger screen in a smaller package. The counterargument: pay $200 less for the same processor and back camera and charging, better battery life, proven TouchID and let somebody else go first testing Apple’s new hardware. Plenty of people have been arguing for the 8 Plus on those grounds, and given the opportunity to have it from work, I might well consider it knowing I still have the SE to fall back on (but I may also stick $500 back just in case some notional SE2 should ever appear).

So…is there a valid use case for these phone? Yes, yes and yes. I am not in the demographic pool for the lifestyle choices for which they appear to be optimized, but I still have my old man phone, and I love it. As long as Apple stays willing to produce a phone with a screen smaller than 5 inches, I can get by. Once that paradigm goes…things will be more difficult.

So we have the iPhone 8 and Plus instead of 7S and Plus, which means a new form factor. In this case, it’s back to glass, literally, as we have a glass back of the sort last seen on the 4S. And with that we get…wireless charging using the Qi standard. Which is nice…but…

Then we get the iPhone “X” (pronounced “ten”) which has the simultaneous effect of insuring the civilians will be calling it the “echs” forever AND making the just-announced iPhone 8 seem wildly out of date already. And it has a new OLED screen with no bezels and uses facial recognition for unlocking. Which is nice…but…

The thing that stuck in my craw was that Phil Schiller, my old hockey-shit-talk nemesis, used that same Gretzky quote about skating to where the puck is going to be. And yet the existence of facial recognition in Android, or OLED displays on Androids for literally years, or Qi as a standard for Android wireless charging…it kind of puts the Stu Grimson to his Gretzky quote. Apple can’t claim to be on the cutting edge here. All they can claim is that they’re implementing these things right, somehow. Or that the addition of the Apple Watch, AirPods, ARkit and CoreML somehow makes the Apple ecosystem more advanced and out on the cutting edge as a collective implementation.

But ten and a half years on from being one of those first people to gasp at the original iPhone, there was nothing there today – at all – that made me loosen my grip on my iPhone SE, even a little bit. Processor is faster, camera is better, fine, these are basically the same incremental improvements every year since the iPhone 4S finally delivered point-and-shoot camera performance and 1080p video recording back in 2011. Wireless charging is okay, I guess, but when you already have the cables everywhere and would just end up plugging a pad into them, the use case is basically “put your watch and earbuds on the same pad and save an outlet.” Which is dearly to be desired, sure.

Apple – and not to pummel them exclusively because every other maker of phones is in the same boat – is still coming to grips with the fact that the smartphone crossed the finish line in 2013. For four years, we’ve had endless incremental improvements, marginal gimmicks, and constant attempts to overlook the fact that nothing is more important than battery life. And my phone, the thing that steers my life, is a year-and-a-half-old upgrade of a 2013 design, just a little better processor and a little better camera and Apple Pay built in is all.

Apple really has gone full Tesla. Cutting edge technology married to a luxury experience, and if you have to ask don’t bother pricing it. Yes, the iPhone “X” is big and without bezels and with OLED that may – may – give it plausible battery life, but I’m still waiting for the killer app that makes it better to have than a 4-inch pocket phone that doesn’t require me to set down my drink to use or take off my sunglasses to unlock.

Tim Cook is an Auburn man, so I trust he will understand when I say: Apple has gone frog-stickin’ without a light. They may be sorry they did.