Are my eyes really blue?

(NB: this draft was found in the Phone transition. Don’t know why it never posted but I’ll try now.)

9 Aug 2017

It’s quiet out here. The BART lets you out at Montgomery in a vague aroma of smoke and diesel that suggests London as you walk upstairs in the fog past the Palace Hotel. Popping into the office of American Giant – where they have a showroom, not a retail shop as such, but able to try sizes and evaluate colors and plan your fall order – feels like a bit of something else. Then back on the Muni, the N Judah, where it’s not far from Market Street to the beach, a beach that’s fogged in solid and 57 degrees on an August Wednesday.

There’s coffee and cinnamon toast at Java Beach, and a couple blocks away, Pittsburgh’s Pub has been open since 8 AM dispensing adult libations in a manner recalling Cookie’s Caboose in Punxsutawney. It’s a marvel that a little slice of western Pennsylvania exists in the corner of a motel three blocks from the Pacific. And it may be a day game in the summer sun for the Giants, but the fans piling into the train are bundled for autumn here on the edge of the Western world.

In the Inner Sunset, at the Fireside Bar (whose fireplace is tragically unlit despite 58 degrees weather at 1 PM), the bartender sees the Vanderbilt hat and immediately asks about Damian Jones. It’s hard to explain but there’s just something about the light rail trundling down the street outside that heightens the sense you’ve landed somewhere else – a phenomenon equally pronounced at Trial’s in San Jose…

So in keeping with tradition, this was banged out in the device itself. I was three years since my last company Phone, they had already ordered loaded iPhone 8 Plus devices for staff, and I presented a use case for the larger screen of the iPhone X as well as a willingness to test against our security standards.

Reader, they bought it.

This is only the second time I’ve had a new iPhone on launch day. The first was the iPhone 4 on the day after that epic 2010 day with the Isner match at Wimbledon, the firing of the chief officer in Afghanistan, the Lawrence Taylor arrest and the greatest USMNT goal ever when Landon Donovan slotted it to beat Algeria in the closing seconds. Yesterday was not nearly as eventful. Maybe it was and I just don’t notice the world anymore. But anyway.

It’s big. It’s a hair bigger than the 6/7/8 line, smaller than the Plus, and the geometry of no bezels makes for some awkward handling when you don’t have all the new swipe gestures down yet. It’s a bit awkward in the front pocket for sure.

I did this for two reasons. One was the ability to test whether I can live with the phablet as the One Device. The iPad, the Kindle, the travel phone(s) – all on the shelf. One iPhone X to rule them all at least for the next few weeks, and see how it works out. This is clearly the way the world is headed and I need to see if I can adjust to it.

The other reason, honestly, is that Apple crossed the finish line with TouchID and NFC in 2013/14. Everything has largely been iterative. The iPhone 6 was compelling to me simply because I needed off that dreadful Verizon 5, but the only new iPhone I’ve paid for myself since launch day 2010 was the iPhone SE. Nothing else was compelling. But with the OLED display and FaceID and the emphasis on viable AR and the shift to a gesture-driven UI, Apple is plainly making a case that this is their future vision. And if work will float the cost, I’m willing to play in their sandbox for a bit.

The look is distinctive. The rounded corners and the notch on a screen that covers almost the entire front all combine to shout that this is Something Different. I’m curious to see how long it takes developers to adapt. I’ve left all the bits and bobs turned on with screen animation and raise to wake and Hey Siri and everything else, because I want to experience it the way they want you to use it and see what happens. BeatsX buds, Apple Watch paired, and let’s see how it goes.

But I have to put my drink down to use it. That isn’t gonna go well.

“I can’t help but wonder if the real desire behind the tax bill is to end social mobility completely. It’s all to keep people in their place.”


-Catherynne Valente

She’s not wrong. What the proposed tax bill does targets all the things that heretofore allowed you to avoid living hand-to-mouth as a subsistence worker. Blowing away the home mortgage interest deduction makes home ownership more expensive than renting. Messing with 401(k) in a world that already did away with defined-benefit pensions takes away any prospect of retiring in comfort. Removing the deductibility of student loan interest makes higher education an even greater burden, but one that if not borne prevents you being able to get anything other than hourly work forever.

It’s difficult not to feel like the last two or three recessions were all about giving business the excuse to cut until we were left with nothing but walking wounded. Outsource everything that isn’t a core function. Your general services, your IT, your facilities, even your payroll and HR – all that is shuffled off to one contract or another. Create a permanent level of structural unemployment and you can start cutting salary and benefits and any kind of security, because you should just be grateful to have a job at all.

This isn’t accidental, this isn’t inadvertent – this is the whole plan. The goal is to perpetuate financial insecurity. Because when you don’t have financial security, you have to take whatever you’re offered. If you have student loans you can’t write down, if you have no benefit for home ownership, if you’re going to bear the whole brunt of medical emergencies, you can’t afford to roll the dice. You can’t leave and build your own business. You can’t risk a bird in the hand. So the bosses and the owners can keep more for themselves and you can scuffle for peanuts, because what’s the alternative? Strike out on your own and if you don’t make it, you’re cooked.

The entire organizing principle of this tax bill is 99% of America saying “please sir can I have some more?” Forever. It’s a piss-poor way to run a country, but then, we’re proving to be a piss-poor country.

I never watched the Daily Show, or the Colbert Report. I don’t know why – it just didn’t really do anything for me, especially the latter. The cable blowhard style was too utterly annoying, even as parody, for me to get anything out of. One thing I did watch, a little at first and then voraciously, was Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. Right up until the week before the election.

I haven’t watched it since.

Part of it is simply the same reason I don’t watch television news anymore. I can’t stand this shit. I read just enough to keep me informed and don’t have to look at or listen to the actual bullshit as it happens on screen. So from that standpoint, it’s no worse than me taking BBC World Service off my car presets or relying on Quartz and Economist Espresso instead of using the Sky News app. But last night, with Late Show clips booming way too loud as I tried to exercise, something clicked in my head and I was able to articulate it to myself.

I don’t like these shows anymore because they blew it.

Like Sonny Dykes at Cal, they had a one-trick offense. All they had was ridicule. And that hurt, in the long run. Not because it ginned up the mental defectives to say “HURRRR DURRRR DEM LIBERALS MAKIN FUN OF US HURRRRRRR”, but because it convinced a lot of middling sort of people that this was so ridiculous that it couldn’t come to pass. There’s no way this guy can be President. This is such an unbelievable joke, this is a formality, this is absurd. And it let a lot of people just not vote, or waste a vote on a third party candidate, because there’s no way Donald Fucking Trump can fall ass backward into the White House, right?

WHOOPS.

What these shows did – what everything did – was functionally wanking. It was ridicule of the threat without taking it seriously. It was false bravado, overconfidence, this-could-never-happen – even Obama was guilty of it himself at the 2016 correspondents’ dinner – and then, holy shit, don’t look now but it actually came to pass. And just like Jeff Tedford’s I-will-do-just-what-we-did-in-August-regardless-of-circumstances approach or Sonny Dykes’ throw-throw-throw-what-is-defense solution, once it fails that spectacularly? I’m done with it. 

You had your chance. You ran your offense. You did things your way. It failed. Your way didn’t work. Sauron has the Ring. Stanfurd has the Axe. Fucking actual Nazi sympathizers have the government. So forgive me if I’m not willing to go back to your playbook again for a while. It’s like watching the Astros last night: you hit four guys in two innings and you can’t put the ball over the plate? You’re coming out of the game. I don’t care if there’s a five run lead, we’re going to do something else because if we keep doing the same thing we’re gonna blow it.  The night the nomination was clenched was the time to switch from “HA HA LOOK AT THIS FUCKER WITH AN ONION LOAF FOR HAIR” to “YOU HAVE TO VOTE FOR THIS GUY’S PRINCIPAL OPPONENT IF YOU DON’T WANT THE FUCKING WORLD TO BURN.”

And that didn’t happen. Maybe because people wanted to say “we’re just a comedy show,” maybe they wanted to take refuge in “both sides are funny,” maybe because nobody wanted to look like they were in the tank for one side even if it was Not A Nazi, maybe because nobody wanted to pledge themselves to Mean Old Granny Eat-Your-Vegetables after two decades of calling her that. So now here we are. Sorry boys (and once again, it’s always boys, hmm) – you can do your little monkey dance all you want on HBO or CBS or whatever. Enjoy it. God bless. My time is better spent on something else.

Fewer jesters, more jousters. Let’s go.

One thing that really jumped out after visiting DC was the juxtaposition. The Metro was full of ads for defense contractors and government IT solutions providers on Sunday afternoon, and the drive home down 101 on Sunday night was chockablock with billboards pitching developer jobs and infrastructure management solutions. I’ve moved from one industry town to another, and that industry’s gravity pulls everything into its orbit somehow. In a lot of ways, to be honest, because all the things I marveled at in California in 2002 – pervasive free wifi, GSM phones, gourmet burger places and craft beer options and Apple technology everywhere – all that has come to the DMV, pretty much. 

Now it’s time to start looking the other direction. Because there are things that Silicon Valley needs to be going to school on. And one of the big ones is that for better or worse, you can’t stop pretending like all these towns up and down the Peninsula are anything but boroughs of one big city. Forget about parsing out Redwood City and Palo Alto and Menlo Park and Sunnyvale and accept the truth: San Francisco is 800,000 people, San Jose is 1.1 million people, and they both border a city of 1.5 million people that just happens to be divided into two counties and a bunch of trifling municipalities for no apparent reason. 

Next big thing: when DC expanded into Arlington and Tyson’s, it did it by building train lines and growing around them, and in a pinch running the train into where the growth had already happened. Say what you like about Metro, but it’s out there running a train every six minutes at rush hour, sometimes more where the lines overlap. In Washington DC, you couldn’t get away with a transit line that only put up one train every 90 minutes on the weekend or once an hour between 10 and 4. Caltrain is commuter rail that tries to pretend it’s transit, and it suffers miserably in the effort. And yet people insist on trying to build around a Caltrain line as if it were transit for anything other than commute hours, and that development is highly imperfect at best. Apple isn’t on the Caltrain line. Facebook isn’t on the Caltrain line. Google isn’t on the Caltrain line.  Maybe if you decamped to San Jose…where you not only have Caltrain, but Capital Corridor and ACE and the future BART down from the East Bay and the VTA…

Hold up.

VTA light rail is currently something that runs every 15 minutes at rush hour, every 30 minutes otherwise, and knocks off at 10 PM. It runs at street level through much of San Jose, but has its own right-of-way in the northern part of the county. And it runs right through a whole lot of space that’s developed as office park at best, with precious little housing and no other amenities.

Here’s the thing about my old neighborhood in Arlington: the 25-story apartment towers are clustered within five blocks of the Orange Line stations and then taper right off. But they’re not only walking distance to the trains, every single one of them has (or is directly adjacent to) some kind of deli or mini-market or other retail necessity right there. You don’t need a car at all. Famously, I was walkable to two CVS stores, a mall with a movie theater and a full size grocery store. And the easy draw, the thing that made it attractive, was that you’d have a Metro train every twelve minutes, in either direction, every day from 5 AM to 1 AM. This was not the case when they started building the Orange Line under Wilson Boulevard in the 1970s, and people at first wanted to know why they wouldn’t just build down the middle of I-66. But they didn’t. They built it and the development grew up around it.

The biggest feature of construction in Mountain View right now is the growth of these blocks of 4-story apartments, rental or condo, all along El Camino Real from Adobe Creek to 85. Probably only four stories so they don’t have to switch away from wood construction in case of earthquakes. But here’s the thing: they’re on the road. They aren’t on any train system. What transit options they have basically boils down to the 22/522 bus line on VTA, or calling some sort of ride share company (of the sort that has demonstrably grown San Francisco traffic out of control). This new dense housing is going to do nothing to alleviate traffic problems, because the thing about urban development isn’t that you have dense housing, it’s that you have dense everything. Dense housing without transit just means bodies stacked like cordwood and roads that don’t move.

So it’s time to take the bullet and build along the VTA in the north. Build your 15-story luxury apartments if you must, but every single one has to have a drugstore or a taqueria or a dry-cleaners or something worthwhile in it, such that you don’t have to hop in the car for every little thing. And you’re going to have to run more train cars, and you’re going to have to run them more than every half an hour, and you’re going to have to run them past 10 PM. Because “Silicon Valley” is functionally the seventh largest city in the United States, and a city that size has to have trains that run more than twice an hour and don’t shut it down before prime time television ends.

I was at the airport, I was in downtown, I was all along my old patch in Arlington and I was all along route 7 all the way to Reston. And I only needed to call a cab twice: once to go all the way to Leesburg and once to speed home from the bar past 1 AM. You’re only going to build a workable urban environment when you don’t need to use a car anymore, whether you’re driving it or not, and anyone who tells you Uber or Waymo are the answer can pound sand. See the transit, be the transit, use the transit. There’s no sustainable alternative.

WMATA might be among the most beleaguered and benighted agencies in any level of American governance. Torn between two states and the District of Columbia, overcrowded and underfunded, reduced to pitching a PR campaign about how they’re getting “Back To Good” – it’s an awfully big ask and an awfully bad situation.

And yet, descending into that round concrete brutalist tunnel system felt like coming home.

I hadn’t been in the DMV for five and a half years, not since last call for the 4P’s. Since then, time happened. DC was occupied by the Russians, National Geographic was subsumed into the NewsCorp media empire, my best man got divorced and my crew was scattered to the four winds (one, as it turns out, landing in Ireland just in time for me to completely miss him. The one time it would have been helpful to be on Facebook, and neither of us was. But anyway). And most of all, I underwent a complete meltdown at work, my lowest point in California, and found myself in the summer of 2015 realizing that in eleven years, I had found myself right back where I was professionally in 2004 when I left, and without my crew around me at that.

I missed being in the DMV. A lot. My virtual communities – scattered across half a different blogs, sites and apps – never had the immediacy or the reality of that gang that went for coffee at the Mudd House (sadly demolished) or lunch at the Pizza Place (ditto, and I couldn’t tell you its real name with a gun to my head) or Fuddrucker’s (now a Shake Shack) or closed the 4P’s on Saturday nights (again, RIP the best Irish bar in America). I missed the strange poetry of Rappahannock and Chain Bridge and Spout Run, the Virginia license plate which hasn’t changed since I first moved there, the mirrored glass towers rising out of fall-colored rolling hills down the Dulles Toll Road or I-66 or Route 7.

But the other thing is that when my academic career plowed into the earth, I was thrown free of the crash and didn’t stop moving for almost a decade, during which I had a crazy and chaotic life. I took my two political science degrees to the capital of the free world and never meddled in politics again. I latched onto IT at a time when anyone could and spun a career out of it. I drove back and forth to Ohio and New York and learned my way around the Metro and the Delta Shuttle. I embarked on a whirlwind romance on both coasts with JetBlue as my commute option back and forth to see my girlfriend who was almost on a rotator commute between Arlington and Silicon Valley. And when it all came to a head, I moved to California, got a job at Apple and got married. By the time things settled down and finally sank, I had completed ten years of being the most interesting person I could imagine being and achieving things I would never have imagined possible.

I came back to DC four times in the first year after leaving. It was a slow detachment, not least because Courtney at Signature Cigars was still sending me sticks and there was a Cosi in the Macy’s at Valley Fair mall in San Jose. I could almost feel like I was still going back and forth the way my now-wife had. After that last trip, though, it became an every-couple-years sort of thing. Spring 2007, spring 2010, spring 2012 – and then nothing for five and a half years. This was my first trip back in autumn since 2004, the first time I could see the city and its surroundings in a similar way to that first time two decades ago when I started my life over.

Some of the places are the same. Plenty aren’t. Some new things have grown up in their place, and some betray the bones of their predecessors if you stare closely enough. I could close my eyes and see the America restaurant or the Illuminations or the Hecht’s in Tyson’s Corner Center, but when I opened them again, there was the huge new space and theater and three high-rises where the parking decks used to be, complete with outdoor plaza full of Astroturf and fire pits and Starbucks and a platoon of athleisured stroller moms. Ballston Common has been gutted and is being rebuilt. Someone dropped an entire new line on the Metro map that goes all the way out to Reston, which was “here be dragons” territory for transit twenty years ago.

But plenty is the same. Geographic looks the same as it ever did. So does Mario’s Pizza, late night on Wilson Boulevard, and the Silver Diner is still at the corner of Clarendon even if Hard Times Chili isn’t across from the Clarendon Metro. Ranger Surplus is still in the strip mall on 7 for all your paintball needs. The Clarendon Apple Store, where I once tried to FaceTime my sweetheart in the Palo Alto store, is still a going concern. So is the Barnes & Noble that anchors the Market Common, and so is the Crate & Barrel adjacent where I once speculated on what kind of furniture I might want in a notional California residence someday. And walking down into the Metro at Virginia Square looks, sounds and smells like the autumn of 2000 in every way that matters, a strange mechanical aroma that is invariably associated in my mind now with…Disneyland.

And the crew turned out. Some of my dearest friends, some folks I haven’t seen in years (or over a decade in a couple of cases), some of the people with whom I have this avalanche of memories of good times and bad, of struggle and triumph, of shoulder to shoulder in the darkest hours. The old college crew, the Army buddies, the high school championship team, all the cliche stuff that you can’t and won’t and shouldn’t let go – this is what I have. For seven years we were the lords of the Earth, and we had a chance to celebrate us without having to wish we could go back. I was a little worried about how much of an emotional wrench it could have been, and I suspect there are a couple of circumstances where it really would have been, but those did not obtain for better or worse.

As it is, it was fine without being overwhelming, even if I might have liked being overwhelmed (and regretted it later). We were legends – we are legends – but time happened, and life happened, and Centreville and Leesburg and Brooklyn and Cupertino and Kildare happened. And as I stood there in Tyson’s II looking out over a scene of luxury shops that hadn’t budged in 20 years, I thought about what has come since, because I remember standing on that balcony looking around in the spring of 2004 when I knew I might be going away for good.

An Apple staff badge. An iPhone. A new model VW Rabbit and a hybrid Chevrolet. The iPhone. A mortgage with my name on it and a wedding ring on my finger. London, Paris, Tokyo, Galway. The rise of Vanderbilt baseball. Twitter and Facebook and SBNation and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A Metro line running from East Falls Church to Wiehle Road, which in 2004 seemed as futuristic and exotic and unlikely as a black President. The guy standing on that balcony in 2004 had never seen any of that. The one there last Friday has seen all of that and more, and he’s glad he has.

DC and Northern Virginia, for seven years, was where everything happened. It’s great to be reminded of who you were, and in a way reminded of who you are. It’s also a reminder that you can’t go back, you shouldn’t go back, and you should make the next thing happen instead. So let’s get on with that, shall we?

Back to the future, as the new Nokia 3310 (3G) finally lands in America. I don’t know if it was as iconic in this country, as the 3310 was a 900/1800 GSM device; while there were similar models in America none of them became as iconic for that era as the Motorola MicroTAC or StarTAC flips. So what happens when you harness nostalgia to a burner phone?

The Nokia 3310 in the US isn’t the dual-sim version, as it turns out. Instead you get a MicroSD slot where the second SIM would go, which I guess is fine for MP3 storage and playback. You won’t be doing much else with media on this phone for sure; the 2MP camera takes worse pictures than you could take with a potato. Which would also make for a superior browsing experience, as the phone features good old Opera Mini, a proxy browser I was trying to make the best of before I ever left the DMV for California.

In fact, this phone is a memento mori of how things used to be. Had you offered this phone for $65 in, say, 2006, people would have lost their damn minds. A Nokia with a 2-inch color screen, a 2 MP digital camera, Bluetooth and speaker phone and no thicker than your little finger? In a way, you can look at it and see the vestigial DNA of the Nokia 6620 which was my first real California phone when I started at Apple. The slight bulge in the middle and the screen that takes up the entire top half of the phone, oriented what we now think of as portrait rather than landscape? There is all the nostalgia you want here, and it’s true to life. You are getting the legitimate “Re-Elect Bush 2004″ mobile phone experience.

And it’s proof of why the iPhone had to happen to launch the true mobile Internet. Trying to interact with a tiny web browser screen with 12 keys and a D-pad is a nightmare. It also explains why the WAP deck was the key to everything in early mobile phone data: tiny trickle of information meant you could easily be given something like sports scores or basic weather or stock updates (delayed 15 minutes most likely) but anything that required graphical interaction was right out. 

So for my purposes, this is the shutdown-night phone, the device I use when I don’t actually want to be connected. What am I likely to need at that point? Well, Wikipedia, if I’m being honest, because I can’t deal with not being able to look something up as soon as I’m curious about it. And the UI for Wikipedia through Mobile Opera…I’ll make something up and be satisfied with that until I get outside. Where I can see what the weather’s like because it’s easier than trying to navigate to even the most bare-bones website for forecasts. Two things the iPhone revolution got us were a display big enough to be graphically useful and apps sufficient to cut through the web nonsense and get you straight to the data you need, frequently unencumbered by advertising. Modern web ads destroy the proxy browser as a viable choice.

The biggest kicker with this phone, though, is that 3G spectrum. Not only does it work here and abroad, it will continue to even as countries shut down and refarm their 2G spectrum for other 4/5G use. Right now T-Mobile is the last man standing with 2G in this country and even it will go away sooner than later, but UMTS/HSPDA 3G is barely 10 years deployed successfully in the US and will probably persist for a while yet. It may be functionally about where the phones I took to London in 2005 and 2007 are, but it’s not like I’m ever leaving the country without my SE ever again (until the SE2 or X-Minus appear).

Nope, this phone is another reminder of How We Used To Live. Kind of like my mechanical watch, a sort of sidestep into a world where I don’t need or want to be plugged in constantly. Just as the MOTOFONE F3 in 2007 was a reminder of what life was like in 1997, this phone is a reminder of what life was like in that last spring before the iPhone arrived, how things were what seems like a lifetime or two ago.

Of which…

For Christmas 2007, I got a MOTOFONE F3. It still works just fine – it’s the most minimal phone you can have. There seems to be a pretty good market for “festival phones” or the like as people attempt to get away from it all, and a phone that just places and receives calls, places and receives (rudimentary) text messages, and has speakerphone and an alarm – and that’s all – seems to be desirable to a lot of people who it turns out could have gotten it for maybe $30 a decade ago. But, as with so many things, time happened. And now only T-Mobile still supports GSM 2G networks, and not for very much longer.

Enter the Nokia 3310. The 2017 nostalgia phone has an update to quad band and 3G, so now it’s broadly feasible to have a simple phone that will continue to work after the plug gets pulled on the old networks – and will work around the world into the bargain, not least because this version is dual-SIM. (Not that I could go abroad without a smartphone, to be perfectly honest, but it’s the principle of the thing.) The original has sold out of all proportion to sense in the 900/1800 GSM world – with no 3G, no meaningful apps, a 2.4” display and technology that is the best 2006 could offer.

Why? More to the point, why would I throw $60 at this thing myself on a pre-order?

It’s aspirational, to be honest. Like the mechanical watch I wore abroad in place of the Apple Watch, it’s a touchstone of a time past – and maybe a time to come – when you don’t want or need social media, or GPS directions, or a steady stream of updates so you can watch the world burn in slow motion. It’s the means to keep in touch in a pinch, to text and say you’ll be late or call to hold a table, to snap a quick two-megapixel reminder of where you parked or what the address of the coffee place is. It’s a way of clinging to just enough technology to assist your life without letting it take over your life.

The truly ironic thing is that the only thing it really needs that it doesn’t have, at this point, is WhatsApp. Just because managing a group chat is so much easier without SMS, and for better or worse, WhatsApp – not Signal, not iMessage, not Facebook Messenger, certainly not any Google product – has become the de facto universal mobile messaging solution. Cross-platform, international, and it would be nice – but not utterly essential, thanks to the cunning use of Google Voice in a pinch. And then there’s Instagram…but then that’s opening the door to everything else too. The ironic thing is that Facebook owns both WhatsApp and Instagram, has largely left them alone, has managed not to screw them up – but it’s Facebook that has a built-in icon on the 3310, not its superior subsidiaries.

Honestly, this is all driven by the Irish experience. What apps did I legit need in Ireland? Maps, certainly, but that’s fair enough when you’re in a new town every night. WhatsApp to communicate with the traveling party. Instagram for people back in America to see how things were going. And really, that was about it. Almost no place took Apple Pay. There was precious little to be gained by checking email or RSS, it was just as easy to walk out and stick up your arm for a cab as to use any sort of ride-hailing app, and while using Swarm to check in was handy to create a record of where I’d been, it was a little superfluous with the pictures being tagged.

The moral of this story is simple: if you’re not really going anywhere and not socializing, then what is the point in having a device on you that’s just going to steamroll you with all the stuff you’re trying to get away from? There is no percentage in it. Instead, as 2G shuts off my F3 and the lack of updates slowly obsoletes my Moto X, I will soon have this 3310 for a while to be a species of cosplay, an artifact dropped in from another edit of life where it’s all you really need to get by. It’s a new tool in the escape kit. It’s the same phone you give a toddler…for the same reason. It even looks right.

We’ll see if it helps.

This is when it started.

Minneapolis, on the road in a strange city for a conference for a product we hadn’t deployed yet, no idea what I was doing and trying not to catch a sinus infection for my trouble (too late, it arrived as I left), and I was suffused with a darkness that couldn’t just be put down to encroaching Minnesota winter. It was the slow creeping realization, with two weeks to go, that we could fuck this thing up and that I had no plan for what if we did.

And we did. And I still don’t.

We got here well before November 8. We got here for eight years of Bush the Younger, when all of this choose-your-own-reality nonsense was pioneered. Stop acting like Bob Corker or Megyn Kelly or anyone else on the right is somehow heroic in the face of this outbreak of insanity, because their dumb asses drove the monkey to the airport every day for seventeen years. When “who you want to have a beer with” was somehow privileged as the only fit criterion for choosing a President, that paved the way for “no qualification whatsoever.” Purple Heart band-aids and Swift Boat documentaries and racist panic about Muslims and Sharia law proved that you don’t even have to pretend to have a winking association with facts as long as you fit what the Fox News demo wants to believe. And worst of all, we let a President get elected in the 21st century with fewer votes than his opponent. That should have been a fucking tornado siren for American democracy, and if it had been a Democrat who benefited, you can rest assure the GOP would have moved heaven and earth to undo the result of the election – because they spent eight years moving heaven and earth to undo the election of a black man with the temerity to win both the electoral college and the popular vote, twice.

That’s why it’s a waste of time to fret and wring our hands about preserving the norms and standards of our political system. Because those were shot to shit seventeen years ago. Once you say that the person with the most votes doesn’t win, you may as well hang it up. You don’t have a democracy any more, you have China without the organizational planning. A world where every single bill takes a 3/5 vote to move just because one side says so, a world where you can block a Supreme Court nomination for a year without consequence so it can be handed over to the useful idiot of a foreign power – don’t waste time worrying about what resistance and opposition and scorched-earth defense is doing to American political culture. The damage is done. It’s been done for years. We didn’t do these things before because nobody did. Then one side broke the seal, and it’s time to accept things are different now. You can’t un-ring the bell and it’s pointless to pretend we somehow could. We’re never going to have not elected Trump. We already burned the house down. Now we’re just arguing about how impolite it is to put the fire out if it hurts the arsonists’ feelings, when we’re not slobbering all over people covered in gasoline who are bemoaning how fire debases us. 

Because this has been a long time coming. The people who were turning firehoses and dogs on protesters in Birmingham in 1963 are still alive. So are their children. None of this ever went away. We just pretended it did because we knew it was wrong and we were content to say “this has no place in society.” And then when people persistently whispered “yes it does,” one side chose to indulge them for the sake of votes. Since Lee Atwater helped the Bush family go full redneck in 1988, the GOP has managed to win exactly one popular vote – but they’ve gotten a President in three times, and every time it was to our further detriment as a nation. The Republican Party willingly let itself be led by rednecks – not conservatives, rednecks – and now we live in the United States of Alabama and we’re pushing back hard. Five years ago, we thought – I thought – if we could just hold on and wait for the Old Ones to die off, we’d finally be able to get somewhere as a nation. More fool me.

And now matters are worse. What we’ve institutionalized is the idea that the best thing is to be as big a dick as you can, all the time, to everyone, and it will pay off in the end. If you don’t believe me, look around Silicon Valley, where an endless parade of assholes builds their advertising Panopticon out of your personal data without oversight or consequence or the balls to face an open market, because there’s always some dickhead on Sand Hill Road or Pioneer Way willing to prop his Allbirds on the desk and shoot another five hundred million dollars at a Stanford dropout with a fifteen year old brain. Our future is ever bigger businesses doing whatever they want and insisting on “personalizing” everything so that you can have your miserable life just the way you want, and never mind anyone else who might be driving you or delivering your food or standing on the same train platform. We wanted a classless society? We got a society with no class.

Two weeks in Ireland confirmed my worst fear: I didn’t want to come back. I am sure Ireland has no end of problems of its own – the Repeal 8 march on the Saturday after we arrived should be evidence of that – but Ireland didn’t look at a leadership position in the world and say “let’s let the worst people in our country shoot us all in the face” the way Britain and America did. Maybe there was a time when Ireland was hopelessly rural and backward, but it sure looks from here like they’ve managed to crack the code of having all the important stuff the 21st century has to offer without simultaneously giving in to the 19th or disappearing up your own asshole like area code 650 does.  Maybe it’s not practical for us to spend between six and nine years establishing residence and obtaining citizenship, but there has to be something I can do here that gets me separation from Palo Alto, separation from Silly Con Valley, separation from the United States of Alabama and the redneck mental defectives that make it so. And if I can find it, I might just about have three more years left in me. 

I don’t have seven.

So. Lessons learned. After finally visiting Ireland, what did I learn and what do I want to take back to improve my life here?

I mean, this is what I do. I go abroad and discover things I want to apply to my mundane workaday life. In 2007, London and York made me actually want to start visiting my local farmers’ markets regularly. 2010 in Europe opened my eyes to Spezi, elderflower and long haul train travel. Japan in 2015 made me want to drink highballs again, and London last summer made the half-pint of session ale an aspirational desire. So what did I come back from Ireland with?

For starters, wool. I bought a tweed flat cap and a dark gray fisherman’s sweater – certainly not the dingy off-white lanolin-rich tight-weave actual Aran sweater, but something more suited for a part of the world that never seems to get below 5 degrees Celsius no matter how hard I try to will it so. Sure, I look like somebody’s dad, but to be blunt, my whole life has consisted of me waiting to age into actually being that auld lad in the pub.

For another, I now realize that the pubs of my frequency in the South Bay are actually not that far off from the real thing if done right. The Tuesday night trad session in San Jose. The Kilkenny on tap in Sunnyvale. There’s no one place that will actually give me a snug, a fireplace, half pints, comfy chairs and live trad all at once, but I can probably get three out of five in any given spot if I play my cards right. Having experienced the real thing, my hope is that I can now embrace the local spots as warm reminders rather than cold comfort.

(And as much as I do enjoy the cheeky half, it’s nice to have the full long Imperial pint of Guinness or Smithwick’s or (insert local sub-5% ABV milk stout that I will move heaven and earth to find now) and I’ll probably have to have it in the 20 oz Yeti tumbler so that it can stay crisp and cold to the last drop. I got back, didn’t have a beer for almost a week, then had a Sonoma-area IPA and my actual tongue puckered. Lesson learned. Stick to the stuff that isn’t stunt-hopped to a fare-the-well and try out milk stouts and brown ales instead.)

Third, and this one could be big: it might just be time to knock Twitter on the head once and for all. I was very little in social media on this trip, Instagram notwithstanding, and it was proof that of all the social media outlets out there, the one that genuinely works and counts is…the group chat. Whether it’s in WhatsApp or iMessage or what have you, the group chat kicks the very ass out of the Twitters for being a good environment where you’re not constantly wading through the crap of the wider world. So there’s a nonzero chance that my various attempts at a private friends-only Twittersphere will get disposed of in favor of just maintaining the existing public presence (which in itself is less of a big deal, somehow) and I will stop trying to make this toxic thing somehow be nutritious for me. That would be nice.

The other thing I learned about myself is that in addition to fog and stone, I apparently have a thing for urban running water. The problem is, we don’t have a lot of that around here. Stevens Creek or the Guadalupe River are probably the closest, but they are dry for months at a time and don’t have buildings butting right up against them the way the canals did in London or Dublin. What I did do was change the white noise app in my phone from rain to running water…and it seems to be helping, even as I struggle to get my sleep cycle back to normal. (Naturally, I get it sorted just in time to make an early morning flight to the East Coast. Typical. Of which.)

Other than that…just patience. Wait for cold. Wait for fog. Wait for the darkness to pass you by and endure in the meantime. And just remember that someday you get to be back on the Sea Road, half eleven, listening to the session sounds drifting out of the Crane Bar and into the coal-smoky night.