Are my eyes really blue?

One hears quite a bit from time to time about the eroding middle class.  It’s well-documented that the disparity in wealth in this country is growing, and that the top of the stack has a greater percentage of the money than ever before, but I’m looking at it in a different way.  It’s impossible not to, with the recent rash of cops killing minorities and stand-your-ground nutballs looking for a chance to shoot a brown person.

PJ O’Rourke spoke of the Whiffle Life, that idea that above a certain point a kid on drugs is going to get routed into a treatment path and sent to a clinic and maybe worst case reform school, rather than jail and a beatdown from the cops and juvie. And that makes plenty of sense when you look around you.  But then look at the kind of gentrification happening in San Francisco, where one formerly working-class area after another gets hipsterized and Googlefied and your nightclub has to close because the people in the new million-dollar condos don’t like the racket and never mind who was there first.

And the middle class…well, that’s not really a thing anymore, right?  Because everybody wants to claim they’re middle class, but you there working in an office at a computer – you’re on an hourly wage, right? And you get more or less whatever benefits they’re willing to cough up, probably a choice of two HMOs if you’re lucky, right? You fill out a time sheet just the same as if you were punching a clock? And you probably get two weeks vacation a year and can’t work from home, can you?  Guess what: from a legal standpoint, you’re indistinguishable from that union pipe fitter who probably has better benefits because of collective bargaining, but you don’t need a union because you work inside at a table, right?

I haven’t read Thomas Pikkety’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century yet.  The take-home message, as far as I’m hearing, is that he asserts that capitalism inevitably leads to a flow of resources to the top of the pyramid, that the rich will only get richer and the rest will be left behind, and that the only reason this was interrupted in the 20th century was due to the impact of the world wars and the confiscatory levels of taxation needed to finance them (and the Keynesian spending to get out of recession in between and thereafter).

This comes around every so often.  Back in the day when Old Navy first launched, no less than Time magazine was concerned that Gap Inc was splitting into its high end and low end brands (and that was before Banana Republic became what it is today).  John Edwards, before he knocked up his videographer, had gone to great lengths to push the theme of “Two Americas” as the basis for his campaign. Naturally, Occupy Wall Street drew a line between the 1% and the 99% and it didn’t get any less bright just because the movement collapsed into its own dysfunction.

But the split comes round in different ways out here.  Sure, there’s the private transit system every major company now employs to move its workers back and forth from the Mission to 650 and back (which keeps drivers on duty for fifteen hours while only paying them for eight). But there’s also the revelation that the split in iOS/Android ownership tracks with economic status pretty smoothly.  And that in turn leads me to look at things like Google or Facebook services where everything is free at the point of use, as long as you’re willing to be data-mined.  You’re paying, just not in cash on the barrelhead – and if you can pay the money up front, you don’t have to have a cellphone contract or an email provider harvesting your data.

Really, the only way to measure class in this country is by the spectrum of diminishing consequences.  I said years ago that the definition of a charmed life was freedom from the consequences of your actions, and in the grand scheme of things, that’s about it.  Debt? Ignorable, written off, repackaged. Crime?  Do a few months in tennis prison or else just catch probation, maybe wear an ankle bracelet. White male? You can do anything.  Black?  Better not get pulled over.  Woman?  Better not want to be a gamer or a sports fan.

And the most annoying thing of all, the very worst thing, is that now you don’t even have to grow up. If you want trampolines and treehouses at work, they’ll build that for you.  They’ll drive you to and from and bring your meals to you.  You can even keep saying girls are icky and passing notes and pulling hair if you like.  As long as you chose a sufficiently lucrative field, you can pretend like it’s still third grade and that fifty years of society never happened and get paid $200K a year for the privilege.  The American Dream is a luxury good but adulthood is a lifestyle option.

It’s worse than it used to be. There are plenty of reasons why. Social networking made it possible for sociopaths to link up and validate their opinions (e.g. Reddit and 4chan). Obama backlash gave voice to all manner of racists with the thinnest veneer of politics smeared over their demands for birth certificates. A whole generation grew up with endless positive affirmation and helicopter parenting and freedom from setback.  And strange and straitened economic circumstances created conditions where unemployment could sit at excessive levels for historic lengths of time while bailed-out investors shot money out of a firehose at any and every stupid idea imaginable.

Twenty-five years ago, in a college education class, the Japanese education model was decried as a system where all through high school, you work like mad, you take extra courses, you attend cram school in the evening, you barely leave your room, because you must get into one of the correct six universities no matter the cost…and once you get there, you switch to glide because you made it into The System and will be all right from now on.  A quarter-century later, it’s hard not to think of that as you walk around Stanford.  If you want a motto for the current tech boom, the current state of American society, the current level of cultural maturity, make it this: Stay seventeen forever.

Or you could declare that we live in a society, and you have to accept that there are other people, and live accordingly.  And if you don’t?  Nobody’s too old to be spanked.  And we as a society need to call out these adultolescents…and reach for the paddle.

Last night, going through a box of stuff from the crawlspace (as the wife dug out T-shirts to be made into a quilt), we unearthed a particularly unflattering sweater of mine, vintage September 1990.  I didn’t want to throw it away, but I couldn’t put into words why.  And then, this morning, came the most unexpected news ever: David Lynch confirming that twenty-five years after the end of Twin Peaks, there will be more.  Showtime, nine episodes, 2016, picking up right where we left off (when Laura Palmer, or her doppelgänger in the Black Lodge, said “I’ll see you in twenty-five years”).

And it all came rushing back, with Gene Loves Jezebel’s “Jealous” underneath.  Because I know what I’ve talked about before with the beginning of my college experience and how it all went wrong, but…

There is another edit.

In this edit, I don’t panic at the failure of my abortive Greek experience, and I don’t latch onto the first girl who shows an interest for fear no one else will.  In this edit, the show I fell in love with over the summer becomes the hook by which I meet some other people, and we watch the season premiere with coffee and cherry pie to see if Dale Cooper was really shot dead at the end. In this edit, I meet some fun and interesting people who aren’t tied to the Greeks or the theater department and who have an interest in politics and this new show called Seinfeld (since Jerry Seinfeld is honoring a prior commitment and doing a standup show on campus despite his new program taking off like a rocket since then). In this edit, I pile in a car with people, go buy ice cream, and have to eat it all because it doesn’t fit in the dorm fridge. In this edit, I don’t have all my chips on one immature and jealous girl and I actually make friends instead, because I make a smart decision instead of panicking.

And that’s where the film runs out, because I don’t have footage of that decision, because I didn’t make it.

I have a vivid emotional feeing around September 1990, because it was a liminal moment at its truest.  There was a brief window where maybe the college experience could have been salvaged, maybe things turn out differently, maybe I get to have an acceptable college experience rather than spending the next twenty years trying to retroactively piece one together out of a scattering of memories and a series of increasingly poorly chosen compensations.

Maybe I want that sweater to be its own sort of memento mori, but in the opposite direction – instead of remembering your own mortality and fragility and inevitable doom, remember that you can make the right call and make life a little better in doing so.

I think the thing that’s made this first month of Vanderbilt football so hard to take is simple: it wasn’t supposed to be like this anymore.  When the previous coach started in 2011, my ambition for year one was “more than 2 wins” and I was hoping for bowl eligibility by year 3.  Instead, we started out 3-0, could have finished 10-2 if half a dozen plays had broken the other way, and wound up in a bowl immediately.  Vanderbilt football was coming off back-to-back 8-4 seasons capped by bowl wins to get to 9 – literally as good as the football program had ever been.  And then Mason shows up, and we’re assuming yes, there’s going to be a lot of new talent, but the non-conference schedule is squishy-soft and the SEC East is the easier division by far, so we should still clock six wins, right?

Oops.

The absolute defenestration at the hands of Temple might have been the single worst loss in Vanderbilt football history: an orgy of complete bed-shitting that saw the starting QB pulled after going 4 for 6 and replaced with two ineffectual quarterbacks who failed to deliver a single offensive point through two games.  Blame it on the repeated lightning delays and the ridiculous 10 PM start if you must, blame it on a squad that to this point has played 30 true or redshirt freshmen, or blame it on a coaching staff that through three games looked absolutely lost and over their heads and got their one win by virtue of a UMass kicker who pulled a 22-yard field goal attempt wide.

But here we are, 1-3 and only now looking good, and that’s thanks to a pair of blazing kickoff returns for touchdowns that let us cover the spread on ranked South Carolina.  We had a win that felt like a loss and now a loss that feels like a win, and we’re back to the money line as defining a successful performance…

Same. Old. Vandy.  It wasn’t supposed to be like this any more, but it only took about thirty minutes of football to set back three years of work.  Right on cue, here was literally everyone in the college sports media jumping on the pile, dying of eagerness to proclaim that things were back to normal, that Vandy had returned to its accustomed place.  And you want to push back, you want to scream, you want to punch somebody in the dick, but what can you say or do?  Because we did exactly that.  We went backward to the level of the Robbie Caldwell year. We looked like a football team that never heard of football.  And the ridiculousness – the godawful uniform fracas complete with an email printout, for the love of God, we had a permission slip – or burning Wade Freebeck’s redshirt for the sake of one quarter against UMass (to be fair, he played well in relief in the Carolina game and may have to do so again), or the decision to put the game against Ole Miss in the Titans stadium for the sake of selling 3,000 extra tickets (all to Rebels fans) and then having people unable to get to their seats until the second quarter, and now the revelation that Brian Kimbrow (who has known knucklehead tendencies) has been indefinitely suspended and Jordan Cunningham has taken an indefinite leave of absence…

It’s a bad look.  It’s a horrible look.  It makes Vandy football look worse than bad – it looks incompetent. A team that can’t get out of its own way, a team committed to running a precision passing game with freshman receivers and inexperience quarterbacks when the running game is gashing defenses for regular reliable first downs, and a team – to put it bluntly – that looks like all its mojo was carried off to Happy Valley to be part of the Penn State Get Right Quick whitewash.  Back to the basement.  Normal service has been restored.

This, then, is the challenge for the Commodores.  Not only to get back to the heights of mediocre, in the most challenging conference in football, while still actually sending kids to class and enforcing the law (looking at you, Florida State), but to get people to take us seriously in a world where back-to-back nine-win seasons couldn’t do the job.  I don’t envy Derek Mason the uphill climb.  It’s going to be a steep one, and no matter what they tell you in movies and fairytales, you don’t every time get to the top just because you try hard and believe in yourself.  And it’s an awful long way to fall.

I hadn’t been to Portland for five years.  The last time I was there, life was very different: I had just started this job, I was carrying my laptop because of fantasy football draft requirements, and I had just started using the Kindle app on my phone to read books.  Now, the Kindle app (or device) is pretty much the only way I read books, and I was doing it on either my iPad or my Moto X.  I did end up spending most of the time carrying two phones, thanks to the requirements of the job (gah) and I learned I don’t want to do that anymore, so I got that going for me which is nice.

But Portland.  Five years ago I said it was like “what if my high school was its own town” and I see no reason to change that.  This year, it feels like San Francisco, only with nothing to prove and successful treatment for Asperger’s.  It’s like Silicon Valley if it could only realize there were other people.  Without fail, everyone was nice. Like seriously nice. The only real problem with the week is that it was hot as balls in a part of the world that I am assured is reliably cold, rainy and fogged in. Jacket and socks were a no-go.  Otherwise…

It points up the real problem: we could totally move to Portland.  I’d find another job, the wife could probably telecommute, we could totally afford a house – but as soon as you move out of the Bay Area, you’ve moved away for good unless you hit the lotto or somehow arrange to move back into a house trailer of some sort.  It’s the problem with having a house that’s suddenly worth a million dollars: sure, you could sell, but then you have to turn around and buy something else in a market so hyper-inflated it thought your house was worth a million dollars.

But there’s all the beer.  There’s all the coffee.  There’s Distillery Row and an allergy-sensitive bakery around every other corner and a light rail-streetcar system that goes places you want to be and a soccer stadium smack dab in the middle of town and a soccer team that’s THE big attraction and an NBA franchise if you need that, so you have a local sport year around.  There are trees everywhere, plenty of shade, the beginning of fall color already.

Now.

I know that a lot of this is down to the novelty of a different place, coupled with the joy of not being at this job.  And that’s as may be. And it’s entirely reasonable that people in Portland would drive me nuts after a while. And you know what?  That’s exactly what I said when I decamped from DC to the Bay Area. And it worked out just fine.  At least until this job turned shitty at the same time as the technodouche boom washed up the flotsam of a hundred thousand hipster CS50 washouts.

We’re not going anywhere.  Not for a good long while.  But wouldn’t it be something if we could?

The new iPhones are, sadly, predictable.  The iPhone 6 at 4.7”, the iPhone 6 Plus at 5.5”, and the iPhone 5S still sticking around as the $99-with-contract option.  Apple has caved and gone the way of all other phone manufacturers, and decided that the premium phone must of necessity be a big phone.  It’s the same problem with the new Moto X, which grew from an ergonomic and delightful 4.7” to a just-a-bit-too-big 5.2” – and every reviewer is saying how much worse the hand-feel is as a result.

It drives home the point that the “phone” bit is more of a misnomer than ever.  These are Internet communication and media devices; telephony is an afterthought.  Holding a 5.5” phone up to your head looks incredibly stupid, but you’re never going to do it any more than you’d hold your iPad up to your head.  The iPhone 6 Plus should more accurately be called the iPad Nano.  For anyone who’s ever done a real train commute, though, needing two hands for the phone is a pain in the ass.

And that, in many ways, is where the Apple Watch comes in.  After two-plus years, the mythical “iWatch” is finally real – and starting at a wig-splitting $350, more than even the Moto 360. Apple did well to remember that a typical mechanical watch has a crown, and that it makes an excellent input device, and maybe the integration will be enough to be worthwhile…but $350 is a lot of fuckin’ money for a tertiary device.  Then again, that’s what I said about the iPad, and three years later the iPad Mini has almost entirely replaced my laptop for everything outside work.

But back to the iPhone 6, which is almost certainly what I’ll be moving to.  The screen is larger than my Moto X (and so is the phone itself, by about a third of an inch vertically), the battery life is allegedly improved, and they’re finally caving on NFC payment – which is truly interesting.  Because so many other devices have NFC readers already at point of sale (gas stations, drugstore, Whole Foods, vending machine) it should only be a software update to make them work with ApplePay – but because the system relies on a thumbprint from TouchID, you can’t just take the phone and start scanning to pay anywhere, which makes it safer than an actual credit card.  (People who don’t understand computers are already conflating an iCloud brute force password hack with the payment system, and making themselves look stupid in the process.)

So now we wait.  Will an iPhone 6 on AT&T get through the day better than an iPhone 5 on Verizon?  Almost has to, right? It had damn well better, anyway, or I might need to replace my iPod shuffle for the third time…

Not much to say except this is completely predictable.  Small-time police department given the armaments of an invading army (literally) and firm in the belief that all crime is fungible and all criminals are supervillains. Throw in the racial element of a town in the South with a history of disproportionate police action against racial minorities and you have all the elements needed for Birmingham fifty years later…with the caveat that the cops in Birmingham had dogs, firehoses, and revolvers.  Not fully automatic assault rifles with six clips each, armored vehicles, countersnipers and tear gas.

Which is fucking absurd. Their “sniper” was sitting on top of the armored vehicle with his SR-25 on a bipod, exposed to everyone in a position that in a real war zone would get him greased in about ten seconds.  That was a guy who was absolutely positive he wasn’t going to be shot at…which means he had no business being up there to begin with. Countless Tweets from people who service in Iraq have pointed out that the Ferguson cops are carrying far more ammo – and actually pointing their guns FAR more – than they ever did in-country, and one in particular noted that American troops put down riots outside mosques with less loadout than the Ferguson PD feels obliged to carry.

It’s out of hand.  And really, there’s no way to easily sort it out.  Ideally, you’d put the entirety of local law-enforcement on the sidelines and bring in cops from somewhere else where the police aren’t merely the best-armed gang and the rednecks who want to need the guns don’t have badges. And then the community activists would do a bang-up job of isolating the guys who just want to throw Molotovs and stir the shit (I guarantee you there are some of the usual Free Mumia-International ANSWER-Black Bloc-type douchetards out there making things worse).  If you could remove the untrustworthy police from the situation and launch a loudly public external investigation, you might persuade people that this is not going to be swept under the rug and justice will be served.  But then, if ifs and buts were bros and sluts we’d all have been laid on prom night, and right now not a mumbling word is being said about ann investigation.  Hell, nobody knows where the shooter cop is, he’s not in custody, and there are rednecks marching for HIM in St Louis even after autopsy results suggest that he capped an unarmed man on his knees.

And that’s really the thing, isn’t it? The Ferguson police are out spreading the meme that the kid was a criminal, that he had just robbed a gas station or something, despite admitting that the cop would have no knowledge of that at the time of the incident.  And even if it’s completely true – we’re doing “shot six times without trial” as an appropriate response to an unarmed theft now?  It’s like I said earlier: in the minds of certain people, all crime is fungible and every criminal is a terrorist and all terrorists are Magneto.  And more than one person is pointing out how a bunch of old white people pointed military weapons at the ATF for two weeks at the Bundy Ranch without consequence, and the point should not be lost on anyone.  Those old crackers weren’t criminals, after all, they weren’t dark enough for that.

Ironically, we have just found the perfect use for Google Glass.  Real time video of everything a cop does from the moment they step out of the car, both policeman and subject, with real-time data updates in the corner of your eye too.  Horses for courses, and law enforcement is the ideal spot for it.  And we already have documented evidence that the camera makes a huge difference: cops play by the rules and citizens know that tape is running on them too.  Instant surveillance at the time it’s needed: maybe that’s the fix.  Because the cops are loaded for bear in Ferguson but they’re still trying to shut down the media – which is all the proof you need that in 2014, the iPhone is mightier than the sword.

The paraphrase is Eddie Izzard, of course, during the award-winning Dressed to Kill, when he asks his American audience “do you know there’re other countries?” And the crowd roars, because after all, Americans are famous for not really grasping the existence of anything beyond our borders.  It’s an age-old story, one going back to Washington and his warning against foreign entanglements.  Fair enough.

But the border has gotten closer and closer – and basically now exists in front of an American’s nose.  For a decade now, I’ve been snarking that the first lesson on day one of California driving school is “there are no other cars on the road” and I stand by it. But there are also no other people on the train platform. There certainly aren’t any signs saying “No Smoking” or “Dismount Zone” or “Walk Your Bike.” There definitely aren’t any people getting off the train when you’re trying to get onto it – or while you’re standing idly in the doorway. And there absolutely isn’t another car at the four-way stop, especially one that was there before you.  And even if you do notice these things, it’s okay, because you were in a hurry, so you had to drive your car down the bike lane or ride your bike on the VTA platform or blow through the red light to make a left into pedestrian traffic or walk through the big red DON’T WALK sign underneath the green light.

The principal achievement of American life and culture in the 21st century has been to make it more solipsistic than was ever before possible.  The proliferation of media means you can now see exactly what you want without ever encountering a dissenting opinion or distressing fact. Entire online ecosystems now exist to tell you how right you are, to affirm everything you believe and allow you to freely and anonymously lash out at anyone with the temerity to be different. The main effect of a device that can transmit all the world’s knowledge into the palm of your hand has been to get between you and anything you don’t want to bother noticing.

It cuts both ways. On the one hand, that lonely geek kid in a hick town in Alabama now has access to a wider world around him and knows there’s something else.  On the other hand, his relatives can now bombard everyone they know with a thousand email forwards, each more bogus than the last, giving each other the incontrovertible factual proof that a Muslim atheistic socialist theocrat has taken over and is persecuting Christians. (Sidenote: I disrespect any American Christian who claims they’re being persecuted when believers in Syria and Iraq are literally being ordered to convert to Islam at the point of an AK, but that’s a different post.) Conspiracy-mongers, outright racists, people with behaviors and beliefs that would have been socially abhorrent even twenty years ago – all have found mutually reinforcing support and validation through five hundred channels of TV and unlimited bandwidth.

(Aside: that’s what drives me nuts about the misuse of things like “civil disobedience” and the First Amendment. When those folks went to jail in Birmingham, they were dressed in their Sunday best, and they went along without a fight, because they knew they were breaking the law and they accepted the consequences.  Now people say stupid shit and scream “First Amendment” without realizing that it guarantees freedom of speech, not freedom from consequence.  You want to dress like a circus clown? Don’t bitch when people stare.  You want to make a spectacle of yourself on TV and radio and Twitter? Don’t bitch when you get taken off the air.)

It doesn’t help that one of our two political parties is driven entirely by the ethos of “I Got Mine – Fuck You.” That’s the libertarian ethic at its most distilled, the idea that it should be possible to shuffle your money through two other countries and pay no taxes, or that you should be able to go armed and pick a fight and blow somebody away without consequence, or that your private shuttle should have the free use of public bus stops and that you should be able to resell your public parking space for profit.  I got mine, fuck you. And everyone who reads Atlas Shrugged and decides that it means them – they are the special ones, they are John Galt, they are the uniquely gifted and talented and the backbone of society as opposed to those looters and moochers who have the temerity not to have been born on third base – just feeds the beast.  I got mine, fuck you. 

In a way, I guess it was inevitable. The baby boomers were the original Me Generation, and they raised a critical mass of kids with a wall full of participation ribbons and helicoptered in to complain about grades and playing time.  It’s not lost on me that the bulk of bad actors on local transit are headed back to San Francisco in the afternoon, where a whole world is being carved out in “the Quad” so you can be bused back and forth to your job and have a hip edgy urban lifestyle in between.   Hannah Hart was being satirical about “adultolescence”. I don’t think these kids are.  So if you want to dress up like you woke up drunk in a Goodwill donation bin, go ahead, do your thing.  But be prepared for people not to take you seriously. If you want to go to work dressed for wake-and-bake in the dorm common room, go on with your bad self, but prepare to be judged. This might be the most casual place on Earth, but it’s not too much to expect things like clean and sort-of matching clothes in a professional environment. Respect for other people suggests that your teal V-neck with a fountain of chest hair doesn’t really pair with your faded brick red drainpipe jeans, which probably ought not be pegged with your Toms – but at the very least, I’ll be damned if you can help me pick out a shirt.  But hey, if the VC doesn’t care, do your thing.

Which is the trick. I ask “do you know there’s other people?” and immediately get asked “do YOU know there’s other people?”  It’s the age-old intolerance trap: if you don’t tolerate my intolerance, you yourself are intolerant and lose all moral standing.  But here’s the thing: we live in a society. We have to rub along or the whole thing falls apart eventually. If you insist on “I got mine, fuck you” and everyone else does too, you wind up with that libertarian paradise of Somalia. And while I’m sure that’s the perpetual wet dream of the people who want to need the guns, it’s no kind of a society.  If we’re going to survive, everybody’s going to have to accept that you have to nudge over and make room for the next guy.  Including those who want to freeload off the tolerance of others.

In essence, there it is: the Golden Rule rewritten for the 21st century. And we need it. Damn near everything that’s wrong with American society in 2014 can be nailed down to the disposal of any sense of empathy, the abandonment of any concept of community deeper than “people I agree with on Facebook”, and the refusal to acknowledge that somebody somewhere might be different and that’s all right.

I was first directed to John Cole when he was still largely a generic right-wing warblogger. He was taking a break to take the piss out of some Catholic functionary who had denied communion to some little girl over an arcane and probably ridiculous point of theological legerdemain, and after some glancing around I noticed he was also taking the piss out of people who thought Terri Schiavo was one favorable ruling away from jumping out of bed and playing lacrosse.  And he was turning on the GOP with the sort of savagery normally reserved for the dirtiest and filthiest of hippies because they could just not let this woman die in peace when there was religious-politics hay to be made from it.  And that was the tipping point.

Nine years on, John Cole isn’t really a liberal at all.  He’s just a regular guy who found the ground shifting beneath him and making him a supporter of Democrats without any fundamental change in his worldview or approach…with one exception. He acknowledges now that he is an idiot, which he was unwilling to do when he was blindly backing the Bush administration’s charge into Iraq.  But then, he tends not to candy-coat very much…including the fact that he is an alcoholic and needs help.

His attempts to get into rehab were by turns hilarious and horrifying, because the American health care system is not equipped to deal with someone who walks into the ER and says “I am drinking myself to death and I need your help to prevent it.”  It took about five tries for him to be admitted into a facility for detox, but he got there eventually, and is now nine or ten days sober with a more traditional 28-day rehab stint coming up.

I would have liked to have a beer with this guy, but I would settle for a nice Coke Zero or something, because he is an interesting dude.  Gulf War I veteran, now teaching college somewhere in West Virginia, sponsor of a fraternity which appears to be less the typical douchebags and more just a bunch of guys who he is trying to make less knuckleheaded.  Not a guy who puts on a lot of airs. The sort who goes into Macy’s and asks “where’s the fat guy section?”  Although given that he dropped 20 pounds in the first 8 days of hospital-enforced sobriety (pancreatitis is hell) that may not be a thing for long.

Here’s the point of all this: the guy knows he’s an idiot. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, because we’re all idiots.  I’m smarter than 99.95% of everyone in this country, and I’m an idiot. I wouldn’t know where to start changing the oil on my Rabbit, after always changing my own throughout high school and college.  I can’t fix anything in the house.  My knowledge of history outside of England from about 1065 to the Revolution and the US after that is feeble at best. I haven’t had a firm grip on mainstream pop culture in a decade or so.  If I try to cook anything that doesn’t involve a mix or throwing meat on a grill, I’m liable to burn the house down. There are gaps in my knowledge that leave me sub-functional as an ordinary human being.

We’re all idiots. The trick is knowing where your shortcomings are and then being able to patch them over.  Either know where the takeout places are, or marry someone who can handle the strategic finances, or buy a bike that never needs to be maintained other than putting air in the tires.  Possibly the most important part of being a grown mature functioning adult is to know the ways in which you are an idiot and do what is necessary to mitigate it.  A lot of people are very very bad at that.

Fortunately, Cole isn’t. Good luck, dude.

So I’m coming home from an outdoor street festival tonight – an odd combination of band party, farmer’s market, car show, alfresco dining and assorted other stuff. There was a pop-up demonstration of a separated bike lane, there were root beer floats from a stand in front of the local small grocery, the works. And I came there straight from an errand in the city, in the Mission, on Valencia and 17th – the very beating heart of hipster heaven, currently chockablock with techies and their ilk.

And I thought about Portlandia – not least because a minibreak to Portland appears to be on the cards for later this year – and how it deftly skewers the excess of hipsters and yuppies alike. And it occurs to me there’s not a lot of difference anymore. Skinny jeans are everywhere. Surplus store clothing? Hell, military style jackets are in Macy’s. Apple products? You couldn’t get more mainstream. Yupsters? Everywhere, and for one simple reason: that’s now effectively the mainstream of a life that can more simply be called urban.

Urban is the magic word. It used to be the preferred media euphemism for “black” but now it seems to be the signifier of an entire realm of cultural experiences. Street life, eschewing cars, technologically mediated, transit-focused, the works. Consider Mountain View, perhaps the archetypal suburb (if not outright farm town) until the coming of Fairchild and the age of silicon. Now it’s one of a handful of towns around the turn of the peninsula with its own art and wine festivals, its own commuter train stop(s), its own bike share stations, a slew of restaurants with outdoor tables, and – inevitably – political arguments about just how cityfied you want it to become.

In years past, the big fight was always how to keep the urban realm from becoming suburbanized – no big box stores, no chains, every effort to preserve local character. Now, the argument seems to be about how much of the urban box you can unpack in suburbia without getting the bad bits. Denser housing without towering skyscrapers. Transit and shuttles and bike lanes without crippling the ability to move regular traffic. Business-friendly and upscale retail without pricing out the locals or destroying an affordable future for kids who might want to keep living there after college.

It’s a tough nut to crack. It’s not something you can get with ample doses of loose money and a pro-bidness-at-all-cost attitude. But it also required being urban-minded, which is why it hasn’t really taken hold in the old country at all. I suppose it’s just lucky that much of Silicon Valley already had a Southern Pacific line running down the peninsula and a tradition of interurban rail going back to the old #40 line to San Mateo. And then there’s San Jose, which went from farm town to bedroom community to quietly becoming the third largest city in California, bigger than Oakland or San Francisco, yet with a downtown that hardly seems bigger or more compelling than a cleaned up multi-ethnic Birmingham.

And these places all have their own character. If you have a specific sort of thing in mind – city grit, rustic isolation, working-class credibility, crackerbox suburbia – you can find it somewhere along the 415-650-408 axis, although you may not care for the resulting commute. Then again, the transit and transportation infrastructure has yet to scale to accommodate the true need, because stuff costs money. And it’s hard to get too fired up about the limited transit when your employer will bus you to work, or when you have to drive yourself anyway and why should you care about the shitty light rail performance anyway? Which in its way is of a piece with the ever-popular “this place was paradise up until five minutes after the person after me arrived” way of thinking. And…but then, that’s a post for another time.

In a lot of ways, I think that’s the goal for most of the area. Not Los Altos Hills or Atherton or Hillsborough, obviously, but everywhere else – if you had to pick a civic goal, I would put it on something like “Just Urban Enough – But No More.” Which, depending on the approach, is far from the worst aspiration for growing suburbs in 2014.

When the zombie apocalypse comes, my first thought is going to be to go steal one of the Bay Area Bike Share bikes.  In a post-apocalyptic landscape, when fuel is no longer to be had (good luck with that Tesla, buddy!), what would you rather have? It doesn’t need fuel, food or a plug, and it beats the hell out of walking.

The bike I have is pretty shitty. It’s a hybrid, somewhere between road bike and trail bike, and not very good at either.  It’s got a 21-speed gear system that uses thumb and finger triggers to shift, it’s amazingly uncomfortable to sit on, and its best function is gathering dust in the garage.  Which is what I asked for, to be honest, but for the last nine years I’ve dreaded biking simply because it was a shitty experience every time.  Much to my wife’s chagrin.

And then I experienced the bike share bikes, which despite being very heavy are stable, comfortable to sit on (with step-through frame), easy to operate (seven-speed internally-geared with a twist shifter), and uncomplicated to use.  And then my wife got her new C7i from Public Bikes (okay, I got it for her birthday) and lo and behold, it wasn’t bad to ride on.  And that made me rethink things, and then she rode my bike and confirmed that holy shit, that’s a terrible bike, no wonder you hate riding it.

But I like those bike share bikes.  And then I saw the new creation of Priority Bikes in NYC, a simplified $400 bike with run-flat tires, a belt drive instead of a chain, a 3-speed internal-hub gear systems and coaster brakes like a kid’s bike, a comfortable saddle and upright seating position.  Basically, it’s the perfect bike for somebody who just wants to ride a bike instead of being A Bike Person.  And that rang a chord with me, because my whole professional life has been spent working in a computer ecosystem that has its roots in computers for people who didn’t want to be Computer People.

So after a little looking around, we were advised of a sale at Public Bikes on the M7i – a French-style mixte bike suitable for either sex, enough step-through for aging hips and knees, a really comfortable upright riding position, the same 7-speed internal-hub transmission with twist-shift as the share bikes, accessory compatibility with the wife’s bike, and – most intriguing – an easy conversion path in future to an electric-assist bike. I was sold, not least because ten years from now, I might not be able to walk all the way downtown and might appreciate a bit of a bump.

And that’s the approach I take to biking, which seems to be the opposite of most other people in this part of the world.  To most folks, the bike is part of an alternative to driving.  You use the bike and transit to replace a car, mostly for commuting.  I’m going completely in the opposite direction: the bike is a replacement for walking, a force multiplier to get me further than I’m willing to go on shank’s mare.  I’m not going to battle the crowds on what’s already an overloaded Caltrain system. But what I will consider is that there are destinations that take the better part of an hour to reach on a back-and-forth transit route, too far to practically walk, which are suddenly fifteen minutes away on a bike.

So we’ll see.  This is a pricey experiment, but one I’m genuinely looking forward to.  As long as it’s not going to be too hot or humid (serious risk lately with all the monsoon moisture in the air) and not pouring rain (bigger issue in the winter months), this could be fun, and (gasp) I’m actually looking forward to it.