Are my eyes really blue?

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.

“There comes a time in your life – and if you haven’t felt it yet, trust me, you will – when you have to stop trying to be the person you were, and let yourself become the person you are.”

-me, June 30, 2004

“There comes a time in every man’s life where you have to stop trying to be Nuke and start trying to be Crash.”

-me, repeatedly, for years now

 

Three years ago, I was at Disneyland with friends.  We had been rampaging through Disney California Adventure, a park that didn’t exist until 2001 – and which I’d never visited until 2009. It was a brand new experience, one unencumbered by any past baggage, something entirely new to explore and experience, and in three previous trips, we’d enjoyed it immensely.  And after taking it in for the fourth time, there I was, with my wife, sat on a bench with the sun setting, Sleeping Beauty’s Castle over our shoulder, and the sounds of “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” drifting up from the end of Main Street USA.

It was the dream.  It was everything I’d hoped my life would be back in 1989.  Sure, life wasn’t perfect, but the things that weren’t were on the other side of the bubble.  I had my girl. I had friends, both here and waiting back home.  I even had some family again.  I was good at my job, I didn’t hate it, I was a year removed from going to Europe, the Commodores were in the College World Series, all was basically right with the world.  More or less.

We went back a few weeks ago.  Aside from an experiment which successfully proved that we have no business on a bus, it was glorious. The parks, the food, just being able to get away from it all and have a few days together in a dream world.  It was the kickoff to another emotional roller coaster brought about by sports – Stanford stood between Vanderbilt and another trip to the College World Series, and the Dores brought it off.  Then beat Louisville, UC-Irvine, beat Texas (it took two tries and ten innings, but we miracled through) and then beat Virginia in three to clinch the first national championship in baseball ever…and this is a team that started playing in 1886.

Dreams do come true, as Joe Fisher said on the final strike.

What was the dream?  Did I really want to be Vice-President? Did I want to be in the Senate? Did I actually want to be teaching political science in some small private liberal-arts school with a great basketball team? Those were things I thought could happen, but not things I really wanted – because I wasn’t seriously thinking that far ahead, ever. Looking back, the dream came down to three things: my girl, my crew, and adventures.

Ten years ago, to the day, I arrived here with my girl in pursuit of an adventure. Left my crew, left my job, left the East Coast, and came out here in search of a fresh start and the ever-nebulous big dream.  I wanted to see if I could make it here, partly inspired by the detritus of the dot-com boom and partly because of the need to play in the big leagues. Which – along with a College World Series title – has put me back in mind of Bull Durham quotes like the one above. Or like this one:

 

“Yeah, I was in the show. I was in the show for 21 days once.  21 greatest days of my life. You never handle your own luggage in the show, somebody else carries your bags. It was great. You hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains.”

 

I honestly thought it could be months before I found a job.  I had specifically not thought about what might happen, because I didn’t want to set myself up for expectations. I just wanted to take it as it developed naturally rather than get my hopes up on unrealistic things.  (The three things I wanted were a gambling stop in Reno, where I got cleaned out in about 4 minutes, a DirecTV dish, which I got, and a VW Beetle. Which I got, except it took two years and was a Rabbit by then. But I digress.)

Instead, after about three weeks, I was a contractor with a certain fruit company in Cupertino. It was chaos the first few months, and there were a couple of days when I wondered whether my badge was going to work in the morning, and then I was hired on staff.  And less than a year after that, there was a sort-of promotion and a job shift. I had an actual office with an actual door, I had a short email address, I had a company AmEx and got sent on show support for ten days. For the only time in my high tech career, there was no friend-of-a-friend, there was no recommendation, there was nothing but my resume and my skills and my own dubious charm. And I made it. Dream accomplished.

Then I got sick.

I probably could have sought some accommodation for the physical infirmity. Maybe doing so would have alleviated the mental health struggles. Not doing so was the second biggest mistake of my entire life.  Instead, I panicked, and I ran, because I thought the key to my future was being technical. Maybe that was true and maybe it’s not, but I wound up heading right back into what I’d done before…and have been doing ever since.  And lately it’s been hard as hell to shake the thought that I may actually be doing this for years to come, that I’ve maxed out at triple-A, that my brief sojourn in the big leagues was just that.

It might not be the worst thing.  As long as I can still make some money, take all the leave I’m offered (the only real perk of the current job), and make an effort to go out on vacation and travel and go down the pub and win trivia and spend time with friends and take my downtime and enjoy life away from work…that wouldn’t be the worst way to kill the next twenty years, would it? Find some way to make work into something I can live with and just enjoy the rest of my life otherwise?

It’s tough. But then, you get told unrealistic things as a kid. I’m not going to be the first man on Mars, because this country doesn’t even have the capability of putting a person in space without help from the Russians anymore.  I’m not going to be President, or even Vice-President, because that’s something that only happens for two or three people per decade.  Forty-three individuals have been President of the United States, ever (and one of them got counted twice, and another only stuck in the job for a month).  I’m not going to cure cancer, because there’s no such thing as monolithic “cancer” and besides, I haven’t made an A in a lab science course since eighth grade. Sure, you might be in the top one-tenth-of-one-percent in the country in terms of IQ, but guess what?  That means that 300,000 people are just as smart as you or smarter.

 

“Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It’s 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There’s 6 months in a season, that’s about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week – just one – a gorp… you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes… you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week… and you’re in Yankee Stadium.”

I’ve learned a lot of things in ten years.  But if I had to nail it down to just one thing that life in Silicon Valley has taught me, I’d say this: the world is an unpredictable place. Not everything follows the rules, no matter how much you wish they would. Randomness is real and luck is real, and sometimes the luck breaks your way and sometimes it doesn’t. Life is not predictable, fortune is not something you can teach in class and turn into a reproducible process, there is no standard rich and famous contract, and much like college football, there is no god in high tech but Loki.

Just because you give it your best effort and try your damnedest, you’re not guaranteed that everything will always work out in the end.  Nothing is promised to you and the future isn’t real until you can put your hand on it.  The lead isn’t going to come into the back of shop and help with the laptops, the boss isn’t actually going to set up cross-training opportunities, the Sony rep isn’t going to come through with the free K710, the second interview isn’t going to result in an offer. All you can do is try to bend the curve of probability as best you can, through effort and influence and preparation and whatever else.

And if (when) it doesn’t turn out like you expected? Puke and rally and try again tomorrow. Harold Hill doesn’t every time marry Marion the Librarian, and when the prospect you’re mentoring gets fast-tracked to the big club, you might find yourself cut from the squad. But sometimes, there’s an opening for a manager at Visalia, and you have to rethink what you’re doing and whether it’s isn’t time to take your career in a different direction.

“Well, Nuke’s scared because his eyelids are jammed and his old man’s here. We need a live– is it a live rooster? We need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose’s glove. And nobody seems to know what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present. Is that about right? We’re dealing with a lot of shit.”

It’s called life.  Best to just get on with it.

First off, don’t be misled by the scoreline. The history books will say that Brazil lost to Germany 7-1, true. But that one goal was scored in injury time at the end of the match, long after the Brazillian humiliation was complete. In every other way that matters, Germany defeated Brazil by seven goals yesterday, more goals than Brazil had given up in an entire World Cup since 1998, the first defeat on home soil since 1975, the biggest margin of loss for the national team in ninety-four years.

What is this like? I don’t think people in this country really grasp what it means to be down 5-0 after thirty minutes.  You could compare it to a hockey team up 5-0 after one period, or maybe the Super Bowl defenestrations of the Broncos against the Redskins or Niners in 1988 and 1990 respectively.  But to really grasp what it’s like, imagine the new college football playoff, with an undefeated Alabama team hosting, say, Nebraska. And imagine Nebraska going up 35-0 through the first quarter and ultimately winning by a final of 84-3, with the final pathetic field goal for Alabama coming as  time expires in the 4th quarter on the last play of the game. And oh, by the way, Auburn is playing in the other semifinal and could win a championship instead.

That’s what happened. The team with more World Cups than any other, the host nation of the 2014 tournament, the nation synonymous with the sport – that team was absolutely destroyed, utterly humiliated before a worldwide audience behind a team that couldn’t miss. This wasn’t a match, it was an autopsy. This was the biggest disaster for Brazil since Google announced that Orkut was shutting down.

I mean…I don’t know what you do for a loss like that.  The coach is fired, for sure.  The players will live with this for the rest of their lives – Tim Vickery, the BBC’s South American football specialist, said on the World Service this morning that he had known players from the 1950 Brazil team that still lived with the pain of the loss to Uruguay half a century on.  Right now, the whole country is shellshocked or blackout drunk.  When they come to, it’s not going to be pretty…especially in a country where the tournament – and a presumed victory – was supposed to salve growing unrest over economic inequality and political corruption.  Elections have been lost over less.

It was amazing to watch.  It’s not often you get to see one of the superpowers of sport systematically destroyed in real time in front of two billion people and all of Twitter.  And along the way, it drove home what a great job ESPN has done with the World Cup as a whole: get the best announcers, get good analysts (including not only foreign players but Julie Foudy – can you imagine somebody bringing in a former WNBA all-star to comment on the NBA finals?) and let the game tell the story, instead of loading it down with hype and analysts and the kind of human-interest folderol that makes the Super Bowl and Olympics unwatchable.  ESPN does so much wrong, but they’ve done this absolute right, and I suspect we’re really going to miss them in four years.

The Supreme Court has just decided that if companies really really mean it, it’s ok for them to decide they won’t provide coverage for birth control for slutty slutty slutbag women, but hey, there was no real difference between Bush and Gore, right?

Do me a favor: if you voted for Nader in 2000, don’t let me know.  I don’t care where you lived, I don’t care what you were thinking.  Politics is real life.  If you wanted to dream, you should have been a theater major.  I’m just better off not knowing.

Meanwhile, the Republican dream of the New Feudalism continues.  No wonder they don’t talk about jobs sitting on this kind of real unemployment – it’s a buyer’s marker for labor. Easy to piously declare “well any woman that doesn’t like it can find a job somewhere else” – but when real unemployment persists in double digits, it’s not that simple, is it? And employers get to revert to the kind of full control over their employees’ lives we saw in the company towns of the deep South.  And it all comes full circle.

Individual freedom is for rich people.  If you work for somebody else, or have the temerity to have a vagina, shut up and get back to work.  That’s the new American dream.  If you don’t like it, lace up your boots and start punching back. Hard.  If this is enough to keep the GOP out of the Senate another two years, then we can at least make lemonade from the biggest sour lemon of the term.

I miss DC.  

Not in the way that most people think of Washington DC – political intrigue, monuments, Congressional aides, West Wing-style high drama, the Sabbath Gasbags blathering on and on every Sunday morning, interns on the make, power dinners at the Palm, the whole cut and thrust of life inside the Beltway – that’s not my DC at all.  

My DC was autumn on the GW Parkway. Late nights at the dearly missed Ireland’s Four Provinces. Bluegrass on WAMU and go-go at the 9:30 Club. Sonny Sam and Frank on the call of Redskins games, Don & Mike on JFK in the afternoons and the Sports Junkies at night. George Washington and George Mason and Maryland hoops. Coffee at the Mudd House or Common Grounds, groceries from Giant, Barra Brava and the Screaming Eagles at DC United, Lake Braddock vs Annandale, DeMatha vs Good Counsel, trying to find parking at Montgomery Mall, Buck calling the Wizards and the Locker calling the Caps and Jim Vance and Doreen Gentzler and George Michael on the Channel 4 news, Mac McGarry hosting “It’s Academic”, and the 4th of July on the Mall (always better observed from the Arlington side of the river).  The whole world, the real place that nobody ever thinks of when they think about the DMV – indeed, if you hear DMV and think “drivers license?” that’s as good a shibboleth as any.

Ten years on, I have come to the conclusion that as it exists in 2014, I kind of loathe “Silicon Valley.”  I really do.  Not the geographic area, not the outstanding HBO show, but Silicon Valley as it exists in the popular mind around here.  Uber and Lyft and $18 billion in valuation for a middleman app that relies on regulatory loopholes and “independent contractor” dodges.  Stanford University and its private incubation/investment services. Most of the Mission and more than half of SoMa. The endless array of hoodie-clad neckbeards whose eyes glaze over at a “Walk Your Bike” sign. Dolores Park, all of it, every weekend. Clinkle and the endless black hole that keeps getting funding no matter what. The idea that the single best resume in high tech is “just dropped out of Stanford or MIT”. $1.2 million for an app that literally just says “Yo” and has security holes you can drive a Google bus through. The notion that a degree is worthless but Bitcoin is valuable. The appropriation of public goods for private profit, whether it’s MUNI stops clogged with shuttles or people auctioning their parking spot off with MonkeyParking. The frathousing of high-tech, the infantilization of high-tech, the parade of private buses down suburban side streets in Mountain View while Caltrain has to scramble for cash and the inability to buy a house anywhere unless you can put up 100% cash up front.  The replacement of high tech with a Wolf of Market Street cash-grab boondoggle bonanza.

Which is a shame, because in these ten years, I’ve come to love the real place underneath. The place that has In N Out burger and charbroil joints that were doing delicious burgers long before trendy names like Umami and Super Duper came along. The overcast layer in the morning and the fog spilling like Cool Whip over the tops of the Santa Cruz mountains above the reservoir along I-280.  The art and wine festival in every small town’s high street some weekend or another between Memorial and Labor Day. The beaches at San Gregorio or Pescadero and drinks by the firepit outside the Ritz in Half Moon Bay, or by the fireplace at the Riptide deep in the Outer Sunset.

I could go on.  In fact, I will.

Sal Castaneda doing traffic in the morning on channel 2 and John Madden offering commentary on KCBS radio on the drive in to work. Hole-in-the-wall Italian places in North Beach.  Following the Cal Band up the hill to Memorial Stadium on a Saturday morning.  Turkey Mike’s BBQ and a couple of beers as the sun sets at San Jose Giants games. The Warriors, any time, any place, Golden State or Santa Cruz alike. A pub without a television in San Jose and a bar without a beer tap in Mountain View. Camping in Portola State Park where there’s no data signal of any kind, just a book and a lounge chair and the shade of the redwoods. Ad Hoc in Yountville and Los Charros in Mountain View. St Francis vs Bellarmine and Santa Clara vs St Mary’s.  A slice at Pizza My Heart, a cup of fresh-ground Peruvian coffee at the farmer’s market, a sack of persimmons or Meyer lemons and take all you want because they’re overflowing the yard.

This is a real place, full of real people, with a real history that goes back decades to Fairchild engineers drinking at the Wagon Wheel or Steve Jobs bribing the Macintosh dev team with pineapple pizza from Frankie Johnny and Luigi’s or entire orchards of stone fruits as far as the eye can see. There’s a whole valley of real people and real places and real things that will be here long after the bubble bursts and the hipster hustlers decamp back to Portland or business school.  

A million years ago, seemingly, they called this place the Valley of Heart’s Delight.  If you can wall off the bullshit and immerse yourself in the real thing, it still is.

Well, at long last we have the Amazon phone.  The Fire Phone is the Kindle Fire, shrunk to the increasingly-standard 4.7” screen size.  It does have a couple of party pieces of note:

* Firefly, a universal “recognize everything and send you right to Amazon to buy it” function that’s already on the Amazon iOS app under the name of Flow.  Although the Firefly implementation looks more comprehensive and is apparently extendible via an API.

* Dynamic Perspective, an approach to the UI that uses four (!) front-facing cameras with infrared lighting (!!) to do constant real-time face recognition and modify the screen display accordingly in a sort of 3-D effect (!!!).  Setting aside the “on camera at all times” aspect that will no doubt make the Edward Snowden worshippers crap their trousers, my immediate first thought was “Amazon: F Yo Battery Life, Lawya”.

* Mayday, the instant-tech-support app made famous during March Madness by Craig Sager’s exotic fashion choices.

 

Here’s the thing: the appeal of the Kindle Fire was that it was the first genuinely non-shit-on-toast Android tablet.  It got there by eschewing most of what made Android Android – carving off the UI and the Google features in place of an Amazon UI optimized for watching and reading your Amazon-purchased media, with apps bought from a curated and well-managed store.  In other words, by making a tablet that was everything the iPad was accused of being, and bringing it in at a ridiculously reasonable price.

But the phone is $199 with a two-year AT&T contract. And AT&T is the only launch carrier.  This sounds an awful lot like what happened with the Moto X, where a phone with less than cutting-edge specs was offered at premium price on the grounds that its Unique Selling Proposition was worth the difference.  It works with Apple, because they can offer the largest app ecosystem in mobile and the ease of use that goes along with iOS. It works with Samsung, because they max out the spec sheet and flood the zone with advertising.  It didn’t work with the Moto X, because Google simply didn’t put the kind of promotion behind it that it needed…and because its USP remained tied to AT&T for too long.

And that’s the thing about the Fire Phone…you have to really want to use the Amazon ecosystem.  I mean, really want to use it.  Because you can buy stuff from Amazon on regular Android or iOS phones.  In fact, right now, your iOS device can be used for everything on the Fire except Dynamic Perspective – shopping, Instant Video, even an approximation of Firefly via the Flow option.  And some of the things you give up – like Bluetooth LE or even multitasking, in the first iteration – are going to be a lot to ask, especially in a world where wearables are the next great frontier.  Try telling Ed Earl Brown – or his wife, as likely as not – that they can’t use the Fitbit with their Fire Phone.

Then again, this is not a power-user phone.  This is a phone that you can give your mother, and she can use it to make calls, take pictures, probably do text and email, watch movies, listen to music, read 50 Shades Of Unintentional Comedy on the down-low, and if she has problems or has questions, press a button and there’s somebody to help instead of speed-dialing you to try to talk her through something.  Maybe there’s a market there, although the jury is out until more people interact with this thing in the real world. That’s actually another trick: Google’s attempt to sell the Nexus One was a complete bust. This phone is going to have to be in front of people, and just having it at the AT&T store isn’t going to cut it.  It needs to be in Target, in Best Buy, in Wal-Mart, and people need to be able to see how things like Firefly and Mayday and Dynamic Perspective work in the real world.  That will do more to sell it than just looking at video online and taking their word for it.

But right now, there’s nothing that seizes me like the Moto X did and makes me think “I must try this phone.” Which means it’s definitely not targeted for my market.  If it is, then Amazon may have just laid an egg.  It remains to be seen how it works out for everyone else.

That chime.  That guitar chord, supposedly recorded by Stanley Jordan, with the B top note and echoing F# in there somewhere.  The startup sound for the Power Mac 6100.

It echoed off the plywood floor in my room, where the carpet had been ripped up in the name of a whole-house remodel. It was my first computer. After summers and holidays spent on a borrowed Apple II in elementary school, and four years spent in the DOS version of WordPerfect 5.1, I finally owned a computer of my own, the first generation of PowerPC-driven Macs.  I had to learn what an “application” meant.  I had to learn the difference between what I thought of as a program and things like extensions or control panels.  The first time I tried using WordPerfect 3 for Mac, I literally looked for a way to turn off WYSIWYG. Because seeing the text justify itself on both sides was confusing me.

It wasn’t an auspicious start.

I also signed up for my first online service – there was some attempt to donk around with the local BBS scene, but I splashed out for an account on eWorld – it wasn’t a true ISP, but it did do email, and thus began my first attempts to interact with the wider world.  By Christmas, I’d have MacTCP installed, access to the rarely-used Apple Remote Access modem pool at school, a beta copy of Netscape, my own Vanderbilt email address and Eudora to read it with, and – for the first time – the ability to reach out to people out of town without relying on pricey long distance calls or actual postal mail.

People in the Valley these days think they’re being “disruptive” whenever they come up with a new way to use your phone instead of just pulling out cash.  But this is what real disruption means. All of a sudden, the world becomes smaller. You can stay in touch with people at a distance. Five years earlier, a “long distance girlfriend” meant you would throw letters in the mail like messages in bottles into the ocean and wait to see what, if anything, ever drifted back.  Or make a phone call, hope somebody was there, and hope that you could stay on the phone long enough for a conversation but not so long that the long distance bill exploded. And then, in 1994, all of a sudden?  Tap tap tap, done.

But there was a lot more than that.  There was all the poking and prodding needed to get a PowerMac running System 7.1.2 to perform in a reliable manner.  When I got to grad school, I had to find the software to get a network connection. Then I had to figure out how to get TCP working.  Then Eudora. Then things like Stuffit, or a Zip drive, or RAMDoubler, all bits and pieces of getting more out of the computer, like a hod-rodder trying to squeeze an extra 5HP out of the engine or shave another tenth of a second off the quarter-mile.

I didn’t know it, but before I’d even started grad school, I was on the path to my future.  And it would have nothing to do with political science.