Are my eyes really blue?

Here’s the thing…here’s the reasons why is utterly a shitshow on multiple levels:

1) this is the first time in decades that we had a coach who aspired to more than “try not to die.” We were encouraged to believe in the program, we were encouraged to hope, we were told that we could be competitive with everyone in the country and that no one should settle for less. Then, at the peak of our success, he goes somewhere else. That kinda hurts.

2) everyone in the SEC – hell, everyone in college football – spent most of the season saying that he would inevitably leave for another job. Find a Power Poll at Team Speed Kills that didn’t allude to his imminent departure once the USC job opened up. The rest of the world keeps telling us that we essentially don’t deserve to have a successful coach, and he gave them the chance to say “told you so.” That really stings.

3) this is the most success this program has had in a lifetime. Literally. You have to look at the 1920s to find this level of success. Nine wins in back to back seasons, back to back wins over a rival, back to back bowl victories – it sounds pretty damn modest elsewhere, but it’s literally as good as it’s ever been for Vanderbilt. We didn’t have this for almost a century. And then, a historically successful program that’s on the rocks – and deservedly so – is able to swing in and poach a big chunk of our success so they can restore themselves? It kind of smacks of punching out a homeless guy and taking his money because you forgot to bring your wallet and you really want a Coke from the vending machine. Having our brightest moment in over 80 years purloined so Penn State can get right quicker…it’s football, not feelingsball, but it’s fucking heartless.

This is the chip. No one wishes us well. Nobody else has our best interests at heart. Nobody thinks we deserve anything more than to be their easy automatic W. We have to stick close, we have to stand together, we have to fight for each other, because nobody else will, and we’re all going down together. To the last man, to the last play, to the last snap, to the last second – we fight.

Honestly, it’s like they moved the campus over top of an Indian burial ground while we weren’t looking.  Now Eric McClellan is not with the team, leaving Vandy basketball down to seven scholarship players.  Couple that with the two walk-ons, and we no longer have enough live bodies to scrimmage 5-on-5. The real risk at this point is that guys will have to play so many minutes that injury starts to take a further toll, with long-term implications.

And that has almost gone unnoticed because of the drama around James Franklin.

Look, it’s an unalloyed good that Vanderbilt has a coach so highly thought of that he’s been explicitly named as a candidate for (deep breath) USC, Texas, Penn State, U of Washington, the Cleveland Browns, the Washington Redskins, possibly Louisville, possibly the Detroit Lions, and for all we know CEO of Microsoft (still vacant).  Plainly he is now the hottest thing in coaching, not impeded by his ubiquitous presence on ESPN’s coverage of the last BCS championship game.  Vice Chancellor David Williams (heretofore referred to as the Goldfather, in the formulation of one particularly smartass Vandy blogger) has been one thousand percent vindicated in his choice of three years ago – not to deny candidate number one’s credentials in getting Auburn from 3-9 to 1:30 from a national championship in one year.  But if we can’t have Gus Malzahn, James Franklin is pretty good.

Consider the numbers: we finished 6-7 the first year (by virtue of losing the bowl game), but all but two of those losses were by a single score.  The second year, we went 9-4 including a bowl win, 5 SEC wins, and our first home victory over Tennessee in 30 years in an utter blowout – our best overall record since 1915.  This year, despite losing our starters at QB and punter, our top DB, and the best running back in school history, we racked 9-4 again.  First back-to-back nine-win seasons ever.  First back-to-back wins over Tennessee wince 1926, in an epic come-from-behind road victory led by a QB with a brace protecting a torn ACL. First win over Florida since 1988, in the Swamp (where it was the first win since 1945). First appearance on SEC on CBS in twenty years.  First win on CBS in 30 years, another come-from-behind win over Georgia led by our then-third-string QB.  A 24-point lead in the bowl game at halftime, blown completely by the end of the third and finished with 17 unanswered points.  Vanderbilt has as many bowl wins since James Franklin arrived as they’d accumulated from 1890 to 2010.

And let’s not understate this.  Since the establishment of the BCS in 1998, some of the teams that made it there include Purdue, Maryland, Georgia Tech, Utah, Pitt, Hawaii, Wake Forest, Baylor, UConn, Northern Illinois, Boise State, Central Florida, and of course Stanford, which clocked three Rose Bowls in that span.  Look further back, and since 1986, Duke’s won an ACC title (under Steve Spurrier in 1990) and Cal’s won a share of the Pac-10 title (in 2006) and Tulane’s had a 12-0 season (in 1998) and Northwestern’s been to the Rose Bowl twice.  That’s all in the 25 year span from 1986 to 2010.

And in that entire stretch of time, Vanderbilt’s best regular season record was 6-6.  Once.  They went to one bowl game, that very year in 2008, all of four miles away from campus in their same town, and won 16-14 in a game where their punter was MVP. Hell, they won a whopping five games twice in a four-year span from 1991-94, and it was a good enough record for LSU to poach away Gerry Dinardo as head coach.

Fans around the country can moan and weep and point at their collective futility over time, but no one – no one – enjoyed a longer stretch of uninterrupted despair in college football than the Vanderbilt Commodores.  And it was that perennial basket case, that tire fire, that toxic waste dump of a program that James Franklin has delivered to back-to-back 9-win seasons with bowl victories and triumph over the archrival…in a span of three seasons.

And he’s only turning 42 years old on Groundhog Day. If you are an athletic director or general manager with a head coaching vacancy, and you don’t at least call down to Nashville and make an inquiry, you’re probably too stupid to be running a football program.  Not to be chasing James Franklin would be an act of professional malpractice.

But.

It’s really hit the Kubler-Ross stages in order, let’s face it:

 

1) DENIAL. “He’s not going anywhere. He’s got a contract. He’s made commitments to these players. It would fly in the face of his whole entire shtick if he left now. The NFL isn’t going to hire a guy with only three years’ head coaching experience, especially all in college.”

2) ANGER. “Fuck you for assuming we’re a stepping stone.  Fuck you for assuming everybody’s dying to leave Vanderbilt for a real job.  Fuck you for treating us like an afterthought when we’re out there kicking your ass on the field and in recruiting. Fuck you, fuck you, FUCK YOU.”

3) BARGAINING. “It’s got to be a leverage thing. If we commit to building a new stadium, if we get the Board of Trustees on board and break ground already, if we just prove that we’re serious about this and it’s not a flash in the pan the way they treated it when Steve Sloan was here or when we lucked into bowls in 1982 and 2008, he’ll stick around.”

4) DEPRESSION. “He’s gone. We are so fucked. The dream is dead. Normal service will now be restored. We can never have nice things.  God hates Vanderbilt.”

5) ACCEPTANCE…

…you know, the thing about Vanderbilt football, when you get to stage 5 it’s basically the same as stage 4.

 

The thing I’m worried about is this: even if he is coming back, the whole strung-out process, the trauma, the fans losing their minds every hour of every day…that’s the sort of thing that maybe you come back from, maybe you don’t. I worry that this is going to poison the fan base at a time when we need that fan base alive and active and fired up – and that the whole protracted saga is going to soak up and absorb and nullify any momentum from a triumphant weekend in Birmingham and another top-25 finish.  It’s like calling off the engagement without ending the relationship – maybe you get back there, but maybe you don’t.

And the other problem is that we went through this last year.  Not to the same extent, but we did go through it (and hell, we even went through a little of it after that first 6-7 year, because 6 wins at Vanderbilt is enough to make other folks come calling.  Or was.)  If he returns next year, and if McCrary or Carta-Samuels the Younger is a stud at QB, and if the young guns in the secondary come through, and if the senior-heavy offensive line can pave the way for a stable of talented running backs, and Vanderbilt somehow breaks through a down SEC to win 10 games and play on New Year’s Eve or New Years’ Day…how much louder is the clamoring going to get?

And make no mistake, no contract will ever stop the clamoring. ESPN’s got Franklin’s bags already packed for State College, once they unpacked them from Austin. Every other school has spent two years telling recruits “Don’t go to Vanderbilt because Franklin won’t be there for long.” If we’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop, that will affect casual fans, it will affect donors, it will create a cloud of doubt that will act as a drag on the program until the day James Franklin finally leaves and the rest of the world gets to bellow a triumphant “TOLD YOU SO” to a crushed fan base in black and gold.  Or until Vanderbilt swoons back to five wins…and the same thing happens.

Honestly, there’s no solution. Franklin could come back, announce he’s going to leave Nashville only in a pine box, win a national championship, and people will be saying that now he’s sure to leave Vandy for a real program.  And at no point has Franklin said a single thing that points to him leaving…but then, right now he hasn’t said anything that clearly points to him staying either.  And because we’re Vanderbilt, we’re expecting the worst.  We’re Charlie Brown lining up to kick the football, we’re Wile E. Coyote trusting that this shipment from Acme will finally be the one that gets the job done, we’re the eternal schlimazel of college football waiting for the soup to get spilled in our lap.

Maybe our lot in life will change.  But it isn’t going to be this offseason.

A lot of things have gone sideways in the last 24 hours of my life, so I want to get this down while it’s still somewhat fresh in my memory and I still have the reflected memory of what went down this past weekend.

I didn’t want to go.  I mean, I did, but I was slipshod on the planning (bailed out heavily by my lovely bride) and that usually leads to continuing anxiety as events get closer and closer without plans settled. Plus it’s Alabama, and the obligations of family, and there’s stress that goes with that.  Plus flying, of course.  But most of all, I think there was just the creeping fear that we’d lose, that it would be another thoroughly demoralizing experience like the Holiday Bowl in 2004 – that a team done wrong by the vagaries and politics of the bowl system would trip up and make it all for naught.

Oh me of little faith.  But more on that in a bit.

The first 24 hours after arrival were tied up with discharging family obligations, except for the mad dash to the coach’s call-in show.  Siri almost let me down, but then got my rental car to the right spot, and lo and behold – a bar, in Birmingham, completely full of Vanderbilt fans.  I saw all sorts of VIPs, I saw several players’ parents, and of course I saw Coach Franklin – I told him I’d gotten up at 3:45 AM in San Francisco to make it there, and he shook my hand vigorously and looked me in the eye with a smile and said “Glad you were able to make it.”  And I let it go at that, because he was working the whole entire room and I didn’t want to make an ass of myself, but he sure as hell didn’t look or sound like a guy with one foot out the door.

So anyway…Friday lunchtime, I finally meet up with my crew, and we decide that we need to pre-game the pep rally in Five Points South.  Long story short, we parked ourselves at J. Clyde’s, on Cobb Lane – a cobblestoned back alley that houses some secluded shops and restaurants.  I know that twenty years ago, a bar called the Back Alley Pub was a traditional senior night college spot…well, it turns out that we were in the former Back Alley Pub.  Better late than never.  They had an amazing selection of beers on tap – and this is an endorsement for Good People Brewing, the Birmingham craft brewery whose goods and services can stand up to any and every beer maker in America, for my money.

The pep rally itself was right on the corner of Highland and 20th, where they closed the streets for both teams.  That was the first indication that there were going to be some Vandy fans in town…they were swarming.  In short order, I was handed a Yuengling and introduced to a couple of players’ mothers, which led to doing a couple of shots with said players’ mothers after it got dark but before the pep rally started.  Which was pretty smart, because it got pretty damn cold out there.  But I looked around me and it was just black and gold as far as the eye could see, and everybody was wearing our logo and our colors and our name.

So after Franklin warmed up the crowds and introduced the new Mr. C (younger, bigger eyes, black hair, still creepy as hell), our by-now-enormous posse commandeered the shuttle bus to Dreamland.  Ribs, sweet tea, recovery time, and – ridiculously – a Birmingham barbecue joint packed FULL of Vanderbilt fans, occasionally letting rip with the Anchor Down cheer (I freely admit to leading four of them on the shuttle back from Dreamland to Five Points. The ride is three-quarters of a mile) and a huge chorus of “WHO YA WIT” as we rushed out the door.

Back through J. Clyde for a nightcap, and the most Vandy Lifestyle question ever: “Does anybody else think the new $100 bill looks like canned ass?”  And a comical incident with the next table over asking something about a cheer, which I promptly led everyone back into…yeah, we were kind of That Table.  But the thing is, the place was crammed with Vanderbilt fans.

You may be seeing a theme here.

Saturday morning, we get dropped at Legion Field.  Some walking around, and then the NCC official tailgate, and they have to pull an entire side off the huge tent to get everyone in. There are refreshments, and cheers, and barbecue and mimosas, and we formed up a HUGE contingent for Star Walk as the team went from bus to locker room (kicker Carey Spear actually had on an WWII army helmet).  Oh yeah, and Zac Stacy was in the crowd with us cheering the team on. And we get ourselves good and revved up before entering Legion Field – the same place where I used to watch the World League of American Football, or the CFL, or the XFL.

The announced crowd was 42,000, and that sounds about right.  But it was easily 90% Vanderbilt.  It was loud and rowdy and black and gold, and really felt like what the Vanderbilt home game experience should be like (aside from scoreboards and screens that haven’t been touched since Olympic soccer in 1996 and are barely suitable for a high school game). And we got to see Jordan Matthews deliver two touchdowns in the first half, and a 24-point lead in the first half…and a collapse in the third quarter and a 24-24 tie at the end of three.

And then we got to see Brand New Vandy, a team that takes care of business in the fourth quarter, and 17 unanswered points nailed down the victory behind dogged running from Seymour and Kimbrow and ferocious defense from the Black Death (and another hero interception by Andre Hal). And we won our ninth game for the second year in a row for the first time ever, and we were pretty sure we would finish in the top 25, and we were right.

The thing is…the thing I take away from this whole weekend…is that I may have finally, conclusively, once-and-for-all filled in the black hole of having no college friends.  This felt like I was going back to the game and seeing the old crowd and hanging out with people and having a good time – and because it was in Birmingham, I knew my way around and knew where to tell people to go and had memories and stories I could tell of this bar or that restaurant or what used to be around that corner.  For the first time, the whole package from those seven years could be rolled up and recycled for the weekend, and that was something I never expected to feel.

It was a triumph.

Unfortunately, the crisis in Nashville meant we didn’t get to enjoy it and relish it like we should, as we remain on tenterhooks to see whether we’ll still have a coach tonight or tomorrow or the next day, and it’s not sounding too good.  But for one weekend, Vanderbilt football was perfection.  And it’s something I won’t soon forget.

2013, done at last, and not a day too soon. Last night’s excursion to the wilds of the outer Sunset – a holiday tradition for four years now, apparently – ended up with way too many cocktail weenies and Twitter outbursts and not nearly enough quiet reading by the fire, but then, they weren’t projecting football on a screen over the fire before. I guess I’ll need to try again later, once the fog is up – and apparently because the fireplace is their sole source of heat for the building, they are not encumbered by Spare The Air days, so I could have gone anytime.

There’s a lot of complex information there about how 2013 went down. After the emotional firestorm of 2012, I was hoping for a dull moment – what i got was the worst year, health and work-wise, since 2007. So here I sit, on December 31, with the same project incomplete and the same crick in my neck hurting worse than it has in months, as if the Baby New Year is dancing around showing his ass at me.

At least five friends moved out of town this year, including my only blood family I want to claim and the only remaining Southerners I knew. The NOLA contingent and the Canadian contingent are both gone. Silicon Valley became a materially less pleasant place to be this year, driven most forcefully by the brogrammers of SOMA and the techies of the Mission (once I found out that ‘techie’ is being taken as a slur, I resolved to use it every day in a sentence, because fuck those guys). And Vanderbilt football proved once again that no good deed goes unpunished, whether you’re trying to hold a Caesar’s wife standard in a moral cesspool of a conference or persuade the powers that be that facts and evidence should hold more weight than decades of prejudice. And oh by the way we’re playing in a bowl slotted two or three below our finish and not on January 1. The chip is real, and it gets bigger every year, and it should.

Other sports…probably don’t warrant a mention. The less said about Cal and the Redskins the better, although the Skins at least got shut of the most overrated and fraudulent of their recent string of coaching disasters. Honestly, the best sports find of the year was twofold: the return of minor league baseball in an old WPA park in the California League, and the realization that my favorite San Jose bar doesn’t have a single television – which is probably why it’s my favorite.

2014: get healthier. Not so much with the soda, or vending machine chow, or fast food, or unnecessary pastry. More Vasper, more weights. More shutdown nights, even if I have to hole up in the living room or the garage to force myself. And an evening walk at least every other night – not for exercise so much as to let the brain run down, let everything slow down and burn off before going to bed. And oh yeah – get as much personal stuff as possible off the bloody work laptop, because ideally there might be an opportunity to get rid of it. But if I stay in this job, this job goes in a box, and stays there, and is only touched from 8-5 on weekdays. More water, definitely. And get better at shutting out the annoyances of the world that I can’t do anything to prevent. Suck it up and go back to taking the train some days, plug in the headphones and escape. (And maybe see if carrying an iPad mini in the jacket will help prolong the battery life on the phone.)

All I want for the new year is a dull moment. I didn’t know when I was well off.

You wouldn’t want anything much smaller than this. The 8-inch display is amazingly crisp and clear, given that it’s the same resolution as the 10-inch iPad with retina display, and that clarity really pops. Especially when the backlight is up – text on a white background looks like print on paper. An 8-inch display also lets you actually interact with it much like you would with a larger tablet – it’s not the same cramped experience as a 6-inch “phablet” (but you can totally one-hand the iPad mini for reading or grip it by the fingertips on either side for easy pickup). Also worth noting: this is the first iPad I’ve ever had that was fully visible through my polarized Ray-Bans instead of going dark in portrait mode. That alone is a huge win.

It does fit in the inner pocket of my peacoat, although it’s a little snug and the opening is far enough up that you can’t really slide it in easily – but once in, it fits and carries without any problem (it’s less than a pound) – basically, this is going with me anywhere I wear a jacket until warm weather returns. The 200 MB per month of free T-Mobile data isn’t nearly enough for everyday use, but then, the whole point is to use the ubiquitous wifi everywhere in Silly Con Valley and have the T-Mob stuff in a pinch (and based on my testing of a T-Mob SIM in the phone for the last week, there will be plenty adequate signal for my purposes in said pinch).

Long story short: this is fulfilling the promise of what I was trying to squeeze out of the 3rd-generation Kindle all those years ago: all-purpose reading device plus enough free data to be useful without having to splash out for a monthly nut. This tablet could absolutely go to the UK with me and the temptation to do so would be mighty strong. I’m glad I have it.

Out for my traditional distraction. Fortunately, the bar of my frequency in San Jose has a gas fireplace in the back and a gas stove up front, thus circumventing the ban on burning particulate matter that keeps me from the Riptide in San Francisco for the moment. Cask ale, good reading, and quiet…my own sort of homage on this day.

And blogging, as I tap this out on a newly acquired iPad mini, second generation. Through no fault of my own I stumbled into a new iPad Air, which I intend to sell – because for that money plus a little Christmas present dough plus a small investment of my own, I could turn it into the 8 inch model with similar battery life, processor performance, screen resolution, and a form factor that fits in a jacket pocket. At long last, the perfect iPad, and one that will let me mostly urge personal things from the work laptop. The free 200 MB per month of T-Mobile LTE data as a fallback is, of course, the icing on the proverbial cake.

The keyboard isn’t the best at this size, but it’s still doable. The Bluetooth would help. But the tradition of banging out a post on the new device isn’t a chore – no more than on an iPhone, certainly. Would that I remembered the password for the wireless here…

I bought it at the Eddie Bauer outlet in Gilroy on the way down to the 2004 Holiday Bowl.  It was on ridiculous sale post-Christmas, as were the other three or four jackets we bought (including one which became the international travel coat in 2005 and 2007) – but those all had practical applications.  To this day, I’m not sure why I thought I needed a suede trucker jacket.

In retrospect, I think it had something to do with wanting to make a clean break from the person I’d been in DC six months earlier – burned out by the rage and wanting to change how I lived.  And while the Indiana Jones jacket was and is one of my most prized possessions, it felt like I needed to change up the look if I were going to regenerate, and so I bought the suede. Button-up, of course, and the sleeves were a little big and baggy like a 90s sweater, but the pockets were deeper than the hand warmer pockets on the Indy jacket, and it was something called “Seattle Suede” which you could throw in the washing machine, and I just went with it.

I wore it off and on for three or four years, through my time working in Cupertino and during the brief ill-fated sojourn in government subcontracting. And it never looked quite right to me, somehow. It was heavier than the Indy jacket, for one, which made it about the heaviest thing I could practically wear without reverting to snow-wear.  Something about it was strongly suggestive of the pilot jackets from the original Battlestar Galactica, and not in a good way. Still, it was warm and cozy, and in the right light and with the right steel-toe boots and flat cap was oddly suggestive of leaning against the bar at a public house somewhere in York, or Kildare, or Greenock.

But then time happened, as the wife says, and the more I looked at it, the less I felt right in it.  It looked like somebody trying to be something they weren’t, somehow.  It just didn’t seem to suit me.  And this time last year, I stuffed it in the crawlspace with another jacket once I was given the black Filson number for Christmas.  And since I didn’t get it out, it’s time to donate it – which is exactly what I did.  It and two other jackets went to a Legal Aid collection in Napa where they will find their way to somebody who needs a coat to be a coat rather than a random talisman of memories they’re not altogether sure about.

There may be a lesson in there, if I’m bright enough to figure it out, but I’m not altogether sure I am.

Let me get this straight: a backwoods hick on a show about backwoods hicks said an utterly backwoods hick thing when questioned about something backwood hicks are notoriously backwoods hick-ish about?  WELL I NEVER.

Fred Clark, who you should all be reading instead of my bullshit drivel, pretty much owns this one, so I’ll just link to him and have done with it. Short version: the usual suspects are up in arms saying that Mr. Chia Beard is being persecuted for his Christian beliefs, since apparently homophobia is the indispensable linchpin of evangelical Christianity in the Year Of Our Lord 2013.  Less observed is the fact that the same crowd, fifty years ago, was arguing that striking down racial segregation was a similar imposition upon their Christian beliefs, which they’re obviously falling about themselves to deny now…but since Chia Beard was downright Stephen-Foster-Swanee-River about black folks, it’s disingenuous to suggest that problem’s gone by the boards either.

To me, personally, the fact that one old white dude is horrible about those different from him is about as shocking as downing nine shots of tequila and finding that you’re walking like one of those blow-up things in front of a gas station. You knew damn well what you were getting when you gave a TV show to a superannuated white Southerner, and it wasn’t going to be fucking Glee.  To be honest, it’s of a piece with Honey Boo Boo or whatever: I don’t know whether I’m more depressed and offended at the prospect of blue-state folk tuning in for some sort of reverse minstrel show “look at those dumb rednecks,” or the prospect of red-state folks tuning in to say “look, we’re on TV and these people are the apotheosis of our culture and heritage!”

But it puts eyeballs on the screens one way or another, until now – I can only assume that enough of the viewership of A&E generally is the sort of folk who will be put off by homophobia, such that allowing Chia Beard to remain on TV is a greater hit for their brand than taking him off and outraging his amen corner in the Confederacy and thereabouts.  Hollywood has an agenda, all right, and it’s the same as my alma mater’s benefactor: GET MONEY. Be assured that they will find someway to finesse a non-apologizing-apology and carry on as if nothing happened, should that be the quickest way to keep printing money off the eccentricities of duck-call manufacturers.

Ah well.  Add support for Duck Dynasty’s stars and their products and their beliefs to the list of new-age Southern conservative religious shibboleths, along with buying all your picture frames at Hobby Lobby and gorging yourself on Chick-Fil-A and, well, whatever Sarah Palin does to make money these days.  It seems like the best thing you can to do make a profit down South is say something horrible about gay people or contraception or otherwise create an opening to plead “religious persecution” and the holy-roller faithful will fall about themselves to support you. Cynical and awful to be sure, but it’s as good a hustle as anything else out there these days…which only goes to show, I suppose, that the doctrine of “GET MONEY” extends far beyond Cornelius Vanderbilt and the heirs of his body.

…that I’m only ever two pints and a rebel song away from the DMV.  I was in a strange mood, and I had a couple of Guinness in me, and I chose to actually respond on Twitter to some obnoxious redneck state senator who said Obamacare was worse than the Nazis, the Communists and terrorism. And what made me snap wasn’t the obvious garden variety Fox News ignorance for once…it was the dismissive reference to terrorism.  Please, you fucking hillbilly, tell me all about how much worse Obamacare is than September 11, because as someone living in Arlington and working in DC on September 11 – and September 12 – let me offer a hearty FUCK. YOU.

The thing about DC that comes back to me lately is that I took the Metro to work, every day, except for a brief one-year interregnum where we were two to the car (and I hated it, sorry A, it’s a fact but you probably knew that already).  On any given Wednesday morning, I would be packed on the Orange line between a homeless dude, a smoking-hot George Washington U co-ed, and a 2-star Air Force general in his leather jacket and class-As.  There was a commonality there, everyone having to rub along, and it’s probably a big part of why I ran out of patience with transit earlier this year and started driving to work. Something I never thought I would be doing again if I had the option.

Because transit in this part of the world doesn’t rub along. The techies have opted out of it, and to add insult to injury routinely use MUNI bus stops for the private shuttles that run up and down 280…and ensure their passengers are spared contact with the rest of the world. And those that do use it tend to be profoundly solipsistic – never mind the northbound bikers who still use the Mountain View VTA light rail platform as their own personal bike boulevard, there’s a serious and sustained issue with people here not understanding that you have to let passengers off a transit vehicle before getting on. And it’s not just F-line tourists outside Pier 39.  Transit, at its root, is about giving up a little of your own primacy and autonomy for the sake of the collective good and to make things work easier for everyone.  It’s kind of the building block of society.

And that’s the thing: you need everyone. Somebody has to grill the carne asada at that Mission taqueria.  Somebody has to troubleshoot that printer-copier’s connection to the network. Somebody has to haul off the compost and recyclables after the party, somebody has to drive the forklift to unload the pallets at the grocery store, and somebody has to drive that fire engine to put out the roaring blaze from the unattended bong left under the tree.  Hardcore survivalist nut jobs arming themselves in the woods against the socialist zombie apocalypse still had to buy canned goods and 9mm ammo from somewhere; even if they’re doing hand reloads they still had to obtain the powder and the tools from someplace.  How much more delusional are the sorts of techies who live at the corner of Ayn Rand and Asperger’s?

My theory is this: after the financial collapse of 2008, the finance sector was no longer the key to instant wealth: if you were the sort of person who would have wanted to go to Wall Street and get filthy rich in the 1980s, that became a much less attractive option after the global credit crunch.  Instead, that sort of person came out of Harvard or Stanford with a grade-inflated degree and the necessary connections to go into high-tech.  But unlike the last bubble, the goal isn’t the IPO.  Building the next Netscape or the next Amazon or the next Microsoft was the plan in 1999.  Now the plan is to sell out to Google or Facebook or Apple, cash the check, and move on to the next thing.  And that, more than anything, is how the hackers and EECS guys and the like gave way to the current crop of hipster brogrammers. And it’s making this valley an ever more unpleasant place to be.

Because this place isn’t just some mental construct, some cloud of tech bubbles connected by wi-fi-enabled bus and self-driving car.  This is a real part of the world.  There are roads and schools and taquerias and used bookstores and Catholic parishes and Macy’s and In N Out and town high streets that don’t have an Apple Store or a craft cocktail bar.  Places that were here before the bubble and will be here long after it bursts. Places where parents have children, look around, and can’t afford to buy a house anymore.  Places where you’re looking at an hour in the car to get to a job that’s never going to provide a private bus to work.  Places where the American dream really has been turned into a luxury good.  Home ownership, children, financial stability – pick two. That’s life in the 21st century in what used to be the Valley of Heart’s Delight.

…the Old Days in college football would have given us this in 2013:

 

SUGAR BOWL: Auburn vs Florida State (SEC Champ, plus FSU since the ACC wasn’t locked to the Orange)

ORANGE BOWL:  Missouri vs Ohio State (7-8 BCS)  (best original Big 8 team)

COTTON BOWL: Alabama vs Baylor (3-6 BCS)  (best original SWC team)

ROSE BOWL: Stanford vs Michigan State (4-5 BCS)  (Big Ten-Pac 12)

FIESTA BOWL: Oregon vs South Carolina (9-10 BCS)

CITRUS BOWL:  Clemson vs Oklahoma (11-12 BCS)

HOLIDAY BOWL: Arizona State vs Oklahoma State (13-14 BCS)

 

Guess what?  You can pair up the top 14 teams rat-a-tat-tat and get great matchups all the way down.  And no need whatsoever to go through any ridiculous gyrations to get the matchup.

As the BCS lurches to the grave, the final proof: it was largely unnecessary.  The playoff risks the same.