Charging...

Theres's an adjustment period to all change, for all humans everywhere. It's true of course that there are loads and loads of people (measuring perhaps even in the low dozens) for whom a change of life circumstances--family, employment, finances, romantic, religious, health, celebrity, level of metallic sheen in your skin tone, all the normal major ones--is just another thing to be noted, piled on top of the stack labeled EXPERIENCES, integrated and moved on from. They can just keep swimming forward, eating as they need, like sharks, but with dead-er eyes. 

Unfortunately, I'm in other category where the slightest disruption of routine or what I know to be predictable is grounds for a late-night impromptu phone session with my therapist at the emergency off-hours rate not covered by insurance. It's possible in this way I'm something of an overachiever in the the-known-is-inherently-better-than-all-other-options scope of human behavior. A decade-plus ago I was the guy trying to salvage a marriage that had already clearly failed, and living miserably because of it. It's embarrassing in retrospect, but faced with the prospect of, say, opening a new bank account and re-establishing your entire online bill paying routine, boy, you'll tolerate a lot. Everything worked out great in retrospect. I mean, I'm with a credit union now, so, that's two toxic relationships I launched myself out of, my marriage AND multinational corporate banking. It's been a real hot streak.

My credit union has an online banking app, which my old bank had too but I was always too wary of losing it because, you know, multinational corporate, etc. You can google "bank of america data breach" if you want, but you're really going to have to specify a year if you want to find just one. The good news is with the app I can access and monitor my bills whenever I want, wherever I happen to be. The downside, as you can imagine, is that now I can access and monitor my bills whenever I want, wherever I happen to be.

So here I am trying to adjust already to the luxurious new emotional obstacle of bonding myself to a new car. Already something of a struggle, if a happy one, just because I'm a native-born Anxiety American trying to metabolize something that wasn't part of my normal six-ish weeks ago. If that wasn't weird enough, it doesn't run on gasoline of any kind, which is admittedly way easier to get used to on a practical level when you don't have to find time to stop and idly read the Prop 65 warnings posted on all the gas pumps as you wait for your car to fill up. You can just plug it in at home! Overnight! As needed!

Convenient, yes. But not the same as it was before, which I immediately noticed, of course, but is really starting to sink in as I check my online banking app and see my first full month's electric bill with the new electro-car and... OK, what's the breathing exercise to calm down? My body is saying "shallow, rapid breaths so harsh you can hear your larynx rasp," yeah, that feels right...

Nope, got dizzy. OK. Southern California Edison is in for an absolute bonanza, congratulations to them, a semi-private public utility that at least has a slightly less murderous PR burden than the state's other major provider.

It's by far the most I've ever paid for electricity. By far. By far. By far. But! I have years of directed training in emotional coping, I can just remember to ground myself, look for perspective, like 1) I've never had an electric vehicle before, of course it was always going to be higher than normal, 2) it's August, traditionally the hottest month of the year, which this has been so far after an unusually mild July, so it was also always going to be the most expensive electric bill of the year, and 3) hoo boy, right down the list of bills from my SCE one is my credit card that I used to use to at the gas station and dang, that's a pretty, pretty low number.

OK, I think I'm there. It'll take a few more months to make this new normal the normal-normal, but I can see a path. And if there are setbacks, I have my therapist's direct line and a paper bag I can breathe into and an almost endless variety of mood-altering drugs on the market if it comes to that. Everyone knows the best way out of a financial panic is to buy your way out of it. Luckily I know lunch-sized paper bags are pretty reasonably priced.

We Will Not Be Mentioning Dean Cain

 

Superman

starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Edi Gathegi, Isabela Merced, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Wendell Pierce, Skyler Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, Neva Howell, Pruitt Taylor Vince and Nicholas Hoult

directed by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy [all volumes], Peacemaker, The Suicide Squad)

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THIS IS WHERE THE SPOILER WARNING WOULD NORMALLY GO. But this is a 100 year old story, what am I going to spoil for you at this point? OH MY GOD, HE CAN FLY?! Get over yourselves

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There was a time when I used to collect comic books. Luckily for me, that was back when your hobbies defined not only your entire personality but also carried with them a certain amount of social determinism. What you consumed and how you consumed it still had weight, it was related still to your choices, your discernment, where the things you curated by exclusion (comics? yes. organized sports? yuck, no) ended up sorting and excluding you from certain life paths at the exact same time. That's right, I collected comics back when meant something, primarily that you were several years away from the possibility of getting laid.

Speaking of that, let's just get this out of the way, so you know: this Superman fucks. They don't show it or anything (though we're all still curious about the logistics, or at least we have been for at least 56 years), and they even show it less than did back in Superman II with that weird silver beanbag thing, but as movies have become more and more sexless in the 21st century, explicitly (no pun intended) pushed aside by more action and quippy dialogue in the now-ubiquitous Comic Book IP Cinematic Universii peopled entirely by de-genital-ed men and women who spend a lot of time really violently working through a lot of pent-up pent-up-ed-ness by punching through whole buildings and shit, it's established very clearly that Clark Kent and Lois Lane are definitely smashing. On the scale of things about the re-emergence of this beloved cultural icon to concern ourselves with, should this be the first thing, straight out of the gate? Well, name a more important one, I'll wait.

That's what I thought.

Here's the point I'm making:* the hardest thing to do with Superman is to make him a person in a world and not a weird, stoic avatar of a selected basket of virtues in a stretchy suit who also sometimes punches through whole buildings. The challenge of Superman is a problem of scale. How do you bring a demigod down onto the plane of squishy, puny mortals? Of course there's a way to make a good and decent Superman movie that explores his otherness, but that's only really been tried in earnest once, by Bryan Singer, and what you got is a final shot of Superman creeping on his ex and her happy family from afar, like a lion pondering a frolicking clutch of baby gazelles. Yes, they took pains to establish that that Superman fucked as well, even producing a child, but it was way before the story started and in the end you couldn't help but feel like it had been an experiment or maybe an accident. Also that had Kevin Spacey in it, so the whole thing had the ick on it in retrospect.

And I did like Henry Cavill in the role. He was purpose-built from scratch to wear the suit, but Zack Snyder's default mode is stoic avatar of a selected basket of virtues in a stretchy suit who also sometimes punches through whole buildings. I have inexplicably seen almost every piece he's created, none of which are ultimately necessary but even the really unnecessary ones I've seen, and he has yet to actually produce a piece with a signal recognizable human character.

Shout out to local Inland Empire homie Tyler Hoechlin doing his dang best on TV, but cinematically, it's been a lot of misses. The closer we've tried to get to movie Superman, the farther and farther he's drifted away from us, arguably since Richard Donner got replaced most of the way through directing Superman II. It's like we are the comic book collectors and the character is all the girls I knew in high school: aloof, inaccessible, inscrutable, and SUPER busy on--sorry, what night did you say again?--yes, that night.

I never collected any of the Superman titles directly, but for some reason or another, this character in film has always been important to me. Probably because early-days HBO showed Superman II on a goddamned loop with, like, Beastmaster and 9 to 5 and a few others. I can't tell you why I'm less emotionally invested in subsequent expansions of the Beastmaster cinematic representations, but the first Superman I knew was Movie Superman. That's where he fits. That's what I want.

If you've read any other reviews, it won't surprise you to know this is... really good. I'm relieved as much as I am happy about it. I'll say if I have to critique anything, it's that James Gunn understands the Superman Problem exactly the same way I do and makes that the center of the entire film, scene after scene, in every interaction with every character. The grand denouement follows a thunking, heavy re-set of Superman Is An Earth Person Too involving his excellent human adoptive parents, crescendo-ing into him literally screaming this at the antagonist.

All of this comes out in a very human performance by David Corenswet, more grounded by his use of the word "dude" in a few select scenes than by any philosophical soliloquy. The line between Superman and Clark Kent is kept deliberately wobbly to the point of almost not existing (Clark playing Clark where not everyone knows he's Superman exists for exactly one scene). He doesn't change who he is, he just has magic glasses (seriously) so people can't tell. Superman is a great big goob, un-self-consciously uncool in a way that makes him cool again. He definitely could have gotten away with collecting comic books in the 1990s.

Hoult's Lex Luthor is... trickier. I'll be honest, I don't know what I want from my Lex Luthor anymore. We've had goofy schemer (Gene Hackman), boring bumbling dumb creep (Kevin Spacey) and guy-in-manic-episode (Jesse Eisenberg). This is a better, larger, scarier version. He's obviously and overwhelmingly a mad scientist, he has the quiet bitterness and rage you want, the Javert-ian obsessiveness, acts of wanton and outright, unmistakeable malice. He's cool without trying, even though he's trying so hard, which is a weird space to be in. At the end, I think he gets a bit too much of a comeuppance as I think I like my Lex a little oilier, a little better at hiding the raging monster from the public, but for what they were going for here (Superman is more humane and thus more human than the Earthborn Lex), it worked. And I don't think the performance of Nicholas Hoult can be faulted in any respect.

As for who carries this thing, it's Hoult or Edi Gathegi. Corenswet is up there the most (literally! Two separate roles!) and he holds both the screen and the emotional center of the story, but he does get upstaged a tiny bit by The Theme (the stuff I said before about Superman being "human"). Gathegi just sneaks out from behind a flashy and funny part by Nathan Fillion (Isabela Merced is grossly under-used) and makes a supporting role a co-starring one every time he's on screen.

Also the CG dog is good.

If you saw any Guardians of the Galaxy, you know James Gunn does fun and funny and joy and sentiment, visually and story-wise, and that happens here in a long overdue counterweight to the infestation of grimdark that has lingered on DC properties since 1989 Batman gloomed it up to fight the lingering image of 1966 TV goofin' that was the Adam West Batman. Comic books are basically science fiction. The stories only need to be "grounded" if you lack the confidence to try. This is bright. It does its share of goofin'. And all to entertaining effect. If I would have ever read any Superman comics when I was a kid, I would have been just as satisfied.

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*100% meant to make it and am definitely not now improvising to cover. This is in print, so there's no way for you to prove any lack of pre-meditation, sorry. Except maybe my entire previous body of work, yes, that may give something away... 

And The Nominee Is...

It's difficult to find the right words to say when we find ourselves living in a country where a certain percentage of its voting populace are not only indifferent but actually enthusiastic about the idea of military forces deployed on the streets of an American city during peacetime. I'm not even talking about the "logic" of it since the Department of Justice itself just this last January told us that violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low, that's a point beyond which rational discussion is even merited, it's all so transparently obvious. Sometimes when you have all the power, you do things just to do them, or, in this case, because people are asking too many questions about your time in the company of a noted and notorious sex offender and his sex offender lady companion. Logic is for chumps.

Look, I'm not suggesting a cover-up or a conspiracy, to be clear. A cover-up would require an attempt to do something out of the public view and, as far as I can tell, the animating philosophy of a Trump Administration is that there is no such thing as "out of the public view." That's soft-boy Democrat shit. Policy discussions and plan formations and negotiation with foreign governments and whole governmental initiatives happen in real time, off the cuff, in rolling insane rambles, in front of cameras and with live microphones, or really, otherwise, what would be the point of doing them at all? The reaction is the juice. The only thing I can think Donald Trump has ever wanted to do out of the public eye is engage in sexual trysts of varying levels of legality and absolutely no levels of morality at the organization or even in the presence of his best friend Jeffrey Epstein, but there are so many pictures and videos of them hanging out and being chummy, I can't even say that with confidence. Honestly, he's so locked in to the idea of immediate feedback, all of this could have been avoided if his parents were broke. Then, instead of going into real estate like his dad, he would have taken some college improv classes and gotten it out of his system. Well, for a while. He still would have been him, which means there's no way those theater kids would have accepted him and all that direct rejection would have probably led us right back to where we are now, except I guess he'd know what a Harold is.

And where we are now is that even the massaging (sorry) of the Epstein story is happening in obvious ways right out in the public view. This should be good news for the Nixon apologists, but no. It's not that his crimes will be re-contextualized as "I guess not that bad really" on this new sliding scale that apparently has no bottom, it's more that he'll be seen as less of a crook and more of a snivelly little bitch who didn't have the balls to really go for it all the way. Really, you tried to cover it up? And you got taken down by journalists?! How fucking quaint. Somebody's out there trying to do crime according to the rules. That's what happens when your racketeer president is a Quaker. I hear he even loved his wife. What a fucking normie.

Things are weird and they're just going to get weirder. The number of citizens who are going to be directly frightened by people whose salaries their taxes pay is just going to go up, which is (just to understate it by ten thousand percent) horrifying. And he'll brag about it when he runs the TV show at the Kennedy Center honors after naming himself the host. The whole thing will be gold-plated and tacky and the jokes will make you want to die (because the only people writing for him will be straight white Republican men, who are all JD Vance-levels of funny at best), but honestly, fuck him, let him have it. I know it's some kind of institution, but if you let him be that theater kid he never had the confidence or talent or empathy or insight or creativity or presence or wit or courage to be, maybe it'll keep him busy. At this point, what we're trying to do is run out the clock at least until November 2026 midterms, but (because I have no confidence in Democrats running a competent national campaign) more likely January 2029. Keep him busy. He wants a Nobel Peace Prize so embarrassingly bad, you guys. Let him have it. Hell, give him one every year. Just bury him in awards. Put him in every sports hall of fame. Make him an EGOT. You know he'll run to each and every ceremony. If it's that or, like, sending the 101st Airborne into Philadelphia, it does seem like the more palatable option.

She's Alive!

First, let's resolve the cliffhanger from last week: I did not, in fact, die as a result of my shingles vaccination shot. It probably wasn't a strictly necessary update since, from public health and demographic standpoints, people dying from vaccines isn't actually a thing, but I didn't want to be all like the first season of Severance and leave you all hanging just in case something unforeseen like a crippling but necessary labor insurrection took us down.

Also the fact that I typed out this whole thing and then eventually hit PUBLISH, those would have probably been enough proof of life to satisfy a hostage's family, let alone a high-single-digit (but dedicated!) readership.

To be clear, though I was in no danger, that second shingles shot really did have me feeling like bona fide goat ass. But it was all in the name of my future wellbeing and a thumb in the eye of all the late millennial/early GenZ parents out there who are trying to undermine the bedrock of our society one wanton public sneeze at a time.

I am starting to wonder what it will take for the societal fever to break. I'm talking less about the viral kind and more like the viral kind, the one where exasperatingly unqualified dinguses all het up on a (uninjected) cocktail of unearned certainty and a righteousness that can only be achieved by the defiantly uninformed reach spectacularly incorrect conclusions about microbiology and public health in easily digestible TikTok clips of under 90 seconds.

I know there are some out there doing the Lord's work of trying to put out counter-information, to correct the record as it were, but we all know there's no way actual true things are going to gain the kind of traction that the the government doesn't want you to know this currently does. The root of the message and the success of the message of correct information is... nothing. Literally nothing. If everyone got their vaccines, nobody (statistically) gets sick from these diseases burdened with the apparently vexing (to some) but quite on-the-nose adjective of preventable. A bunch of people on your favorite social media just sitting around, not having rubella? It's good policy and even better neighbor behavior, but it's absolutely awful content.

At some level, my instinct is "well, if they want to die or be disfigured by something no president has had to manage since John Quincy Adams, or at least Calvin Coolidge, well, I guess win-win," but the problem is we do live next door to these people. Not only does that mean the next house over is potentially a pest house, but more perniciously, the distaste and distrust of institutions and their associated messaging seeps into the information groundwater and next thing you know, Ananada Lewis is dead. We all lose (and have lost) in that scenario.

There's no reason to trust an insurance company on any level, really, and in this country insurance and medicine are the same thing. We're living in an Age of Actuarial Rule, which means everything related to your health is filtered through a lens of risk management for your insurance carrier. Unfortunately for those of us insurance holders, every case of medical need is an anecdotal case, where the outsize effects on family and people mean everything to those enduring it. Sure, it doesn't make financial sense to approve an MRI for everyone with a tummy ache, but if it helped one person catch pancreatic cancer before it was too late, well, fuck your tables, right? But the mega-global corporation can't afford (literally) to think that way, so it's always deny, play the obfuscating and litigious adversary to your own client base and cement in them a paranoia about all aspects of medicine and how it works until they are actively sabotaging their own health and the health of their children just for a quick inhalant hit of control.

Fevers break when they break, with the duration time affected plus or minus by patient self-care, rest and some genetic good luck. It's tough to count on all that when you're talking about a whole country as the patient in this metaphor. Hopefully in the meantime we don't have to get to the point where we're drafting hospital ships to supplement the normal healthcare infrastructure or using refrigerator trucks as morgues. Again. But then I'd have to trust that we're more focused on surviving than willing something interesting to happen, which, yeah, ask me again after the 2026 midterms.

Hot Blooded

Although it was publicly and socially gauche for a while, "low energy" is all the rage again, which is a lucky escape for the 79-year-old exercise-allergic president. What timing!

It's also lucky for me because I'm going into this blog Thursday the day after having gotten my second vaccine shot against the varicella zoster virus, which is one of the few things I know of that has a separate name for if a kid gets it vs an old-ass adult. "Chicken pox" sucks when you actually have it, but it sounds adorable, unlike "shingles" which sounds like they need to be applied and removed by a licensed and bonded workman.

Today I got up feeling fine save for a sore left arm (right where I got voluntarily stabbed by the otherwise non-violent nurse lady, probably not coincidentally), but got progressively more achy, tired and yuck-feeling* as they day went on. As an adult straight man, of course I responded with the traditional self-care response of complaining about it to everyone who I could force to listen, like my co-workers, but first and foremost my significant other.

Luckily I work in an environment headed by Donald Trump and (until recently) Elon Musk, so you have to bitch-whine at a pretty intense pitch to get anyone to notice at all.

And I was at work today, all day, because we've had all telework, including the situational kind, revoked by Those Who Were Mentioned In The Previous Paragraph. I generally don't hold with going to work sick, but since it was a vaccine, I had no chance of infecting anyone else. Plus if Robert Kennedy Jr. happened to stop by, I wanted to be ready to show him it was no big deal, the way I was powering through and definitely not vaccine-murdered. It's not a spoiler for the rest of the blog to just let you know that he did not turn up, the coward.

There's stuff going on the world (we had a normal SoCal-style non-tsunami earthquake right in the middle of the workday, woo), but this is all I can manage at the moment. See, I tricked you into listening to me bitch about feeling 5% sick, and you're not even my girlfriend. I guess in some ways we can count that last part as an upside for you.

Thank you for your attention on this matter.

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*Sorry to get all medical on you, but you know the syndrome and its associated presentational characteristics: icky, then pukey, then tummy-achey, then altogether yucky. It's hard to hear it in graphic terms, I'm sorry again, but we're never going to face them down if we can't have frank discussions about boo-boos.

The Lid Is On

It's not the best time to be president of the United States and, in fairness to Donald Trump, he's also doing a terrible job. Maybe I used "in fairness..." incorrectly there.

I've never had the ambition to run for anything. I'm also not entirely of the mind that anyone who does suffers from some kind of megalomaniacal sociopathy as a prerequisite for qualification. I think the numbers there are just skewed by the fact that running for office is a perfect fit for that personality type, so the draw outpaces the demographic percentages at which you'd expect to find those specific fucking boring lunatics in any population subgroup. As a non-politician, you get to experience the reflex revulsion tempered with grotesque curiosity in experiencing just one utterly inauthentic dipshit of a personality simulacrum like Markwayne Mullin, but the surprise isn't that one of him exists, it's that the entire Senate isn't just made up of 100 of them. That's why it's so jarring when you hear one--your Pete Buttigieges, your Zohran Mamdanis, your (god help us, a billionaire) JB Pritzkers--saying things that resemble other things that actually matter to you; people freak the fuck out. They go viral these days in a way that a cat playing a piano used to.

In that context, amongst a hoard of unsocializable weirdos, with all of the input of the outside world drowned out by the roaring rush of their own inexhaustible spring of self-regard, rendering them context-proof and completely immunized against anything as prosaic as a consequence, the current president is an absolute all-timer. The freakness of his freakitude is so dense and massive, it has a warping gravitational effect on everything around it like "democratic norms" and "basic human decency." Does that draw impel people like himself toward him or does it mangle and misshape them into a thing more like himself once they are drawn into his inevitably retrograde and annihilating orbit? To that question, the only answer I can give is "who gives a shit, fuck all these trolls." I don't feel a super strong impulse to "nature vs nurture" the authoritarian dismantling of basically every once-functioning normalizing institution that touches government in any way. I prefer to save those questions for when they're relevant or can at least do somebody some good, like when one or all of them are eventually on trial.

The press is included in this disfigurement, of course, as they're cursed with proximity to the Singularity of Bronzer. So yeah, as I started this off, it's not a great time to be president what with the level of scrutiny available via the (haha) democratizing (haha) of information with the promulgation of the internet. It's not just up to a dedicated press corps to potentially ruin your life if they ask the right/wrong question to the right/wrong person at the right/wrong time, any self-proclaimed "citizen journalist" could fuck with your bag if they pick the correct sequence of words to post at a time when you may or may not be vulnerable to a certain type of flesh-melting spotlight.

Honestly, I'd fully lost hope. The mainstream press has become so cowed and heeled by two full generations of Republican working the umpires about "left-wing bias" and the dismantling of newspapers as a profit-independent outsider voice, the full capture is evident in literally every press availability. I don't think any president has ever had as many as Trump does (the weakness of the self-obsessed), but given all that is swirling, not once have I heard a journalist just shout at him "Have you ever had sexual relations with a minor while you were an adult?"

That's how we used to do it. Hard questions, pin them down, make them lie if they are so inclined, then hang it around their neck like a burning tire and forge your Pulitzer out of the flames. But it's just an accident that that's the press I grew up around. I was born with just a few months left in the Nixon administration, before a dogged and fearless press chased a whole-ass president out of office and back to Orange County. There's a joke to be made as to whether San Clemente counts as purgatory, but I'm headed to South OC later tonight, so I'm going to leave it there.

In the post Woodward-Bernstein world, the idea of a hero journalist was alive, the great culmination of the climb that had started with Murrow vs. McCarthy and Cronkite going to Vietnam. But in there too, before Nixon, there was an agreed-upon quiet silence on some topics that would have killed a politician in my lifetime. You could have an "open secret" like JFK's roster of strange and still get on with the rest of the business of being president. That's not a great example since, as consequences go, he took a pretty tough one, but that's more fuzzy karma maybe than a direct Catholic A-to-B on sin and punishment. I don't think even the wildest conspiracies conjecture he was shot by, like, Marilyn Monroe.

After Reagan now and the fact that Clinton wasn't brought down by the media screaming about the same scandal for like two years nonstop, the press is back to a knowing and known deference by omission and a sort of whipped-dog comportment that doesn't do anyone (including themselves) any good. Presidents get to have "open secrets" known about them that the press can just compile and re-report whenever public interest seems to call for it, to no real consequence, as you'd expect from this kind of ass-backward demand-and-supply arrangement.

So that sounds easy and ideal, but it's hard to be president because even if you've got the press boxed neatly up, there's no containing the information anymore. It can come from anywhere and everywhere all at once and fuck up your whole day(s). Like JFK, but thankfully* only figuratively in the form of tweets and blogs, but just as difficult (apparently) to swat away.

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*It's longstanding policy that we don't wish harm on anyone or anything here. Everyone gets to live a healthy long life in the tepid pond-water aftermath of their own choices.

Departure Point

Not a lot of time to work out here, as I've obligated myself to experience the Worst Airport Pick-up Experience in At Least North America, Maybe The World™. If you aren't from the area, I invite you to google "LAX horseshoe" and see what kind of exploratory invective and neologistical swearing you can find. Nothing fires human creativity like a little discomfort. It's why so many artists refuse to take any kind of mood stabilizer, for fear of muting the keening screech-song of their muses. Yes, as a result, a disproportionate number of artistic types are untreated insufferables. Nobody said the discomfort needed to make art had to be their own.

I'm just a few minutes away from having to get in my VERY FANCY new electric car and have a running series of anxious panicks as I do my first not-entirely-local trip petroleum free. Range anxiety is a real thing, people. I've got like 300 miles of battery life to make like an 80 mile trip, but about 10 days in to this whole experience, it still feels like I'm pushing it. And "pushing it" is specifically what I'm trying to avoid.

It'll be fine. I'll be fine. We'll be fine. I have to pick up an adult child and then another stop on the way back to pick up the adult child's adult cat. It's a matryoshka doll set of nested responsibility I bought for myself when I elected to procreate. This would be a prime opportunity to complain, but doing so negates the Parental Martyr Karmic Equity I'd be earning otherwise. If you take the Suffer In Silence option, you can yield as much as 10-15% extra on your return, to be paid out when you watch your adult child have to do the same thing for their own kids at some point in the future. It's risky if they never actually have kids, though. But not ruinously so. More of a 401k scenario than a T-bill, say. If they never give you the satisfaction of seeing them suffer exactly as you have, you can always spend it in other ways, like by breaking your hip right before they're supposed to go on some OTHER goddamned vacation. That'll show 'em.

For now, however, I'm still functionally dual-hipped and primed to sit in traffic, in the chorusing near-silence of my embatteried zero-emission science fiction chariot. The look of stress as I watch the battery tick down I will have to work on if I'm going to perfect my electric car smug face. Though admittedly the bar is lower when you're doing it in a Chevrolet. I'd never make it in a Rivian.