Depresh Mode

I've never been the person with the plan, at least not professionally. I have life ambitions, sure, but most of them have to do with clunking out guitar scales or collecting achievement badges for Baldur's Gate III. Those are just two examples, but there's a gist to be got: you know, limited goals with (let's say it again) limited financial potential.

My therapist would likely tell you this has been a lifelong hedge against disappointment and failure, since you can't fail at something you lacked the courage to admit you were attempting in the first place. And then I'd show her by suddenly putting together an ambitious plan to sue her for breach of trust and professional ethics, because what is she doing telling you my shit? I'm pretty sure that's HIPAA.

There are upsides to not having an agenda, or at least I'll speak for myself: it's allowed me to find my own way, without dragging around the baggage of frustration or disappointment, viewing from below peaks I'd identified as climbable. It's also how you spend seven years at three colleges and emerge with something as monumentally ornamental as a master's degree in history with an emphasis on the Reformation period in Wales. But I loved doing it while I was doing it. Not enough to finish the whole PhD I was tracking toward, but way more than any of my science nerd friends seemed to love sweating blood through their engineering or biology courses en route to their fancy degrees that did stuff like "made them employable." Enjoy your living wages, nerds, I've got peace of mind.

They'd ask you when you were a kid what you wanted to do, but I never had an answer, ever. Part of that is an almost fanatical commitment to the core principle of noncommittal-ism,* but also none of the stock answers ever really seemed like Me. I always felt like I lacked some basic trait or skill that made any of those one-day-I'm-gonna-be child's answers appealing, like fireman (upper body strength), doctor (staying awake during math) or police officer (lying under oath). Anything I was going to do for a living was something I was going to end up doing. This is how you end up with an advanced degree in one of the humanities and/or being a stay-at-home parent. For me, these were "and."

Much longer story short, this is also how I ended up being a civil servant. It's a windy tale of both triumph and woe, both of which the basic circumstantial serendipity are agnostic about, but somehow following your inclinations tactically can work just as well as following some program strategically.

What I've learned in my time in the public sector and public-sector adjacent is that this is my best version of me. It offers balance and focus and service-oriented goals that involve at no stage spending physical or emotional energy making a bunch of money for some goon or goons way over your head on some org chart who have either failed to comprehend or refused to acknowledge the existence of the concept of enough.

But it turns out, those fucking goons aren't entirely escapable. I'll probably be out of this line of work, against my will, perhaps as early as tomorrow, due to goon-directed circumstances, which we'll call the converse side of indifferent serendipity. It won't be the end of me as a person, not by a goodly margin, but it will be (should it happen) the death of a dream I didn't know I'd dreamed until I woke up and I was living it.

Or, to rephrase a little more directly: this shit sucks ass.

As I've said in one form or another to literally every person I'm in contact with over the last 15 days or so: I'll keep you posted.

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*Want to make an adult man sweat? Ask me what my favorite color is.

Everyone Gets Arm Bands and 3D Glasses

I'll be honest, it's not incredibly easy to focus on a) sitting still to do anything like write and b) do so with my expected and established superhuman levels of wit, charisma and bon vivantisme when a lot of the professional universe around me is made of stitched-together what-ifs and intentional, bespoke chaos. I try to monitor things as best as I can, and I have a history as a more or less together understander of things. I have the capability to comprehend events in context as well or better than most probably, it's just that in the years since the invention of the iPhone, I've chosen to let those skills atrophy in favor of becoming a dab hand at Angry Birds or whatever.

Reading the news isn't all the helpful at the moment, when all I can really see is the growing list of agencies targeted and the blood-red, pulsating bolded keyword PROBATIONARY spotting every bit of coverage like a herpes outbreak. I'm not saying specifically if that does or doesn't apply to me, I just know there's no Valtrex available for "unemployed in service of discredited trickle-down theory of economics."

The system so far (if we can generously call it that) seems to be to tie up/fire the oversight people first (inspectors general, the FBI, etc.), then swoop in and shitcan the probationary people. It doesn't make a lot of sense when you're trying to "purge" the agencies in question and you're only keeping the longest tenured people (the ones who know best how to throw the levers labeled Fuck Shit Up), but as intimated above, I'm not sure sense is a massive part of the program here. In a newborn political philosophy born out of the accidental syncresis of Heritage Foundation white-paper porn and Donald Trump's dimming mind, rooted in libertarian fantasy, gluttony and opportunistic revanchism, you get a sort of distilled capitalism we haven't seen since Victorian England. The idea of a blended economy where a portion of the wealth it generates can be translated (via a civil service) to any kind of social benefit is not just frowned upon, but something to be hunted and killed, for the benefit of the people who have the most any people have ever had in the history of humans. Some people might die, sure, but we're reminded it will be in service to a greater cause, the cause of You Should Have Thought Of That Before You Decided To Be Poor/Sick/Elderly.

In the meantime, my main strategy is to try not to read the news, ironically something I now can't seem to stop doing as a compulsion. All those years I spent skimming headlines and calling myself "informed" have really come around to bite me in the ass. I'd call this a penance to make up for allowing my civic literacy to atrophy as it has, only to have a resurgence of interest when it allegedly/potentially affects me directly, but maybe that's also a sign that I'm getting the hang of this New America: the bodies of the fallen are a ladder up if you pile them correctly. Face down, probably, so they can't watch you do it.

Bury It and Rise Above

It would be a lie to say every time I sit* here and start to write, it's entirely spontaneous. Sure, it feels that way because of my lack of professionalism and active, debilitating allergy to proof-reading, but like any good writer, even in a low-stakes endeavor like this, I do feel the looming pressure of crankin' out pages as I contemplate the doing of the thing. I've been at this long enough that I know when I sit down, even when I have nothing in particular percolating, I'll likely be fine. It's the double-barreled beauty of a) the confidence borne out of decades of experience and b) literally zero feedback. People would only take the trouble to stop you if it was something that needed fixing, that's my philosophy. You only get those grim-faced sit-down one-on-one meetings with your boss at work after you've missed enough achievement milestones to draw their attention. Nobody stops work to have a "you're doing great" meeting, am I right? I'm pretty sure I'm right. I thank you, imagined audience, for your tacit and resounding silent support.

So I do spend random parts of the week between posts with the antennae extended, looking for topics I either find interesting or lend themselves particularly well to dick jokes. I realize those two propositions are fairly redundant, but not all interesting things are dick jokes, even if all dick jokes are interesting.

These past few weeks? Hoo-ee, the content is out there in the air, thick and sticky, like clouds of tree pollen, or a fine mist sprayed from a skunk's stank gland. I'm sure it has a more scientific name, but you have to imagine the skunk is the size of South America and the spray covers just about the entire globe, so we're outside the realm of biology here. Stay with me.

Like everyone else, I've been watching (and living, allegedly) all this Bannon-esque flooding of the zone that has predictably overwhelmed an already culled and cowed media, leaving it slack-jawed and swooning like Glass Joe, which is of course the point. Pondering it all, it's been difficult to draw single conclusions, or even see strategy in the chaos of random tacticality in volume. Just when you think Trump might have a plan, he breaks out a "let's turn Gaza into Saint-Tropez" idea that literally everyone hates and you're back to square one from an understanding point of view.

Instead of comprehending the incomprehensible in terms of its own presenting--a dubious proposition bordering on impossible, just definitionally--maybe the clearest path is to take a step back and notice what's missing. So earlier this week, I concluded: nobody better ever say the words "Deep State" to me ever a-fucking-gain.

All this talk for all these years about a cabal of self-interested actors embedded in the machinery of government, designed and self-empowered to protect their own power base at the expense of any of the "mavericks" and "reformers" who might dare try to challenge it... like, wouldn't right now, in the face of the comprehensively intrusive and by-all-rights-most-likely illegal unspooling of whole organizations at the agency or even departmental level be the exact time to activate something like that? Shouldn't the secret, disparate pieces be emerging from their buried places, like cicadas, to shake off the dust and swarm and devour the interlopers who dared to rouse them? These bitches are either the second-worst run conspiracy ever (after the one between Democrats and the media to prevent Republicans from winning elections, please see Exhibit: Every-fucking-thing) or they never existed at all. And I need just one Republican to say that on the record. The evidence is here and it's overwhelming. You want the Department of Labor? OK, but you have to trade us a public statement of "Yeah, fine, we obviously made all that up."

Also to be clear: it's definitely not actually OK for you to have the Department of Labor.

However... however... however....

Maybe the Deep State just took a second to get rolling? I mean, it's got "deep" right there in the title, maybe I'm not giving it enough time to surface.

I dunno. It's hard to judge history when you're in the middle of it. Like that first Tom Brady Super Bowl way back in 2002. We all thought it was a freak thing involving Drew Bledsoe's backup. There was no way to know it was going to result in a 20 year reign of pure evil and darkness.

Same exact thing here. We have a lame duck near-octogenarian doofus president with severe attention deficit issues. Not a lot of visible or credible opposition at the moment, so are we on the brink of an era of greyscale doldrums where the country is stripped for parts by the billionaire oligarchs who came into this with enough money to buy their own fucking parts already, if not their own country? Or is this another instance of Karl Rove's famous "permanent Republican majority" that lasted about 18 months?

Again, history stubbornly refuses to divulge spoilers. It also makes us do all the work by living in it, which seems impertinent and rude. All I can think to do in the meantime: keep writing it down. It feels like activism, but I can do it at home, and seated.

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*I guess it's presumptuous to presume I knew how your imagined me positioned as I worked on this. I suppose a standing desk is as common as anything now as well, but no, you were right to think of what I'm doing as "sitting" even if it's in this ceiling-mounted sex swing modified for productivity. I thought the wiring for the reading lamp was going to be tricky, but sex swing technology has come a long way. This one has a USB-C port built right in!

You Have To Throw the Stone to Get the Pool to Ripple

I already went through this week and made all my facebook posts private. I know what you're probably thinking: wait, you're still on facebook? And YES, OK, I'm related to like 80 people who are all either Boomers or GenX, so it's my one-stop shopping space for schadenfreude when I see how disappointed all my cousins are in how their children turned out. Hey, I'm not sure Barry Jr. can be "between things right now" when the last two "things" were "life coach with zero clients" and "back in rehab."

I've been very conscious about making my online profile as narrow and translucent as possible, which is a little embarrassing as it's the result of some pretty direct online bullying. Hopefully seeing me fold like a cheap suit will be a little less damning when you realize I (me, specifically) am being targeted by a combination of the richest person who ever was and the current president of the United States.

I'm a little hesitant to get into too much detail about what I do or where I do it* even here, where I've been anonymous for a long time. I'd like to say it was with foresight for this specific reason, but I think by now everyone who's read any of this knows it was primarily so my mom wouldn't have to read me writing the word "fuck" a lot. She got enough of that proofing my book reports.

Am I a federal employee? Very probably, though we'll have to go with "alleged" until we run any of this past my lawyer (I do not have a lawyer). Have I seen the Elon Musk emails about giving us a chance to be "bought out" of our positions? Reader, I have, but so have you if you have an internet connection. And since I stopped self-publishing the print version of this blog, I know that you do if you're reading this. So nothing is proven!

I'd like to say my experience since the emails aligns with some of the stories about backlash out there amongst federal workers, but honestly, if there's one place you would like to go where you never have to hear anyone talk about politics, get you a federal job. In my experience, since elections happen every four years, nobody wants to explicitly out themselves as one side or another if/when the status quo flips a maximum of two cycles out from the current one. It's not so much fear of reprisal than just a sort of professional politeness based on a Golden Rule approach: I won't bitch about your guy this time if you don't bitch about mine next time. This will be the fifth time they changed the picture in the lobby at the building where I work and so far 0% of the near-fistfights I've seen on the job have revolved around electoral politics or policy. They're always about something way more important, like parking.

The watchwords amongst the working corps of federales is about the same as it is about politics in general: keep your head down. You feel exposed and threatened because this is an effort to expose and threaten, so full marks to all involved for responding correctly. The tension is between the steadiness of the work--every single federal worker provides a service in exchange for their compensation, separate from the volatility of a fickle market--and the calculated destabilization, especially coming from people neither elected nor confirmed to run anything in the public sector. The fact that the people implementing the policy (he said, head shaking) seem to be handpicked for their lack of qualification and/or are literal children of course falls under none of the categories of Coincidence, Accident or Mistake. This is diktat, this is fiat; and fiat by meme, where "meme" is a thing designed to be funny by a person who very pointedly has no functioning sense of humor.

So we weather it and wait to see what the next thing is. There are plans in place to come for federal workers, but we have four years of specific prior experience knowing the primary characteristic of the person in charge (you can pick from the two) and the people around him are a) distractibility and b) a deep, core-level incompetence.

There are already reversals and catastrophes in plot developments so predictable, it would be a category error to call them "twists." These are plot-straight-lines, which doesn't sound so bad until you realize the dead-level road ends at the intersection with an asteroid. Which, you know, on balance...

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*professionally speaking, I mean. Perverts.

Anti-Comedy

Look, maybe Elon Musk really doesn't know. The fact that his repeated raised-right-arm gesture toward the crowd at a political rally in an arena has been so positively received by vile Christian Nationalist white supremacy groups is maybe an unfortunate coincidence that he now feels chastened and/or slightly embarrassed by. But if we know anything about Elon Musk, it's that "chastened" isn't something he has either the inclination or even perhaps the capacity to publicly express, so instead we get the typical messaging, that of a thirteen year old in 2005, minus the wit. It was a response so fumbling and artless, even the Anti-Defamation League refused to provide further cover.

Whatever his intentions may or may not have been,* the responses have been pretty boring. Really, Elise Stefanik says it didn't even actually happen? I'm almost more angry at the motivation to ask the question in the first place. "Get them on the record," OK, fine, but to what end anymore? I mean, if we're letting the guy openly doing Nazi salutes skate, what is going to be the socio-political fallout for someone else saying it wasn't that big of a deal? They get to be the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., that's what.

And that's where I'm at with all this, now. I've lost the capacity to be surprised. "Outrage" no longer even fits as an appropriate response. The second inauguration of Donald Trump, which I've seen pictures of but very purposely did not watch, looked appropriately small and grim, with corporate VIPs lined up dutifully genuflect and the rabid root-level supporters left ignored, outside, literally in the cold, their usefulness at an end for a lame duck president who needs zero more votes the rest of his life. A past version of me would have shook his sanctimonious head with incredulity and mild disgust. He might have even used the word "sheeple" in a sentence, to my retroactive shame. But the main feature of a status quo is its banality.

Resistance was the watchword of the first go-round, but this time it feels more like endurance. Part of that is probably spurred by the fact that I live (on the far edge of, away from the epicenter, but in the same danger zone) in a greater metropolitan area undergoing its largest natural disaster in its history that is only currently getting worse. It's sobering and clarifying to realize there are immediate priorities that need our attention (and money and supply donations). I remember the noise of the first Trump administration, like a sack full of old pans and kettle-bell weights falling down a flight of stairs exactly four years long. And just like then, there will be real harm and consequences to the executive branch of the government only operating on a scale of response with INDIFFERENT on one end and HOSTILE on the other, but most of what comes out of the noise remains noise. Knowing what to ignore sometimes takes a whole disaster.

I'd like to get all metaphorical and poetic here and point out that we just have to hold on until the rain finally arrives, but everyone out here knows that just means now we have to look out for mudslides as well. But that's how it'll work: one disaster at a time.

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*I'm definitely not in the camp trying to justify something he did not just twice, but emphatically bordering on violence, as some kind of unfortunate bummer of a coincidence. Go through any white dude's online history and you will find some period of time when they were trying out "extreme" personas because they didn't yet understand how humor and/or social norms fully worked. This Edgy Era is no excuse for dropping an N-bomb at someone because they beat you in a round of Mortal Combat X, but it's easy to go "well, that person is obviously an idiot I can now block forever." The difference is Elon Musk is well past 17, is about to have an office in the West Wing and very specifically you are not allowed to block him.

Old Dog

Oh hey, it's you, you're back for your second week at the gym. You must really be serious about your New Years resolution. Good for you.

Don't worry about those meatheads over there. They get defensive about their equipment at this time of year. They're used to, like, July when it's just the fellas in the free weights area. I keep telling them nobody thinks it's homoerotic, but I think that just makes them more self-conscious. It's a vicious cycle I haven't figured out how to break yet. It's not that they're being unwelcoming, they just don't know how to express their sensitivity. I wouldn't take it personally.

I don't really overlap with those types that much as I just stick to the scheduled classes. I'm not much of a self-starter, so I need an instructor shouting at me. If I were going to get on any of the machines, it would be the treadmills, but the way people are packed in this time of year, I always end up next to a woman I don't know, which makes me self-conscious. Everyone is sweaty and vulnerable and under-dressed (appropriately), so I automatically feel very aware of the space I take up. It would be easier if I were a gay man I guess, that would really free up a lot of real-estate for me.

Anyway, I don't want to overstep, sorry to be talking so much. I've been taking these boxing classes for a like a decade-plus. No, I've never sparred or hit anybody, that feels too much like competition. I know, the gym has a whole octagon ring as part of the gimmick of the branding, but I think for liability reasons, they don't want the general membership going at it hammer-and-tongs in the middle of a Wednesday evening. Besides, if you punch people, they tend to try to punch you back, which doesn't appeal to me much. I think the opportunity for those days are well behind me. If I want to get woozy, I'll just stand up too fast from my recliner at home, haha.

I just saw you were struggling with your hand wraps, but you didn't ask for help, so I'll leave you to it. Oh... yes? OK, well, yes, start with the loop around your thumb... label on the inside, it'll matter at the end... OK, now make sure it's tight, but you don't want your fingers to turn purple... and don't forget between the fingers... yeah, that's pretty... wait, watch me do... is that your right or left... oof, you know what, I'm sorry, I can never do this for someone else, it's like teaching someone how to tie a tie. Except with these there's no chance of accidentally strangling yourself, haha.

I think I saw the instructor heading this way. I like her, she's not overly technical. Once we start, just remember to... you know what, you'll figure it out, you didn't ask, sorry. OK have fun. And hang in there! The other newbies will start falling out in the next few weeks and we won't have to share bags anymore. Don't worry, I'll try to keep my sweat on my side, haha. Sorry that was kind of gross. You'll do fine. Ope, she's putting on her microphone headset, here we go...

A Lamentable Fire

First and most obviously, a detailed update on my gastrointestinal status after last week's debacle: I am fairly confident now that it wasn't a virus, it was low-level food poisoning, probably from a recently opened Chipotle location, where we picked up food en route to my son's pace to watch his beloved Oregon Ducks get absolutely atomized by An Ohio State University. If it were a virus, my appetite would have come roaring back after the bout of fever and sleepiness, but it's been very slow going with regard to eating and other post-eating functionalities I will demurely decline to detail for you, in the subsequent week. Suffice it to say there's been even more ginger ale consumed.

The details of my personal digestive tract have failed to make the broadcast news as everything since then has been dominated by the fact that Southern California, where I live, is once again an active hellscape of flames and randomized uncertainty. For clarity, I want to say that while I live in SoCal, I do not live in LA, so I'm watching events unfold from the safety of remote news feeds, like most everyone else. But as the Santa Ana winds continue to test the grip strength of my house's terra cotta roof tiles for the third or fourth straight day, it's a very there-but-for-the-grace-of-Yahweh sort of feeling. We did this dance out here as recently as this past July, when I watched with many of my neighbors from the top of a hill as helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft made circuits between a nearby lake and the chaparral brush right behind our houses to drop load after load of water. We're lucky that the wind direction and convenient location of the lake helped knock ours down pretty quickly and that the area burned (in that fire and in the much larger one a couple of miles away that started almost simultaneously) was pretty open and undeveloped. The ones in the Palisades and San Fernando Valley are already much larger and in the immediate vicinity of neighborhoods of varying densities, in difficult landscape way more conducive to fire than earthbound humans and their fire suppression.

From fifty miles away, my sense of empathy and fear grips like anxious nausea.* The hardest part about any of this is seeing snippets or hearing back second-hand (I'm not going anywhere close to indulging any of it by seeking it out, let alone willingly soaking in it) responses ranging from gleeful political point-scoring to the no-longer-appropriate-to-describe-as-"outlandish" conspiracy theorizing to the sadistic outright cheering for people to struggle, to suffer and die. Which is, I guess just where we are as a country. It wasn't that long ago that we started saying "die in a fire" as a hyperbolic way to close out a ranting thought aimed at people with whom you disagreed (primarily in print), but we're at the point now where the performative rhetoricism of it has dwindled down to an imperceptible scant. The lived reality now is that between a persistent (even dominant) environment of misinformation and the by-the-day improvement in the capabilities for deep fakes and large language models, there's more out there that isn't real than is. I'd take it more personally, but it's affecting the people perpetuating the lies in the areas affected by similarly scaled disasters as those of us out here on the ribbons and strands of Cultural Elitestan. In the latter cases I guess you sit back and root for the fires, in the former you go out and point guns at FEMA workers trying to help you.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we've been wondering what the definitional aspects of American culture would be once we didn't have the dirty commies to scream at/about anymore. For a while it really did look like the Forever War would be the paradigm, in the endless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many more countries could we add to the list as pointless drains for both American taxpayer dollars and international goodwill? Well, it turned out those couldn't last forever, so instead we've turned to our own class of Tech Bro, some homegrown, some illegally imported, to usher in a definitive age of monetized bullshit at the expense of, well, literally everyone, none of the stakes of which or actual cost we'll be clear about until it's far, far too late.

The image is a red, white and blue boxing glove, punching itself in the dick, forever.

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*OK, when you're recovering from food poisoning recovery, everything feels like nausea, so maybe a little lazy, but still not inappropriate