A Reverse Theodicy

It's getting to the point where I'm not certain there's an actual balance to be struck between being informed and being driven insane by the attempt to be informed. The problem is that the delivery systems are made of garbage just as potent/more potent than the content, like if you were in medical pain and the IV tube providing your morphine drip was made out of fentanyl. You only need one of those things in this circumstance, but you'd have to choose to overdose every time you elected to stick it in your veins. It's not even the medicine necessarily that is tainted, there's just no way to get to it without approaching the taint. The secondary imagery there was unintentional, but do with it what you will. I can only apologize.

Like all good lefty leftists, I'm on Bluesky more than anything for all my unclean "news," but I try to be cognizant when I'm scrolling that the dopamine is the point. I'm not dumb enough (anymore) to go sliding through the postings with the idea that I'm being in any way "informed" by what I'm ingesting. It's more about being surrounded with things I find soothing for a short period of time, even though I know the exercise is a) pointless and b) inherently dangerous. It's like taking a nice hot bath while trying to dry your hair with an electric blow-dryer at the same time.

It's gotten to the point where I can't really even tell if there's a "lot going on" week to week or day to day. If you follow the chatter, it sure feels like it's busy out there, but churning up the dark, sludgy sand at the bottom of the lake isn't the best or most productive way to spend a day at the lake. Like, what if I just didn't try to do that at all? I can elect for a certain amount of ignorance still, can't I? What is my (ostensibly civic-minded) curiosity going to merit me other than some cloudy water and hands and arms covered up to the elbow in lake goo? Who is benefiting in this scenario?

I'm doing a lot of imagery because I'm avoiding the actual topics out there with jags of goofy poesy as a procrastination/coping bit. I pay good money for therapy, I can cobble together some low-level self-awareness here and there.

But look, tell me which of these things is actually news:

• Dick Cheney died and a bunch of people went to his funeral.
• Trump called a female reporter "piggy" when he didn't like a question.
• Trump said Democratic some lawmakers should be executed for treason.
• There's an AI bubble that could/will crater the economy.
• A bill for the DoJ to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein passed almost unanimously.

That seems like a lot of stuff! But which one(s) of those items is/are a) information I need to maintain my status as an Informed Citizen responsibly participating in a functioning democracy; and which ones are b) brain worms coated in a slow-leeching, unholy pill jacket of psilocybin and e. coli? Like is it possible to find nuggets of useful truth generated and delivered by a Dedicated Bullshit Machine?

The argument could be made that the AI bubble thing and maybe the Dick Cheney thing are pieces of legitimate news that it would help to know if I wanted to have a not-instantly-embarrassing conversation with a random stranger.

Of course that's a false premise though, because you'd never talk to a random stranger in this day and age, would you? As soon as you get past the introductory pleasantries, you know you'd have to brace yourself for some level of actively disinformed conspiratorial nonsense. Or at least what used to pass for actively disinformed conspiratorial nonsense, which is now just shit that's on the CDC website's front page.

That's a good example though, because "your Center for Disease Control is encouraging you to watch your children die from preventable disease" is news you should know. Actionable to the point of life-saving, especially if you have vaccine-age children. Phew, I think we found the bar.

Filthy Lucre

A week is a long time. Not chronologically when you're middle-aged, those fuckers just whip by, all blurry and spinny like the imagery that typically occurs inside a cyclone as it carries your house away. If you understand the reference, you understand the point.

No, in a week a fairly confident and resurgent tone from one blog can look embarrassingly self-indulgent and naïve the next.

As one of the many directly affected by the events carefully and indirectly referred to above, how do I feel about them?

On the one hand, I have a job again, which was not true for the past 43 days, so that's nice, certainly from the point of view of my mortgage lender and their ilk. There's no question the promise of regular income in exchange for time and effort in my field of expertise bears with it a feeling of not only relief, but structure and direction. I've tried both kinds of time off, paid and unpaid, and the former pips the latter, if only because the latter eventually makes you have to move all your stuff. That's not the only convenience afforded by money, just the most disruptive of my default time-off agenda of sitting as still as possible for 8-20 hours per day, wringing every cent of value I can out of my dropout.tv subscription.

On the other hand, access to health care and social welfare for my country-fellows in general are things I care about at a close-to-the-molten-squidgy-core level, so shit is really complicated after just last week.

Overall, I've got the prospect of money coming in, everyone's healthy, nobody got permanently laid off, all my colleagues seemed to have weathered everything OK, so on balance, how what would I say was my primary state of emotional being?

Incadescent, squealing-kettle rage. Yeah. It's a mixed metaphor, depending I guess on how glowingly hot you get the kettle, but this is not a rational state of being, so you're going to have to cut me a little slack.

I really do lack the patience or the masochism to deep dive into the Congressional Democrat reasoning behind the surrender on what felt like a principled holdout behind a winning hand that even Republicans recognized. I know to some degree I just told you I'm not looking at it in depth, so this is a conventional wisdom parroting with little or no analytical depth, but in my defense, holy shit did you come to the wrong place for that. I can give you reflex contrarianism when it's called for, but that only goes so far.

Overall, this offends my principles, principle of which is I DON'T LIKE DRIVING TO THE OFFICE. Am I still mad I lost my remote telework status in January of this year? Yes I am. Is it still the thing that propels me forward every morning until I fall grudgingly into a fitful sleep again at night, muttering swears and incantations disparaging the parentage of the current national leadership? Reader, it is.

I know this is petty, but all politics is local. And you can't get more local than having to drive past three different schools on surface streets during both arrival AND dismissal time. If you can't build a worldview around that, I'm pretty sure you don't have a political instinct worth listening to. If this shutdown taught me anything, it was the recapitulation of the basic human truth that, given the option of fighting for cozy at-home cat time, you fight for cozy at-home cat time. These are my ideals: work in a bathrobe, and never having to use an office public toilet.

It's a work in progress, but when I get those ideas down to a small enough number of words, they go on a T-shirt and we storm 2026, undefeatable.

Election Interference

Well, the world looks very different this Thursday, two days after the Marxist Dawn that was Election Day 2025. Wait, or maybe it wasn't an overture to the next act of American life opening into a dystopian hellscape of free public transit and law enforcement accountability, maybe it just went exactly like we all thought it would go and the correct response is a collective yawn? Apparently the answer lies somewhere in between those two positions. I can accept this, but I'm different. I learned this kind of mental and emotional dexterity in graduate school, where thousands of dollars in tuition, much of it taxpayer subsidized, were devoted to instilling the confidence to respond to any question, no matter how dense, contradictory or ultimately unanswerable, with a full-throated "well, it's probably somewhere in the middle." I can tell you it was way faster than actually trying to read any of those books they made me buy. Never let anyone tell you a humanities education doesn't impart any practical skills.

It's a real challenge in New York City these next two months as they have to stare down the possibility of understanding a confounding, unfamiliar status quo of a mayor neither already convicted of comically blatant corruption nor a loudly inscrutable weirdo. But there is a silver lining: we don't have to give a shit, really, because we (statistically speaking) don't live in New York City. For those of us who grew up outside the sound of Mike Francesa snoring into a radio microphone, this past Thursday's results were the wendepunkt we'd all be waiting for, though probably not in German. OK, probably in German for some of us, but just the real enthusiasts.

OK, we can give a little bit of a shit, as it's definitely a curiosity as far as object-lessons go. Sure, Mamdani came out firing, shouting into a microphone (which, I get it, sort of doesn't let the microphone do what it's designed to do, but he was excited, that should be allowed) and name-dropping Eugene Debs in his first sentence. And if I lived in New York City or Virginia this morning, I'd feel great this week as someone who at minimum maintains at least a Susan Collins-level of concern about the shouting, stomping authoritarianism that stopped being eligible to be described as "creeping" a full calendar year ago. We seem to be entering a new era of political alignment, warped by the idiot gravity of whatever singularity of anti-intellectual information-hostility fires Donald Trump and only seems to work for him, where the obligatory softening of actual ideals in order to appeal to the electorate and then soothe the to-be-governed once the votes have all been counted, feels not only quaint but dangerous. It takes a projected, keening voice to cut through the static din of a hundred thousand contentless messages (more and more of it not even human-generated) from ten thousand noise-only outlets vying for the public attention. To be a normie political voice in these unsettled waters defined only by measuring the drama of chop and swell is to volunteer for a drowning. We've seen it in the past several months as corporations and back-bench replacement-level political figures have had to declare themselves as not just supportive of the Trump batshit scattershot incoherence of policies but also actively fash-tolerant, at minimum, just to keep up a public profile.

It may or may not matter in 2026 or 2028, when the DNC has to run national-level campaigns, and their instinct is always, always for caution, for the benefit of the big-money corporate donors who keep them in chicken dinners and the good offices in the Capitol. If those continue to be the priorities, they will bear themselves out electorally and this past Thursday will be a curiosity we forget, by executive order of President JD Vance.

Ha ha, just kidding, it would never be Vance, that weenie. It will probably be someone way worse.

Luke 12:33

At this point, I'd really just appreciate the opportunity to be bored. You'd think with all this free time I had off--closing in on a month out of work with no real end in sight--I'd have ample time to while uncounted hours, pottering around getting myself in trouble with new hobbies, which I guess I have been if you count "developing a lower back problem" a hobby. If nothing else, it has the benefit of being free.

"Free" is an important aspect for any new hobby in a state of affairs I like to call "post-income." I seem to have transcended the brutal cycle of paycheck-bills-paycheck-bills by having one of those elements eliminated for me by people I've spent time and energy voting into office. Actually, that's not fair, I definitely didn't vote for this president or the person who has been my completely invisible and useless House district representative my entire adult life. But somehow, these people I vehemently object to with all of my available energy* and protest in the strongest possible terms (which in 2025 means, basically, typing it in this box and hitting PUBLISH, that'll show 'em), have pushed me into this new era of personal enlightenment wherein I look upon my possessions without the limiting bonds of ownership and instead of thinking "how do I maintain my hoard at any and all costs?" transitioning to "I wonder if there's a market online for slightly used socks?"

I'm not at the point where I am considering trying to sell my lightly worn underthings, but I'm definitely seeing it all with new eyes. I think of all the fall-away days where I just flitted through this ridiculously oversized four-bedroom palace for one man and a cat and took zero time to consider how burdened I am by the material, my eyes glazed over by the static and fog of the day-to-day grind to maintain what I have or (best case!) acquire more.

Yes, I'm sort of telling you modern Republicans have turned me toward some principles of actual Christianity. The good news is these are principles none of them would actually recognize or practice, so there's no chance of making me GOP-curious. I'm safe to explore my new asceticism, comfortable in the knowledge that performative capitalist, Christianist fetishization is wholly mutually exclusive with the actual practice of Christianity.

The connection between asceticism and holiness is long established (not just in western cultures), though, so I feel like I'm on the right track. Whether it's communities of monks or nuns living on bread crusts and herbs, sleeping in stone beds and torturing themselves with hair-shirts, fasting, self-flagellation and haircuts specifically designed to make them unfuckable or weird cave-based eccentrics living on their own in self-imposed hermetic exile to achieve mystic communion with the divine, fucked-up anti-social weirdo-hood has been a known path to social and religious transcendence for as long as humans have been keeping records.

I didn't know it, but I've been practicing for it my whole life, I just always called it "acute situational social anxiety." I just needed this little extra push of the elimination of all my income to begin to see the pattern in the noise. When I have my first prophetic visions, I'll be here to publish them here first, NOT behind a paywall for my Patreon subscriber(s). It's not that I don't appreciate them, it's just that this purity shit is only working if someone is bummed out about it. I mean besides just me.

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*the itemization of what I spend that energy on before I actually get to "object to politicians" I will not be publishing here, but it does fall below things like "watch other people play video games in YouTube," just for scale.

Obligate Ram Ventilator

I typically don't go in for serialization of these posts, as that would violate the one sacrosanct rule I have about my work in this space: don't make it actual work. It's a single phrase, but that encompasses a lot of ideas, like "two hours is too long, unless you spent most of it distracted by YouTube shorts about cats knocking things off shelves" and "never do any actual research, unless by 'research' we mean 90 minute diversions into YouTube shorts about cats knocking things off coffee tables," rock-solid personal ethos stuff like that. The sort of unimpeachable ideas around which one can build not only a limited endeavor like this, but a whole human life.

That said, the ongoing drama of my life has led me to a) skip a week of posting, which almost never happens, because I'm a compulsive weirdo, and b) thrust me in the middle of an ongoing national news story the type of which I have had the luxury to ignore in the past, where I could lazily while away the hours watching Instagram clips of cats knocking things off counter tops (YouTube shorts didn't always exist, you know), none the bloody wiser.

So, to update the major storylines from the last episode:

1) I did indeed go on vacation in the middle of being out of work. It's a weird state of being, enjoying sights and experiences and major metropolitan manhole cover venting smells you've never experienced before while you know you have no money to pay for such things. But when Such Things had already been paid for well before this no-work situation became a thing, well, you do what you do and Don't Let The Bastards Get You Down.

2) I've given away the plot, but it's kind of been out there, so I'm not sure it's much of a spoiler: still not working. Your tax dollars are currently at work somewhere I'm sure, but not in the direction of running the government or paying the salaries of people hired to do it.

I was being overly coy I guess talking about your tax dollars "at work somewhere," as that "somewhere" has also been in the news a fair bit in the active non-allegorical demolition of the White House. I missed the start of that particular subplot as I was busy up a mountain (or what the East Coast adorably pretends is a mountain) taking in the resplendence of a sunset over a horizon of autumn foliage. I'd like to claim I was purposely unplugged; I definitely had my phone with me, but the reception up there is shit. Couldn't even do the Wordle, I just had to take in the wonder of autumn or whatever.

And I guess that's the lesson: normies like me can get sidelined or sidetracked, but completely inexplicable, self-justifying extractive bullshit, well, that has a tick-tock work ethic immune to diversion, distraction or sleep. It just keeps humming along, swimming ever forward like a shark, because, like sharks, these types of enterprises understand that to stop would mean a potential moment for self-reflection, the only thing fatal to a project immune to logic, reason, financial constraint, moral compunction, information, objectivity, decency, empathy or fairness.

Wait, no, sharks just do it because they'll drown if they stop. I don't have any insight into their ambition, fiscal discipline or moral character, that was too far. If I had to guess, I'd say they're probably less Kant or Rousseau and more prone to Ayn Rand or purposefully misreading Nietzsche, but wait, I'm probably talking about Republicans again.

Anyway: New England was great. Saw zero sharks. We went prepared with the correct rain gear, but we only needed it those first two days. I got to come home and start dipping into my saving to pay my mortgage, but again, that's not the vacation's fault. Like looking at the fall leaves, it's valuable as experience, but way less adaptable to any kind of edifying metaphor like the cycles of natural shedding and rebirth. Unless I do eventually get the backpay I'm supposed to get, then I can maybe work up something more poetical and life-affirming for you. But that's going to be in heavy, heavy retrospect.

You're Fired*

Well, here's the BIG UPDATE: still out of work.

I know every time you get a Government Shutdown 2025 alert update on your phone, like I presume we all do, your first thought is inevitably going to be "Hey, I wonder how this is all affecting that guy who writes that blog still like it's 2006?" Year by year, the number of people that sentence could describe comes closer and closer to describing just me. All the Blogger OGs either quit the game entirely (goddamned hobbyists) or fucked off to twitter (shorter attention spans, by percentage probably Nazis) or Substack (longer attention spans, by percentage probably also likely Nazis). As far as I can tell the only real logic-puzzle-proof causes of sticking with Blogger seem to be a) no ambition in the direction of monetization or audience growth and b) not a Nazi.

This is the point where one of you gets in the comments to let me know, actually, how many Nazis are using Blogger these days. I would check myself, but come on, I don't read anything on Blogger, who does that? It's 2025 for fuck's sake. Grow up.

How am I doing with it all, being out of work? Just great! A lot of people who hear about it don't really know what to say so you get a default jocular "heh, cool man, free vacation," which I have learned not to respond to automatically by jabbing my index finger into their forehead and shouting in a mid-2000s nü-metal scream-growl "IT'S NOT A VACATION IF YOU DON'T HAVE A JOB." Do that enough times and you get barred from the inside café part of more than one local Starbucks.

Not only was that approach socially and commercially inadvisable, but it's also not technically true. I do have a job, I'm still gainfully employed, I'm just currently not allowed to go there or perform any functions for which I could then me remunerated. Maybe gainfully was the wrong adjective there. Cash-flow-zero is an interesting state to be in for any period of time. I'm responding to this financial crunch in the way any responsible American would, like for instance just today I took myself out for a nice lunch and then bought myself a new pair of shoes.

Look, I know it sounds crazy, especially the day I also paid out all my outstanding bills with what I had left in my checking account and ended up in the cozy low-three-figures with no prospect of replenishment (shoutout to my single Patreon patron!) on the horizon, but before you judge me, I want you to keep in mind: I needed the shoes because I'm actually going on vacation.

This isn't weird! I had planned it well before the shutdown, so it's on the books at work already. I'm going off to New England to witness the collective seasonal death of trees, which is a thing people do.

I'm not going on my own and all the major steps have been paid for (flight, accommodation). I hadn't planned on buying anything else pre-trip, but then I found out (as of like a day ago) that the weather for the duration is now forecast to be "basically underwater." So I thought some waterproof walking shoes, the goofiest of curiosities in Southern California, would be a good idea. Stores even sell them here, for reasons way beyond my limited knowledge of marketing strategy. Maybe for people who like beach walking but don't like sand (which is not helpful, since that category includes All People Forever), I dunno.

I can't really justify the lunch expenditure, other than I was out and I like lunch. We'll see how much I miss than $16 two weeks from now when pay day runs around.

The weird thing is, if I take my vacation while the government is shut down, I won't be charged leave days and I'll get the leave I technically didn't use credited back. So maybe I'll come out ahead?

Oh, I forgot who was running this administration. Probably not.

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: So if I am able to actually leave, probably no blog next week unless I decide to throw something together on my now totally working iPhone. If nothing appears in this space, either I'm having a great time or the air traffic control situation means I'm driving through what I will angrily be calling "fly over states" during the whole unplanned ground-based trip back from wherever we got stranded.

Damnatio Memoriae

This isn't a journal, and it never has been. There is plenty of overlap with my actual personal life, sure, but this record is also shot through intentionally with lies, misdirects, exaggerations, omissions and hyperbole. If it were just my experience, my god, you can't imagine how dull it would be. These days so much is done for clout or to build an audience or just straight-up for money, I'm sure you can forgive a little bit of zhuzh-ing of the truth so I don't threaten to drive off any portion of the mid-single-digits readership by being my regular boring self.

I trust most of you who read this are sophisticated, well-read adults who don't need the reassurance and aren't put off by the SHOCK REVELATION that some of this is lies. If you built a parasocial relationship based on the content here, I'm not going to try to discourage or dissuade you directly, I'm just going to say: you could just do so much better.

I'm prefacing this because I'm about to tell you REAL THINGS that have happened to me in the last 4-5 days. I know I just said I do a bunch of lying and exaggerating but this all REALLY HAPPENED!

1) I managed to lock myself entirely out of my iPhone.

Now look, this is the First World Problem of First World Problems, I get that. But it if you've bought into the the-known-universe-in-my-pocket lifestyle, you find out fast that being cut off from your little world-tether umbilical is pretty disruptive. You sort of die, socially and economically. Not biologically of course (if you have that app on your phone that does kill you if you lost contact, my god, delete it. Why would you download that in the first place, what is wrong with you? What's the upside, I don't see it), but you do get the sense, in the dim, cold quiet of separation, that the world is moving along just fine without you being able to affect it in any way.

The short version of the story is I switched carriers and learned about "SIM card carrier lock" on a cellphone, which I had to clear by doing a factory reset on my iPhone 12. I have iCloud backup, but it turns out you can't get to the backup if you don't have the password. And it really doesn't help you, once you've already started to delete the phone contents, to only then remember that you'd changed your password semi-recently and didn't bother memorizing it because it was written down on an app in the phone. The phone whose contents you were watching it, irrevocably, delete. Woo!

Can you recover your Apple ID using other means? Sure! Like if you have another Apple device that's logged in to it, like for example the MacBook Pro museum piece I use to type this very blog on week after week. But when it's so old it hasn't been able to update the operating system since pre-covid, you will get the very helpful "an error occurred" when you try to initiate the recovery process.

I thought I was stuck with a non-working phone. I had dropped my previous cellphone provider but couldn't initiate the new one, I thought, without access to all the phone's functions. I don't want to say which provider I went with, but this one seems to have spent all its money on a second-tier British soccer team and none on in-person stores for emergency service. The process is DIY and pretty straightforward, but only if you skip the crucial step of Being A Giant Doofus, which I opted in for.

I thought I had to sit through the long process of having Apple review my case and give me an opportunity to re-set my Apple password, which takes minimum 72 hours, but the 72 hours passed and... nothing. So I had the genius idea to call Apple support. They walked me through the reset in maybe 15 minutes? Felt great to get back to the life-giving oxygen of online existence again, to reclaim my digital citizenship (and be able to drive without terror since I haven't had a physical card for my proof of auto insurance since maybe 2018). This is all being presented with the tacit agreement, after this, to never again talk about the circumstances by which any of this came to pass. I'm OK leaving a mystery in place. Man, that was crazy, what was it again? Probably a lightning bolt or an angry Jesus. Maybe both, I'm not sure if Jesus does lightning bolts or if that's too pagan.

2) All this occurred right as the government was shutting down. This is the government, the American federal one, that employs me and issues the checks that allow me to fund my gasoline-free Southern California lifestyle of glamour and hedonism. It's super fun and not at all embarrassing to tell your boss they have to call your Google Voice VoIP number you just made up because you all-thumbs-ed your way into monk-like asceticism, right at the worst possible time.

The phone now works, but this all meant that in the interim, I had a ton of unexpected free time and literally nothing to do. It was quite the crisis for a brain that has been trained for constant input.

I paced some. I talked to the cat, but her muted reactions (up to and including changing rooms or remaining disdainfully asleep) left something to be desired. I filled the void with caffeine and sugar, like any responsible American should, but things got desperate there, I'm not going to lie. I even read a few pages of a book.

I came to my senses though. By the time the book-related vertigo wore off, it was only a few hours until I had my phone up and running again. I only had to scroll through 3-to-7 hours of Bluesky and reddit posts to remember who I was and how I belong in this world.

I can thumbs-up or heart react to Instagram posts again. Bright red oxygen-rich blood flows from my core to my fingertips and back again, once more. I'm whole. I'm me. I can do this shutdown standing on my head.*

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*provided I figure out how to lock the screen so it doesn't keep "fixing" itself right-side up for me.