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.

Let's Get You Over To Our Finance Guy

There's a lot of politics and a lot of life going on at the moment, all of which deserve some sort of attention. It would make a lot of sense to spend some time talking about a high loss of life in a preventable (or at least mitigable) tragedy right at the time the federal government has become its most active and interventionist on all aspects of society EXCEPT the ones where people either could be or have been hurt/killed. A ready and adequately staffed FEMA fucks with the conspiracy theories and bugbears of the churning, chorusing, uni-voiced mass of rugged individualists and free thinkers, and we're learning in real time that the one thing you do not do is tip over the chum bucket, especially the big infinite-gallons one the remoras have been feeding out of since at least 2019.

Is it a great metaphor? Remoras don't really eat out of chum buckets, especially not upright, un-spilled ones, which would presumably be in a boat, out of the water, making it hard for them to breathe and, you know, live. So I'm getting a little crossed up, but that's been a thing the last few days. Last night, for example, I completely forgot my boxing gloves in my fitness class when I left the gym. Going to this class has been a routine for years, one that predates even the existence of this gym (I'm on I think my third boxing gym since I started 15 years ago), but as a creature of rigid habit, the smallest deviations can cause incalculable upset. The problem is you never know which way it will go. Sometimes you replace one whole Terrence Howard with a whole separate Don Cheadle and nobody says boo. But if Felicity gets a haircut, next thing you know fortunes are lost, careers unmade and you can't have a quiet lunch at Nobu because of all the pitchforks and the torches.

I'm pretty sure I lost my boxing gloves because I got a new car. The connection there is of course too obvious to bother explaining, but for posterity, let's get it on wax:

I wasn't necessarily looking to get a new car, but the glorious 2015 Mini Cooper Countryman I've been driving since my the dashboard panel on my old Prius wouldn't stop being festively lit up with ALL the colors, had been trending toward the geriatric now as well. I had put 160,000+ miles on a car that I was told would likely get me about 90k. It was also a bottom-level trim option, which in this case meant the heaviest Mini with the weakest engine, so our girl, she always struggled. Ran great, worked as designed (for the most part), but kept trying to whine out RPMs at banshee levels at every slight provocation, especially when set upon by her mortal enemies of air conditioning and slight inclines. Did I mention I live in a semi-arid transitional climate right next to a desert and on the very hilly edge of a valley? Not the best choice in retrospect, but in my defense, it came in a very nice shade of dark blue.

For years I've lived in dread of car payments. The Mini I crippled my savings in order to buy outright; just in case I lost my job, I would always have a car nobody could repossess. She was holding up, except she had started to eat oil, requiring a fresh quart every 1,500-2,000 miles, in between full oil changes. We were past regular maintenance, so something had to be considered.

The original plan: drive until she gives out. That's what I did with the Prius, just made that mule drag me around until the only option left was a merciful captive bolt pistol to the forehead, which in that case looked like a donation to local public radio.

Being on my own for so long, and having recently taken a job that a) meant a pay cut, but with the promise to make up the difference over the course of years and b) become complicated by the inauguration of new management in the form of a presidential administration determined to fire half and haze the other half of the public sector workers I count myself among. I'd narrowly avoided both being fired and being driven to quit, but the feeling of uncertainty was now baked into the experience. Best time to take on some new financing, surely.

Well, sometimes you don't really make plans, plans make you. That doesn't make sense at all, but see above about the remoras and the chum. There's a theme of thematic incoherence, for which I can only apologize.

Sometimes, and I hadn't experienced this in so long I completely forgot it was a thing, you can attach yourself to another person romantically and physically (if you're both up for it and haven't eaten too heavy a meal recently) and also financially. This can go either way, but every once in a while it's possible to find someone with whom you're compatible romantically, personally, socially, sexually and with regard to income levels. I'm told this can lead to things like stability and functional relationships. I had to look those up, but I didn't only find them defined in Urban Dictionary, so I know they're legit things.

With that reality being what it is, it became possible to consider options. And in this case, the options looked like new cars. And electric cars. And then a specific GM electric car. One that included multiple incentives adding up to about $12,000 off the sticker price, before any negotiation or trade-in. So it all got weirdly feasible really fast.

So no public radio of any kind got my old Mini, that old girl was left in the loving hands of a sales outlet of massive multinational automotive concern. I'm certain she will be treated well.

And me, I'm sitting here covered in New Car Smell and pretty happy, if you minus out the disorientation. It's an interesting new normal on pretty much every level. A pair of boxing gloves is a small price to pay. Well, that and a few tens of thousands of dollars.

You Don't Look A Day Over 247

I'm here in my busted-ass easy chair in a climate controlled room at the start of a very new Inland SoCal Summer tap-tap-tapping away on the keyboard of my busted-ass 2012 MacBook Pro a little earlier in the day of a Thursday than normal because tomorrow is a holiday. When you work in my agency of the federal government, that means you (sometimes, at the discretion of management) get what they call "59 minute rule" where you're allowed to leave one minute into the final hour of your shift. I wanted to say something snarky here about how the benefits of public sector work after a full winter and spring of being hit over the head with the bureaucratic and political equivalent of a sock full of oranges have been reduced to slightly less than an hour off up to 11 days of the year,* but I'm home at 2 pm (including the commute!) on a Thursday before a long weekend; it's hard not to feel a little bit of "fuck yeah."

But I'm not off the hook for the weekend yet, because I've set this recurring task for myself to provide this ABSOLUTELY FREE (unless you don't want it to be, no pressure) content for you, my single-digit readership. That means I'm professionally obligated to be ENGAGED and EARNEST and GIVE FULL EFFORT, but it's a little difficult when the only thing happening in national news right now is this fucking stupid bullshit cringey cruelty-forward omnibus bill passing. Mostly it makes me feel relieved to have chosen not to be born like 15 years earlier than I actually was so I don't immediately have to worry about the dismantling of (more) social programs that make it possible to do things like not die from sepsis because my cold turned into a sinus infection and none of the hospitals or clinics in my area could afford to stay open without that support. Still being viable working age in 2025 turned out to be real strategic coup on my part.

The pundit class are already talking about how this is going to be the fuel that fires the Democrats to big wins at least in the next Congressional election cycle in '26, which, you know, great. The contemplation of the immediate consequences of the bill AND all the other horrifying anti-human shit that was going on before that (also known as "right fucking now") doesn't really put me in the mood to start throwing Sun Tzu or Napoleon quotes. I think that's some beta-male shit these days anyways, disqualified for being too old and dusty and not concerned enough specifically with daily protein intake. Real men only want to talk about how much raw organ meat they should be weighing out to eat and nothing else. Besides, Napoleon couldn't even qualify as a short king as a) he apparently wasn't that short and b) technically an emperor.

Plus, being fully honest, I don't really know what's in this bill. And yes, it's clear Trump doesn't really know what's in it either, but to be fair to him (just this one time), I don't think anyone on the whole earth read all 900-whatever pages of it. Like everything else this administration does, the details are for nerds and losers. It's the winning that's the point. You can just do whatever you want, as long as it's not losing. And if you do lose, you frame it as cheating and you move. On after maybe jailing one or two of your political opponents.

So that's what I'm going to do here: we (America as a whole) didn't lose a bunch of necessary stuff just now, what happened was the powers that be, occupying all the levels of government, animated by a radical death-obsessed ideology, conspired to pretend to have a functioning legislature and just ran through a rigged vote, thwarting the will or the needs of the people they pretend to represent.

Oh wait, I was trying to make that sound all whiney and conspiratorial in the Trump style, but in this case, it's a pretty fair assessment. Shit, I accidentally did a punditry. I keep forgetting satire and irony are almost completely inert forces. I guess it's true, everything is politics now: prescriptions, gas prices, going to the Home Depot, writing explicitly about politics on the internet... at some point, someone's going to try to take every innocuous thing and make it seem partisan. It's getting so bad, even Joe Rogan is starting to notice.

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*back down to10 when Trump inevitably cancels Juneteenth as a holiday for being whatever the successor racist buzzword is that replaces antifa/woke/DEI next

Ranked Preference

I've been on Bluesky since before it opened itself up to the general public. Yes, there was a time, boys and girls, when it was still an in-development project and you had to get yourself an invite code from someone who was already a user. Me, I found my code in the comment section over at Defector.com, a publishing collective by of a bunch of sports-oriented leftists borne out of something as sinister as LABOR ACTION, so you know Bluesky is already suspect in its associations. Defector even writes regularly about women's sports, that's how far OUT THERE it is compared to the mainstream normals who, as we all know, are frightened and confused by ladies being sportsy. I can't see it ever starting to feel like a natural thing to watch until we get the right number of women doing online sports betting, which we all agree is the true mark of social acceptance. If it can't get a FanDuel badge slapped on it, it's probably actually communism. You can't be too careful.

I've been at it on Bluesky for a while now, always reading, never posting (some of us are shy) but now I'm being told that it is Actually Maybe Bad? So like any self-reflective person who spends any time online at all, I had to immediately make the response to any slight criticism of something I might enjoy MY ENTIRE PERSONALITY for an unspecified period of time. Honestly, Reader, I have not been this upset since I was informed I was too old to like Fall Out Boy in like 2006. Come on, they're only like 10 years younger than me! It's not like I was doing that plastered-down swoopy bangs haircut or anything, I just like some bouncy emo anthem pop-rock. And it turns out they were the last mainstream act to hit it big AND play instruments. And there, NOW I sound like a proper old person.

The main criticism of Bluesky is that it's a bubble or an echo chamber or whatever, a place for lefties to silo themselves off from the world because they're TOO SENSITIVE to have their Bleeding Heart blood thrown right back in their faces in a REAL COMBAT PIT like X/twitter. Just because X/twitter is owned by (in the literal sense) the richest racialist ideologue since Henry Ford, I'm supposed to accept it as some sort of global public square neutral ground while he actively pledges to tweak the code of his bespoke AI chatbot to make it more amenably racist.

Like, OK, a Muslim guy won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor the other day. I don't subscribe to any mainstream news outlets anymore and I live about as far from NYC as is possible while still being within the contiguous 48, so I got the news about Mamdani defeating Andrew Cuomo from my Bluesky cohort and it seemed like... fine? Normal-to-good news, really right in that range. It took another half day or so for me to see/hear the teeth gnashed and hands wrung hard enough to cracking in the rest of the news media, but in that 12-24 hours, honestly, what did I miss? And further, what did I miss that I couldn't have 100% predicted? Fox News is so sorry to tell you he's a Muslim, very unfortunate, completely disqualified from American public office. And the New York Times wants you to know that actually this is bad news for Democrats, for sure. And everyone else is brought to you by Draft Kings, who are now going to be in the predicament of trying to get this "socialist" guy to accept a campaign donation check and see if he'll go on TV with a branded jacket.

Look, I'm very much of the opinion that even if you intend something in the range of good-to-benign, you should occasionally do a check to see who is traveling with you after you start. Like I don't think Joe Rogan is an openly racist white supremacist, but once the podcast got going and it was all edgelord incel listeners whose main animating personality feature is trying to say the N-word as often as possible in public spaces, maybe that was time to re-think the direction of the endeavor? But I look around where I am on Bluesky and it's smart people who seem to want the best for their neighbors and their country, even though there are steep disagreements in the Body Politic at large about the right way to go about those aims. Which, yeah, tracks as fine to me.

I recognize also that my Bluesky feed looks that way because I'm allowed to curate it directly instead of having it algorithmically fed to me by twitter. I realize being bombarded by bots and burner accounts is now the American Way and my patriotic duty, but I'm being social on social media in a way I'm comfortable, which I guess could be described as "socialist" now, but that's not even a bar for a major party nomination in America's largest city anymore, so I guess I'll live with it.