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.*

--

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

Proper Spinal Support

SPECIAL NOTICE: None of the proceeding should be taken as a metaphor for mental health.

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I've woken up most mornings in the last 5-10 years in a depression,

I know that's difficult to square with the SPECIAL NOTICE I made all the very necessary effort to include, entirely out of character, right out at the top, but I want to be clear: I'm being incredibly literal here. I'm making no attempt to be clever or misdirect or disguise intent. That is the purview of punsters and others species of fraud-peddlers in the Hack genus. I'm a normal man, classifiable strictly using the Normal Man categories of... whatever other words might go before or after "genus" in a biological taxonomy, I forget. I'd learned all that briefly for a junior college anthropology survey class, but I purged it all immediately after the final and filled the space with more trivia about Claremont-era X-Men, Mario Kart track layouts... almost exclusively anything in the opposite direction of projecting sexual appeal in the early/mid 1990s.

No, I'm speaking to you plainly here, which if you're a new reader (we get one every 11-14 years, so we might be due!) you might not know is incredibly typical of me. Straight shooter. Blunt. To the point. Well, as much as one can be in a 3,000 word piece stitched together out of single-sentence large-block paragraphs and more subordinate clauses than an Elon Musk birthing-partner pre-procreation contract. Is the language torturous? Maybe. But the points, once you get to them, are almost always crystal clear, in the times I can be bothered to remember to have one.

OK, sometimes I'm out here be-boppin' my way through a masturbatory tone-poem of free flowing word association that makes sense probably only to me, but the point is: NOT TODAY! Today I'm being literal. I want you to hear this: l i t e r a l .

I've woken up most mornings in the last 5-10 years in a depression,

I mean that my mattress has gotten old and I only sleep on one side. So in a literal sense, I've been waking up, in increasing degrees over the passage of time, along a portion of the surface of a plane that is at a slightly lower elevation to the surfaces on all sides of me. There's a depression in my mattress.

Emotionally? Totally fine with it. Well, I guess the depression did leave me a little sad from time to time when I would realize "don't I deserve better?" but that is STRICTLY a coincidence. I have more personal dignity and respect for you, gentle reader than to try to slip "the depression made me sad" past you. If I tried to just leave that there, uncommented upon, sure, this blog would be like 75% shorter, but we'd all be so embarrassed.

Is this too much work to tell you I got a new mattress finally? After like 20 years wearing down the old one? And what the consequences are of being so compulsively averse to deviation from the comforts of repetition that even after my now-ex-wife moved out OVER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO I've stayed sleeping in the same spot on the same side?

DO NOT start reading things in now, I've warned you. I've lived a full spectrum life in those times. "Over time the depression grew" is facile and beneath all of us, and frankly a denigration of the complexity of my nuanced and varied emotional being. It's been 20 years in the making. Many life events! Many relationships! Several pets! Sure, as I said, I can be rigid and locked-in to certain physical routines and take great comfort in expected outcomes, especially when pleasurable or tied to feelings of safety and/security, like for example sleeping, but that doesn't mean the beat-up, floppy, sunken-in mattress represents anything specific about who I am as a person or how I'm getting on. It was just time! Because of how it was depressing! I mean that literally!

And once every year or two, you rotate it so you're sleeping on a new part of it, even though you know you're just causing a depression on the other end. And even as much as you'd like to flip it over entirely, with the pillow-top technology, you can't really, so rotate all you want, you know deep down you're limited to existing on the same surface, tidally locked, where every rotation is just another step toward the inevitable future rotation where the same circumstances play out again and again in a space, while technically differing, is functionally and materially indistinguishable. It feels new, but in the end, for all your efforts, no matter how you feel in the moment, you're weighing a thing down to the end of its design-life and incrementally toward its eventual entropic scattering into atomic nothing.

Ah shit. I almost made it to the end.

Hold The Underwear!

My first instinct is to go "see, I told you last week shit was going to get in-a-bad-way weird," but that's hard to take any credit for. It doesn't even qualify as prognostication when there are really only less than four likely outcomes and all of them are directly related to the same people and the same impulses. My bold prediction was that "something will happen!" and I guess we can be relieved it was only yet another late night talk show host getting summarily fired and not, like, an act of violent retribution. Yes, we're down one Jimmy, but the basic rule of late-night TV for the last couple of decades is we stock Jimmys so deep, you never really run out. Things are a little more dire now as we've only got the one Jimmy left, but he's taken steps to anchor and aluminum-clad himself against the battering of the growing storm, for the low-low cost of his basic human dignity.

Kimmel was ostensibly fired for saying insensitive and outrageous things about the Charlie Kirk killing, but it's not even below the surface where we see the issue isn't so much murder as it is merger. Murder is an A-1 problem that warrants no defense. But side by side with the Stephen Colbert thing, the suggestion emerges that the exact same people--the Trumpified FCC--finds points of leverage to lean on corporate interests caught in delicate negotiations for which they need federal approval, then attaches the string tied to the back of the suit-jacket of the very public comedian they don't like, resulting in a yoink off the stage. This is a very cynical analysis, I know, but it starts to look a little bit like the murder of Charlie Kirk is being deployed as a cover in the Kimmel "suspension" to avoid the awkward, muffled indefensibility of the Colbert cancellation. Congratulations I suppose to the Nexstar people, whoever they are, and to the Walt Disney Corporation for their act of radical compliance. Everyone denies this and all is couched in the right number of broadcast-safe allegedly-s. It's also a shallow analysis, but that's what makes it seem somewhat compelling: I'm not actually capable of a deep analysis as the business of corporate law isn't really one of the topics I know anything meaningful about. If it were a category on Jeopardy, I'd still well clear of it. I'd go for "Potent Potables" first and I don't even drink. One of the answers is reliably to do with sherry, whoever she is. But if I can cobble this chain of events together, we can't even deign to call it "underhanded." It's pretty openly handed.

It's also not novel or interesting (and yet here I go!) to notice that the loudness and brazen-ness of the perpetrated act ends up kind of being the point. The first Trump administration was hampered by professionals who knew what they were doing monkeying up the works by insisting on actually doing the jobs for which they were ostensibly hired. Inevitably, they would be fired for competence, or to put it another way, for not offering the most full-throated defense for an insane and reckless idea by the idiot Boy President when asked about it within a half mile of a microphone. On the way out, the president would make sure we all knew they were useless, backstabbing weasels who didn't deserve any level of employment and the fact that he failed to notice that before literally all of them were hired in the first place, well, that just proves how sneaky and sinister they were.

Now the most raging, virulent, audacious incompetence is not only excused but praised as long as the person doing it remembers to extol--as loudly as possible!--the courage and virtue of their boss. The fireable offense they could commit would be to stammer in public when questioned about the work they do. That's the old model, where when pointedly questioned by a lawmaker or a journalist, a functionary caught in a lie or not able to explain away a deficiency or a public fuck up mews and burbles and eventually crumbles, and that's the scandal. Recent testimony in Congress by FBI Director Kash "Krash Out" Patel and RFK "I'll Kill As Many As Your Children As It Takes To Keep Them Safe" Jr. shows that the new model is not only to defend the indefensibility of their records, but it's to SHOUT DOWN ANGRILY those who dare question. If you're wondering how committed they are to this course of action, think of what it takes for someone with RFK Jr.'s voice to actually shout.

That's the line now: we must be outraged, and the source of the outrage itself is irrelevant, so long as it is correctly performed in public. In the short term, it makes everything feel empty and hopeless, as if everything is an edifice and no building, like the rebuilt decoy version of Rock Ridge from the climax of the 1974 historical documentary Blazing Saddles. In the end there, the forces of cynicism and evil and Harvey Korman were defeated; the main difference now is there's no obvious Cleavon Little figure to save us, even though we don't deserve it.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

OK, I don't even want to write today, not because I can't think of anything, which is my normal point of departure as far as procrastination goes. In the guise of "looking for inspiration" I'll be eight tabs deep into an internet rabbit hole about the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world or the post-Laverne & Shirley career of the guy who played The Big Ragoo. Turns out that guy died just a few years ago and he wasn't even 70! Well, at least we know Lenny is still kicking around.

No, the problem is that there's too much inspiration. We've entered into one of those deranged periods where the content and the hot takes are so thick in the air it's impossible to tell which way to move, ever since right-wing political somebody Charlie Kirk was shot and killed yesterday.

As a person who writes a thing that is public, when the atmosphere becomes this saturated with a single subject, you become obligated, to a degree. This even counts when your "public" is a modest, retiring number of low-volume but of high-discernment and class (and well dressed and handsome, don't think I can't tell). That's enough to constitute and audience though, if we're quoting Jesus. To paraphrase Matthew 18:20, if two people show up, you gotta get the puppets out and do the whole show. But Jesus had it easy, he was a prop guy. Loaves, fishes, a whole-ass human-size cross and his big closer, the cave escape. It's a little hack in retrospect, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it still really plays in Branson, Missouri.

Me, in these heady days before I give up and start feeding prompts to an AI version of writer's autotune, I can't whip out a walk-on-water trick, I have to grind words. It feels too weird to ignore it, even though I couldn't really tell you who Charlie Kirk was beyond "right wing" and "not an elected politician" as recently as Wednesday morning. I couldn't tell you where he lived or what his voice sounded like or what platform he was on... I could probably draw him if you asked me to, but that's kind of cheating as they all have that same JD Vance-Ben Shapiro aesthetic of pasty brunette white dudes in poorly fitting clothes.

So do I have a take? I'm on paragraph five to tell you: not really. It was just a week ago I reiterated to you guys I didn't wish physical harm on anyone. That's a long-standing personal conviction I take pretty seriously, but ever since I heard about this yesterday while I was at work, since I'm not entirely off social media, I had to hear about how I, a Dirty Leftist, revel in this stuff and DEFINITELY a) knew who Charlie Kirk was, b) really super hated him! because of all the truths he did!; and c) celebrated his violent death in front of hundreds of unsuspecting people.

Since then I've done really the minimal amount of research, admittedly from probably the least sympathetic sources like The Guardian to orient myself, but it immediately became too depressing to continue. I haven't developed anything. It's a liberating thing when you realize you're definitively the wrong guy to ask about a thing.

Really, what it came down to was this: as soon as I heard about it, I freaked out a little. He didn't seem like a pleasant or admirable person, but I wish he hadn't been shot, for his sake, for the sake of the witnesses, for the sake of his family and for my own. I had to reawaken the group chat with my three GenZ adult sons as the anxiety compulsion ordered me to tell them to keep their heads on a swivel, partially because this is a reminder that no open space is ultimately safe in this country from random gun violence, and because the charged atmosphere felt like a green light to people who have been waiting, engines revving to red-lining, for the word GO to get out and do some really heinous shit to "evil leftists" who will finally--finally! we're certain it was them!--did the thing they've been fantasizing about for ages.

This is even though we currently don't know the shooter. And we don't know the motivation. This would not be clear if you were watching Fox News. They killed him because they couldn't shut him up. None of them will say who they is, but I'm less worried that it's specifically me and my tragic, stubborn leftism and more that one of us will be at whatever public event at which they choose to exact their ritual of blood-extraction payback. Just because they won't be shooting at me or my kids doesn't mean was can't be shot.

A faceless they is effectively all faces. The only reprieve any of us got from this incidence of murder is that the assailant only fired once and no one else was maimed or killed. I have no confidence that will be the case next time.

Jesus. See, I told you I didn't want to write about this. Nothing good can come out of peer-pressuring yourself.

I Don't Want To Go On The Cart

I want to say up front: I feel fine.

I also want to acknowledge that, as a non-public figure with about the same socio-cultural profile as Jeff Dobsky (you don't know him) and Sandra Gilmartin (you saw her once coming out of a dry cleaner in a strip mall by your parents' old house in like 2004-2005, something like that), or many other people whose names I could also make up, but would have the exact same relevance to the general public that I do. The fact that they're invented and published here, ironically, makes them immediately actually more interesting than me and more internet-searchable, so there, I've just created two of my betters out of thin electronic air.

I was about to make a joke like "there are debilitating diseases that are more well known than I am," but then I realized that's probably a good, solid pillar of a functioning public health system and less of a commentary on my notoriety. If I were better known than, say, herpes, we'd all be in a huge amount of trouble. And probably a lot itchier.

Besides, it's not a great time to take shots at public health as an idea. The ground there is a bit shaky at the moment.

But it's not just because I'm a completely anonymous, faceless* public non-entity that you have no cause to be alarmed about my health, but more specifically, I'm not a) the president nor am I b) 286 years old, nor also c) completely devoid of any habits normally consistent with prolonging or preserving life.

None of these, of course, are true of Donald Trump, a near-enough-as-makes-no-difference octogenarian living on a diet of saturated fat deep fried in other saturated fats, aspartame and human grievance and whose idea of exercise is whatever unmeasurable amount of effort it takes to push the golf cart pedal enough to make it go. Admittedly, he does that a lot, but I feel confident expressing my doubts that he does it at a rate that would result in any kind of cardiovascular benefit.

Of course if I were a principled and ethical journalist on the level of a Jake Tapper, unhindered by secondary or conflicting interests, I would have definitely been locked in over the developing story this past weekend of Donald Trump's mysterious lack of public activity and all the gathering signs of physical/medical degeneration or distress. Apparently (and I missed this because I was outside, as the kids say, touching grass over the holiday long weekend) this developed into a whole buzz online and in the media around Trump's health including speculation that he had actually died, to the point where the president, apparently exactly as aware of this as I was, was pushed to speak about it from his position as a non-dead person this week.

Not only was I busy, I think I just missed it because "old person is old and has old-person stuff going on" is not much of a story, so it all just flew under my radar. Also the internet is the internet, so depending on the media I'm seeing it in, "the president might be dead" as a phrase wouldn't even necessarily register for me on, like, twitter or bluesky or whatever. That's old-school interrupt the Sunday morning infomercial broadcast kind of news if it were actually happening. Even while indirectly trying to (as I was), I wouldn't have been able to escape it.

Trump has issues. This is not new. This is also the place where, if I were a total hack, I'd be making "if he went into decline how could we even tell?" or "he can't die, the evil ones last forever" kind of half-joke remarks. But I'm not that lazy, or rather I am cursed with enough self-awareness to be embarrassed by those particular laziness tracks. All I'll say is I've never really wished harm on anyone, include Donald Trump, and not just because I already know explicitly how much JD Vance sucks. I wish the same thing I wish for Joe Biden and his health journey: independent of my judgement or opinion, an outcome commensurate to what he deserves. Read that how you want.

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*not literally, I do have a face. If I were literally a faceless guy, you probably would have heard of me.

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.