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.