Defense Condition

I hate that all of these posts for the past [checks calendar] SEVEN WEEKS? Hang on, it's only been seven weeks?! Jesus Christ, I'd have bet a body part (and one of the innie ones too, the ones that do stuff) it had been at least nine months since the inauguration. I've never had morning sickness, but I imagine all this nausea and weeping like I've got a hormonal imbalance is something akin to what pregnancy feels like. At the end I don't have to pass a human through any of my orifices, but I'd try it if it meant a break from all the rest of all this shit.

What I was going to say was: I hate that all of these posts for the past SEVEN FUCKING WEEKS have been updates and then updates to the updates, but I'm not going to apologize for it again, it's just how it's going to be. I'm still gainfully employed, still allegedly having my lifestyle funded by tax moneys, but weirdly we've moved past the feeling of terrifying imminence and immediate alarm into... something else.

Don't get me wrong, the threat is still the threat. They're still pinging around between agencies and bonking people on the head in a largely incoherent and maximally catastrophic way, if you'll allow the adorable verb choice "bonking" here to describe something akin to the Allied firebombing of Dresden during World War II. It's a confusing metaphor considering who is on which side, and of the two which is the one doing raised-arm definitely-not-Nazi salutes in public fora they know are being televisually recorded, but this is a post-sense, post-rationality age. Even the metaphors are going to be scrambled and shot through with confusing but unmistakably fascist allusions and references.

The beginnings of the assault on federal workers specifically and on the concept of laws in general have resulted in some pretty standard anxiety. To be expected considering both the circumstances and my track record as a Nervous-American. All the attendant physiological reactions to overbearing, interjecting, status quo threatening events are bound to show up in a way that is both familiar and (just by their nature) intolerable in the moment: chest tightness, heavy breathing, restlessness, pacing, intrusive preoccupation, shaky hands, disrupted sleep, irritability... old friends, all of them. The kind of old friends who show up on facebook after you thought you'd forgotten about them and only really want to know if you wife is single yet.

But as I said, it's been weeks now. A full-blown panic episode isn't really sustainable for an extended period of time, so I had a conversation with some other similarly afflicted people in my workplace and we all agreed that we'd all transcended to a space past regular anxiety. What is there, you may wonder? Where do you go when your body can't sustain the massive redlining energy output to be freaked the fuck out all the time? Here are the most popular options:

1) The random spikes. This is the one where your body makes a strategic decision to turn the base anxiety setting down so you get the impression that you can function, but reserves the right to crank that dial back to 11 at any arbitrary time it feels like it. Ideally this will not be while driving or doing an appendectomy or performing oral sex. In any of those cases, the other people involved are bound to take it the wrong way. Luckily for me, this only really happens while I'm sleeping; waking up screaming at 4 am is rarely the best choice, but the only victims tend to be me and possibly the cat.

2) Simmering rage. This isn't really a let-off as it's still pretty exhausting. Even at the low-heat setting, the calories are still required to maintain the burn. And if you're doing it all day, well, god help everyone around you and their choices of words, tone or how their turn indicator gets used.

3) Full nihilism. This is one of the "off button" modes and probably the least damaging in the short term. But deciding nothing matters and consequences are for losers isn't a sustainable life strategy either, especially if you're doing something like driving, an appendectomy or oral sex. There are times for which an appreciation for human life and happiness as a concept come in handy.

4) Nervous exhaustion collapse. The other "off button" mode, but this is an extreme, involuntary one. This is the one where your friends and/or family get to start making some life choices on your behalf in the short term. Maybe work up a list of instructions and preferences in advance, otherwise you're going to end up with a freezer full of soups and casseroles from people who mean well but don't know what else to do. At least that way you get some soups you actually like.

5) Depression. So grateful this isn't an option for me (or at least hasn't been so far), but it's a real danger for some friends of mine as part of their experience of emotional turbulence. I don't have much to say about it except I can do a decent pozole if it comes to that.

Right now, I'd set myself closest to Option 3, with intermittent periods of Option 2. I'm incredibly fortunate that other things in my life are actually going pretty well for the first time in a long time. While my insurance lasts, I'm doing all my doctor appointments as fast as possible and so far, I'm an otherwise healthy-ish 50-year-old man. You take the good news where you can find it, like hooray, I'm going to live a long time to see the consequences of all this play out fully. I'd consider that in all of its potentialities, but that feels like a surefire recipe to graduate to Option 4.

A Different Drum

Cardinal Rule Number 1 about any sort of social interaction: never tell anyone about your dreams. They're nonlinear, you don't remember all of it anyway, they skew into the absurd and, ultimately, they mean either nothing at all or something hyper-specific to your experience alone. The paradox is, of course, because they are of you and for only you, it's almost impossible for you, a prisoner of your own subjectivity, to find them anything but endlessly fascinating. So it seems like it would stand to reason that the conjurations of your recalibrating, processing, recuperating, subconscious mind would be humanly interesting as the expressions of the super-sensory super-ego in repose strings together light and sound like a little narcissist auteur, a homunculus Francis Ford Coppola projecting impressionist images against the inside of your snoring skull, when really what you're doing is describing what happens to your brain when it's on screensaver mode. It's not that people don't care,* it's that they're convinced their own dreams are the exception to the rule, not your stupid brain seizures.

Cardinal Rules Number 2 through 30 all have to do with fantasy football and sports betting, but those should be so glaringly obvious they don't need underlining. I say should be because my children are all GenZ straight young adult men and somehow, these are the things that come at you, projectile, like vomit, but less welcome.

All that said, and I'm not sure what number this gets, but there's only so many times you can complain about the same thing before you become the nuisance. Every group has its Diego Downer, just dying for someone to make the mistake of delivering the unforgivable prompt "How's it goin'?" Then comes the big wind-up sigh and the heavy "Well..." before you get regaled with the regalia. It's almost always about romantic misadventure, with the same ill-matched person over a completely unjustifiable period of time, over and over again, and all you want to do is scream "dude, I don't care what she told you, Bumble is not the appropriate place for her to meet a new mixed doubles pickleball partner," but the safer thing to do is just slowly be more and more "busy" when Diego wants to hang out, hopefully before you have to think of a good excuse to RSVP in the negative for the inevitable destination wedding.

That's not what I want this space to become between myself and my bordering-on-half-dozen readership, but goddammit, I've got this version of Diego's girlfriend and he's the richest person in the whole stupid world. And he's OBSESSED WITH ME. I would break up with him right now and never think about him again, but he keeps following me around and won't stop talking about me to all his friends (the international news media). So I guess I'll keep complaining about the same thing over and over again until one of us is finally rid of the other.

But paradoxically, I'm sort of OK with the idea of drawing it out too. In the meantime, I'll just have to pretend I'm not listening to him and keep my health insurance. It'll be exhausting though, I know. He doesn't seem to know Cardinal Rule 31 which has to do with trying to talk to people while infused with enough ketamine to kill a friend.

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*It is.

Depresh Mode

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone Gets Arm Bands and 3D Glasses

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

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

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

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

Bury It and Rise Above

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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*professionally speaking, I mean. Perverts.

Anti-Comedy

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

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

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

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

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

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