Old Dog

Oh hey, it's you, you're back for your second week at the gym. You must really be serious about your New Years resolution. Good for you.

Don't worry about those meatheads over there. They get defensive about their equipment at this time of year. They're used to, like, July when it's just the fellas in the free weights area. I keep telling them nobody thinks it's homoerotic, but I think that just makes them more self-conscious. It's a vicious cycle I haven't figured out how to break yet. It's not that they're being unwelcoming, they just don't know how to express their sensitivity. I wouldn't take it personally.

I don't really overlap with those types that much as I just stick to the scheduled classes. I'm not much of a self-starter, so I need an instructor shouting at me. If I were going to get on any of the machines, it would be the treadmills, but the way people are packed in this time of year, I always end up next to a woman I don't know, which makes me self-conscious. Everyone is sweaty and vulnerable and under-dressed (appropriately), so I automatically feel very aware of the space I take up. It would be easier if I were a gay man I guess, that would really free up a lot of real-estate for me.

Anyway, I don't want to overstep, sorry to be talking so much. I've been taking these boxing classes for a like a decade-plus. No, I've never sparred or hit anybody, that feels too much like competition. I know, the gym has a whole octagon ring as part of the gimmick of the branding, but I think for liability reasons, they don't want the general membership going at it hammer-and-tongs in the middle of a Wednesday evening. Besides, if you punch people, they tend to try to punch you back, which doesn't appeal to me much. I think the opportunity for those days are well behind me. If I want to get woozy, I'll just stand up too fast from my recliner at home, haha.

I just saw you were struggling with your hand wraps, but you didn't ask for help, so I'll leave you to it. Oh... yes? OK, well, yes, start with the loop around your thumb... label on the inside, it'll matter at the end... OK, now make sure it's tight, but you don't want your fingers to turn purple... and don't forget between the fingers... yeah, that's pretty... wait, watch me do... is that your right or left... oof, you know what, I'm sorry, I can never do this for someone else, it's like teaching someone how to tie a tie. Except with these there's no chance of accidentally strangling yourself, haha.

I think I saw the instructor heading this way. I like her, she's not overly technical. Once we start, just remember to... you know what, you'll figure it out, you didn't ask, sorry. OK have fun. And hang in there! The other newbies will start falling out in the next few weeks and we won't have to share bags anymore. Don't worry, I'll try to keep my sweat on my side, haha. Sorry that was kind of gross. You'll do fine. Ope, she's putting on her microphone headset, here we go...

A Lamentable Fire

First and most obviously, a detailed update on my gastrointestinal status after last week's debacle: I am fairly confident now that it wasn't a virus, it was low-level food poisoning, probably from a recently opened Chipotle location, where we picked up food en route to my son's pace to watch his beloved Oregon Ducks get absolutely atomized by An Ohio State University. If it were a virus, my appetite would have come roaring back after the bout of fever and sleepiness, but it's been very slow going with regard to eating and other post-eating functionalities I will demurely decline to detail for you, in the subsequent week. Suffice it to say there's been even more ginger ale consumed.

The details of my personal digestive tract have failed to make the broadcast news as everything since then has been dominated by the fact that Southern California, where I live, is once again an active hellscape of flames and randomized uncertainty. For clarity, I want to say that while I live in SoCal, I do not live in LA, so I'm watching events unfold from the safety of remote news feeds, like most everyone else. But as the Santa Ana winds continue to test the grip strength of my house's terra cotta roof tiles for the third or fourth straight day, it's a very there-but-for-the-grace-of-Yahweh sort of feeling. We did this dance out here as recently as this past July, when I watched with many of my neighbors from the top of a hill as helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft made circuits between a nearby lake and the chaparral brush right behind our houses to drop load after load of water. We're lucky that the wind direction and convenient location of the lake helped knock ours down pretty quickly and that the area burned (in that fire and in the much larger one a couple of miles away that started almost simultaneously) was pretty open and undeveloped. The ones in the Palisades and San Fernando Valley are already much larger and in the immediate vicinity of neighborhoods of varying densities, in difficult landscape way more conducive to fire than earthbound humans and their fire suppression.

From fifty miles away, my sense of empathy and fear grips like anxious nausea.* The hardest part about any of this is seeing snippets or hearing back second-hand (I'm not going anywhere close to indulging any of it by seeking it out, let alone willingly soaking in it) responses ranging from gleeful political point-scoring to the no-longer-appropriate-to-describe-as-"outlandish" conspiracy theorizing to the sadistic outright cheering for people to struggle, to suffer and die. Which is, I guess just where we are as a country. It wasn't that long ago that we started saying "die in a fire" as a hyperbolic way to close out a ranting thought aimed at people with whom you disagreed (primarily in print), but we're at the point now where the performative rhetoricism of it has dwindled down to an imperceptible scant. The lived reality now is that between a persistent (even dominant) environment of misinformation and the by-the-day improvement in the capabilities for deep fakes and large language models, there's more out there that isn't real than is. I'd take it more personally, but it's affecting the people perpetuating the lies in the areas affected by similarly scaled disasters as those of us out here on the ribbons and strands of Cultural Elitestan. In the latter cases I guess you sit back and root for the fires, in the former you go out and point guns at FEMA workers trying to help you.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we've been wondering what the definitional aspects of American culture would be once we didn't have the dirty commies to scream at/about anymore. For a while it really did look like the Forever War would be the paradigm, in the endless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many more countries could we add to the list as pointless drains for both American taxpayer dollars and international goodwill? Well, it turned out those couldn't last forever, so instead we've turned to our own class of Tech Bro, some homegrown, some illegally imported, to usher in a definitive age of monetized bullshit at the expense of, well, literally everyone, none of the stakes of which or actual cost we'll be clear about until it's far, far too late.

The image is a red, white and blue boxing glove, punching itself in the dick, forever.

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*OK, when you're recovering from food poisoning recovery, everything feels like nausea, so maybe a little lazy, but still not inappropriate

Punt

So as far as New Years Days go, on Wednesday, I didn't have to work, enjoyed the company of my lady-friend, went to watch a disastrous college football game with my oldest son on his fancy new TV in his fancy less-new apartment and I went for a brief hike (I typically avoid such things, but see, there was this girl...) and saw a flowing river at sea level in Southern California. Picture not included because I for some reason brought my wallet instead of my phone on this hike. I was ready if we stumbled upon some bush vendors, but alas, they remain mythical. But you know, I never thought I'd see the crazy river thing, so we will keep our optimism in place.

Day 2, well, slightly different story. Around 12:35 this AM I woke up with the grippers and a creeping ague. Since I'm still working from home while trying to build up my leave hours at my new-ish job, I showed up (down the hall in my spare room office) and powered through, but I am now befevered, uncomfortable and exhausted.

This post then is going to be blessedly short as I have unchangeable plans to daintily sip ginger ale and fall asleep watching TV on the recliner, like the world's least successful alcoholic.

I had plans to lay out some ambitions for the year, but that will have to wait. I don't want to leave you hanging though, but the gist of it was: if in your life you get the chance to try, you should be Bootsy Collins.

For the moment I will have to settle for being one of those rose-beige Vampire Weekend kids until this Canada Dry puts my mojo back in place.

Stay safe out there. New year, new you, but viruses are out there thinking the same exact thing.

I Am Glad You Are With Me. Here, At The End of All Things.

Fifty-one Christmases is a lot of Christmases. It's enough to learn the hard lessons, like when you make a double batch of ginger-molasses cookies, the lie that it's "for the family Christmas Eve gathering" is such an obvious one, we don't even bother making it anymore. You smuggle the Ziploc bag of cookies into the party, squirrel them away where they're technically "out" for anyone to eat,* then feign disappointment when you smuggle them again on your way out the door. Gosh, I guess nobody likes them except me, you can say to yourself seven tea-saucer-sized cookies later in the course of 12 hours. It's weird since people specifically asked you to make them and bring them, as they do every year, but I dunno, maybe they got too full at dinner or whatever. Shame.

Honestly at this point, Christmas is on cruise mode. I know at some point there will likely be my kids settled farther away (even out of state, which seems unfathomable but California housing costs being what they are, we fathom) and grandkids complicating things once more, but the days of assembly and secrecy and the fashioning of magic on others' behalves are largely behind me. I don't think I've even done a Christmas tree since 2019 and I have to say, it feels like liberation. Yes, I have more inexplicable knee pain than I used to, but not everything associated with aging is a cost.

This is the time of year when the aging thing really kind of gets me, though, so I have to be vigilant. The letdown time between Xmas and the new year would be when the dread would close in, gray-white and sticky like a Dickensian fog, only more annoying when you think about how many electric cars are out there driving around in it. Being released from both hustle and/or bustle of the season is great, but it's one less distraction from the looming mathematical tyranny of the calendar ticking up one more year. They always make it seem scary that the Ghost of Christmas Future shows Scrooge his own headstone, right before he freaks out enough to turn his whole life around, but all that shows me is that this Scrooge character had no kind of inner life. Like his old ass had never conflated the ideas of Christmas and the inevitability of his own mortality before? Tell me you don't have a therapist without telling me you don't have a therapist.

It's the last post of the year, so I don't want to close on a down note. Except we're about four weeks away from another Trump inauguration, so down notes, well, they're kind of thick on the ground at the moment. There are some things I'm actively thankful for and looking forward to seeing in 2025. My kids are all happy and healthy, thriving and developing as young, independent adults, the last of whom will graduate college in June. My relationship is still young, but holds a lot more promise than I've experienced in a long time. I have a job that has a career track and a promise of crazy things like "raises" and "bonuses" that I couldn't have conceived of in the 17 years with my previous employer. If a mouse gets into my house, I have an undersized-yet-scrappy cat to stalk and murder it for me. So much to live for!

With the giant exception of Nov. 5, it's been a pretty good year. Zero percent of my parents died, which is something I couldn't have said in 2023, for example. Clouds have silver linings, but given how the weather has gone this year, I'm mostly basing that on the vaguest of memories and the axiomatic assurances of others.

Anyway, Happy New Year, everyone!

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*If they didn't want people in the home office down the dark hallway, they wouldn't have left the door mostly unlocked.

Felicitations

Doing some review of the last few weeks of blogs, it's all been pretty heavy, both in terms of content (America entering our Jump the Shark Era) and in terms of content (I can't think of a single defensible argument for eleven girthy paragraphs last week). Sure, the justification is there given the size of the historical moment, but one should have the self-awareness to understand the medium and why anyone might come here to read something. If you really wanted in-depth historico-political analysis by a flailing amateur, you could turn on cable news at any hour of any day. Or at least if you want that, you should probably get to it soon, before news is cowed into only being about unusual Christmas light displays or a strawberry that looks like Jesus.

To that end, I thought I would take this almost-last post of the year and, with inspiration from a YouTube video I saw, review my cat. This is in lieu of a list of stuff I read or watched because all I watched this year, well, was fucking YouTube. It's been stressful, OK? I'll do culture in 2025.

Cat

An evaluation

Date rage: 1 Sept through 19 Dec 2024. Call it a quarterly review.

Subject name: Socks*

Type of cat: Regular (like, not one of those freaky giant ones. Normal cat size, for human laps)

Quantitative Evaluation by category:

Coloration: 8/10. Technically a "tortoise-shell" type of American shorthair. Points off because, although her mottled pattern is excellent for camouflage, I've been given to understand that people call them "torties," which I cannot abide.

Physique: 6/10. Although she can look graceful and sleek, she's on the small side and, at over 2 years old, not likely to grow. As a result she comes across as fragile, which causes me to worry about her safety, which I do not appreciate.

Shedding: 10/10. Sheds almost not at all, weirdly. The only pet I've ever had that was allowed in my bedroom, let alone my bed. And not because I live alone and compensating for the seeping darkness of a home once enlivened with children's laughter, I mean just because she doesn't make the comforter look like shag carpeting. Value here cannot be exaggerated.

Vocalization: 8/10. Was very quiet at first, but now speaks primarily when spoken to, meaning we can have sorts of "conversations" as she responds, though honestly the subject matter is limited. Her positions on things like politics or global warming are embarrassingly underdeveloped, though I take responsibility for being the one exposing her to most media. Points off for being very begrudging with the purrs. They happen, but rarely and never for more than a few minutes.

Temperament: 6/10. Frickin' scared of every goddamned thing. She's used to me now, but it took a lot of work (me sitting perfectly still for hours at a time, which is luckily one of my primary skills). Three-plus months in and I'm still the only person she'll approach. Her reticence has been tough to break her out of as I'm the only person she sees normally. But even regular visitors (I have those!) send her scurrying for cover. I get it, she's small and the world is big, but there's really no need to panic and scramble away like you're Indiana Jones running from the boulder just because I'm walking toward you in a corridor. Chill the fuck out, honestly.

Personality: 7/10. I've heard many times "ooh, a tortie, torties are spicy" from people who I now hate. What they are trying to convey is that cats with this coloring tend to be combative, unaffectionate or even aggressive. But it's a coloring, not a species or even a breed. Her sister at the cat rescue was a regular tabby, it's just an expression of superficial genes. She's a regular cat. She's curious, but also cautious. The fact that she's combative and not that affectionate (or at least wasn't at first) I'm sure are coincidences.

Maintenance: 5/10. Honestly, a five is about the best any creature is going to do when what we're really talking about here is volunteering to be obligated to handle their feces. Do not enjoy. But she doesn't eat a lot. Could be worse.

Interactivity: 6/10. This one I really had to think about. She's made big strides. She annoys the shit out of me in the mornings, mewing like she wants something but keeping her distance. And she wakes me up at night now, crawling all over me when I'm trying to sleep, typically in the small hours before my alarm goes off for work. She doesn't like to play much as she gets suspicious and either flighty or defensive pretty fast. But luckily a cat that leaves me alone a lot kind of suits what I was looking for anyway: something to point to if the neighbors worried about hearing me talk to myself.

Overall score: 56/80, or 70%

For someone who was a dog guy for 50 straight years, this is a remarkable number. A bare C-minus might seem harsh, but I don't want to inflate the score in case she reads this at some point and reaches the conclusion she doesn't have any room for improvement.

I will continue to monitor thorough the next year and let you know how she gets on. I will go out on a limb and say we should allow ourselves to be cautiously optimistic.

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*I hope you know me well enough to realize I would never, under any circumstances, give my cat a name this banal. But I can't get her to sign the release forms, so I'm not taking any chances with online privacy issues going forward. So a pseudonym it is. This is the same reason I am not including her email address.

Long Division

Since probably 9/11 I'd say it hasn't been super easy to figure out where we are or where we're going as a society. Part of that is the terrorist attacks of that day kind of scrambled everything, kicking up an obscurant cloud of dust that made everything difficult to discern, and would maybe give you cancer eventually.

Yeah, maybe you're against war in principle, but if we don't do something about the situation in Afghanistan... etc. Normally we can count on actual American politicians to help clarify things eventually by doing something monumentally stupid or in the narrowest and most obvious of self-interests, like for example invade a whole nother country completely uninvolved in the threat either real or perceived, or run an entire national political campaign around conflating being against tax cuts for the wealthy with being pro-terrorist.

So the roots of the neighbor-as-enemy political present aren't hard to discern, but it doesn't make it any easier to navigate. I've been an advocate for a saner and more sensible evaluation of our cohabitants, but it's pretty hard to do when all the ones with whom I disagree seem kinda fucking stupid. Like, I told you I wanted to be nice, why do you have to still believe bad things? I'm not sure why they don't listen. Idiots.

The election was a huge fucking bummer, pretty dispiriting for those of us who had some hope restored when Trump got his ass absolutely handed to him in 2020. It seemed at the time to be a full rebuke of a fluke election four years prior, where one dummy accidentally became president after getting whomped in the popular vote, who didn't really want the job, farted his way through it and fizzled in the face of a real international crisis. All of it was utterly predictable and ended the correct way, with a loser who hates losing getting his face smashed in, in the most public way possible. The narrative was correct.

In the last month, we've had to deal with the whiplash effect of not only the same loser not losing, but squeaking out a popular vote plurality. There's very little left to hang your indignation on anymore; all the irate, animating RESIST impulse of January 2017 is blobbily, wheezily absent. Maybe it really is just too soon, seeing as it's only been like 40 days, but over in our cozy bubble on Bluesky, the tone is way less "BURN DOWN THE PATRIARCHY" and a lot more <<sound of four domestic light beers cracking open in succession>> "...these fucking people..."

But nothing is as settled as it seems. There's not really a "mandate" to do anything since, as I said, this was an incredibly narrow win, historically speaking. Since Republicans also hold the House and Senate and the Supreme Court (we're well past the point of pretending it's not just as partisan a body as the legislature), it's more a window for a specific type of action, sort of like the window of action the Visigoths had when they entered Rome through the Salarian Gate in 410. Thieves who enjoy thieving on the mass-est of mass scales are about to all get their hands on the most money-rich thing in all of human history, the United States government. It's a complete capitulation to corporate interests, the kind of thing Ronald Reagan probably had in his mind whenever he had his last orgasm.

But at the same time, however, there's this one hyper-privileged dipshit Ivy League sociopath out there shooting one of the leaders of one of these extractive post-national human misery farms and... people seem to be not only OK with it, but cheering about it? The dissonance has caught me off guard a little. Are we a nation of "the government should be run like a business" dickheads who will be the death of us all, choosing to trust the people whose only defining feature as fully formed adults has been the avoidance of taxation, or are we an abused and tired conglomeration of raging proles ready to flip the table on this rigged card game, pushed by circumspection and want into literal bloodlust?

I read the thing from the NY Times I linked above about Trump voters and... yeah, it sounds like we're both. Part of the reason I'm not as discouraged as I should be is that it doesn't feel like a movement has broken out eager to hand over our livelihood chickens to a gaggle of suspiciously fox-shaped overseers, it's more just the anomaly of Trump. I'm finally past trying to understand why (probably because this was the last election he'll ever be able to run in), but nothing sticks to this fuckwad. If you don't actually have any principles and that is actually who you are, to your core, people will feel free to project whatever principles they have to you, even if they are entirely contradictory. People believe contradictory things all the time, it's more normal than not. A president with no ideas in a period of high uncertainty starts to make a lot of sense. Just to be clear, that is not the same as "a good idea."

The reason Trump is an anomaly is because he's not faking it. He really, genuinely believes nothing. Yet other people with no discernible principles--your Ted Cruzes, your JD Vances--walk around surrounded by a repellant stink cloud of inauthenticity. You can get elected locally, but understand that everyone actually hates you. Big donors understand you'll do exactly what they want and people will vote for you because you're Not One Of Those Others in a two-party system so, sure, they pop up. 

The challenge for Democrats is it's a mashed together party of small ideas. You have to represent something--at least say you believe in something--to get somewhere, but not so much that you make yourself unattractive to big-money donors, whom you still need because American national electoral politics are a pageant of fiscal obscenity with no end of the upward spiral in sight. We don't have the luxury of fielding a very pudgy empty suit, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The next Democrat to win (and there will be another one, I know people forget that time does march forward and the seeming inevitability suggested by the present has always proved to be a lie eventually) will have to be someone from outside the Clinton-Obama-Biden circle (we've spent them all on a combination of age and failure) who can talk a good game and mobilize some of the spite and marginalization we all experience way down, with shaky arms and legs, trying to hold this whole stupid financial pyramid up for the benefit of a tiny few way up top.

I'm never in favor of shooting anyone, even a healthcare CEO, and I don't want to be one of these people who say "killing is bad, but...", however it is edifying seeing what people respond to. The next four years are a real opportunity to build opposition to an active and unapologetic kleptocracy already forming, with no effort to hide either its composition or intent. If we can't get people behind that, we deserve to lose. Again.

Ink-Stained Wretches

If my research is correct (and it's 2024, so you know exactly what I mean when I say "research"),* we're about 16 years short of the 600th anniversary of the invention of moveable type and the printing press. And I have to say, it's been a pretty solid run!

I could be pedantic and argue that the real innovation was the moveable type and not the press itself (printing presses already existed), but I'm less interested in the effects than the processes, and no it's not because I don't understand processes in general, it's just that I specifically went to school to study a subject where one could plug in knowledge gaps with sophistry, word-play and the structures of rhetorical argument. You're just dealing with the wrong type of nerd for all that math shit.

It's not weird or really coincidental that within less than a century of moveable type, literacy spun out of the control of the aristocracy and the church, reshaping societies starting with something as simple as demand for access to the Bible in the local language. These demands had existed before, resulting typically in (at best) circumscription and censure but often also the horrific maiming and torturous death of the perpetrators. With that you get things like a whole-ass Reformation, a Renaissance, an Enlightenment, all movements away from (purposely or not) an orderly control of a pyramidally shaped society to a much flatter sort of arrangement where those at the top were always more in arm's reach of the ones at the bottom.

The link between print and democratization is not to be undersold or diminished. Nothing leaked out of hegemonic control faster than an idea, committed to paper, in the hands of one person just long enough to absorb it, even if the paper itself were destroyed, lost or seized. With print you get education of the masses, a middle class, labor organization, suffragettes, civil rights movements, entire subcultures of novelty and resistance both manifesting and understanding themselves on their own terms, impervious to the pressures of norms, conformity or both.

A piece of paper is an irreducible thing, a transmitter of an idea but also a tool, for dissemination of complex challenges to seemingly intractable political oppression or just long consideration as someone figures out for the first time what sound the "A" character makes.

Sure, Johannes Gutenberg smashed open Pandora's jar, but the weight of the troubles alighting collected most heavily on those in the loftier places, with farther to fall and more to lose. Those of us who remember the early internet felt the Gutenbergian thrill of seeing it happen again, the flash-fire of an idea leaving one mind and arriving at any other in the world in a literal instant, in things like dial-up BBS communities, where the world was whatever you wanted it to be. The ethos carried over somewhat to the centralization of the impulse in services like Prodigy or AOL, sacrificing the DIY scrape-by and ephemeral aesthetic for something more reliably convenient, slickly packaged and constant, at the cost of some intrusion of advertising and the horrifying idea that now it was accessible enough that your mom could actually use it.

Then a whole swirl of shit happened:

-The death of the idea of news as a loss-leading public good in favor of a for-profit model odiously perfected by Fox News

-The undermining of traditional media as a resource for basic information in favor of instant-gratification sources in social media, especially facebook and twitter

-The collapse of traditional media in an entertainment-and-profit environment as "information" and "news" become qualitatively synonymous.

-The arrival of private equity as a predatory force stripping newsrooms for parts, with no interest in the output, mission or societal value of the thing they are buying

-The necessary turn to big-money individuals to take on news organization or social media as loss-leaders again.

The last move burnished up people like Jeff Bezos for a second as saviors of a dying industry, but the problem with corporate capture is the "corporate" and "capture" parts. You can play the pro-democracy savior right up until you decide not to, and we all get to see at once that it's been too late since about 1997. The "no real choice" option as the standard bearers of old media were dying means the mastheads and bylines are now subject to the capriciousness and idiocy of worm-headed moguls who have too much money to be told "actually, that's a bad idea" by anyone around them since they first breached about $50 million in net worth. There's a reason "brain rot" was named Oxford's word of the year.

Now what we've got are people at the bottom having their ideas being dictated to them by people at the top. We're back to the pyramid shape again, but in a more literal way: a pharaoh-and-slaves model of building. The moveable type is being deployed in a way that's designed to get the slaves to thank pharaoh for the work.

This post hasn't been that funny, but it's all getting to be a little too much with the genuflection and ass-kissing since Election Day. At least it's now all explicit. The only thing we can really say with confidence is that when things really start going to shit, the press' take is going to be: why did the Democrats let this happen?

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*actually I guess I should clarify since Wikipedia only qualifies as "research" on its own for the apolitical and/or lefties. If you're on the right, "research" means nodding along to whatever Joe Rogan just credulously said "what, really? That doesn't sound right to me, we shouldn't be doing that..." to in response to a guest asserting, like, trans kids somehow deplete global food supplies or Jell-O gives you AIDS.