The Most Important Least Important Thing

You don't often get a shot to redo a mistake of missing The Most Important Thing In The World. It's the premise of a lot of movies of course, but they all involve mysticism or time travel or some woo-woo Hollywood hand-waving that somehow manages to get fully grown legal adults' consciousness puppeting the bodies of their former selves that may or may not be over the age of consent. There's a strong level of creep going on in the barely-sub subtext of it, but if you're Jennifer Garner or Tom Hanks, a boatload of personal charisma can paper over a lot of that.

Wait, those were both movies about kids jumping into the bodies of adults, not the other way around. Way creepier and in no way helpful to my metaphor, but I didn't really realize how extensive that subgenre of body horror comedies was. Huh. Hollywood is disgusting.

See, the 20-year-old me from 1994 has found himself transported to the body of me at 51 years old in 2025. First of all: yuck. What's with all this extra body hair? And who said it was OK for me to get this fat? Note to future-future me: just because "you can always move up to XXL T-shirts" doesn't mean that should be a goal, you know? But alternately, hey, you found a way to make a career out of majoring in history that wasn't law school or barista, good for us! Implausible, but encouraging!

In 1994, the international extortion racket and pirate cartel known as FIFA made the insane decision to put their signature event, the World Cup,* in the United States. It seems absurd now as we have the televisual rights for essentially every top-tier national league in the world (and some of the lower tier ones) in this country, but at that time, I will remind you that soccer was, with grotesque and inexcusable inaccuracy, labelled "gay." In 1980s-speak of course that means "things that threaten me because I do not understand them yet many other people seem to enthusiastically enjoy," which only mostly included actual homosexuality in this category. And the ones who used it the most viciously and vociferously turned out often to be just, as we would say today, manifesting.

Because of the money involved necessitating a high-profile rollout and ad push, and the fact that I was a college student with plenty of free time in the afternoons, I found myself dipping in to watch parts of matches from time to time. I couldn't even say that I watched that much (we were pretty sure about the epidemiology of "gayness" back then, and that's definitely one way to get it on you, by watching stuff other people might make fun of you for if they caught you in the act), or even all of the USA matches. The famous shock win over Colombia decided by an own-goal that eventually got Colombian player Andrés Escobar killed I heard about after the fact. And this happened at the Rose Bowl, like 30 miles from my house. I can't imagine what I was doing that seemed more important at the time, probably just busy trying to figure out how to wear my clothes backward.

And then they had a WHOLE WORLD CUP FINAL in the same place, just like a week or two later! An easy drive away! With mostly adequate parking! And I didn't even TRY to go!

Now, though, redemption is an option. In 2026 they're finally running it back. However, after really drinking the poison in 1998 where I think I watched every available match, the World Cup is probably my favorite thing. I love it more than any movie or book or anything else one might take in with their senses in their discretionary time. This week they've had the draw for the games and Team USA is playing several of them right here in SoCal again, this time at Fancy Landed Spaceship SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which I know from personal experience I can get to and return home in the space of a single day. It almost bothers me the level of compulsion that now exists in my being driving me to procure tickets to at least one of these matches.

Part of the reason it bothers me is I don't like feeling like something outside of me has control of my decision-making functions, but we are where we are, as far as that goes. I'm not going to choose not to be unreasonably excited about LITERALLY EVERYTHING, that's a pose, not a way to actually live. I'm pretty full on GenX when it comes to apathy and the allergy to earnestness, but even I have my limits.

The second part that bothers me is that my money is going to go to the most absurdly disgustingly brazenly openly corrupt international organization in the history of international organizations, which is saying something when we know the International Olympic Committee exists.

But I'm trapped. It's the thing I love the most, except maybe my children. Would I love my children less if they were involved in human trafficking, slave labor and the general immiseration of segments of the world population that would already show up pre-miserated? Probably, but you know, rest assured, the relationship would then be complicated. Like the way people who became adults in the 1970s now feel about Woody Allen films.

And that's about as much influence as we have in this world where basically everything has been corrupted. We get to feel conflicted about it. Make no mistake, I'm going to overpay for this ticket if I can get hold of one and I'm going to go, mostly because the next time the event rolls around this way, I'll likely be either too old or too dead for the steep rake of upper-deck stadium seats. So I'll take my second bite at the cherry here and let the moral dissonance ride. It's not like I haven't had a Chik-Fil-A sandwich since they were outed as being shitbirds. I've got some real practice at this rationalization thing.

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*We didn't have to call it the Men's World Cup yet as we were still laboring under the delusion that nobody would be interested in women's sports even though like 50% of households had tuned in to watch the ladies' figure skating final alone in the Olympics that year. Oh Lillehammer, you were wonderful.

I Feel Seen

I probably haven't been as careful as I could have been leading up to this point. Sure, I post anonymously and mix it up by including bits of true things that might have been zhuzh-ed for effect or even outright lies because I'm a seasoned enough writer to know aspects of my actual life aren't good readin' material. I'm just out here doing everyday stuff like everyone else. Humdrum mundanity abounds like the compounding aches and pains of progressing middle age, what medication I may or may not be on, what shows I'm watching on which streaming platforms, which shows you definitely need to watch ohmygod-how-have-you-not-seen-that-yet-it's-so-good, Australian rule football scores, that time I ate a diamond, how I've cut my average down to four bar fights per week and the dizzyingly graphic/borderline upsetting details of the sexual dynamics within my eight-person live-in polycule. Just normal stuff, yawn.

As careful as I've been (for your reading benefit!), I'm sure it's possible to piece together some of the actual aspects of my life, like how I very subtly over the course of the recent government shutdown and in a series of consecutive multi-hundred-word posts given the impression that I'm a worker in federal governmental employ somehow.

But haha, how could that be true, no way! Those jobs are super hard to get! That's a cushy life (as I've heard) basically free money for no work, where you can just fuck off and play golf or tennis during a work day. The jokes' on those federal workers, whoever they are, because tennis? That's actual effort, so much running! If I'm getting paid for not working but had to pick a sport to do instead of my not-work, I'm not taking one with a signature injury named after it, I'll tell you that. Also, with all that sweating, I'd be really threatening my reputation as an indolent layabout. Not worth it! Everyone knows the laziest athletes all play pickleball.

In the interest of maintaining my air of mystery and looking to protect myself better in the future, I won't confirm or deny if I'm a federal employee. Especially on a social media platform like this. Saying anti-Trump things on a site readable by anyone? That's how you get fired these days, that's what I've heard.

But you can ask yourself: is it still "social" media if literally no one is reading it?! My best defense--wily, sage, definitely on purpose--is having an audience that, when averaged out over the years, is statistically indistinguishable from zero. An almost null level of engagement sure feels like winning to me, no matter what my dad, teachers, ex-wife and therapist(s) used to tell me.

I'm a little worried though, as the dark corners might not stay so safely umbral these days. Now they can train AI to scour the internet--all of the internet, even these cobwebby parts nobody has ever looked at--for whiffing, acrid, burnt-cinnamon hints of baked dissent. Then I'd be found out! Done for! Activated!

I guess the answer is to make hay while AI is still bullshit. Our days here, just like my time in the federal job I DEFINITELY DON'T HAVE, are numbered.

A Day of Humble Gratitude

OK, so I totally forgot to post something yesterday on schedule, but traditionally, Thanksgiving is a day I "skip" by posting something short and punchy and definitely not evidence of compulsive behavior on my part. People need this. I'm doing a public service.

But as I've got people coming today, I'm not feeling 100% and I still have Thanksgiving dishes to finish doing, we honor tradition by cutting this off here. I leave you with a picture of US Olympic legend Jesse Owens racing a horse:

Life comes at you fast, people. Sometimes you find yourself in a position where you have to take a race vs a horse as a spectacle. Some of those times, though, you do beat the horse.

A Reverse Theodicy

It's getting to the point where I'm not certain there's an actual balance to be struck between being informed and being driven insane by the attempt to be informed. The problem is that the delivery systems are made of garbage just as potent/more potent than the content, like if you were in medical pain and the IV tube providing your morphine drip was made out of fentanyl. You only need one of those things in this circumstance, but you'd have to choose to overdose every time you elected to stick it in your veins. It's not even the medicine necessarily that is tainted, there's just no way to get to it without approaching the taint. The secondary imagery there was unintentional, but do with it what you will. I can only apologize.

Like all good lefty leftists, I'm on Bluesky more than anything for all my unclean "news," but I try to be cognizant when I'm scrolling that the dopamine is the point. I'm not dumb enough (anymore) to go sliding through the postings with the idea that I'm being in any way "informed" by what I'm ingesting. It's more about being surrounded with things I find soothing for a short period of time, even though I know the exercise is a) pointless and b) inherently dangerous. It's like taking a nice hot bath while trying to dry your hair with an electric blow-dryer at the same time.

It's gotten to the point where I can't really even tell if there's a "lot going on" week to week or day to day. If you follow the chatter, it sure feels like it's busy out there, but churning up the dark, sludgy sand at the bottom of the lake isn't the best or most productive way to spend a day at the lake. Like, what if I just didn't try to do that at all? I can elect for a certain amount of ignorance still, can't I? What is my (ostensibly civic-minded) curiosity going to merit me other than some cloudy water and hands and arms covered up to the elbow in lake goo? Who is benefiting in this scenario?

I'm doing a lot of imagery because I'm avoiding the actual topics out there with jags of goofy poesy as a procrastination/coping bit. I pay good money for therapy, I can cobble together some low-level self-awareness here and there.

But look, tell me which of these things is actually news:

• Dick Cheney died and a bunch of people went to his funeral.
• Trump called a female reporter "piggy" when he didn't like a question.
• Trump said Democratic some lawmakers should be executed for treason.
• There's an AI bubble that could/will crater the economy.
• A bill for the DoJ to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein passed almost unanimously.

That seems like a lot of stuff! But which one(s) of those items is/are a) information I need to maintain my status as an Informed Citizen responsibly participating in a functioning democracy; and which ones are b) brain worms coated in a slow-leeching, unholy pill jacket of psilocybin and e. coli? Like is it possible to find nuggets of useful truth generated and delivered by a Dedicated Bullshit Machine?

The argument could be made that the AI bubble thing and maybe the Dick Cheney thing are pieces of legitimate news that it would help to know if I wanted to have a not-instantly-embarrassing conversation with a random stranger.

Of course that's a false premise though, because you'd never talk to a random stranger in this day and age, would you? As soon as you get past the introductory pleasantries, you know you'd have to brace yourself for some level of actively disinformed conspiratorial nonsense. Or at least what used to pass for actively disinformed conspiratorial nonsense, which is now just shit that's on the CDC website's front page.

That's a good example though, because "your Center for Disease Control is encouraging you to watch your children die from preventable disease" is news you should know. Actionable to the point of life-saving, especially if you have vaccine-age children. Phew, I think we found the bar.

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.

Election Interference

Well, the world looks very different this Thursday, two days after the Marxist Dawn that was Election Day 2025. Wait, or maybe it wasn't an overture to the next act of American life opening into a dystopian hellscape of free public transit and law enforcement accountability, maybe it just went exactly like we all thought it would go and the correct response is a collective yawn? Apparently the answer lies somewhere in between those two positions. I can accept this, but I'm different. I learned this kind of mental and emotional dexterity in graduate school, where thousands of dollars in tuition, much of it taxpayer subsidized, were devoted to instilling the confidence to respond to any question, no matter how dense, contradictory or ultimately unanswerable, with a full-throated "well, it's probably somewhere in the middle." I can tell you it was way faster than actually trying to read any of those books they made me buy. Never let anyone tell you a humanities education doesn't impart any practical skills.

It's a real challenge in New York City these next two months as they have to stare down the possibility of understanding a confounding, unfamiliar status quo of a mayor neither already convicted of comically blatant corruption nor a loudly inscrutable weirdo. But there is a silver lining: we don't have to give a shit, really, because we (statistically speaking) don't live in New York City. For those of us who grew up outside the sound of Mike Francesa snoring into a radio microphone, this past Thursday's results were the wendepunkt we'd all be waiting for, though probably not in German. OK, probably in German for some of us, but just the real enthusiasts.

OK, we can give a little bit of a shit, as it's definitely a curiosity as far as object-lessons go. Sure, Mamdani came out firing, shouting into a microphone (which, I get it, sort of doesn't let the microphone do what it's designed to do, but he was excited, that should be allowed) and name-dropping Eugene Debs in his first sentence. And if I lived in New York City or Virginia this morning, I'd feel great this week as someone who at minimum maintains at least a Susan Collins-level of concern about the shouting, stomping authoritarianism that stopped being eligible to be described as "creeping" a full calendar year ago. We seem to be entering a new era of political alignment, warped by the idiot gravity of whatever singularity of anti-intellectual information-hostility fires Donald Trump and only seems to work for him, where the obligatory softening of actual ideals in order to appeal to the electorate and then soothe the to-be-governed once the votes have all been counted, feels not only quaint but dangerous. It takes a projected, keening voice to cut through the static din of a hundred thousand contentless messages (more and more of it not even human-generated) from ten thousand noise-only outlets vying for the public attention. To be a normie political voice in these unsettled waters defined only by measuring the drama of chop and swell is to volunteer for a drowning. We've seen it in the past several months as corporations and back-bench replacement-level political figures have had to declare themselves as not just supportive of the Trump batshit scattershot incoherence of policies but also actively fash-tolerant, at minimum, just to keep up a public profile.

It may or may not matter in 2026 or 2028, when the DNC has to run national-level campaigns, and their instinct is always, always for caution, for the benefit of the big-money corporate donors who keep them in chicken dinners and the good offices in the Capitol. If those continue to be the priorities, they will bear themselves out electorally and this past Thursday will be a curiosity we forget, by executive order of President JD Vance.

Ha ha, just kidding, it would never be Vance, that weenie. It will probably be someone way worse.

Luke 12:33

At this point, I'd really just appreciate the opportunity to be bored. You'd think with all this free time I had off--closing in on a month out of work with no real end in sight--I'd have ample time to while uncounted hours, pottering around getting myself in trouble with new hobbies, which I guess I have been if you count "developing a lower back problem" a hobby. If nothing else, it has the benefit of being free.

"Free" is an important aspect for any new hobby in a state of affairs I like to call "post-income." I seem to have transcended the brutal cycle of paycheck-bills-paycheck-bills by having one of those elements eliminated for me by people I've spent time and energy voting into office. Actually, that's not fair, I definitely didn't vote for this president or the person who has been my completely invisible and useless House district representative my entire adult life. But somehow, these people I vehemently object to with all of my available energy* and protest in the strongest possible terms (which in 2025 means, basically, typing it in this box and hitting PUBLISH, that'll show 'em), have pushed me into this new era of personal enlightenment wherein I look upon my possessions without the limiting bonds of ownership and instead of thinking "how do I maintain my hoard at any and all costs?" transitioning to "I wonder if there's a market online for slightly used socks?"

I'm not at the point where I am considering trying to sell my lightly worn underthings, but I'm definitely seeing it all with new eyes. I think of all the fall-away days where I just flitted through this ridiculously oversized four-bedroom palace for one man and a cat and took zero time to consider how burdened I am by the material, my eyes glazed over by the static and fog of the day-to-day grind to maintain what I have or (best case!) acquire more.

Yes, I'm sort of telling you modern Republicans have turned me toward some principles of actual Christianity. The good news is these are principles none of them would actually recognize or practice, so there's no chance of making me GOP-curious. I'm safe to explore my new asceticism, comfortable in the knowledge that performative capitalist, Christianist fetishization is wholly mutually exclusive with the actual practice of Christianity.

The connection between asceticism and holiness is long established (not just in western cultures), though, so I feel like I'm on the right track. Whether it's communities of monks or nuns living on bread crusts and herbs, sleeping in stone beds and torturing themselves with hair-shirts, fasting, self-flagellation and haircuts specifically designed to make them unfuckable or weird cave-based eccentrics living on their own in self-imposed hermetic exile to achieve mystic communion with the divine, fucked-up anti-social weirdo-hood has been a known path to social and religious transcendence for as long as humans have been keeping records.

I didn't know it, but I've been practicing for it my whole life, I just always called it "acute situational social anxiety." I just needed this little extra push of the elimination of all my income to begin to see the pattern in the noise. When I have my first prophetic visions, I'll be here to publish them here first, NOT behind a paywall for my Patreon subscriber(s). It's not that I don't appreciate them, it's just that this purity shit is only working if someone is bummed out about it. I mean besides just me.

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*the itemization of what I spend that energy on before I actually get to "object to politicians" I will not be publishing here, but it does fall below things like "watch other people play video games in YouTube," just for scale.