Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler

Here's a genuinely terrible idea: go out and get two degrees in a humanities discipline, spend 20+ years leveraging that to make dick jokes to an audience smaller than any measurable amount of statistical white noise, then have world events conspire to compel you to write down words in a public space about tariffs. Do I know what tariffs actually are? Reader, I couldn't tell you who Smoot is, let alone Hawley. How am I supposed to be able to lay out for you in any kind of understandable way what it is they are supposed to have achieved and/or failed at, depending on the outcome of whatever it is they did or didn't do?

I'm not! But here's the best news: we are in the era where knowing about a thing no longer precludes anyone from acting on it, not only in public but in ways that directly (some might even say menacingly) affects the public! This is the post-norms society we all (100% if us, if the primetime lineup on Fox News is to be believed*) voted for six months ago when we avoided a Harris-led American present that looked a lot like the four years prior. Admittedly, still a pretty horrifying prospect if you're a Palestinian in Gaza, but for the rest of us, well, I can at least say for certain that since the election, no Haitians have eaten my cat. Promises kept.

I'm not going to try to make a point about the vapidity of punditry and the ubiquity of the Hot Take Media Ecology. Those points have been made, over and over, including by me, but usually by other media people commenting on how media people are all so shallow and Don't Get It, not like us, the Smart Ones who are above all this crassness and embarrassingly insincere performative outrage, some examples of which we will definitely provide right after this message from Tylenol PM. If nothing else, you can trust me and the integrity of my position as I've got decades of commitment to working on the internet while generating zero American dollars in proceeds from it.** That kind of unbesmirched purity you can't buy in this day and age (even when it's actively being offered for sale, come on people).

No, the point I'm making is that expertise is passé, as they say in French, a language that has already gone through what the United States as an economic animating force is now experiencing: a long period of global expansion and recognition driven by contraction and collapse into a bemusing curiosity by a series of catastrophic self-inflicted economic wounds literally everyone else around you told you was a bad idea. In France's case, it was the failure to diversify from their over-reliance on beaver pelts as a trade good. For us, it seems to be levying trade penalties on islands inhabited almost exclusively by penguins. In my lifetime a Ben Franklin USA $100 bill will be regarded the same as a French-language phrasebook, relegated to use by nostalgics and contrarians who think Mandarin is "boring" just because literally everyone uses it now. A quaint, maybe interesting thing to roll out on a date, but nothing to build a meaningful life around.

So I'm off the hook trying to explain tariffs, because the people who are actually implementing them don't seem to know what one is/does/corrects for either. Learning things is hard. It takes real time and effort, some measure of motivation and a minimal amount of applied discipline. My next move is going to be walking into a music store and smashing my fists over and over again against the wooden top of a closed piano, then trying to fight anyone in there who dares to tell me they didn't just hear Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor.

A lifetime of learning stuff I can now just do without. It really is Liberation Day.

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*and, you know, under no circumstances

**well, almost zero American dollars

Demeritocracy

As I've crossed into my 50s and the questions about my age relative to popular culture become suddenly, starkly less ambiguous or hedged, I'm making an effort to not be one of those older people who are threatened by new things or changes to the old things. I try to keep the nostalgia out of my core personality. I find if you let it sit there too long--in that airless, lightless space--apparently it seeps and rots until the liquifying flesh and hardening sugars transform into a grainy crystallized sludge that somehow powers an indefatigable generator of paranoia and self-regard. Imagine being freaked out about the smallest social or cultural change all the time. It sounds fucking exhausting. For self-preservation, I limit my nostalgia to pointing out how some buildings used to be other buildings, while driving by them. "The corner where that Cane's chicken is used to be a Naugles" never got anyone disappeared, Pinochet-style, if you run it out to its logical extreme the same way "there seem to be way more foreigners around than before" seems to have.

I also don't complain about the kids and the way they talk or the music they're into or whatever. It's never occurred to me to say anything like "you call this 'music'? All sounds the same to me," and that's even acknowledging that it's WELL PAST FUCKING TIME to move on from the high-hat triplets running in every single trap beat in like 90% of popular songs. It's important to make a distinction between "this is what an old person would say" and "totally legitimate position to take by a culturally still definitely relevant person who is just saying." And besides, it's not always bad. I'm not saying let's go back to something else, I'm just saying let's move on from this thing. See, I'm the innovator advocating more change, if anything. I really am the Cool Dad.

I'm even fine with people changing the way they say things. Like especially millennial and younger women out here on the West Coast glottalizing their T's in the middle of words like "mountain" or "important." Sure, you can say it only seems like a change and people have been doing it for a while, but my anecdotal ears don't lie to me. It's different from how it was when I was a millennial's age! But that's OK with me! Evolution is what language does. At some point we stopped using "mack" to mean "generic person whose name I don't feel like using" in favor of "man" and nobody died. The hippies won that one thing in the 1960s and somehow society has not collapsed, man. So now we sound less like an old Bugs Bunny cartoon. Only a marginal loss, which, again, I am OK with!

Like I said, I even advocate for new things when it seems like we need them as we, as a society, outgrow certain ideas or expressions. Like right now, we need a new word for "scandal." In the old days, it meant something akin to "cause for public shame and personal and professional recrimination," but a couple of things have happened in the past few days that have really finally reset this for me. What's a happening now is that public officials can do a thing that would have normally have resulted in a tearful apology at a podium on their own amidst the sound of occasional camera shutters snapping, naming their families and their colleagues whose trust they've irrevocably broken, followed by a swift resignation and (if it was a really good one) a promise to immediately get either therapy or rehab. Then stern news people would grimfaced analyze the events as "momentous" or "unprecedented" or "really good for ratings."

And the bar for these things wasn't really even that high. You didn't even have to be that important! You could just be an inarticulate drunken sports doofus making a totally unsupportable ahistorical and racially tone-deaf point in the unfortunate presence of a microphone completely unprovoked and boom, career over. Now apparently you can be the whole-ass secretary of defense and commit the worst offense against basic operational security during an active combat operation in the history of communications and the result is... probably nothing, bolstered by the active public support of the president. You still get all the heat and the activity on cable news as you would with an actual scandal, but absolutely none of the payoff. I was going to say "so far," but I'm plumbing new depths of cynicism here, let me grow, even if it's downward.

It wasn't that long ago that there was some serious pearl-clutching and irrevocable damage to the reputation of a decorated career military professional (so you know, qualified to be SECDEF) just one administration ago because he had the audacity to go to the hospital and not tell enough people fast enough? No tearful resignation, but Lloyd Austin was still expected to eat it. Now we get the outlines, the silhouette of a real honest-to-jeebus "scandal," but the end bit, the shame and humility, gets honked down by louder and louder donkey-braying from the accused and his abettors.

I don't know what the word even could be to replace it. "Scandal" has done a lot of work for thousands of years, through Greek and Latin and Olde English, evolving just like language is supposed to. I'll have to think on it and we'll climb that mountain* when we get to it.

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*Pronounce it however you want! I'm not bothered! I'm not even checking! You're fine! I'm the one being normal about this!

Don't Start Nothin' Won't Be Nothin'

I sometimes wish I were better at holding grudges. That sounds like a humblebrag, like I'm about to tell you what a magnanimous well of human forgiveness I am, but honestly it's more a question of things fading as I get older, specifically energy and memory. Who was that guy who said that thing to me that I hated...? Bah, it'll come to me maybe after I watch seven more YouTube videos by a guy who trims cows' hooves. Don't let anyone ever tell you it's not possible to back into transcendence. The Buddha did it by just taking a nap under some tree, never forget.

There's no denying that a thirst for revenge is an incredible, limitless motivator to action. It not only provides the drive and the disinhibiting spark to action, it also unlocks paths of opportunity that may not have ever otherwise occurred to you in a non-perturbed space. If you're not sure what I mean by that, think of anyone you know who's been divorced, or even I guess just broken up with, and the things this otherwise rational, conflict-averse person is now willing to entertain. Or listen to, like, one country song. You get it.

Or, just to make this as grim as possible, think of the deterioration of the institutions undergirding the traditions and cultural norms of representative democracy and the rule of law in the United States at the moment. The dismantling of the functional state, without regard for (in the best case scenario; this is what passes for optimism these days) or in active hostility to (which feels more correct) the idea of any intersection between state action and human empathy, all can be drawn back to Donald Trump being embarrassed by something Barack Obama said at a dinner a decade ago and Elon Musk being booed on stage at a Dave Chappelle show in San Francisco. Are these typical reactions to targeted social humiliation? Not really. If it were me, I'd do what I normally do, which is have an out-loud argument in the shower by myself in a fantasy version of the same scenario where I slay with all the comebacks and correct levels of indignation I probably swallowed in the moment. I won't say that running for president or crippling the apparatus of the state were ever necessarily on my mind in response for any similar incidents I might have endured, but to be fair 1) my personal humiliations tend not to be televised and 2) as a long term carrier of social anxiety, that type of shock-trauma social surrender happens to me (in my warped perception) like 80 times a regular-ass day.

So yeah, all the bullying I perceive myself to be receiving are almost always an invention of an emotionally abnormal brain and misfiring limbic system. With enough therapy, I've learned to put it in some kind of context, even if the resultant emotions aren't necessarily negotiable: they can be contextualized and rendered survivable if not actually minimize-able. At the end of the day, there just aren't enough hours to exact the appropriate level of get-back to all who have wronged me. I've never really been a list guy.

Which really sucks, if you think about it. So much ambition and drive I'm leaving on the table, all because I want to be a boring, relatively balanced person. If you lean into it, that same kind of shit can get you the song of the year and a Super Bowl halftime show. I didn't think I could say this given how I've been through the course of this year so far, but: maybe I need to get madder?

Stock-In-Trade

The curse of being a Former Intellectual is lifelong and unbreakable, ultimately. Part of that is because the social framing is always incorrect. States of mental acuity or analytical sharpness aren't static, that's some bullshit IQ-numbers-are-actually-helpful kind of outdated thinking. You can indulge in it if you want, but I'm here to warn you there's nothing down at the end of that cul-de-sac except the collapsed curb sofas and busted-out fridges of "women aren't funny" and "Asians are good at math." The kind of FREE, PLEASE TAKE ideas that only get picked up by people with no ability to generate their own.

What I mean is there aren't really "smart" people. Yes, some people have more of an affinity to certain modes of critical thought or troubleshooting than others, but I'm here to tell you: being a "smart kid" is not who you end up being. I know that Me at 50 reading things Me at 23 wrote under the intensity and plasticity of both youth and programmatic instruction is a near impossibility: I have no idea what that fresh-faced uber-nerd was talking about it. It's not necessarily that I'm stupider (though this is arguable. I'm still mystified how my new electric kettle boils water so fast); I certainly know more, just volume-wise, than I did then, 100% as many lived years later. It's just that the type of knowledge you have and its application always have a context, which was in those days an intense familiarization with the western critical theory canon and the training to express it in recitation in a manner consistent with academic norms. Because it's not good enough to absorb the information, how "smart" you are also depends almost entirely on your ability to get it out of your stupid head. The late, great Christopher Hitchens isn't a genius because of his thoughts (plenty of people are atheists in public), he was one because he could proclaim in a manner that was both charismatic and made full use of his reading and training (deployed strategically depending on the audience and the debate opponent) when he explained it to lunkheads and dopes like you and me. Also he was British, so the accent did like 40% of the work.

There are less arduous ways for people to seem smart, especially in a capitalist social and societal milieu, and that is, of course, to have a shitload of money. It's the shortest shortcut really. Like everything else in this setting, the rules are such that there is literally nothing you cannot buy, up to and including a massive and unearned benefit of the doubt. Sure, the president is absolutely single-handedly driving a robust and relatively (vs the rest of the world) stable economy into a ditch he also seems to be simultaneously digging all on his own, but a certain percentage of the people voted exactly for this, believing despite all of the evidence consisting of literally everything he's ever said in earshot of another person. "Well, he's rich, he knows what he's doing." This is the same man who owns a gold toilet.

And this seems to be proportionally applied, e.g. if you have a lot more money, people are willing to give you a big giant wide berth the size of the world entire. Like this Elon Musk fella, who had a decent run back when nobody really knew who he was, but since he's become a public (and even richer) person, can only seem to destroy things spectacularly, like twitter, now Tesla, and also the whole federal government. But he's smart, he's got like a third of a trillion dollars! It must be us, we're just not understanding it right, because we're so stupid. If we were smarter, we'd be third-of-a-trillion-aires too, probably. So let's choose to defer to his judgment, even though he has never actually displayed any. Or you know what? Let's all just pre-submit. Richest person ever must mean most capable, that's way more important than institutions, due process or basic human empathy. Also if we're nice to him, maybe he'll just drop $10 million in loose change when we're around him. He wouldn't even miss it!

I want to be smarter about all this and make it make more sense, but I barely remember disjointed scraps of the episteme in which I was intellectually socialized. We read a lot of Marx and Foucault, as one does, but now it all seems so distant, soft echoes translating themselves back into their native German or French, beyond my American monoglot grasp. There's something there about the best way to hold a population hostage is to convince them to do it themselves, to be both jailor and jailed. But that's too sophisticated for a cat dad who hasn't finished a book in like three years and is trying to get through this writing business so I can go watch this cartoon I'm really into.

All I know for sure right now: I didn't get fired this week. Still have my job. Maybe I should thank the bully for not punching me in the face and stealing my lunch money, but they still have been terrorizing me (and millions of others) for two months now. I'm sure there's a cleverer way to frame all this and make it make sense, but I'll really, really have to think about it. Preferably like 27 years ago.

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.