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The enduring lie of the present is the sensation that all of it is a) important and b) will be reckoned with permanently. I don't really see any other viable way for experience to work, so I'm not really being critical of the people experiencing the present as such. To go further, it would categorically be a mistake to regard what is happening to you right now as an abstraction to be disregarded as insignificant when considered against the scope of the whole of your lived life. This is how people get hit by cars.

Right now today, it seems relevant to write about and try to contextualize the fact that Kristi Noem was just fired as the secretary of Homeland Security, thus far the biggest casualty of the second Trump administration. This is of course if we're using "casualty" in the sense the political press uses it when talking about the inside-baseball of Washington job shuffling, not literal casualties. Not only are there plenty of them to consider in the non-metaphorical sense already, we're making more all the time.

There was a rhythm to the first Trump administration, where a bunch of pinhead conventional doofuses convinced him he had to appoint a bunch of nominally capable normies to high level positions in order to give his administration a skein of competence/responsibility, like for example former U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis as secretary of Defense, only to eventually discover that neither competence nor responsibility were desirable traits within the workplace culture led by Donald Trump. These boring people would then resign, be fired, or resign but then have Trump proclaim that he had actually fired them, culminating of course in the consistently self-damning public campaign to make sure everyone knows that actually, that person who quit/was fired was actually a useless, traitorous moron. After all the terminations, by my count like 98% of that first cabinet was populated with useless, traitorous morons. To be fair to Trump, in some cases, this opinion was borne out.

This time around though, the administration was much more clear-minded in what they wanted from a cabinet and surrounding officials, which is how you get a Kristi Noem in charge of DHS in the first place: absolute tabula rasa personalities not just willing but eager to leave aside the nourishing ideals of integrity and service for the thin gruel of servility and obsequiousness.

So why fire a parrot when you hired someone with the job description "is a parrot" in the first place? Because sometimes a parrot fails you by actually repeating things you said, for which they must be mercilessly punished.

This is after Noem got beat to hell in a Congressional hearing that covered things like how much money she wasted and whom she was or wasn't boning. It didn't even get to the actual people she's responsible for killing on her watch at DHS, so you know this was some serious shit.

It's unusual because, as I said, in this second Trump go-round, the firings are way less frequent. Since it's right now, it has the feeling of being significant, but go back to that first paragraph: will this actually matter or is it just a moment? Consider that he's replacing her with Markwayne Mullin, by some lights the dumbest person in either house of Congress. Sure, Kristi Noem is gone, which feels like a win, but honestly, how are we even going to notice?

I would say Plus ça change... but I'm worried about a DHS AI bot finding this and prosecuting me for it when French finally becomes illegal.

Read the Room

In my Third Stage about a lot of things. I don't really have a fully developed schema about this idea I'm banging into existence literally with each stroke of the keys, but I figure:

-First Stage: Birth through like maybe 16-17. The basic cognitive development stage, where everything in the world is experienced without context or clarity. It's all loud and threatening and you lack the materials to construct the skills to cope. Ideally you have parents who recognize this and do a lot of the pre-coping for you. If you were born in the 1970s like me, however, your parents were basically roommates you only had to see a few minutes per day, usually when they fell asleep watching M*A*S*H while eating their frozen dinner from a TV tray, so you had to put together a worldview guided mostly by what you gleaned from your peers' experiences and sitcoms (see previous reference to M*A*S*H). This is when you're at your most stupid, and, paradoxically, the most bored.

-Second Stage: Post-high school through about 44. Mostly just trying futilely to recreate the sense of new experience and wonder you knew in First Stage using all sorts of ingestible stimulants (romance, alcohol, drugs, love, sex, work, pornography, politics, friendships, culture...). Not everything is a surprise anymore, so you have a platform of experience/experiences that you can plant your feet on and drive forward toward intense engagement with things, where you fall in love the hardest and get your heart the most broken. The vulnerability is the last vestige of the First Stage, the part of you that is still a big stupid dummy. This stage is about beating that vulnerability out of you.

-Third Stage: the Homer-Simpson-into-the-hedge meme, but in an actual human life, like 45 to around 80. Sure, you still care about stuff, but you've suddenly found that "wait, why am I getting so worked up about this?" is a gear that is available for you to shift into. This is the Slow Disengagement, but the luxury of it as a life-stage is sort of dictated by events sometimes. Like if you're in Minnesota recently, you're still actively engaged, because the secret police stealing your neighbors and ghouling around your kids' school perimeter won't let you leave it be. This is definitely where I'm at. The Third Stage, I mean, not Minnesota. It was 85 degrees here today, for example.

There's a Fourth Stage after age 80, but how that plays out basically comes down to how you're doing mentally and physically. I call this part JESUS CHRIST HOLD ON!!! But I can't really speak much more to it as I don't hang around with a lot of 80+ year olds. The only ones I'm aware of on the daily are all the ones who hold all the influential positions in the American government. I know enough to know that drawing conclusions about life quality in this stage from that demographic subset would be a massive injustice to literally everyone else. Not every geriatric is a daywalking vampire trying to pass for a regular human (and failing badly).

When I was younger (Second Phase), I would have watched every minute of the State of the Union speech Tuesday night. I would have lived and died with every line and howled at performative injustice of the Other Side standing up or not standing up as the president wheezed his way through whichever particular talking point. And two days later I'd still be all worked up, with a ready-to-go fifteen minute chunk on How The President is Transformatively Good/Apocalyptically Bad (depending on what president it was) for anyone who asked. Or happened to be near me. Or the cat, if we were home alone and I felt like pacing for exercise (can't pace without ranting, everyone knows this, that's the sign of psychopathy).

Because I'm in Third Phase I know: you don't need to hear me tell you what I thought about the dumb president and his stupid speech and the attempts to spin it one way or the other. The beauty of this phase is the analysis and the talking points floating around don't really matter anymore because I understand my own mind, specifically: I understand what not to let in too deeply, so as to maintain my equilibrium. Let's see a First Phase baby do that. Babies are shit at boundaries. And walking. And catching things. Pretty useless all around.

Also this is the time of year where I should be getting all hand-wringy and het up about baseball arriving and how my team is looking to continue a phase of historical badness. But look: sometimes your team, like the dominating political order, is in the range of disastrous-for-the-foreseeable-future. By the Third Phase, you learn that these things cycle and upswings are just as likely as the downswings, even if the downswing is sometimes a sledgehammer aimed at our collective brain-case. Yes, in those cases you can't afford the bemused earned-wisdom distance of disengagement and you've got to learn to move. But you can be a resource to the panicking goose-flock of Second Phasers in your life and let them know: the sun'll come out tomorrow. And you know you only know that because you were old enough to experience the film version when it came out 40-plus years ago. They'll learn to integrate the same lesson from their own experience in time.

She's My Priestess, I'm Your Priest

We get a lot of shit talked about us out here in California, though to be fair, most of it comes from Texas and Florida. If I was stuck in either of those places, I think just knowing people could live where there aren't that many mosquitos would drive me insane with jealous resentment as well. Sure, we've got our issues, like the way we spend and build more than just about any other place in the country on public transit even though it continues to have no apparent impact on mobility (literal or social) or traffic. Or how our governor is a weird dingus anti-liberal liberal who has been running for President of Social Media for what feels like 20 years. And also it's raining here, which we find, you know, generally confusing at best and an infrastructural panic attack at worst.

But I also know that nearly every single person I've met who has ever moved out here, they all go through the same process: 1. won't shut up about how it was better back where they were from, for all the EXACT SAME reasons, verbatim (it has seasons, the pace was slower, the layout wasn't designed to drive you specifically into a prison of isolation, existential despair and human loneliness by making everything, including your own home, a minimum 45-minute drive away), 2. calling us all babies for being cold when it's under 70 degrees, 3. living through exactly one California winter, 4. finally, complaining about being cold when it's under 70 degrees. It's a clumsy, unsubtle sort of seduction that you only really realize you've succumbed to when you have to go back to whatever inferior spawning ground you escaped from to come west in the first place and you find you're a squishy, wide-eyed alien among all these hardy, snow-blighted survivors who persist on living wherever it is they are living even when they know there's a better option because you cannot stop yourself from constantly telling them. You can't relate to them as humans anymore, these mole-people, these bridge trolls. The best you can do is chalk it up to a mass psychosis caused by seasonal vitamin D deficiency, compounded by the fact that you know the shit weather "season" lasts like 10 months. In the end all you can do is live in gratitude, and pity them. Ideally right to their faces. Their pasty, pasty faces.

It's not that we've done everything right out here, of course. We've only had two Californians end up as president and they were arguably two of the worst ever to do it (present occupant excepted). Building some of the world's largest urban areas in places without reliable sources of drinking water continues to prove itself a bit of an own-goal dry season to dry season. The cost of living out here feels like an elaborate practical joke. Stephen Miller, that's on us too, though he did go to Duke University. Not an excuse, just something I'm mentioning and I'll leave it there.

All of that said, I don't really have any desire to leave it. And not just because of the weather thing, though that's not nothing. I could continue my current career if I were willing to relocate with my job that will do so before the end of this year, but at age 51, I have enough perspective to realize: I live in an aspirational place, one that people from elsewhere dream about to comfort themselves from whatever level of misery, petty or grand, as they're stuck wherever they are. Visions of palm trees (stupid, useless), wide sandy beaches (windy, too cold, crowded, parking is generally bad), Disneyland (OK, that's pretty solid), Hollywood (dirty, small, confusing) or the Golden Gate Bridge (excellent from a distance, but generally windier and colder than the beaches) have fired the respite imaginations of generations all over the world who haven't had the opportunity to be thoroughly disabused yet by actually experiencing any of it first hand. What a wonder! What a paradise!

Also this is where I keep my house. And all my stuff.

Derp Face

Typically, life events and news-of-the-week are the most obvious jumping off points for anything I post here. There's nothing special about me as a blogger in that regard. I'm out here ginning up content just like any other social medial schnook, willing to call any blip trend-line of routine inspiration, in ways that I know border on almost indecent levels of depreciation of "inspiration" as a concept when I know things like the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel exist or whatever. But if you think about it, look, the execution is awe inspiring, sure, but that was just the result of Michelangelo taking a contract job from some rich asshole. So really, yeah, his work gets slightly more hype, but he knows he's a corporate sellout while I'm out here keeping it real, doing this at the minimum integrity-buy-in level of NO DOLLARS,* so those factors kind of balance each other out. We're functionally the same, Michelangelo and me, people are always saying. But he's got his fancy religious pictures and I've got my sanctimony, so I feel like I'm ahead a little.

Right now, though, looking at the news, I almost wanted to write about how things are better than they have been, or at least have a positive spin, but most of the things affecting me or at least dominating my vision are all government related, so I'm not sure "positive" really exists as an option. It's like getting hit in the head with a bat over and over again, but putting the emotional contortionist's work in to get to "well, at least the bat didn't have any nails driven into it."

Like is it great news that the fascist secret police show of force occupying a major American city is purportedly finally ending? I mean, of course it is. And the way the government is doing it, slinking away after the relentless, heroic pressure put on by ordinary citizens in an exercise of advocacy and sustained public action we haven't seen activated in this country since the Vietnam War ended, or maybe the Civil Rights Movement before that, is a clear win for the things we are supposed to root for in the United States. But it's hard to be too elated when the conditions for which the collaborative public activist effort was required existed in the first place, including but not limited to kidnapping, brutalization and murder by agents armed, sent and justified by the federal government. These are what my therapist would call "mixed feelings," which I could probably leverage into so pretty good meds if I pushed.

But if I'm going to push for good meds, I should do it soon as I've also just quit my job. This isn't great news, but (and this is complicated) the last job I quit to take this "upgrade" occupies the same space I work out of, so all my friends and former co-workers I see every day. The people in that job, they're also all about to lose their jobs too, with no parachute or backup plan. But me, because of my status? I have the opportunity to quit my job, but still get paid and keep my benefits in place for six months without having to come into the office.

Six months off? When was the last time you had six months off? When you were four, before you started kindergarten maybe? What a boon! What a wonder! What a luxury unworthy of denigration or complaint!

Well, OK, until you consider:

1) This program was invented by that pedo guy who broke twitter

2) It's a way to circumvent federal law regarding layoffs

3) It's after a campaign of psychological bullying of government workers en masse as an anti-labor action (and in my case, an ultimatum to move my whole life across the country or else get fired anyway)

So yeah, I've got a nice glide-path into unemployment ahead of me, far more than most people could expect, but I recognize it's not offered in any kind of spirit of generosity or good financial sense. If they hire someone in my position while I'm still in my six month window, that's the government paying twice for the same job. But you know, these DOGE people who started all this, they're all about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse...

I can have a sense of general gratitude in place while still maintaining the morally objectively correct level of contempt for the people involved in offering me the deal I've taken. I guess that means, yeah, at the end of the day, I'm not really any better than Michelangelo. Or at least not by the margins I typically assume.

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*Well, almost no dollars. Infinite love and gratitude to my patron(s?)!

Cataracts and Hurricanoes

Some non-personal circumstances have gotten me thinking about grief as a process and a state of being a bit lately. Dark as it can be, it's a luxury to be able to consider it without the fresh slash-wounds of family-close bereavement to bear, ideally not with the detached clinicality of a real sociopath trying to figure out why the man-animals do feelings, ha ha, no; more like with the expectant posture of someone bracing for an imminent blow to the head with something heavy, say a sandbag dropped from the stage rafters. "You have to consider all your options" is a timely and sage adage, even in 2026 when "all your options" range from "shit" to "also shit, but sanctioned by the government."

I don't want to worry anyone or paint my current situation as anything more dire than it actually is. Physically and medically I'm fine,* kids are fine, cat is thriving (apart from the occasional sneezing fit, I think she has allergies), my relationship is remarkable and surprising and strong... there's just a swirl of change in the air. Several pantheons have the concepts of creator-destroyer figures, so even the pagans knew, when it comes to one's relationship with the world in general, the default is often "it's complicated."

This blog is a little vague and it'll be a bit short because I'm definitely in more of a considering phase than a settled one, which makes expression a bit scattered as a lot of contradictory things are happening intellectually and emotionally at the same time. But I'm coming up to some hard sell-by dates for my work-related status quo, which will mean I also face the prospect of being a 50-plus aged person on the job market. That's less scary than it used to now that I think about it, since for Gen Z it seems like the only worse nightmare than looking for a job is actually finding one.

My expertise is pretty niche and my experience is actually somewhat limited given that I've changed jobs a few times, and this after not getting started until later (mid-30s) because of delays caused by grad school and being an at-home parent, two phases of my life I (more or less) loved. This is American capitalism after all, however, I blame myself for not seeing how personal fulfillment would only result in punishment and recrimination long-term.

The good news is I'm not going to be out of a job tomorrow. I've got some time to plant my feet and reorient myself a bit. I've also got an insane amount of support. But still, when looking to the sky for auspices, if you expect to be parsing a lazy flock of birds susurrating in one direction or the other to allow you to decipher divine intent but spot a descending cylcone instead, it's better to dive for the storm cellar than to stroke your chin in paralytic contemplative wonder. Anything more extreme than a tropical depression, you're better off moving past denial and rage and skipping right through to the acceptance.

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*I'm in my fifties now, so there are creaks in my joints and it takes me a few steps to get all the way upright when I stand up from a chair, but I do get there. Erect, as it were, without the aid of pills thus far.

No Sleep Til...

It's kind of a bummer when the best you can do in a good news/bad news situation is a qualitative relativism that lets you recast what would normally be the kind of thing to ruin your week in normal circumstances as "well, maybe it's for the best." That's a fair ways away from "actually possibly good," but that condition as a concept seems to have been pause-buttoned in about 2014.

For example, this past week my team lost one game away from the championship, which I talked about in the previous blog; the positive spin would be to point out that I'll be spared a lot of stress-watching from here on out, so that's a win for my over-taxed limbic system! I do lose the chance at distraction, missing out now on the sweet soft-caramel florality of sportsball superficiality masking the bog-fever fetid reek of... well, literally everything else. But that doesn't get to qualify as "bad news" when we've got state sponsored extrajudicial murder and acts of terrorism by government actors describing what would be an otherwise peaceful, normal American city as though it were a war zone. Without the sports, I guess now I have time to really focus on the important stuff. Which is terrible news for my over-taxed limbic system!

If it sounds like I've run myself in a complete emotional circle here, that's because it's the only shape we're allowed to experience anymore. Complexity in all its forms has been banished from every social and experiential level, from politics and economics and news in general to entertainment and sports, the gravity exerted by the grim, inevitable banality of the black hole at the center of it all, warping every news cycle it touches, leaves us with a perfectly circular ouroboros in the form of a snake angrily fellating itself. Which is no small feat considering snakes have two dicks.

Everything is so obvious and overwhelmingly simple, it frustrates the possibility of hiding out in a niche corner of interest or self-interest to find even a bit of relief, which would be the best we could do when we know that anything actually good isn't even remotely on offer. The historian in me says that the long view is the right one, that the way things are now is unsustainable and will pass. Happy things small (football!) and great (the concept of a just society!) will reassert themselves at some point, certainly, right? But when things like whole Constitutional liberties are being set aside in favor of arrest quotas and extortion for the sake of undermining future elections, even that gets the gritted-teeth emoji and a long exhaling "yyyyeeeeeeeeeahhhh...." trailing off into a question mark.

I wish I had a better message of positivity and hope, but it looks like the only way forward currently, when it comes to your community, is to look to the Upper Midwest and see that the best way to keep yourself occupied is actual action. I don't know what it will look like in your community when the need arrives, it just seems like it's going to involve a lot of whistles.

Revenge of the Iceberg

It's a sobering moment in a long history of sobering moments. The one thing all sobering moments have in common, comic-tragically, is that the person being sobered realizes they should have been "sobered" a really long time ago, ideally since birth. But one understands that the human brain needs time and space to properly develop through its most plastic/elastic periods, so we allow the indulgence of whimsy and fantasy, even encouraging belief in figments of collective imagination, like Santa Claus and the United States Constitution. Of course a time comes when those figments become impediments to clarity and must be brushed away, sometimes with deliberate care by loving parents prepared for the psychological reorientation, and sometimes in a violent spasm of revelation by circumstance, like realizing all the Santa presents are addressed in Dad's handwriting, or watching armed men representing your government steal a child off the street. As a parent, it's a bit of Hobson's choice really: you could decide not to delude your children right from the first firings of cognition and the acquisition of language, but they have the whole rest of their lives to be chased down by the existential dread of a fundamentally disappointing world.

The process of revelation doesn't end with bar/bat mitzvah, confirmation, quinceañera, acquiring a lower-back tattoo of questionable craftsmanship, whatever time-honored ritual your culture practices to mark the passage into adulthood. Of course the moments of inflection, of insight, of re-discovery of the World As It Actually Is, they are harder to acquire as we age and ossify into "what I think about X", and can be somewhat more embarrassing when the necessary re-contextualization makes it clear you'd missed the first 90,000 opportunities for the penny to drop. But it's never, as they say, too late, and possibly why they refer to these moments as sobering, as an arrival at clarity from the obfuscating inebriation Things As They Seemed.

Note that this is not always for the better. Plenty of people found it "sobering" to "realize" that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim sent here with a fake birth certificate on a mission to disarm the American population so he could put white people into concentration camps. Sources of information, it turns out those are important as well, though these days the distance between internet cranks and the anchor of CBS Evening News is getting so short, it's more of a step than a jump.

I know at the moment we've all been forced into (I won't say "awakened" or any other forms of that verb) a new version of reality of one kind or another. This week's unending onslaught of TOO MUCH FUCKING NEWS has been no exception to all the weeks before, forcing confrontation after confrontation between ourselves and what we can/should expect from the world. The idiot president was an idiot in public, Canada broke up with us, the Minnesota occupation continues...

This is the time to reflect and focus and find ways to affect change. It is not the period in history where it is appropriate to want things for yourself. Like if your football team finds itself one game away from the Super Bowl, look, that's nice, but what kind of a frivolous, oblivious asshole pulls up a chair to listen to the string ensemble play on the deck of a badly listing Titanic?

You can't see me, but I'm pointing two thumbs at myself. They're my own thumbs, to be clear.

In an increasingly secular world, I guess sports are the new opiate of the masses. The good news is that, even as we embrace the inky haze of indulgence dulling our senses to the sound of creaking steel and water rushing past what we were told were unbreachable bulkheads, the sobering happens immediately when your team finally loses. It's a hot cup of coffee directly down the front of your trousers. Searing in the moment, but once you recover, you're just grateful for the moment of distraction that was.