Would You Like To Know More?

The YouTube algorithm isn't any better or worse than the ones running any other social media soma distribution system. It gets a slightly less dystopian rap than the ones aimed at the impressionable and wayward youth, but I think that is less a comment on its qualities and more that it has never been wholly owned by a hostile foreign government for the purpose social infiltration and engineering. With YouTube, we had already proved we could do undermine and spy on ourselves. Plus it has become more associated with Millennials, whom we've somehow always assumed were lost anyway, so addressing it has felt less urgent. Sure, it will suggest a video for something unrelated to anything else in your feed that you had only recently had a conversation about or, magically/creepily, had only thought about, but that's a level of invasive sorcery we've not only grown accustomed to in our tech, but we seem to be actively pining for more of in the fantastical fever dreams of what "AI" is supposed to become capable of. While AI won't be able to do all of our thinking and creating for us--the internal agreed-upon lie AI companies tell tech investors as a shibboleth before they pass some more insane amounts of money back and forth--it will do what all tech currently does, which is redistribute wealth upward into the hands of those who already have most of it. In that way AI is almost as quaintly and comfortably conservative as stodgy old YouTube.

I'm neither a child nor a wine mom, so I spend no time on TikTok, but YouTube has slowly taken over my screen-viewing life over the past several years, certainly since the pandemic. The root of it was just to fill the days of lockdown, running long (four to seven hours!) VODs of Critical Role in the background while I tried to exercise or work or catatonically disassociate, all with mixed results. 

As media distribution has fractured more and more since that period, YouTube has come to take up a plurality of my viewing time. I think for most us, there is no "majority" anymore for what we consume on whatever platform as there are just too many goddamned options. This is much like the way voting seems to work now as well, at least for this cycle in California where I live. Instead of a couple of funded and visible candidates slugging it out, basically everyone has decided they should be in office. I can't tell if it's because media content creator culture has convinced everyone they should be able to launch themselves into the public consciousness with little or no effort or if things have just gotten so bad, way more people than normal are jumping in trying to help. I'm going to gently suggest that with 61 candidates on the ballot for California governor, two of whom are named Barack D. Obama Shaw and LivingForGodAndCountry DeMott, it might be the former.

In my own district, gerrymandered in a counter-move in the very stupid national game to rig the election in favor of one party over another, we got to chose between two incumbent Republicans, five democrats and one unaffiliated rando who doesn't understand how the American duopoly works. The overall idea is going to get the desired result: one of these two Rs will eliminate the other, leaving the GOP at net minus-one nationally. I get it. The lines had to be drawn that resulted in me being stuck in a roughly +10 GOP leaning district instead of one that used to be pretty purple. And in California, the jungle primary system means the top two vote-getters move on to the final contest, regardless of party. Because there are (and I'll say this in italics again) five Democrats running, they have split the vote and will definitely leave us with these two Republican incumbents--or as I like to call it, no actual fucking choice--on the November ballot.

I get it, there's a larger cause. There is a president to rebuke and a whole arm of government to re-establish as a functioning component of civil governance per its constitutionally mandated role. People can argue all they want about what the Founders may or may not have wanted, but they made the whole Article I about just the legislature, so maybe that could do the minimum parts of its job.

But I keep thinking about this YouTube video I got recommended about a drone service in rural England that finds lost pets in the countryside. In this 3-4 minute video, it was actually about how the drone service failed and one of a lost dog's dog-friends had to lead rescuers to a spot where they discovered the lost dog had been chasing rabbits and had become stuck underground, entangled in tree roots. They had to dig the dog out by hand, which they did. The rescued dog, being a dog, was completely peppy and non-plussed post-rescue, just happy to be a dog, incapable of gratitude really or self-recrimination.

So like, I'm happy to do my part I guess and get stuck with the same GOP member of Congress who has been haunting my electoral life since I turned 18, but inside a district like this, where you know what the outcome will be and also that you've been forced to live within a fence with only the worst of your neighbors, I can't help but feel a little like the dog who got stuck underground chasing rabbits. Only in this case, I've been put here deliberately, so there's no drone service coming to help me out.

At least I'm stuck down here with my phone. It's not easy to breathe, but at least I've got videos of professional actors playing Dungeons and Dragons to pass the time.

A Trip to Bountiful

The Mandalorian and Grogu

starring Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White('s voice), Jonny Coyne, Shirley Henderson('s voice), Martin Scorsese('s voice?!?!?) and Pedro Pascal('s voice, mostly)

directed by Jon Favreau (Swingers, two of the Iron Mans, Elf, Daredevil [the Ben Affleck one])

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NORMALLY THIS IS WHERE A SPOILER WARNING WOULD GO, BUT COME ON, BABY YODA LIVES, IT'S FINE

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One of the recurring segments of the old Muppet Show, was "Pigs in Space," which I remember always looking forward to because it was vaguely sci-fi shaped and I had been exposed to Star Wars by that point. Just to be clear, The Muppet Show in its original first-run airing I was far too young for, though I was definitely alive by then. I don't know why it's important to me to make it clear to you that I was aware of "Pigs in Space" in second-run syndication, probably on daytime television. I'm ok with you assuming I'm a giant dork, but I draw the line at letting you think I'm a Boomer.

In retrospect, I couldn't tell you a single character or plot scenario or even the premise of the sketch beyond the titular pigs in the also titular space, I just know it was presented as something Star Wars adjacent, which was satisfying enough for me at the time. I've looked it up for the purposes of writing this and apparently Miss Piggy was a recurring character, which I should have definitely just have assumed, but again, if asked, I couldn't produce a single piece of trivia about the thing beyond the fact that it made me sit up and take notice, with not only anticipation but a certain amount of relief, as in: oh yes, at last, the space thing is on, no more waiting through this bullshit. Of course as I got older I understood that the "bullshit" was, like, Madeline Kahn being a big bright shining star while co-starring around a bunch of felt socks with googly eyes stuck on, but those first impressions didn't register anything as subtle satire, talent or even actual entertainment. I didn't even apparently actually give the first fuck about pigs, as long as I got the in space.

That's really the best way to understand a lot of my interaction with both Star Wars and Star Trek content these days. It used to be true with Marvel and DC movies as well, things I'd always wanted to see when I was a kid and would sit up a little straighter for when, as an adult, their trailers would pop up ahead of whatever it was I was seeing instead (at that point, probably a totally different DC or Marvel film. We all remember the 2010s). Ever since Star Trek: Enterprise and then The Force Awakens 15 years later, I had to transition through the phase of rising to defend "the good parts" of shakily executed things I wanted to automatically like, to myself as much as (or more than) to other people even though it was evident to everyone that the quality was what it was. It's not that those projects or their postcedents were necessarily bad, it's just that they weren't obviously good either. And then, yeah, eventually The Rise of Skywalker comes out and there's no more room behind you left to retreat, it's all been sawn away by JJ Abrams and you're full Wile E. Coyote, standing unsupported in the sky, suspended by habit and hope vs. the pitiless reality of gravity, a contest that resolves itself exactly in the way you'd imagine, every single time.

I'm not only older now, but I'm fully on the other side of full psychosis fandom. I still watch the stuff, just now with arms crossed, daring it to impress me; dubious, but with just a crack left ajar for the light of something that is actually good to break through, like Andor or more recently the visually gorgeous Maul--Shadow Lord. The latter may end in a lot of noise and an overused climactic cliche of a Vader reveal (see also Rogue One, Jedi: Fallen Order, etc.), but it's pretty, fluid, thoughtful noise where people do cool flips and shit, so I was down. I'd have forgive Daredevil: Born Again season 2 if there had been one goddamned ninja in it, but no, I had to settle for some decent performances and all the ultimately unresolved angst masquerading as character. I'm going to need way more spin kicks if you want my thumbs-up, show about a guy who is a blind karate man.

I went into The Mandalorian and Grogu with the right kind of skepticism then, with a bar low enough that anything short of "Somehow, Palpatine returned" was going to clear it. The question was by what kind of margin?

And the answer is: eh, enough. I watched the whole thing, on a last-second whim of a plan with my youngest adult child. And I wasn't ever entirely bored, nor did I audibly groan at any of the ideas, characters or dialogue, which is saying something considering it included our first ever look at a Muscle Hutt, the swole-ass son of the merely swollen Jabba.

The Hutt in question is called Rotta, meaning this one is a soft sequel to another Star Wars low point, the cringe minefield that was the pilot film for The Clone Wars animated series. That one I had watched out of parental obligation as I had three children under 10 at that point, all of whom I naively and irresponsibly already exposed to Star Wars, setting my own petard in place upon which I was then hoist. What that awful film brought us as two things: an improving-to-the-point-of-genuine-excellence Clone Wars series over many years and the rise of showrunner Dave Filoni, who now famously has never had an idea he was willing to throw out. On the one hand that gets you the knowing hat-tip of fan service with Rotta in this movie along with Zeb from the Rebels series and a cameos by Filoni himself as an X-Wing pilot, paying off your attention even if it was to stuff you didn't necessarily like on the first helping. On the other hand, you end up kind of wishing for just one new idea.

Look, the Baby Yoda is very cute, as are the even-smaller-than-Baby-Yoda creatures ported in from Rise of Skywalker our wide-eyed Grogu gurgles and waddles around with. The puppet-action of Grogu and his wee alien pals (I'm not looking up the species, nerds, I told you I'm past that) is very charming and carries the last third of the movie as much as any action set pieces do. But overall, this doesn't really pay off or bring forward any character information established in any of the seasons of The Mandalorian, all of which I watched,. Three seasons only really got me some saved time in the beginning since I didn't have to pay attention to any exposition establishing the characters.

To this film's credit, though, there is almost no exposition. All you really need to know is that the silver man and his little frog pal find people, and they're sent off to do so from the geriatric retirement home for X-Wing pilots led by Sigourney Weaver. The main antagonist our title characters mostly interact with, some kind of lizard-robot in a sombrero, is pointedly mute; they just go about their business antagonizing.

It's all very efficient but still feels bloated somehow. It's entirely inessential and doesn't accomplish much in the lore department. In some ways that's a nice break from every other part of the Star Wars franchise very needily screaming in your face LOOK HOW IT'S ALL CONNECTED! REMEMBER THIS GUY FROM THE OTHER THING? YOU LIKE THAT, RIGHT? SAY YOU LIKE IT! But at the same time, you do come away from a series of fights with a series of monsters in an escalating scale of both size and grossness, wondering whom this is for and for what purpose. Entertainment? Sure. But is Star Wars about entertainment anymore, absent the more blatant pieces of fan service? When this film starts, our Mando and Grogu are an established team doing low-level jobs for their preferred employer. It ends with that status quo exactly in place, subtracting only the two hours it took us to get there.

It was fine. My instinct to wait for streaming for essentially a two-parter episode of a show I kind of forgot about was probably the better way to go. But I went with my son, whom I'd gotten into this mess in the first place by letting him watch any of this stuff, which is the kind of experience I'm happy to say is almost as envigorating and appealing as the opening titles of Pigs in Space used to be when I was, like, seven. Almost.

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Note: published on a Wednesday, one day early, because of Having A Life. It's inconvenient, but it does occur occasionally.

Asynchronous Orbit

Firstly--and this is important--I would like to enter it into the record that I have never once used the portmanteau "funemployment," nor will I ever. You would be right (and a little bit of an asshole) to point out that I just did use it, right there, in the previous sentence, but invoking a thing is not the same as employing a thing. Besides, everyone knows you have to say a thing a minimum of three times in order to make it actually manifest. You can also cheat by having two other people say a thing at the same time. That's how we ended up with a second Beetlejuice movie. I leave the moral implications of that for you to decide.

About six weeks in now, I still struggle to talk about or understand myself in conversation with other people while I'm in my unusual paid unemployment phase. It's not a new source of angst or confusion (the previous sentence has a whole hyperlink to an earlier post about this, so, you know, obviously...), but I've recently had cause to interact in more meaningful ways with some of my former colleagues, those who chose to stick it out as my old job exists in a limbo state that mirrors my own, between things as it figures itself out ahead of moving 3,000 miles away. The main difference of course is my existential-furniture-rearrangement phase only really affects my cat and (when she wanders into the blast zone) my non-live-in partner. It's a way more expensive proposition when an institution has the same kind of extended period of unmoderated self-doubt. Destabilization means a lot more when you own several occupied buildings. And even more when the people inside those buildings depend on you for health care.

I remain technically employed at my old job as my elongated severance status lingers, so there have been occasions where, for administrative reasons, I've had to log in to my old email and Teams accounts. On the one hand, of course it's never not going to be a relief to zip past the backlog of bolded UNREAD items without any sense of obligation. On the other hand, it's really odd to say this about things with subject lines like "The annual government financial ethics training you were assigned is now 30 days overdue," but it does make you feel a little like you're revisiting your old house some weeks after your own funeral. I don't think you'd really realize you were a ghost until you saw everything most familiar to you moving along without you. Although if you're a ghost and you're out there visiting your old job, I'm not sure you're really making the most of it. Whatever "unfinished business" you have to complete before you're released into the bliss of the afterlife or whatever, unchained from the mortal plane, I'm sure it didn't have anything to do with making the weekly Tuesday staff meetings. Or if it did, I'm so, so sorry.

What I get asked specifically by former colleagues is if I'm out there looking for a new job or if I'm just on a long vacation. A month-plus in I can say: really kind of neither. Some of that is circumstance as I've had to schedule some medical stuff and get through some appointments. But that's settled now; I've got a (very minor) procedure definitively on the books for early June. So my time and energy is "free" finally but for some reason the last thing I want to do with my former-ish colleauges--or with anyone really--is betray in any way that I'm actually having a great time. Not as in I'm hiding it, but more because if there's a way to do that in this circumstance, I haven't cracked it.

This is for two reasons: 1) it's the American shame thing of not really being able to relax or define yourself except by the value you generate as a working person. I struggled with it mightily while I was a stay at home parent. It's also, I think, the same thing that makes billionairs incapable of just fucking going away. It's OK, you did it, you won, go do some indoor hobbies, preferably ones that don't include being governor of my state. And 2) this isn't really that fun. A lot of it has to do with things related to Point 1 (see immediately above. Did you forget already, my god...), but it's also not just cultural. I really do have to sort of Figure Out The Rest Of My Life on a timer. I also have to learn to flatten out the spikes of anger when I internally respond that "I had figured out the rest of my stupid life with a civil service job, but that was destroyed by a totally different billionaire fucking hobbyist, a couple of them actually..." Exciting as it is to break new emotional ground exploring the ways in which rage and anxiety complement and exacerbate one another, I am going to have mortgage payments all the way through the end of the year and beyond, and I currently do not have a source of income for any of them past September.

It's a difficult thing to complain about, but look, I just spent another six paragraphs trying. I'm sure there are ways I could find to make more of this experience, turn it into an opportunity for growth or personal exploration. But the thing they don't tell you about growth or personal exploration: that shit happens anyway. I'm sure this will have been a fecund and enlightening phase of being, but only in retrospect. I also, for example, grew and explored personally when I got divorced, and though I know the things and people in my life are better for it having happened, that shit sucked ass. And that experience also taught me that the "growth" and "personal exploration" positive outcomes are all achieved with a tremendous amount of work (higher or lower relative to the trauma involved) and some definitive, practiced choices about contextualization. In other words, you have to decide that it was worth it. For me, handling this, that'll come later. Hopefully before the first mortgage payment in October is due.

I Feel Fine

I had a family visitor from out of town this week. We had planned to meet up and play golf, which I never do except with this person because golf courses in the Land of Perpetual Drought feels like an environmental crime. Plus there's a 100% chance you're going to come into contact with Actual Golfers, the meanest, measly-est, most-exactly-like-what-you-think-they-probably-are-like demographic subgroup in the world. And these are on public courses, so for the low, low price range of like 50 to 200 dollars, you get the same swaggering societal-rules-incurious air of superiority you'd find at a country club, but from people driving Kia Sorentos or Ford F150s. They want, more than anything, a space to be haughty and dismissive of societal ills or the existence of struggling people. And they bring the assumption that you (me), another middle-aged white man, want that too, so you (I) learn to keep the conversation on the flight of the ball or the conditions of the course. You know you're only one or two wayward or indisciplined questions away from having to hear about crypto or vaccines or some aspects of Great Replacement Theory, all in some way misunderstood or misapplied.

I was OK with my visitor having injured himself in the median time between booking the tee time several weeks ago and his actual trip out, leading us to cancel the golf outing. Instead we just hung out here at my place and we had a real dude's morning on Mother's Day, meaning I made apple cinnamon crepes and blueberry lemon scones and we talked about our feelings.

Well, we talked about our feelings secondarily, that is. Whether he'd been slightly injured or not, we are middle aged, so like all middle aged people, the first thing you are socially obligated to get out of the way is your litany of hobblings and ailments and all the poultices and tinctures you regularly ingest to thwart them. It's essentially a magic spell you chant-cast in tandem to wish for quality of life and to stave off the increasingly alarming imminency of death. In practical terms, it works exactly as well as all spells do, meaning we both have pending doctor's appointments and procedures on the books. You say the words, but you also have to do the work. Maybe more elaborate spells with some physical components might be more efficacious, but I don't have the wherewithal or frankly the interest to source some eye of newt or, like, sacrifice a chicken. I'm pretty sure the second one would be a violation of my HOA rules.

Like a good host, I pretended to listen as my guest listed the things hurt, broken or in need of medical intervention until he stopped talking so I could get to my stuff. I'm not sure at what point in one's life it becomes the most satisfying thing to rattle off your weaknesses to another person. I make my kids sit through it, but I pretend it's for their own good. It's not 100% pretending as it is polite to apologize to your children for their genetic lot when fully half of it is your fault. Letting them know that, at some point in their future, their feet will just start hurting for no reason feels like good manners. But also it's a good set-up for when you need a ride to an outpatient procedure requiring anesthesia. You have to plant those guilt seeds so they'll save the space to spring up like weeds in their schedules some time in the future.

Do I enjoy comparing myself to an invasive, unwanted weed in someone else's life? Honestly, sure. I think all of this is working toward a pretty traditional Catholic life trajectory into narcisstic self-pity dressed up as martyrdom. Is it great that I have to schedule things like an endoscopy to deal with acid reflux at this stage in my life? Of course not. But if that scope going down my throat taking a biopsy of my stomach lining leaves behind just a little more potency for my future of supercharged weapons-grade passive-aggression, maybe all these petty nags and this slow-motion implosion I'm experiencing will all have been worth it.

This is me being positive. This is what that sounds like.

Capital Punishment: She's Last Year's Model

People in my age cohort, what I like to call aggressive middle age, even though we're not technically Boomers, do end up with a reputation for a resistance to new things/ideas and a sticky fetishization of older stuff drenched in a sweet sheen of nostalgia syrup. So far we haven't proven to be immune to Good Old Days syndrome, the root of many economic, social and political crimes of our predecessors, which we seem determined to outdo, to our great shame. Sometimes that kind of stodgy, stubborn wariness works out OK (we're going to end up having been absolutely correct about this AI bullshit), but there's an aphorism about stopped clocks that doesn't bear a full airing out here. Those, at least, get to be right twice.

I do try to resist the pull to turn and look behind me. I was horrified when at the end of the year Spotify told me my "listening age" was actually one year older than I actually am. I've made an effort to unashamedly game the system and weight my choices to at least music made this millennium, which I do already enjoy and listen to quite a lot of anyway, it just gets overwhelmed by my inclusion of, like, every Elvis Costello album. It would be way easier to accomplish if I could/would make the effort to create a dedicated Newer Stuff playlist, but the other part of getting older is being intimidated by technology but covering it up by gruffly pretending you're simply annoyed by it. "Make a playlist... with my hands? I thought this was supposed to be the 21st century?!" etc.

I'm not immune from holding on to the old. Take my children for example. As of this month, all of them will be right around the quarter-century mark, but you know what, I don't care. They're technically in the category of vintage children, but I don't really see the need to replace them. The expense alone (monetary, emotional, physical, storage...) is daunting enough, but also by not having more, I'm actually right on the cutting edge of young people trends. Not having kids in 2026 is like bleaching your tips in 2002. If any of us need a gauge of what we should be doing, I think Ryan Seacrest is still an acceptable benchmark.

What inspired this reflection on reflection is that I'm typing this at you on a brand new MacBook Air. I feel bad typing that as I can see my 2011 MacBook Pro just lying there, closed and cold but glowering at me from its slowly flashing power light across the room. They share an Apple ID login, so I know it's also actively listening to this as I type it.

There's no doubt it was time, but the Boomer in me can't help but acknowledge that the new machine lacks the romance of the old. It just hums along, very pointedly without any noticeable hum of any kind, in the same kind of sterile solid-state silence that keeps new new technology enigmatic, inscrutable, at arm's length. All the chirps and purrs and whines and sometimes random crescendoing click-click-click-clickclickclickCLICK CLICK CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK! the old one would make at least let me know it had a heartbeat and maybe, I could let myself wonder, a soul?

This new one also doesn't do any of the romantic things to keep me engaged and on my toes, like dropping from 80 percent battery power to zero out of nowhere. Its unsubtle efficiency inadvertently outlines the spaces around what it doesn't have: the petulance, the moods. It lacks any kind of drama. The crisp ticking of its effortless keyboard simply gets the job done instead of asking questions. There's no negotiation, no tension, no art in it... at least not yet.

Sure, my old machine gave me 15 solid years. That's forever in laptop age, and sure, we had developed our own level of deep understanding. There are things I'll never have with this new machine, like the coquettish, almost fetishistic, withholding of access to a CD I last inserted in my MacBook Pro's drive in I think 2017 that it still refuses to eject, no mater what combination of remedies I attempt. This thing doesn't even have a drive, of any kind. I couldn't stick anything in it, no matter how badly I wanted to.

But it was time to move on. New things have merit, that is true. It's pretty, brighter, weighs less, but now I've found the one cliché about middle aged men trading in something they had for something new. This does have some of ths same pitfalls as trading in your wife for a new girlfriend though, because this has  has "Apple Intelligence" in it, which means some part of it processes ideas in a way I think is stupid or naïve and will never engage with without condescension or dismissal. As much as I try, parts of me are going to stay within the statistical modeling of predictable behavior. I am but a man.

Help, I'm Being Repressed!

You can't say anything anymore.

This is something usually said by a stupid person right before or after they have just said something, probably pretty racist/misogynistic or derogatorily using the word "retarded" and then standing there waiting for the applause to wash over them. To our discredit, sometimes it does. Thankfully this effect is only really measurable within the gravitational range of the greater Austin area. You might counter with "yeah, but someone told those apes about the internet and microphones and now they're all polluting the interwebs with terrible podcasts!" which I'd then be forced to counter-counter by reassuring you that podcasts don't actually exist. They're a thing invented to scare you or keep your mind distracted with just the thought of the idea, like cryptids or Area 51. The fact that so many podcasts want to talk about cryptids and Area 51 is all the proof you need. It's an ouroboros made out of hot dog casing, stuffed with more hot dog casing.

Of course the complaint about "not being able to say anything anymore" is a great hook for an entire career based on not being funny or interesting or artistically relevant but touring the country talking incessantly, without ever any fear of disruption or denial, to paying audience about how you're not allowed to say anything anymore. There's a whole second show business built around it now. It crops into public view every time anything gets too many eyes on it that Ted Cruz thinks is "woke" so they have to produce some kind of alternative to the mainstream thing that is actually good. Unfortunately that second show business turns out to be entirely made up of Kid Rock and Rob Schneider, but if you can sell an ad or one piece of merch for it, it counts as an industry in the United States of America. It's good to know as we approach 250 years of existence, we still have at least that as a rock-solid principle to stand on.

Just claiming that the woke thought police exists and then building your entire public persona and career around it isn't a guarantee of success. There are whole groups of comedians, some of whom were always terrible but others who had longstanding careers, even if they were as grinders scraping by as dedicated road-dogs and cruise ship acts. You find a lot of them in the Rogan orbit in the aforementioned Austin environs, being given every opportunity under the cover of the Rogan shadow to try out their grievance-based material, which is kind of cheating because what is funnier than naked self-pity? The best news though is that when they inevitably fail miserably, they can always just claim to have been "cancelled," which is of course great news because you have a built-in title for your next shitty self-produced YouTube special.

Recently we've been more willing to experiment with a fuller form of cancellation, involving the whole-ass US government coming after you and your employers for saying things it doesn't like, but even that has its limits. So far it has been either an invitation to a robust (and likely successful) resistance or a doorway to another thing. Disruptive yes, but existential?

The only cancellation that exists is death. But honestly, in the rules of capitalism as written, even that is hit or miss. 

The Second Hand Unwinds

To say everything exists in context is one of those obvious things that is so obvious, you get away with saying "obvious" like three times in the same sentence. Every seemingly spontaneous generation occurs in a birthing medium of some form or another. Nothing exists in a vacuum, a truism so true it takes tens of billions of dollars just to send people into space, and that's the closest vacuum we know about. And even then, the people who successfully find themselves yawing and pitching and rolling through a directionless void are neither exposed to the vacuum directly nor are they actually directionless. The reason it costs tens of billions of dollars is that it's expensive to keep the vacuum on the outside of the vacuum-traversing craft and to pay for the shitload of equipment it takes to give them direction and some precise control of it. It's a lot of work for a metaphor, but you get good pictures out of it.

After all that, it's a false metaphor anyway. You aren't contextless in space. You just came from a planet, which is going to be the biggest thing out of most of your windows, reflecting all kinds of poxy sunlight, just defying you to notice anything else. Plus you generally know why you're up there and how you'll get back, so it all has a framework, a schedule, a beginning-middle-end. If you forget, there are usually handy patches on your outfit to remind you.

What I'm experiencing currently is way less expensive than any of that, I'm just out of work for the time being. Just shy of three weeks into this thing and I can say that that feeling you get when you are working every day, that weeks both grind and blink by, so you pick your head up and everyone around is saying "I can't believe it's already [whatever times of year it is that generally surprises people or makes them feel existentially unsettled, usually either summer or Christmas]" as time (per its wont) continues to relentlessly, mercilessly pass. Like a kidney stone, but only slightly more cosmic.

These weeks have proceeded stubbornly forward, just like work weeks did, but without any of the scaffolding I'd gotten used to holding my existence together and giving it coherence. I'm not complaining about having paid time off (though I am an American, I'll find a way to complain about most any situation), I'm saying there's a disorientation that I haven't processed my way into yet. So it does feel a bit like tumbling through nothing when words like "Sunday" and "Wednesday" cease to have any functionally distinct signifiers attached to them.

I have all this time off, but when it's not "off" from anything, it loses that play-hooky sweetness of vacation time with regular work obligations on either side. And at 50-plus years old, neither able nor looking to retire, feels a bit like being swept out to sea, if the "sea" mostly involved getting medically appropriate amounts of sleep and quality time with your cat.

These aren't my best metaphors, I will grant you. Maybe that's another thing that goes without a structured schedule, your ability to employ literary devices correctly.

If you're reading this, I'm sure you're waiting for me to introduce what the downside actually is that I seem to be either building up to or have missed entirely. I'll say I've managed to kind of fuck up my billing cycle as I forget which day it is or how long it's been since I last paid this bill or that. But all that's cost me so far is a couple of nights where I had to get out of bed right as I was falling asleep and panic-schedule a couple of payments. I guess what I'm saying is if I could surrender the last wisps of the illusion of control and set my bills to autopay, I might slip out of the time stream entirely. If that happens, the next blog you read might be from the fuuuuutuuuuuure...*

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*or the past, depending on when you read it.