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.

So What Do You Do?

The Greeks will tell you that they invented hubris, but they're using a Greek word to describe it, so that's basically cheating. The sociological and technological concept of multiple discovery has shown over and over again that some of the fundamental tools of human development and social organization, for better or for worse, occurred independently all over the world. I'm sure if that's true for, like, fire, flush toilets and patriarchy, there's room for the idea of "being too big for one's britches."

Anyway, everyone knows making up words to mean specific emotional or cultural ideas is really a German thing.

What I'm contending with now isn't exactly hubris, but it is something of a readjustment of one's pride. It's not that I feel shame, exactly, for not having a job currently, it's more that my status as a non-job-having person is an automatically confusing one in 2026 America. People who don't work pretty much fall into two categories in modern capitalism: 1) independently wealthy heroes and 2) vampiric day-walking parasites attached to the neck of a functioning economy, the revolting and unnatural enemies of a healthy society who will kill the body entirely if we don't all collectively do something about it. "Do something about it" almost exclusively means "hold them up as figures of shame and rebuke during an election cycle," most vociferously by Republicans but to degrees by both major American parties, and then forget about them entirely in the meantime. And when I say "forget," as a former abject poor person in the 1980s, I really mean forget, in an active and hostile way. Especially if company is coming over.

Right now I'm neither poor, unhoused nor without income. I've got benefits and my regular salary still happening for another five-plus months as per the terms of my "separation" (you will have to envision the eye-roll there yourself). I exist in a liminal sort of cultural space that people don't really know what to do with. The state of affairs always requires an explanation, which people sort of understand. At first they're pretty excited as, on the surface, it sounds great and honestly, I don't always have the effort to talk about the ways in which the program I've opted in for is a pressured resignation caused by intolerable work conditions as a workaround against protections for federal workers against layoffs or firings almost certainly in violation of state and federal labor laws. I also find people tend to wander out of conversations when you say "labor law" at all, which, you know, fair enough. So I just let them be "happy" for me, in the short term, collect my bag of takeout food and walk out. Which of us started the conversation in this context is not an important part of the story, just leave it.

I've been in this culturally ambiguous sort of state before, so I have some muscles I can try to stretch and rebuild. I was a stay-at-home father for over eight years starting in 1999, which I can tell you, even in that modern, progressive day and age, nobody knew what to do with. I was still getting Mr. Mom references because people didn't know what to say, and that was after Michael Keaton had already been Batman for like 10 years. But that was when beer commercials were still basically just close-ups of sweaty boobs in bikini tops, so I guess it stood to reason. Patriarchy is a hell of a drug.

My days now are an exercise in humility, but not humiliation, to be clear. It's not quite apparent how much your job gives you status and identity as a currency to trade with strangers until you're without it. For most people, the goal might be to over-explain that you've got literal currency still coming in, in order to keep even the suggestion of the stink of poor-ness off you. But as a former literal poor and a formerly unemployed by choice, I'm in a unique position to let those kind of (supposed) judgments pass without effect. If I want to be socially humiliated, I could have a kid younger than my own children put me through a series of awkward poses and pelt me with edifying metaphors as I take tennis lessons I was given as a gift and now have time to pursue. This is America, after all. If you want to be humbled, sometimes you have to pay for it.

States of Matter

One of my also-recently unemployed friends, in a commiseration text exchange, shared that she had a stress dream where her hard-earned work skills had atrophied and she couldn't contribute to her group effort at Dream Work Inc.* In this case she had a dream job, but only in the extremely literal sense, which was being imperiled by her apparent diminishment in value as a person as measured by her level of productivity in both volume and quality. This is perfectly consistent with the lowest-level vibration of an undercurrent animating all of late-stage-capitalist American culture. This is also what constitutes a nightmare.

I of course do not feel this way about myself, because the contribution I'm making is happening right now, as I type this squawking missive into the void of The Current Internet, a contest of infinite sound-board fart noises canceling each other out so that all that is audible is a kind of very noisy silence. Not this though, this blog is actually important, not because I am writing it per se, it's just that my intentions are pure. By that I mean I don't have any kind of sponsor for this work that I'm doing here. This isn't really an integrity thing, or to put it a kinder way to myself, I don't know if it's an integrity thing or not because no company or brand has had the foresight or clarity to try to tempt me with any kind of lucre, filthy or otherwise. But if you check back in the first paragraph, you'll see that I am currently not working, so, you know, integrity on its own doesn't keep me in the lifestyle to which I'm accustomed (Slim Jims and cable internet). Papa's gotta eat. If you want to pay to watch me do that, ask me again when the streaming service bills are due, we'll see where my integrity is at when faced with the prospect of missing the last few episodes of Invincible.

I've never really been the type to associate my worth or my identity with my work, but I am an American after all, as embarrassing as that's been for the last 10 years or so. But in these past few days since my active working phase at my previous employer was suspended by loving mutual agreement last Friday, I do find myself somewhat formless and dissipated. I know in the past when I'd saved up the leave hours to take a noticeable chunk of time off, the start of it was both thrilling and confusing. The anticipation of being unshackled, if only temporarily, resolved into an almost ecstatic headfirst plummet into the extreme, almost pornographically hedonistic indulgences of sleeping in and not going to meetings, but it took almost a full week to learn to actually relax.

Though the circumstances now are exactly the same in terms of the day-to-day outcomes of vacation (if an email has been directed at me, it has not found me "well" or "at all"), they are occurring without any kind of structures on either side (vacation start date, vacation end date, regular work both suspended and awaiting), so it's... shapeless and weird. Work isn't my identity, by I do feel lost without it so far. Not my specific work, but just the basic compass orientation of routine to give time focus and direction.

To be clear, this isn't complaint, just observation. A huge majority of people would change places with me, not having to work for six months while still getting paid full salary and benefits. So I'm not bragging either. There's a larger grief and cloudiness to these early days than I anticipated. I assume when there's some more reps in this new space, it'll be clear that it's the people and relationships I built over 20 years that are causing the hole that needs filling rather than a fixed quitting time and a series of tasks to complete. At least, Jesus Christ, I hope so.

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*wholly and legally distinct from DreamWorks Pictures and/or DreamWorks Animation, two very real legal entities (with real lawyers on real retainer) I in no way wish to misrepresent here nor claim to be a spokesperson thereof. Unless neither of them actually exist anymore. That's how worried about this I am, I can't even be bothered to do the Wikipedia-level due diligence to see if they got private-equity-absorbed out of existence in the, like, 30 years since Shrek came out.

Blue Blood

There are very different ideas of what constitutes "making it" culture to culture, country to country. In the UK, for example, you can be "upper class" or "an aristocrat" while dining on soup-kitchen donated food by kerosene lamp in a giant house held together by gravity as it slowly falls in on itself over the course of generations. Some ancestor whose name is definitely written down somewhere solemnly accepted a title and the parcel of land you still occupy from, like, William the Conquerer in happy recompense for helping to pacify the Welsh marches or whatever, but those peons and tenant farmers that propped you up stopped contributing their tithings some time between the Reformation and the steam engine, way before anyone had to figure out how to pay for both central heating and dry rot repair. But nobody is ever going to confuse you for, like, a pipe-fitter, so, congratulations I guess. Pipe fitters bear the unmistakeable mark of being socially useful, after all, and all you've got are some vintage tweeds and hemophilia.

It's a little less romantic in the good ole US of A as we tend to simply peg a person's value to, well, their actual literal value. Rich people wouldn't be rich if Jesus, in his American cultural role as Santa Claus For Adults, didn't approve of who they were or how they were conducting themselves. Conversely of course the link between poverty and wickedness is not only tacit but punched, dented into the default verbiage of all two of our political parties. Republicans and Democrats may feel plenty divided these days on a range of dire, life-or-death issues, but the one thing that can always bring them together is punishing the destitute with the threat of destitution for the unforeseeable future. It's OK though, because we're not really taking that much. How do you take something from people who have nothing? Well, that's a trick question, you obviously drive them into more and more unpayable, quality-of-life-crushing debt with fuel prices, food prices, housing inaccessibility and the killing (haha) blow of sudden, drowning, tidal-weight medical debt. Sure the parties alter the way they frame it--Democrats with "we need to give people a hand up" suggesting there's something about being working class that needs to be reviled and cured, and Republicans with "what if we just herded them all into a pen and fed them poison?"--but in practical terms the results are exactly the same.

In a context like this, what even is luxury? I've got one idea: let's say you have like 50 people all working in one place. They all lose their jobs at the same time, but half of them (contractors) are out on the street with nothing but a payout of whatever PTO time they hadn't spent and the other half (direct workers) still have to leave, but they get to "opt" for six months of continued pay and medical benefits. It makes it reeeeeeally hard to complain or be all that bitter when you're one of the ones in the six-month buffer class and you're watching your contractor colleagues talk about how to apply for unemployment and/or disability. You still do complain, of course, just not to them.

Today is my final day before my six months of administrative leave starts. I count myself lucky as I've got some medical tests for some lingering conditions coming up. There's a low but non-zero chance something larger, more debilitating and thus decadently expensive comes up from all this testing. Having steady health insurance in America in 2026 is the equivalent of a manor house would have been in like 1700. The good news is, I can't pass any medical debt on to my children. Yet. There's still time on the congressional calendar to make me a real aristocrat.