The Deck Chairs

Well, that lasted all of about a week. You can say it's almost pure coincidence that I've been offered and have accepted a new job just days after my last one ended, and following a four-month concerted effort to apply to all available postings I could find on multiple online job seeker portals, about half of which I had never even heard of before the process began, and during which the sheer volume of indifference from the places to which I'd applied caused me to entertain a non-zero percent chance that it was possible I was a figment of my own imagination. I knew the internet here was working because my second screen streaming me a calming constant feed of sports betting information and pornography kept going and going, so it couldn't have been that the messages couldn't get out. I just started to suspect that it doesn't matter if you "send" them if you're actually a psychologically defensive construct of someone's collapsing psyche, probably your own. That leads to the question of what the person imagining me would have been doing while I was over here busting my hump filling in tedious application after application, but maybe that's what the sports betting and porn were for. Actually, that makes a lot of sense now.

But no! It doesn't actually make sense, because I got more than zero responses to my entreaties. I got exactly one! The sports betting and pornography were just evidence that I'm a REAL 21st CENTURY AMERICAN MAN.

Sorry, more evidence because the true test of someone's patriotism is in the important things like punching a stranger who doesn't take their hat off during the national anthem at a sporting event or eating so many hot dogs so quickly and all at once, you couldn't possibly enjoy any of them and may be actively harming yourself. Those are the basic tests of citizenship in this country, along with the most important one: being plugged into the matrix the economy as a full participating member. If you're not sure about that as a proposition, keep in mind: if you're not plugged in, you don't get health insurance from your employer, which means if you get any kind of minor infection, we're pretty much OK with you dying from it. It's the literal determining factor in the cost-benefit analysis of keeping you alive.

There are anomalies, sure, of people having multiple jobs, contributing to the economy as much as three or four people while none of their jobs provide health insurance. It seems like we don't value their lives at all either, but they do have a role. The goal is to try to get those people to also somehow vote Republican. And weirdly, it sometimes works. When we say "the American Experiment" we mean more than one thing and we mean it way more literally than you'd think.

On my end, I've done my part and taken up the flag again as a Fully Employed American. This is triumphant and triumphal news, a result to celebrate and to be celebrated. HOWEVER, this job is a goodly distance from the home I currently live in and have occupied for more than two decades and raised my (now fucked off) children in. So I'm going to have to vacate for the sake of my sanity. I'll still be in the same Greater Metropolitan Area, it's just that SoCal is frickin' vast, even vast-er if you factor in travel times during peak commuter hours. The idea of five-ish hours per day in the car doesn't appeal to your beloved author, a soft and downy hand-fed veal calf who has lived a life of surface-street-only driving and/or remote work for 20 years. Oh and the last six months of not having to work at all. Inconvenience? I'd collapse to the ground in a slow-falling column of dust.

It's inconvenient to move of course, but it's in the name of making my life as easy as possible. Also, I lost my old job, I just got married, I got this new job, now I'm going to move... it's the Era of Big Swings here at your friendly neighborhood 2004-style personal essay-type blog. It's just that within the month, it will be coming at you from a totally different neighborhood.

First Kick I Took Was When I Hit The Ground

It's been a pretty long time since I've been a self-recognized drain on the gross domestic product. It feels pretty natural coming back to it though, I must say, seeing as I was, as a very young person, nourished on the teat of the the Welfare State. For those of us who grew up on food stamps in the 1980s, this not only assured that you didn't grow up with rickets or pellagra or any of the other malnourishment-related maladies but it also ensured you got yourself an early push into political self-awareness and self-identification. There were hundreds of people with easy access to facetime with television cameras lined up to let you know that YOU, defenseless child living in conditions that couldn't possibly be of your choosing, were at the root of something sinister, undermining and cancerous nestled menacingly against the heart of our otherwise pure and good FULLY CAPITALIST society: human empathy.

That's right, it was understood in the 1980s that open-heartedness was the fastest way to get heartworms. Arms opened in embrace of your fellow person predicated only on their shared qualities of personhood? Invitation to a knife in the chest. Kindness was softness and softness was for suckers. Suckers were the ones the heroes identified, primed and then exploited for all the value that could be extricated. And that extrication was the duty of every contributing member of society, by which of course I mean men. Not just any men though, the manliest version of men who ever manned. A version of manliness so definitely self-assured, non-defensive and un-fragile, it was impervious even to satire. Satire was for wimps and New York homosexuals, at least that's what the REAL MEN heard, they wouldn't know for sure, because there was ZERO OVERLAP in cultural spheres between the alpha-butch and the sissies and their feelings. Any attempt to satirize was immediately adopted in earnest as a mantra. Real men don't eat quiche. Greed is good. The president was literally a cowboy from a TV western. The lines were clear, and any wavering would not be abided. Stay the course, even if the results are a genocide by pandemic.

But then Magic Johnson got HIV and well, OK, maybe we should start thinking about it as a medical issue now that it can happen to one of us. And then Bill Clinton became president and solved the problem of "welfare queens" less by mitigating the socio-economic conditions that cause and exacerbate a systemic and morally indefensible disproportionate apportionment of resources in a system that requires an exploitable underclass to sustain itself, and more by joining in the kicking. This of course ushered in the golden age where we lived free from want and nobody ever blamed poor people for anything ever again.

Which comes as a HUGE RELIEF to me as I, just today, find myself for the first time in almost 20 years, entirely unemployed. To be fair, I haven't had to go into the office for six months due to the highly successful and in-no-way-problematic Deferred Resignation Program for federal employees. I've been getting paid my full salary to stay home and talk to bot-monitored HR text chat channels in the new hellscape of employment-seeking, which is a pretty interesting way for a government to combat fraud, waste and abuse. I think the strategy is to psych out fraud, waste and abuse by leaning into it so hard, they become frightened and confused and can only run away. Shocking the system, kind of like the way vaccines work, but societally instead of biologically. If we believed in that kind of quackery anymore, which of course we don't.

The best news is that even though I'm definitely a freeloader now, I'm freeloading off my spouse now that I'm married again, more than the government as yet. Or at least I will be. I'm waiting on a pretty decent payout from the vacation leave I accumulated but didn't use, so I can "contribute" with that for the next few months. And I do have a second-round job interview next Tuesday. The job is in El Segundo near LAX though. For those of you who aren't familiar with Southern California, anything El Segundo/Inglewood in the LAX sort of area is at minimum 30 minutes away from itself. Now factor in the fact that I live two counties, three freeways and one mightily earnest but almost practically unusable network of public transit options away and Google maps tells me to expect a one-to-three hour commute each way.

Needs must, I guess. But even if the public transit worked, I wouldn't be allowed to take it since real men drive. Trucks usually. With those naked lady reclining silhouette mudflaps and also a set of disturbingly realistic faux testicles hanging from the trailer hitch. You know, things men like. But then, I've already bought an electric car, so maybe that ship has sailed.

Breaker of Horses

There's a certain self-harming cruelty in having the privilege to say "that was thirty years ago" whilst talking about something you were not only old enough to remember, but something you participated in as a fully formed, whole-ass adult. The easy self-soothing answer is of course "it beats the alternative" but death doesn't really work well as a counterweight to life experience. It's too ephemeral and clunkily final. Like, there's nothing actually there. It's can't be the other half of a scale that includes the experiences of life; it's more like some asshole coming along and shoving the whole scale off whatever elevated surface it was resting on while you were over here minding your own business, you know, weighing shit. It's not really a source of context, more really the whole entire obliteration of it. At that point, context is for your loved ones and relatives who are, like, still alive.

I know I make it sound bleak, but I'm not afraid of dying. I'm absolutely terrified of it. It's like literal and appropriate mortal fear. Seriously, that's why they call it that.

The problem with time is that it kind of sucks. Yes, it's the only way we've come up with as a universe (so far!) to exist in any kind of an orderly (ha!) way versus the limits of resources available. Like if we all existed forever at once, we'd run out of shit immediately, to the extent that "immediately" still functioned as a concept. The alternative is what we have now, where we skid by, perpetually forward, in a system that keeps us consuming in a pinpoint context locked in with our accidental cohort of time-wise siblings in an iterative existence that we are specifically disallowed from seeing the end of. The good news is I can't, like, go back and steal from the Renaissance the things that I need now, even if I know they weren't using it, like palladium and, I don't know, soap. Temporally just as physically, I'm constrained by the length of my reach, limited to the absurdity-slash-gift of right now.

As I proofread the preceding paragraphs while I'm composing here, it sure feels like I'm leading up to something wonderful, extolling the virtues and the value of living in the moment or some other rah-rah Oprah shit. Or maybe how the past you and the present you are unwitting partners in the construction of a point of view that is unique in every mathematically unlikely combination of influences, experiences and events that make a person that person. If I really hated myself (or more specifically my readership) there'd be a metaphor about snowflakes or fingerprints.

But you're this readership, so I think I feel comfortable when I say for all of us on that score: barf.

Sixteen years ago, I was able to write one of my favorite things based on one of the kicks in the head you get from life, when my marriage had fallen apart. And that was only possible because thirty years ago, as a whole-ass (if barely) adult, I had decided to get married in the first place. The proto-adult getting married in 1997 could not in any way have anticipated or even really understood the 2010 guy writing my sad-guy divorce blog. And the latter, rather annoyingly, could at best conjecture or grasp at wisps of memory of what it was to be the 23-year-old in the rented tuxedo who was laboring under the misapprehension that he'd really figured something out here. The cheap joke would be to call that kid an idiot or laugh at his naïveté, but he was wearing that black tux, double breasted, in August in the Inland Empire. He suffered enough.

It's been such a struggle to avoid the easy jokes and the clichés in the last month or so. The guy who wrote that blog post in 2010 was trying to be optimistic, but 16 years later, that seems just as silly as the unsullied joy of the 1997 version given that it took a whole 'nother decade-and-a-half to get back to that willingness to risk and surrender, to commit and, the ultimate hurdle, the most dangerous one: to feel safe.

I'd like to be able to tell you that it's an ability I've found to live in the moment, but what did I just say about clichés? Also "live in the moment," that's the worst one. Facile and meaningless, yes, but also, what other choice do you have, like in quantum terms? I've got these 30 years of life experience, but I can't say with any certainty that they prepared me to love my wife, as she now is these six days on, or embrace a life of logistical questions and uncertainty I have volunteered to no longer be solely in control of. Literally none of my life experience "prepared" me for any of this. The certainty I feel, well, I guess we might as well chalk that up to magic.

VVs In My Necklace Shining

Boy, there's a lot going on! Not only am I trying to solve my imminent unemployment situation, I'm trying to wind up the circumstances of my current employment from what is (er, was [sad face emoji]) essentially my dream job...

Well, hang on, I hate to interrupt myself, but maybe the situation prompted me to use some strong language there. Nobody really describes their job as a government archivist as a "dream job." Certainly it was a desired situation based on my long-developing employment history and became an absolutely-best-case opportunity given the fixed circumstances in context, but I can say with some confidence that when you ask a child or even a teenager or a young adult or a fully grown adult or a middle aged adult or an elderly person what their "dream job" is, the answer "government archivist" coming up would occur at a likelihood so negligible it would indistinguishable from total impossibility. Let's just say I was happy with where I was at.

As I was saying, not only am I processing out from my dream job,* I'm transitioning my house from A Place Where Kids Live(d) to an empty nest ready for sale, I'm fitting in the end of a long cycle of medical testing (all positive, no worries), I'm actively pursuing what leads I can for a new job, oh and also I'm getting married. Like tomorrow.

Luckily I'm marrying a very practical person, so that actually is taking up the least amount of time, money and energy, believe it or not. A civil ceremony more or less is done with the wedding prep the day you make the appointment. Photographer, flowers, catering, DJ, strippers for the after party, all the traditional wedding trappings become moot points when you know there's another wedding waiting at the civic center 20 minutes behind you and 20 minutes ahead of you. Maybe that sounds overly functional for something as romantic as the joining of two souls or whatever, but the outcome is exactly the same for later tax considerations.

Everything else outside of the wedding part does require a lot of attention and tedious focus. So far I have a couple of strategies I've been employing to approach the problem. First, I've been indulging in a medically unwise indulgence in both caffeine and sugar, often at the same time. I say "medically unwise" as the issue I've been chasing down with testing is primarily a digestive complaint, so maybe coffee and Coke Zero aren't necessarily therapeutically indicated, but I'm sure it's better for me than black market Adderall or whatever. So we make compromises.

The second strategy I've employed is to fall all the way down a YouTube rabbit hole following reactions to the white British geriatic gangster hip-hop duo Pete & Bas. There's a lot to do there, from just being impressed by the lyricism and the flow to seeing young (mostly Black) American hip-hop heads lose their shit the first time they see them to running down the theories and conspiracies around how much these two pensioners are actually involved in the music at all, a whole range from "this is them" to "this is some Milli Vanilli bullshit."

Now, I can see how the second strategy on the surface might not seem that productive, or even in an extreme interpretation an active avoidance in negation of productivity both in practice and as a concept, but I would counter that with... you know, something if such a counter existed. Except maybe to ask in the rhetorico-hypothetical: maybe in times of high task pressure and demands on our focus, an outlet of low-energy (passive? catatonic?) intake of zero-stake stimuli is actually a strategy to refresh and reset the brain and nervous system to better re-engage with the checklist(s).

Or to put it another way, is it good mental hygiene or pure brain rot? What am I, a doctor? The internet already has one of those. I can't ask him directly, so I think the responsible thing is to watch 90-200 hours of his existing videos just to see if I happen upon an answer.

Anyway, mazel tov to me and the soon-to-be missus. There won't be a lot of coverage of my actual personal life here, as it's just not really what I do, but I look forward to making up some things about it to either amuse myself or to disingenuously underline a point I have no business making. Essentially I'll tell you the same lie we tell kids when they're about to also become step-kids: don't worry, nothing will change.

I certainly have no plans to become interesting all of a sudden. We're all safe on that score.

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*Yeah, OK, I'm fighting with myself. Worst I can do is a draw.

Arrive Without Traveling

I've been posting these fairly early in the day* over the last several months because I've had the extreme and borderline obscene luxury of having whole days off while still getting paid for the job I still technically have. I've documented this extensively since this program period began back in April so I won't belabor it, but suffice it to say that the persistence of my availability at some point in the last month or so has started to edge away from Hedonist's Utopia and teeter toward Something Of A Pickle.

While the circumstances of being able to pay my bills has been "You know what, that's a funny story..." for the better part of 2026 by now, I'm very aware that one's abilities as a raconteur don't really enter into it when you get to the point where you aren't able to pay the same bills. It turns out just about everyone in Accounts Receivable, regardless of industry or institution, are humorless sticklers. Some stereotypes (like boring accountants) are built on verifiable experience in statistically meaningful sample sizes. See, they've even got mean talking that nerd shit.

All this means I'm getting right down to it in terms of my need to get another job. One that pays money and has health coverage, exotic features like that.

Today's posting is later than unsual as I had to spend the morning prepping for and then attending my first real measurable opportunity since I started looking in earnest back in June. It was a video call job interview using Microsoft Teams (Zoom is for Millennials, apparently, so passé) for a position that overlaps well with my skills, but would give me a 1-2 hour commute (one way) to basically LAX every day. If you don't live in the area and you're wondering how far I'm talking, just know that "basically LAX" is automatically "too far" no matter where the point of origin is.

But beggars-in-prospect can't be choosers-in-fact. So I took the interview.

I think I did OK, but the real downside of a) having little to no contact with professional adults for half a year and b) being a twitchy recluse at the core of one's nature is that you can forget how to Person. I acquitted myself acceptably though, I think. I didn't do any swearing or work in a racially insensitive joke as an ice-breaker. It's another job working in the 2026 defense industry headed by Pete Hegseth though, so that last part might actually count against me.

I've got a few other prospect on the go, plus a whole shitload of other life-changing rearrangement happening, so it's possible future postings might be "late." But that's not just a quantum abstraction, when I post this when I feel like it and you read it when you can. It's almost metaphysics to point out that if you're reading this right now, I can't have posted it not on time. Think about that.

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*Early in the day for me. The really interesting AND ALSO super tedious types of physics people will tell you the idea of simultaneity, a "now" that two different conscious beings can meaningfully agree upon, is an absurdity. This has something to do with gravity and spacetime and distance and probably the speed of light. Please keep this in mind the next time I'm "late." Also maybe I just mean because time zones...

Cherubim Play the Harp

To continue a theme from last week: let's root for some billionaires! I know it sounds gross and degrading, but I'm about to relate this to sports in the United States, which has almost always been about people with the least being involved directly in a portion of the holdings portfolios of the people with the most and the unequal, exploitative, emotionally problematic relationships implied therein. It's as American as apple pie, which definitely existed before America did so it's actually probably, like, German or some shit, but no no no, we're overthinking! I apologize! Flags titties beers! All things invented in America! Let's go!

Axiomatically, the actual trifecta of American things includes mom (not your mom specifically, we have to be careful in case your mom comes from somewhere else. We mean American moms, like maybe Superman's mom, the one from the first movie with Christopher Reeve, with the white silver hair and living on a farm, not his actual birth mom, a literal alien), apple pie (we covered this already) and baseball.

Honestly, it's early September as I type this and I've had very little reason to consider baseball as an idea this late in the year for over a decade now. The team I support--the finally/again expertly (if misleadingly) named Los Angeles Angels--has been consistently mediocre-to-bad over that span. This is not an unusual tale as sports fandoms as a rule are paeans to a state of voluntary suffering. No matter what sport you follow, the stark brutality of it is that only one team ever actually wins anything at the end of the year. One of the most popular long-running annual features at Defector, my preferred site for sports information on the internet, is bemoaning the curse of being a fan of any particular NFL team, inclusive of the one that just literally won the Super Bowl the previous year. It's a sportswriting stance that is a little dated at this point (it's a quaint 2010-ish kind of snark), but the underlying current of opt-in self-flagellation remains a truism.

Like all the mythic things associated with America and patriotism, baseball and its history are, of course, heavily sauced in half-truths and outright lies that suited a sensibility that preferred the coherence of narrative to the blurred, messy, contingent chaos one might end up with if we applied the rigors of modern fact. Not the current 2026 social value of facts, of course, I mean the pre-2016 ideas like actually figuring things out instead of letting everyone get measles because it conflicts with a constructed alternate political narrative. Its an interesting historical curiosity that we've found our way back to Big Lies to obscure the impertinences of reality. We can all agree its a surprise(?) and an irony(?!) that the reversion to a "simpler time" of story over truth has resulted in a dystopia of nihilism and social atomization instead of any kind of cohesion (narrative-wise or societal). Not funny in the ha-ha sense, more funny in the death-sooner-than-we-expected kind of a way.

At the root of the Abner Doubleday myth of the founding of baseball is the idea that baseball needed (to paraphrase the linked article) a daddy. Yes, America is mom and apple pie, but "mom" in this scenario is a blurry fetishization locked within the bounds of convention and silence, slicing up the apples provided to her by the sweat of the brow of her hunter-gatherer (or shift supervisor or banker or hedge fund manager) husband, the Daddy, the stand-in for God-His-Ding-Dang-Self. She receives graciously the fruits of his labor and somehow, in a mysteriously woman-magic labor-free, zero-agency way, transforms them into a nourishing labor-fruits-pie so that Daddy can sally forth again, sustained and supported in a way that in no way conveys equity in the outcomes or benefits, to hunterer and gatherer again. Though probably not "sally forth," a way butch-er verb than that. You get it.

American sports overall has been skeptical of private equity and sovereign wealth, big blurry concepts that lack focus and specific masculine charisma that have weaseled their way into effeminate things like "Europe" and "soccer." There has been some softening, but still American teams by and large have to be owned by a person with a controlling interest. A person with thick hands and a barrel chest. A booming voice and shoulders broad enough to lay your fearful head on when the big world gets scary. The contract language is very specific.

Me now, I'm dealing with the introduction of a new Sports Daddy as my baseball team, my first sports love, has been sold. The good news? It's my same Sports Daddy from my football team, the LA Rams! No awkward transition period where I call him "Stan" or just work conversations where I don't actually have to use his name at all, no getting used to the idea that he's sharing a room with my mom, no clumsy holiday dinners with his family as a weird outsider amongst strangers who have known each other since birth. No more Arte Moreno, the profligate wandering aloof weirdo who spent all mom's money on second-hand JetSkis that he never bothered to get off the trailer since he brought them home; not abusive, just distant and inattentive, a guy seemingly really interested in lots of things that just coincidentally don't include You and Your Needs. Now we've got Stan Kroenke (and his investment group), a guy (and his investment group) who has married (with his investment group) into a lot of sports families and generally made them better. A slutty sports polygamist with the kind of toupée that dares you not to notice, but parenting is a results-oriented business and this guy Gets It.

In the abstract, of course, I reserve all my rights to my leftist indignation about the existence of billionaires even as an idea. Inherently destabilizing, exploitative and disempowering and should be fought at every place fighting can be done. If in the meantime before we get this bloody revolution thing going the Angels actually aren't terrible, well... just a signpost on the path, a fading whiff of opiate as the masses one day surge forward. We can shake his hand before we put him up against the wall, right?

Soup Kitchen

I started my "deferred resignation" administrative leave (all at once voluntarily and completely against my will) back in April, which I know I shouldn't complain about. It's not the worst thing to not have to report to an office every day or stress about outputs or collaborations or which route is best to take in the hallways at the office at which time to avoid having to actually speak with anyone. Work is, it turns out, a lot of work.

As an American, there are only two things I know for sure: 1) these colors don't run, and 2) the value of a human life is starkly and manifestly quantifiable. Before you click away in disgust, no, I'm not winding up to some woke-ass spiel about the what-really-should-be-unsustainable-but-we-seem-to-be-pretty-good-at-sustaining-it epidemic of gun violence that is met with a forceful and defiant shrug of the shoulders by our elected leadership every time it breaks into the news cycle, or the way in which specific socioeconomic or racial demographic subgroups in this country are subjected to violence (at large and by authorities) exactly as though they deserved less protection than the hegemonic rump that controls all the levers of power and means of production.

I'm not doing that here! That would be bleak and so Woke 1. Social justice and equality before the law? What is this, 2020? As the kids probably still say: so cringe! Did I use that right? They still say that, right? Also, unrelated, what is "gyatt," anyone? How would I use it in a sentence? Should I try? I probably shouldn't try.

Right now, I'm not sure who I am. The thing that defines us as citizens in this country is, and this is not exactly groundbreaking social science or even really that deep a political insight, how we stand in relation to productivity. How much of our day is being spent contributing to the economy, and if it isn't the correct amount, how should the power of the state be used to punish us for noncompliance with the expected output norm? And the math is super simple, like obviously if you don't have a job, the public humiliation by political actors and the vulnerability you experience in terms of food scarcity, proximity to violence, police harassment, educational abandonment and social experimentation is not only tolerated but expected. Cheered, even. It's such a deeply ingrained societal truism that poor people vote against the interests of disgusting other (imagined) poor people and in the interests of billionaires as a matter of course, election over election, as part of a specific engineering program to frustrate and defeat the development of the idea of shared political interests among the wide base of the population that have the least. Pointing it out is like pointing out misogyny. Everyone's like "yeah guy, duh."

If you do have a job, is it the right job? If you're complaining about schools and food and the brutality of the police-state-within-the-state, well, have you thought about just getting a better job? It's the promise of America, after all, that literally every person should be able to be middle class. The fact that economies do not function in that way, never have, never will and there isn't enough money in the whole history of the world to make that sort of reordering even remotely possible isn't relevant or worth exploring, but the promise of it is enough to warp perception just enough to make something like the modern Republican Party (or even the non-modern one dating back to at least the New Deal) viable.

So if someone, just hypothetically, isn't doing anything to actually contribute, like not working at all, but is still on the payroll and collecting a check, is that person a) a dirty freeloader worthy of our scorn, or b) a folk hero living the dream, sticking it to The Man?

Like, I'm not on public assistance, except I'm definitely having my lifestyle subsidized without being required to put in work. It sounds fishy, but when you remember the context that this was a scheme cooked up by the richest person who ever was, well, I guess I have my answer. You can't be wrong or stupid or misguided or a narcissistic waste of space if you have a lot of money. Wealth is self-justifying. I feel like I'm covered. Thanks, Elon.*

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*Did it hurt to type that, even as a rhetorical bit? Reader, it did.