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.

Gone Fishin'

I try not to be too cutesy or thematic with these posts. I figure as a 50-plus-year-old straight white dad, the cringe would come about naturally just in the course of me expressing myself. Usually you don't even have to get to the body of the text as the title will almost be a half-remembered rap lyric, a pun or a pun based on a half-remembered rap lyric. Good writing should making you feel something, even if it's just "aw man, come on..."

Sometimes thematic-ness happens accidentally, to wit: last week was about having not enough time and this week, whew, brother lemme tell you, is it ever not about that.

In the short term, I'm home early from my usual work hours. This is after having taken Monday through Wednesday off. And the previous Monday through Wednesday. And I will be taking off the following Monday through Wednesday. This series of five-day weekends is being brought to you by the magic of Impending Job Loss and the phenomenon of Not Paying Out Accrued Sick Leave Upon Separation, one of the enduring, towering achievements of American-style capitalism along with Housing Inaccessible To Most Working People and my favorite, Dying Of Preventable Illness To Avoid Ruinously Expensive Treatment Thereby Burdening Your Children With Unrecoverable Debt. So I've been "sick" a lot these last several weeks, which isn't all waste, fraud and abuse as I'm, as I've said, a 50-plus-year-old man, meaning I'm laid up with some creeping malady or another most days. I'm on two daily pills now that I wasn't just a few weeks ago, and I went in for a whole-ass ultrasound of my rotting innards just yesterday. Did I need all those days off for that? Maybe not, but if you count the hours put into a seventh full run through Baldur's Gate 3 as "mental health days," you can't say I'm not making it count.

I'm fine, the checks and tests and pills are all within the scope of slumping old-man-hood,* but the point is, a lot of "making it count" is in my future. A week from today is my last official day before the six month "administrative leave" portion of my departure begins. If you aren't sure what that means, there's a very smug primer on some of the facets of this Elon-based anti-labor weasel-around of worker protections to affect layoffs in all but name, an artifact of a time when we naively believed we were living in the worst version of how things could get. Remember how innocent we all were before anyone had been ICE-kidnapped and no Iranian schoolgirls had been bombed to death from any American warship, let alone several. Those were the good old days (derogatory).

I don't know what my plans are right away, but that's something of a luxury. My mortgage will not lapse, nor will my health insurance, at least not until October-ish. There's room here to pull back, breath deeply and get a high enough view to get a bit philosophical, which I've tried a bit here and there in the days I've had off. What I've come up with so far? Mostly violent fantasies about Pete Hegseth getting his head stuck in tighter and tighter spaces. But to be clear, for law enforcement monitoring, this is just fantasy. Everyone knows with that much fucking hair product, ole Pete isn't get his stupid peanut head stuck in anything any time soon, no matter how hard he presses.

See, that was lame and cringe. I might be slightly too angry for "perspective" yet. Maybe we'll check in on that again some time after the midterms. But by then we might have a Republican governor in California, so I might need another six months off.

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*this is different from "slumping old manhood," where the emphasis is really on the "slumping."

Hello, I Must Be Going

Well, I had planned to write more, but I'm in a Real Life Doing Stuff kind of mode as I transition out of my job, plan to combine my life with a partner and continue shepherding my children through living through a period of adult transition while the country is being run by a feral donkey.

This is my way of saying there's no time for a proper blog this week. I had sat down with all the good faith and best intentions to give what I call Normal Effort, and these days, really what more can you ask of a person? Useful production of something you can use? Ha, what is this, 1950? Wake up, noob. I thought about doing something you could use, that's more than enough to elicit your groveling gratitude. That's how we roll these days in Feraldonkeystan. Put that to music and you've got a national anthem.

OK, I have to go. Please don't be killed or maimed by any unforeseen global/national emergencies in the intervening week, when I'm back to regale you with something more punishingly substantial in my particular idiom. You are welcome.

The Blitz

Hello, good morning if you're just waking up! Anything interesting going on over there, wherever you are? Looking forward to spring/or (if you're one of those aberrations living on the underside of the human home world) autumn? How's the car running, hanging in there still? Did your dog and/or cat get that minor surgery it needed? I'm sure it looks funny with the cone on its neck, ha ha! Kids doing OK in school? Did you end up having to hold that one back a year after they got kicked in the head by that horse at the petting zoo when you guys were on that budget trip to Bulgaria? How about work, is that still good? Work? No? No work?

Hey, either way, it could be worse, you could be like me and having to look to the skies for a rain of steel and flame manifesting fiery geopolitical vengeance from above.

To be clear, I'm not exactly panicking about this. We don't have an Iron Dome over here like Israel or anything, we have something more powerful: the lack of any commensurate experience by anyone in living memory. As long as we don't get bombed, being bombed remains unimaginable. Basically we are on a very long successful streak of fending off disasters with our hopes. Not all disasters, we've been pretty spotty on those, but the ones that look and smell and feel like war on domestic soil. Everyone here is keeping our collective shit together despite the (still vague) threat. We're doing normal California shit like not taking public transit and gloating about the weather we've clearly intentionally manifested/deserve as people. If something should happen to (literally?) pierce that feeling of invulnerability, however, be prepared for a collapse of composure we haven't seen since 1993. Just more on a societal level.

Southern California is pretty big and I live a fair distance inland, in a spread-out exurb away from any targets of value (as far as I know), so I don't feel all that personally threatened, but my main concern is that if Trump is in the market for regime change with his Iran thing, would he also be willing to let Iran bomb California to try to accelerate some regime change right here in the state?

We know for example that he has a penchant for withholding or withdrawing support for stuff or people he has decided don't bow and/or scrape low enough for his liking. And further, he's specifically picked out California for his own form of malignant neglect according to his whim.

Would he go the whole way and hold back military protection from a blue state if it were attacked by a foreign power? I mean look, we already started bombing Iran, as the internet would understate, "for... reasons?" And it's important that you say it that way if you speak it out loud, "FOR DOT DOT DOT REASONS QUESTION MARK." Win any debate instantly with that technique, especially if screamed.

Of course this is not the time for irony or mocking. We're a nation at war. Or, er, not really at war, but you know, a war-like, uh, conflict. Which is awkward since they just spent a bunch of time and money and vomiting red-meat into microphones insisting that the Department of Defense is now the Department of The-Double-U-Word. It's tough to claim your disinterested in a thing when it's now on the letterhead of all the new stationery you just ordered. I've never seen an administration backtrack and double down at the same time, but I guess these are unprecedented times for a reason.

What that reason is specifically, like all things of this particularly stupid historical moment, evades me. Ideally any potential drone strikes in proximity to my home area do the same.

An Editor Has Nominated This Article For Deletion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She's My Priestess, I'm Your Priest

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

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

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

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

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