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.

Click Here to Apply

I don't think it speaks particularly to my sense of meticulousness to any level of peculiarity, nor to a compulsion toward constructing a codifying order in futile defiance of the entropy that has the advantage of a literally limitless pool of time to achieve its end-state goal of pulling the universe and all we've ever known to love into its subatomic constituent parts to point out that I made a spreadsheet for my job search. Really it's just that I like making the little grids. You can make the cells, like, different colors and stuff. And word wrap, woof... who's having a bad time?

Honestly, it's just too much to manage. Since I started the job search in earnest back in early June, I have applied for close to 90 jobs. I know this because of the above-mentioned spreadsheet, which, like all of technology these days, is supposed to make things easier but somehow can't be simplified enough to actually account for all the chaotic complexity that literally every task seems to require. Like how cars used to be carburators and dipsticks and now they're basically an IT department's worth of problems with wheels attached. My car is fully electric and I'm not exaggerating when I say any time I have to take it the dealership service department* they react with fear and surprise at the sight of it. I've never described an issue that I'm having and then been met with any level of reassurance; not "mm hmm" of general recognition, not a confident off-the-cuff appraisal of the issue, not a single probling follow-up question, not even the kind of "I'm following what you're saying" head nod they used to give you just before they cut you off in that charmingly condescending way only car people and financial consultants really know how to do. The flash of panic in their eyes catches you by surprise at first, but sometimes you can really feel when you're in the middle of a cultural shift and the people experiencing it are scrambling to catch up. This must have been what it was like back when women were first allowed to get their own credit cards. World turned upside down.

I've talked already about the absurd deterioration of the efficiency of any task, including job searching, as technology becomes more "helpful" to job seekers and prospective employers. I guess it underlines that point in a meta sort of way by overlapping a lot of the same territory with yet another overwritten blogpost, which is definitely what I'm trying to achieve here in my normal clever-clogs mode. It's not that I'm just complaining again about the same shit, over and over and over again. I mean, at best you could hit me with two "over"s.

There's loads of free (and less than free) advice out there about targeting, honing, perfecting and deploying your résumé, couched in whatever half-baked market-speak pseudo-paradigm is pinging its way around the "employment space" at the minute. What I can tell you from this many months in, only securing a response of any kind from seven of the almost 90 places I've applied: the only things that matter are volume and speed.

If you've been around the internet for any amount of time, one of its truest constants, an axiomatic known-knowable against which one could calibrate atomic clocks, is that if there is a comment section for the thing posted, SOMEone will, within 1-to-4 seconds of it being put up for public view, will comment "First!" Of course all of us know that in the time it took them to type that out, at least two other people will have posted a comment, so the "First!" comment, by understood and stipulated internet rule, cannot appear earlier than the third comment under a post or video, with no lower limit known.

What we didn't know is that impulse that makes people stupid in the sort of public way where people can see what you thought was a good idea to type, that's exactly and only the one strategy that will work to get a response when job hunting. It's FIRST! or nothing.

Helpfully, job sites will tell you a) when the job posting was first listed and b) roughtly how many responses it has garnered, up to "100+." The reason why it stops at 100 is that all these sites know that by the time you hit triple digits, your chances of even being seen--let alone considered--rest at zero, the same way the OceanGate Titan rests on the ocean floor. The people in that thing had a better chance at swimming to the surface than you do of getting a job that has "100+" applicants listed or has been posted for more than three days.

Grim metaphor, sure, but this is grim stuff. The only traction I've gotten for any applications has been because I stumbled across a posting soon after it went up. But it doesn't really get less bleak than that once you've (improbably!) cleared the first hurdle. So far I've had only one interview, with a "virtual AI assistant" bot about a week ago and from whom I have not yet heard anything back. Feels great. I haven't been ghosted by a bot since I was on the dating apps, so I appreciate the notalgia hit.

I had an interview scheduled for this morning, but the person never called, never responded to any attempted follow-up. Not my favorite experience, but you know what, the managing of the volume happens on their end as well. Just like with the dating apps, I can get pretty quickly to some kind of empathy for the other half of the equation. That's also a safe coping mechanism to recontextualize rejection by giving them a built in excuse, only in this case it has to be "well, they can't really get to everyone..." rather than "she was wearing that Sailor Moon shirt in her profile, she's probably not really that into guys actually." You have to adapt, obviously.

The answer is to, as the cliché goes, make finding a job as much like having a job as possible, which is to say: tedious and disheartening and getting in your way of playing more Baldur's Gate III.

No snoozing, literally, so I'm up with an alarm now. First thing I do is dig into my email and start sorting through the zillion messages I've gotten from the 6-12 active job sites (some I actively applied through and some who just... found me) I'm using and determine whether or not I can make any applications that day. I do it in 2-3 hour chunks a few times a day, right up until the the boulders of hopelessness avalanche through my soul and I have to take a break to let it re-inflate with the right amount of delusional optimism (about 5 parts per billion). I'm committed to getting this done.

And by "this" I mean "maintain continuity of health care so I don't have to pay for my statin pills out of my own pocket." Dystopias are dark things to live in, but you can't say they're not chock full of motivation.

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*I'm not a financial masochist, it's just that it's still under warranty.

With Any Luck, He's Got The Grail Already

Denholm Elliott is dead. This is not breaking news, as it happened way back in 1992. And honestly, if you were coming here for current hot-stove celebrity news, you've misread the last 20-plus years of my posting history. To the extent that there is an operating philosophy behind any of this, it's that nothing published here should ever be misconstrued as enlightening, informative, actionable or timely. Developing and maintaining a reputation for that kind of reliability and/or usefulness comes with it way too much implicit responsibility. I have a cat, I'm already way over-booked in that department.

Besides mourning a deeply dependable British character actor and also taking a minute to refresh myself on some of his roles and accomplishments,* mentioning him is just a culmination of thoughts I had today when I was filling up my 32-ounce large drink cup with iced tea before I enjoyed a bean and rice burrito at a local Mexican fast food institution. I concede that it's possible that the connection there is not apparent or immediate to some of you, so I will flesh it out, just in case.

My first experience with Denholm Elliott was in Trading Places, the Eddie Murphy-Dan Aykroyd-Jamie Lee Curtis high-concept comedy from 1983. I don't remember when or where I saw it, but I imagine it was on early HBO in the 1980s, at somebody else's house (HBO used to be just for fancy people), and it definitely contained way, way too many boobs for whatever age I was. Also a man gets sodomized by a gorilla. You know, as a joke.

It's very possible I first saw him in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he played Marcus Brody so straight in that one, I don't think he stuck out that much and I only recognized him retroactively. To be fair, he was competing with animatronic snakes and Nazis having their faces melted by a box of ghosts. If you compare it to his later turn as Marcus in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he went from Supporting Exposition Man to Main Comic Relief, a gigantic upgrade and, to Steven Spielberg's credit, really leaned into what Denholm Elliott could deliver as a performer. Iconic line readings, effortless stealing of scenes... everyone once in a while, this Spielberg guy gets something right. Credit where it's due.

In the intervening nine years between Last Crusade and the goofy-ass, abortive (but still ultimately delivered) follow-up Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Elliott died (today I learned) due to AIDS-related complications. This is before we started CGI-ing digital zombie avatars of dead people into films, so in an apt reflection of the creative effort that went into Crystal Skull, Spielberg et alia cast deeply dependable British character actor** Jim Broadbent as Indiana Jones' new English Supporting Exposition Man, probably actually named Marcuss Broddy.

Part of the attempted creative character and narrative messaging in that film has to do with time passing and the life transitions forced upon us by aging, conceding agency from one generation to the next. This had also been touched on in Last Crusade, but in that case the handoff was to the protagonist from his supporting Dad character, so we didn't take much note of it. But now, it's a central theme because the check is being cashed agaisnt the account of Indiana Jones himself, to the benefit of (let me double check my notes here to be sure I haven't made a grave error... nope, it still inexplicably says) Shia LeBoeuf.

English Supporting Exposition Man Who Is Not Denholm Elliott, from his home nestled deeply in Act 1 of Crystal Skull, delivers the iconic and THEME-CRITICAL nut graf: "We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away." Were they mostly referring to Sean Connery in that line? It's not impossible! But they mentioned Marcus Brody directly, and this is his stand-in character specifically delivering the line, so yeah, it makes me think more of Denholm Elliott. Roger Moore was a better James Bond, too. I said it.

Of course the movie then blatantly betrays itself by spending the rest of its run-time just giving Indiana Jones new things like a rekindling with his One That Got Away in a sparky, game Karen Allen and the burden of a new son in the-guy-whose-name-we-already-mentioned-it's-fine. We had to wait for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to do a way better job of directly pitting Indy against mortality, even if it still wasn't great. But give me a choice between Sh*a L*Bo*uf and Phoebe Waller-Bridge and, well, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is Roger Moore all day.

Again, what I'm getting at is obvious, but in case I have to spell it out: I've had to give up drinking diet soda. I know. I was at the burrito place and I was getting iced tea (to be fair, they do pretty good iced tea) instead of my normal Diet Coke (I buy Coke Zero at home, but Coke Zero from soda fountains is gross for some reason) as yet another adjustment to mitigate my ongoing low-level medical issues that do not have an obvious solution, or even palliative program, as yet. I've already given up pretty much all meat except poultry to control for cholestorol, even though I'm on a pill for that now anyway. And now, what, I can't give myself the pleasure of some lab-made harsh chemical sugar-substitute fizzy caffeine delivery vehicle, for what? Dried leaves steeped in some water.

I've reached the point where life stops giving me things and starts taking them away.

Well, the joke's on them (whomever has told me to cut out diet soda, my own nagging inner voice I guess), because it doesn't seem to be helping that much! Next thing you know They are going to be telling me to stop eating fast-food burritos the size of my forearm as overeating is as likely a culprit for digestive discomfort as anything.

Oh god, there's no bottom, is there?

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*Did you know he won a BAFTA for his role in Trading Places? That was news to me just today! Pretty happy about it too, he was great in that. Hang on, did this blog just lead to something informative

**Please do not describe him as such in front of Mike Leigh