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.

Derp Face

Typically, life events and news-of-the-week are the most obvious jumping off points for anything I post here. There's nothing special about me as a blogger in that regard. I'm out here ginning up content just like any other social medial schnook, willing to call any blip trend-line of routine inspiration, in ways that I know border on almost indecent levels of depreciation of "inspiration" as a concept when I know things like the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel exist or whatever. But if you think about it, look, the execution is awe inspiring, sure, but that was just the result of Michelangelo taking a contract job from some rich asshole. So really, yeah, his work gets slightly more hype, but he knows he's a corporate sellout while I'm out here keeping it real, doing this at the minimum integrity-buy-in level of NO DOLLARS,* so those factors kind of balance each other out. We're functionally the same, Michelangelo and me, people are always saying. But he's got his fancy religious pictures and I've got my sanctimony, so I feel like I'm ahead a little.

Right now, though, looking at the news, I almost wanted to write about how things are better than they have been, or at least have a positive spin, but most of the things affecting me or at least dominating my vision are all government related, so I'm not sure "positive" really exists as an option. It's like getting hit in the head with a bat over and over again, but putting the emotional contortionist's work in to get to "well, at least the bat didn't have any nails driven into it."

Like is it great news that the fascist secret police show of force occupying a major American city is purportedly finally ending? I mean, of course it is. And the way the government is doing it, slinking away after the relentless, heroic pressure put on by ordinary citizens in an exercise of advocacy and sustained public action we haven't seen activated in this country since the Vietnam War ended, or maybe the Civil Rights Movement before that, is a clear win for the things we are supposed to root for in the United States. But it's hard to be too elated when the conditions for which the collaborative public activist effort was required existed in the first place, including but not limited to kidnapping, brutalization and murder by agents armed, sent and justified by the federal government. These are what my therapist would call "mixed feelings," which I could probably leverage into so pretty good meds if I pushed.

But if I'm going to push for good meds, I should do it soon as I've also just quit my job. This isn't great news, but (and this is complicated) the last job I quit to take this "upgrade" occupies the same space I work out of, so all my friends and former co-workers I see every day. The people in that job, they're also all about to lose their jobs too, with no parachute or backup plan. But me, because of my status? I have the opportunity to quit my job, but still get paid and keep my benefits in place for six months without having to come into the office.

Six months off? When was the last time you had six months off? When you were four, before you started kindergarten maybe? What a boon! What a wonder! What a luxury unworthy of denigration or complaint!

Well, OK, until you consider:

1) This program was invented by that pedo guy who broke twitter

2) It's a way to circumvent federal law regarding layoffs

3) It's after a campaign of psychological bullying of government workers en masse as an anti-labor action (and in my case, an ultimatum to move my whole life across the country or else get fired anyway)

So yeah, I've got a nice glide-path into unemployment ahead of me, far more than most people could expect, but I recognize it's not offered in any kind of spirit of generosity or good financial sense. If they hire someone in my position while I'm still in my six month window, that's the government paying twice for the same job. But you know, these DOGE people who started all this, they're all about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse...

I can have a sense of general gratitude in place while still maintaining the morally objectively correct level of contempt for the people involved in offering me the deal I've taken. I guess that means, yeah, at the end of the day, I'm not really any better than Michelangelo. Or at least not by the margins I typically assume.

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*Well, almost no dollars. Infinite love and gratitude to my patron(s?)!

Cataracts and Hurricanoes

Some non-personal circumstances have gotten me thinking about grief as a process and a state of being a bit lately. Dark as it can be, it's a luxury to be able to consider it without the fresh slash-wounds of family-close bereavement to bear, ideally not with the detached clinicality of a real sociopath trying to figure out why the man-animals do feelings, ha ha, no; more like with the expectant posture of someone bracing for an imminent blow to the head with something heavy, say a sandbag dropped from the stage rafters. "You have to consider all your options" is a timely and sage adage, even in 2026 when "all your options" range from "shit" to "also shit, but sanctioned by the government."

I don't want to worry anyone or paint my current situation as anything more dire than it actually is. Physically and medically I'm fine,* kids are fine, cat is thriving (apart from the occasional sneezing fit, I think she has allergies), my relationship is remarkable and surprising and strong... there's just a swirl of change in the air. Several pantheons have the concepts of creator-destroyer figures, so even the pagans knew, when it comes to one's relationship with the world in general, the default is often "it's complicated."

This blog is a little vague and it'll be a bit short because I'm definitely in more of a considering phase than a settled one, which makes expression a bit scattered as a lot of contradictory things are happening intellectually and emotionally at the same time. But I'm coming up to some hard sell-by dates for my work-related status quo, which will mean I also face the prospect of being a 50-plus aged person on the job market. That's less scary than it used to now that I think about it, since for Gen Z it seems like the only worse nightmare than looking for a job is actually finding one.

My expertise is pretty niche and my experience is actually somewhat limited given that I've changed jobs a few times, and this after not getting started until later (mid-30s) because of delays caused by grad school and being an at-home parent, two phases of my life I (more or less) loved. This is American capitalism after all, however, I blame myself for not seeing how personal fulfillment would only result in punishment and recrimination long-term.

The good news is I'm not going to be out of a job tomorrow. I've got some time to plant my feet and reorient myself a bit. I've also got an insane amount of support. But still, when looking to the sky for auspices, if you expect to be parsing a lazy flock of birds susurrating in one direction or the other to allow you to decipher divine intent but spot a descending cylcone instead, it's better to dive for the storm cellar than to stroke your chin in paralytic contemplative wonder. Anything more extreme than a tropical depression, you're better off moving past denial and rage and skipping right through to the acceptance.

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*I'm in my fifties now, so there are creaks in my joints and it takes me a few steps to get all the way upright when I stand up from a chair, but I do get there. Erect, as it were, without the aid of pills thus far.

No Sleep Til...

It's kind of a bummer when the best you can do in a good news/bad news situation is a qualitative relativism that lets you recast what would normally be the kind of thing to ruin your week in normal circumstances as "well, maybe it's for the best." That's a fair ways away from "actually possibly good," but that condition as a concept seems to have been pause-buttoned in about 2014.

For example, this past week my team lost one game away from the championship, which I talked about in the previous blog; the positive spin would be to point out that I'll be spared a lot of stress-watching from here on out, so that's a win for my over-taxed limbic system! I do lose the chance at distraction, missing out now on the sweet soft-caramel florality of sportsball superficiality masking the bog-fever fetid reek of... well, literally everything else. But that doesn't get to qualify as "bad news" when we've got state sponsored extrajudicial murder and acts of terrorism by government actors describing what would be an otherwise peaceful, normal American city as though it were a war zone. Without the sports, I guess now I have time to really focus on the important stuff. Which is terrible news for my over-taxed limbic system!

If it sounds like I've run myself in a complete emotional circle here, that's because it's the only shape we're allowed to experience anymore. Complexity in all its forms has been banished from every social and experiential level, from politics and economics and news in general to entertainment and sports, the gravity exerted by the grim, inevitable banality of the black hole at the center of it all, warping every news cycle it touches, leaves us with a perfectly circular ouroboros in the form of a snake angrily fellating itself. Which is no small feat considering snakes have two dicks.

Everything is so obvious and overwhelmingly simple, it frustrates the possibility of hiding out in a niche corner of interest or self-interest to find even a bit of relief, which would be the best we could do when we know that anything actually good isn't even remotely on offer. The historian in me says that the long view is the right one, that the way things are now is unsustainable and will pass. Happy things small (football!) and great (the concept of a just society!) will reassert themselves at some point, certainly, right? But when things like whole Constitutional liberties are being set aside in favor of arrest quotas and extortion for the sake of undermining future elections, even that gets the gritted-teeth emoji and a long exhaling "yyyyeeeeeeeeeahhhh...." trailing off into a question mark.

I wish I had a better message of positivity and hope, but it looks like the only way forward currently, when it comes to your community, is to look to the Upper Midwest and see that the best way to keep yourself occupied is actual action. I don't know what it will look like in your community when the need arrives, it just seems like it's going to involve a lot of whistles.

Revenge of the Iceberg

It's a sobering moment in a long history of sobering moments. The one thing all sobering moments have in common, comic-tragically, is that the person being sobered realizes they should have been "sobered" a really long time ago, ideally since birth. But one understands that the human brain needs time and space to properly develop through its most plastic/elastic periods, so we allow the indulgence of whimsy and fantasy, even encouraging belief in figments of collective imagination, like Santa Claus and the United States Constitution. Of course a time comes when those figments become impediments to clarity and must be brushed away, sometimes with deliberate care by loving parents prepared for the psychological reorientation, and sometimes in a violent spasm of revelation by circumstance, like realizing all the Santa presents are addressed in Dad's handwriting, or watching armed men representing your government steal a child off the street. As a parent, it's a bit of Hobson's choice really: you could decide not to delude your children right from the first firings of cognition and the acquisition of language, but they have the whole rest of their lives to be chased down by the existential dread of a fundamentally disappointing world.

The process of revelation doesn't end with bar/bat mitzvah, confirmation, quinceañera, acquiring a lower-back tattoo of questionable craftsmanship, whatever time-honored ritual your culture practices to mark the passage into adulthood. Of course the moments of inflection, of insight, of re-discovery of the World As It Actually Is, they are harder to acquire as we age and ossify into "what I think about X", and can be somewhat more embarrassing when the necessary re-contextualization makes it clear you'd missed the first 90,000 opportunities for the penny to drop. But it's never, as they say, too late, and possibly why they refer to these moments as sobering, as an arrival at clarity from the obfuscating inebriation Things As They Seemed.

Note that this is not always for the better. Plenty of people found it "sobering" to "realize" that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim sent here with a fake birth certificate on a mission to disarm the American population so he could put white people into concentration camps. Sources of information, it turns out those are important as well, though these days the distance between internet cranks and the anchor of CBS Evening News is getting so short, it's more of a step than a jump.

I know at the moment we've all been forced into (I won't say "awakened" or any other forms of that verb) a new version of reality of one kind or another. This week's unending onslaught of TOO MUCH FUCKING NEWS has been no exception to all the weeks before, forcing confrontation after confrontation between ourselves and what we can/should expect from the world. The idiot president was an idiot in public, Canada broke up with us, the Minnesota occupation continues...

This is the time to reflect and focus and find ways to affect change. It is not the period in history where it is appropriate to want things for yourself. Like if your football team finds itself one game away from the Super Bowl, look, that's nice, but what kind of a frivolous, oblivious asshole pulls up a chair to listen to the string ensemble play on the deck of a badly listing Titanic?

You can't see me, but I'm pointing two thumbs at myself. They're my own thumbs, to be clear.

In an increasingly secular world, I guess sports are the new opiate of the masses. The good news is that, even as we embrace the inky haze of indulgence dulling our senses to the sound of creaking steel and water rushing past what we were told were unbreachable bulkheads, the sobering happens immediately when your team finally loses. It's a hot cup of coffee directly down the front of your trousers. Searing in the moment, but once you recover, you're just grateful for the moment of distraction that was.

Hot Fuzzy

 

Avatar: Fire and Ash

starring Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña, Oona Chaplin, Kate Winslet, Sam Worthington, Britain Dalton, Stephen Lang, Jack Champion, Trinity Bliss, Baily Bass, Cliff Curtis, David Thewlis, Jemaine Clement and Edie Falco

directed by James Cameron (Aliens, the only good Terminator movies, True Lies, the one about the boat, Avatar 1, Avatar 2, plenty of other stuff)

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THIS IS NORMALLY WHERE I WOULD PUT A SPOILER WARNING, BUT LITERALLY NOTHING HAPPENS IN THIS FILM

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OK, I'm not trying to be a snob here. There is something inherently irritating about the way James Cameron talks about this whole Avatar project and the unique message he thinks he's trying to convey through it, but if you aren't all caught up, we're just three films in now to the exact same story Kevin Costner told in Dances with Wolves like 35 years ago. Or Edward Zwick and Tom Cruise told again 15-ish years after that with The Last Samurai. If you haven't seen those films, the message is basically this: the problem is white people. The solution? Adopt a white person to lead the rebellion against the white people, which ultimately fails, underscoring the tragedy of the western colonial mindset but also reaffirming "well, there's really nothing you can do about it ultimately..." I guess the main difference is in those two examples a) the resistance was led by two charismatic movie stars and in these, they're led by Sam Worthington,* and b) it's taken three very long movies already and Jake Sully refuses to get around to dying tragically yet heroically in an act of futile defiance.

Again, not a snob dismissing these films out of hand, it would just be easier to take if James Cameron just said he was out to make a big dumb shooty popcorn movie and not trying to inspire people to save the world or whatever. There are of course major elements of this film and its two predecessors as a whole that work on that first level, but the more of the story we learn about, the only real-world translatable questions its going to raise will have to do with how we spend our increasingly precious disposable income on things that are kind of shit.

So there were a couple of strikes against it. Not prejudices necessarily, because I've earned my skepticism over, what, seven-ish hours of movies so far? Also, this is the third Avatar film and they seem to have made NO SERIOUS ATTEMPT to work the number 3 into the spelling of the title, like Fant4stic or F8 of the Furious or F1. Hm, in retrospect, maybe only movies that start with F are allowed to do that? Plus there's no obvious place to stick a 3 in Avatar, like maybe Avat3r, but that looks dumb. Best I can do is Avatar: Fir3 and Ash, but also, not great. OK, you get a pass on this one, James Cameron, but the other skepticism is valid.

The other thing Cameron talks about incessantly is how hard it is to make these movies and how intent they are on pushing the envelope in terms of what is possible in film with CGI and motion capture and... OK, I gotta hand it to him there. Although the overall visual impact is undermined by the excessive length of these films (this is not the last time I will mention this, almost certainly. These are long!) which makes the parade of UBER-GRANDE visual-scapes become overwhelming, like white noise for the eyeballs. There isn't a single frame that looks bad or out of place, per se, but they still have the problem of emotional detachment from all the grandeur, as the cartoon CG of it all is still a bit most-expensive-Lego-set-ever, with all the limits on investment in any of its survival implied therein. So when these giant things are all exploding or catching on fire or being harpooned (again), there's no real sense of loss or shock. You feel like they could just to go back to the previous save game and reload, try the level again. Astoundingly pretty, but in a weirdly forgettable way.

This is not the case, however, for the motion capture, specifically with the facial performances. Zoe Saldaña and Oona Chaplin specifically, holy shit, these are legitimately great performances. My son and I talked some shit after walking out of the theater, but I also said Chaplin was on some Oscar-level shit. She speaks no English in this role, so it's all raw emotion and she's absolutely riveting, genuinely scary. That was necessary because the main antagonist played by Stephen Lang has been neutered by his own nonsensical actions in the plot and mustache-twirling so as to be a non-threat. Chaplin's character, almost tragically, gets relegated to being his girlfriend, but she still pops off. That is not a joke about having had to see it in 3D.

Is there a plot? Well, yes, but it's literally (and I'm using that correctly here: literally) the same plot as the last movie. The Sullys are in danger and have to move around but in the end they have to fight against the military and the company hunting whales, which they resist by rallying the locals and getting the animals to help them. The kids also get kidnapped by Stephen Lang again, who neglects to kill any of them before their parents have an opportunity to affect a rescue. At least in the last movie one of the kids died! But he threatened them like four different sequences in that film alone, plus the ones here! I'd have more respect for the character if he would just murder a child, that's all I'm asking.

Otherwise, this all feels like a placeholder for some larger arc's grand denouement that we will possibly never get to see. That means nothing gets resolved, in terms of plot (see above) or character. This is supposed to be about a family, but this family spends the whole movie so mad at each other, you find yourself pondering the idea of space-divorce among these cat people. The only bonding that gets done is when they're out there murdering gringos, and that only starts happening because the run-time of the film said it was time to do that. Sure, I'd like to trust that this is all going somewhere, but I'm also going somewhere every time I leave my telework-disallowed job to come home. It would be a bad idea to do 400 circuits of the office parking lot before I decided it was time to head in the actual direction I needed to go.

Yeah, if I had to describe this film in one TL;DR log line: it's 400 circuits of your office parking lot. Just with better scenery.

PS: also I didn't realize Kate Winslet was in this until I read the credits at the end of the film. Normally I'd give an actor praise for disappearing into her role, but it's harder to do when they literally disappear.

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*OK, this was kind of mean, but it's not fully Sam Worthington, it's a cartoon version of him. I've honestly forgotten what actual Sam Worthington looks like.

Get It Twisted

You know, I used to do blogs six days a week. The labor inherent in that kind of frequency was exhausting on its own, of course, but the other downside was just being tied to the news cycle. If you've set yourself the task of ginning up content that often, it's the easiest shaft to mine. The only other option to keep people coming back that often and regularly involves way more nudity and Photoshop fluency than I'm comfortable with.

Switching to weekly blogging was a sanity-saver. Sure, it coincided with me having to stop being a stay-at-home parent and join the work force as my marriage disintegrated, but I was burning out on that posting tempo regardless of where my then-wife was sleeping and with whom. Seven days between posts gave me miles and miles of headspace to consider and foster ideas, let them germinate, root and grow shoots I could then brutally harvest in unripe form and scatter haphazardly to the wind (Blogger). It's a decent metaphor, but come on, what can you grow that's worth growing in seven days? The fastest thing I've seen anyone grow is a radish, and a) those still take like six weeks and b) who wants a radish? All the effort and patience and you get a cherry-sized nubbin that tastes like hot soap.

It doesn't matter though, because all of the headspace we might use to this end or that has been colonized and infected by a relentless news cycle detailing the rolling, bouncing catastrophe that is Late Stage Imperial America. Surprise invasion of a country picked seemingly from a hat? OK, one of those. Hang on, let's also throw in the extrajudicial murder of an unarmed citizen by federal agents. Is that all for this one calendar week? I dunno, I've deliberately not checked by phone since I started typing. For all I know Pete Hegseth has announced we've made contact with aliens, one of which he then attempted to karate-chop in the neck on live TV. It seems far-fetched, but guys, Venezuela? We're eight days into the year! Where is this going?!

Maybe the AI curiosity, the indefensibly inexplicable apparent impulse to cede a lot of basic human functional ground to automation using a system that has actively and repeatedly demonstrated its total inability to do any of the promised functions, is just desperation to dissociate. In the emotional/psychological sense, sure, but also technologically and socially. The promise of the internet was both improved connection and immediacy, but we hadn't really considered how both of those outcomes would leave us battered by every piece of news and completely vulnerable to whatever the next hailstorm of human misery a global army of faceless messengers can hurl at us without regard to our readiness. In fact, the only thing anything like "AI" has gotten right is weaponizing and arming a swarm of info-firing bot accounts on twitter or facebook, directed by adversary states/agitators or (at this point really, because that's just a feature of how the internet works now) all on its own, unbidden.

AI as it works now is promising to put a mediating layer between us and the thousand nettle-stings we're promised every single hour of every single day just by electing to try to navigate through the forest of informational nightmares guided by our smartphones. It sounds like an insulting way to break human connection in its most basic forms by usurping all the things that define us as cells within a social organism, but maybe now the cells are so sick, we could use a bit of a barrier to affect a quarantine. The news and the vectors (human and bot) that carry the blight can't hurt me if they're interacting (coming and going) with a digital projection of myself propped up by my AI valet. Sounds creepy and unnatural, I know, but if we're all pretending to be people, that Uncanny Valley gets a lot shallower really fast.

The kids these days have the right answer, that the solution is to "touch grass," ideally without the app or website on your phone to tell you what kind of grass it is. The point is to be ignorant of some things, at least for a little while. It's not an abdication or surrender of our social obligations; it's really knowing the difference between being information-overloaded and properly informed. Of course you can, if you want, even opt to be ignorant of literally everything, but ironically you might need AI's help with that.