So What Do You Do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

States of Matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue Blood

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

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

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

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

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.