Sweet Hereafter

Part of the problem of shifting to my New Right Now is that my schedule is all un-scheduled. At my last job, I was working until 2:30, driving my half hour home, picking up a nice coffee on the way, then sitting down to peck away at this at my leisurely, meandering pace from about 3:15 in the afternoon of a Thursday until, basically, [sideway-eight-symbol] o'clock. Not only was it stress-free, but it also meant I had all the time in the known universe to do with my writing what guitar players call noodling, just futzing about with the shapes and patterns I know to no meaningful end, seeing if I stumble across something that pleases my ear. And that's an important distinction: it pleases my ear specifically. Listening to someone else endlessly noodling is to endure a whanging aural cascade of self-indulgence. It's like masturbation in that the rules really change once you have a roommate.

And I do have a roommate these days, or rather a wife who also lives here. She's not the issue (or an issue of any kind. Yes, I'm a newlywed, roll your eyes all you want) though, it's just that I haven't been afforded a rhythm or structure to my days, which means I don't have the luxurious blocks of downy, floofy free time to loll about in on a normal Thursday. It's not that I can't find the time to write on the days when I normally would--look, I'm doing it right now!--it's just that I lack the space on either end of the actual typing bit to form, stretch out or toy with thoughts and phrases and linking ideas that turn blocks of texts into pieces. I don't pretend to be a professional (those fuckers charge), but I try to have standards, even if they tend to shift literally keystroke to keystroke.

Today I'm absolutely feeling pressured as I really think a massive political realignment such as we all experienced just two days ago in America deserves a lot of thought and space to contextualize and metabolize. And mostly I mean to clown on Blue-ass Texas, the state that has been content to feed their citizens into the woodchipper of weather catastrophes and gun violence all in the name of not having a state income tax for the better part of two generations now.

I want to spend more time really thinking about how Republicans thought they could get away with fielding candidates that were, as far as I could tell, deliberately chosen for either their lack of ability or because they were the absolute worst fucking people available. In so many cases they might have had more viable or competitive people running, but the president instead handed them a burlap sack full of toads and said "here, run these." That's how you get Vivek Ramaswamy. That's how you get Ken Paxton.

Ken Paxton was really kind of it for me. That was the litmus test of how far down we were willing to go as a country. Like a lot of people of my political persuasion, I had long ago reached the point where faith in my fellow man in general or my country in particular were no longer serious considerations. Those were the ideologies of a youth misspent on delusion, a character arc of self-deception destined for a messy disabuse about half way through the series run. Like Breaking Bad if Walter White starting taking meth himself around season four.

Vivek Ramaswamy showed himself to be a vile, amoral monster with no visible compassion, charisma or grace, but that's kind of normie shit these days, especially amongst candidates for higher office. Ken Paxton was just... I mean, he's a fucking cartoon of corruption. His only notable character traits are all specifically things that would get candidates disqualified before, like, 2012. Cheating, thieving, lying, corrupt, adulter-ing, but also with all the charm of a half gallon of goat's blood. Not the fresh kind either, one that's been laying around in the sun for a bit. I know the normal thing to expect is Ah Yes, Another New Low For Us As A People since Trump started running for shit, but it really felt like the last straw. Like if Texas was going to elect this fucking guy to ANOTHER something, a federal one not contained inside those stupid borders, just because he's got the R next to his name, when James Talarico was the squeakiest, cleanest, most effortlessly spotlessly goodest boy there ever was, and incidentally with the shark-like political instincts to turn those qualities into advantages at every opportunity, then there was no hope for that state and the state of affairs in this country had no hope of recovery for at least a whole nother generation. We were going to be locked in to Trumpworld as a status quo, the Bucket Of Old Goat Blood Nation, until my grandkids were voters. Grandkids, I would like to point out, who do not yet exist even in prospect.

Instead we all got to sigh some relief, cry a little, laugh a little. OK, laugh a lot, when the shit-weasels got shitcanned and Donald Trump became the lamest duck since the invention of lameness. You have to think that the deepest sighs of relief came from Republicans now released from what they though was the gravity of a Trumpian black hole pulling them all into warping, stretching, noodling nothing, with no stars to navigate by visible beyond the hungry and all-obscuring event horizon. And that's great for them I guess. And we can do real thinking and empathy later. For now, though, in the limited time I have to think about it, every one of them can get fucked. Over here, we're dancing.

The Old Me

Well, it's been over a week since I was brutally upended and relocated by the buffeting winds of indifferent fate. I'm kind of like Matt Damon in that movie from the summer, but instead of having my friends turned into pigs or suffering long-term sex-slave captivity by Charlize Theron, I find myself in a walkable urban gay neighborhood with a plethora of vegan restaurants. The one real similarity is that I also always have a beach in view. I guess the main and most definitional difference is that unlike Odysseus, the place I've been dislocated to is actually home.

I'm embracing the newness of experience, specifically with the accidental circumstance of being cool. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying I myself am somehow now notably cool, but given my funky environs, if I described the place I live absent the polluting subjectivity of my extreme middle-aged-dad-ness, an unbiased observer might mistakenly reach the conclusion that a cool person lives here. And given the pool of other residents in this apartment building--younger, childless, pastel-color-dyed hair, unmanicured eyebrows--I am, by the law of averages, a cool guy. We're not going to examine all that closely what part of that data set might be bringing up the rear of this demographic coolness spread. This is math, we're just interested in results.

The downside of this density and closeness is that there's a lot of people going the same directions at the same times of day most days, including me traveling to my new job. At first I was horrified when using my Google Maps to game out my commute scenarios, but after a week of trying to make it work, it turns out that a solid red commute route every day means the traffic, if nothing else, is predictable. Consistently horrific very notably contains consistent.

Right now the days are still long and disorienting. I'm surprised I've found time to write this at all. I'm working through being The New Guy at work for the first time really since 2007, which really is the most displaced-feeling part of the experience, more than the move, more than the lifestyle shift. Sure, in time I'll be my normal self, dominating the workplace with my terrifying competence and humility, but for now I have to remember how to be the closed-mouth information dumpster, a slow-blinking mute being taught to talk again after a traumatic brain injury, mostly in acronyms. I'll know it's time to find my voice again when I can form a coherent sentence made of just strings of capital letters mixed in with the business-jargon verb.

For now, we're going to FM the DMJ until we can cohere the BBVL into a SDE that squares with the OOLA. I'm not sure if it's exactly dactylic hexameter, but I don't really know what that is, so maybe! 

Exodus

Probably the most constant theme I've hit over the years (and years and years) is that, even though there's a massive--even directly contradictory--difference between the motivations of discipline and compulsion, the end results are often indistinguishable. Did you get way more done versus the expected mean output of the average person? And is the difference in those results an expression of their laziness OR their relatively well-balanced mental/emotional self-regulation? WHAT DOES IT MATTER IF THEY'RE IN SECOND PLACE AT BEST? Winners don't give a shit about your rationalizations. If you were able to buckle down and/or obliterate the sense of boundaries that would otherwise keep you happy and engaged with the world around you, maybe you wouldn't be looking at the back of me disappearing in the distance. Think about it.

I'm neither going to indulge in nor tolerate any speculation about which core motivation has driven to post every Thursday, every week with almost no gaps for 20-ish years, just suffice it to say I acknowledge I have been an absolute machine. And machines, famously, live full and meaningful personal lives amongst the meat-creatures with whom they are forced to coexist, miming and mimicking their ticks and micro-expressions not to mock or manipulate, but just to make sure everyone feels comfortable. The weird steely focus and shocking productivity makes flesh-folks defensive already, there's no reason not to make an effort to give the Uncanny Valley the widest possible berth.

When specifically not considering my motivations and appetites, we don't have to spend time considering how it makes me feel to have accidentally missed posting for an entire Thursday just six days ago. And to be clear, it's not avoidance or deflection. The fact that I'm posting this after 9 pm on this specific Thursday is a hefty clue for you, observant reader, that I've got A LOT GOING ON. "Exploring ones feelings" is an indulgence for people who are "capable of staying awake." The good news about my job offer for a place telework-ineligible two counties away from my two-decade-plus home simultaneously also sounded a starting gun for an absolute frenzy that has included finding an apartment, paring down a four-bedroom house with a five-person history over 23 years into about 800 square feet, achieving the move while also spending about half my waking time back at the old house coordinating the five-figure effort to prepare it to be Someone Else's House.

Has it been a lot emotionally? Reader, it has. Has it been a lot physically? Reader, also, it has. Has it been a lot financially? Well, yes, but we're talking about selling off Southern California real estate two-thirds of the way through its conventional mortgage term. The rug-pull of losing the only real home I've ever had and facing down the proposition of willingly foregoing the warm-hug of the ghost-images of my babies (when they were still properly addressable as such) contained within the fiberglass-stuffed walls has been a heavy lift but will eventually result in a literal payoff. For now, constant driving back and forth along a 50-mile track in SoCal freeway miles for the opportunity to make 10,000 tiny decisions means I. Am. Sleepy. I can't remember not being sleepy. I'm sure at some point I was, but that lazy fucker didn't have a job. It's time we shed that dead weight memory and actually achieved a thing, which in this case looks a lot like living like a 20-something urban apartment life thirty years after it was an age-appropriate idea. Romantic, sure, but how much of that romance would you trade for the convenience of an attached two-car garage?

Am I sleepy now? Have I actually fallen asleep once or twice in the course of writing this? Am I certain there's any kind of thematic or even coherent connection paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence or even word to word? The answer to that is clear: at least I'm doing it, one way or the other. Maybe it's discipline/commitment, maybe it's compulsion. Either way, the measurable results are the same: 1) a finished blog post, and 2) legitimate questions raised about my capacity for self-care. The only thing I can say for sure is that I don't "do it for [the readers]." It's not that I don't care, it's just that the line starts behind me.

The Deck Chairs

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Kick I Took Was When I Hit The Ground

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaker of Horses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VVs In My Necklace Shining

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

*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.

---

*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.*

---

*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.

---

*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?

---

*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

No Thugs in Our House

 

The Odyssey

starring Zendaya, Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Anne Hathaway, Matt Damon, John Leguizamo, Samantha Morton, Himesh Patel, Robert Pattinson and Charlize Theron

directed by Christopher Nolan (Inception, Memento, several Batmans, that one with John David Washington we don't talk about, Oppenheimer, etc. [the "etc." here is doing an embarrassing amount of work])

---

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

starring Zendaya, Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Tramell Tillman, Mark Ruffalo, Florence Pugh and Marisa Tomei

directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (some indie stuff, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Wonder Man)

---

OK SERIOUSLY THIS TIME, THERE WILL BE MAJOR SPOILERS IN THIS FOR A NEW-ISH MOVIE, SO THIS IS A GENUINE WARNING. NOT FOR THE ONE THAT IS BASED ON A 5,000-YEAR-OLD STORY THOUGH, COME ON

---

It's not easy to make a summer blockbuster anymore, I get it. You have to contend with the changing paradigms of what a movie studio is and how it manages (or doesn't manage) risk, and that doesn't even take into account the fact that most studios are run by spreadsheet dipshits whose only real responsibility is to keep an eye on how leveraged their private equity patrons are and whose only common denominator seems to be how much they kinda hate movies and TV.

I'm not minimizing the fact that these types of big-rollout films are a massive financial investment that carries actual risk to some degree for studios, not just "risk" in the way noodgey consultants talk about it. Like there are rooms right now in corporate offices where a hired outsider is giving a presentation where at least one of the slides is going to quantify as a percentage how much sexual harrassment is "survivable" and a pros/cons breakdown on whether or not the health care plan should include support for transgender employees. What constitutes a good financial decision these days is so much more complicated than the Golden Age of Hollywood where the primary consideration was whether a studio executive wanted to bang one of the leads. Now it's a spaghetti-map flowchart of knock-on decisions for global entities with a dizzying array of holdings and assets across an array of industries. If a massive film fails, they'll have to balance out the expenditure with write-offs and insurance claims and offsets in other lines of business. Maybe that means if, say, The Flash underperforms, we have to lose a few thousand acres of rainforest or fire everyone in an athleisure-wear sweatshop in Bangladesh, but the only measurable "evil" in 2026 is if the number doesn't go up at the correct angle on the graph. We can all agree on that.

The fact is that sometimes these films do miss relative to their investment, without even addressing the quality of the product, and vice versa. It's not like Star Wars Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker lost anybody any money, even though we'd all rather do 600 burpees over a puddle of our own sick than watch any of it again. But we keep getting more Star Wars because it's time not necessarily because someone has a good idea. This has been the issue that has plagued the post-Endgame Marvel movie franchise system as they keep cranking and cranking and cranking out product to meet concepts of tempo and expectation to statisfy the investor class and prediction markets, not because, say, someone as reliably awesome as Ryan Coogler has a burning need to make something that results in a wonder like the first Black Panther movie. And every move nudges the risk meter in one direction or the other, pushing them to make wronger and wronger decisions, so you end up with a super messy Doctor Strange movie that everyone is frustrated with (even though it's mostly fine), but somehow Blade with Mahershala Ali gets cancelled, in some ways explicitly because the Doctor Strange one turned out to be a miss.

Reliability is hard enough to find in this marketplace run by crouching, shuddering, mewling hedge fund babies and the people they hire in their image, but we knew already that there are a few poles on which we could pitch our tents in any weather: Spider-Man and ancient Greek myths of dubious authorship (as directed by the guy who made a blockbuster out of a very talky movie about a science dork). All know this.

Even as superhero movie fortunes (in a literal sense) wax and wane, with varying levels of think-pieces generated by their failures especially (doubled if a woman is featured as a lead or co-lead), for some reason the two reliable exceptions are films about Batman and films about Spider-Man. Even The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the film so worrying they had to reboot the whole thing with a whole different English person pretending to be a Queens boy, made over $700 million worldwide, almost the exact same number as 2022's The Batman, which was hailed as a return to form for the character, despite featuring the sleepiest of all the Batmen to date.

Brand New Day had a lot going for it then, separated from the chaff and clutter of a bunch of Avengers baying for screen time and character arc. Totally unfairly, then, Destin Daniel Crestin and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers also hit us over the head with a truly excellent expression of the genre. They were helped immensely by an insanely gifted core of performers, which feels like shameless overkill, but these are the factors that result in the second highest box office opening week of all time.

Also, hey, remember Troy? It's kind of a meme because Brad Pitt is so weird in that movie and Orlando Bloom is such a little bitch, but if you're going to be portraying a demi-god with priorties outside the scope of human morality and a sniveling princeling who runs off with a powerful king's wife, respectively, those are the right outcomes, in terms of characterization. OK, Greek-poetry-based films maybe aren't quite a "franchise" in the modern sense. I know it feels like a reach going back to Troy to talk about Homeric epics on screen since that was over 20 years ago, but in the whole scope of how long the stories have existed, that's lightning fast really. Spider-Man has only been around since like the 1960s. Dude is WAY behind.

Both The Odyssey and the latest Spider-Man rely on epic and spectacle in different ways, and both do so exactly to the sensory-pummeling levels we've come to demand. Both are, in their ways, about journeys of transformation and self-discovery, The Odyssey you'd think in a more literal sense but Spider-Man is out here sort of maybe becoming a whole-ass spider? That part wasn't entirely clear, but it came with a cool blacked-out eyes effect for Tom Holland. Not exactly shipmates-being-sculpted-into-pigs, but it was going for something.

The Odyssey itself exists at much more of an emotional remove than Spider-Man, mostly because we've had three other movies now to live in the character dynamics (Peter Parker, MJ and Ned) that are centered in this iteration the way fan service and (literal) magic were in the previous one. In fairness to No Way Home, they made that into something really good as well, but Brand New Day is a rough and poignant metaphor about post-high school separation, isolation and the struggle with becoming someone separate from the safe context of your childhood friends and family, although here in a sci-fi extreme case where literally everyone forgets who you are (instead of just feeling that way because you're 19).

Odysseus has the opposite problem is that nobody forgets who he is, which is a real pain in the ass for his wife and son, a super-power-free Tom Holland again. Everyone back in Ithaca is stuck in a grinding stasis because they just can't get past Odysseus as an idea, as a place-holder, with Penelope literally doing and undoing her weaving night after night just to keep her grubby swarm of Tinder stalkers off her ass. They're in his house, fucking up all his shit, eating up his food, asking where the hell he is, while he's out there literally on a 20 year boys' weekend that includes all the stops at every roadside attraction including, literally, hell.

I'm not going to compare the two directly... but OK Spider-Man is way better. You have to mark it out as even with the casts almost since there's so much overlap (if I'm Jacob Batolon, I'm pretty mad I'm not in The Odyssey. There's already all this bullshit "race controversy," no reason you couldn't have also had a Filipino), but Spider-Man also has a truly excellent and story-crucial turn from Sadie Sink, who isn't in The Odyssey at all. AND Brand New Day has ninjas. Red ninjas. And they fight Spider-Man. I know The Odyssey had a lot of cool enemies too, but they didn't really fight, they just made the Greeks yell "BACK TO THE SHIPS!" as they just barely avoided having their shit wrecked over and over. Ninjas win.

Now we wait for the next Window of Film Distribution Profitability, which will be around Christmas time, this time with a built-in spectacle of so-called "Dunesday" when Dune Part 3 releases on the same day as Avengers: Doomsday, two films which will of course in the aggregate also include Zendaya and Florence Pugh and Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland and what I like to call the off-brand less-American version of Tom Holland, Timothée Chalamet. You can't really manufacture reliability on your returns, but I guess when it comes to blockbuster movies, you mitigate by using the same 8-10 bankable movie stars, pair them with some franchise IP and that's it. Literally nothing else works. Sorry, Paul Rudd, apparently you don't make the cut.

Desmond Has A Barrow in the Marketplace

Don't worry, I'm fine. We don't really know each other (unless we do, in which case you've already rolled your eyes because you can feel I'm about to attempt to be either humorous or clever, with reliably mixed results), so I don't really imagine you are or would be all that worried. I'm not such a narcissist. Besides, I should make it clear, that first sentence was exclusively for me.

"Don't worry, I'm fine" is a thing I say to myself a lot the last few months as I make shuffling, unwilling steps along a boringly pedestrian (ha) health journey with profoundly common and predictable features that shouldn't give anyone much pause at all. There are simply Things That Happen when you crash into your 50s, an impact your 40s don't really prepare you for except maybe planting in your head the perspective "Oh you thought you were 'old' before now, did you?" Really the curse of aging is a constant reframing and stockpiling regret regarding your just-passed previous era and how well you were actually doing in retrospect. The trap is, of course, that you're always older than you've ever been and you have no experience to tell you how to be that old. And look, that moment passed and you just totally wasted it and now you're even older. And now you're even older. And now you're even older.

You should brace yourselves now. Everyone you have crowded around the screen to read this with you at your regular Ochlocracy In Action Blog-Drop Group Read Party should probably take a seat, partly because of how shocking the following news is and because sometimes, I can really go on and on. You should be comfortable.

I had the follow-up appointment with my specialist after my VIOLENT SCOPING of a month or so ago and here are the results:

There's nothing visibly wrong with me.

I'll let that sink in, I know it's a shock to a lot of you. But, and I hate to say this, there's more.

Also, I've managed to lose some weight.

I'm sorry to give you all that at once, I know it's a lot. In a demographic space where the main/possibly only thing to reliably talk about is ongoing/nagging/developing health issues and the ways in which our once taut and viable bodies are sloughing and morphing into something like eight pounds of wet oatmeal in a five pound sack, finding out a) I'm fine and b) keeping it kinda tight is something a disaster, social-currency wise.

Independent of the inevitable ostracization from my peer group on a level I haven't experienced since I joined the marching band in junior high school, this is actually somewhat worrying in a few other ways.

First, I still don't feel great. The complaint that had me VIOLENTLY SCOPED in the first place is still extant, still an irritant (literally), though very manageable and not a massive degradation in my quality of life, by any stretch. The medication I have for it doesn't seem to help a ton, but some lifestyle changes around meal sizes and food choices seem to mitigate. None of this should be a surprise as anyone in middle age knows mostly it's a series of winnowing out, bit by bit, of all the things you like to eat for various health reasons. If we follow the trendline, if we make it to 80, it'll just be starchy pap force fed into our toothless mouths by a syringe, like abandoned kittens, except without the payoff of developing into something anyone would want to pet.

Second, weight loss is way harder as you hit a certain point in middle age, but I've dropped like 5-10 pounds in the last two months. Is this because of the minor changes to my diet (see above) that still includes (in small amounts) Ben & Jerry's plant-based ice cream frozen dessert, plus the fact that I've changed up my exercise routine in favor of tennis rather than the boxing conditioning group classes that I'd been taking for nearly 20 years due to some nagging hand and arm injuries? Nobody seems to be able to say!

Either way, what this means is that my surprisingly healthy and correctly colored esophagus and stomach--absolutely on point for their on-camera debut last month--plus the weight loss plus the continuing issue means I get to do some more medical imaging. This will be my third round after an ultrasound (everything OK!) and VIOLENT SCOPING down my throat (everything OK!) frustratingly found that I'm 100% healthy, and not just "for an older fella," like objectively.

There's a CT scan in my future which, by all indications, will also show that I'm fine and having to deal with a gurgly tummy is just my cross to bear for the near-to-indefinite future.

In the meantime. though, in the absence of that final clear bill of health, Schrödinger's Cat has nestled up cozy in my solar plexus, purring away, meaning right before I go to bed every night, I get to scroll away on my phone looking up symptoms to reassure myself I don't have, like, pancreatic cancer or a vengeful gall bladder. Literally NONE of my symptoms line up with either of those things, but yeah, in this transitional time before I know-know, I get the luxury of wondering the Big What If.

This all really tracks though, for when I'm comfortably in my 60s and I look back at how I wasted my stupid 50s worrying about nothing and I wish I was as healthy in that future-now as I am in the now-now. It's good to know yourself, but even if you can say you see it coming, you can only really process and internalize it in hindsight. Like a car crash, but in incredibly slow mothion and nowhere near as visually interesting.

Variations on a Theme

This has always been a variety blog as I don't really do series. I do give the same metadata label to all the film/TV reviews that I do, but that's really only so I can call them up quickly to see if I've done them already. I've been at this Blogger thing since before they had labels as an option, so when they arrived I treated them with the same kind of arch bemusement as I treat everything else here that I might have used to purposely grow an audience or betray in any way that I took this seriously. It's a specific GenX kind of personality flaw that ensures I'll be able to keep putting in the work to produce these every week, but without any of the burden of expectation of quality, ease of use or betrayal of my emotional needs. In retrospect, I guess posting these once per week for 20-odd years is in the aggregate a small indicator of what my emotional needs are, but we're not allowed to talk about that directly.

And also, OK, I don't purposely do series except how, again, in the aggregate this is also a chronicle of my inner life, lightly-to-moderately obscured by jokes, comedic premises, obvious exaggeration and more than a few well-placed lies (but only if, like nudity in films, they're tastefully lit and serve the plot). So sort of topic-agnostic, the whole thing counts as a series accidentally, kind of like how if you put enough marbles in a big enough bag, one at a time over a long enough period, eventually you end up with a planet.

I did not take astrophysics or really any sciences past basic physical science, but I'm pretty confident that's how planets are born. Just a big enough bag of marbles.

What I'm trying to get at is just recognizing that sometimes my actual interests interfere with the curated presentational interests of by blog-writer persona and I end up with de facto series about things that betray what I'm actually in to, especially if it lasts, says, four to six weeks and is probably the only truly global cultural event in this age of post-internet attention-siphoning.

No, I'm not talking about The Odyssey coming out in IMAX (more on that in short order when I run out of things to write about during these summer doldrums), I do of course mean the just-concluded FIFA Men's World Cup. And see, you can read my own feelings and exeriences regarding said thing in these several places because, apparently, I couldn't help myself.

I've said before, quite often out loud to people around me to the point where they just put a hand up to indicate they'd like to auto-skip that part of the conversation like it's a dialogue option in a role-playing video game, the the World Cup is my favorite thing, past any movie or TV show or book or whatever. As a point of cultural experience or consumable entertainment option (depending on your level of cynicism, but given how many commercials starring David Beckham I watched, it's at best some level of both those things) unique on that level, it stands to reason that I struggle to shut the fuck up about it. The challenge is being reflective when it's over instead of just being all twitchy, palpatative, sweaty and hyperventilating like a junky forced to go cold turkey. To paint you a picture, I'm sitting here on a weekday morning typing this with the television off entirely, zero games on in the background, for the first time in I'd like to say... maybe forever? Is that possible? Was there a "before"? Who am I if I'm not calculating group standings in real time based on current scorelines? Do I even exist, and if I do, what would even be the point of it?

For all the drama and surprise--the elements that make live sports the last lingering vestige of the pre-streaming paradigm where people all kind of watched the same thing--the ending was still an ending, recognizable in the way almost all World Cup endings are. The final was actually pretty dramatic in retrospect, though while you're watching it, it never feels like it lives up to the month-plus of building expectation. That's unfair of course, but it's also ruined by the aboslute banger that was the 2022 final between Argentina and France, the exception that really fucks up the rule.

Spain were both dominant in a specific way and kind of boring through a lot of the tournament, but they were fairly active in the final. And Argentina knew it didn't have much shot (or any shot) past a lot of hysterical jumping around and judo kicks to the body parts of their opponents. The match was way better than a team that doesn't score that much vs. a team employing a nullification strategy implies, and the result was predictable if Argentina is relying on a statistically unreliable (but somehow repeatable in all their previous knockout round games) intervention from heaven (in the form of Lionel Messi, in some notable way).

Was the third-place game comparatively insane? It sure was. But a) it takes a while to warm up to that as a viewing experience since everyone watching feels so so bad after having their dreams shattered by a semifinal loss, and b) I didn't watch it as I was at a function (sometimes I have to go to functions) so, as far as my experience goes, I can't factor it in. So we'll pretend it was a shared fever dream some of you had and leave it there.

Now we're back on the clock, T-minus four years until the next iteration for the fellas. We can start the cycle of picking up the USA men's side again after a hard switch-off of interest or attention the second after they were knocked out, after a reasonable period of letting that interest lay fallow for a brief period, like two years or so. Will that be long enough to forget their non-competitive pulverization by a mediocre Belgium side? Likely yes, but odds are they will endeavor to remind me of it with subsequent underwhelming performances.

In the meantime, I will revert to being a normal person with healthily variegated and diversified interests for... OK, definitely not for the entire four years. The qualifiying campaigns for 2030 will reach a peak in 2029, so I'll be into that. And the Euros will be in 2028. Oh and the Women's World Cup will be in Brazil next year, so... Eleven months or so of hinged normalcy, then we pick up this series again. Back to our irregular programming.

Melissa Benoist Is Doing Fine, Everyone

Supergirl

starring Milly Alcock, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, David Corenswet and Jason Momoa

directed by Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl; I, Tonya; Cruella)

---

IT'S BEEN OUT LONG ENOUGH, YOU EITHER ALREADY GOT SPOILED ON IT OR WON'T CARE. EITHER WAY, YOU HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED

---

Did I want to go see Supergirl? Come on, I'm a heterosexual man, what interest could I possibly have in a superhero movie starring a girl? And this one is practically a dare, it's got "super" and "girl" right in the the title. It would be less of a provocation if it was just called I Bet You Won't, You Little Bitch. What was I supposed to do, just sit there and take that? As confused as I am by the idea of a woman who doesn't need rescuing by or guidance from a man, I was obligated to go pay money for a ticket and sit through the experience of viewing to confirm my pre-existing completely rational hate for this film.

Ha, I'm just kidding, everyone knows the online dipshits who review bomb every movie that has a female lead don't actually go out and see the movies they so loudly (allowing ALL CAPS to count as "loudness") decry as anathema to something something birth rates something something testosterone levels, etc.

Me, of course I made a special effort (leaving my house, buying a ticket, meeting up with people I like, seeing a move I either like or dislike, discussing it afterward) to take in Supergirl. Like most of the rest of the woke mob, just about everything I do is about virtue signaling. Movies are about escapism, sure, but sometimes they're also about escapism-ing from little things like patriarchy, am I right? It's an effort to spend my money on things that everyone objectively knows without experiencing them are "bad" (a Star War with a girl, a Greek myth film with a black lady in it) so that I will be seen by... someone (TBD) to have done the "right thing." It's the exact same kind of smug contrarian satisfaction people like me revel in. Like if you see trash on the ground in public near a trash can, what is the point of picking it up and putting it in if no one is around to witness you doing it? Sometimes I'll stand there for like ten minutes waiting for a quorum of citizens to be in eye-sight. Think of this review like that. If you're reading this, I've been waiting a week-plus for you to see me. Your validation is both implied and appreciated.

I trudged along to do my self-deputized civic duty, with my partner and one of my adult children, stiff-backed in a reclining theater chair and ready to do my totally passive part in the fight against whatever coherence-free agglomeration of points of view drive review-bombers and the rump remnant still inexplicably active on Twitter.

Imagine the conflicting emotions when I'm out there, trying to bring down centuries of misogyny and oppression by buying a movie ticket and sitting completely still in the dark for two hours after enduring 40 minutes of advertising about a range of things from Milk Duds to a local home re-piping service, and I find myself entertained at certain points. A complication and a distraction, neither of which are going to win me any kind external value from any kind of online crowd on any sort of social media, 98% of whom are probably bots.

Ah, but then I remembered I'm not active on any kind of social media. If you really are looking for a constant, clean hit of pure dopamine, just exist in this world and have it wash over you every now and again that you've been too lazy, contrarian or pre-emptively overwhelmed to be a Very Online Guy. It's the same feeling of relief you get as waking up from a bad dream you're sure was real at the time. Except, OK, the circumstances of the dream do follow you around in real life in all spaces, public and private, but you're just not hooked up enough to let it hurt you in the squishiest places.

Even here, though, I'm seven paragraphs in and I've only talked about the online discourse, with no mention of the actual film at all. You can call it hypocrisy if you want, I call it reliable content generation in volume.

Is it true I see all the woman-led superhero films that reflexively get derided by a very small, but determinedly unfuckable minority of online dudes and their robot friends before release? Yes, but please understand that I also went to see The Flash, so it's less a gender-specific political statement than a sign of terminal completism on my part. Far more an act of compulsion than defiance, but as long as it looks like defiance because it accidentally aligns with my politics, well, not every good thing we do is the heaviest of lifts.

Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El/Supergirl was introduced in a sort of epilogue scene at the end of Superman last year, and James Gunn's new effort to make DC movies into a thing picks that up directly. This movie is a re-telling of the acclaimed "Woman of Tomorrow" storyline that ran in the Supergirl comic book earlier this decade. This is always a good move, to pull from a fleshed-out and well-received narrative, though it doesn't always come out (see the two major swings taken so far at the "Dark Phoenix" X-Men storyline, yikes).

The criticism has been that the setting is grim and dull, the color palette is beige and gray, the story is dark and dour (people trafficking)... I do definitely agree that it feels like a tonal and aesthetic step backward (chronologically, not necessarily artistically) after the explicitly intentional decision to make Superman optimistic and brightly colored to the point of being, dare I say it, frickin' goofy. But Superman paid off and did well even in a dimming market for theatrical-run superhero films. I do agree that this film is kind of sludgy in bits, which in context makes some of the decisions feel retread, recycled, past sell-by. Films can look however the filmmaker can pull it off, of course, but this was asking for trouble.

And though this isn't a James Gunn film, it absolutely has his Guardians of the Galaxy fingerprints on it as some of the thematic overlap in its planet-hopping setting amongst space scoundrels and its reliance on a pop-music soundtrack to add propulsion and layers to both interstitials and action set-pieces. Not poorly done, but it does feel like a copy of a thing, with just a slight degradation in clarity and resolution.

That said, the central relationship between Milly Alcock's Supergirl and Eve Ridley's Ruthye feels rooted, a well-realized vehicle linking the character development in the A-plot with the interspersed telling of the Supergirl origin story.

Jason Momoa's Lobo doesn't need to be there, that's all fan-service, as fun as the character is (inherently I mean, not necessarily in this application). And of course this story has to clear the same hurdle as every other Krytponian superhero story, like why don't they just smash all the bad guys in Act 1, Scene 2? Making her jaunt to red-sun planets intentional is smart, setting us up for a payoff we see coming when she's powered up and fully unleashed in the dénouement, but they doubled down a little too hard with a whole "green sun" section that stepped on the momentum of the narrative. It's not dissimilar to the section of The Mandalorian and Grogu where "Pedro Pascal's" character gets incapacitated, giving the sidekick time to shine, but as much as I like Eve Ridley, she's no Baby Yoda. Plus all they really gave her to do was wait in a cave and get captured. It's even less inspiring than it sounds.

Overall I've been struggling with movies of this type and intent, like the B-tier characters in a shared narrative. The mass appeal of Superman and Spider-Man and Batman and a team-up Avengers movie are apparent and will draw the biggest budgets, the most advertising money, the easiest amount of cultural awareness and cachet that will all justify (at least in intention) a theatrical release in the movies-as-a-second-screen-on-our-phones era. We're a lot of years and a lot of filmed frames-per-second removed from 2008 when B-tier Iron Man came out and was accidentally really good. Then Thor came along in 2011 and gave us the mistaken impression that we should expect automatic success from comic book movies regardless of the prominence of main character. Since then Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and all the sad fuckers in Sony's Spider-Man intellectual property stable (except Venom, those movies did OK) re-set the expectations levels to pre-2008 calibration, though studios seem a little slow to recognize this.

Colored by the anti-buzz, I surprisingly genuinely liked it, but there's no denying, though the rhetoric around female-led films is still poisonous and embarrassing, this movie lost a shit-ton of money. That's certainly not Milly Alcock's fault, it's more a lesson of: make these movies with smaller budgets, but don't try to make it look like it had a larger one. Otherwise you set yourself up for a kicking on an Ant-Man sort of scale. Which can be way bigger than it sounds.

Ball Don't Lie

It's not safe or reasonable to be a fan of things. The word "fan" of course carries with it the connotation of unseriousness, something frivolous and disposible to attach some portion of your finite emotional energy to. You can be a fan of, to make the obvious example, the Los Angeles Lakers say, in a way that people aren't really "fans" of dialectical materialism or quantum gravity. Or I guess you could be, but people who know better would peg you as a dilettante and a poseur. Yes, I'm still talking about the Lakers.

Being a fan of a thing is/was/should be a notable and consequential category shift that separates the laity from the experts, but like many things that underpinned our intellectual and social equilibrium in the past, those immanently separable ideas have been hurtled at one another with a terrible speed until they collide and we all end up with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. Sounds exciting and novel until you realize we're all like two weeks away from a government-funded program promoting the health benefits of botulism.

All things being equal, I'd have taken the sweats, the cramping and the gut-liquifying invasion of food-borne illness over watching the U.S. Men's National Soccer Team get stomped into oblivion by Belgium in the round of 16 at the World Cup this week. The emotional investment in something like this--a World Cup, even more fleeting and ephemeral than a fixed annual league sports team one might follow--was a mistake I (knowingly, excitedly, monetarily) chose for myself 32 years ago when the World Cup was first in the United States. I, like many others, ended up one of the success stories of a marketing push, which is itself embarrassing, but also puts me in the same group as novelist John Green and many others more prominent and interesting than myself. Or to put it another way, it's really them who should have known better, those media savvy elites. I'm just some blinkered schmuck with two degrees in history, what do I know about critical thinking, context awareness and perspective? I had no chance.

A lopsided 4-1 drubbing should carry some kind of poetic leitmotif bookending to wrap things up neatly since we opened with a surprising 4-1 win, but that's not really how sports works. Well, it does, but if you try to bring it up, you just end up the guy who wants to talk about sports that nobody wants to talk about sports with.

I didn't write about the steady, professional, grind-it-out win over Bosnia and Herzegovina (both at once!) last week, as much as I wanted to, for a couple of reasons: 1) I was very aware that I was "in it," that a World Cup experience only exists really between your team's opening group match and the final one, which is almost always a loss, so I decided glide with the experiential current, without commenting on it, and 2) I actually really meant to, but sometimes when I start typing these blogs, I get distracted by my first paragraph and go way off the rails. Instead you got some kind of rant about job seeking that ended with a joke about sexting with an AI. Given the result against Belgium vs where my head was at last Thursday post-Bosnia, in retrospect I went with the much less embarrassing option.

Yeah, the US won a knockout-round game for the first time since 2002, but it was a made-up knockout round that never existed before 2026, which means we ended up going out at exactly the same stage as we always do. The high water mark of modern US men's soccer continues to be a Torsten Frings handball on the goal line that wasn't called, pre-VAR era, in our lone quarterfinal appearance. Stupid, frustrating, painful lore still gets to be foundational lore, unfortunately, moreso when there's nothing better presenting itself as a replacement.

It's been a lot, emotionally, over something that means literally nothing. Did I cry real human tears after the Bosnia and Herzegovina win? I did, it's true, and I'm not a cryer. I honestly hadn't cried since I randomly watched a YouTube short about a stray puppy that was very cold but was brought inside and got warm. And that was like 4-6 days before the game. It had been ages. I'm a rock, typically.

There's a real danger to hope, of course, but it's not the one you're normally thinking of, that it exposes you to the risk of a real soul bludgeoning when it inevitably crashes against the rocks of experience. The real danger is that, in the crush of disappointment, deciding on the cynic's truth that all hope is delusion, an indulgence a genuinely happy human would never/could never afford themselves if they were being truly responsible.

I've considered this all week and the best counter-argument I can come up with is: what if your team gets mollywhopped 4-1 and are never really in it from the first minute? Then you got to hope beforehand AND get absolutely inoculated against the negative effects by the numbing ice-burn of cold reality way, way before the last whistle. You can watch the whole game in a state of digusted disbelief and low-burning rage instead of the annihilating weight of near-miss devastation. I guess what I'm saying is, if we had to go out at this stage, was it easier to be me or to be an Egyptian fan?

Thanks for the run, U.S. men's team. And, in retrospect, thanks for being so awful in the last stage that you never let me get so delusional to think you were actually going to be competitive. You didn't have to do that for me, but a show of such incompetence can only be interpreted as an act of love and care for your supporters, to ease us out of the tournament; so we can transition back to focusing on things that really matter, like electoral politics and the spectre of unemployment. Bless you, boys. What a public service.