Are my eyes really blue?

Back from a brief sojourn in the Big Smoke for the third time in four years. It’s not even a joke when I say this has become our Disneyland – it is a place we get away to, in order to ride the rides (underground, black cabs, double-decker bus, premium air travel), visit the attractions (Dishoom, Fortnum & Mason, pubs, Mr Fogg’s cocktail bars, the British Boot Company, SkyGarden, Pret), meet the characters (our friends, any cabdriver at all), and bring back the branded merch (shortbread, “spicy Advil”, occasional jelly babies, new bovver boots). It’s a refuge from the real world, from the miasma that is America 2025, from work (or the lack thereof), from everything. It is, in short, the long-desired escape. Except that you have to come back from it.

It was in the breakfast room at the St Pancras hotel in 2022 that I realized how much it felt like something Disney would spend tens of millions of dollars to capture the feel of. And I took note of this as we visited Disneyland, and Disney World, and other places in Europe, and other places in America. And I came to the realization that I can get a high percentage of what I wanted from London without having to get on a plane. It comes down to: gray skies, cool temperatures, brick buildings of roughly three stories, and the ability to have a cold pint of local ale at 10 AM in a cozy setting. And after a fashion, I have been able to piece this together a bit at a time everywhere from San Francisco to Cupertino to Seattle to Santa Cruz to Denver to Nashville.

The missus and I have long said “there’s no point in going back to London unless we are moving there” but then gone back again over and over anyway. But this was the first time she said about London what she says about New York: “I want to be there, but I think I want to be there and 30 years old.” And I absolutely get that. I mean, I could be in London at 55 a lot easier than NYC or even SF at 55, but I’m also thinking that I’d rather be someplace at a more human scale. Like Sacramento. Or Portland. I want a new city that has new things, big enough to have health care but small enough to be comprehensible, big enough for transit but small enough for minor league sports, big enough to be safely blue but small enough to be affordable.

But at some level, the urge is just to be somewhere else, to have a couple days off from reality, to have a brief respite from the bleak mundane. To retire and have enough in the bank to stay retired somewhere (or at least working something more enjoyable). And if the same caliber of retreat can be obtained closer than GMT, then it’s past time to explore it at every opportunity.

Well, he only went and did exactly what he said he would, and the results were exactly as was expected, and now everyone’s lost a chunk off their retirement with no prospect of getting it back, and the damage is done. Things don’t just magically go back to the way they were, and the rest of the world is going to spend the rest of the 21st century interpreting America as damage and routing around it. We are officially a pariah state on a par with Russia or Israel or North Korea. And now I don’t know when or whether I’m going to be able to retire, let alone where.

It shouldn’t have been like this. The Jetsons promised us robots doing the work and a twenty hour week tops. We have become more productive, it takes less effort to accomplish more work, people live longer – but the result is that we have to work to sixty-seven now and we’re stuck in offices forty-five hours a week ever since lunch became an unpaid addendum to eight hours work. We don’t need as many people working – which means that a job becomes a privilege and lack of one means you don’t have health care. And instead of cutting down to four days a week or thirty hours a week or otherwise reducing the burden as we did all through the 20th century, now we employ fewer people and use that to suppress wages, because if you need to have a job and there aren’t enough to go round, you’ll take less to ensure you have something.

We need confiscatory taxation of wealth. We need to separate health care from employment. We need to establish universal basic income. And if we do that, we don’t need any of the existing unemployment insurance or welfare assistance, employers don’t have to provide insurance or severance, and instead of billionaires with “send pop stars to space” money to waste on subverting our democracy, we can take jobs that do good without worrying about our cost of living, we can strike out and be entrepreneurial without risking our families’ health, we can live closer to that mythical 1950s of plenty that only became an issue for conservatives once it was extended beyond white people.

They say you’re supposed to grow more conservative as you get older, but that only worked when each generation did better than the next and had something to lose. Generation X, with its pensions turned into stock roulette and its kids paying confiscatory tuition for what was once free in-state public college and the prospect of returning to lifetime benefit caps and pre-existing exclusions, is at the vanguard of the Great Screwing. And if the billionaire and boomer classes are going to continue to bleed us dry, then we have to protect ourselves. Somehow.

It’s known that there was a moment on move-in weekend in August 1994 when I turned from 21st Avenue onto Wedgewood Avenue in Hillsboro Village, and before turning onto 18th to my new apartment, looked past Belmont Mansion and suddenly had the premonition “I’m never going to know what’s on the other side of that hill.” And sure enough, when I left for the last time, it was under a cloud and with the Oxford-style consolation MA instead of the PhD I’d been accepted to earn. My career as I had known it was over. There was no idea what might be coming next.

But the thing I also remember is the end of that first year, May 1995. I remember hearing the Cranberries singing on Lightning 100 on my way down Blakemore. “Ode To My Family” was a different song before I was Irish, when my parents were both alive and I hadn’t been alienated from my relatives, before the blindside letter that summer that would be the warning shot for the future. It sounded like the end of the movie. Like I’d battled through and finally had that fifth year of college in a super-senior setting where I finally had what I’d dreamed of: friends, football, walkable campus with stuff to do, Internet access, a new city with new radio stations and new TV channels and new places to learn. In retrospect, it was the end of one movie, I just didn’t realize it.

And last weekend, for the first time since before I was in high school, I went to Nashville and didn’t set foot on campus once.

I was busy. I was spending time with the last blood family I have before they make the escape I wish I could. We went out to dinner like in days of yore: four adults in a cool place enjoying the comfort of company that knows its history together. We saw friends we rarely get to see. And I saw a city that is a funhouse mirror of what it was thirty years ago, one that steered hard into becoming Baptist Vegas and remade itself into the cultural capital of White America. Nashville was always a blue dot sort of town, but when your business is hospitality for the kind of people who think having to see brown people is woke, it’s hard to see it working out as a retirement option.

I never wanted to need a blue dot. I just wanted to be. There is another edit where I stay in Nashville, or Birmingham, or find myself in New Orleans or something, and have the crew of people around me that makes it possible to survive or even thrive. But everyone in high school moved away, and there was no one there in college or by the time I crashed out of Vandy, and as I’ve said so often of Birmingham, I didn’t have twenty years to wait.

I don’t know what happens next. The world is in far worse shape than it was in 1995, or 1997, or any of the other times in my life where I didn’t know what happens next. It’s impossible to think about a future further away than June right now, and retirement feels like it’s off the cards without moving somewhere else. And then where do you move where you don’t need a dot, or can find the people who can make you one at age 60 or worse?

The dream is being pared down to what is really important. We’re inching our way down Maslow’s pyramid. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but that’s the course we were put on 25 years ago by people who assumed things would just work out and the floor couldn’t collapse. Now when people say it’s going to be okay, I have two questions:

when? And how?

A series of circumstances forced me to create a new user account for myself on my work laptop, and in the course of trying to replicate my data, I inadvertently loaded my browser with all my old bookmarks going back to around 2007 and running through 2011 or so. So I’ve gotten lost trying to look through them lately.

The first thing that stands out is that 90% of them are dead links. Blogs, vendors, just the passage of time. Links to shows on Virgin Radio, or the Sports Junkies, or old Gawker Media articles are all 404s at best. More frequently, there’s a warning because the bookmarked domain now redirected to a Chinese gambling site or a domain reseller. So in a lot of ways, all that remains is the stored page title in the list.

Going through and looking at the topics from days gone by, it’s not hard to tell what had my interest: Android devices (still unsure who was going to prevail), steampunk (as an aesthetic generally), Maker Faire and its adjacents, things of interest in San Francisco, the netbook and its possibilities…it was a time when I was still interested in technology writ large, an era when the same five companies didn’t have everything in the world by the nuts. New players could still emerge, things like Foursquare or Instagram could catch fire and run wild without the presumption that they would be immediately eaten, smartphone time was just arriving – the confluence of finding out what was possible with a camera, a GPS and an internet connection all in your pocket with a 4-inch screen.

But there were other things there too. American-made clothing and footwear, the beginnings of what would eventually take over my entire wardrobe. Two different links to the Wikipedia article on the Episcopal Church, part of that first fumbling exploration that eventually led to 2023. And looming through all of it, articles and commentary on the Tea Party and the increasing Confederate radicalization of the Republican Party. Which, of course, went on to bear toxic fruit in the years to come. But it’s not like anyone can plausibly claim no one saw it coming or what the risk was.

It was a different era. There was still possibility. It still felt like the future could somehow get better. It certainly didn’t feel like the world was a decade away from going to the point of no return.

But what really stands out are the blogs. Mostly untouched for fifteen years or so. Personal blogs from friends who moved away, who gave them up, who aren’t even friends anymore in some cases. There was a whole life there, and it feels like William Gibson’s remark about being the last survivor of Atlantis: there is a whole world there and no one knows.

Things foundered and died, or turned to slop and silage. Vox, the first one. LiveJournal and Tumblr. Yahoo and ultimately Twitter. Gawker Media in its necessary form, especially Deadspin and Valleywag. Facebook choked social networking and blogging to death and became the AOL of the 21st century. Twitter became a symbiote that poisoned journalism to death. Amazon became yuppie Wal-Mart. Microsoft crumbled into a business than made the stuff you use at work with a gaming console as a side hustle. Google…Google became a tax on everything, the boss you had to pay a vig to if you wanted to be known or found by anyone else. And Apple was content to sit back and make the finest tools for infecting yourself.

The greatest scam Silicon Valley ever pulled was convincing the Obama administration that just because some of them were gay, they were fundamentally Democrats. When in fact the VC culture of libertarian greed was underpinning the whole thing and eventually empowered the worst people in the world, because they weren’t taxed into submission when we had the chance. Tech convinced us that Uber wasn’t a cab company, that AirBnB wasn’t an unlicensed hotelier, that Facebook wasn’t an advertising company, and that apps meant you weren’t an employer, just matching people up as if DoorDash was actually Tinder.

The title of this blog is fitting. Gibson and Stephenson and Ridley Scott and all the others led me to believe that living in a corporatist cyberpunk dystopia would be a Hell of a lot cooler than it is.

I was misinformed.

It’s so fucking dumb. It’s the inevitable result of impeachments without conviction, and filibuster without having to show up, and blocking appointments without consequence – the MAGA movement has decided that since nothing has consequences, rules and laws mean nothing. We’ve basically fed Article I of the Constitution into a chipper shredder and allowed the President to allow a drug-addled shaved monkey billionaire to stage a leveraged buyout of the federal government.

It’s not even a proper reduction in the size of government, executed by passing laws through a Congress that the GOP ostensibly controls. It’s more like going through a person and saying “you don’t need an appendix, you don’t need toes, you definitely don’t need TWO kidneys, look at all this small intestine, nobody needs a small AND a large intestine, it’s woke to give women separate holes for pooping AND giving birth when it’s all pushing stuff out” – there is absolutely no actual knowledge behind the decision-making.

The more frustrating bit is this: Trump got 49% of the vote. His margin of victory in the popular vote was smaller this time than the margin Hillary Clinton beat him by in 2016. And yet, the press treats this as the Mandate of Heaven and a sweeping triumph, and the Democrats flop around as if 48% of the electorate didn’t vote against this exact thing. The Democrats cannot muster a tenth of the pushback against Trump that the Republicans did against Obama in 2009, and that is an absolute disgrace. They need a wartime consigliere, too young to remember black and white TV, who has actually fought a competitive election since the invention of the World Wide Web and isn’t living in trauma of Reagan in 1984.

Democrats can’t fix this. They can’t even appreciably ameliorate this. What they can do is make sure everyone knows whose fault it is and give the appearance that they’re strewing glass in the path. They need to get on that right now, or find someone who will, because otherwise we are done for my lifetime.

If I could obtain a job and citizenship in some other EU-or-equivalent country right now, I’d be off like a shot. But that’s not on offer. After all those years, I’m back in Alabama without ever leaving California, and help isn’t coming.

I added a new country to my list and revisited three of my favorite cities in Europe. I accumulated almost everything I could imagine wanting – outerwear, drinking vessels, footwear, hats. I drank at two of my favorite tiki bars. I finally got the shed with the string lights as the Sunday night retreat. I was working from home without any issues, able to walk to the local, an active participant in a spiritual community and relatively happy with how things had landed…with one eye on the approaching meteor.

And then, it hit.

Now we live in a foundering country that is speedrunning the “we’re going to be the next Russia” plan. The rule of law is being abandoned with barely a whimper from the press and no interest from people whose lives are about to turn much worse, because some people won’t know the circus has come to town until they’re crushed beneath the piles of elephant shit. Our financial situation has taken an unexpected turn and now there is a non-zero chance we will have to sell the house and move as a result. And as insult to injury, after almost five years of doing tremendous work and going completely unrecognized for it, I’m back in the office five days a week, which was not the base condition well before the pandemic, and there has been no attempt at a justification for why.

Life took an irrevocable hard turn on November 5, 2024, and at this point in history it’s hard to argue that it’s going to be possible to ever get back in my lifetime. I have, at best, maybe 30 years left for America to claw back any of the 50 years of progress that have been attacked in the last month and a half. And the Zoloft that made 2024 possible and enjoyable is now apparently in the crosshairs of the snake-oil purveyor in charge of American health. Who is not to be confused with the drunk rapist at the controls of national defense, the foreign billionaire whose interns are shredding the civil service or the convicted felon at the top of it all, whose handpicked Supreme Court has paved the way to make him king.

I would love to get out, to decamp for some other English-speaking country and retire and see out my days. But I don’t think that’s possible any more. Even if we could cash everything out, it’s not enough to finish our lives on, let alone endure if the markets implode and take out our retirement savings. Retirement, at all, is suddenly a lot less plausible, and the odds that I’ll be doddering along at a help desk at 70 are only reduced by the likelihood that first level tech support will all be AI and second level will all be in Hyderabad by then.

The odds are very high that right now, things are as good as they will ever get again. There is nowhere to go but down, and the only hope is a controlled descent as slowly as possible. That would be different at 60-something, when you don’t have that long a life expectancy anyway, or at 30-something when there’s still a prospect of making a fresh start somewhere else. But 53 is no-man’s-land. It’s too late to begin anew from scratch without giving away a lot of income and accumulated wisdom that has no value in a new career. It’s too soon to start Medicare or Social Security, so you have to have some sort of job that will provide health care – and sufficient health care, in case you have some prior condition.

I enjoyed pre-tirement. Even though the job was annoying and frustrating, being able to do it entirely from home meant I could empty the dishwasher or move the laundry into the dryer or bring in the trash cans during a dull moment instead of staring out the window across a sea of cubicles for five minutes. I didn’t waste a half hour or more every day putting unnecessary miles on a vehicle. I could have stayed pre-tired long enough that I could have staved off actual retirement for a long time. But now, we don’t know what life holds in the next year, and even pre-tirement seems as unlikely as retiring.

The only thing left now is to play out what’s already on the board as best we can. See friends one last time before they head for a better country. Visit London on airline miles and hotel points while it’s not coming out of our cash reserves. And then, a whole lot of learning to love what we’ve got and being satisfied with a couple of cans of Guinness in the shed or by the fire pit instead of going down the pub, or watching endless British and Irish television on Prime Video and trying to get lost in books instead of counting on another international trip, and reconciling to the notion that you have to live in the moment, enjoy the moment, and be grateful for the moment, because nothing is promised. Not even tomorrow.

Find all the little blessings and immerse yourself in every one. A sausage biscuit, a comfortable sweater, the grippy socks, a new book, an extra half hour cuddled up in the morning without having to think about the world. If putting a D-ring on your lightsaber, or skiving off to work from home in the afternoon, or rewatching QI, or wearing your East Belfast GAA shirt – if anything can bring you contentment for the day, do it without hesitation.

That’s the plan for 53.

In the MCU, we think it’s 2026 at this point. Pretty sure anyway. And the Avengers…do they even still exist? We know that there’s some connection between Bruce Banner, Carol Danvers, Wong and Shang-Chi now, but Steve’s gone, Tony and Nat are dead, Thor is on the other side of the galaxy, who knows where Wanda and Vision are, everyone’s forgotten Peter Parker, Rocket and Nebula are back with the Guardians…who’s left at this point?

So, people who were members of the Avengers (i.e. on the team at the end of an Avengers movie or part of the Time Heist) who still exist and are active and on Earth: Sam “Captain America” Wilson, Scott Lang (and we’ll throw Hope Van Dyne in there fo historical purposes, you can’t have the Wasp and not have her an Avenger), Bruce Banner, Colonel James Rhodes (with the enhanced Iron Patriot armor), and…that’s it and that’s all. As far as other super-people on Earth go, you’ve got Shuri, Wong, Stephen Strange, Shang-Chi, Jennifer “She-Hulk” Walters, Cassie Lang and Kamala Khan who are known to at least one other active Avenger. There’s also a smattering of others – Riri Williams, Matt Murdoch, Moon Knight, King Valkyrie – and the handful of folks who are going to be in Thunderbolts, almost none of whom are “good guys”.

Basically, the Avengers as previously constituted are dead. It’s a similar situation to the end of Civil War when all you had available on the official roster was Tony, Rhodes and Vision. When Tony said “the Avengers broke up, we’re toast” he wasn’t kidding, given that there were more of them tooling around with Steve than actually in the lineup.

So you’ve got Nick Fury in orbit doing whatever he does to try to stave off another interstellar threat, Wong (and presumably Strange) fending off mystical threats, a couple of random menaces completely unaccounted for in Namor and the Super-Skrull (and doesn’t the MCU need to completely punt and disavow that Secret Invasion ever happened, what a load of shite), the beginnings of the Young Avengers…we’re three years since the Battle of Earth and there’s not really anything in place to substitute for what the Avengers were 2012-2018. And that appears to be the main driver for the first two MCU movies this year – what is going to be done about the fact that we don’t have that any more?

It’s still kind of weird that we don’t really have a good look at the world on the other side of the Blip. The only movies that have taken place primarily on Earth in the post-Blip era are Shang-Chi, Eternals, the third Spider-Man, and the second Black Panther, and the events of those movies have not been revisited since in any case. That’s the weirdness of the Multiverse Saga: whereas Phase 2 was all about building on top of Phase 1, Phase 5 has seemingly no connection whatsoever to anything in Phase 4. To this point, everything since Endgame has been a firehose of new stuff with occasional involvement from existing characters in ways that don’t really engage with where the world is now. And that lack of focus, more than the amount of homework, is to me what undercuts the MCU.

It’s time to get back on track. Soon. We’re going to need all the escape we can get. Of which.

I don’t know why, but…no let me explain. Last night, I went to Trials, where I’ve been seeking solace for a third of my life, only to find the cask ale was empty and the big leather chairs have been removed. But instead of sinking into misery, I rallied and decamped to Dr Funk’s, a tiki establishment where I enjoyed several drinks without ruining myself – and along the way, Vandy beat Tennessee in men’s basketball and Washington upset Detroit for a berth in the NFC title game for the first time since I was touring Central Europe.

And then, after a lovely foggy day, I walked all the way into town for dinner with church folks, floating on the high of Vandy repeating the Tennessee win with the women’s team. And under a socked-in 6 PM sky, waiting out in the cold, I listened to Enya sing the old hymn “How Can I Keep From Singing.” And I felt myself filled with…hope? Determination? The Holy Spirit? I don’t know what it is, but I’m more optimistic right now than I have been since the weekend before Election Day. And I have no reason to. It’s grim. It’s going to be bad. It’s gonna be worse before it gets better and a lot of people are going to suffer and there’s so little we can actually do about it right now.

But even so…

As long as we hope, as long as we are not afraid, as long as we believe, we have a chance. They want us to give up, to surrender, to submit. And as long as we don’t, we’re still in it.

At a minimum, it’s gonna take 1,461 days of endurance to get through this. Maybe more. And who knows how much it will cost, or whether we can get away with this one. But giving in and giving up are not options.

Do you reject Satan and all his works and all his pomps and all his empty promises? With God’s help, I will.

I don’t think I believe in America any more.

Everything I learned, everything I was told growing up. The Great American Melting Pot. The land of opportunity. I’m Just A Bill. Democracy. Individual responsibility and the equal chance to make it. Like God, the vision which I was sold all my life was a lie, one honed and polished by those who benefited most from it. And I don’t – can’t – believe in that any more, for the same reason: the people pushing that vision know it’s bullshit, and act in ways they would never consider if they actually thought it was true.

So now what happens?

It took the better part of a decade to come to a way of seeing God that made sense, and finding a tradition and a community that were on board with that way of seeing. I suppose in ten years or so, it might be possible to see my way clear to an idea of America I could believe in, but it would take a lot. It would take a massive mid-term rejection in 2026, followed by a re-aligning election in 2028, affirmed in 2030 and 2032, and resulting in an extinction-level event for the Republican Party as it exists today. Then, by 2035, I’d feel like I could exhale, and maybe – maybe – still be able to retire and have ten good years.

It’s not lost on me that retirement is not on the cards before then. It’s not lost on me that retirement might not be on the cards at all, depending. I need an employer for health care, I need income to feed the retirement account to the point we can still afford the house, I need the economy not to collapse and I need those accounts to grow somehow. And I need it all to happen in a world where a 50 year old in this Valley is un-hireable.

We didn’t care enough about America to defend it. We let things fall apart in the twenty years between “9/11” and “January 6” and by then it was too late. The unwritten rules were shredded by one side and the other thought if they just kept playing by them, everything would work out eventually. Turns out when you lose with class, that just means the other side wins.

In a perfect world, this wouldn’t have happened. In a better world, I’d have the resources and means to decamp to an actual democracy and retire there and see out my days in a village near Galway (or maybe on the Oregon coast of an independent Pacific Empire, who knows). But we only get the one world, and we have to make our own best way in it. I and my loved ones are positioned about as well as we can be, under the circumstances, so now we just have to protect each other and help fuel the fight, and learn to love the struggle.

What had happened was, in typical fashion, the end of the Y2K project meant laying off everyone they could. And one of our techs was a Kildare man, and said he’d gone to this Irish bar in DC called Ireland’s Four Provinces where there were live musicians, and they’d asked where he was from and played a Kildare song, and that it had the finest pint of Guinness he’d had outside of Ireland. And we agreed, and so all went up there Friday after work at 6.

We left at 2 AM, having drunk ourselves senseless and bought all the tapes from the selfsame musicians as our man had seen previously (and they played his song again). And the next night, Saturday, we were back again at 6 PM and stayed until closing time again – and in between, I drove through the residual snows to Tyson’s Corner and bought my first pair of Dr Martens 1460 boots, in brown leather, while the McTeggarts’ version of “Whiskey In The Jar” played through the speakers of my old Saturn. To this day, there is one chord in that song that puts me right back in the humidor of Georgetown Tobacco, looking at Domain Avo or Padron 3000 cigars and new Zippo lighters.

It became a regular stop. The 4P’s was where it seems everything in my life happened from January 2000 until June 2004. Everything was celebrated there, mourned there, it’s where we brought friends, and in my mind, if I do as I should in life, Valhalla will be the front table at the P’s at 11 PM with the third set of five just striking up as more friends come through the door and a fresh round of pints are sat down and “On The One Road” begins…forever.

But it wasn’t just limited to that bar and that time. I found myself supporting Celtic FC for the better part of a decade. I got up at stupid o’clock in the morning to go to Bethesda to watch the 2001 All-Ireland Final in football. Five years later, I did it again, three hours earlier, in Millbrae California for the same thing. When I moved to California, I immediately found an Irish place down the street from that first apartment, and then spent years trying to find any place that would have the music (the closest I came was the trad sessions at O’Flaherty’s in San Jose, and when I sang along with the Fields one night, Mr. Ray O’Flaherty of blessed memory pressed a complimentary pint into my hand and asked where in the Holy Land was I from myself). And I never really found it despite my best efforts.

But then my cousin began to date a gal who was living in Galway. And they picked the lock for me to finally spend two weeks in Ireland. And what I found was a country that operated at a human scale, felt warm and welcoming, was conscious of the price of sectarianism and warfare and acutely aware of the demands of modernity and moving beyond the old ways. It felt like what might have been in Alabama had Folsom been re-elected in 1958 and the Birmingham Community Chest’s racial efforts actually borne fruit and Reagan never happened. It felt like home.

And I delved into the history books, watched my fill of Cheap Irish Homes and Derry Girls and London Irish, listened to podcasts from RTE and Virgin Media, learned to appreciate the Irish spots in the Bay Area that were just as authentically Irish even if they weren’t wall to wall trad and rebel songs like I thought. And when I was there last April, Dublin felt like the most obvious and natural place in the world to be. And I felt like I could see myself easily spending the rest of my days there.

It won’t happen, of course. Unlikely in any event. Maybe if a giant bag of money hit us on the head, we could afford the requirements to retire there and split time. But the slogan painted over the stage at the 4Ps has stood up in my mind for 25 years now, and I’ve never had reason to question it, because I have always felt a hundred thousand welcomes.