Are my eyes really blue?

I don’t know why I am focused on spending money. The best thing I did this year was decide that I couldn’t buy things online during Lent, which has spared me from impulse purchases and forced me to consider how much of my wanting stuff is just trying to perfect things I already have, in that eternal quest to have The One Perfect Thing. I am good on lightsabers, on computing equipment, on outerwear. So why do I still want these things?

As always, I think it goes back to wanting to need those things. I want to be somewhere I’ll need the linen blazer, or the charcoal wool Crombie coat with a custom gold lining. Somewhere I will have need of my own MacBook Neo. Somewhere I have an excuse to have a personalized lightsaber on my hip at all times. Basically I want to be able to work remotely from Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland Galway, is what it feels like.

It’s another flavor of escape. Same reason I have the “False Trip” playlist full of songs that replicate the sound of the lobby and lounge room music at the Park Lane, or the candles that approximate the smell they pump in there. Same reason I now have a purpose-acquired Yeti just for work and a separate one with a different texture that never leaves the house so that I’ll know I’m not on the job when I sip from it. I even loaded up big on the Nitro Emerald Cliffs dry stout from Athletic so i can have as many pints as I want without ruining my health.

You can’t assume the world is going to get any better. You have to accept that things will never go back to how they used to be. You just have to make the most of what there is now – whether it’s the unlikely return or regular trad to the nearest pub, or the presence of a dive bar and a cocktail lounge less than three miles away, or the walkable village, or the candles and purple light in the shed. Or the saber you have, or the family laptop (even if it doesn’t have your stickers), or your new linen blazer that can stand up to even 80 degrees. FInd a reason to need the things you have, and then use them.

The unthinkable happened today: Apple dropped a $600 laptop. The MacBook Neo is more or less what was predicted: no frills, A18 processor, only 8 GB RAM, none of your fancy Center Stage camera or MagSafe plugs or the like. It’s basically a drop-in updated replacement for the original M1 MacBook Air, or for a Chromebook that doesn’t suck, or for a mediocre Best Buy Windows laptop.

It certainly feels like a contender for the “blogger’s delight” spot first filled by the 12″ PowerBook G4 over twenty years ago. Small, cool-running, and far more useful with a keyboard and mouse than trying to make an iPad into a laptop. And thanks to a cunning discount, I could score the higher-end model for that same $600, which would give it 512 GB of storage – same as my phone, twice that of my work laptop – and the added convenience of TouchID, which has turned out to be kind of a must-have in a world of passkeys and ApplePay. Blogging, Signal, proper shopping, maybe streaming and Zoom – and more importantly, all of that stuff NOT on my work computer. There’s something to be said for making it possible to just pull out the work laptop, click “Erase All Content and Settings” and leave it on the desk.

In any event, I’ve already thought through it, so now it’s just a question of deciding whether it’s worth my while.

The All-Mess Olympics are finally concluded, to my chagrin. I don’t know why this seemed like so much fun – perhaps because we were finally back in a Winter Olympics area instead of trying to cram it into the same totalitarian capital that hosted the Summer Olympics 14 years earlier, perhaps because it was finally possible to watch everything on the global feed if you didn’t need to be live, perhaps because I just needed a little more light in the darkness.

The last Winter Olympics wrapped up just as I was about to turn 50, and then we had the invasion of Ukraine, and there we were in London for three weeks. And in so many ways it felt like a high point, in retrospect. It felt just fine to be 50, it felt alive, it felt like maybe we had made it through the dark of the last three or six or ten years and come to a new equilibrium we could live with. And then we got home and things started to decay within months.

The winter games always resonate more with me than the summer games. It’s that glimpse into another world of ice and snow and speed and grace that we wish we could live in, the same way it’s special to disappear to Tahoe every year (when we aren’t snowed out of being able to get there). I have the markers of memory in 1980, 1988, 1994 and almost every Winter Olympics thereafter. I don’t know what I’ll look back and remember from this middle fortnight of February 2026, but I’ll remember it as light enough to push back the dark for a little while, and as always, I’m grateful for the opportunity to escape again.

So for about a year, the Great Mentioner has been kicking around the closest thing to a surefire recession indicator: a cheap Apple laptop. What makes this interesting is that for the first time in almost twenty years, it would be a purpose-built inexpensive laptop rather than last generation’s base model for the low. In fact, if the Great Mentioner is to be believed, it is built around the chipset of the iPhone 16 series – in other words, the same A18 SoC that drives my mobile phone.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it suggests that’s the minimum RAM and firepower required for Apple Intelligence, which is the table stakes for Cupertino hardware these days: 8 GB RAM (or a thousand times as much as my first Mac) and processor performance somewhere between the M1 and M3 (which in turn would make it comparable with my work laptop). Not to mention the economy of scale that comes with having been punching this chipset out for two years already, although one wonders how it scales up to a larger display. The Great Mentioner has it on 12.9”, slightly smaller than the MacBook Air, which means that we are looking at that most unexpected of things: a return of the Scottish Laptop, the MacBook, only with far more firepower than a Core M and with a price point commensurate with that power. And possibly even more than one single port, an undersupported USB-C, which meant at the time that there was no way to buy a MacBook and an iPhone and connect them.

I don’t really need and can’t justify a personal laptop. That said, a personal laptop would not have to do that much – Signal, MarsEdit, Safari for streaming, maybe Zoom or Facetime, and Kentucky Route Zero – assuming that there’s any way to run it when Rosetta support for Intel code goes away in two years. It would also mean, once and for all, the complete obliteration of any personal data on my work laptop for good. And the A18 in the body of a 12” laptop should have functionally infinite battery life.

Basically this would be the iPhone 16 in laptop form. Which…you could do worse, especially for less than the price of the iPhone 16. My only concern is that the notional price point will suffer from the AI-driven hyperinflation of RAM costs, and then, do you really want to invest in a laptop with only 8 GB of RAM in 2026? Especially when it has to run macOS and not iOS? If this is really the plan, shouldn’t the plan be a 10” iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard? And yet, that was a clearly inferior solution to an actual laptop in Prague two years ago.

Something to mull over, anyway.

For the second year in a row, I am giving up buying stuff online for Lent. Because that has again become a distracion, a form of self-medication and an expensive one. I don’t even really have justification for the moleskin trap blazer, except that it’s part and parcel of my search for 100% the right thing that ends up with my owning half a dozen 80% things.

Thing is, I have so many of those things that I don’t actually use, some of which I didn’t even get out of the packaging for a while. I have Nerf blasters that need to be shot. I have modular 3-d printed Nerf blasters that can be made new with a different $4 barrel. I’m finally down to one “everyday” lightsaber, although it’s no Mace Windu. I ordered a handful of stray Nerf parts and added them to the refuse of my advent calendars to craft my own little creation, complete with a Lego version of myself at 60 trying to recapture my youth in DC. I have more Yeti stuff than I could possibly use, mostly limited to two in regular use: a 25 ounce mug for work and short range drives and bringing home ice in the evening, and the 16 oz moon dust that is my at-home go-to because of the way the tactile feel reinforces the feeling of not-at-work. It adds to the escape.

Because you have to make a hole in the night to hide from the world. I keep trying to pare it down – the nearer dive bar downtown is a cheaper night out than the pub in Cupertino, and walking to the local and back for one pint is cheaper still, and cheapest of all is home in the shed on a Sunday night. There are plenty of books to get through, the fire pit is replaced and works, the Olympics are back for mess and distraction for two weeks…

I’m bearing down on 54. Next year is another step into the transition – one with more discounts, perhaps a couple more legal protections (for as long as those last), the age at which I was prepared to decamp to Cañada Cove and work remotely for the rest of my career. Which, honestly – if they’d just let me go back to working remotely even three days a week, my quality of life would be so much improved. If allowed to work from home permanently, I would almost be willing to keep this job to the end. And that is the frustration: it would have taken so little to make this the life I have grown to want, and instead we have to struggle through this madness. 

so 54 is about learning to make a hole in the world and hide from the misery. Not escape, because as i said once before in this space, it’s not escape if you have to come back. There may be no escape, but there is a way to live deliberately in spite of everything. And that is what I hope to craft in the next year so that when it’s time to start clicking the 55-64 category, I’ll have things to do there.

I don’t know quite how to reckon with the extent to which we are traumatized and exasperated through being terrorized by the stupidest shit on Earth, flung by the stupidest people on Earth. You think about how dull-witted the average American is these days, and then think half of them are as bad or worse, and it all starts to make sense.

My lovely bride is fond of saying “the question isn’t how smart are you, it’s how are you smart,” and I find no fault with that. I’ve known people who would struggle to read this post aloud but know how to manufacture a semi-automatic firearm from bare metal, who would struggle to balance a checkbook but can instinctively do the calculus required to drain ten 3-pointers in a row, who can single-handedly take down an entire pub on trivia night but cannot make it past day two of any in-person programming course ever. I absolutely endorse her position. However, it comes with a contrapositive, which is “how are you stupid,” and we are afflicted with multiple overlapping stupids. Always have been, honestly, but it goes a long way toward explaining how we got here.

There’s the “I don’t know anything about politics/I don’t care anything about politics” form, which is absurd when you consider how many of those people have opinions on how the BCS should have worked or how the College Football Playoff should be constituted. There’s the people who treat politics as spectator sport, assuming it will never have a material effect on them. There’s the generation of boys with failed parenting who think entirely in Call of Duty, Joe Rogan and racist Twitter accounts with Roman statue avatars. And there’s the Democratic consultant class permanently trapped in amber in 1995, convinced that the mythical white working class male vote is the only thing worth winning and trying to run back the business-conciliatory New South Governor as the sole hope of the Democrats.

But there’s one particular brand of stupid that is driving me out of my mind, and it’s the stupid of Republicans who think they can keep shaking hands with the devil without consequence, that this will all go by the boards when Trump is gone, that normal service will return and there will be no consequences or any repercussions for what they have done. It’s just business. All in the game, yo. It would be unproductive and unseemly to hold anyone to account. The American people want us to move forward.

Horseshit.

The reason we are in this position now is because we never move forward. We never completed Reconstruction, in the 1870s or the 1970s alike. We never held anyone to account for the Iraq war and the credit crisis of 2008. We never held anyone to account for January 6 and the malfeasance that followed. We never held the media to account for harassing Joe Biden off the ticket because of age and incipient senescence, only to pretend nothing was wrong with a transparently worse case. We never held Big Tech to account for the things they enable.

We never paid the price, never asked anyone to, and as a result the bill has grown astronomical. And it might well cost us a nation. We cannot flinch from making this right if we ever get the opportunity. We can’t shrug off a mob of paramilitary killers sent to wreak havoc on an American city. We can’t wave away the kidnap and deportation of American citizens. We absolutely must not allow “mistakes were made” to be the extent of the repentance. No forgiveness without contrition and reparation. Red America, in its lands and homes and minds and television networks and blogospheres, must be occupied and de-MAGA-fied or else we’ll be right back here and worse in another decade. Just long enough for the Democrats to struggle to pull together a fix and then lose.

Because that’s the stupidest stupid of all: the memory of a goldfish that says why should we worry about measles, or polio, or Y2K, or anything else that we once fixed and hasn’t been a problem for so long that people assume it’s the natural condition and doesn’t require constant vigilance.

You know, like democracy.

How many more citizens will have to be publicly murdered by government thugs before the “pro life” and “Second Amendment” and “government tyranny” and “All Lives Matter” people admit it was never about any of those things and always about white supremacy?

Every Democrat in Congress needs to shut down regular business until something happens to stop the American Stormtrooper Squad. Not one penny for ICE. Not one penny for DHS. Not one penny for the functions of the American government as long as this is what it does.

We cannot stop this with a flip of a switch. That’s what elections make possible. But we cannot stop throwing things into its path. If they want our blood, we have to make those bastards work for it.

We have friends everywhere.

I’ve spent a year going into the office to sit at a desk, stare into the middle distance, and then do exactly what I would have done from the front room, or the sofa, or the bed, or the shed, or Gulf Shores, or Nashville, or Prague – because I did. And nothing ever slipped, nothing ever failed for lack of my physical presence. In fact, since returning to the office? Half the support staff has been laid off and incompetent three-ring-binder phone jockeys have been given the keys to the kingdom. I’m still waiting for a review, still waiting for anything but the same across the board raise as everyone else, waiting for promotion, waiting for acknowledgement that we do a good job, waiting for acknowledgement that we even do a job, waiting for the axe to finally come for the oldest system administrator because why do we need an administrator for someone else’s system.

I just about survived the first year of Trump 1 because that was all I had to deal with. There was no work misery as such, or at least no more than the traditional frustrations. Nothing like the second-class citizenship that came from being outsourced. I could just about handle that. And then when we were outsourced, we got a break from a worldwide pandemic and then a ghost of hope that the world would stop getting actively worse, so work was the only real issue. But then the seesaw broke. Now look, both sides are on the bottom.

The attempts to punch out and get some separation from reality aren’t going too well, if the stress dreams are anything to go by. When you dream that the most incompetent part of your org has set fire to your Corvette because they were proactively trying to fix something they imagined necessary, it’s to a point you can’t even rely on going to bed as refuge.

If 2026 is anything like 2025, bugger all, I might take the whole Christmas fortnight off and see if we can decamp to Santa Cruz or something. This is unsustainable.

And that is my Grievance, Aired. Now give me a ball bat for these Feats of Strength.

Anyone who’s seen a loved one deal with stroke can see what’s happening here. The current occupant of the Oval Office is almost certainly taking blood thinners to prevent – or remediate – a TIA, or worse. He can barely hold his head up, his public utterances are the stuff that gets Papaw’s car keys taken away, and the press continues to act as if nothing is wrong at all by comparison to how Joe Biden was branded a senile half-corpse a year and a half ago. The question of whether any one person can take charge of the MAGAts is going to be a serious concern sooner than later, and it’s the same problem that’s existed for a decade: the Republicans don’t have one person who can take the torch from Trump but at least half a dozen who believe they can.

This is an old old story – half a century, at this point. These things happen when the GOP and the mainstream press can’t accept that they were wrong – about Vietnam, about Clinton, about Iraq, about Trump. So the people who were *right* have to be discredited – because otherwise the press would have to acknowledge their wrongness. And right now, with three-fifths of the country out of patience with the bullshit, the white house press corpse [sic] is as hapless and helpless as ever. It’s going to take so much. The power of billionaires has to be broken, ruthlessly and without ambiguity. A billion dollars has to be treated like a rogue nuke, and as equally unsafe in private hands. the Supreme Court has to be expanded and packed with people who respect the rule of law and reject a blank check for one party. There are entire layers that have to be peeled back to remediate what’s happening here. And it will take the rest of our lives. And it won’t work until enough people are fed up – you need 2/3 of the country to be mad enough to back a change. And while the numbers may be there, or close, the numbers of people willing to take action to turn things over aren’t where they need to be. You need enough people to elect 250 in the House, 54 or 55 in the Senate, a President who can hold their feet to the fire and make it plain they need to vote right, and a public mad enough to let them do what has to be done to clean up the rules and the process.

And we’re going to have to tear down the ballroom, rip down the tacky gold shit, make an affirmative rejection. It happened, and nothing can undo that, but we also need to make it clear that it has been rejected. The bullshit they build in an attempt to gain the continuity with some imagined great past – like all fascists do – has to be hosed down and washed away, and those who made it happen tarred for life. That’s the biggest piece of all: we are going to have to bring back shame, properly targeted and mercilessly pressed, and the kind of people who advocated for revoking women’s suffrage and repealing birthright citizenship need to be more radioactive than David Duke in 1991. “Republican” needs to be synonymous with “pedophile” for the rest of our days. The last decade – hell, the last three decades – need to be looked on like the Gilded Age or the Know-Nothing era, an age of kakistocracy and corruption without parallel.

I’d like to see things on the way back up before I die. It’s not much to ask.