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I’m now officially OLD.

Turning sixty is not the same as turning fifty.

For one thing, I feel it. Fifty was sort of a milestone, but it didn’t feel appreciably different than any other birthday. Sixty, however…let’s just say many parts of this body that I was never even aware of now ache on a regular basis. Bending over to get anything off the floor is a chore, and if I have to get down on the floor to do something, getting back up again is always an interesting exercise.

My energy level—while back to “normal” from what it was a few months ago—is still shit. I think about going out to wander downtown and take photos like I used to do years ago and I immediately think, “Nah. Not gonna do that.” At the same time I know I need to do that if I’m going to avoid having to start buying all my clothing at Destination XL. (My daily after-work bowl of chips-n-salsa is directly to blame; I readily admit that.) But I watch all these home improvement shows on television and think, “Okay, these folks are half my age, but still…where do they get the energy to do that?”

And time. Where has that gone? Thirty years ago how did I somehow manage to find several hours to do nothing but work on my tan every week and still have other interests and a life?

Getting a good night’s sleep is a rarity. I don’t know if that’s directly attributable to age or just general anxiety. Almost every morning since January 2017 my first thought upon waking has been, “What has the asshole in the White House done now?” I’m starting to think that pretty much everyone who didn’t vote for the Orange Russian Wig Stand is suffering some degree of PTSD these days, and the damage that he’s continuing to do not only to our country’s reputation around the world but also to our collective unconscious is going to take a long time to repair—even if he’s removed from office tomorrow.

The no-longer-suffering-fools-gladly attitude that sprouted when I turned fifty is now in full bloom, but there is still only so much bullshit you can call out on a daily basis.

I’m now older than either of my grandfathers were when I was born.

I’ve also developed that “old man shuffle,” although truth be told I may have always walked that way and it’s only because I’ve only recently seen myself on video that it’s now so obvious. (My parents were forever telling me to “pick up my feet” when I was a kid, and based on the wear patterns on the soles of my shoes I suspect it’s always been this way.)

I’m really ready to retire. My sister—five years younger than me!—is retiring at the end of this school year. Lucky bitch. Three friends have also called it quits. I’ve had enough workplace bullshit; I don’t care if your PowerPoint won’t open. Despite what you believe, THE WORLD IS NOT GOING TO END BECAUSE OF IT. Unfortunately retirement is still at least five or six years away—more likely ten if I want to get the maximum Social Security benefit available. And that’s assuming that Social Security is still a thing at that point…

And I guess that’s it.

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robertreich:

I spent last week at a conference in South Korea, during which time Trump went from seeking a meeting with Kim Jong un to cancelling it, then suggesting it might be back on.

“What does Trump want?” South Korean officials at the conference kept asking me. Notably, no one asked what the United States wants. They knew it was all about Trump.

Trump’s goal has nothing to do with peace on the Korean peninsula, or even with making America great again. It’s all about making Trump feel great.

“They are respecting us again,” Trump exulted to graduating cadets at the Naval Academy last Friday. “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Nothing like winning. You got to win.”

In truth, the United States hasn’t won anything, in Korea or anywhere else. After fifteen months of Trump at the helm, America is far less respected around the world than it was before.

The only thing that’s happened is Trump is now making foreign policy on his own – without America’s allies, without Congress, even without the State Department. Trump may consider this a personal win but it hardly makes America safer.

Some earnest foreign policy experts are seeking to discover some bargaining strategy behind Trump’s moves on North Korea. Hint: There’s no strategy. Only a thin-skinned narcissist needing flattery and fearing ridicule.

Trump got excited about a summit with Kim when he thought it might win him praise, even possibly a Nobel Peace Prize. He got cold feet when he feared Kim might be setting Trump up for humiliating failure. Now he’s back to dreaming about the Prize.

The delicate balance in Trump’s brain between glorification and mortification can tip either way at any moment, depending on his hunches. All international relations become contests of personal dominance.

He rejected the 2015 Iran treaty for no apparent reason other than Obama had entered into it. Trump couldn’t care less that by doing so he has harmed relations with our traditional allies, who pleaded with him to stay in. And he’s undermined America’s future credibility. Why would any nation (including North Korea) enter into a treaty with the United States if it can break it on the whim of a president who wants to one-up his predecessor?

Ditto with the Paris climate accord. Obama got credit for it, so Trump wants credit for unilaterally sinking it.

Trump has demanded that America’s nuclear arsenal be upgraded. Why? Since 1970, the United States has been committed to nuclear nonproliferation. What changed? Trump. A more powerful arsenal makes him feel more powerful – “respected again.”

It’s not about American interests in the world. It’s about Trump’s interests.

Wonder why Trump promised to lift trade sanctions on ZTE, China’s giant telecom company? ZTE has been trading with North Korea and Iran, in violation of American policy. Everyone around Trump advised against lifting the sanctions.

Look no further than Trump’s personal needs. ZTE is important to China, and China recently pledged a half-billion-dollar loan to Trump’s family business.

While we’re on the subject of high tech, why has Trump pushed the Postal Service to double the shipping rate it charges Amazon? I mean, isn’t Amazon important to America’s high-tech race with the rest of the world?

The most likely explanation is that the CEO of Amazon is Jeff Bezos, who’s also far richer than Trump. Bezos also owns The Washington Post, and the Post has been critical of Trump.

As you may have noticed, the man doesn’t like to be criticized. As Trump recently explained to Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes,” his aim is “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

Any halfway responsible president of the United States would be worried about Russian meddling in U.S. elections. Protecting American democracy is just about the most important thing a president does.

But Trump has turned the inquiry about the Russians into a “dark state” conspiracy against him. And he’s demanded that the Justice Department investigate the people who are investigating him.

With Trump, there’s no longer American foreign policy. There’s only Trump’s ego.

If peace is truly advanced on the Korean peninsula, the Prize shouldn’t go to Trump. It should go to South Korean president Moon Jae-in, who has tirelessly courted the world’s two most dangerous megalomaniacs.

Some earnest foreign policy experts are seeking to discover some bargaining strategy behind Trump’s moves on North Korea. Hint: There’s no strategy. Only a thin-skinned narcissist needing flattery and fearing ridicule.

Wil Wheaton adds:

Trump is only able to do so much harm because the GOP-controlled congress, headed (certainly not lead) by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, refuses to assert its co-equal status in government.

America is overwhelmingly opposed to Trump and his policies, yet McConnell and Ryan do nothing to slow or stop him. Compare that to President Obama’s policies, which were overwhelmingly popular with the majority of Americans, yet were obstructed without regard for the will of the voters, by McConnell and Ryan at every opportunity.

America must give control of Congress to the Democrats in November, to save our country and the world from Trump.

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With so many veterans experiencing PTSD, Memorial Day is probably not the best holiday to celebrate with fireworks.

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It’s 3 am and I’ve been wide awake for nearly an hour. It started with a trip to the bathroom but when I crawled back into bed my mind refused to shut back down.

Thirty five years ago I’d be awake at this hour on a Sunday morning as well—but I’d either be sitting in a Denny’s surrounded by friends after a night of clubbing or—if I’d gotten lucky—busy with other things.

Tonight, however, I am neither enjoying a post-clubbing repast with friends nor am I involved any of those other things. My thoughts have simply refused to sit down and shut up and have taken me on a journey back to the mid 1970s and hanging out in the audio room of LaBelle’s.

While the more economical equipment was displayed on shelves in the main part of the store, the listening room was reserved for the high-end equipment; stuff my friends and I could never afford but still coveted with an unbridled passion. To this day I can remember how the knobs of certain equipment felt, as well as the wonderful new-electronics smell of the room. I remember how rapt we were the first time we walked in and saw the blue glow from Pioneer’s new “fluoroscan” meters. No more antiquated needles, no sir! Those pulsing blue displays were the future!

But Pioneer’s blue glow was not the source of tonight’s obsessive thoughts. Rather I focused on a single pair of headphones: the Stax SR-X Mark 3.

These were electrostatic headphones; something relatively new for home audio at the time and very expensive. The sound, however, was sublime. It was like nothing else I’d ever heard before—or since, for that matter. But they were totally out of reach for this high school boy. At $275 ($1280 in today’s dollars) they were to forever remain just a dream.

(Stax is one of the few audio equipment companies from back in the day that is still in business, and their headphones are still ridiculously expensive. Even in the aftermarket they command a steep price.)

And what did I listen to through those headphones that day? The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Hermann, a recording that amazingly I still do not have in my collection.

Several years later I did manage to acquire a set of Stax headphones, although they were of the more economical electret (vs. full electrostatic) variety. These phones, while sounding almost as good as the SR-X, were substantially less expensive at $79 (about $275 in today’s dollars). The SR-44s still required a separate “energizer” that was plugged directly into the speaker outputs of your receiver  like the SR-X, but this box required no additional electrical connection to the mains in order to work.

The SR-44s were not especially comfortable. I ended up with “headphone fatique” after only an hour or so of listening, but the sound was worth the discomfort. Unfortunately, the cord that led from the headphone amp—as well as the cord that connected to the main amplifier—was very short, requiring that you sit right by your stereo if you wanted to listen. They were also very delicate. After only a year the connection on one side went out  when the wire broke at the strain relief as it came out of the earspeaker, requiring more than a little bit of disassembly, wire-cutting, and soldering on my part to get it working again. This became a yearly ritual until I finally tired of it after the tenth or so time. They then somehow ended up in the trunk of a roommate’s car in SF (probably to be taken to GoodWill) where they remained until were stolen when the car was broken into..

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A few weeks ago my buddy Mark (I know far too many Marks) in California was telling me he was ready to throw his MacBook Pro (mid 2012) through a wall.  It had gotten slow and unresponsive to the point of being unusable.

He couldn’t afford to upgrade to a new one—something I strongly dissuaded him from doing anyway based on my own experience over the past year—and instead suggested he increase the RAM and swap out the spinning hard drive with an SSD since his was the last year of “upgradeable” MBPs and it would be a relatively easy process.

He didn’t feel comfortable doing it himself, and since I have always been his hardware go-to guy but now lived 700 miles away, he asked, “Can they do that at the Apple Store?”

“Probably, but you’re better off just buying the parts and sending it all to me. It will be cheaper in the long run and you’ll know all your data will be transferred properly.”

“Tell me what I need to buy.”

So last Thursday the machine arrived, along with 8GB RAM and a new 512 GB Intel SSD.

And for once—a rare instance for my experience with Apple these days—everything just worked. It took only about two hours to swap in the new parts, load a fresh copy of the O/S (I had it on a USB thumb drive that I’d created for work a few days earlier), and restore his data from the old drive.

Working on this “old” Mac reminded me just how much we’ve lost in Jony Ive’s unrelenting quest to build a Mac no thicker than a sheet of paper. Never mind the loss of ports or the stupid fucking keyboard on the latest models. It’s the little things like MagSafe and that slowly glowing (but otherwise invisible) indicator on the right side of the bottom case that showed the machine was sleeping when the cover was closed) that initially made me such a fan of Apple. And of course this:

Having the two machines side by side, however, did highlight how much better the display has gotten over the past five years, even leaving out the fact that Mark’s wasn’t a retina display and mine was. The brightness and color saturation were so much better on my 2016 it was ridiculous.

But c’mon Jony…how about bringing back a little of that “surprise and delight” factor Apple used to be known for?

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Ben and I went out to dinner last night and watched in rapt fascination the mating dance of the elusive Urban Hobro.

Dude on the right was ostensively there with his wife/girlfriend, but she was all but being ignored—and her body language conveyed in no uncertain terms she was pissed off. Meanwhile, these two were busy talking sports and flirting heavily while Jersey Bro was oblivious to the fact the bartender was undressing him with his eyes every time he walked past.

No, this was not a gay bar. It was a friggin’ Applebees.

Just as we were about to leave, Jersey Bro leaned over to the other guy and literally said, “No homo, where did you get your fade?”

As Ben said, “Dicks might touch tonight.” BUT NO HOMO!

“Hey Honey..Joel—you know, the guy from the bar?—wants me to come over and watch the game.”

“It’s 2 am.”

“He has it on DVR…”

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I remember seeing these in the darkened audio listening room at LaBelle’s back in the day and lusting mightily.

Unobtainable then. Unobtainable now.

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…is one of the hosts of a WestWorld podcast I listen to. His voice had always given me impure thoughts, but when I finally saw what he looked like…in the words of George Takei, “Oh my!”

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I’ve been watching the very trippy series Legion on FX since season one. It supposedly takes places in the Marvel X-Men universe, but I’ve given up trying to actually understand what’s going on; I’m just enjoying the ride. The visuals are stunning. The cast is exemplary. The main character, David, played by Dan Stevens, simultaneously doesn’t push any of my buttons and at the same time pushes all of them and I look at him and think, “Ew,” followed immediately by, “Hot dirty monkeysex. NOW.”

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