While in line at Chipotle today, I read their sign announcing early closure on New Year’s Eve and complete closure on New Year’s Day.

The final sentence read:

We sincerely hope you can survive waiting a couple days for your first burrito of 2009.

And it immediately hit me that someone out there won’t survive to see that first burrito of 2009. Even now, midday on the next-to-last day of the year, someone was reading that sign in Chipotle and chuckling mildly at the witty sarcasm and imagining the first of many burritos they’d be chowing down in the bright shiny new annum to come. And they were sure that those burritos, like so many of their presupposed plans, would unfold like an infinite accordion before them to build a bridge to an unforeseeable but infinitely remote future.

And they will die before the year.

And they have no idea.

The moral of this moment may be “be careful what you’re sarcastic about.” Or perhaps just “be careful.” Or even, given how most of you are probably reacting to the tenor of this post, “the most basic and predictable realities of life are soul-crushingly depressing when truly considered beyond a passing whim.”

Bon appetit.

Just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas (for those interested in such) and an even Merrier Christmas Eve, which we all know (at least in New Mexico) is the real holiday.

There is some debate from past years as to whether the previous record for luminarias was 525 or 576, but the record has fallen this Christmas Eve, as Emily & I constructed 620 luminarias, which I single-handedly placed as Emily contracted a flu this morning. My Dad helped light them (to the tune of about a third of the total), but otherwise, I placed and lit all 620 between 7:30 this morning and about 5:15 this evening. I even took a couple breaks here and there.

I was hoping to instantly upload some of my favorite shots of the record-setting display (talk about your instant media), but we are facing technical difficulties in camera compatibility and failure to bring a cord. So you will have to imagine, if you will, luminarias from street to roof and every level in between, totaling 620 in number, with not a seam put wrong. (Though we lost about 8 bags to fire, but they were replaced and thus only counted once in the 620 total.)

My legs and neck are sore, even when at rest. I feel vaguely dazed and thoroughly overwhelmed. And yet, I couldn’t be much happier (minus the Em being mightily sick thing). It may be the last Christmas in America, but it’s quite a Christmas. My heart will always swell for luminarias. I’m going back out to the cold, the candles, the sand, the bags. This is my holiday, the day on which I probably work the hardest.

Somewhere along the way, Time Magazine lost its way. Maybe it was the influence of AOL, long nicknamed “A-O-Hell” by my generation, which itself is somewhere between the nickname of “Generation Y” and “The Millennial Generation”. I’ll take either one, but I’ve always preferred “Generation Why” (this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve made this observation on this blog alone).

AOL killed my computer in the transition from high school to college. This was the computer that was a present from my parents to take to college, was exciting and new. It came with a trial AOL account that I used to connect with other fellow “pre-frosh” en route to Brandeis, few of whom were worth meeting in person. I got it in July and by the time it landed with me in Waltham, it was rapidly becoming cursed. Two weeks into school, it went off the deep end entirely, prompting Compaq to send a series of head-scratching techs to the remote ends of campus searching for Scheffres Hall. Their confusion only began in looking for a third-floor dorm room on a locked hall and ended with wondering why Compaq felt their time (probably $100-300/hour) was worth more than Compaq just replacing or refunding a computer that two of the three techs literally labeled as “possessed” on the work order form. Two people with hundreds of dollars an hour’s technical training using the word “possessed”. So much for technology, progress, experts, us being in a place beyond medieval witch doctors. The writing on the cinder-block wall, or at least on three sheets of carbon copied paper. Somewhere in a “box of doom”, I still have a yellow sheet, now even more yellowed, in papers I just refuse to throw away. Like the 16,000+ e-mails I’ve sent at work, they’re records and it all counts.

Or maybe none of it does. Just ask Time.

Time’s selection of Barack Obama as 2008 Person of the Year is hardly egregious, especially in comparison to some of their past picks. The original mandate from Henry Luce, who was at least a journalist despite myriad other problems (do we have anyone we can call a journalist anymore?) was to pick the person who had influenced things most, for good or for ill. Who was an emblem of the change that is innate to a year. Somewhere along the line, as with so much of America, an interest in true depiction got replaced by an interest in happy-talk. George (HW) Bush won in 1990 instead of Saddam Hussein. Rudy Giuliani won in 2001 instead of Osama bin Laden. You won in 2006, prompting the ire of nearly everyone and my supposition that everyone should start putting “2006 Person of the Year, Time Magazine” under their “Awards and Accomplishments” section of their resume, if only to ridicule the selection. End of history indeed.

So much for the legacy of a notoriety that had the guts to pick Gandhi 17 years before the Nobel Peace Prize had failed to do so (and it was too late as they tried to make up for it with their lame posthumous recognition). For a group that picked Hitler in ‘38 and Stalin in ‘39, demonstrating a foresight in recognizing the two most devastating and influential figures of the twentieth century before each had done much of their killing. And maybe 1941 is where it turned, picking FDR instead of Hideki Tojo.

Of course, there’s a part of me that says maybe Time knows too much. Maybe there’s a reason Tojo was passed over in 1941 and bin Laden in 2001. And it’s not just about wanting to be patriotic. But this is not the post for such conjecture, until maybe later.

Which brings us to Barack Obama. Clearly the second I clicked the revealing link into the Time Magazine article, I was expecting to see Obama’s tall grin looking back at me. Having been surprised and disappointed by so many picks in the past, I was almost surprised to find that my supposition had been correct. And yet, upon reflection, it became clear that this was not the right pick.

Think this is a special nod to the wave of change that seems to be coming with Obama-mania? Think again. This pick in an American election year has become a knee-jerk reaction for Time. W won in 2000, Clinton in 1992, Reagan in 1980, Carter in 1976. So really, this was the President-Elect’s award to lose all along. They probably had penciled it in for whoever won in Time board room meetings in January and moved on.

And seemingly more than any previous pick, Obama seems to have changed the landscape of how people think they’re looking at America. (After all, wasn’t Katherine Harris really the influential force in 2000, while W was just the beneficiary bystander?) Obama is an agent of action, a force for change, the first great rhetorical leader to hit the political scene since JFK. How could you pick anyone else?

And yet, my temptation is to say that 2009 is really the year for Obama. Not that people can’t win multiple times or, indeed, even back-to-back years (only previous back-to-back winner: Nixon in 1971-1972). Time even seems to acknowledge the fact that they’re jumping the gun, setting themselves behind the eight-ball with a title “Why History Can’t Wait”. And of course, a la my thoughts about 1941 and 2001 and even JFK, maybe they’re ensuring that they literally jump the gun. An assassination of Obama in the next year would be the most expected, telegraphed, universally anticipated assassination in world history. It seems painfully ironic that such cynical fear follows an individual known for inspiring hope and disparaging attitudes of terror. And yet I haven’t spoken to a single person about the historic Bryant Park rally on November 4th who wasn’t mentally scanning the crowd for firearms from the moment he and his family hit the platform.

So maybe Time’s hedging their bets, knowing that they can document the innocence and hope and anticipation that comes with Obama now, either on the precipice of its horrific fall or at the base camp of its tremendous climb to the future. Either way, it’s about the safest pick in history.

And yet, I doubt 2008 will be remembered for Obama. 2009, yes, whatever happens, but not 2008. 2008 will be about the melting of America’s economic standing. 2008 will be about the clash of hubris and reality, the tormented battle between those clinging to the Titanic’s decks and those packing up banquet food into lifeboats.

Time’s Person of the Year (then Man of the Year) was started in 1927, just in time to make an amazing pick in 1929. While they didn’t select anyone directly related to the collapse of the stock market and the American economy, they chose Owen D. Young for his “Young Plan”, a desperate effort to offset the German reparations payment schedule. What a prescient selection in determining how history would look back on the 1920’s! The Young Plan failed, of course, and the rest is profound history. But Time knew what it was doing back then.

So who really represents 2008’s influence on the coming years? The obvious road seems lined with some combination of Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson. The team that will be remembered for destroying the greenback dollar, plunging it into unprecedented worthlessness. With a mutual effort of eliminating interest rates and ratcheting up the printing of money, Bernanke & Paulson are the duo that are setting the dollar to its destiny as just another failed idol in the story of human belief.

So they’re the obvious pick, the real safe picks, the clear standouts. But for symbolic flair, neither of them, nor the pair, are my selection. My pick for 2008 Person of the Year is Bernard Madoff.

He’s a late entry to the contest and maybe disproportionately influential because the selection is made in December. He probably became important after the story on Obama had already gone to bed. But he is the single clearest embodiment of the attitude of 2008 and what this year means to history.

Can you imagine any other time in history, save maybe the late 1920’s, when the profit rates of a pyramid scheme would be able to pass themselves off as the realistic results of sound investing? When there would be so little oversight and investigation that a charlatan of this magnitude could be appointed to run the NASDAQ? Is there any more profound human embodiment of American greed, faith in money, reverence for capitalism, belief in the systems it invented, and total trust in the infinite upward spiral of wealth? Bernie, you really hit this one out of the park, and just in time. If only you could maintain the defiant refusal to face facts that we see in Rod Blagojevich, you’d be beyond perfect. Reading about the board room meeting you called where you admitted what happened, followed by turning yourself in, revealed that you have shreds of accountability that don’t really resonate with the America I know. Maybe you’ll have to share it with the still-clinging Illinois Governor.

But sure, Obama’s fine too. A hat-tip to the future, as even the great picks in ‘29, ‘30, ‘38, ‘39 were. Up near the top of the article, Obama admits his own fears, despite the image he’s projected to the nation. He outlines four scary priorities for the nation:
1. Economy
2. Afghanistan
3. Nuclear Proliferation
4. Climate Change

Oh boy. While I agree that no one could deny the precision of #1, it’s #2-4 that make me roll my eyes. Escalating a war may be his hidden solution to #1 (indeed, this picture hit me like a ton of bricks as the explanation of why government policy has so thoroughly greased the wheels of the economy’s slide, especially on the employment front… in an era where the all-volunteer military and lots of wars are big priorities, you have to de facto draft people by giving them no alternative jobs), but it offers nothing to a pacifist who has come to realize that we are in a post-conquest era in history. Nuclear proliferation? I posted over a year ago about how Iran will get toasters. It’s not that I don’t believe the world would be better off without nukes spreading further, but frankly, the worst nations in the world already have nukes and trying to maintain peace by keeping a stranglehold on science and technology is about as futile as shutting down the Internet by cutting physical cords, one at a time. And don’t even get me started on climate change. If you really think climate change is a third of the threat that most people seem to, then total, unrecoverable economic collapse is your only hope.

My hopes this season are pretty scant. I hope to get to New Mexico so I can bury myself in warmth, friends, family, green chile, and a part of the world that has managed to inspire me through some of the darkest times. I hope for a little snow, a bit of cheer, a lot of thought and reflection. I hope to find the energy to light at least one candle, to buy at least one gift, to make at least one wish for the year to come.

May God be with you.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Money roasting on an open fire. Bad news nipping at your nose. Blind optimism being sung by a choir. And folks as poor as Eskimos.

It’s not just the financial news, though, and the steamrolling depression that’s engulfed America. It just plain doesn’t feel like December.

Sure, there’s word that Americans have decreased their debt for the first time in history. Really. The first time ever that Americans’ total individual debt has gone down.

While that’s the headline, isn’t it more disturbing that debt is 25% of total American net worth? Or that while debt declined by 0.8%, net worth declined by 4.7%, meaning that debt functionally increased greatly as an overall portion of the bottom line? Who came up with this system, anyway? How did we get here?

This is not my beautiful house.

Maybe the problem is that I’m in California. Not just California where the newspaper ran a headline with the word “Armageddon” in it today about the state budget crisis. But a part of California where it never truly gets cold (or warm), where it never snows, where it never feels like anything except, as I’ve long described the weather here “a little crappy”. If I were somewhere where the weather artificially inflated my Christmas spirit, like Buffalo or something, then I might be all set. It’s like reverse-light therapy. Snow as savior.

But somehow, I think that would be hollow and artificial. I think I would just be writing a post about how I could physically see Christmas and it felt physically like Christmas, but the soul was missing. It’s like everyone woke up in August and said “Hey, let’s have Christmas now!” And because no one rejects suggestions by the right people or the right publicity, we just did it. And with none of the feeling or verve or resonance, we just put on the show, flew home, and went through the motions.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m delighted to go home for a vacation that I’ve been counting down by the half-day. And maybe Nuevo’s cold and luminarias will save my spirit.

You also shouldn’t get me wrong – this is far greater than my standard ambivalence about Christmas as a non-Christian and a non-child. Those categories both put a decent layer of resistance to the ol’ spirit around me, but I’ve become well accustomed to not being a Christian (15 years) and not being a child (what, 11 years, I guess?).

This is different.

I even, for the third straight Christmas, work in an agency positively obsessed with Christmas and the spirit. Everywhere, everyone is preparing for the next big holiday helping, be it food, toys, or fellowship. It’s all most anyone can talk about or think about.

And maybe it’s my extra removal from clients (and kids) this year over last, but I think there’s something deeper. Something deeper even than the bottom line of a nation on life support in a power outage. Deeper magic from before the dawn of time.

You know what they say about all winter and no Christmas. One-hundred years of winter and all that. We’re going to need an awfully big groundhog to turn this around.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

People are looking for places to put their anger these days. I don’t know who is responsible for the above depicted action on our front lawn any more than I know who is responsible for skyrocketing the stock market toward the 9,000 stratosphere when unemployment is a runaway train. But people don’t really understand trains in America anymore – only cars, trucks, and vans. And how to bail things out.

I did the American Community Survey last night – with our residence “randomly” selected by the Census Bureau as one to represent the many. At times it didn’t feel so random; it felt random as a security screening at an airport with my long hair and my lack of a flag pin. At other times it felt less random because maybe everyone in America is filling on of these out. But I can be reassured that it was random because America rarely likes direct democracy or the true enfranchisement of everyone. We’re a republic – we like Electoral Colleges and Congressional Districts and ways of putting a thick layer of money-motivated corruption between ourselves and our political outcomes.

Maybe it wasn’t random because of our income, because we’re doing okay, because they have our tax return and maybe if they can only survey houses like ours, there won’t be any proof of a depression (see below comic).

I saw the movie “Milk” on Friday. It’s not quite in the rare air of the two Important Movies I mentioned last week, but I think it’s worth seeing. It’s about a lot of things, but perhaps mostly anger. Anger at being personally left out of the picture and the steps, through anger, that people take to reestablish themselves. And, ultimately, how all anger is personal and nothing hurts quite so much as the sting of losing one’s job.

Actually, an incredible amount of the movie, as I re-ponder again, is about the pain of losing employment. Heck, maybe it is an Important Movie after all.

I don’t know where all the people losing their jobs are going, but I don’t think they’re buying stocks. I don’t think they’re looking at the 401k or the IRA balance and thinking how they won’t need that money till they’re 65. I don’t think they’re looking for ways to make Christmas a bigger splash than the year before. A major city (like, top-fifty in the US) is losing their job every month. An entire major city. At an escalating rate.

The anger is coming.

And, obligatorily, because not all of my posts can be downers, here’s something to brighten your day. Also, because it’s the only thing keeping my job-related anger at simmer instead of boil.

Officially reported as “two people in the diamond”:

There’s no truth in Pravda, even online.

Shoot – that makes this a downer again, huh?

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

We did it:

Watch live video from Adam’s Block (San Francisco) on Justin.tv

And also:

Watch live video from Adam’s Block (San Francisco) on Justin.tv

We learned a lot from this run. Our firstbasewoman was completely out of the shot for most of the game. The shadows were bad (fullscreen mode is better). We may run it back sometime. But man, did that make the workday better.

If you’re going to be on a computer today, you’ll want to do this at noon (Pacific Standard Time) today:

1. Go to AdamsBlock.com.
2. Watch.

I don’t sponsor or endorse the site fully, though I did just hear that the site’s owner learned about my workplace yesterday and was “inspired”. Apparently he’s donating some ad revenue and donations to Glide. He may even change the reference on his FAQ to something other than calling us “apparently some sort of Methodist church”.

Tune in today. Trust me.

That is all.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

On the train ride into work this morning, I wasn’t able to get a seat. The train was running just late enough to pick up enough stragglers to sell all the seats just before Downtown Berkeley. I had to stand and observe instead of read and recede.

Almost immediately, I noticed the middle-aged man two rows up and to the left with a laptop. I noticed him not because of his balding head or tall stature, but because he was playing Civilization III on his laptop. It took me a few minutes to determine, from my vantage, which version of Civilization he was playing, but the menu screens gave it away.

Before I could definitively determine that it was Civ III, it occurred to me the man may work for Sid Meier in some capacity and that he may just be heading into the office early by loading up the laptop. But realizing the version confirmed my actual suspicion, that this man was simply trying to prolong the delay before his workday really began and he had no time for games.

There was something profoundly resonant about this man’s experience and the fact that it occurred to me fairly soon after this that I should try to get a closer view so as to vicariously play and thus get some leftover utility from his game to make up for what I was losing in not being able to read. Then the question: would trying to closely follow a Civ game over the shoulder of a stranger give me the same headache I would otherwise get from reading while standing in a moving BART car? Sigh. It simply wasn’t worth it.

But watch I did, from long range, just enough to determine the man’s general approach to gameplay – he seemed to espouse the quick expansion and massive city-building that has always been a hallmark of my own approach through ownership of all four Civilization editions, plus the esoteric unsanctioned alternative Civ 3 that came out about a year or so before Sid Meier’s actual release of same. My vision isn’t what it used to be, so I could only make out terrain and general unit types, but nothing too specific (or headache-inducing).

Back when my vision was more like 20/12, my friends and I infiltrated the brand-new computer lab at the Albuquerque Academy library with freshly minted pirated diskettes of the original Civilization. The librarians were about to get an extended lesson in the first rule of computer lab setup: always face the computer monitors (screens) toward where the lab monitors (people) are going to be. One’s initial inclination is the opposite, because one thinks of a computer lab like a classroom. Students should face the front and the teacher and the monitor all at the same time. And for a full-time classroom, it might work, but not for a free-range computer lab.

It was of course forbidden to play games (let alone install them on the hard drive) in the library lab, perhaps even more evocatively so than it was illegal to copy the game in the first place. But the librarians there were all too stereotypical: lonely overweight women pushing sixty with all the technical savvy of John McCain. They were slow and lumbering and suspicious and you could see them coming in plenty of time to save your game and quit and open a Word document while trying to feign that ponderous, vaguely constipated look that signifies being stumped in the first paragraph of a paper.

It should be noted that this was just before the Internet age, about 1994-1995, so there was none of the alt-tabbing and massive multitasking and assumption of illicit Internet activity that pervades modern education with computers. Hence the naivete to set up the monitors facing the back wall and the incredible innocence of allowing students write-access to the hard drive. The computers were immensely expensive pretty new toys with capabilities entirely unknown to their adult overseers. Keep in mind that this is the school where, about this same time, I would join with a co-conspirator and a classroom full of willing amused accomplices to successfully convince a teacher that she was using a voice-activated VCR.

Eventually, out of sheer boredom or a truly teenage desire to constantly push the envelope, we got less diligent about saving and closing games every time a librarian would pop their head in (can you believe they only came by once every 20 minutes or so?). We would line up in the back row, sometimes four of us in the back and two more in the next-to-last, all playing our various games (my kingdom for network multiplayer in those days!). We would often laugh too loud or curse too much and draw more frequent visits from the stern gray-hairs. And look up innocently, making eye-contact only with that perfect blend of “I-have-nothing-to-hide” and “what-are-you-so-suspicious-of?”

I forget how it all ended exactly – a couple people got busted from time to time, but they really never punished them much (it was outside of school time, after all), sometimes suspending them from coming to the library for a couple days. They didn’t really comprehend the depths of Civ’s infiltration on the computers until much later, maybe after a year and a half or so of our reign over the lab. They locked up the hard drives from student access and we moved on to the Mac labs and text-based Internet (!) RPG’s that were harder to detect as anything other than scrolling word processing.

On the return trip on BART today, I got a seat and chose, since I was getting off early, one in a four-plex of facing seats. Next stop, at Montgomery, two noticeably overweight young women, just on the border of high school and college, piled in diagonally across from each other, each flanking me laterally (one across, one next to). The third empty seat they reserved for… their shopping bags. And they more than occupied the seat. The instigator of the dump-bags-on-seat plan kept having to tamp down the pile of colorful plastic.

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever been on BART in rush hour out of the City, but it is no place for bags on a seat. Not that people don’t try this occasionally, with luggage or their feet or a bike. But the withering peer pressure and angst of so many crammed unseated passengers coveting one rest-worthy surface that isn’t even being occupied by a sentient being – let’s just say it’s not something one generally wants to subject oneself to. Inevitably when confronted, people’s reactions for overtaking this space are huffy, defensive, and entitled, as though they know such a front is the only reasonable-seeming response to being called on being so downright unreasonable.

In any event, these did not exactly strike as BART neophytes, but bag-tamping was underway. And despite the Walmart-on-Black-Friday throng of boarders at Embarcadero, the last SF stop, not one person asked that the six (yes, 6!) bags be removed from the seat in their favor. Perhaps because it looked like it would take the length of the Transbay Tube to even undertake such extrication.

It was only midway through my incredulity at their audacity and selfishness that another amazement struck: what person age 16-20 is buying six bags worth of stuff? Who are these debutantes with their obliviousness and their functioning credit cards?

Being wedged very much into the center of their conversation, I was able to learn a few answers. They were very involved in a health or science class of some kind, where they’d each just completed a final project on a different disease. Indeed, the non-tamper was waving around a 10-pager with a cover sheet that simply read “Herpes” in eighty-point font. (I mean, really, did I imagine these people could have a lick of self-consciousness when one of them is animatedly waving the word “Herpes” in the air?) Amazement at the ease of transmission methods of a particular disease whose name eluded me (perhaps the aforementioned manifest on text). Mutual reassurance at the virtual lock on securing an A in this class. Detailed analysis on how to adjust double-spacing and margins to reach 10 pages.

Just before my stop, the non-tamper hauled out a cell phone and started calling home (a good indication that they were pre-collegiate). She rolled her eyes and half-gasped and mused on why she ever calls home in the first place, since everyone has cell phones. She informed her comrade that she had, in fact, just cancelled caller ID and call waiting on the home line, since no one ever used the phone anyway. She was waiting for someone to notice.

With savings like that, you could bring home a whole extra quarter of a bag. But who would notice that either?

They were overly gracious in moving their legs aside so I could pass out of the train, up the escalator, and into the night.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.