Hakeem Jeffries had a moment last night. Standing in front of a crowd of well-wishers and hopefuls, he delivered a speech. A speech that will go down in history as a big ole nothing burger. A speech that is now, less than 12 hours later, largely forgotten in the political and collective memory of an otherwise monumental moment. I surmise this is because he lacks the commanding presence and leadership qualities necessary to serve as Speaker of the House.

His charisma, if it can even be called that, is more akin to that of a Home Depot bag of paver sand. You search through the poorly stacked pile selecting the one with the least holes. Yet, despite that effort, it still spills it’s contents all over the cart on the way to the register. Not a good look.

If that does not speak for itself, then consider this. As a potential Speaker, Mr. Jeffries would face the immense challenge of uniting a fractured party that has not managed to maintain a large and diverse tent of voters since Debbie Wasserman Schultz declared Bernie a non-starter. Mr. Jeffries is simply not capable of standing firm in the face of political opposition. Don’t take my word for it. Perhaps, instead, the ever present consumer advocate Ralph Nader may sway you:

More introspection may lead you to ask yourself whether you are up to leading the House Democrats in their immense and immediate tasks of policy and program restorations and adopting our Constitution’s mandated Congressional independence from the Presidency for the protection and advancement of the livelihoods, peace and freedoms of the American people. There is no indication that you are so willing and prepared. Unfortunately.

His record in Congress has not demonstrated the kind of bold, decisive leadership that the position of Speaker demands. Instead, he has often been seen as a cautious, moderate voice. Dare I say, a voice coming from a very real human (I swear) with a spine made of NeeDoh.

Let’s be frank. In times of crisis or when tough decisions must be made, the leader of the Democratic Party and Speaker of the House is not merely about personality. I understand that. Such positions require a deep understanding of the legislative process, the ability to negotiate, and the resilience to withstand the political pressures that come with the position. Jeffries has not consistently shown these traits in his career. For any informed observers, this must raise serious questions about his suitability for such a high-stakes role.

Finally, to convey my firm belief that Mr. Jeffries is not the right person for the leadership role come January, I paraphrase the amazing Forest Whitaker in his role as PFC Edward Garlick in “Good Morning Vietnam”

Hakeem Jeffries sucks the sweat off a dead man’s balls. I have no idea what that means, sir, but it seems very negative to me.

Let's imagine for a moment that you're in the house of the owner of Arizona's first Rolls Royce dealer, and after his 89-year-old wife has adequately prepared a bolognese, he wants help getting into his email, as Anthony skipped lunch.

My life is a fucking dichotomy at this point. I have rejected capitalism and am planning a commune, yet I have a soft spot for a multimillionaire who provided a chilled white from the Valais.

Oh, he's also the honorary Swiss consul. Just another day at the office.

Returning to Arizona has always felt weird because I know why and how I was raised, but it simply isn't me. Elsbeth asked some question about the artistic director of the Phoenix Boys Choir when I was the soprano soloist, and I ask if she knows Herbie is now running it. Max jumps in and asks what happened to the Austrian, and I'm like "Georg Stangelberger? He was a disaster for the choir."

Because, you see, I am actually that guy.

I am back in Texas tonight, having negotiated Phoenix roads without actually thinking. I don't drive in Austin on autopilot, but drop me in fucking Scottsdale and I can debate fine policy points while also knowing I need to be one lane to the left in 1,000 feet.

I don't like that Paradise Valley is where I simply need no directions. It's a terribly uppity place now, but it wasn't when I was growing up.

A.J.'s was not A.J.'s in the '80s. It was A.J. Bayless, and simply a small grocery store, not the absurd monstrosity of expensive food it currently is.

But, you see, that's where I grew up. It's just home. It looks really high-end, but the Bentleys are in the garage.

When Elsbeth asked to see where we'd deposited Pop, we had to go up the road a bit to get her a decent view. Via the garage, where of course there's a Volvo as the daily driver and two Bentleys and a Jag.

Because that's who I was. And I fall back into it easily. But it's not at all who I am now.

First. This is US politics. I can't seem to post there. Anyways...

While the stunning gains are welcome, a reminder. There is no political solution to the problem of today's United States.

The country remains ignorant, unpredictable, and woefully unable to offer its own people the most important trait of a democracy. Empathy. Yet the results today offer a shred of hope that rebuilding could start early. You have to start somewhere afterall.

However, Its going to be a long two months with the Jan 6th crowd still in power. They need to transfer that power now. An armed and militant paramilitary still does trumps bidding. And many know they might be held accountable in the months to come. I am not optimistic they will wait to see how it plays out.

Stay vigilant down there.

for the first time i realized i cant really [politely] ask people at work about voting. in previous jobs/election cycles its a no brainer.. running around the office 'where's your sticker? did ya vote?'. regardless of affiliation, people should vote..

but theres a palpable embarrassment this year. no one speaks of politics here anymore. i sure as fuck am not going to burst that echo-bubble by askin if they voted.

i just cant really do that in my current location. very strange.

I've been trying to ease her into certain things, but she doesn't remember me running the 2000 election, nor does she seem to think I had any experience for my first job.

We needn't talk about fisting here, but it's crucial to the past 17 years of my life, to my detriment.

We were at dinner tonight ... nice place, great Caesar dressing, and it became apparent that she, at 79, doesn't at all remember why the fuck I didn't just get into journalism but accepted it as my life.

She seems to now think it's random that I worked at the paper, sted "Holy fuck, I didn't know what love was."

I've got a couple of things prepared for our drive tomorrow, but she seems oblivious to what made me who I am.

I learned about the announcement via Discord at about 20,000 feet (Southwest's Wi-Fi could use some help).

But of course I couldn't really do much in terms of looking up tributes when I was getting throughput akin to 14.4K speeds (ask your parents).

Thankfully, some 50 feet above ground level at Sky Harbor over the south runway, I have something new to worry about: a sudden 10,000-foot climb. Not the sort you do on a normal takeoff, but rather the sort where the engines start making noises you simply don't hear on a passenger flight. No one was alarmed, but we talked with our neighbours about how usually a descent onto a runway ends with a landing.

The pilot, and I think rightly so, gave us about 10 minutes of circling completely around the airport (once again giving us an approach out of the east guaranteed to provide a long taxi back to Terminal 4) before coming on the intercom to let us know that a takeoff had stalled on the runway, and as such, the option other than pitching the fuck up (not his exact words) was hitting a stationary object directly in our path. (This was at roughly 1405 MST^[this is correct for Oct. 29; most of Arizona does not observe daylight saving time, and I first changed a clock when I was 18 in college], and I'll be curious to see if a near miss is reported on.)

You might be thinking, OK: So an actor died and you didn't. And that's fair as far as I've gotten in my day.

I'm a bit out of sorts when I finally meet up with my mom, who'd arrived from New Mexico nearly two hours earlier. I've not been able to vape for at this point six hours, and learning you narrowly avoided being a statistic gets the ol' adrenaline going.

PHX now has a "Sky Train" that takes one to the rental-car area, which we had to board, and my mom at this point needed a wheelchair for this odyssey. This of course means it's best if I drive.

Well, the entire fucking airport has been reconfigured in terms of traffic since last I actually drove in Phoenix. Being in a rental, one has to be careful, but this is not a city where driving defensively is rewarded. My mom of course is telling me that I needed to take this exit or that one, "turn here" ... that sort of thing.

I got us to the hotel at least a half hour earlier than her routing would have led to. But that's what happens when you apply 1990 routing to a 2026 layout.

I headed to Fry's (it's a grocery store here; fun fact: The Fry's grocery store is related to the defunct electronics retailer, hence it starting out as outpost.com) to pick up water and a six pack (my adrenaline was not going back to baseline), and cracked one open as we discussed plans for the afternoon.

It should be mentioned here that we are here to spread my dad's ashes, nearly a year since he died.

She wanted to scout out the entrances to trails on Mummy Mountain that used to start across the street from our house but have long since been replaced by multimillion-dollar homes. I'm pretty sure we found one that still makes sense up a road you only know exists if you grew up hiking there, but we're not going to be able to make it to the spot that would have made the most sense.

At this point, we've lost light and are ready for dinner. New issue: Everywhere that existed in the '90s no longer does. I head up Scottsdale to Shea, expecting a Macaroni Grill just before the intersection, but it's gone. So, I head into the shopping center with the Safeway we started going to after the one on Camelback shut down.

I did point out that my phone suggested Ruth's Chris a couple of miles back, but that was a nonstarter. Neither of us was dressed correctly.

So I pull through what seems like a gateway to nothing. "This will get us over the the Harkins side." And on that side we find a wonderful Italian place. Quick, friendly service, fantastic mango hefeweizen. We dine al fresco despite my mom's misgivings that it will get too cold ... in Phoenix ... in October ... by 7 p.m., she does indeed secure a table outdoors while I park the car after dropping her off. (Yep, that's now my parent, not my grandparent.)

Much has gone through my mind in the 49 weeks and some change since Pop's death. It was kinda nice to be able to leave it at back of mind in the ensuing time, but that's not why we're here just now.

All things end. Not just all good things.

But between the news about Stewart, my reason for being in Scottsdale in the first place and having my first brush with mortality that wasn't my own fault, I decided the heavy conversations need to come first. Because my mom won't live forever, either, and she's now needing to be dropped off at a restaurant, so that's a bit of an indicator that if you want to actually have the talks you need to, best to do that while the opportunity is available.

I eased in. She had a lightbulb moment when I mentioned, "Haven't you ever noticed that I tend to say things from TNG in standard conversation? No kid says 'avail yourself,' and my cadence in terms of when to use contractions and when to skip them stems directly from the writers of Star Trek."

Murmur of agreement.

"So, then, why is it that you and Pop did everything to avoid accepting neurodivergence as part of my issues growing up?"

Now she's confused.

"OK, as an example, dropping out of UW" -- mind you, I'm saying this wearing the sweatshirt I got from the bookstore on my 1996 campus visit -- "because I was so infuriated by having to write 'Hello, World' despite over a decade in programming that I decided the entire system was broken."

Here, there's a bit of recognition.

I mention that over the past few years, as I've entwined myself further and further into the burner community, the recurring motif is "how is it that no one told you that you were on the spectrum?"

"Something I've seen reading about ASD that pops up with some regularity is 'justice sensitivity.' Now consider how I ended up in journalism. Not because I wanted to be a journalist, but I had to call out incorrect framing, leading to a terrible first column that then got edited to make me sound racist, and the cherry on top of that was the art that ran with it. A normal person does not vow to take over the entire section because the initial problem has now been compounded. But once I had a goal, I was laser focused."

"Well, back then, we knew you were smart, and awkward, but no one really talked about autism. It was reserved for kids who couldn't function."

"Remember how I refused shoes with laces after learning about Velcro?"

"Oh, yeah, you hated those laces."

"Because they were unnecessarily complex."

A beat.

"We really didn't know what to do with you. We tried to keep you interested in things, but we both failed in a lot of ways."

From here, it goes into details about both my parents' upbringings that I knew about but hadn't before heard distilled.

The reasonable takeaway is now I'm a lot less stressed about the next five days. I may not like all the places we go, but availing myself of the opportunity to have the conversation I couldn't with Pop seems prudent.

And I suspect Jean-Luc Picard would agree.

We've been trying to make things work, and some days it feels easier than others. But lately, it feels almost impossible. The constant misunderstandings, the short tempers, the emotional exhaustion, it all starts to take a toll. We're both trying, yet somehow we keep finding ourselves in the same place, feeling drained and disconnected. How do you make things work when even trying starts to feel exhausting?

I wrote about some formative years in my life where I found success... then had to start over.

I was laid off at my then-local paper in August 2014, which I'd known was coming because I was only hired knowing the copy desk was being centralized later that year. There was no plan to come down here.

I got unemployment, but a third of newspaper wages only goes so far.

After several months of attempting to find work locally, I reached out to the director in Texas who'd offered to immediately hire me when centralization hit but offered an insulting pay cut.

By April, I was worn down enough to reach out again. He was willing to negotiate only an 18% pay cut, but that's still a lot better than zero dollars, and the household wasn't functioning.

My ex and I bonded over being equally manipulative back in 2009, so I get the U-Haul and announce I'm moving to Texas.

It worked.

Simply saying I was going to wouldn't have. She had the only vehicle at the time, so "moving in what?" would have been a valid initial question.

But this was not my goal. She'd already said in August that Texas was not an option. And so I stayed in rural Oregon, interviewing for media-adjacent jobs ... school PIO, tech at a TV station ... but the UI benefits run out at a certain point, and if you have one "can you start tomorrow?" up your sleeve, that's the only remaining option.

In terms of manipulative things I've done in life, this likely ranks as a 7/10 short-term, 10/10 long term. But I saw the options as being homeless (again) or an unpleasant move -- I'd explicitly forbidden Texas my entire career (I may have been able to start my career a few months earlier had I been willing to move to San Angelo in 2001), so this was practical, not a goal.

She has to have known at some level that it was a farce. Not the job, but the U-Haul. I'd packed nothing up, and there was no discussion of division of particle board. In no universe am I getting out of there in a day.

However, this brings her to the table with a sharper sense of reality in about an hour. I think that whole charade ran me $30 all-in.

And later that day, I call the director and say I need to push my start date back by a couple of weeks. Then we start planning the move properly.

Perhaps not as properly as hoped. I arrived here by train on Memorial Day 2015, and flooding meant I had to get off the train at an ungodly hour without sleep to get on a bus for the final leg.

Not that the trip was any easier for her. She lost her stuffed animal in a hotel and nearly got arrested in Nevada for her wedding collar (it's apparently a deadly weapon).

Some days just don't end up how one expects.

Around 9 p.m., I got a text from my ex-wife (she's back, everyone! 🎉) trying to guilt me into coming to see her. As my financial situation has not recently improved, I explained this was not in the budget.

The usual "whatever" sort of gaslighting ensues. After rent (which includes all utilities), I have $500 a month for everything else; $70 on a round-trip Lyft is not a rounding error. So it's not like I could totally afford it but was grasping for an excuse.

Somehow, after I'm just not putting up with her bullshit for long enough, she asks for my address. And then informs me that she's on her way.

So, a couple of things here: I'm renting a room from a family. They've heard of her, of course, but in the abstract. As such, I need to explain that unexpected plans are already in motion, and would they mind too terribly much if she arrives at an odd hour?

She did have one mitigation plan for this: she brought weed. And while I have no idea what the reaction to her was, I can't imagine that hurt as a peace offering.

A new problem arises: I do not have beer for two. This quickly becomes a nonissue as Ra invites her on a beer run (meaning my ex-wife and my landlord had plenty to time to talk about me as a common reference point, should they so choose).

Worth noting here is this is the first time since the divorce 10 years ago later this week that she has unilaterally paid for everything to see me. When we started interacting again last fall, we'd split transportation costs.

So, everyone's stoned, there's beer aplenty, and, well, we retire to my room. Her collar is somehow just as spiky as when I got it in 2011, but I no longer have the proper callouses in my neck, so I definitely noticed.

The takeaway I have from what otherwise feels like a disjointed evening is that community is important -- I'm doing far better than I was in my van, as she pointed out -- real connection is still necessary.

By about 1:30 a.m., she decides it's time to head home, having met her quota of orgasms. She ends up fighting with apps to get a ride home for 15 minutes while I'm pressed against her flesh.

I should explain the fridge situation.

The things that came with this new build (as of six years ago) tend to suck. So, there's this really nice built-in fridge. But it doesn't work. There's a second fridge in the kitchen that does.

It's also full of food, cold and lit, so I'm not sure what indicators led her to place cold beer in a thick ambient box, but here we are.

At any rate, I wake up this morning to several texts from her. The first reminds me that there's "shitty beer in the warm fridge." Honestly, likely a good reminder, as the night was a bit of a blur.

From there, the tenor changes: "Thank you for your hand and body and tongue and just freaking with my 'me' tonight."

When I ordered a beer delivery today, I was surprised to see my Koozie on Ra's car from when my ex's Lyft arrived. The beer was nearly full, so I dumped it out while the driver got out of her car.

The next text was "invasively uninvited or not, I needed you tonight."

"... and then I already sickly miss you FUCK."

When I say we aren't done, it's not some romantic notion that maybe we could reconnect. The problem was disconnection. Her body still feels like part of mine.

Oh, and she accidentally left a sweater here.

Seriously, that whole thing is a pastiche of things I've seen in other movies.

Reddits moneitized enshitification has finally caused me to use a blocking script to prevent me from even opening their site. They have made browsing impossible outside of their logged in ecosphere. Old.reddit requires a login now. At least for me if I fell into the A/B testing that forced it.

It's tragic. So many niche topics, resources, etc. exist there. Now locked behind the equivilant of a digital border wall. I'm not sure why it bothers me so much. Perhaps the closure of another more familiar space. Perhaps nostalgia for the old reddit. Or perhaps just another example of greed and tech bros taking away and wrecking a digital third space. Perhaps I should have called it when many others did when Spez took over and the process all started.

Alas, poor woodworking, specialty coffee, DMAcademy. Good bye and good night.

Later today (July 27 2026) 2:pm nsw time the government will issue what is called aus alert which means every phone in Australia will have an alarm at the exact same time. If you are someone that uses a safety phone it is best to turn it off for 24 hours. I would also recommend avoiding traffic or any situation that could cause danger to the governments poorly planned aus alert.