The Bizarre Vibes of Liminal Time (the holidays)
Also: Freaking out about drones; visiting NYC like it's Disney World; trying to survive walking on sidewalks
Happy holidays, folks. This will be the final Rangelife of 2024, and I’d like to thank everyone for subscribing and reading.
What a year, huh? We elected a convicted felon to the presidency before he could be sentenced to prison. We got two new Gen Z celebrities — one of them for joking about spitting on a penis, and another for murdering a health insurance CEO. The song of the year was entirely about how a popular rapper is a pedophile, and an even more successful rapper got indicted for decades of sex crimes that somehow involved one thousand bottles of baby oil. Just another installment in our Crisis Era.
I’m not really a Holiday Season guy. Jews in general are pretty ambivalent about this time of year TBH. In spite of 20+ years of a sustained War on Christmas, Christmas is still the dominant cultural force in America for an entire month of the year. (But Jews at least have a menorah that’s also a bong.)
Anyway, here’s a picture of our dog Howie from a few years ago. I’ve never felt so emotionally in tune with anyone.
I generally try not to be too vocal about my indifference about normie Christmas, because people hold sacred both the religious and secular versions of the holiday. They clearly enjoy hearing that Mariah Carey song everywhere they go, wearing sweaters, and reminiscing about treasures on Christmas morning. Humbug. I’m envious.
We Christmas Ambivalents used to have a much longer ordeal. In the late 20th century, you’d start seeing Christmas TV commercials and displays in stores right after Labor Day, so you could watch Macy’s put up a snowy window display on a stifling still-summer afternoon. Lexus would start advertising red-bows-on-cars on the NFL’s opening weekend. We can thank the breakout success of Adult Halloween in the 2000s for relieving us of the four-month Christmas season.
If, like me, you can’t bear to hear the same cash-grab Christmas pop songs again, I made a YouTube playlist of good holiday music. It’s not all for kids. Enjoy.
Existing in Liminal Time
As we head into our holiday recess, there’s something about the news that’s making everyone uneasy. And I think I finally put my finger on what it is: We’re living through the temporal equivalent of a liminal space.
Although the internet has mangled the meaning of “liminal spaces” to mean “poorly lit, empty spaces that feel creepy,” liminal spaces are, more precisely, transitory places that feel outside of time, because they exist only for you pass through temporarily. Think: parking lots, lobbies, hallways, airport gates, elevators, locker rooms, and stairwells. If you’ve ever felt uneasy in these spaces, it’s because you’re not meant to hang out there.
Every four years, Americans get about 10 weeks of waiting time between our presidential election and the inauguration. Like a lot of things in our dusty-ass Constitution, this made sense in 1789 when the president and members of Congress had to schlep back to the capitol on horseback in winter. These days instead we have an extended lame duck period, when the president doles out pardons and the incoming Congress figures out who’s going to lead each committee.
This one feels especially fraught because (still?) President Joe Biden has been so invisible for the past year, except when he ate pavement at that debate in June. Trump, who is not president but is still a felon awaiting sentencing in New York state, is already meeting with foreign leaders, accepting bribes, demanding a federal shutdown, dictating laws, and attending ribbon cuttings as if he’s already in the job.
Trump’s made clear that everything is going to get wild as soon as he takes the oath. So we’re all just sitting in the waiting room for one month before the Crisis Era really hits.
Since Trump’s reelection last month, the governments of France, Germany, and South Korea collapsed. Canada is obviously next. Brazil is spiraling into crisis as well. All of these situations are quite different from one another, but they’re all emerging from similar post-COVID economic/social conditions. The leadership of much of the democratic world will turn over in 2025, mostly trending to the right, whatever that means these days.
And the world is probably less prepared than ever to deal with this, because reliable journalism is on life support, partially from technology disruptions, and partially from pure indifference.
Which bring us to…
Droning On and On
As we count down the hours to the new year, America is obsessed with spotting lights in the sky. I posited right here about a year ago that we’re primed to embrace a government-alien conspiracy fantasy, and it feels like that might be starting right now.
To summarize, all these things are happening at the same time:
People have been spotting mysterious lights in the sky, maybe drones that are larger than the ones that suburban America gives dad for Christmas, often flying around sensitive areas like military bases.
Various federal agencies have said “we don’t know what these are, but we don’t think you should worry about them.” This is meaningless, because if a contractor is flying experimental drones on behalf of the NSA, nobody at the FBI should know about it. Most citizens don’t understand this, so they read the FBI’s stated ignorance as either (1) evidence that the drones are something foreign or alien, or (2) suspicion that the government is lying to us.
Because most people are getting their news from TikTokkers, podcasters, and YouTubers whose primary motivations are views and ad impressions, they’re getting conspiracy-minded takes.
Public officials are often making things worse. A mayor of a town in NJ announced on TV that it probably had something to do with “missing radioactive material,” a fictional connection that he probably saw on YouTube or Xitter. The lame duck governor of Maryland Larry Hogan, previously believed to be Not An Idiot, wrote a long post on X about the drones and included as evidence a video of the constellation Orion. Another soft-headed Congressman said the drones were emerging from an Iranian “mothership” stationed off the east coast.
Most people aren’t accustomed to looking at the night sky, and many can’t discern drones from stars, planets, satellites, or even airplanes. This includes mainstream media, which should play the role verifying that they’re showing a close-up of Venus instead of putting it live on the air like “WHAT IS THIS? NOBODY KNOWS.”
Millions of people in the USA own and fly drones legally. “I see drones in the sky” is like saying “I see SUVs in the Target parking lot.”
People are starting to take matters into their own hands. Our wonderful president-in-waiting has encouraged the government to SHOOT THEM DOWN, as if tens of millions of his supporters don’t also own guns and wouldn’t gladly fire shells into the sky. Enough airline pilots are being blinded with lasers from the ground that federal and state authorities are making videos asking people to cool it with the vigilantism.
Right now the Mysterious Lights story is generating fresh chaos in our polluted information environment. Because “I don’t trust the government” is the only acceptable position to hold in our no-trust Crisis Era, even the highest people in the government are demanding answers that they should be the ones to have!
Vision Zero Progress
Last summer, about a mile from my house, a young couple with a toddler and infant were waiting for a bus to take them to the SF Zoo. A woman in her late 70s sped her Mercedes-Benz SUV at 72 mph down that sleepy urban street, jumped the curb, and killed all of four of them. It’s still unclear exactly why or how this happened, but the driver is facing four counts of vehicular manslaughter.
If you live in any sort of urban or suburban environment, you’re probably taking thousands of steps each day just a few feet from passing cars, whether on sidewalks or in parking lots. I say with full responsibility as a near-daily driver of a 2017 Subaru: Cars are, at their essence, tamed death-machines. The difference between lawful operation and a mass casualty event is one subtle twitch of a driver’s hands or feet. Given the daily risks of walking around, it’s amazing we’re alive at all.
Pedestrian deaths around the US have shot up by 68% since 2011? Why? (1) People are driving more because they migrated from established northern and western urban centers to fast-growing suburban Sun Belt communities which are built around cars, and (2) Americans have ditched their sedans for aggressively designed passenger trucks and SUVs.
A decade ago, San Francisco instituted a city plan called Vision Zero to eliminate pedestrian deaths by 2024. In spite of a lot of traffic changes, it’s failed to achieve its (impossible) goal. In fact, pedestrian deaths are at a 10-year high. An SFPD officer ran over and killed a man last week, which was only one of only 151 incidents of pedestrians and cyclists struck by city employees, just in the past five years!
The state of California recently passed a law requiring “daylighting,” so after Jan. 1, you can’t park 20 feet from a legal crosswalk. This change will eliminate 14,000 street parking spaces just in the city of San Francisco, or about 300 per square mile. Not everyone is thrilled about this. How many saved lives are worthy of this inconvenience?
Now drivers are starting to push back and demanding responsibility from pedestrians. Why are you just crossing wherever you want without bothering to look up from your phone? Most adults have gotten addicted to their phones in the years since their last refresher on how to cross the street safely. And many states and cities have legalized jaywalking because cops only used it to selectively harass people.
Not everyone drives a car but 100% of us have to cross the street on foot sometimes. This shouldn’t be a cars vs. people battle. I think we could all use a re-education campaign about how drivers and pedestrians can co-exist. Yield for humans. Drive slowly. Watch your right turns. Put the Candy Crush away.
Maybe this campaign needs a cool mascot. Not Safety Sam.
Rangelife Shorts
Conner O’Malley: Stand-up Solutions. Conner O’Malley is the Steely Dan of comedy. He’s brilliant and unique and definitely not for everyone. You’ve seen him in things as “guy who yells.” Last year he toured with an hour-long audiovisual show called “Stand-Up Solutions,” in which he gradually unveils an AI comedian — and a bizarre life story. We saw one of his first stops on the tour, and in spite of serious A/V problems, he killed. Go watch it on YouTube tonight.
The top 14 movies in the world in 2024 were all franchise installments. That includes Wicked, which was — to many people’s surprise — only a part one.
Visiting “New York City.” Business Insider’s travel writer Megan duBois purportedly travels “100 days a year,” but she visited NYC for the first time ever last week. And by NYC, she meant midtown Manhattan. She admitted in the article that she declined to take mass transit out of sheer intimidation of understanding how. For a point of comparison, in October my teenage daughter successfully navigated the NYC subway by herself, from Port Authority to her friend’s dorm at NYU, and declared it to be “very easy.” Thanks, Google Maps.
A lot of people are mocking duBois, but it’s probably worth asking what’s happening here. She explains that she lives “in a part of Florida where public transit isn't really a thing,” which is relatable to a lot of people in the US. Others live in places where public transit is stigmatized as being for the poors. (When I worked in Miami after college, my co-workers thought it was hilarious that I took Metrorail downtown everyday, even though it saved me almost 40 minutes round trip.)
Ms. duBois is also generally on the Disney World and weekend cruises beat. And this also reflects how most people actually choose to vacation, where they prefer fun choices to the challenge of learning something new. No judgment here — some of my favorite people have grumbled about an upcoming Disney Cruise, and later arrived home excited to do it again next year.
And yet, it’s still incredibly lame not to ride the subway in NYC just because you’re from central Florida. It’s like going to Taiwan and refusing to use chopsticks. Excuse me, can I get a fork?
RIP, Rickey Henderson. Baseball today is not nearly the cultural force that it once was in America. One reason is that it’s missing characters like Rickey Henderson, who died this morning at age 65.
People have so many great stories about Rickey. My favorite was at the end of his rookie year, 1976, the Oakland A’s accounting department noticed that it had $1 million more in the bank than they’d expected, because Rickey hadn’t claimed his signing bonus. When they called him, he explained that the paper check for $1 million was hanging framed on his wall. Rickey confirmed the veracity of this story in 2009, explaining that he promised himself he’d do that when he became a millionaire.
A class my daughter is taking next semester has triggered Fox News. She’s so proud of this.
Oh yeah, I got laid off again. Happy holidays, y’all. See you on the other side.