The Default State Is Broken

I spent yesterday not going out. This was deliberate, because I spent Wednesday with way too many people trying to kill me. Now, normally, I like to keep the number of people trying to kill me as close to zero as possible, excluding my ex-wives, but sometimes you have to leave the house and run errands or whatever, and when I do that I do it on my motorcycle. I have a Suzuki Boulevard C50T , which I bought brand new a couple of years ago and really love riding. It's comfy enough for daily riding, it's big enough I'm not worried about taking it up hills or on the highway, it's nimble enough that I'm comfortable in traffic, and it's small enough that I get pretty good gas mileage (on the order of a VW TDI, and  it's easier to park). Riding a motorcycle is great, even in the rain; if you're geared properly, the rain isn't even that big a deal: just take a little more care, give yourself a little more space, and be aware of your temperature, and yo...

I am currently, as they say, a "gentleman of leisure" in my career. That is, I am between gigs. Which is to say, I'm currently unemployed. This is weird for me, honestly; I've been more-or-less continually employed in one sort of job or another since I was 14 and got my first job doing the breakfast shift in a Hardee's Drive Through. I did some time as a security guard for a while after high school, and then I read this amazing book: Microsurfs , by Douglas Coupland. I think for anyone who was inside  the IT industry at the time, it's hard to understand the draw of this somewhat-cartoonish story, and for anyone outside  the industry at the time, it's hard to understand the appeal of the industry in any way, but for me, a 20-year-old living in the bleak winter wastes of Kansas, the life described in the book was exactly, exactly , the life I wanted for myself. So I packed all of my shit (and all of my wife's shit) into a rented U-Haul, abandoned eve...

There's a scene in the pilot episode of  Life  (the TV series with Damian Lewis and Sarah Shahi) that I  still  remember as being the moment where I fell in love with the show. It was the moment that carried me through the really fantastically bad parts of season two (and there were some really fantastically bad parts in season two).  It's a pretty normal moment for a police procedural: our detectives have tracked down the bad guy and are kicking in the door because that's what cops on TV do, and there's a shootout and the bad guy gets shot and dies, and we in the audience are all supposed to feel good about it because the bad guy was a bad guy and the cops are the good guys. That's not the thing here, though. We've been told the bad guy is a bad guy. He's in an apartment with enough coke to get a good chunk of the LA Metro Area high, and it's pretty clear that the bad guy killed a 9 year old to show how much of a bad guy he was. But anyway, the...

I was thinking about commenting in another thread on feminism but realized that given the question and the subject matter, my best bet and best method of being feminist was to shut the fuck up and get out of the way. There are places where my voice can be an important one, but this was not one of those places. Mostly, as a white male feminist, my job is to  listen . I must, must, must  remember that.