Brownout

Perhaps I was meant from the start to contain more of my private thoughts

On Wednesday, I lost my two-year-old, low-grade Android to an overdue “accident,” and not for the first time considered going without cell service permanently. This is not workable for anyone who wants to exist in 2022, especially someone who’s drifting inelegantly toward the end of his savings and technically looking to be hired after newly gaining licensure in an unfamiliar field.

But it’s a perversely appetizing choice anyway. I have a standing resentment against cell-phone companies for rendering “old” phones inoperable via forced system upgrades. Samsung has a deep quarrel with people like me who are content to buy an Android AAAAA0000000001 and keep it forever. So even though I kept the dumbphone I got sometime in 2020 almost free of apps and kept disabling built-in software, by last month, Samsung had smoked me by brute remote force into needing a new device—not necessarily one of theirs, but a new one.

I have a higher tolerance for inconveniencing myself than most people do, because I simply add new frustrations with businesses or individuals to my pile of existing justifications for blowing my head off (or the equivalent in cardiac arrest) as soon as that act can no longer be construed as a frankly irresponsible or inconsiderate. I decided I could go without a phone for a while and e-mailed my suite of frequent texting partners to instruct them to use email.

But on Thursday, I learned that I would have to go without home WiFi until Sunday thanks to ineluctable modifications to the property. With a phone, I circumvent the requirement for a wireless signal using an app everyone with unlimited data should have called PDANet+, which essentially turns a smartphone connected via USB to a PC into a modem. Without one, my computers may as well be from the 1980s.

With near-infinite reservations, I went to the Cricket store on Thursday for a replacement. I was prepared to purchase yet another $70 value for $20, but because I couldn’t provide a PIN to verify the account—the driver’s license I and others often use for ID verification was of no use, I’m afraid—I was unable to link the phone to my existing number (the SIM card had been….discarded). So I left the store without a phone, and I’m honestly surprised I didn’t leave through the front window after removing several of its panes with a chair.

I often apply the label “masochists” here to people who routinely engage in one or more specific online behaviors knowing that the assured outcome is an increased burden of negative emotions. For example, I’ll point out that someone who advertises herself as an anxiety princess and spends all day blurting “OMG THE PATRIARCHY SUX SUX SUX!!!” on Twitter and looking for mean people to block is almost indistinguishable from a version of Superman who can’t resist a daily kryptonite-laced popsicle while sternly asserting the need to ingest trace elements.

I of course have every one of these people beaten in the realm of ritual self-abuse, because while most of my targets are people committed to operating in the joggerverse as content creators, coaches, gear providers, influencers, and so on, I no longer have any formal vocational or other connection to the mayhem and am free to ignore it. But I don’t, and I’m not even making a real effort to run an effective side-grift myself because I paywall none of my posts by conveniently boastful design. The entire point is to make my complaints available to their subjects.

That this invariably occurs, however, is hardly a reward when the only thing that happens is those targets gaining more positive in-joggerverse momentum even as they flagrantly humiliate themselves. I could go on doing this forever, and the only thing that will prevent more obese and “queer” grifters from enjoying the feckless ride they’ve been on for two years are sweeping changes to cultural forces far beyond my or any individual’s control.

I understand that someone called out Strava and Latoya Snell after her latest DNF and lie-fest, and that she insulted him in a 30-minute-long tirade before deleting the video evidence. Snell is a psychosocial toddler in a 37-year-old, 300-pound carcass that emanates pungent evil and swampy decay from every one of her overstrained and hissing pores and booze-slickened apertures. Everyone who has supported her—and that includes figures like Kara Goucher, Lauren Fleshman, and Tommy Rivers Puzey, all of whom have their own public and “secret” skeletons and shortcomings and grifting to answer for—are always silent when she goes full psycho. How convenient for these entrepreneurs and everyone else. No one with a name will ever defend Snell on the ground, but they will hover close by to offer an empty flyby of support in less chaotic periods.

All of these people are just, like, gross and icky and stuff. But they’re welcome to wander around as mouth-breathing opportunists slipping in their own sharts. Pro running really is the purview of absolute scrote-roaches now, all discardable, all demoralized by the influx of drunken, covid-infected lard and liquor-stank and pink-haired pecker-jerkers calling themselves ladies.

See, it doesn’t take me being off the grid for even a day to hate “running” and its characters even more. What a complete embarrassment.

So I am typing this from a public place in which about half of the people are adults wearing masks that do nothing besides establish that they are proudly unable to think for themselves, establishing the fundamental lack of viability down the road of the world’s most celebrated upright monkey, which for all its language is as doomed as Homo habilis or any number of long-extinct Australopithecines. I promised (to the extent I promise anything) a New England High School Cross-Country Championships preview, which will now have to consist instead of post-meet coverage.

I spent Thursday and Friday nights in a state of tranquility simply by not being online. It’s strange having to go outside to get a sense of the weather, or not be able to look up a factoid while reading a book. But I really could comfortably exist in the 1980s if I could find a way to remain employed without doing anything I consider real work, which has been true for most of the past twenty years now. Like most people I was instantly more “in the world” without access to the Web, but unlike most people I wanted more of this now-unfamiliar sensation, not less of it.

I make an effort to reply to most of the comments of any substance I get, but I have fallen behind on that and will probably remain behind. I expect to have 24/7Internet by sometime tomorrow, and if I were desperate, I could go to a friend’s and use the WiFi there all day and night. For now, I am enjoying making my own life worse by giving the finger to Samsung and others, if only after a failed attempt to resume my normal lifestyle.

Next on my agenda, and long overdue, is dumping my Wells Fargo account in favor of a local credit union. No one should maintain a PayPal account or belong to any financial institution of scale, not Morgan Stanley Chase, not Bank of America, and definitely not Wells Fargo. (The amounts in these settlements are trivial to the corporation and its shareholders.)

I have also realized how much I hate the act of typing. I don’t like hunting for words, either. I think the idea I cooked up for myself at age 27—that I could live as a writer—would be fading now even if I didn’t have to earn a token living and could spend all day every day writing whatever I wanted. I’m not terrible at it, but I’m glad I will be limiting it to this place and its curiously burgeoning cast of supporters (you all need to stop that. pronto) from now on.