by Don Hall

In 1983, I was a Thunderbird. A Circle High School Thunderbird, that is. As a non-sports guy, it wasn't that much a part of my identity—I went to school there, for Chrissakes—but when we headed for debate tournaments, the label was required and defended.

"Fuck you, Circle High!"

"Fuck you right back with lime twist, you Valley Center Twat!"

This dude was not on the debate squad. He was a Valley Center High wrestler. He took me in my knit tie and sweater vest and beat the snot right out of me. I debated that afternoon with a shiner and a limp.

I didn't know the guy; he didn't know me. But the weird ritual of identifying with a school and the rivalries of tribal warfare were just too much for our undeveloped frontal lobes to resist.

I did, however, come to resist it some in my twenties (but not as much as I'd like today) and have fully eschewed the whole identity thing entirely in my fifties because I have a rule: anything I thought was righteous and correct when I was in high school is probably dumb.

I'm dumb enough about plenty of things today so walking back from the dumb of my adolescence just seems prudent.

———

I live in Las Vegas so I tend to gamble some. Due to the eighteen months as a Ops Manager in a casino, I've seen how the demonic obsession chasing that jackpot win can destroy otherwise normal folk, like how OxyContin can change your brain chemistry after a certain amount of consumption. My technique is the Twenty Gone and Done method.

I bring $20. I put it in whatever slots or video poker or blackjack machine that catches my eye and I play. If I double the money, I cash out, pocket the overage, pop the twenty back in. I'll play until that original twenty is gone.

A trick to know is the machine that sits alone, the only one of its type on the floor, is likely to pay out more frequently. This is because that single machine is either being retired or is brand new and the casino is either milking that last bit of juice or generating interest.

I'm in the D on Fremont Street. I've found a standalone Flintstones slot machine. Not a single other one like it on the floor. I pop in my twenty, pack and light my pipe, and press spin.

"You don't see a pipe around much."

He's sitting on the other side, just enough for me to catch view. Older white guy (which is funny to write as I am now an older white guy), heavy set (in the less polite verbiage, the guy is seriously fat and a candidate for a COVID death if I've seen one today), wearing a Vegas Knights ball cap. He isn't a tourist—they're pretty easy to spot at this point—and he sits with one of his sneakered feet up on the side of the machine he's playing.

"I used to smoke cigarettes. The looks I got from nonsmokers was that of disgust. Now they smile because I smell like their grandpa. The sweet scent of nostalgia."

It's my go-to response as it gets a laugh and keeps it simple.

"Yeah. It's nice."

A beat as we both focus on getting some bonus spins.

"I can't even go into the sportsbook anymore." he states, matter-of-fact.

I'll bite. Why not? Just making idle conversation, right?

"Why can't you go to the sportsbook?"

He erupts like he's been holding in his anger for just a moment too long. "Fucking Colin Kaepernick comparing NFL training to slavery! And then painting Aaron Rodgers as a criminal! Everything is about Biden and race. What the fuck is that! I can't even just relax and watch a ball game anymore! You see?!"

I'm exhausted. My will goes to zero. "It's just sports, dude."

I cash out and walk away.

———

The Great Resignation has focused primarily on hospitality and food service workers rather than college professors weary of the fear instilled upon them for speaking about controversial issues or white collar professionals deciding that a year off in the Bahamas is just what is needed to recharge. Poor wages (that have stagnated in the past fifty years) as well as an almost non-stop and unending hatefulness of the routine customer are the causes.

I get it on a minuscule level. Having spent a lifetime in one version of customer service or another, this pandemic pause has placed the requirements of that sort of labor in contrast with the payouts, both financial and emotional.

It's an easy dodge to claim that the pent up demand for normalcy is what is amping up the overt entitlement and rudeness of the modern customer. The root cause is the rise of Identitarianism—simply put, the more each of us aligns our identities with orthodoxy, the harder it is to separate ourselves from the talking points of ideology.

As each of us moves further away from embracing common ground and basic humanity—what I often refer to in storytelling workshops as 'universal commonality'—the more silo'd we become and the less we are able to have simple conversations about, well, fucking anything without also invoking the identity litmus test with one another.

The lockdowns and drumbeat of "be afraid of everything" promoted by even our most vaunted media giants are not causing us to lose our minds and become utter assholes. It is our need to make sure that every topic, every point of discussion, every minor disagreement is seen as an assault on our survival.

———

"Hey. HEY! That woman isn't wearing a mask! Someone call security!"

I look over from my place in the self checkout line at the grocery. The woman has dropped her brown plastic basket full of bread, soups, and various items to stand and loudly call out another woman shopping but maskless.

"Does anyone see this? She is a danger to everyone here! Security! Management! Anyone!"

From behind my mask, I sigh. "Why can't people just mind their business?" I ask, under my breath, to myself.

"What? Mind my business? Wearing masks during COVID is everybody's business."

Oh, fuck. I alerted her to my presence.

"Are you vaccinated?"

Her demeanor changes instantly. "Of course I am. Are you?"

"Yup. Pfizer. Both jabs. If we're vaccinated then her wearing a mask or not doesn't much affect us, right?"

"Go fuck yourself, anti-vaxxer!"

———

As we dive deeper into this series of identity phalanxes, we find those institutions that rely on accurately painting those crucial pictures for us to be unreliable. Sides are being taken not just by the obvious actors—FOX News, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review—but by those we thought we could trust. 

Corporate profits in the second quarter of 2020 sat at $1.58 trillion. One year later, that number was $2.69 trillion, a roughly 71% increase. You wouldn't know that at all given 9 out 10 stories online, on the air, on radio, and in most major distributors of our daily news were about Dave Chappelle vs a bunch of trans allies, the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett, an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (not true, btw), that nothing resembling Critical Race Theory is being taught in schools, and whose life is really affected by whether Kyle Rittenhouse is found to have defended himself?

In a society far more defined by classism and income inequality than anything to do with race, sex, gender, trans issues, or what Dave Chappelle says about the humorless Gadsby, maybe a few headlines regarding the rape and pillage of the Robber Barons while we all sat locked up in quarantine might be in order.

I'm finding that even in civil conversations with family and friends, any disagreement over worldview is considered an attack. I'm the first to admit that I'm an asshole. No question that when I get spun up about one of these bizarre cultural war topics I get a bit loud and aggressive but even when I'm carefully monitoring my tone and approach the idea that I've attacked someone personally when disagreeing with them has become routine.

———

"Nobody wants to work. Buncha lazy fucking kids looking to get something for nothing these days."

I listen. I process. I breathe. "I could be wrong but maybe it isn't so much laziness or entitlement. Perhaps it's merely the idea of working for a wage far below the economics of living is compelling lots of people—not just kids but those in the Gen X and Boomer spaces as well—to reevaluate that my time and industry for money equation?"

"Jesus Christ! What the fuck is your problem? Socialist. That's your thing, isn't it? Socialism. Let's just give lollipops and free college to these punks."

"Yeah. My thing is most definitely not socialist. More Keynesian than that."

"Then what the hell are you? Who'd you vote for?"

"What am I? I'm a fifty-five year old white guy. I'm straight as an arrow. I'm wholly independent in my party affiliation. I like to say that if I have an identity, it is that of a writer, a teacher, and a storyteller."

"What a buncha crap. You voted for Biden. Let's go, Brandon!"

———

I get it. Without religious affiliation or a war to fight, we are all looking for purpose. We all want to be a part of something more than ourselves.

Tribalism is a defensive posture from our earliest beginnings as a species but, like all that shit we believed in high school, it is most pragmatically dumb.