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Idiocracy-adjacent
Friday, August 15 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
As much trouble as I have focusing on work when I am in the actual brick-and-mortar workplace, it's even worse when I'm working from home. There has been this task hanging over me for months at this point that is essentially impossible to work on. It cannot be debugged on a local laptop because it requres Crystal Reports, which can only be made to run on the development server. But to work on the development server, I had to have all the correct test data in the database. I also have to modify the front-end Angular layer, something that is normally only done through pull requests. So instead I end up wotking on tools that will eventually help me with such tasks, like my Noah's Ark test data rescue program. Today I was so frustrated with the things I should be doing that I added another feature to it: the ability to choose a schema dropdown menu. By the late in the workday, I was chatting with one of the two other senior developers about the sorry state of our database deployment system and what programs could help with that. That actually made me happy about my job at the end of the day, since it would give me something straightforward to do on Monday.
Instead of going to the Adirondack cabin this weekend, I would be driving solo down to my childhood home south of Staunton, Virginia, to attend a memorial service for my mother, who has been dead for more than six months now. (Gretchen would not be coming because she would be doing tabling for New York Abortion Access Fund at an anti-Trump event in Woodstock.) I'd packed up the Subaru Forester (no fucking with dubious charging infrastructure on this trip!) with the things I would need, which included a tootbrush and a razor in addition to the more usual things such as a laptop and various foods I can eat on the road.
I left just before 4:00pm and took my normal route, that is the one through Scranton, Harrisburg, and Winchester. Just before setting out, I put a little effort into loading music on my phone, something I had never done with this phone (and may not have done with other phones either). To play them, I also had to install a music player, since I'd never used this phone (which I've had for more than four years) as a music player. In the long-enshittified Google Play Store, all the top-listed music players contain ads, and I had to scroll down to the 21st item to find a music player that doesn't include ads (one called AIMB; the branding is terrible, as I can't tell if it's an upper-case I, lower-case L, or a one in that sans-serif font that is in the logo). But then I had a great music player to keep me entertained for my whole drive. I'd loaded my phone with some series clunkers, including every song from an album by Yes called Time and Word. But there were also some amazing songs I'd forgotten about, like "Lesser Demons" by Male Gaze. (A good trick is to sort my music collection my date and take the most-recent songs not in folders. This gets all the interesting singles I'd heard and downloaded individually, often by ripping from YouTube, and it doesn't take many to get back a few years into a part of my life whose music I haven't heard in a long time.)
As for the drive, it went fairly well, at least for one that begins as late as 4:00pm. There was a lot of single-lane-only driving on I-84 in eastern Pennsylvania, but the traffic there is low enough that it wasn't a problem.
Lately I've been thinking about how Idiocracy will start manifesting now that so many conspiracy-theory-addled chuckleheads have access to the levers of American power while other chuckleheads are driving the intelligent people either out of their jobs or out of the country. I say this because two things about how the highway had recently been reworked seemed Idiocracy-adjacent. I-84 just east of Scranton, I found myself driving on curved surfaces that had been banked wrong, that is, the low side of the bank was on the outside of the curve, which made driving through those curves feel unsettling. And on I-81 southwest of Harrisburg, a recent repavement job had a strange and completely unnecessary undulations in it.
My vision prescription has changed enough since the one for the glasses I was wearing that driving at night (which began about 20 miles from Maryland) was a little unpleasant, as glare from headlights tended to reduce my ability to focus on what I needed to. Compounding this was extreme brightness of the headlights of some vehicles, which definitely made the road less safe for everyone else. I considerezZzzd all such headlight to belong to douchebags, initially assuming the vehicles were Cybertrucks. But they never actually were; I didn't see a single Cybertruck on the entire drive.
I like to drink road beers when I drive, though I never want to be anywhere near the legal limit should I get pulled over. So I come up with road rules to limit my consumption. The rule today was that I could drink a beer at the beginning of the drive and then only drink another after I crossed a state line. But the driving in New York was only about 65 or 70 miles, while the driving in Pennsylvania would be close to 240 miles. So once I'd crossed in Pennsylvania, I decided not to drink another beer until I was at least in Scranton. But once I was in Scranton and saw that I was 186 miles from Maryland, I decided I should wait until I was less than 160 miles from Maryland (this was the result of some calculation where I was splitting a difference). Ultimately, though, I waited until I was 97.5 miles from Maryland before drinking that second beer. And I didn't drink the third beer until after I'd refueled in Woodstock, Virginia, only 65 miles from Staunton. This time I was drinking Mickey's Big Mouth I'd bought at a gas station, a nostalgic impulse buy. (I hadn't had Mickeys in decades.)
I got to Creekside at about 11:20pm, and after briefly stopping in to say hello to my brother Don in his hot, pungent trailer, I headed across the road to sleep in the Shaque, which was still there and still somehow had working electricity. I'd taken 150 mg of pseudoephedrine late this morning, so I had a xanax on hand to make sure I would sleep well tonight no matter where I ended up. (I'd half-expected to be sleeping in the Subaru Forester.)
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