Powderhorn

Early tomorrow afternoon, my ex was to pay for my ride home. I've already been here longer than planned for financial reasons.

But I do not head to Austin (fuck you, AP, it's the 11th-largest MSA in the country) tomorrow; rather I'm headed to Temple, Texas (not a major city).

The burner activist who brought me up there a month ago wants me to crash in Mike's room for a couple of nights. I'm assured there's a second bed and a private washroom.

The idea here is to get to know him enough to finally get closure on the story I couldn't write from our first interaction.

Luckily, Killeen (I think we've established I'm in Texas, despite having to say that) is far closer to Temple than Austin. My friend pays half the price, and my ex pays nothing.

Speaking of which, last night, while we were talking about other things, I was bitching about her getting all the stuff and me getting all the debt. In the manner that one can only do in middle age, she pushed back.

"What the fuck do you mean? I ended up 11 grand in debt because you hadn't been paying things for months."

Now, I'd been paying things as billed, but our landlord was a bit shady, so I'd not be surprised something like this happened.

The thing is, I never knew. I moved out in February 2016. She expressed anger, rage, jealousy, but she is fucking terrible at communicating the real problem.

As am I.

It will be nice to focus on something in the vicinity of journalism for a couple of days, but there's a full can of worms waiting in Temple.

Out of the pan, into the fire. I suppose it's apt for a burner.

I asked for life to get interesting as a homeless guy in a van. Be careful what you wish for.

"My friend just sent me this video, told me she’d found me in it,” read the text. “As I was looking for myself, I noticed you’re in it too. I didn’t know I was being filmed, guess you don’t either, just wanted to let you know …”

When Nancy Naylor Hayes received the message in November 2023, she felt a twinge of fear. It was from an acquaintance she hadn’t heard from in years. “I was panicking,” she says. The text pointed her to a Facebook link, which led to a montage of clips of women filmed on the streets of Manchester during nights out.

“You don’t know what you might have been caught doing,” she says. “What if they’ve got a horrible video of me?” She saw herself a few minutes in, with a friend she had been with that night as they visited the city’s bars. Clearly oblivious to the camera filming her, she stands on a pavement outside a doorway on her phone – calling a taxi, she recalls – her hand on the hip of her khaki miniskirt. Then the film-maker zooms in on her face and lingers there before recording her reaching across to wipe something from her friend’s cheek.

As previously referred to, I refer to my ex as "babe" in standard conversation.

My time here has been unexpectedly extended, which is fine by me ... don't threaten me with nutrition, HVAC and indoor plumbing!

Somehow, saying "hey" feels sharper than "hey, babe."

I finally asked tonight if she was OK with that, as she has noticeably excised her use of the term. Pulling an "I love you" without part of me in her is just this side of impossible. She said she was fine with it, but for me, it's just muscle memory.

This is the trip where I finally realized I don't give a shit about a good sex life. Just being around her regulates me fine, and I can't complain about the free food.

We banter, we cross over into giving each other shit, and life proceeds apace.

I know very well why we got divorced a decade ago, but as we head into Day 5 of this visit, the practical reasons we've had the luxury of ignoring when I travel up here seem ... distant.

What concerns me most here is that I've experienced reality turning into fiction decades ago, and right now, sitting in her living room feels like reality, and my van feels like fiction.

Something is going to have to give, and soon.

It is now day three at my ex's. She ordered food again today, which was good (there's a local chicken place).

Because I'm socially maladjusted, I asked to talk about what we were doing during a commercial break.

The answer was not ideal.

She confirmed we have no future, implored me to accept the present for what it is, and it sort of feels like I'm Custer.

It's SXSW right now, so things for locals are kinda fucked.

My ex texted me that she turned out not to have her grandson for the weekend, and would I like to come up? Lyfts were vacillating by the minute ... my first check, it was $100 (baseline is $50-60), then I got a notification that it had dropped to $70 after not booking. She checks what it would be in the other direction: $45 -- and then implores me to check again. Now it's $120.

At this point, I've given up on the idea, but I do check one more time, and it's $60.

As I'd resigned myself to the fact that this wasn't feasible, I'd not really done any packing ahead of ordering the ride. So I get down to that after booking, and when my phone dings for what should be the "here's who your driver is" notification, it was instead the "your driver is already here."

So, I'm frantically just throwing anything I can find for laundry into my suitcase. I made it out with a minute to spare before she took off.

On the plus side, I remembered my dentures this time.

Now, it may seem irresponsible to spend $60 to visit my ex, but the forecast wild temperature swings are hell in the van. It was in the low-90s today, which is barely survivable even with my fan. Tonight, we drop into the 30s, which would have required heat, and tomorrow's high is 51.

Spring in Texas is fun!

Unlike prior visits, this one was left a bit ... open-ended. Without her grandson needing to be here, there was no real deadline for when I'd leave. We addressed that this evening, and I said if I would stay until Tuesday, that would be ideal, given tomorrow's low as well. After that, it's back to May weather, so this is a fluke.

This has been a wildly different experience from my prior visits in some ways, while remarkably consistent in others. To address the elephant in the room, yes, we're still physically compatible, but there may start to be contours forming on what we're actually doing.

And I don't know what to define it as.

Once I'd loaded my laundry, we settled in, as usual. I took a shower, as usual. I ended up in her clothes, as usual. She then ordered food delivery, as usual. That $60 is starting to look like a bargain.

We watched a fair amount of Young Sheldon, which I'd not seen before starting to come up here. As usual. Given a bumper crop of cardboard, we start burning it in the fireplace, as usual.

We decamp to her bed and continue watching in there after what I've sufficiently described in the past.

My sleep schedule has been inconsistent for months, so while she nods off around 2 a.m., I'm up until 5.

Every now and again, while I'm watching TV on her laptop over her shoulder, she shifts as she's lying next to me, with the most popular surprises being a leg thrown over me and her grabbing my arm.

So it was with a fair amount of surprise that I awoke (well after her) to hear about how (we'd not yet covered my departure date) I was no longer welcome in her bed. Apparently, after I drifted off, I ended up putting my knees in the small of her back, and the snoring wasn't a plus.

Over the course of the afternoon, this softened into using the giant sock monkey she usually sleeps with as essentially a chaperone. She's already gone to bed, as she has a job, but I'm allowed to climb in after all.

Outside of intimate activity, we have barely touched. She's apparently gone the Pretty Woman route and wants sex without kissing, which is a bit dejecting with one's ex. She let me know that in the four years she was with her last fuck buddy, she only let him kiss her once -- and that was in public just to piss off his ex.

I have never claimed this was a healthy relationship.

Still, even though we both still had plenty of leftovers, she decided to make (way too much) salmon with a couple of sides for dinner.

Most of today was us not interacting. She's still a cigarette smoker, and thus frequently decamps to the porch. Add in the phones calls she had, which I have to be invisible for because of history, and it was pretty much me watching the show with occasional interruptions to talk.

We both have a couple of vices, so I'm sitting next to a bowl prepared before she retired. I'll just self entertain for the next two days while she works from home in her room.

I do like her ultrasonic denture cleaner, though.

While it's still unclear what we're doing, I think I may have had rose-tinted glasses on possible outcomes. We're not antagonistic or awkward in any way, and we do talk a fair amount, but it seems our goals come down to animalistic sex and just supporting the other warm body in the room.

Which is likely a good way to start framing the fact that I don't be able to see her at all once she moves to be closer to her grandson's mother.

She's at least covering my ride home, as usual.

Today's development is that I'm committing theft from content creators on YouTube.

OK. So, you think I, as an unemployed writer, am responsible for "content creators"? What the fuck does that mean, anyway? I've shot porn, written lots of columns and editorials, and taken photos.

This is back when we didn't call it "content." So what's your point? Up-and-comers need more money than corporate America and me?

I'm going to need a more compelling argument than "you're stealing if you use an adblocker." I simply don't have the energy to point out that if losing work as an editor makes me a thief, you should direct your ire to the media companies that no longer care to hire us.

If I were making six figures and owned my home, as I should at 46, sure ... fair play. I can afford YouTube Premium. Neither is true, so this feels mostly like a case of "shut up, nationally award-winning pleb who has literally run newspapers; you don't understand the media industry."

And in a manner of speaking, they're right. I understood it only while we had the audacity to commit journalism.

I was raised on the scripture of the 1990s: Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen. It was the Golden Rule. The dating equivalent of Slip, Slop, Slap. Whispered at sleepovers. Bolded in the margins of Dolly magazine. Never pick up on the first ring. Never say you’re free on a Saturday. Be the prize, not the contestant.

In my 20s, this felt like power. (It was mostly fear in better lighting but I didn’t know that yet.) I mastered breezy indifference. I timed my texts to the minute: double the time he took, plus 10 for mystery. I thought I was teaching men my value. I thought I was training them to love me.

But I am 51 now. Looking back on that first year of dating after divorce at 50 – the apps, the profiles, the quiet violence of being matched and discarded by an algorithm – I realise something uncomfortable: I wasn’t training them. I was hiding.

There is a specific humiliation in dating at midlife that we rarely discuss: the dissonance between who we are in the world and who we become the moment a man with a nice jawline delivers the modern cruelty of the read receipt – the blue tick that confirms he saw your message, and chose silence.

In my real life, I am capable. I have interviewed politicians for the BBC. I have managed budgets. I have navigated the death of parents and the collapse of a marriage. I am a woman of substance. Yet give me a “maybe” from a man I met on an app, and I regress three decades. I stare at my phone. I debate the semiotics of an emoji with a girlfriend who is also a high-functioning professional. We analyse the silence like Kremlinologists.

Meeting people sucks in midlife.

To me, the best first sentence of any piece of journalism is the one in Joan Didion’s 1987 book, Miami, which begins like this: “Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.”

I love that sentence and that propulsive first chapter so much that I once sat down to try to figure out how she did it. I looked at the sentences one at a time to assess what purpose each one was serving, and I counted how many of them Didion had needed to accomplish each thing she wanted to accomplish. Then I thought about how she figured out what order to put them in to have maximum page-turning impact. And then I compared all of it unfavorably with the flailing and feeble way in which I would have pursued the same goals. I marked up my copy of the book in a somewhat desperate fashion and then became depressed.

That type of copying is pretty normal, and they teach it in school. It’s how you learn (and how you become depressed). But in the age of generative AI, there are many new kinds of copying. For instance, Wired reported last week on a tool offered by Grammarly, which briefly offered users the opportunity to put their writing through something called “Expert Review.” This produced AI-generated advice purportedly from the perspective of a bunch of famous authors, a bunch of less-famous working journalists (including myself, per The Verge’s reporting), and a bunch of academics (including some who had recently died).

China’s BYD will aim to take on Porsche and BMW in the European luxury car market with a premium electric vehicle that can be charged in just five minutes.

BYD, which overtook Tesla as the world’s largest EV maker last year, first demonstrated its “flash charging” technology, which enables an EV to be charged almost as quickly as filling a car with petrol, a year ago.

The Z9GT model, part of the premium Denza brand, can be 70 percent charged in five minutes and be almost full in 12 minutes, even in temperatures as low as -30° C.

The vehicle has a range of up to 800 km and will be launched in Europe next month and in the UK in the summer. Pricing is yet to be revealed.

BYD’s international chief Stella Li said the Z9GT marked an important milestone as it began the global rollout of flash charging.

The Chinese carmaker has aggressively expanded in the UK and Europe with affordable EVs and plug-in hybrids as sales in the home market have come under pressure from a government crackdown on pricing competition.

In January 2025, a measles outbreak erupted on the western edge of Texas and soon spilled over to New Mexico and other states. The overall outbreak would become the largest the country has seen since 2000, when measles was declared eliminated from the US. In Texas, it was the largest outbreak recorded since 1992. And in New Mexico, it was the first measles outbreak the state had even seen since 1996.

But the trajectory of the two states’ measles cases diverged. Texas declared the outbreak within its borders over on August 18, with an end tally of 762 cases. In New Mexico, officials declared its outbreak, which began in February, over on September 26, with a total of just 99 cases.

One of the key differences, according to a new study, was that in New Mexico, the rapid spread of the highly infectious virus spurred a massive surge in measles vaccinations among children and adults. Overall, shots of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine increased 55 percent statewide from January to September compared to the same period in 2024.

The study, appearing in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, further broke down the increase in shots. Over the whole year, the number of MMR doses given to children (defined as less than age 18) increased 18 percent compared to 2024—from 27,988 in 2024 to 32,890 in 2025. Doses in adults (aged 18 and up) skyrocketed by a whopping 291 percent— from 5,748 in 2024 to 22,500 in 2025.

Huh. Who'd have thought "competent health authorities produce better results"?

This is only 18 minutes and change, but a good luck at how fucked we are.

In the playground of the rich, nobody wanted this war. For decades, Dubai built itself up as a sanctuary of unadulterated consumerism visited by tourists the world over.

But now, the city in the United Arab Emirates faces an existential threat, as the war between the US and Israel and Iran has shaken the foundations of the “Dubai dream” that so many foreigners had bought into.

The UAE has borne the brunt of more than two-thirds of Iran’s strikes; the state targeted in part, say analysts, for its deep military and intelligence partnerships with western powers, and Dubai’s reputation as a favoured centre for global finance and western holidays.

“The shine has definitely been taken off,” said John Trudinger, a British resident of Dubai for 16 years, who is a headteacher at an Emirati school in Dubai. He employs more than 100 teachers from the UK and said most have been so “deeply traumatised and really struggling to cope” with the sudden arrival of war in Dubai that they have left and won’t come back.

They are among the tens of thousands of residents and tourists that have fled Dubai since the US and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran almost two weeks ago. The city’s large population of migrant workers largely don’t have that privilege.