Bryan Joiner

My college had, and may still have, a university-provided late-night van service that was known to everyone as the “Drunk Van,” for self-evident reasons. There were people  studying physics at the library until 3 a.m. who used the service and legitimately needed a ride home, but that didn’t sober up the van’s nickname or reputation one bit.

You know what happens when a bunch of drunk adolescents call a van service they don’t have to pay for and then have to wait? Complaining. A lot of it. Much of it directed at the driver of said van, who, because this is a college campus, is almost always a student him or herself.

One of my fellow editors on the college newspaper moonlighted as a Drunk Van driver on non-newspaper production nights, which helped him fulfill his life goal of never being awake when it was light out.* He had strong opinions about the people he drove around, most of the them negative, and he had a visible forum in which he was eagerly invited to share them—the newspaper’s Op-Ed page. We didn’t have content aggregation. We had a blank tabloid-size piece of paper that had to be filled with the words of someone nearby who was fed up with something.

* This could have just seemed like a goal. I don’t know.

My friend published an article that was as self-evidently true as the fact that the Drunk Van’s drunkest occupants had been drinking alcohol. It was headlined, “It’s not the Drunk Van, it’s you.”

About a month ago, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Neil Strauss, “The Insidious Evils of ‘Like’ Culture,” which basically said the Facebook “Like” button was a blow to originality and contrarians everywhere. The money graf:

So let’s rise up against the tyranny of the “like” button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same. Write about what’s important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear.

In deference to my friend… if you’re writing to get “Like” clicks, it’s not the “Like” button, it’s you.

Another friend of mine, named Peter, writes a daily blog on Cleveland Sports and oh boy, a lot more, at Cleveland Frowns. As a rule, I like everything Peter writes, and not because he’s my friend. If you are my friend and write like crap I won’t read or like your stuff, and I expect the same treatment. (Is anybody there?)

At the end of every Frowns post, there is, rather conspicuously, a Facebook “Like” button. I like all his articles. Do I click the button every day? No, I do not. Why not? Because I realize what it is asking me. It is asking me to grade on a curve. It is asking everybody to grade on the curve that we use to grade everything in our lives, online or offline. You want to talk about insidious “Like” culture? Tell your co-worker, when she asks, that you don’t like the look of that girlfriend in her son’s graduation picture. I dare you.

Okay, you might do this. But you probably won’t. That’s because we’re able to use tools like saying we like something to an end everybody understands. It’s just what we do. If you’re one of those people who run around in real life just begging to be liked, explicitly or implicitly, people will tune you out pretty quickly. They might just be polite in doing it.

Likewise, if you’re a writer or artist trolling for “Likes,” ur doin it rong. It might work for awhile, but you’ll likely find that conformity is boring. You might be tempted to blame the “Like” button. But it didn’t do anything wrong. You did.

Your average person does not understand how American economy works. Nor does your average American politician, including the president. Most economists don’t even know it, or know it but keep their mouths shut. Linguists know it, but they probably gave up the fight long ago in a bow to common usage.

But I think there’s a strong argument that a little linguistic game we play has serious consequences for how we think about our country and our politics. I think there’s one little word that’s standing between us and our ability to properly conceptualize the problem in which we find ourselves.

That word? “The.”

Go to any article you can find or pull up any press conference video and you’ll see or hear countless references to “the economy.” “The economy,” however, doesn’t exist. Economy exists, or it doesn’t. Our processes are either efficient or are not. Our economy is good or our economy is bad.

The problem with calling it “the economy” is that it creates something tangible out of something invisible, and politicizes it and dumbs it down at once. Why can’t President Obama just fix “the economy?” Can’t he get in there with a screwdriver and get the thing running again? Obama, for his part, can blame Congress for not doing the same thing. Calling it “the economy” makes our discussions reductive and dumb by removing them from the real world. It becomes a twisted take on Kenan Thompson’s Saturday Night Live character, yelling “Fix it!” over and over and expecting results. Which is pretty much what our political system has become.

A fair question would be whether I think a simple linguistic trick really has the power to make us all reductive and silly. The answer is: Yes! I just don’t think it’s intentional, most of the time—commodifying economy into “the economy” prevents us from thinking about it too much, by design. Economy is, by definition, everyone’s problem. “The economy” is President Obama’s problem. Fixing it is his job.

To a degree, that’s true, obviously. He has more power to affect American economy than anyone else. It is my job to write about licensed products, and it is his job to deal with 1,000 different problems of American inefficiency at once. In the right hands, conflating these problems into something called “the economy” wouldn’t matter, but bankers have already showed us what happened when very smart people use deliberately oversimplified terms to describe mind-bendingly complex problems.

People are not stupid. They can understand complex problems. It does not help anyone to dumb these problems down, because when people work off of incomplete information, they make the problem worse. For all the talk about how badly our media outlets go to misinform us a la the full-court press at Fox News, the solution might be a “broken window theory” of information providing—get the little thing right, and the big things will follow.

Peter Luger’s has changed. Where there used to not be a third large dining room there is now a third large dining room. This is odd because Peter Luger’s is not supposed to change. You are. And you do.

•••

When I moved to the city almost 10 years ago, I didn’t know much about it that I didn’t learn on TV. As a 23-year-old moving in with a 30-year-old girlfriend, I was in for a series of introductory classes to New York and adulthood, none of which were easy. It was kind of like the first year of Law School, when they make everything hard to weed out the losers. I was determined not to be a loser.

I had very little money, however, but like a lot of new New Yorkers I had identified the place I wanted to spend large amounts of what little money I had: Peter Luger Steakhouse in Williamsburg. It wasn’t like I walked around thinking about this all the time like a 17-year-old saving for her first car, but I considered the deliberately rough-edged Luger’s as some sort of paragon of New Yorkism, the way some people would eye eating at Cipriani or sitting front row at Lincoln Center.

That was me—it was who I was. There was an everyman mystique to Peter Luger’s, which deliberately looked down at Manhattan’s raised noses, something that appealed to me. I spent more than 95 percent of my life in Queens, and the idea of going into Manhattan to be another loser dropping money he didn’t really have did not appeal to me. Luger’s famously takes one credit card—the Peter Luger credit card, a de facto corporate-only card with the balance due at the end of each month—so when you’re rolling in, you’re rolling in with cash. Translated to young me: You were coming in as a baller, or you weren’t coming in at all.

I broke that image in two last week when I went to Luger’s for the first time in five years and paid with the paper money I acquired by cashing in a year’s worth of change at the TD Bank Penny Arcade earlier in the day. One year, $216 worth of change, more than half of it converted into steak. Free steak, basically.

I don’t know if the free steak aspect of it is what has my stomach churning, even now, thinking about the meal. I don’t know if, freed from my post-adolescent view of Luger’s as a New York status symbol, I was able to focus more closely on the food than I had before. I don’t know if I just pretended to like the food before and have lost interest in pretending. I don’t know if I finally noticed that Luger’s's scrupulous lack of pretension is itself an overwhelming pretension, or whether it has just stopped appealing to me. I don’t know if I’m just as at age and place in my life where a homemade steak, three minutes to each side, then into the oven, is far more appealing than the pretentious restaurant experience. I don’t know if this is just a phase for me, and in 10 years I’ll want to go back, and hating on Peter Luger will provoke the same type of nostalgia that loving it has churned up in the service of writing this article.

All I know is that I was unimpressed and I don’t want to go back.

•••

I’m not a vegetarian. I’d sure like to be one, though. I think I’d save a bunch of money and animals and I’d have more energy and the only consequence would be getting laughed at by people who think that it’s funny to laugh at vegetarians. Plus I’d still eat seafood, because fish are stupid and delicious.

I’ve had a few periods of vegetarianism that last a few days at a time, but there’s always an equal and opposite reaction. I’m weak. I am a weak human, and I will come back to burgers like the guy smoking a cigarette filter hoping for just a trace of nicotine. Only I’m worse because a cow gets it in the end and I feel like a catatonic slug—which means I am like a slug compared to other slugs.

This is not a treatise on how you shouldn’t eat meat because Bessie was such a sweetheart. This is me saying I feel better when I don’t eat meat. Much like some people are soccer fans for the fashion, I’m a veggies fan for the pep in my step.

Of course, I’m writing this in another veggies binge, albeit a longer one than normal. Outside of the steak dinner, eight whole days! And there was much rejoicing. I am keenly aware a backslide might be forthcoming, however. Until then, I fight the good fight.

Hence all these words. My words are saying that, largely for the reasons I used to love it, Peter Luger’s is an overvalued commodity.

There is no argument that the quality of meat at Luger’s is quite good. It was my understanding that Luger’s staff would buy meat, hang it up in the basement, allow mold to grow on it, and at the time of cooking, effectively cook off the mold, leaving as much as the meat as possible cooked but uncharred. Kinda brilliant, if you think about it, at least to someone who doesn’t think much about cooking.

Except for also kinda not, which I’ll leave just like that as a deliberate tease.

My stomach is hurting again.

The bill came to $130 per person for the three of us, not counting the beer I got while we waited. We got steak for four instead of three, so it could have been cheaper. Also might explain the stomachache. I ran seven miles that afternoon. Leave me alone. But keep reading.

•••

To those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of going to Luger’s, I’ll present the menu to you more or less in its entirety:

Mains

• Steak (porterhouse) for X number of people

• There are other cuts/food items on the menu but I’ll believe they exist when I see them

Sides

• Bacon

• Creamed Spinach

• Tomatoes and Onions

• Potatoes

• Shrimp

Of course, Devil+details=BFF, so let’s tackle these in reverse order with more colorful nomenclature:

• Shrimp the size of infant forearms

Did I do a bad job of making that sound appetizing? My bad. Solid “buy” rating here.

• Potatoes they will try to push on you by being like, “Potatoes?” and expecting you to say yes without thinking, which, let’s face it, you might

They’re fucking hash browns. Avoid until the next morning’s breakfast.*

• Tomatoes and Onions

It’s a plate with giant rings of tomatoes and onions. To eat with a fork. It’s quite German. It’s kind of hilarious. Avoid.

• Creamed Spinach

Order more than you think you need. This is your baseline. Add as necessary.

• “Bacon” that will change your life

Transcript-like-thing-with-hints-of-internal-monologue-thrown-in from a diner at our table on Saturday who we’ll call “Bryan J.” to protect his or her anonymity:

“If we’re going to get steak for four instead of three why should we bother with the ‘bacon?’ Yeah it’s a huge, thick and wide but we’re eating plenty of red meat later. Okay yes I know this is white meat but still. I say get the shrimp and skip the bacon. Fine, you guys get the bacon. Hey let me have some of that bacaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh oh my god.”

Get the bacon.

• Other cuts/food items are to be ignored, excluding burger

Yes, yes, the mythical Peter Luger burger, the one that’s only available at lunch and which the waiters scowl at you for ordering. I’ve had it, and it’s glorious. But there’s no glory to be gained from saying you’ve been to Luger’s and not had the steak—a burger can be pretty good, and an entire accessible food craze has been built upon this platform, but it still can only be as good as a burger can be, which is not as good as a steak. QED.

• Steak for X

About that “we cook the mold off” thing: It means you’re not really jazzing up the steak.

I’m sure this is how steak purists like it. I don’t know if they also like enough butter to fill a swimming cap with, too, but that’s how you get the steak, wading it in. The butter, not the swimming cap. There is no swimming cap. The butter doesn’t do much to flavor the meat—it actually masks the flavor. In my opinion. To the degree that eating the twix-bar sized wedges of meat ends up feeling more like a bird choking down a large fish than enjoying the process of chewing, tasting, talking way too much. You need to eat fast enough that you don’t fall asleep, because you WILL fall asleep.

It is basically an old-time feeding frenzy that I have grown out of enjoying. You pay for the brusque-ness. I get enough of that as it is.

But wait, there’s schlag

Oh yeah for dessert, and they give this to everyone, is a giant bowl of whip-cream like stuff called schlag that you scoop with milk chocolate medallions and basically if I killed someone and got the death sentence and had to have a last meal this is pretty much precisely what I would choose to please the PETA people who wouldn’t want me taking the life of another sentient being, but mostly to please myself, despite the gnarly stomachache, which obviously comes with a shelf-life, unless the governor is feeling nice.

* Except that you are clearly not eating breakfast the next day. Maybe a pear or something.

My iTunes has a long and storied history of being erased through breakage, human error and theft.* There aren’t many albums on there right now. There are few enough that I can count them: 79. More than I thought, but fewer than there would be if not for the crises listed above. We’d be in the 200-300 range, and I’m not even a big “music guy.” I’m an aspiring one, however, because I’ve realized how much I really like music in the month I’ve gone without cable. Sort of like having a normal sense of smell (mine is pretty shitty, which isn’t all that bad in the city, most or the time) might change how I feel toward nearly everything in my life, I just play the hand I’m dealt. Without garbage television cards to play, I’m leaning heavily on my iTunes account, especially after I got that message from Time Warner for illegally downloading torrents that said they were after me, basically. Jerks! Get a life.

* There was no theft

Any top five albums list of any time is an excuse to talk about things that you like in a context that doesn’t seem self-serving but really is, and this one is no different. In no particular order:

1) Beck, Sea Change

I lied. There is an order. I’m listening to this album now and it inspired me to write this post. I have a long-ish history with this album that’s about half as long as the album’s actual history. An ex-girlfriend is involved, but this album has survived the emotional fallout. Recently another player on my basketball team put this on during our maddening drive home (they close a bunch of shit on the Brooklyn Bridge toward Manhattan after 11 now, leading to gridlock’d chaos, more or less) and nothing seemed weird about it, because it’s self-evidently awesome.

2) Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain

The last computer explosion spared Sketches but ate Kind of Blue, so that decision was made for me.

3) Radiohead, In Rainbows

Ask me tomorrow and it could be OK Computer. Ask me the next day and it could be Kid A. Ask me the day after that and it could be Hail to the Thief.

But more likely if you asked me tomorrow I’d just say, “In Rainbows, but ask me tomorrow and it could be OK Computer. Ask me the next day and it could be Kid A. Ask me the day after that and it could be Hail to the Thief.”

4) Stereolab, Emperor Tomato Ketchup

I don’t think I was a small-town rube who only listened to pop music when I got to college in Chicago—I still think I’m a small-town rube who only listens to pop music, even if it’s not true. It was sure true back in 1996, though. This album was and remains the album that showed me there was Something More out there, and it has not stopped being awesome.

5) Nas, Illmatic

I tried to come up with some explanation as to why I was picking Kanye (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy) above this that involved “All the Lights” and desert-island sunsets, but it was horseshit. This is probably the album I’ve listened to more times than any other in my life, which I’m just realizing now.

But Bryan there are no Beatles albums on your list

That’s true, but they’re all in my brain. I realized this week that I hadn’t listened to Sgt. Pepper in probably five years, and that’s a conservative estimate. There were two summers growing up where I listened to nothing but the Beatles. And when I say nothing, I mean nothing. My best friend, brother and I all worked at the same place and no matter who drove there, we played Beatles tapes. I went from not knowing a Beatles song from a piece of bark to knowing everything about them in two summers. I loved Sgt. Pepper then, but it wouldn’t be my favorite now. Abbey Road is probably my favorite, which is unfortunate only because it believes I think they were still getting better when it all fell apart, and yeah, the tension reached a breaking point, but still.

There had to be some tough cuts

Well as this list is entirely hypothetical, I wouldn’t call them “tough.” To that end, no one has really ever explained how we’re going to play these albums on this island. It was tough to cut Siamese Dream, but I have a habit of not listening to it after the first six songs anyway.

You are entitled to burn an EP of 5 songs from the other ones

Really?

Yes. Go.

Okay:

1. Let Down, Radiohead

2. Rebellion (Lies), Arcade Fire

3. 3030, Deltron

4. Television Rules the Nation/Crescendolls, Daft Punk

5. My Favorite Things, John Coltrane

Is this more or less capricious than the albums list?

Far more.

How are you feeling about the albums list?

Uh…

Spit it out

I might swap out Beck for the Avalanches’s Since I Left You.

That album is awesome

Yes it is.

What keeps planes in the air? Yeah, yeah, hydraulics, geometry, combustion and speed. That’s not what I mean.

What I mean is: Why do we fly?

That question has long had two answers: Business or pleasure. Apparently they used to ask which it was at ticket counters, and they still ask it at Customs. The question is really: “What in God’s name is so important that you need to leave God’s Green Earth for a few hours to get there?”

Airlines don’t really make money, and when they do it’s on the backs of wealthy corporations that pay egregious sums for last-minute and first-class seats that effectively subsidize the entire enterprise. Often it’s not the corporations themselves that do this subsidizing, but the people who work there who are otherwise egregiously compensated and think flying coach class is for rodents, and they buy overpriced seats, thereby subsidizing the whole enterprise.

The intersection of all of these factors comes in last-minute travel and it’s nowhere more stark than it is when traveling for the death of a loved one, where airlines offer a “bereavement fare” to those who show up with a death certificate.

THINK about this for a second. I think it tells us everything we need to know about airlines.

An airline will cut your fare by hundreds of dollars if you can prove that one of your loved ones died. They will do this because air travel has become as much a part of our culture as grieving. If you have decided to move away from your loved ones, you are allowed to go see them one final time. We have decided that this is fair for everyone. This is the bargain we have struck.

I will not get into the wisdom of mourning, except to say that it is such a regular occurrence in human affairs that there must be a value to it that goes beyond money. Except, in the cases where a bereavement fare is applied for and accepted, we have an exact number for how much, to one company and industry, the mourning of a death was worth.

In the months after September 11, I had a conversation with a friend who was angry at people who were angry at new flying regulations. “No one needs to fly,” he said, correctly. Of course, no one needs an iPad or Gatorade or even to brush their teeth, either. The difference is that people will subject themselves to specific searches and delays and the incredibly slight chance of certain, immediate death to fly, which I imagine they would not do to obtain Gatorade, unless they were thirsty to a degree few have experienced.

The hollering about these delays is nonsense. Air travel is the most efficient way to get from, say, New York to Charlotte, but that does not mean air travel is an efficient system. It is, in fact, such a grossly inefficient system that it relies heavily on subsidies and union labor and price gouging of AmEx black holders that the cognitive dissonance between the reality on the ground (so to speak) and the average person’s idea that flying should be simpler and easier is so vast as to be almost indescribable.

I have a good number of friends and one brother who are obsessed with air travel—its inherent romanticism and Byzantine framework are, for them, the stuff that studying makes life worth living. One will holler out the carrier name for each airline that sends a plane over the Mets’ home ballpark, usually before the rest of us have even noticed the plane; another wrote a full New York Times column on how to abuse the airlines’ nonsensical fee structure; another has kept every ticket stub from flight he has taken, a pile that was larger than the size of a fist when I last saw it seven full years ago (note: I used to do this with sports tickets, but eventually stopped; my friend laughs at me); my brother has merely devoted his life to trying to get a job at an airline, going to engineering school and wading his way through various supply-chain management jobs until an opportunity arises at an airline and he boards, ultimate destination unknown.

It’s here I wonder if the purpose of flying hasn’t been misunderstood from the very beginning, and whether airlines should be set up like movie theaters, where the attraction (being the air) is the draw, and not as a utility to get us from one place to another. (As a movie does with time and emotions.) But—no. Hooters Air can attest to this. For 99.9 percent of the people who do it, flying is a void into which we shove Stieg Larssen books and airplane food. It is the absence of an experience, because the only experience we imagine we can really have on an airplane is crashing.

Which gets to another point: When flying, you cede all control to the airline system both on a macro (getting to the airport, having your goods X-rayed, being delayed by a storm system thousands of miles away) and micro (pilots and flight crew, storms hundreds of miles away, people sitting next to you) level. But in every case, you’ve almost always ceded control to something larger than air travel, be it business, emotion or wanderlust. The last being a lack of control that looks like a freedom right until you realize that the truly open mind could be enlightened by the next town over.

But that truly enlightened mind is as much an ideal fiction as the fiction that airlines are run efficiently. Sometimes we really feel like we need to go far, far away as fast as possible—a view that is encouraged by enlightened travel writers, who encourage us to move without guidebooks in foreign places because travel is the best way to broaden the human soul. What would these writers do without air travel? What would any of us do? If airplanes suddenly vanished from the world tomorrow (on the ground, empty), would it change our concept of what it means to be human? And another thought experiment: What if this was just temporary, and we decided to start “airlines” as we knew them from scratch, as a business and system that made sense? What would we end up with?

It’s my thought that we might end up with something slightly more efficient in the short-term, but we’d end up with the same problems in the long-term. The airplane is an anachronism, kept afloat by nothing more than our feelings, which, more predictably than anything in history, twist logic to their own ends. The entire air travel system is a testament to our inability to balance our needs and our wants with any sort of economy. Any person’s lack of economy is one thing, but add up the change from hundreds of millions of people and it can support a perpetually failing business in the sky that always manages to stay airborne. If you look at a photograph of a plane, you have to know how it works to understand why it doesn’t fall toward the ground. It stays in the air not by hydraulics, geometry, combustion and speed but by love, heartbreak, dreams and fears.

I had come home from work and missed my stop because of the adrenaline rush of getting an obscenely high score in Fruit Ninja, turned around, got my computer and went straight to the Banh Mi place, which raised its prices and was playing salsa music.

•••

I remember what it was like to spend 10 hours in a retail store trying to push the hands around the clock with your mind.

•••

I have not been working in any sort of customer service, where I am required to be nice and polite to people for their ends and those of my bosses. You learn about people pretty efficiently this way. Now I’m nice and polite to serve my own ends because unlike at a store where people are trying to find what they want, I’m trying to coax things out of them that they often don’t want to say. Sometimes they want to, sure, but not as often as I’d like. In the end I get my information, but in the exchange they end up learning something about me.

•••

Most journalists aren’t really trying to save the world, but are trying to live in it.

•••

The world is a nice place where people give you club soda for free if you just show up to ask for it.

This is largely the fault of sabermetrics. Although the tool was designed to deal with the independent interactions of pitchers and batters, it’s now being widely applied to team sports, such as football and basketball. The goal of these new equations is to parse the complexity of people playing together, finding ways to measure quarterbacks while disregarding the quality of their offensive line, or assessing a point guard while discounting the poor shooting of his teammates. The underlying assumption is that a team is just the sum of its players, and that the real world works a lot like a fantasy league.

No, Jonah Lehrer. That is not the underlying assumption behind sabermetrics. The underlying assumption behind sabermetrics is that things can always be done better, and finding a way to measure things is a good way to help us do things better. But there’s a reason teams are not run by computers, and it’s that general managers are still valuable for the reasons you cite. A team without statistics would do just as poorly as a team that used them exclusively, and your comparison to a stock market study (where people without analyzed the stock market better than those with too much data) doesn’t hold water. The stock market is a confidence game. Sports are results-based.

The problem is with not the numbers. The problem, as always, is about the people using them. There is no “math problem” in sports, the same way there is no problem with sports coverage on Grantland. Just people who know what they’re doing, and those who don’t.

Here.

Is an essay at the Tumblr site.