The era of things going away
An actually good column by Thomas Friedman today.
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An actually good column by Thomas Friedman today.
Hi!
I encourage you to read the YouTube note on that one, or well okay then I’ll paste it here:
While dropping acid with George Harrison and John Lennon in Los Angeles, Harrison blurted out that he thought he was going to die. “I think I’m going to die man,” he said; but Peter Fonda reassured him. “I know what it’s like to be dead…”
Hence the term: “I know what it’s like to be dead, I know what it is to be sad.”
Good Day Sunshine isn’t going to cut it right now. Instead, strap into your Ferrari because we’re going to Siberia on Christmas Day. Yes, it’s Rocky IV time (This one even got me to stop playing it on iTunes [I bought it for a dollar!] and go over to YouTube):
You know I had never seen any Rocky movies until the age of 25 or so? Until I had a lot of friends from New York, it never came up. Then it came up a lot and I was accused of seeing no movies whatsoever. Then I saw Rockys I, II, and IV. I still haven’t seen Rocky III. I know. But I think I get it.
There’s no shortcut home…
Finally, let’s see if I’m right all those times I say that every time this song comes up I feel like dancing. I’m about to pass out and I’m home alone. It have it at 50/50:
Whatup.
The people spoke long ago. I drunk blogged, and they were like: Hey, do more of that! We like that. When you write sober, it’s boring but you’re flippant when you’re drunk. And I was like: “Flippant?” And they were like, yeah dogg. And I was like okay then.
But now is the first time since then that I’ve manned the keys while under the influence of le booze. Check out those italics. Makes you dizzy, doesn’t it? Or is that just my dizziness? I went downtown at about 6 tonight, when the sun was setting behind lower Manhattan. I took the Q so it went over the Manhattan Bridge and I could see that shit. It was awesome. Then I drank hell of beer at two dive bars. At one point, I thought an extremely attractive girl was winking at me. She was winking at Edgar. I’m used to this. I drank some more.
So now I’m here at home, drunk blogging. I’m not sure this is any sort of narrative. But isn’t this what blogs are for? If not, what? Hey, this is fun: I walked from Astoria to my house this morning. I’ll spare you the other details but it took almost 3 hours. Forty-five minutes of this walk was spent amongst the Hasidim. FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. I mean, I know generally where they live but Cot damn I didn’t realize there were that many in south Billyburg. Not that I cared. Someone told me tonight they would have felt out of place walking like that. Not me. I don’t give a f*ck.
That * is a u, by the way.
What am I watching on mute now? “Coca-Cola: The Real Story Behind the Real Thing” on CNBC. I guess I was watching the Olympics and never switched over.
Okay, I’m going to bed. Over there.
I wouldn’t watch that show How to Make it in America if it came with a free subscription to HBO. There’s no fucking way. I can’t think of a less appealing idea to me than to show the guts of a hustle. The whole point of a hustle is that you make it up as you go along; plan it to much, and a hustle it ceases to be (in this way, a hustle is kind of like a blog post). And for me to have any interest in watching some kids try to peddle skinny jeans to earn “respect” over money is just pushing it beyond absurd. Well no: those would be the ads all over town, which are sure to be meant as aspirational for every “wanna make it” kid in a 10 mile radius, but the joke is that every one of those kids has got enough money to burn that they’ll never have to live this kind of life and won’t see the point in learning about it. If they really wanted to, they could walk onto the street and try to do something. Maybe they do for a few weeks at a time, but they’ll get bored soon enough, and return to boring the shit out of the rest of us.
When I used to watch wrestling, Ravi always reminded me of the rule, “If you see it on TV, it’s a work.” That is, in wrestling there are two types of events: works, which are part of the scripted show; or shoots, where one of the characters does something on their own, usually to upset the balance of whatever’s happening around them and forcing the cast to either improvise or scrap the whole thing. Shoots are exceedingly rare, but that didn’t stop us from speculating about them happening all the time, and Ravi would eventually (and often lamentably) repeat the mantra and we’d realize we’d been had. This is the point, of course. Not all that happens in the WWE is supposed to have the “shoot” quality to it—some of it is supposed to serve the story arc for those that have “marked out”/withheld disbelief. But a good percentage of it has an off-the-rails quality that’s intoxicating, and the more convincing it is, the more compelling television that’s produced. The successful execution of the “Montreal Screwjob”—the most famous shoot of all time—has probably done as much to make wrestling popular among certain segments of the population (stoner adolescent intellectuals, for instance) as anything else.
I thought about this while watching Survivorman, the one were Les Stroud is surviving in the Kalahari Desert. There’s no question the guy is an absolute badass, and the show’s “roughing it” quality is reinforced pretty consistently throughout each episode. He films every episode himself, and unlike Man vs. Wild host Bear Grylls, most definitely does NOT stay in hotels at night. (We’ll tackle this breach of trust shortly.) The only help he has each episode is either something totally vital to survival—like water in this episode—and an occasionally random assortment of other things. In this episode, he drove a jeep into the desert until it ran out of gas, then pillaged whatever he found within. In the cab, he found a plastic bag with empty soda cans and jars, a mostly empty jar of peanut butter, and a ful jar of jelly, and seemed bemused by the whole thing, as if this random assortment of shit was funny instead of helpful. Of course, to think those things got there randomly, especially the peanut butter, is just a joke, but there was so little peanut butter that it seemed almost useless to bother, and he ate one spoonful of the jelly before he realized it was too sweet to survive on. So: these things are useless? Well yes, for awhile, and long enough to forget their apparent futility. Three days later, he matter-of-factly (and ingeniously) sets the jars under scorpion holes so that the protein-rich critters will fall in, and disconnects tubing from the truck and smears the insde with jelly to attract other bugs and such. The thing is, I’ve seen this episode before and I didn’t notice the first time how blindingly obvious how preplanned the whole thing is, which is sort of the beauty of television, I guess. Fundamentally it doesn’t matter to me if these things are planned or not, because the essence of the show isn’t changed. It just makes for better television, and good TV is no accident, even if it often takes pains to present itself as such.
The Man vs. Wild thing, though, seemed like a breach of trust with the audience, and to this day I’ve never watched it. I don’t mind being tricked, but I want to know that I’ve been given all the necessary information to decode the trick.
Something unexpected, wonderful and terrifying happened last week: My job actually became interesting and not, like temporarily. I basically figured out the new media angle for my magazine. All of a sudden, there’s a lot of work to do and it’s even kind of… exhilirating.
Anyhow.
Not much else today. I haven’t had a haircut in quite some time. It’s getting funny.
I just finished a game of Scrabble in which I was handed every opportunity to win, and I did. My opponent tends to take losses pretty hard even when he shouldn’t, and there’s no question he thoroughly outplayed me. I got three “bingos” for 150 bonus points, owing to outrageously good tile fortune, and he got only one, for 50. I won by 12. While planning for and around the bingos is certainly part of the game, the higher your score without them, the better lemonade you’ve made. I was going to write him and tell him this, but I know he doesn’t want to hear it—he just wants to win, and would take it as gloating on my part, not because it would be per se but because we’ve been over this enough to understand how he would feel about it.
I have my own blind spots. Yesterday my flag football team lost to the #1 team in the league in an exceptionally close game. We were ranked fourteenth coming in, and as recently as two weeks ago lost 38-0 in our second game. After that, though, something clicked, and we won last week. This week, we held our own and fell apart but most of the team was happy with the result. The one person who wasn’t was me, and no one could figure it out, because I had played at least (objectively) a decent game as quarterback. The only problem was I threw two interceptions on our “girl plays”—the mandatory once-per-four-down plays that must go to a female—when I vowed not to throw picks at the outset. One teammate couldn’t figure out why I was so down about it until he mentioned it to the quarterback of another team at the postgame bar roundup. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You NEVER forget interceptions.” And at that point my teammate knew that there was nothing he could say to me to make me forget them, even if it wasn’t the end of the world. It’s just one of those things.
If I felt bad yesterday, I can’t imagine what Peyton Manning is going to feel like for the next 50 years.
When I was younger, I once lamented to a friend that some day we’d have to give up video games. I meant that we’d have to grow up, and growing up likely did not involve them, and he looked at me like I was crazy. “I’ll still play video games when I’m an adult,” he said, and he was the last person I expected to hear say that.
I think we were both right. I was just in his wedding, and I think that’s a conclusive sign of some sort of maturity, especially at our age. And at the wedding he told me how much he loves Tiger Woods 10 for the Wii. Full disclosure: I had never really played the Wii until his bachelor party this summer, and even then we were playing just the rinky-dink yet amazing games that come with the system. I returned from the bachelor party (at the Jersey Shore!) on Sunday. Monday, on my way home from work, I went to Target and bought a Wii… and had immediate buyer’s remorse which didn’t quite go away with hours of playing Wii Tennis, so I basically shelved it for awhile. After the wedding I wanted the Tiger Woods game, though, but it never came up again until another friend wanted to decompress after a Business School exam last Friday and suggested we take some swings. The Wii Sports games can only amuse you for so long, so I suggested I should just buy the Tiger Woods game, and I did.
We had a great time playing the game, but when the friend left, I was struck by something like a remorse that went beyond just the $80 I spent on the game and controller upgrade. It was a deep shame, really, that I was 32 years old and spending money on a video game to be played primarily by myself, behind closed doors, something I had long sworn that I wouldn’t do. I had played video games in the years since high school, and played a lot of them, but I always played them with people: They were a form of social interaction, however lowbrow. Now I was living alone, and spent a bunch of money I could have spent on picture frames or art or whatever on a game that simulates a sport I don’t even like.
So what happened? I played the everliving shit out of the game. After avoiding it for a few days based on actual, full-time work, I popped it in Tuesday night and played about 60 holes. I might have been ashamed at myself for doing so, but I wasn’t about to stop. Not that night anyway. I put aside plans to go to the gym (because I’m running a four-mile race Sunday morning with little training) until Wednesday. I woke up Wednesday with sore arms, which I thought would be an impediment to playing the game more and push me to the treadmill, which I loathe more than the real game of golf (at least you’re doing something). I was wrong. I played 120 holes.
On Thursday, my arms were sorer than before, and I planned all day to come home and play the game, but when I got home, I just couldn’t do it very effectively. I missed shots I could have made and realized that I simply had played too much, and in doing so saw where I had matured and still had room to grow up.
Do I still think video games are the provenance of children, on a fundamental level? Yes. But I think the bigger concern is the attitude one takes toward video games. If I was “missing” the shots I was “missing” yesterday 10 years ago, I would have been furious at myself, even if I didn’t want to admit it. Everything I did at any moment had to be perfect, which was the source of my problems; it wasn’t that I was playing too much XBox. Getting over that was one stage of maturity, and most assuredly a more important one that simply “not playing video games” in order to give me some false sense of maturity. My friend is naturally more even-keeled than I am, and spent more of his early twenties sitting around playing video games than I did without any sort of deleterious effect, but I suspect that married life won’t give him decreasing opportunities to wield the “club.” It’s probably waning as we speak, but maybe his rounds on the “course” are the few refuges from full-onset adulthood—ones that he most certainly knows, and fully accepts, are fleeting.
For me, playing the shit out of this game has had the opposite effect. I was so determined to “grow up” that I tried to just go around a very fundamental step: Living comfortably on my own, doing the same things I did as a child, and seeing their limits clear enough to transcend them. Playing Tiger Woods 10 fills my time with something that is necessarily worse than what I’d like to replace it with, but it’s better than avoid playing it on the grounds that doing nothing will lead me there.
For reasons I can’t properly explain, the Miley Cyrus song “Party in the USA” is stuck in my head, only that’s not what I’m hearing. I’m hearing “Party in the USDA,” and I’m imagining smocked, hair-capped, and plastic-gloved meat inspectors jamming to the song. I often rewrite songs in my head, but usually I just insert the word “chickens,” in honor of the nickname of my childhood dog, into the lyrics. I think this is a sign of perhaps not having grown up as much as I like to think I have done, which is fine. Or maybe in this specific instance it’s just a defense mechanism so that I won’t have to admit I *actually* have a Miley Cyrus song in my head, one that I’m fairly sure I’ve never heard from beginning to end.
I also thought about going with USTA, but thinking of the US Open crowd listening to the song seemed a little too on-the-mark.
Politico is a good website to visit if something big just happened and you want news on it. Question Time would be a good example. Otherwise it’s like the WWE: Every day the top news story the BIGGEST STORY EVER! THE REPUBLICANS ARE WINNING! THE DEMOCRATS ARE WINNING! And so forth.
I understand how this could be an extremely valuable tool inside the Beltway. It strikes me as colossally stupid outside of it.
Bryan Joiner 