We’re almost at peak summer, approaching the Dog Days. It’s also Bastille Day, so here’s to escaping all of our personal prisons! Haven’t posted in a while, so let me bang out a few thoughts before I leave for Buenos Aires in a few days.
1. Good people die all the time. It’s nice to finally lose an asshole. I’m not one to malign the dead, but there are times when exceptions can be made. We’ve lost some good people over the past year–artists who made songs that spoke to people, childhood actors, living legends like Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, and Catherine O’Hara, Clive Davis, Ozzy, David Lynch, Ted Turner, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Genuinely decent people like Sam Neill, who died just yesterday. We lost Bonnie Tyler last week (I’ll get to her in a second). None of these people were perfect of course, but all of them made the world a better place in some way. They will be missed.
No so with Lindsey Graham. He was one of the most vile, war-mongering, disingenuous, and unprincipled American politicians in modern history. A man who sold his soul for power and never met a war he didn’t like. A man who helped cause so much human suffering in the world just so he could stay in office and keep enjoying the perks and power that went with being one of 100 Senators in Congress. He supported the International Criminal Court when it charged Putin after the Ukraine invasion, but targeted it when it charged Netanyahu and his Merry Band of Israeli Nazis for the Gaza genocide. He told the world he wanted Gaza wiped off the map. He pushed for the stupid and senseless attack on Iran when every sensible person–including many neocons–cautioned against it. He got on national television and said that “we’re killing the right kind of people” after the United States murdered 168 children and their teachers in Minab, Iran. The guy was an absolute piece of shit, and he will not be missed. But I’ll say this as well: he was clearly a man who lived in fear of a secret being exposed. My guess, and this is already coming out (no pun intended), is he was secretly gay and lived in the closet his entire life. Maybe his secrets were worse than this, but it could be this simple. After living a fraudulent life where he surrendered everything for the world’s illusory trappings, I do hope he finds some peace now.
2. Speaking of Bonnie Tyler… Once upon a time I was a teenager. An angst-ridden boy in the process of becoming a young man. A boy who hadn’t had a relationship yet, but who lived in his head and thus, was developing a healthy appreciation for words, language, and song lyrics. A visual boy who loved a good MTV music video, one with complexity, metaphor, and mystery. A video that made him think and wonder what the fuck it meant. A video that was a little above his head.
When Bonnie Tyler–a virtual unknown–suddenly appeared and came out with this gem, it checked ALL of my pubescent boxes:
I was even a little attracted to her, if I’m being honest. Okay, I was a LOT attracted to her. When this video came out in 1983, I was the same age as some of the boys in this video, and I was seriously turned on by both the power of her voice and that see-through white outfit she had on. She was fucking hot in this video, okay? Hot.
As an older man approaching 58, one who has now experienced love and loss many times over, this song hits me in a way few others do. It is soooooo bittersweet and beautiful, in a way the younger version of me simply hadn’t lived long enough to appreciate. But as an older man, I can tell you that you have not lived unless you’ve blasted ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ in the car with all your windows down and sunroof open after a bad breakup. You just haven’t. Bonnie Tyler’s passing a few days ago made me inexplicably sad. As with Ozzy, her music is a unique marker in time for me. She had two other hits–‘It’s a Heartache,’ a song my mother loved and one of the only ones I ever heard her sing when it came on the car radio, and ‘Holding Out for a Hero,’ which is included in too many movies and commercials to count. But ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ is the one that does all the things for me. Her death and this beautiful song she created (written by Meatloaf’s songwriter, Jim Steinman) are bittersweet reminders of how much time has gone by, how my life, with all its ups and downs, has proceeded since the time I first saw this music video. How much has changed. Who is no longer alive in my life. How innocent I was when I first heard this song. May she rest in peace.
3. The World Cup has been a gift from the world on the most miserable 250th Birthday imaginable. July 4th was my country’s 250th Birthday, and it should have been a day of joy and celebration for a country which, as I’ve written before, really is two Americas, not one, but which was birthed on ideals that are worth honoring and commemorating on such an historic day. Problem is, we have the worst and most corrupt President in history currently running the show, we’re co-sponsoring a genocide, and we’re also in the process of engaging in an unnecessary and senseless terrorist war against Iran–which may be God’s karmic way of telling us we have a lot more fucking work to do–so it was really hard for me to be merry or celebrate anything about this country two weeks ago. I seriously did not give two fucks. For me, there were no fireworks, no ponderous thoughts about ‘Merica. Nothing. Unlike our bicentennial in 1976, which I still remember fondly, America’s 250th birthday was literally just another day for me. And I was grateful for the thunderstorms and bad weather that fucked up many a celebration on the East Coast, including the Pedo-in-Chief’s attempted “town fair” in Washington, D.C. and fascist, dumbass speech afterwards that no one watched. Fuck him and everything he’s done, and fuck all the people who elected him.
No, for me, the true gift on our country’s 250th Birthday has been the World Cup and all of the foreigners who chose to ignore the latest episode of our American Shitshow and risked imprisonment and deportation to visit the United States over the past six weeks because they love soccer more than they fear an American Gestapo. They came in droves–Scots, Norwegians, Colombians, English, Argentinians, Brazilians, and Algerians. They came from everywhere on the planet, even from places like the Ivory Coast and Cabo Verde.
Where they DIDN’T come from was Italy because for the second World Cup in a row, Italy didn’t qualify, which chaps my ass. Get your shit together, coglioni idioti!
And you know what? The American people showed out. They did us proud. Everyday Americans not only welcomed our foreign visitors from all across the globe, they partied with them and supported their teams. The way the people of Lawrence, Kansas embraced the Algerian team in particular was truly moving. The idea that a midwestern town, albeit a college town, would support and welcome players from a proud Muslim country in the way it did was quite unexpected to me, and it gave me a lot of hope about what this country really is capable of if we can get our shit sorted and improve our lousy management. The Scots emptying Boston–drink-loving Boston!–of virtually all of its alcohol while walking around in kilts, singing songs and playing bagpipes at all hours made me wish I lived there to experience it firsthand myself. Even famously surly and insular Bostonians welcomed them–it turned out to be a match made in heaven. Norwegian fans rowing in Times Square. Brazilians partying there two days later. The joy went on and on and on, and it’s been a wonder to behold.
I loved all of it. I thought the World Cup was going to be a disaster here, full of Trump immigration flexing and embarrassing stories, and it turned out to be the opposite. All the TikTok interviews I saw of foreign fans saying things like: Everything you’ve heard about America isn’t true. The people are great, they’ve totally embraced us, and we’ve had the best time here, simple things like that made me want to fucking cry. The way my country has screwed the world up so badly and continues to do so, and these people somehow managed to see through all of it and give average Americans a chance, and then to have all that openness and empathy rewarded with the same from my people just gets me emotional. I’m so grateful for it. It proves that people around the world are very similar and want the same things–it’s their governments that ruin everything. Especially mine.
Yes, we still had a few national disgraces, in particular, the way we discriminated against the Iranian team, which made me angry. Instead of allowing it to play just like every other team, we forced the Iranians to leave the United States within hours of every match and return just before the next match. This was totally unsportsmanlike, unfair, and an absolute embarrassment to the United States. We should be better than this, but we’re not. Every member of the Iranian team carried itself with grace and class, even while we were bombing their country during their tournament, which embarrassed us even more. We at least should have allowed them to play exclusively in Mexico and Canada the entire time so the Iranians would have had the same chance as everyone else.
And after all of this, Iran STILL almost managed to make it to the next round, which I was really hoping for, but didn’t happen.
Apart from this and the shabby treatment of Egypt by a Dallas cop that one time, I think Americans showed our best side in this Cup. All those World Cup Hopecore videos on TikTok made me so proud, both for my country (or certain elements of it) and for the world for giving us a chance and not just associating us with the assholes whom the majority of people in certain states keep electing to office for some inexplicable reason. We are privileged in so many ways to live in the United States, but we’ve been suffering here in our own way for a long time. The happy invasion of World Cup fans over the past month–and all of their smiling, dancing, drinking, and partying in support of their teams–were a sorely-needed gift to us on our 250th Birthday, and a desperately-needed reminder that we are not alone in the world, that we are not our government, and that we are part of a bigger whole. We just need to open our eyes to it. For a month, we were forced to in spite of ourselves, and it’s been glorious.
4. My personal favorite player this World Cup? Erling Haaland of Norway, a Happy Warrior who birthed 1000 memes:
5. Something I learned on TikTok recently: pick your battles with kids and teenagers. TikTok is a great teacher if you get your algorithm right. A recent post by a child therapist taught me something that had been floating somewhere in my mind but had never been crystalized. You have to pick your battles with kids and teenagers. Every interaction with them is either positive or negative. If you want to have a good relationship with them, if you want them to trust you and come to you with problems or issues, your positive interactions need to outweigh your negative ones. As a parent, you have to make this happen. They are going to make mistakes, be disrespectful sometimes, and wrapped up in their feelings, which they are not yet mature enough to articulate in a clear way. If every interaction you have with them is correcting them, telling them what to do, criticizing them, calling them out, or arguing with them, you are going to ruin your relationship. They will just shut down and avoid you. They will cut you off. Not to mention the impact it will have on their self-esteem.
So what does this mean? It means letting some things go. It means not making every contact with them a negative one. It means not correcting them the second you get triggered by something they say or do. It means not personalizing everything. It means talking about something other than instruction or things they’re doing wrong sometimes. A lot of the time. This is easier said than done, but one thing I’ve found that works for me is remembering how I felt as a teenager and trying to put myself in my daughter’s shoes sometimes. Definitely a work in progress.
6. My ex-wife seems not to have learned this yet. I tried to send her the TikTok video that clued me in, but days after I sent it she responds with “I don’t have TikTok.” Oh, well I guess that’s the end of that, then? How about downloading it, which takes 5 seconds? You have Instagram already, FFS. Maybe this will teach you something? I already see communication problems developing between her and my daughter because it seems that she’s making too many of their interactions negative ones. M. complains about her all the fucking time and tells me some of the things she says. Obviously I take it all with a grain of salt and try to give my ex-wife the benefit of the doubt without invalidating her feelings, but I know her pretty well, and her baseline is extremely critical and negative due to how she was raised. This shit is only going to get more difficult for all three of us unless something changes.
7. I will write more about this sometime, but I finally decided to devote some serious attention and focus to learning how to cook. This gap in my skillset has been a thorn in my ass for years. There are reasons why I never learned to cook in a serious way. Most of them have to do with laziness, my views of food intake as being mostly utilitarian and something to get over with, and just being too intimidated by proper treatment of food and the cooking process to take it on. Learning how to cook always seemed like this huge chore, this mountain that I never had the time or energy to climb. Recently, this all changed, and I’m not entirely sure why. It seems a number of factors have suddenly coalesced to get me motivated to start learning how to prepare healthy meals for myself and my daughter. I’ll go into them in more detail at some point, but they include me wanting to eat healthier to support my workouts and weed out as much processed garbage from my life as possible. It started with going with a no-plastic, pour-over coffeemaker two months ago–which is working fabulously, thankyouverymuch–and getting rid of aluminum cans for my club soda addiction and going with glass bottles instead. Then I started thinking about all those frozen Trader Joe’s prep meals I rely on as quick fixes during the week when I’m too tired to cook. What’s actually in that shit? How much processed garbage are we all eating? How much of that shit causes cancer or makes us feel tired all the time. I’ve also been seeing how well M. cooks–she sends me WhatsApp photos of some of her meals–how much she likes food, and how health-conscious she is. So all of this finally got through my thick skull to motivate me to change how I eat.
To jumpstart it–because thinking and doing are two different things, of course–I did what a lot of guys do: I got me some gadgets. New toys to grease the skids. I got rid of the mishmash of old pots and pans I’ve accumulated over the years from my mother and from my marriage, including wedding gifts. I donated all of it to Green Drop. Then, after a headache-inducing amount of Virgo-quality research, I invested in a nice new set from Made In that I absolutely love. That stuff is so much better than what I had.
You can use different skillets for different purposes? No shit? I don’t need to poison myself with cancer-causing non-stick to avoid burning my eggs? You don’t say?
I even replaced the mismatched holdover flatware that I had divided with Ex. when we got divorced and bought myself a new set, also from Made In (after doing more research at Williams Sonoma, Sur la Table, etc.–do you have any idea how many flatware choices there are out there? It’s insane.) They’re made in Italy, simple, and totally beautiful to me. I even replaced my mother’s old salt and pepper shakers, which were a pain in the ass because they were old, too small, and had to be loaded via an impossible to remove suction cup at the bottom. You see, dear Reader, I know myself. I like gadgets and new tools that I can learn to use and keep for a long time, whether it’s pots and pans, cameras, or a photography website. Once I have these tools, something on a primal, caveman level gets triggered in my lizard brain and compels me to learn how to use them to my maximum benefit and creating something cool with them.
In the process of all of this I asked myself ‘Why do you still have all this old shit? Why did you keep all of it for so long? Why are you still using a mismatched assortment of flatware from your failed marriage and letting all that bad juju remain in your life? Why haven’t you upgraded your mother’s maddening salt shakers for 30 years? Why do you still have the table mats she gave you right after law school (I just changed those too)?‘
Two reasons: (1) I’m sentimental as fuck and have trouble parting with things from my past, especially from my parents, and (2) sometimes I just don’t think of something until it pops into my head, or someone crams it in my face. This is why I hold on to things too long. But it really is time for a change. I’m excited to learn to use these new tools of mine, reduce my learning curve, and start eating healthier. It’s going to take time. I’m not trying to become a Michelin chef or anything, I’m just trying to become competent at cooking and feeding myself and M. for now. More about this later.
8. The Celtics traded my favorite player, Jaylen Brown, which sucks. I don’t post about sports very much here–I have Twitter for that–but I need to express my sadness about the Celtics trading Jaylen Brown to the Sixers a few weeks ago. JB was my favorite player, was improving his game year after year, and was socially conscious, doing so much for the Boston community during the ten years he was with the Celtics. JB meant a lot to a lot of fans, including this crying kid who got me seriously teary when I watched this the day JB was traded:
I feel you kid. Most Celtics fans do. Alas, sports are a money business, and Brown’s contract was too big for the team to keep carrying while also paying Jayson Tatum a similar #1 player salary. So Brown is gone, the Celtics got a pittance in return, and another favorite player of mine is now playing for another team.
9. Kettlebells are my new best friend and my worst enemy. If you know, you know. The beauty of these things, which I’ve occasionally used before but learned more about on TikTok–again, TikTok is an insanely good educator if used properly–is they are simple and allow you to get a really good workout with literally one piece of equipment. The difficulty with kettlebells is they require much more attention to form than free weights do. If you don’t use them properly and within your limits, you risk seriously injuring yourself. They also kick your ass in record time. But man, I love them because they allow me to get in a quick mid-week workout in less than half an hour when I’d normally just not do it and wait for the weekend. They also work muscles and parts of my body I typically don’t focus on but which need the most development as one ages: the core and posterior chain. (I had no idea what a posterior chain was until I googled it). If you’re like me and you’re getting older and don’t want to invest in a lot of weights or an expensive gym membership, try getting a couple kettlebells of varying weight and learn how to use them. You won’t regret it. (Or maybe you will, but it’s good for you, like broccoli).
10. Next stop, Buenos Aires. This time I’ll have a nonstop flight with no pre-flight anxiety. It’s winter there, so it’ll be a little weird packing warm clothes in the middle of summer, but I really can’t stand the hot weather, so I’m looking forward to being somewhere cooler than sweltering New York. Unlike in Rio, we’ll be doing more exploring and walking around on foot, which I’m also looking forward to. Getting lost in neighborhoods is one of my favorite parts about traveling. At the risk of jinxing myself, I won’t be as concerned about getting robbed or getting my camera stolen this time, so hopefully I’ll do more street photography in BA. I really don’t know what to expect on this trip. I’ve been to Argentina only once in my life, back in 1995, and I only saw Buenos Aires through a taxi window because I had to switch airports to get to where I was going. I remember seeing a few buildings, but that’s it. What I’m hoping will happen is that this will be a really chill trip where M. and I just enjoy the city, the food, the people, the culture, the scenery, and get to know each other on a deeper level. It hasn’t been easy maintaining a relationship at this distance so these visits carry a lot of weight. I want to make the most of them and learn and experience as much as possible with her and us. It’s going to be wonderful just being together in person, without all that anxiety fronting everything and requiring a day and a half to get used to each other. When I think about it, something about having a relationship with someone in a different hemisphere is quite insane, but YOLO. As my Dad used to say in his simple and understated way, “We’ll see what happens.”
