Hello, LeBron James. On behalf of the whole city of Philadelphia, let me be the very first to welcome you and express how thrilled we are that you’re joining our 76ers. Those Process years sure were hard, but having you on the team makes all of the frustration over Ben Simmons and forced excitement over guys like Michael Carter-Williams worth it.

I know you’ve played plenty of games here in Philly over your career, but going from the hotel to the arena is no way to see the city. So, again on behalf of all of Philadelphia, I’d like to pass along some local knowledge that will help you in your time here.

They Don’t Film Always Sunny Here Anymore

It used to be that you’d occasionally see them filming some scenes here, but they haven’t done any shooting in Philly for years. The show has realistically jumped the shark and it’s kind of like, “OK, who’s this for at this point?” but yet the gravy train rolls. I know you were just in LA, so you may have seen them film there, but don’t get excited if you’re around Logan Circle or the Italian Market or something and think there’s a chance of running into the set. M. Night does still film here. I saw him on set of that Apple TV show he did in Rittenhouse. Little guy. I’m sure you’ll see plenty of him courtside now, so you don’t even have to hope to run into him while he’s directing.

They do, however, film Task and Mare of Easttown around here—mostly in the suburbs. If you can work on your Delco accent a little, they’d probably write you a part. I think that’d be a real thrill for both the crew and the viewers. People love those shows. They love them so much that they’re doing crossover episodes, thus creating a Delco Cinematic Universe, or “DCU” for short.

You Can See the Liberty Bell from Outside

Do not pay for the Liberty Bell. You might be tempted to go see it what with having more time to kill around here, and playing for a team that uses it in its imagery, but it’s not worth the price of admission. You can see it from outside in the glass. I have walked by it countless times, and every time I see a big line of people waiting to pay to see it, when I can see it perfectly well through the perfectly clear glass walls of the room it’s housed in, I think they are suckers. You are not a sucker, LeBron. Don’t spend your money on the Liberty Bell.

Also, there’s a livestream of it, so you can see it from the comfort of home if you really decide you need to look at it right away.

What Is Jawn and When Do You Use It?

While you’re working on your local slang, you’re probably wondering about “jawn.”

“Brendan,” you ask, “What exactly does ‘jawn’ mean and when do I use it?”

You’re not alone in asking this, Bron. Don’t worry. It’s very simple:

“Jawn” is a catch-all word for just about every noun, as in “Pass me that jawn” or “I don’t like that jawn.” The correct time to use it is never.

That Commute from NYC Is Going to Get Old

So, you’ve decided to do the NYC to Philly commute, huh? That’s OK. Look, I know you like books, so the train ride will be a nice time to get some reading done. You might try that for a few months, but eventually you’ll start to get annoyed with potential train delays at 30th, or being stuck in Secaucus, NJ for track maintenance or something. We’ve all been there.

Plus, like so many people in New York City, you’ll no doubt get priced out or worn out by the hustle and bustle eventually, and you’ll move somewhere like Fishtown or Grad Hospital or “Olde Kensington” like everyone else.

I do understand the draw of New York City, and how Philly might feel second-rate. Let’s just say I saw plenty of NYU sweatshirts while I was at Temple.

Once you realize how much easier it is to ride the subway down to the arena for games, and PATCO or even the ferry over to Camden for practice, I think you’ll want to get a place here.

What’s that? You’re taking a helicopter every day? That seems like a bad idea.

You Will Be Hit By a Car

Once you get a place in Philly, you’ll probably want to start biking around. It’s the best and most reliable form of transportation in the city, and I hear that you’re already a guy who likes a good bike ride, so that’s perfect.

Like New York has all of its dumb rules about when or how you become a “Real New Yorker,” one of the ways to fast-track yourself to becoming a bona fide Philadelphian is to be hit by a car while riding a bike. I have been hit multiple times. Plenty of my friends have been hit multiple times. Our unprotected bike lanes and hostile drivers are one of the many charms of the city that you’ll come to love.

As Soon as You Lose One Game You Are Going to Hear the Dumbest People in the World Say You Suck

I know you’ve had disappointing games and even disappointing seasons, but they were in Cleveland, Miami and Los Angeles. Miami and Los Angeles are cities with plenty to do outside of sports, like be an influencer or get sunburnt. If things went bad on the court, it wasn’t the be-all-end-all. People mostly forgot or never even saw it in the first place.

Cleveland has so little of anything, including sports, that even if you shit the bed they are still relatively cool with you because they were just grateful you were there. It’s something the entire city should deal with in therapy, really. No one should be that forgiving of abuse for that long.

Philadelphia is neither of those things. The city and its people don’t have enough going on that they could simply ignore poor performances, but it also has enough going on that people won’t just be grateful you’re here by default. Philly fans, too, need a good dose of therapy, beginning with everyone who speaks on the radio or television.

I unfortunately fear we may be the city that breaks you, LeBron. I worry that Philadelphia is the one that ends your charmed career of winning everywhere you go, and we will go down in history as such. It will be the ultimate test to see if the ultimate winner can overpower the ultimate loser energy, to out-muscle the gravitational pull of self-destruction created by generations of Philadelphians romanticizing being terrible as a righteous suffering.

Unstoppable force, unmovable object, etc.

Do not listen to them, LeBron. You were in Space Jam 2 and you deserve all of the good things that have happened to you in life. The upside to this is that it will give you plenty of material to practice your Delco accent.

The reality is that the city has just been burnt so many times. We Sixers fans have felt like we’ve been at the end of The Process about 10 times now, and each time we’ve just been humiliated and had to take a bunch of steps backward. We’ve suffered greatly, and a lot of people are just putting up emotional walls to protect themselves from getting hurt again. It’s not really about you, LeBron. It’s about them. But therapy is expensive. It’s infinitely cheaper and easier to call into a radio broadcast and air your grievances. That’s the nature of America right now, unfortunately, but you already know all about that.

Welcome to Philadelphia, call me if you need anything.

Brendan

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Dinosaur Jr.

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Round Four

Round Five

Semifinal

It’s Over, Now We Can Wait for It To Start Again

Soccer isn’t a game where you can rely on the statistics as the whole story. I get a little frustrated when people get too in the weeds about things like xG and “big chances created.” But the statistics in the World Cup Final between Spain and Argentina did a pretty good job of explaining the whole vibe.

The eye test showed that Argentina relied on a strategy of “rely on the greatest player of all time for individual magic, assume our superstar goalkeeper will continue to make game-saving stops when necessary, and the other nine of you can go out there and bust heads.”

It’s not an easy feat to paint Lionel Messi as the villain. He can be a bit of a bastard on the pitch, and he has his “Little Dictator” reputation. But, still, it’s largely understood that he’s the light end of the Ronaldo-Messi spectrum. And yet, the rest of the Argentina squad managed to make themselves the villain. Through its collective lack of ever really pushing to win the game through things like shots or goals, and through heavy tackles and then starting fights after the final whistle, there was very little to cheer for. It was a bad look all around, and it made it easy to look at the unbreakable unit of Spain, with its marketing push led by a teenager with braces and his adorable little brother in the stands, anointed and chosen by Messi himself.

It felt more like a relief than anything. Argentina winning that game, after doing so much of nothing for 120 minutes plus stoppage time would be the ultimate in “Nothing ever happens.” They did nothing, and in return they would be rewarded with an ending that felt unsatisfying and even scripted. The greatest of all time with an unprecedented back-to-back victory, sailing off into the perfect sunset after a difficult battle to get to the final, crossing off minor boss fights along the way. It would all just feel a little American, don’t you think? Especially after we were given an unprecedented halftime show, the idea of Messi doing something else unprecedented in the home of the New York Giants and also the Jets just seemed very unappealing. The supposedly ironclad rules of soccer were broken to allow for “hydration breaks” that turned a game of halves into a game of quarters, and American fans still cried out for more rule changes. Scripting it to become a perfect Super Bowl career finale would have been the ultimate pandering to the American viewer that should not be attempted to be won over.

Instead, we were given purity. Crisp passing, total football, suffocation by possession and patience. The winning assist coming from a player whose mother walked thousands of miles while pregnant to give her family a better life in Spain. There was more to root for in Spain rather than simply rooting against something or rooting for one person. Spain was a something, Argentina was (by and large) a nothing, despite Messi. It was clear they were hoping to get to penalties, where Emi Martinez would shine. It seemed like an apt ending for a match that would be scripted to create maximum drama as well as commercial break opportunities.

Instead, we got a nice little team buildup from Spain ending with a solid goal and then the match ended with Messi crying. There were no penalty heroics, no second chances, only an Argentina team down to 10 men thanks to Enzo Fernandez’s poor decision making and the fact that Argentina, the top-ranked team in the world, just never had control of the situation.

And now the Messi era seems like it’s over. The Ronaldo era on the international level is over — the Saudi league might as well just be a very lucrative purgatory. The Neymar era is over. The Kane era as we know it may well be over depending on what a 36-year-old Harry Kane looks like. That’s the thing: We simply don’t know where we’ll be in four years, but it’s exciting as hell to have that unknown ahead of us as a sports fandom.

We now get to watch these new story arcs develop, these new eras ushered in. The Lamine Yamal era, the Mbappé era, the Jude Bellingham era. New rivalries, new comparisons. On the sidelines, we’re about to be gifted Zidane managing France and Klopp managing Germany, and I’d bet my bottom dollar that Pep Guardiola is in the dugout in 2030, whether it’s for Spain, Italy or he goes full competitive psycho and takes a job like the U.S. just to prove that he really can do it all.

The World Cup Final was a much worse game than the “Bronze Final,” in which France and Spain exchanged blows in a high enough scoring game to convert even the most staunch believer that soccer is too boring and nothing ever happens. But, the final had the stakes. And it had a result that allowed us all to move on rather than clinging to some past. We could welcome the beginning of something new. We were given closure.

Because closure isn’t always that perfect positive moment. It rarely is, in fact. Often closure comes with enormous heartbreak that sticks with you forever. Often, closure comes when you experience a loss. That’s just how it works. You lose a lot more than you win.

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Despite all of the problems around this World Cup and FIFA as an organization, it’s impossible not to be excited about what’s next. Four years can be an eternity when so much can happen. Entire lives and arcs can happen in the negative space that exists between World Cups, if you’re not someone who pays attention week in week out for the overwhelming global soccer calendar. But maybe you will now.

If this World Cup didn’t ignite a little something in you to at least be curious about soccer going forward, if the Viking Row didn’t inspire you to at least check out a Manchester City game, or if Lamine Yamal didn’t get you down a Wikipedia rabbit hole of the history of FC Barcelona and its political identity, or if you just didn’t feel that magic that the evangelists talk about, then it might truly just not be for you. At least for now. And that’s OK.

There’s always next time. Chances are good Shakira will still be performing, and thank goodness for that because she rocks. Chances are also good that Alexi Lalas will still be part of it, too. But, we can still dream for a better tomorrow. A lot of things can happen between now and 2030.

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Shakira.

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Round Four

Round Five

You Will Always Be A Loser

I know the odds are astronomical. But you’ve got to play if you want to win.

I was tidying up the house this morning and had more paper trash to throw away than usual, because over the last couple of months I’ve become the kind of person who gets a few lottery plays when the Powerball is especially high. It’s funny to say something like, “I’m not going to play right now. Someone just won and the jackpot is only $20 million.” As if my odds are greater when it’s over $300 million and as if even after taxes the payout I’d receive for the base $20 million jackpot wouldn’t support a life of doing basically whatever I wanted until I die.

I never win, though, and so I throw away the tickets and the receipts unless I forget to and they sit on my kitchen table for a few days, and when they manage to break through the backdrop and become something that I’m aware I need to throw away, I’m reminded that I am a loser.

At the very least, I am not a winner.

One veers dangerously close to “wannabe motivational speaker” if they start talking about lifetime win/loss averages too much. It’s cliche to point out that an All-Star slugger only hits about one third of the time. Shaq only hit about half of his free throws. Is this the second time I’ve mentioned Shaq in this series? Huh.

England just can’t win, man. The upside, I’d say to them if I were trying and failing to console them after the heartbreaking loss to the greatest player of all time, is that France lost, too. No one thought France could lose. They also have a guy who is the best player in the world, and like Messi, the players in place around him are good enough to support the ambitions of a World Cup. So, you know, you lost, but so did they. Because losing happens more often than winning.

I’d say this knowing it has absolutely no consolation, because their brains are still going over what they should’ve done, like keeping up the pressure that had given them the opportunity for their first goal, maintained a similar shape that mostly stifled Argentina’s attack, and maybe made subs that were more conducive to maintaining possession and midfield dominance rather than sitting back and absorbing pressure and crosses. Dan Burn is not this tournament’s designated Big Lovable Guy, please stop trying to make it happen.

Messi has lost like this, too. He’s also won, of course. But he’s lost, too.

I don’t bet on sports. I don’t bet on really anything. It’s all a losing battle and the house always wins. We all know that, even the gamblers. And yet the gamblers still gamble because despite the house always winning, there’s that small chance that they win instead. Sports fandom is just gambling emotion. The more you put in, too, the more it pays out, and vice versa.

And it seems like no matter who you support, no matter how good they are on paper and how much every projection and intangible vibe-based model says they are “supposed to win,” the house always ends up winning.

There are plenty of ways to lose, too. No one is more noble or less noble than anther necessarily. You can be simply stifled in every attempt to do what you do best. You can never even get a real chance at winning because every attempt is shut down. You don’t lose so much as you were prevented from winning.

This was the case for France.

Or, on the other hand, you could lose by seeing the opportunity to win, coming agonizingly close to it, and falter. You can sort of give up and stop doing the things that allowed you to win in the first place, and everyone will be left looking for who to blame exactly. Because certainly someone is to blame for all of this. It’s demoralizing and you can see it on faces. It’s enough to shatter any unity and collective positivity that existed.

And now your reward is a “Bronze Final,” where the only goal is to avoid humiliation by being a loser twice in a row.

I’m not a betting man, but I like France’s odds in this one.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall.

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Round Four

I get it. I see the appeal.

America—really, the world—we love a big goofy guy. We love a big, strong, physically intimidating specimen of a human being that could crush us like a soda can but wouldn’t, because they’re our friend. Shaq, Andre the Giant, The Rock.

We love these big, powerful adults and we love to admire their hugeness while we also project a child-like innocence onto them, creating a feeling that we’re the ones who must protect these behemoths from the cruel world outside.

American culture is now ready to go to war for their newest favorite large boy, Erling Haaland and, by extension, his merry team of Viking destroyers.

And I want the record to show, too, that on June 11 I texted this in a group chat:

Everyone with a brain could tell that Norway was going to be the story of this World Cup. As soon as this official team photo was posted, it was over for every other team.

Listen: The Norway team was not the underdog that the media painted them to be. This is where I have to inject just a little bit of skepticism about this team and the way it’s portrayed. Erling Haaland is, in short, the most unstoppable true striker on the face of the Earth and will go down as one of the greatest to ever do it. And it wasn’t a situation where one star was surrounded by nobodies. Martin Ødegaard is one of the Premier League’s best midfielders. Players like Oscar Bobb, Antonio Nusa, Jørgen Strand Larsen and Kristoffer Ajer are legitimate top-flight talents, while Bodo/Glimt proved this season that Norwegian clubs belong on Europe’s biggest stage. This was a good team on paper and in practice.

But the Vikings won America’s hearts because, among other reasons, they knew what they were supposed to be doing here aside from scoring goals and preventing the other team from scoring as many goals as them. They recognized the current landscape of an international event. The team photo, the Row. Much like how all warfare has gone digital, what Norway did off the pitch was the 21st Century equivalent of their ancestors’ raids on a new shore, spreading their culture and customs, only they did it with clever marketing and gimmicks that they knew would take hold with the population without having to, you know, literally pillage.

This was, quite simply, Norway’s World Cup, because it feels like this World Cup isn’t just won on the field, but online. There is very much The People’s Champion this year, and Norway already won it.

Someone like Erling Haaland was uniquely suited for this. His specific brand of hugeness combined with an affinity for certain new-age social-media-ready wellness regimens like saunas, red light therapy, mouth tape and occasionally grilling big steaks, but combined with his ability to tease traditional American culture just enough to let us know that he’s not some manosphere bro created the perfect cult figure. He was an action figure. He was big and strong but couldn’t and wouldn’t hurt you, and he could still play dress up if he wanted to.

Soccer is still an afterthought in America. It comes after football, basketball, baseball and certainly it comes after reality TV and social media. If each round of the World Cup ended with voting on who your favorite team was, and which team should be eliminated, Haaland and Norway would cruise their Viking ship to an easy victory. This was a very American World Cup in this regard.

There have been plenty of other underdog stories in World Cups in the recent past, but none of them stuck like Norway. Morocco in 2022 is the one that most quickly comes to mind. It was a similar situation: A small country not known for its dominance on the global scale, but packed with stars from the biggest clubs in the world. Morocco surprised everyone by reaching the semifinals after eliminating Spain and Portugal. This was a team that died in the group stage in 2018, and before that hadn’t qualified for a World Cup since 1998. Its only other Round of 16 appearance before 2022 was in ‘86.

I was actually fortunate enough to be in Morocco when they got out of the groups, and the scenes in Marrakesh were as if they had already won, because in a way they had. The world was paying attention to them.

Unfortunately, Morocco has spent the last four years turning heel and finding its way into being one of the biggest villains in soccer, what with having basically stolen the African Cup of Nations trophy from a deserving Senegal thanks to some questionable politicking. But even without that, even before AFCON, Morocco had already been largely forgotten by fans who only tuned in every few years.

There were other over-the-top characters in that very tournament, too. Who can forget what Argentina goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez did with the Golden Glove trophy after Argentina won the whole thing in 2022?

Norway, though, at least right now, is in the perfect sweet spot: They are good, but don’t have the reputation of established giants. They have instantly recognizable stars and a mythology that everyone already understands. Most importantly, they’re in on the joke. They are having fun with this, their social media team is having fun with this, and they haven’t done anything to make anyone feel like they shouldn’t deserve our love.

They are still the lovable group of Viking warriors that America fell in love with, and they probably will be at the next World Cup, which is coincidentally taking place in Morocco, Spain and Portugal (along with some games in Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina. Logistics!). Whether a slightly older Norway can recapture its same magic in the next tournament will be interesting. Haaland will be turning 30 around the end of the tournament. Ødegaard will be 30. But the young rising stars like Nusa and Bobb will still be in their prime, to say nothing of the crop of talent that will likely come through clubs like Bryne, Molde and Bodo/Glimt.

This was the Norway World Cup, and it will go down like that.

And we in America will tell the tales of the Viking raiders who came in, brought about a new chant and stadium celebration that will be copied with diminishing returns just as the Icelanders brought the “SKOL” clap, until the next tournament when a new fun underdog, perhaps Scandinavian and perhaps not, understands that a good marketing gimmick can go just as far as on-field talent, as long as you have at least one generationally talented talisman of a player who is also a fun character and visually idiosyncratic.

If you have all that, you can conquer just about any place you want, and you can cement yourself into myth. Every World Cup, there’s some unknown player who thrusts himself onto the international stage and probably lands a big move to a big club for big money. But, when your new hero already has all those things, how do you reward the man who already has everything?

Today’s Snakes & Sparklers musical guest is Twisted Teens.

Also, I am sick this week, so any typos or errors or half-thoughts, just ignore that and know that I am operating at as high a level as I can given the circumstances.

RIP Bozo

Cristiano Ronaldo once again failed to win the World Cup.

If Ronaldo has zero haters, then I am no longer on Earth.

In his post-game presser, Ronaldo justified his lack of World Cup wins for Portugal by saying this:

Fine, I Will Now Earnestly Review Alexi Lalas’ New Album

Someone quote-tweeted one of Alexi Lalas tweets onto my feed, and I ended up looking at his profile to, I don’t know, get mad on purpose. After seeing a few dumb posts I noticed that his pinned tweet was about his new album that came out in 2022 called “Melt Away.”

I sincerely had no idea that Alexi Lalas was a musician. It makes so much sense. It’s like how so many right-wing grifters are failed comedians or screenwriters. Lalas’s whole “I don’t need you to like me” schtick comes from a deep desire to be liked and appreciated for his talents. It turns out he has nine (nine!) full-length albums dating back to the ‘90s when he was still playing up to a new one, Denim, released in June just before the World Cup started.

I am usually one for letting someone pursue their interests in safe spaces without judgment, and as I get older I am increasingly aware of the dangers of saying someone is “too old” to be trying something. But it is also extraordinarily funny to me that Alexi Lalas is spending his free time writing formulaic, possibly AI-assisted, rock music with patriotic undertones and numerous references to the U.S. team.

I don’t really write music criticism. I never liked doing it. I didn’t think I was qualified or especially good at it. I didn’t get a ton of enjoyment from it like I do from writing profiles or something like that. And, like I don’t like putting someone down for anything, I feel strange seeing someone’s artistic output, like discovering a secret poetry journal or something, and mocking them for it. But, this is a guy who has made his entire being centered around provoking others, picking fights, being obnoxious and having generally bad opinions both about soccer and general society.

So, I’ll put my own moral hangups and professional hesitation of writing criticism aside and, for you, my audience, write an album review for the new Alexi Lalas album Denim, which dropped on June 1.

Off the top, it’s worth noting none of this is interesting. It’s not interesting negatively, it’s not interesting positively. It’s nothing. It’s a nothing album, and I’m not saying this as someone with a distaste for Alexi Lalas. There is nothing of substance to his music. It is on par with a band of high schoolers with a severely uncurated taste in music, copying all of their wide range of influences and churning out something that is none of those things.

With that, it’s almost difficult to approach this music with an actual critical eye. To critique something requires something to grab onto. There must be something that surprises and delights, or something that offends, and there is none of that. It’s the doctor’s office painting of music. And it’s all just too on-the-nose for a character like Lalas. It’s so on-the-nose that you’d think he was kidding if he were capable of a joke of this magnitude. A washed up never-has-been with music that has this extremely divorced Kirk Van Houten “Can I Borrow A Feeling” adult contemporary vibe to it all that if you could believe that Lalas were in on the joke you’d call him an auteur of musical comedy. But he’s not, and you’re left picturing Alexi Lalas in situations where he desperately wants you to see that he is holding a guitar, because music is just such a big part of his life, man.

On top of the soulless, again, possibly AI instrumentation that bounces between Lenny Kravitz-esque Target aisle rock and chain restaurant bar theme song, Lalas’s lyrics paint cliche pictures of self-doubt and performative self-pity that, once again, knowing the man singing it, you find it impossible to believe that he has any sort of internal life like that. He is not a misunderstood man with a rough exterior but heart of gold. He just wants you to think he is for a moment while he sings lyrics like “I used to be a better kind of man, but now I realize this is exactly who I am.”

Lalas has put an album out roughly every four years, each with similar themes of something resembling self-reflection and with imagery that evokes something about U.S. soccer, such as a song called “Bomb Pop” which is probably a reference to the kits the team wore in 2014.

There’s no discernible identity for any of them, though. There are no eras to Lalas’s music, aside from the photo of himself that might be on the cover, starting with his big hair and mustache in the ‘90s to his much more conservative look these days. Across Denim, there is no discernible journey, either. There is no cohesive string pulling these songs together. It’s a haphazard patchwork of half ideas and tired songwriting. And for every song in the first or second person, it’s impossible to tell if it’s Lalas singing to someone else or about himself, meaning that the moments of self-reflection that verge on self-awareness of his lesser qualities, it’s equally possible that he’s simply pointing out the flaws of others instead.

He sings on “Tucked Away”:

Change your colors, change your ways
Little by little, it don’t look the same
The best parts of you are tucked away
And I hope that you let ‘em out some day
All those pretty pieces in your heart have all been folded in the dark and tucked away

If this is to himself, you’d almost feel for him in the moment. You could almost imagine that he’s a man who’s constructed a persona around being “kind of the asshole” and has gone too far, and wants people to understand the real him inside. But, more realistically, it’s probably about someone else or, even more realistically, about no one.

When songs clearly do come from his point of view, it’s on songs like “Lousy Bar,” which centers around a character returning to his hometown and its aforementioned lousy bar, and saddling up next to a woman who he proceeds to neg musically:

Look at all the people who′ve come out tonight
Well, I went to school with you, girl, didn’t I?
Yeah, I′m only back here for a couple of days
And to tell you the truth
I couldn’t wait to get away

He also finds time to lament the damn woke future by pointing out that this once great lousy bar has outlawed smoking and you pay with credit card.

The standout song (derogatory) might be “Avalon,” though, on which you have the narrator at his most bitter, his most self-righteous, his most “This is all your fault, look what you made me do, and I’m also being victimized!”

Is there any chance that you might miss me when I’m gone
Is there any way to turn it over / Is there any way to turn it back
Is there any time to split the fiction from the fact

The final song on the album veers toward “fun,” with an anthem called “Kicking Balls,” which you can perfectly imagine with your mind’s ear. I don’t have to explain it to you. It sounds like it would play over the credits of an extremely cheap movie about soccer. And it’s in this moment where you might think, “Oh, OK, he’s just goofing around. This is a goof.” And if this were the only song, or even the only type of song, you might be right.

But there is so much cliche throughout Alexi Lalas’s musical catalog that it is clear he is trying. The song titles themselves prove this. Anyone who is joking does not put in as much work to try to appear serious, and fall short of doing so, if they are not really trying to appear serious. It’s just that when Alexi Lalas tries his absolute best to be taken seriously as a musician doing everything he understands to be what serious musicians do, you end up with songs titled things like “Drive-By Serenade,” “Sonic Lullaby,” “Chasing Sunset,” “Fight Another Day,” “Welcome to the Life,” “Broken Stars,” “Dancing to a Whisper,” “Angels With Angles,” “Living in Yesterday,” “Life of Someone Else,” “I Still Love Christmas,” “Red, White & Denim.” All of these are real.

It’s all bad enough to warrant being a part of the larger conversation about why there is no good conservative art.

Someone pursuing a creative output, especially someone so clearly playing a “jock” role, should nearly always be celebrated. But, in the instance of Alexi Lalas, you have to mock it. You have to imagine how funny it would be for Zlatan and Thierry Henry to find his notebook of lyrics and read them on the air while Rebecca Lowe laughs in his face. There is not a single redeeming quality of Denim. And for a man who has dabbled in professional sports, broadcasting, political commentary and a relatively prolific music career, the most impressive feat is how dull it all is. And it’s made worse knowing that this is truly the best he can do.

The USA Are Losers. How We Respond to That Will Say Everything

The U.S. lost a game that it could have won. I’m not sure they should have won, considering Belgium still has guys like Jeremy Doku, Romelu Lukaku and Kevin de Bruyne. But, those guys didn’t start the game, and the biggest problem the U.S. had to deal with was Charles De Kataeler and an aging Leo Trossard about ready to ride off into the Turkish sunset with Besiktas.

The U.S. stunk. The Americans’ only goal — Malik Tillman’s free kick — took a deflection generous enough to get past Thibaut Courtois. Manager Mauricio Pochettino did the unthinkable (for him) and made halftime subs and tactical reconfigurations after Sergino Dest and Christian Pulisic put up stinkers. The team looked shell shocked from the jump. They looked panicked and outclassed at every turn. They made dumb mistakes, overhitting and underhitting passes. For some reason goalkeeper Matt Freese decided he was prime Ederson and ventured two time zones outside of his box and then got his boot caught on the ground when he tried to clear the ball, leading to Belgium capitalizing on the empty net.

It was a rough watch, and seemed to only really shock the likes of the Barstool crowd who were high on a combination of unchecked American exceptionalism, blissfully unencumbered patriotism and weaponized ignorance about soccer. Pat McAfee, whose voice I have never heard but whose face I have seen for countless hours at the gym as he seems to be held captive and forced to broadcast for weeks on end, deduced that Belgium was the greatest team in existence after making the U.S. look like this big of chumps.

A few years ago, Pat, you might’ve come across as knowledgeable.

But, instead, the U.S. got its pants pulled down in front of the home crowd and its World Cup journey ended, just like it always has. And now the U.S. finds itself at a bit of a crossroads on its soccer journey.

Remember what Pochettino said at the start of the tournament about U.S. sports culture rewarding losers:

“If you start in MLS and you haven’t won a game in three months and you’re at the bottom, what’s the consequence if there’s no promotion or relegation, no international competition? American sports reward losers! But soccer is different: if you reward those who don’t win… If you don’t have goals, you don’t fight. If I lose, what happens? Nothing. They just fire the coach. Also, the American player is disciplined. But with a sense of complacency that isn’t good in soccer. It took us a year and a half to change that mentality.”

The U.S. will not fire Pochettino. But Pochettino is absolutely not going to stick around to be the Lisan al-Gaib of American soccer. Why would he do that? Despite every interviewer trying to bait him into saying he feels American whenever the crowd sang John Denver, Pochettino has no ties to U.S. soccer. And despite the disappointing exit, Pochettino will have suitors back in Europe. His stock dropped a little after stints at Chelsea and PSG, but those were situations ill-suited to Pochettino’s managerial profile. He is a guy who wants to be involved at every level of squad development from the youth level up to the senior team and craft it in his image. Those two clubs can’t do that. They want to buy ready-made stars and win now.

The irony is that right now, the U.S. is in a situation where it could mold itself into a soccer entity that would be absolutely perfect for someone like Pochettino. But that’s just not going to happen.

(My bet is that he waits for a club like Newcastle to fire Eddie Howe and steps in. Check back later this year.)

So, now the U.S. are losers. And the next steps the federation takes will say everything about whether they really want to compete to win as if there’s no alternative, or whether they’re OK with trying as best as they can and winning a consolation prize, which the leaders of this country claim they despise so deeply. The problems obviously go much deeper than one manager can go, with factors like the disgustingly expensive youth soccer setup in the U.S.

But, one thing that helps is a good manager who can change the mentality of the players. That would be a start. And Pochettino did make a start, but every indication is that the U.S. will once again be starting over.

Nothing Ever Happened Again

Argentina faltered once again on its trek to back-to-back World Cup titles, or at the very least back-to-back trips to the final against France.

After going down 2-0 to Egypt when Mo Salah got one past Emi Martinez, Argentina got a lifeline when VAR called a foul on the opposite end of the pitch. Questionable and frustrating, but Egypt would have to settle for its 1-0 lead after Messi decided to have another one of his penalties saved earlier in the half.

Egypt didn’t sulk, and scored on a gorgeous bit of end-to-end play, and there was no calling this one back.

With just over 20 minutes plus stoppage time left, it really looked like Argentina would be out after finding a way past Cape Verde in the previous round.

But then, Argentina was Argentina.

The announcers dictated it almost beat-by-beat: For lack of a true target man striker profile, Argentina would allow centerback Cristian Romero to venture forward as he has for Tottenham and Argentina — having delivered the dagger against Cape Verde. Before the broadcast team could even inhale, their prophecy came true, and Romero found himself in space for a free header. Moments later, Messi did what he typically does, finding enough space to fire a shot and bring hope to Argentina.

Shoutout Lautaro Martinez for thinking he was about to bag himself a highlight reel with an attempted bicycle kick at the post. Close.

It’s not even worth analyzing Enzo Fernandez’s go-ahead goal, because it just felt inevitable once Messi did this. Argentina would never fall to someone like Egypt, because that would mean something happened.

Gordon, Fuck You :D

Mexico v. England was an all-timer of a battle. But that didn’t mean there weren’t moments of levity and humor.

Rafael Márquez probably should’ve dropped some insults en Espanol for Gordon to study up before he kicks off at Barcelona this fall.

Careful, The Racists Are Out

Just as I suspected would happen last week, Erling Haaland’s break into the mainstream has also meant that the racists of the internet would use his big Nordic face as something to back up their racists beliefs. I will not be posting any of that here. You’ll just have to trust me that it exists. What I also saw was a post Haaland himself posted in 2021.

So, in short, Erling Haaland is a guy who does not want to be used as a pawn in whatever awful race science argument the worst people in the world are making, and we love him even more for that.

Elsewhere in the tournament, Kylian Mbappe was forced to defend himself after Paraguayan Senator Celeste Amarilla (whose name in Spanish translates to Sky Blue Yellow) posted a heinous and vile post about him following France’s win against Paraguay and Mbappe’s refusal to shake hands with goalkeeper Orlando Gill after the rest of his team had spent 90 minutes plus stoppage time trying to kill them with little regard for the ball at all.

Mbappe has always seemed to have his head screwed on especially well, and despite being a Ronaldo fanboy, he seems to have bucked the trend of R7 guys also leaning conservative. He’s been outspoken against the rise of far-right politics in Europe and about racial discrimination. When the weight of the world is placed on the shoulders of such a young person, as they were with Mbappe, it’s always a worry that he won’t live up to the moment. Mbappe has at nearly every turn. There have been so many instances of the international media goading him into saying something that he didn’t mean or something that would create more headlines, and he’s shrugged them off like a Ligue 1 defender.

Mbappe responded with just about the kindest “shut the fuck up” imaginable.

Ms Celeste Amarilla, you are a despicable woman, unworthy of your position.

“You do not represent Paraguay, a country that has shown such passion and honour throughout the tournament. Because of your thoughtlessness and your blatant racism, the whole world has already forgotten the historic journey and effort your players made during this World Cup. It is now overshadowed by an incompetent woman who is presenting the worst possible image of her country.

I will never allow people like her the freedom to spread their hatred and racism across the world.

Yeah man.

Amarilla responded basically saying “Yeah, my post was racist. If he got mad about it, good,” and then doubled down with, “I come from a time where you just said racist and homophobic stuff all the time,” and ended with this, verbatim:

I come from that generation, so now I'm trying to build a different Celeste Amarilla, that's capable of co-existing with others. Have patience, I'm trying.

At time of posting, she hasn’t yet gotten a “Coexist” bumper sticker yet, but we’ll continue to monitor the story.

Sincerity Alert

Every soccer fan has a World Cup memory that’s left an indelible mark on their brain. I remember the Zidane headbutt, of course. I was 14 for that one. I’d be lying, though, if I said that the strongest World Cup memory of my youth was anything but in 2010 when I was at Senior Week in Myrtle Beach, SC. I have this distinct memory of when the U.S. scored in a game (I can’t remember if it was the draw against England, the comeback against Slovenia or the Donovan goal against Algeria), all of the other Senior Week kids on the block ran outside and yelled and kicked over trash cans and then picked them back up and then ran back inside to watch the rest of the game.

We can spend a lot of time arguing about soccer. We can make it the most important thing in the world if we inject the right real-world happenings into it. We can also just overreact like any sports fan does. Every sports fan on earth does their share of at-home talk radio arguing, or losing sleep thinking about what could’ve happened to change the outcome. It can drive you nuts.

And not to get too heartfelt in something that’s supposed to be pretty light (he says after a post about racism), but when I turned on the Norway game and the first shot was Haaland talking with the kids who would walk out onto the field with them, it really made me happy. He wasn’t doing anything particularly special, just talking to them, paying attention to them, smiling as they chattered at him and joking around. Those kids will remember that moment forever. They’ll remember their five minutes with Haaland where he gave them the time of day, because that sort of thing means the entire world to a kid. I’ve met my heroes as a kid, I can say that with absolute certainty. These are core memories.

There’s another clip where Haaland is shaking kids’ hands and has to get the attention of one of them, who has a “Holy shit” moment realizing who just asked for his handshake, and another kid just going nuts from excitement.

Hell yeah. That just rocks. That’s the whole point of this. Yes, there’s the corruption, the geopolitics, the unwelcoming environment of the United States for an increasingly large number of people, the VAR decisions, the lack of VAR consistency, Alexi Lalas, all of those are bad and sometimes make it difficult to enjoy the World Cup with a fully clear conscience.

But when you remember that all of this, really, is for kids, there’s sort of a liberating feeling about it all. It doesn’t mean that you, an adult, are any less serious a person because you are passionate about something that’s for kids. It means that maybe you still have some of that child-like wonder you swore you shook years ago.

That said, I think at age 34 I should get to walk out with Harry Kane or Mbappe before a game. I’d even settle for someone like Michael Olise or Messi. I never got to do the Make-A-Wish thing when I got sick, and I’d like to cash in now, please.

Today’s Snakes & Sparklers musical guest is Fiddlehead.

Took a few extra days for this one, and boy was that a smart decision. We’re getting down to it now. There was almost too many “instant classics” to choose from.

Philadelphian Hospitality

Mexico fans (more on them in a bit) found out what hotel the English team was staying at, and blasted fireworks outside at 2 AM.

This sort of thing happens all the time. So much so that Philadelphia’s own mayor did it to the city when she pushed the 4th of July fireworks show to 2:30 AM because of storms.

You’d think she had to play against the dogs of Fairmount in the morning and wanted a bit more of an advantage. Weird stuff!

The Streets Will Remember Vozinha

The 0-0 against Spain? Flukey. Spain just hadn’t kicked into gear yet. The 2-2 against Uruguay? Uruguay was just underachieving in this tournament. They never were serious contenders. 0-0 against Saudi? At this point, it was expected to get some sort of result, and we’d see Cape Verde make it out of the groups against all odds. They were rewarded by playing No. 1-ranked Argentina and No. 1-ranked Messi, and surely it would be a bloodbath.

Yeah, well.

Everyone knew Argentina would and should have won that game. The fact that it was close at all was something that even the most casual World Cup viewer can’t help but find the magic in.

You probably didn’t even know where Cape Verde was before that. And you’d be forgiven. Could you point to it on a map? Here it is:

There’s a phrase you’ll see in soccer discussions sometimes: “Nothing ever happens.” It means that when there’s a storyline of some great Cinderella or giant-killer or any against-all-odds storyline that could possibly happen, it doesn’t, and things tend to follow the path of least resistance.

By the way, that map isn’t of Cape Verde. That’s the Canary Islands. Didn’t catch that, did ya? Here’s Cape Verde:

Ultimately, nothing ever did happen with Cape Verde against Argentina. And yet, so much happened. To take Argentina — ARGENTINA — to extra time, to say nothing of the actual quality of Sidney Lopes Cabral’s tying goal in the 103rd minute, is absurd. To come within mere minutes of going to penalties and then fall short, justifies all of the tears Cape Verde players were shedding after the game. And it’s a shame, because it would’ve been a wonderful icing on the cake to see the 40-year-old, clubless goalkeeper Vozinha face Argentina in penalties to further solidify his place as the unlikeliest national and international hero.

We knew Cape Verde would lose this game. We knew in our hearts because, ultimately, nothing ever happens. Cristian Romero’s header glanced off of a Cape Verde player and into the net, and Argentina went on like they were supposed to. Nothing happened, because nothing ever happens. But for 115 minutes, plus stoppage time, it really seemed like something could happen or was about to happen. Maybe that’s something enough.

That still wasn’t Cape Verde in the second photo. That’s the point. Here it is for real.

Or is it?

Cool Guys Walk Away from Explosions

Congratulations to everyone who is now aware of Erling Haaland.

I want the record to show that I predicted Norway advancing to the round of 16 on June 11. I have the receipts if anyone doubts that I know ball.

This game, and Neymar’s career with Brazil, ended with a consolation penalty like he was a dog being put down after the game and got one last big meal and run on the beach, after which he started jawing at Norway goalkeeper Ørjan Nyland for some reason.

And then he sat down and had himself a good ugly cry.

I, personally, have never left a job by performing one last task, picking a fight from someone at a different office, and then crying. But that’s just me.

Also, some advice: if someone in your orbit who is not Norwegian is just a little too into this Norway team and the success of a Nordic country at the expense of a country like Brazil, you should be a little wary.

Mexico Had Home Field Advantage

In the history books, or history blogs, about this World Cup, the games that will stand out will be in Mexico. Against Ecuador, the volume inside the enormous Estadio Azteca — ahem, Mexico City Stadium — after Raúl Jiménez’s second goal was deafening on the broadcast alone.

Against England, the packed house of 87,000 braved the thunderstorm and booed “Don’t Look Back in Anger” mercilessly until the house DJ went back to Mexican music. England had to defend for their lives after going down to 10 men, and might as well have been facing more than 11 with the fans behind El Tri.

The U.S. is obviously also playing tonight in Seattle, which is, compared to other places in the U.S., a “soccer town,” but it’s not going to be even close. And, no offense to our friends in Canada, but they simply can’t hold a candle to the Mexican fans.

Until the last whistle, Mexico looked like they could’ve and maybe even should’ve won that game. Yes, England were very much the favorites, but that went out the window as soon as the game started. Mexico looked dangerous, fast, cohesive and backed by the stadium. We soccer fans simply can’t match the energy of futbal fans. The announcers couldn’t stop complimenting the fans and the atmosphere either.

The final might be played in New Jersey, but in the years to come this will feel more like Mexico’s World Cup than a shared North American cup — aside from the obvious negative American aspects.

If America Wants to Move Into a New Era of Soccer, It Must Move on From Former American Players

Plenty has been said in the past about the state of American soccer culture. It’s taken plenty of steps forward with things like the hiring of Jurgen Klinsmann and accepting more players who grew up abroad and, therefore, came through much more prestigious soccer institutions than an ACC college program. Now our starting lineup comes from prestigious clubs like Juventus, AC Milan, Crystal Palace, Leeds United, Monaco and Marseille rather than just MLS clubs aside from a few outliers. Our manager is Argentinian and has managed exclusively in Europe. The on-field culture of American soccer is moving forward.

But now everything else has to catch up.

To do that, we have to start taking ourselves — the non-player part of the culture — a little more seriously, and that might require some cruel decisions not unlike a sporting director cutting players or selling them when the right opportunity presents itself.

Yes, the players of our past like Landon Donovan, Stu Holden, Clint Dempsey, Jozy Altidore, Tim Howard and, shamefully, Alexi Lalas have spent time abroad. But they are still a relic of soccer’s past, and it’s evident in the broadcast. Forget Lalas’ bullshit. Even the best of the bunch still for the most part lack the expertise of someone like Peter Schmeichel, Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic or Clarence Seedorf. It’s why we have them in the first place.

If American soccer culture wants to take its next step forward, it needs to do so on the media front. The same way that we import expertise on the pitch and in the locker room, we should be doing that even more on the broadcasts, because these are the people educating and ultimately converting the soccer-agnostic or nonbelievers. Does it matter that much if the talking head is not American, if it means their analysis and attitude toward the game is perhaps more, I don’t know, nuanced in a way that anyone trained in America broadcast presentation is not?

At a time where we’re getting TV shows where Rob Gronkowski and Jameis Winston are learning about soccer during the World Cup, it says to me that we as a country are still stuck in the era of performative soccer ignorance. You’d see it on old episodes of SportsCenter when a highlight would slip through the cracks and Scott Van Pelt would mock the big words that European announcers would use. Soccer was always other in America.

But maybe, instead of having to play the part laid out by Tubi for Gronk and Jameis (not experts, just extremely confident), we don’t do that, and we pretend that we could actually learn more about the game rather than just be arrogant and simultaneously ignorant and almost disdainful about it.

Until that changes, you’re stuck with the likes of Lalas, because a guy like that who prioritizes takes and bluster thrives in that environment. This is how we end up with him clearly salivating about FIFA suspiciously reinstating Folarin Balogun after a red card suspension ruled him out for the U.S. game against Belgium. Now he can plant his flag on the side of “The U.S. is now a victim of international cancel culture because they hate that we were the recipient of a questionable rules decision. Bring it on!”

Yuck.

We can be better on the pitch, now we can be better in the broadcast booth and, hopefully, better in the stands, too. Because we as a nation have to move on from “I believe that we will win.”

Do Not Let These Weirdos Keep Saying This Stuff

Nate Silver, famous for being wrong online about politics and a lot of other things, took to Twitter last week to say something extremely dorkish.

“Hey, stop the most famous, most exciting sporting event on the globe so me and my friends can do made up homework!”

This is gross and stupid. This is dweeb behavior. This is the kind of thing that exists when you let gross dweebs run the world and have a prominent voice in society. No one wants this except for a select few. Unfortunately the prominence of betting in sports is going to make it so this sort of thing could conceivably happen. Soccer was a simple game of halves until “hydration breaks.” Who is to say that there’s not a pause in the tournament for “prediction market analysis?” I’d love to dismiss what Silver said as stupid and call him a dork and stuff him in a metaphorical locker, but I can also unfortunately see the bleak future where he gets his way.

I heard some kids who did not seem to be of legal sports betting age talk about placing bets at the Fan Fest this past weekend, and they kept unironically calling it “investing.”

So, ya know, who knows?

Jordan Henderson Played the Game of His Life Against Mexico

Jordan Henderson was a bit of a head-scratcher call-up to the England squad. He’s up there in age, now a few years removed from his Liverpool heyday and having spent a comedically short and misguided spell in Saudi before going to Ajax in Amsterdam and eventually returning to the Premier League for Brentford. The understanding is that ol’ Hendo was a personality hire, and that his locker room leadership complements Harry Kane’s on-field leadership. Specifically, England gaffer Thomas Tuchel believes that Hendo is the guy who gets the most out of Jude Bellingham.

So far, it’s hard to argue with his logic.

In the chaotic and wildly entertaining game at the Azteca last night, Henderson racked up a yellow card despite not making it onto the pitch, and then in celebration injured his wrist while jumping over a barricade and needed to be stretchered off. It came out this morning that he’ll miss the rest of the tournament and will need surgery.

“Asshole … just broke his arm”

Senegal Just Can’t Catch a Break

You want to talk about some soccer government fuckery, look no further than Senegal’s African Cup of Nations victory*. To put a very long story short, Senegal beat Morocco in Morocco. Morocco raised a stink about Senegal players leaving the pitch in protest of referee decisions. The game was suspended, and then Senegal returned to the field to eventually win the game and tournament. They hosted a parade back home and everything, but months later it was decided that FIFA and the Confederation of African Football would award the trophy to Morocco due to Senegal’s team leaving the pitch, and therefore had supposedly forfeiting the match.

Anyway, all of this is to say that Senegal really deserved more against Belgium, and it stinks to see them go out like that. Now Belgium has the privilege of facing off against a team also given a questionable leg up by FIFA. Take that, rules.

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Brian Fallon.

Now let’s do one of those big countdowns from 10 that they’ve been doing before every kickoff.

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1!!!!

Harry Kane Might Have Actually Been Cursed

Nil-nil in the 86th minute of England v. Ghana. Ghana has been sitting back and letting England do most of the attacking all game. Reece James floats a ball into the box that finds the head of Nico O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s header agonizingly doinks off the woodwork and somehow bounces right into the middle of the action, where Harry Kane, England’s captain and all-time greatest goalscorer is miraculously the first one to it.

And he skies it.

I yelled at home. Ah! The fans yelled in the stadium, no doubt the entire island of Great Britain yelled either in disbelief or amusement, depending on where you were.

The thing is, Harry Kane simply doesn’t miss things like that. We’ve seen countless goals from him. Actually, it’s not countless. It’s 2 goals for Leicester City, 5 goals for Leyton Orient, 9 goals for Millwall, 280 goals for Tottenham Hotspur, 143 goals for Bayern Munich and 81 goals for the England senior squad. Final count? Countless.

Kane is arguably the most complete striker on Earth, and that’s not even my incredibly biased opinion as one of his close personal friends and what one of my friends has called a “Harry Kane Truther” in our fantasy soccer chat. He just is that good.

So, it does seem like the only reasonable explanation for this is that he was cursed.

A Ghanaian witch doctor named Nana Kwaku Bonsam posted a video cursing Harry Kane before the Black Stars of Ghana took on England in Massachusetts. This guy, apparently, took credit for Cristiano Ronaldo being injured in 2014.

Kane described the moment after the game, sounding a lot like a guy who was cursed for a minute.

““I don’t know what happened, honestly. The moment the ball arrived at my feet, I felt a bit dizzy and suddenly the goalposts looked bigger than I’ve ever seen them before. Somehow, that only made the miss even worse.”

Bonsam has since said that he’s released Kane from the curse, so it’s safe to assume that England will get the job done against the already-eliminated Panama on Saturday.

It’s silly and fun. It adds some non-sports lore to the World Cup, not that soccer needed any more drama. It does make you think, though. These online witches have been successful lately. You can Google it.

And, come to think of it, what does Harry Kane do when he does score a goal? What is his celebration? It’s a celebration I’ve seen countless – countless – times, and could recreate it by memory. He shoots, he scores, and he runs like this:

Huh.

Let’s Hear It for the Ducks

By the end of this tournament, I expect every team to have its own duck mascot.

Mexico has Merlin, who belongs to a street vendor in Mexico City and walks around in his own little Mexico kit.

And Scotland has Donny, who has led a parade of bagpipes in Providence, RI.

I have a tattoo of a duck on my leg. If the US miraculously wins this whole thing, maybe I’ll add an Uncle Sam hat or something.

They’re Bullying Alexi Lalas Now

Listen, Thierry Henry is far too classy to even offer some witty retort to something Alexi Lalas says. He doesn’t have to. This past week, Zlatan has been more vocal, clearly leaning into the fact that the common viewer hates Lalas’s guts and Zlatan is taking the populist route by making little digs at him, like saying “America, you’re welcome,” when Rebecca Lowe announces he’s not in the broadcast studio that day.

But Henry is not that guy. Henry doesn’t have to be that guy by nature of his resume and his skill. And it’s through that skill that he did what I think will be the most overt anti-Lalas moment we get from Henry. He let his ability do the talking for him.

There was a fun clip of Henry and Zlatan going back and forth with keepy-uppy tricks, making it all look effortless and doubly cool by wearing suits. The studio put Elvis in the background, but I think they should’ve put “Weapon of Choice” by Fatboy Slim and rebooted the Christopher Walken dance routine.

Watch the clip, and see if you can see the moment I’m talking about:

It’s at the very beginning. Henry is dribbling and fakes a pass to Lalas, who, like a stooge, readies his instep to receive the pass, only for Henry to pull it back into his own path. Henry doesn’t look at Lalas to laugh with him, he looks at the camera to laugh at him with all of us at home. Lalas does his best to salvage the moment by doing some weird little jig thing, clearly having attended the Ashlee Simpson School of Playing Off A Brutally Embarrassing Moment on Television.

This, friends, is bullying. It’s righteous bullying. It’s hilarious bullying. But it is bullying nonetheless. Henry excludes Lalas from the game and then turns to the popular crowd – the rest of us – to laugh at his expense. Lalas would be excluded from this surely because he couldn’t hang with Henry and Zlatan, but Henry didn’t even give him a chance.

Lalas is, of course, a bully himself. So this is a good lesson from Thierry Henry in how to deal with those types sometimes.

Two down. Only Rebecca Lowe remains. Will she maintain her composure until the final or will we see the otherwise unflappable Lowe break character for the first time in her career?

They Stepped On His Ballsack

Professional athletes are often too media trained to make for good interviews. It’s always “yeah, no, it was a great team effort” or “No, yeah, obviously it’s a difficult game against good opposition,” etc.

So the moments of honesty really feel special when you get them.

New Zealand’s Ben Old gave a post-game interview after they were defeated by Egypt. Old described a clash with Egypt’s Yassir Ibrahim that ended with Old in a vulnerable position.

““I’ve touched the ball and I feel like he’s fouled me. As he’s gone to fall down, he’s fallen down on my ballsack and ripped my shorts and underwear,” Old said.

Old said he was, understandably, “freaking out.” But, don’t worry, he’s been checked by a doctor and he’s fine.

This Version of Belgium Isn’t Golden At All

It’s a trope at this point. I’ve seen it in memes and Instagram reels: Every major tournament over the past 10 years, offering up Belgium as the “sneaky” contenders for the game. For much of the 2010s and into the 2020s, Belgium was ranked as the number 1 team by FIFA. A tiny country that housed brain-spinning talent like Kevin de Bruyne, Eden Hazard, Thibaut Courtois, Jan Vertonghen, Toby Alderweirald, Vincent Kompany, Romelu Lukaku, Marouane Fellaini and, of course, Nacer Chadli.

A few of those names are still there, but they seem more like painful reminders of what never was for Belgium and what looks increasingly likely won’t be for quite some time. Belgium has been frustrating to watch not because of the beautiful on-field talent, but because of the guys put in charge of organizing them and giving them instructions. Current Belgium boss Rudi Garcia’s highest honor is a Ligue 1 title with Lille at a time before PSG was the de facto winner every year, and a series of runner-up finishes in other competitions with other clubs. Before that, it was Roberto Martinez, who had managed to fail upward in the English league despite a few FA cup wins and an overperforming Everton.

It’s sad watching Belgium right now, because with each uninspiring game and reminder that the likes of Kevin de Bruyne are now positively geriatric at almost-35, you’re watching the door slam shut on an era that should’ve brought so much more. And now Belgium just has to wait until it’s given another golden generation and hope that someone more capable is put in charge of them.

It Turns Out Cape Verde Means Business

Congratulations to America’s Team, Cape Verde, after their second win of the tournament: A stunning 2-2 win over Uruguay after their shocking 0-0 win over Spain in the opening match of the tournament. We figured it was a fluke. We thought Spain just hadn’t switched on yet – which still might be true, considering they took their anger out on Saudi Arabia in the next game. Now level with Uruguay on points and with only Saudi Arabia to face, it’s actually possible that they make it out of the group and continue to win over the hearts of neutral viewers thanks to endearing characters like 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha.

With this win, though, I’d like to take this opportunity to shine a light on the other side of that Uruguay/Cape Verde matchup, specifically in the Uruguay dugout.

Uruguay manager Marcelo Bielsa is one of the most storied and celebrated managers of all time. The Argentinian has managed on the club level and national level for Argentina. He’s done stints in La Liga, Ligue 1, Serie A and most recently the Premier League with Leeds before taking the Uruguay job.

I’m talking about Bielsa because it’s important to know his connection to U.S. men’s coach Mauricio Pochettino. Another Argentinian, Pochettino grew up in the small town of Murphy, Argentina. The story goes that a then-13 year old Pochettino was being scouted by Newell’s Old Boys. Bielsa, then a scout for the club, apparently showed up to the Pochettino household at 2 in the morning. I imagine it was storming. I imagine a clap of thunder and shock of lightning lit the figure in the doorway, adding to much more mystery and suspense. Bielsa, and shrouded in mystery and in my imagination also a literal shroud, asked about their son. Pochettino’s parents told Bielsa that their son was sleeping, as he was a child and it was 2 in the morning, so Bielsa did what any good scout would do. He asked if he could just take a peek at their son’s legs. Mr. and Mrs. Pochettino allowed this.

This is all true, by the way. It’s in a book about Pochettino and he’s told the story numerous times.

Apparently Bielsa liked what he saw, and Pochettino joined Newell’s Old Boys, setting him on the path for his playing career across Argentina and Europe and managing some of the biggest clubs in the world and now leading the stars and stripes in their home World Cup.

The takeaway, I guess, is that Bielsa’s managerial success can be attributed to the trust people have in him. It takes a tremendous amount of faith to allow the man who shows up to your house at 2 in the morning to see your son’s legs.

But, maybe he just doesn’t have that juice anymore, and that’s why we’re seeing Uruguay held to a stalemate by a team like Cape Verde. In fairness, Bielsa probably didn’t get a chance to peep at these players’ legs before he picked them.

It Just Feels Better to Watch Messi

I couldn’t believe he missed the penalty. The greatest of all time, and he shanked it wide of the post. It seemed impossible.

But then, about a half hour later, Argentina was on the break with Facundo Medina with the ball out wide. He crosses into the box, (I think) Lisandro Martinez lets it go between his legs, and Messi sweeps it home. It’s beautiful, and suddenly the missed penalty is not only forgotten, you’re grateful that Lionel Messi didn’t just become the all-time leading goal scorer in World Cup history on a penalty kick – in the stadium of the Dallas Cowboys no less.

It’s called style.

There is the eternal Messi vs. Ronaldo debate. Well, it’s not eternal because this era will come to an end, regardless of whatever longevity exercises Ronaldo seems to be doing and whatever divine light Messi has received from birth. The understanding is that this is kind of the last dance for them both in their leadership capacity for their respective teams. Messi, trying to go back to back with Argentina, the country that worships him. Ronaldo, trying to, I don’t know, pad his stats for himself.

I can’t hide my bias here. I’m a Messi guy. How could you not be a Messi guy when you watch them both? To distill their differences to one game, all you had to do was watch Ronaldo desperately try to find a goal in Portugal’s opener against the Democratic Republic of Congo, pulling defenders back into positions that kept teammates from scoring, and rendered generally useless due to a lack of service to him.

Thierry Henry went in on Ronaldo in the post-game broadcast, saying that the goal is for the team to score, not for an individual to score. With Messi, even when he’s breaking a record individually, you get this sense that he’s doing it for something far greater than himself. He’s simply the conduit for Argentina’s greatness. The rest of the team was desperate to feed him the ball in dangerous positions to get him this record. And Messi recently came out and said that his father has been going through health concerns throughout all of this, adding yet another layer to the narrative that Messi is doing this for a lot of someones other than himself.

With Ronaldo, when his goals finally did come against the mighty Uzbekistan, the vibe was different. Again, maybe I’m coming at this from the Messi side of the aisle so I’m just fundamentally incapable of feeling connected to what the Ronaldo stans feel. But, I don’t know, when you’re celebrating being a decoy before a free kick that your teammate scores as if you were the one who did it, it just kind of says everything.

*fart noise*

Ronaldo narcissist? What a concept.

Don’t Get Too Comfortable With Philadelphia’s Welcoming Nature

France came to Philadelphia and all they got was the first ever weather delay due to thunderstorms in World Cup History. Philadelphia has a way of forcing itself to be the main character in things. It tends to find itself on the national spotlight usually due to something that feeds the media narrative that the entire city is unwelcoming and brutish. Well, the joke is on them, because this time it wasn’t the people of Philadelphia. It was the weather.

Congratulations to Philadelphia for etching itself into the history books as the first World Cup game that was delayed due to thunderstorms during the match between France and Iraq this past week. Even when the emerging golden boy of the sport, Kylian Mbappé comes to town, the skies above were uncaring and unrelenting. It was funny watching a World Cup game and being able to say, “Boy it’s really raining down there. I guess it’s going to start raining here soon, too.” And boy did it.

On the whole, it seems like tourists are quite taken with Philadelphia, which makes me happy. It’s been fun being in the city and interacting with fans from all over.

That said, it’s a helpful reminder that there are limits to Philadelphia’s kindness. Don’t take the sunniness for granted. It’s not always like this.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Ceremony.

Open wide for some soccer.

We Are Going to Watch the Limits of Rebecca Lowe’s Professionalism Be Tested

Alexi Lalas is the guy you went to college with who prided himself on being “kind of the asshole of the group,” confident that someone with more social grace within the friend circle would say “He’s a good guy once you get to know him,” but he never grew out of it and by all accounts is not, in fact, a good guy once you get to know him.

Alexi Lalas isn’t even your weird, annoying uncle. He’s your weird, annoying uncle’s weirder and more annoying friend who for some reason is at family gatherings – the reason being that his own family does not want him at their gatherings, or he does not have a family with which to gather due to alienating himself completely from them.

Alexi Lalas is what you get when the media climate favors clicks and engagement at the same level as actual knowledge, insight or nuance.

Rebecca Lowe, on the other hand, is one of the best sports presenters currently on air—period. Knowledgeable, level-headed in her analysis, thoughtful. She is excellent on NBC’s Premier League broadcasts, she’s excellent when she does the Olympics, and she’s excellent in her role alongside Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and the aforementioned Alexi Lalas.

Do you know how hard it is to make Zlatan look like one of the reasonable ones? Zlatan is Swedish Kenny Powers, but Kenny Powers when he still had the heat in Atlanta.

One time Zlatan told a reporter that only God knew the outcome of an impending match, and the reporter said it would be hard to ask him. Zlatan replied, “You’re talking to him.”

Zlatan speaks about himself in the third person and has played for enough teams that he’s my go-to answer for Immaculate Grid like people start their Wordle with ADIEU.

And Thierry Henry has so much effortless cool and quiet confidence to match one of the greatest careers of all time, he is the polar opposite of an Alexi Lalas character. He has won everything (except a Champions League for Arsenal), he’s played for the biggest clubs in the world (excluding Arsenal) and he’s just really cool, man.

With each “hot take,” with each moment that Alexi Lalas is desperate to pull the spotlight from the topic at hand and onto himself, with each attempt at humor at the expense of whatever rhythm the show had, you can watch the rest of the team shudder. They so clearly hate him. I’d pay so much to hear their calls to their family at the end of the day once they’re back in their hotel rooms. If I got a hold of their private texts my phone would glow like the suitcase from Pulp Fiction. These are not squares they’ve paired up alongside Lalas. Lowe has a podcast with the guy from Ted Lasso who isn’t Ted Lasso, so she clearly has a sense of humor. She is more than ready to laugh with her co-hosts on the Premier League show. Henry is one fourth of the most chaotic broadcast team in the world on the CBS Champions League coverage, too. (Side note, if Bari Weiss gets her hands on that show I will just collapse.)

Lalas has none of the bona fides, none of the charm, none of the professionalism and all of the obnoxious bluster that is, unfortunately, part and parcel to a FOX TV product.

He’s not evil. He’s just a hack. He’s someone who thinks he’s hilarious and is irritating. We’ve all worked with or for someone like this, and maybe that’s why we all find him so especially repugnant, even if you aren’t a dedicated soccer watcher. You can immediately empathize with his coworkers because you know exactly how it feels to be around someone like that. He’s exhausting in a very boring way.

Before the end of this tournament, in the heat of the summer when tensions are high and the days are long, I would give nothing more than for Thierry to call Alexi Lalas some French insult, or Rebecca Lowe to tell him what she no doubt thinks of him on the air. A hot mic moment would have me levitating. Zlatan might even hit him.

Until then, we’ll just have to settle for this picture that looks like a father with his kids who have no interest in speaking to him after this mandatory Father’s Day dinner they got roped into by guilt of knowing he only has a few “good” years left.

Hey, I’ve Seen This One! It’s a Classic

This AirPods commercial with Vini Jr. sure looks familiar.

RIP Detroiters.

Matthew McConnaughey Doesn’t Know What Primary Colors Are

We give far too much grace to Matthew McConnaughey. We allow him to play philosopher poet too much. A hackier writer might say something about how we’re sliding toward an Idiocracy-like society where our most celebrated wordsmith is the “All right, all right, all right” dude. True Detective was fine, but it’s not like he wrote it. He wasn’t coming up with the concept of time being a flat circle.

Anyway, Matthew McConnaughey seems to think green is a primary color.

Until he can get his colors locked down, let’s keep him out of the soccer commentary.

Hydration Break!

Soccer is a game of halves, not quarters. For this World Cup, being that every U.S. city is almost unbearably hot in the summer nowadays, they’re allowing hydration breaks in the middle of each half—something that was quite unheard of in a game that was supposed to be free-flowing and consistent. It’s not about the heat, though. FIFA would never be that charitable.

FIFA loves money. The World Cup is a sponsorship opportunity and cash-grab first. Any celebrations of international friendship and transcending borders is incidental and, honestly, frowned upon by the governing bodies both at the state and sporting level. When there’s a hydration break during a game played inside Atlanta’s air-conditioned dome, FIFA is showing its ass a little bit.

With that, here’s a little breather from the soccer in the form of an interview with Andrew Sacher. Andrew is an editor at Brooklyn Vegan, and he has a book called EMO REVIVAL coming out in September. As you might’ve guessed, it’s about the wave of emo bands that came about over the decade-span of 2008 to 2018. As a guy in a city that was full of much-celebrated bands of this time (the cover is even in Philly), I wanted to talk to Andrew about the book, the era, nostalgia and his own relationship to this music.

What prompted you to write this? What was your relationship to the emo revival, the bands you first got into in this scene, the first ones you kind of took notice of, etc.

I love so many different kinds of music, but “emo revival” kind of ended up becoming my main beat when I became a full-time writer at BrooklynVegan. It’s the one scene/community/movement I can think of that I followed almost from the start and documented the rise of in real time. So, fast forward to 2021, after I interviewed Dan Ozzi about his book SELLOUT, I told him I had been workshopping some book ideas and I asked him if he had any advice for me, and he told me to write about the thing I know more intimately than anything else. Emo revival had to be it.

As for my relationship to it, the emo revival really sparked a revival of my own interest in emo. I got into emo when the third wave was popping off with bands like Thursday, Taking Back Sunday, Saves The Day, Jimmy Eat World, etc., and through that I also found and fell in love with the second wave stuff like American Football, Cap’n Jazz, Braid, Promise Ring, etc. But by the late 2000s, I was really turned off by the direction that most of the mainstream emo scene had gone in, so I kinda checked out from emo and spent most of time diving into other types of music. When I got to college in 2009, a friend showed me Snowing’s Fuck Your Emotional Bullshit EP and I could not believe there was a new band making music that sounded so much like mid ‘90s emo.

Another big one for me was La Dispute’s first album—I had the same kind of reaction, they were making the kind of post-hardcore that I loved and missed at a time when popular “post- hardcore” had become something that I wasn’t interested in at all. Then I found Touché Amoré and saw them play an extremely memorable show for like 100 people. From there I just kept digging and started realizing there were all these likeminded bands who were friends, collaborators, tourmates, labelmates, etc., all doing these versions of emo, post-hardcore, pop punk, and other related styles of music that hearkened back to the way this stuff all felt and sounded before it all got co-opted by the mainstream and lost so much of its original essence. I just thought the whole thing was so exciting.

Where geographically were you at the time? Who were the bands in your area, and where did you kind of see as the epicenters of this wave?

I was at Purchase College in the early days of emo revival and this was absolutely a factor. There was a sizable group of people at Purchase who were all about this stuff, and who booked so many of those bands to come play on our campus. We had Algernon Cadwallader, Snowing, Tigers Jaw, Balance and Composure, The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, Touché Amoré, My Heart to Joy, Pianos Become the Teeth, and probably plenty of others I’m forgetting come through in their early years. That Topshelf Records band Sirs was a Purchase band, people who went on to play in bands like LVL UP and Sheer Mag had Midwest-style emo bands on campus before they formed the bands they’re best known for. And then after I graduated, I moved to Ridgewood, Queens, and we had that venue Suburbia in Bushwick that was run by the members of this band Living Room, and that was basically the destination for every emo revival band that played NYC (before they got big enough to start playing 500 and 1,000 cap clubs). But NYC was definitely not one of the epicenters of emo revival. The biggest one was Philly and other Pennsylvania suburbs—I would say maybe 80% of the bands in the book are from Pennsylvania—and the second biggest hub was probably Chicago and other surrounding Midwest areas.

Why does this point in time feel like the right time to reflect on this wave? What is in your opinion kind of the state of emo? What does it look like today? Would you consider things happening to be new waves or simply echoes of the previous wave, or maybe just holdouts of the genre and style?

2026 marks the 20th anniversary of the first Algernon Cadwallader demo, so that’s kind of a nice unintended timing milestone. But really I would just say that, after COVID, we started to see a new generation of punk and emo bands coming up, and the “emo revival movement” so to speak seemed like something that happened, that was set in stone, that was in the rearview. Many of the bands my book is about are still active (this year alone, there are very good new albums from Joyce Manor, Tigers Jaw, Basement, Citizen, Turnover and The Menzingers) so it’s not like it’s “over,” but I think the work they did—taking emo back to its DIY roots, building a scene back up from scratch—has been completed in a way. And I think that completed work is what provided a foundation for the current “fifth wave” emo bands. The fourth wave bands had to build their own scene from scratch because there was really no place for them anywhere else, and now the fifth wave is launching off of what the last generation built. I think there’s much less of a divide between fourth and fifth wave emo compared to any two waves of emo that preceded this latest one—most of the fifth wave bands were musically and ideologically influenced by fourth wave bands, and the current scene sometimes feels like a continuation of the previous one—but like every generation does, fifth wave bands have put their own distinct spin on things. There are too many good new emo bands to name (but here’s 10: Home Is Where, Pool Kids, Hot Mulligan, Prince Daddy & the Hyena, Kerosene Heights, Ben Quad, Saturdays At Your Place, Arm’s Length, First Day Back, Combat—and some of those bands are even kinda veterans now!), and it feels like the fifth wave is really having an impact. This might be anecdotal but I’ve actually heard a handful of people say that they missed the fourth wave but got sucked in by the fifth wave, and now they’re going back and falling love with a bunch of fourth wave bands. It also just feels like emo is here to stay, which was not always the case.

These sorts of things are obviously very cyclical. With a lot of younger bands right now channeling early 2000s style and aesthetic, where does that position emo, specifically this wave of emo, for potential “comebacks” or rediscovery by younger fans?

I think emo is extremely ripe for discovery by younger fans. So many of the fans at My Chemical Romance’s stadium shows are clearly too young to have seen them the first time around, and I can’t tell you how many people I’ve run into after Algernon Cadwallader reunited that told me how excited they were to finally see this band they didn’t find until after they broke up. I think whether it’s the When We Were Young-style nostalgia for the third wave, the new fifth wave bands namedropping older emo bands as influences, or older emo songs going viral on TikTok, there are so many gateways for young people to find older emo bands. And a big argument I make in my book is that emo has become its own subculture, just like punk and hardcore before it, and I think “emo” being a thing of interest is a big part of why older bands will keep getting their comebacks. To go back to my own emo origin story, when I realized there were two whole generations of emo bands that predated my generation, I needed to hear all of it.

I assume that still happens in one way or another. Once you realize you like emo, the internet makes it so easy to start figuring out that there are 40 years worth of bands to start diving into.

While this wave of emo was happening, the internet seemed like a much nicer place. This was sort of peak millennial optimism era, where social media too was less of an endless scroll and more of an actual way to meet people, find shows, network if you were in a band, etc., rather than have to play to an algorithm. How do you think the social media landscape of today, and really the regular media landscape of today, changes the way that any of the DIY bands or rock bands without gigantic financial machines behind them - i.e. most of them - operate?

It’s obviously very different, though I think you’d get a better answer if you asked an actual current DIY band how they operate. I don’t want to sound too “back in my day” but it does seem to me like 15 years ago social media could be used to connect different regional scenes, and now social media and the internet is its own scene, especially for bands who came up during the 18 months when live music didn’t exist.

And not to throw stones, because I do versions of this, too, as someone who’s trying to promote a book, but it bums me out that social media algorithms have pressured young DIY bands into trying to create their own viral moments instead of allowing them to use social media as a tool to find other people who love the same niche music that they do.

That all said, my favorite DIY rock scene today is actually the indie-country scene with Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, etc., and the regionality of that scene (the big epicenter in and around Asheville, NC, plus another hub in Vermont with Greg Freeman, Lily Seabird, Florry, etc.) reminds me a lot of the early emo revival days. And not that those bands don’t use social media but it doesn’t seem like it’s the main focus for them. So I kind of think there’s always going to be a version of the thing you’re looking for if you look hard enough.

Does it bug you when every band from this era, especially from the Northeast or West Coast, are referred to as “Midwest Emo”? Because it bugs me.

Haha. Yes and no. If a phrase actually catches on as an easy shorthand to describe a type of music, I’m not really one to fight it, but sometimes it feels a little silly. I get it for bands like Algernon and Snowing because they play Midwest-style emo, but it does kinda bug me when I see it used to kinda just mean “non-mainstream emo.” Like I’ve seen it used for Modern Baseball. They’re a great band but they’re not Midwest emo!

What’s one takeaway you’d like people to take from reading your book, or maybe one theme or idea to focus on when they go into it?

I think the biggest thing for me is, even if you don’t care about emo, I hope you can see that this was a really special moment for music and culture. I think, just on a human level, the story of what the people in this book accomplished is very inspiring. It’s a book about so many incredible albums and powerful live shows, but the music is almost secondary to the community-building aspect, and to how much can happen when enough likeminded people come together because of something they all believe in, no matter how against the grain it might seem at first.

EMO REVIVAL is out 9/8/26. You can pre-order a copy here.

I Got In An Argument Defending Soccer

I played golf on Sunday. When I put my shoes on, I noticed that I had lost a few spikes, and went into the pro shop to price out some new shoes. The Germany vs. Curacao game was on. An older guy looked up at the TV in the top corner.

“You guys aren’t seriously watching soccer are you?” he asked the young-ish guy working the register.

“We’re not really watching anything.”

“Bullshit sport.”

OK, I thought, I’ll bite.

“It’s the best sport there is,” I said.

Without turning to look at me, he complained that it’s only 1-0. I replied that it’s also only the 6th minute or so, and that Germany would surely pile on four or five (they poured on seven). Also, I added, if you don’t count a touchdown as six points, plenty of American football games end 3-2.

“It’s bullshit,” he confirmed. “No one cares about it.”

We argued back and forth, and by that I mean I started saying something about how the American soccer player no longer has a ceiling of going to the University of Virginia and then playing in the MLS and he yelled over me that plenty of schools were good when he was growing up in Philly, but they were only good because the other Catholic schools didn’t have teams, etc. My tee time was coming up, and I had to go to the bathroom, so I ended things by saying, “Well, you’re watching still.”

“I’m not watching!”

“You haven’t looked at me once during this conversation.”

He looked at me then, and grumbled to the guy working the register.

“Are you going to tell this kid to tuck his shirt in or what?”

He’d probably like Alexi Lalas if he gave him a chance. I should have told him that.

I Felt American For Once In My Life

I had a class in college called “American History From 1945.” Temple University’s journalism program mandated that I take “American History Before 1945,” too, but I took this one first because I was a 19-year-old in charge of his own academic schedule.

On the first day of class, I walked into the big lecture hall and took a seat. There was no professor in sight, and the front of the room, the projector was showing Jimi Hendrix’s famous rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock in 1969. When it was over, a disheveled looking guy walked out. In my memory, he more stumbled out.

“ANY QUESTIONS?”

Over the next minute or two, our professor told us that this wouldn’t be a history class where we’d just memorize names and dates. It was about more than that.

“It’s about what is America? What is an American? How many Americas are there?”

I think about these questions when I’m faced with a dilemma like rooting for the U.S. in a home World Cup when there’s as many dark clouds looming over it. It’s frustrating, to put it simply. Our number 10 is from Central PA. There’s a Philly-area contingent on the team. The manager is Tottenham Hotspur royalty and was the manager when I fell in love with the club. The games are in Philadelphia. It should be perfect, and yet it’s not because the other America had to go and ruin everything.

The one I’m rooting for in this moment is OK. The one I’m rooting for is good, even.

The America I’m rooting for at the World Cup is not the same America that has a UFC fight on the White House lawn. That’s some other country.

When people who don’t watch soccer ask me how the U.S. is, assuming it will be bad, I tell them that we’re actually a pretty good team right now, and not to count them out to at minimum escape the group, at best maybe even make a little run and surprise some people. It’s an exciting team and you should be a little excited about watchin them!

I think about the outrageous scenario of the U.S. actually winning it. It’s far-fetched, but not impossible. Weird game, weird tournament! What would that be like? How much more would I have to compartmentalize patriotism and celebration? Would it qualify as patriotism at all? How conditional would I have to be with it? It’s a funny thing to be quietly hopeful that the team you’re supporting gets kind of far but not so far that they’re accepting the trophy from the current sitting president. Because when that happens, as I’ve seen with other sports teams I like winning their own respective championships, the illusion of multiple Americas, and what it means to be an American, is sort of ruined, because then people show you who they are and what kind of American they were the whole time.

I want them to do well, but not too well. Does that qualify as loser behavior? Is that righteous self-defeatism that apparently only Americans can do?

Mauricio Pochettino, the U.S. manager who has mostly handled this position and the political position it puts him in with some grace, came out in an interview and delivered some hard truths about American sports culture.

In short, we’re soft. We’re losers and we reward losers, despite the complaints from inside the country that we’re all just participation medal merchants now. They asked Poch a pretty simple question: What sort of soccer does America want to play?

Poch replied:

Their culture is playful. They want to play. We told them, “Guys, playing soccer is one thing, competing is another.” They’re two completely different sports. They grow up in a culture of playing. Why? If you start in MLS and you haven’t won a game in three months and you’re at the bottom, what’s the consequence if there’s no promotion or relegation, no international competition? American sports reward losers! But soccer is different: if you reward those who don’t win… If you don’t have goals, you don’t fight. If I lose, what happens? Nothing. They just fire the coach. Also, the American player is disciplined. But with a sense of complacency that isn’t good in soccer. It took us a year and a half to change that mentality.”

This would rile up a certain type of American sports fan. But, thankfully, those American sports fans aren’t reading this news. They don’t know who Mauricio Pochettino is. They’re arguing with me in a golf course pro shop.

Ecuador Cursed Themselves in Philly

The Ivory Coast vs. Ecuador game in Philly might as well have been an Ecuador home game. Those fans can travel, man. I had no idea until my neighborhood was suddenly Ecuador headcuardors. They were a fun vibe to be around, so I’m rooting for them. That said, I wish they had just asked one of us if it was a good idea to put a jersey on the Rocky statue.

Across the host countries, visiting fanbases are being taken in and celebrated as they themselves take in their new surroundings. The Scots in their kilts have charmed the pants off of Boston. They’re chanting at Red Sox games, they’re playing bagpipes. The Korean fans have been welcomed like royalty to Mexico having helped El Tri by beating Germany during the last World Cup. It’s great, man. This is what it’s supposed to be.

Sorry to Ecuador, but it’s important to remember that Rocky didn’t even win the fight. You’re pulling from Philadelphia’s cosmic loser energy. Easy mistake to make.

Congratulations to Cape Verde on the 0-0 Win

Or, as Matthew McConnaughey would call it, Primary Color Island.

I like Spain. They’re my pick to win the whole thing. I adore Pedro Porro. I’ve been to Spain a couple of times and absolutely loved it. Out of principle, I hate when teams set up to not lose a game, as in just sit back and absorb pressure for 90+ minutes in the hopes that they can squeak out a tie. Even worse when that team does that week-in and week-out to win the Premier League. It bums me out to see statistics that show one team peppering shots and maintaining 99% possession only to draw or, at worst, lose on a flukey corner kick or something.

That said, if you can’t appreciate a Cinderella story in the World Cup, well then I don’t know what to tell you. This is the kind of game that could turn someone into a fan, and it was a 0-0 (pronounced nil-nil) draw in the first round of the group stage. A goalkeeper who is 40 (that’s 120 in soccer years) and now has to cancel his usual plans of coaching volleyball to local kids during the summer, and a mysterious mononymous manager with seemingly no history in professional soccer. This game had everything*.

*nothing

If you can find the excitement and romance and beauty in a game where no one scored, this might just be the game for you. Welcome to the party.

See you next week.

This week’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Keo.

I was lucky enough to write the March cover story for SPIN Magazine on Ratboys. Ratboys are truly one of the best bands around, and this was a real treat. Interviewing Julia and Dave for this was one of those “oh yeah, this is a great job” instances, and as a fun bonus I even got to talk to producer/former Death Cabber Chris Walla, who was also very nice. We got into their new album, Singin’ to an Empty Chair, therapy, grief, being a band that fits into all sorts of different scenes, Chicago, the current political climate, being a working band in 2026, and a lot more.

Click the pic below to read it (later).

Guns n’ Roses started the album Chinese Democracy in 1998. It was going to be this big magnum opus of an album that they teased for years. It became a running joke in music that it would never actually come out, to the point that The Offspring joked in 2003 that their next album would be called Chinese Democracy (You Snooze, You Lose), which Axl Rose took so seriously that he hit them with a cease-and-desist over it.

The album eventually came out in 2008, but I’ve never heard it. I haven’t heard most GnR songs to be fair, but that’s not the point.

It always struck me as funny to telegraph an album title this far out. It’s probably because Axl thought the name Chinese Democracy hit really fuckin’ hard so he was excited to tell people about this album well in advance.

Because then the natural course of a creative endeavor takes over, where things take longer than planned and you get lost pursuing every possible route you could take. You get distracted, find a different course, get distracted again by a new possibility while the other one is half-finished, and eventually you end up with 50 sort of OK songs and no closer to anything ready to release. You start to question whether this is worth pursuing anymore at all, but you sunk-cost-fallacy yourself into staying with it because you’ve already spent so much time on it and, more importantly, you’ve told so many people it will happen, so you need to put something out.

Thankfully, I have never done anything like this in my entire life.

Which reminds me—Hey, did you know you could just get a trampoline if you wanted to?

I wasn’t aware of that for a long time. For most of my childhood, trampolines were things that only existed in a select few backyards or dangling from the rafters of BJ’s Wholesale Club seemingly by magic. This is basically how I felt until I realized that you could just buy a trampoline if you wanted to. Armed with a part-time job bussing tables at the Texas Roadhouse or being Clifford the Big Red Dog for children’s events, and with the freedom of a driver’s license, there wasn’t much stopping me from buying a trampoline, so I bought one.

For months—years, at this point, I have had this lede written in a Google Doc titled “On Flips.”

“On Flips” was this story idea I had been kicking around, doing initial “research” on, sending feelers out to do bona fide interviews with people, about the cultural significance of flips. In short: Why do we as human beings place so much importance on doing a flip? Our greatest sporting event, which serves as the closest thing we can get to global peace and friendship has many events centered around who can do flips the best and most. Flips serve as international diplomacy. A common language like physical Esperanto.

Those flippers, the ones we deem the ones who do flips the best and highest and fastest and most admirable and tasteful are given high cultural status and lucrative brand deals where they sell us fast food that might be designed to look healthy, or supplements that will help us live forever or at the very least sweatpants that will make us look and feel how we want to feel.

All because of flips.

On the smaller scale, meaning childhood, flips still carry weight. Anymore, trampoline parks that pop up all over the country and promise broken ankles for every child are now hubs for in-real-life socialization for kids. For Gen Alpha, they’re one of the places where natural school-age hierarchies are formed and enforced. And we all know those childhood hierarchies are just stone age hierarchies in their hearts: Who is biggest, whose family has money and therefore stuff, and who has the most “useful” “skills” to get attention, like flips.

Why do kids like me want a trampoline so badly? To do flips. Why do we do flips? That is the question I seek to answer.

I had been seeking to answer this question for so long that even a project as dumb as this began to nag at me. I’d get ready for bed and do my little mental inventory of what I did today, what I hoped to do tomorrow, and what I can do each day to make progress in every aspect of my life, and honest to god “On Flips” made an appearance in those thoughts. I’d lie there in bed and with my last moments of consciousness think “I really should try to get some work done on that” with the same sincerity and determination as “I should reach out to friends I haven’t talked to in a little while” or “I need to do xyz for my job that pays me real money and provides health insurance.”

When you tell anyone, even yourself, that you are going to do something for long enough, no matter how hacky or juvenile or stupid like a Guns N’ Roses album or a heavily reported story for your blog about the history and significance of doing a flip in human history, you feel like you need to do it and it will eat at you every day.

For the first, and hopefully last time in my life, I began to sympathize with and felt spiritually connected to Axl Rose. I do not want to feel that way.

Did you know flips are a big part of Mormon culture? Benson Boone is probably the biggest Mormon star out there right now, and backflips are a huge part of his whole deal. You might not have even known he was Mormon. I didn’t know he was Mormon until I saw a discussion online about how prevalent backflips are to Mormon youth culture and how Benson Boone just sort of happened to be the one who also got famous and incorporated that into his act.

Basically, a backflip is the most rebellious thing you can do in Mormon culture. It’s the closest you can come to an affront to God. God put our feet on the ground and our heads up top. To switch it up is to spit in the face of Heavenly Father, even if, and maybe especially if, you end up back on your feet as if nothing had happened. It was only a second. It was the illusion of universal disorder but with the promise of re-stabilization.

These are the sort of notes I’d write down in my Notes app in moments both public and private. Maybe you thought I was just jotting a quick email or texting a friend back while we were at the bar or riding on the bus or playing a game. Nope, I had to write down the thoughts on the philosophical side of flips and how they play a role in a particular religious sect’s culture and serve as a proxy for more forbidden vices and practices. I was thinking about this while you were talking. I was waiting for you to turn around so I could write it down, to make sure I would not forget a precious thought like this.

“I grew up in the church, and I can confirm that doing a backflip is one of the classic ways for a Mormon boy to attract a mate and to simultaneously dunk on his less athletic friends,” the original poster of the Mormon Backflip Theory, Alyssa Grenfell, posted. “This, put simply, is Mormon peacocking, and for me, this is the athletic version of the Mormon boy that brings a guitar to every single function he attends. [...] Keep in mind mormon boys can’t look cool by drinking or smoking or swearing. They can’t even invite you to get a cup of coffee. And so flipping is basically the most family-friendly, while still being hardcore, thing you can do.”

We all just want to be special. We all just want to have a skill that no one else has, or at least something they can’t do as well as we can. Like taking seemingly mundane aspects of human culture and excruciatingly examining it and blowing it out of proportion to draw insightful, clever and ideally profitable content from it. I am not the first to overthink for the sake of content, but damn it I can be the Benson Boone of it all.

It got to a point, though, where I really started thinking about whether this was worth continuing.

How journalistic did I want to be? I sent out actual emails to people. For example, the comedian Demi Adejuyigbe’s one-hour comedy special is called “Demi Adejuyigbe: Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip.” The entire hour is predicated on him doing one (1) backflip. The joke, but reality, is that you will wait an hour with the promise of this guy doing one (1) backflip, because a backflip is worth it.

He didn’t answer, and that’s fine.

How poetic did I want to get with this for the sake of humor? I went back to the old draft and lines like this about professional flippers realizing it’s time to hang it up and the emotional gravity of that situation (no pun intended).

Some people choose the moment they’ve done their final flip. They wave tearfully to an applauding crowd, knowing in their heart that their flipping days are behind them, but acknowledging the ride that doing flips afforded them. Others have their flipping ability taken out from under them in an instant. Sometimes while and because of doing a flip.

How academic did I want to get here? How hard would I search for the first recorded instance of a human flip, or the first time a flip was celebrated and appreciated? I remember at one point looking at pottery from antiquity to see if there were any depictions of Greeks, Romans or Egyptians or whatever doing a flip and the guy in the next “panel” cheering and freaking out about it. Did they think the flips would anger the gods or please them? Witchcraft or wizardry?

It doesn’t matter. None of it really matters, if you want to be nihilistic about it. I don’t. Axl Rose didn’t get nihilistic about it, and maybe that was the problem. He believed in this idea until he had an album called Chinese Democracy whether anyone liked it or not.

That sort of tenacity and stick-to-itiveness is necessary for learning a backflip. I would know. I could do one on a trampoline at least. The hard part is committing to throwing your legs back over yourself on a straight axis. If you turn your head, you go sideways. You just have to get a good jump, throw those legs forward and your neck back, look at the sky for a second and believe that in a moment you’ll be looking at the ground once again, and spot that landing while you trust that the momentum from before will carry your legs the rest of the way around. Your feet will touch the ground and your friends will cheer. Or, maybe you’re alone and you’ll still have the feeling of accomplishment that comes with rotating a full 360 degrees against the wishes of any god or natural order.

I’ve landed countless backflips in my life. I had a trampoline, after all. My friends and I could all do them. Once one person was brave enough to commit to one, we knew it could be done and, more importantly, we knew it had to be done. No one wants to be the one who can’t do a backflip when there are backflips being done around you. We didn’t just do backflips. Front flips, side flips, front flips with spins. We did them all. We spent hours doing flips together, bonding, laughing, hurting ourselves in the ways that teenagers did before injuries were real. It didn’t matter if they were real—we’d go to school with a bruise or a limp or maybe even crutches and proudly say that we hurt ourselves doing a flip. We didn’t, though, because we could do flips well and land them. We were so cool. Not because of that, but we could do flips because we were cool.

I knew how to stick a landing. I know how to stick a landing.

I’m now 2,000 words into a personal essay on not only the importance of flips, but now the importance of writing about the importance of flips and its very real effect on my self-esteem and confidence as a writer. I believe that I am now free. There’s a weight that’s been lifted and, as you’re reading this, a Google doc that has been deleted, which will please Google because they tell me I’m running out of storage. Too many half-baked ideas will weigh a man down.

You look at the ground while your feet are above you and trust that everything will fall into place. The thing you’ve worked on so long comes out because you spent so much time saying it would, even to yourself. It’s there, whether anyone likes it or not. Do we do things to be appreciated or for our self-fulfillment?

Who cares?

I do. We do. We’re all just doing backflips for something. We all have that one thing we’ve been telling ourselves, and maybe others, that we were going to do. Like a flip maybe. Are we going to finish it? Are we going to land on our feet? I don’t know. Depends on how cool we want to be.

Today’s Snakes & Sparklers musical guest is American Football.

They’re saying five years and $130 million for Ranger Suarez. I love the guy but that’s silly money. I think the Phillies will ultimately look back on this and we’ll feel like we parted with him at the right time. Coupled with the 40 million the Sox are paying Bregman now and you wonderif it’s going to even get the Sox to third in the AL East.

40 million Euros for Conor Gallagher from Atleti, too. Hearing a five year, maybe five-and-a-half for him, and it’d put him up immediately among the clubs’ highest earners. Might even be the top earner now.

Still a lot of smoke around the Bichette deal for the Phillies, too. Seems like it has to happen. At this point, spend the money. It’s not my money, right? That’s the modern game. Especially if we’re letting JT walk and if we can include Bohm in a trade package, that slots him right into that infield.

Then there are all the other clips and headlines.

About a year and a half ago, or maybe a little more, I decided I would be one of those people who leaves his phone in another room when he goes to bed. I got one of those fancy alarm clocks that connects to your phone through an app, and you can wind down to the sound of piano, sleep to the sound of more white, brown, green and purple noise than I even knew existed, and wake up with a slow burn “sunrise” that is much more pleasant than your phone chirping at you in your dark bedroom.

I have never slept better. My circadian rhythm has never been more on beat. And as someone who frequently has to get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I was worried what I’d do with myself once I undoubtedly got back to my bed bored as hell and unable to fall back to sleep.

The answer is I’d just fall back asleep.

I wake up in the morning and I forget my phone exists for a while honestly. I remember what it was like in the Before Times when I’d wake up and just sort of stare into space for a few minutes. Maybe I’d think about what I have to do that day, maybe I’d try to make sense of whatever dream I’d just had, searching for meaning or any connection to reality. It’s a nice way to wake up.

And then I go downstairs and I see my phone sitting on the counter and I remember all of the things I want to know about immediately.

Did Tottenham fire manager Thomas Frank? No, but in doing so I saw that Real Madrid fired Xabi Alonso. What a mess. I look to see if the Sixers won, or at least got away without any fresh injuries during a game that I didn’t stay up late enough to watch. I look to see if there were any late-night tweets from MLB insiders like Matt Gelb or Jon Heyman about the Phillies’ free agency moves.

And inevitably, while I look for all of this on social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit, I’m sucked back into the reality that I had managed to escape while I slept to artificial highway sounds and woke up to artificial sunlight, and then comfortably drifted in half-consciousness preparing to start my day.

Oh, right.

It being January and all, I’m a little more aware of where I can make improvements in my life. One is being more intentional with my phone—not an original idea. Less mindless scrolling, less multitasking that induces anxiety, more meaningful conversations with friends and loved ones rather than quick hits of memes and jokes.

It’s not new or novel to say that our phones are damaging. Being too clued in often feels like a burden, and we’re more clued in than we’ve ever been in human history. When doomscrolling covers both the real world on fire around you and the sports world, it feels acceptable to choose what is the “lesser of two evils” there—the very therapy-brained mindset of giving yourself space to check out and allowing yourself the junk food. The world is scary! Be kind to yourself and go deep on possible teams Ja Morant might land if the Grizzlies do trade.

Anxiety loves a distraction.

In a world where dopamine hits come less naturally, the rush of your team signing a new player works pretty nicely. But is obsessing over one thing in favor of another any more noble or acceptable right now? Is there any righteous distraction?

I think about the John K. Samson song “Fantasy Baseball at the End of the World,” which came out in June 2020 and now almost feels quaint to refer to that time as the end of the world. Samson, a Canadian, does quite a nice job succinctly putting how it felt in the moment to feel cooped up and helpless and angry. Samson ends his with a call to action to take to the streets and organize and mobilize, even if he’s just telling himself that that’s what he should be doing.

Right now it’s especially easy to feel hopeless, whether that’s as a sports fan or as an American. As a Philadelphian and adopted son of Tottenham Hotspur, hopelessness and nihilism come naturally. And for every self-flagellation over burying my head in the sand and choosing the nonsense over the extremely televised horrors, there’s a beacon of cliche light in there somewhere. To have the idea of thinking about the future at all implies there will be one.

Is there any honor in a distraction right now? Is there any permissible argument for self-care in the form of ignoring existential threats to an increasingly large collection of people in favor of considering where Tarik Skubal could end up? On the other hand: Is there any value in identifying the behavior as cowardly, too? Yes, probably. Objectively, yes. The answer is yes. I can also appreciate the optimism in being upset about the future of your favorite sports team seemingly disappearing in front of your eyes.

And I oscillate between the news and the news of sports and I receive very different sorts of “Breaking News” emails and become so buzzed off of it that ultimately I do nothing and think of nothing and consider consequences of neither world until I’m tired enough to go to bed. And I set my phone on the charger on the kitchen counter and I go upstairs to bed—early enough that the wheels of the news-making apparatuses still turn. And as I close my eyes I’ll run an inventory of my day—what did I do well, what could I do a little better with tomorrow? Inevitably, when I get to my faults, I’ll say I got a little too distracted on my phone and ended the day feeling overstimulated and jumpy, and I’ll say tomorrow I’ll be on my phone less, zeroing in on my job and real-life accomplishments like sweeping the floor and going to the grocery store. And I will start all over again the next day.

But in the back of my mind, I’ll think about how I’d love if we could get to the end of a five-and-a-half-year deal—-even bankrupt and miles from World Series contention or Champions League qualification or NBA Finals in stadiums full of fans booing so hard that the ground shakes—because it means there’s a future where we can still worry about pointless things.

And as I type this, Bichette has signed with the Mets. And the cycle of hopelessness begins anew.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Joyce Manor.

Hello! You probably noticed I haven’t done this in a while. I’ve been pretty busy with other work (read: paid work), so I thought I’d throw some links on here.

While we’re on the topic of baseball, here’s the feature I did on The Starting Line and their new album Eternal Youth. I got to hang out with the guys at a Phillies game (which they won) and wax poetic about baseball and aging gracefully in punk rock.

I caught up with Philly emo legends Algernon Cadwallader about their comeback and nostalgia

I profiled The Dirty Nil ahead of their new album The Lash

I profiled White Reaper ahead of their latest album, Only Slightly Empty

I talked to Ian from Militarie Gun about cults, religion, addiction and recovery in relation to their new album God Save the Gun

I wrote about the WTF with Marc Maron podcast finale, bowing out while the industry he helped create booms around him and setting the tone for other future ‘finales’ as podcasts gain cultural steam

I also wrote about 20 of the best podcasts of 2026 for Esquire

I looked at the “political” landscape of professional skateboarding’s annual popularity contest—Thrasher Skater of the Year—and its new opposition party in the likes of Tom Schaar

Julia Roberts pretending to be Julia Roberts messed me up something good.

Ocean’s Twelve came out in 2004. I was 12. By the time my father was watching it on our living room TV one day when I joined him midway through, I was probably still also 12. Twelve isn’t the most memorable age. 7th grade is pretty forgettable and you’re mostly just excited to be 13. But I have a vivid memory of watching the movie midway through with my dad, and he was explaining that the character played by Julia Roberts was pretending to be Julia Roberts to help Julia Roberts’ character’s on-again-off-again boyfriend, George Clooney’s character, rob a casino.

The conversation went something like this:

“What do you mean? That is Julia Roberts.”

“Yeah but the character is pretending to be Julia Roberts.”

[I pause to do the math in my head]

“But it is Julia Roberts.”

“But the character isn’t.”

To put a long story short, I couldn’t wrap my brain around the in-movie universe and the true universe I was currently sitting in, uncomfortably, existing simultaneously. I did what most children do when they can’t wrap their brains around a concept, and I think I got angry at the concept and said that the movie was stupid or something. Because when you don’t get something, and you don’t have the words to admit that or at least admit that the lack of connection is likely due to your own fault, you act like you never wanted to get it in the first place.

In 2004, months before I would stew over the sleight of hand that Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney and Julia Roberts would soon pull on me and some unsuspecting casino owners, The Sopranos was in its fifth and penultimate season.

I didn’t watch that at the time, because I was too young and we didn’t have HBO.

But I do now, or at least whatever they’re calling it these days. So, as so many other 30-somethings have done, I went back and watched it for the first time and now want to talk about it as if it’s a hot new thing that I had discovered and not one of the most talked about, celebrated, and 20-some-years-old shows of all time.

I specifically want to talk about one guy. Not the one you’re thinking of. No, not him either. And probably not that one, either.

I’m talking about this guy.

Who is played by this guy up here with Bruce.

I probably don’t have to explain this but that character is Silvio Dante, played by Steven Van Zandt, best known as the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and perhaps less known for having a hand in ending Apartheid in South Africa.

The Sopranos, famously, takes place in New Jersey, which is also the famed home of Bruce Springsteen. Because the thing about anyone from New Jersey, whether they’re one of the greatest songwriters of their or any other generation or not, is that they will always let you know that they are from New Jersey.

On The Sopranos, Tony Soprano loves rock music. He drives around and sings Steely Dan. He pulls into the driveway listening to Rush. Fun fact, one time I told my mom that if they made a movie about our family James Gandolfini could play my dad (a man of Italian descent with a similar hairline – I meant it as a compliment. People love James Gandolfini) and she strongly disagreed. When I saw that scene of Tony pulling in listening to “Tom Sawyer” I almost ran it back to film and send to her and say “Look familiar?????” but I didn’t because HBO Max’s rewind function is terrible and it might’ve made my TV fall off the wall. Also, mean.

Anyway, Tony Soprano likes the rock music that you’d expect a suburban dad of a certain age to like. Bruce Springsteen is firmly in that zone.

And here’s the thing: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band exists within the Sopranos universe. Because the Sopranos universe is New Jersey in the 90s and 2000s after all. You can’t have a New Jersey without Bruce Springsteen.

Christopher even references it in one scene:

That is fuckin’ cute, T, I’m sorry. I’m siding with Chrissy on this one. But that’s right before he makes a jab at Adriana for having digestion issues when she comes in, which I can’t abide by. I’m an ally for the digestive community, as you all know well by now.

I’m getting sidetracked.

Silvio, who sits in that office and participates in that scene is played by Steven Van Zandt, contributed to the album Born to Run. He didn’t play on the title track that Christopher is referencing here, but he did arrange the horns in “10th Avenue Freeze Out,” which, depending on the weather, might be my favorite Bruce song.

If you think about this too long, especially when you’re 12, you start to go cross-eyed. What would happen if Tony and the rest of the guys turned on MTV or something and a Bruce video came on? Hell, what if they all went to a Bruce concert? Would the Earth implode upon itself from the paradox?

I’m not sure what would happen. I’m not great at thinking through paradoxes in pop culture. It’s hard to make them air-tight. But even the best of us, like Christopher Nolan, sometimes have trouble creating foolproof plot discombobulaters.

So, after much rambling, here are 10 ways that The Sopranos, a show that ended in 2006 to much fanfare and argument, could’ve incorporated the very real Steven Van Zandt into the universe inhabited by the played-by-Steven-van-Zandt Silvio Dante.

1. Obvious low-hanging fruit: It comes out that Silvio is moonlighting as Bruce’s guitarist (and is killed for some reason)

2. It comes out that Steven Van Zandt is undercover as Silvio (and is killed for it)

3. Evil twin scenario

4. Not-evil twin scenario, like Homer Simpson’s long-lost brother played by New Jersey’s Danny DeVito, and they get along for a while but recognize their lifestyles are too different and lose touch. Chris asks about it every now and then but Silvio dismisses it with something along the lines of “we’re both busy guys” and that’s the end of it.

5. Freaky Friday body switch scenario (they both somehow end up killed, Silvio because he can’t play guitar and the mob of fans descends on him, and Steven because he is not a mafia guy and would make a mistake)

6. Silvio is a time traveler (we don’t know what he got into after the last episode)

7. Bruce Springsteen cloned Silvio at one point in time and taught this one guitar. More are out there with various other talents.

8. They walk by each other on the Asbury Park boardwalk but are too busy with their jobs to notice each other. Paulie notices and tells Silvio the guy in the headscarf looks like him and Silvio says shut up. Paulie is fixated on it for a few hours but moves on.

9. The entire plot of the show, including Tony Soprano’s dream sequences, is Steven Van Zandt’s dream

10. They get in a fender bender on the Garden State Parkway and become friends.

Now the hard part — ending this. I don’t think I need to wrap things up that nicely, right? The Sopranos didn’t. So I’ll take this opportunity to say that having just finished The Sopranos, I’m re-watching LOST. It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. Holy shit—The Sopranos ended with “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It’s literally about the Journey, not the destination. It really is the best show ever.

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Today’s Snakes & Sparklers musical guest is Awning.

What did it mean to me then to be a beach guy? What did I want to be when I thought about my life at the beach? This bohemian existence where my skin was perma-tanned and smoothed by constant sandy abrasion. My hair would be stiff and curly with salt. My shoes tastefully worn down by the grip tape of the skateboard I’d use for transportation and thrill-seeking. Hell, I might even start surfing. I wanted my vacation to never end. I wanted vacation to become my life, certainly not the other way around.

And there was the music, too. Because that’s inextricably linked to this.

I’ve admitted to plenty of less-than-cool musical interests throughout my life. I still stand by most of them. To run the risk of squandering what little credibility I have to the reputable music publications that occasionally pay me for credibility and the reputable readers who read it, it’s worth now letting you in on a secret far more damning than any very real ska phases or Red Hot Chili Peppers evangelism. I’ll gladly admit to that. It’s the white guy reggae that makes me a little itchy when I think of it.

Ballyhoo, Pepper and yes, when occasion called for it, Slightly Stoopid.

When I think of summer fun at this point of mid-high school with my friends, this is the soundtrack that I hear. Mortifying, especially, again, in Central Pennsylvania where there were neither beaches nor any of the fancy weed they were singing about, which definitely also scared me at the time.

Before the aux cables and iPods, before even an era where I could burn a cd and decide I was DJing the moment, families like mine were limited to the CD’s or cassettes that we not only owned but decided were important enough to bring on vacation. I think of three albums immediately:

The Wallflowers’ Bringing Down the Horse

Fastball’s All the Pain Money Can Buy

And No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom

Not a stinker in the bunch, really. My parents packed wisely.

At the time, these were big albums that were making waves in the culture. Not that I was participating in the culture at the time. I was a passenger - literally. But strange as it is to imagine my parents near the age I am now and thus paying attention to the good music of the time, they were, and I picked it up by osmosis. They became core memories, part of the wallpaper along with the way I remember the condo we rented in Ocean City, Maryland or Bethany Beach, Delaware.

Now 20-some years later, the songs are still around. Relevant isn’t the word I’d use to describe them, because their heyday is long over, even if the younger generation eventually unearths them and claims the sounds as their own. They come on and we all smile and sing along a little because we all know the songs. Over time, we’ve glued them onto our own memories, and they were ubiquitous enough that they belong to everyone equally in different ways. They are nice to hear, but they don’t define the era we live in or the culture of the time anymore. They were just part of the wallpaper in the room.

I think often about the idea of travel writing because I am a writer who loves traveling, I love reading travel writing and I would love the idea of being paid to visit all of these amazing places and meet new people and eat incredible food and do exciting things. In essence, the goal is to be on vacation for a job. Or have my job be vacation. However you spin it, it’s the impossible target of vacation never ending and real, boring life never creeping back in.

I’ve written here before about how traditional travel writing is not really much of a thing anymore.

I thought about it while climbing the seemingly endless stairs of Lisbon last week, taking in the technicolor beauty of the city and sweating through my shirts. The travel writer in the vein of Rick Steves, whose outdated books still sit in Airbnb’s, seems gone.

Basically what you’re left with are two ends of extremes: already famous people dispatched around the world for reliably popular content á la Conan, or complete unknowns with cameras strapped to their chests and mounted on sticks as they narrate their travels and over-react to street food hoping to trick the algorithm and come up first when you search for recommendations for a city you’ve just bought flights to.

There’s no way to really break in.

I still thought about what’s missing in the world of travel content. Where is there a gap? Where is there a niche to fill? What’s not being done? I thought about the often-Instagram Storied quote from Anthony Bourdain: “Be a traveler, not a tourist.”

Easy for him to say, right? He had a fixer to show him the places off the beaten path and allow his trip to transcend travel and, therefore, vacation. Friends and friends of the network to get him on fishing boats or backyard barbecues or Michelin star restaurants or illegal speakeasy.

So how does the average person transcend tourism and become a traveler? Where is the passage from surface-level interaction with a place and a true understanding of its soul?

The answer, I believe at least, lies in the mundane.

In the wallpaper.

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As the sun set on Lisbon and my Garmin watch congratulated me on absolutely pile-driving my usual stair-climbing goal, the narrow streets filled in with makeshift bars and grill stations. Soon it would be wall to wall people speaking all sorts of languages and enjoying cheap Sagres and Superbock, grilled sardines and smoky meats. Turns out in mid-June the entire city becomes a party for the feast of Saint Anthony (or Santo Antonio as he’s known there). Finally Catholicism has done something fun for me.

Those colossal steps were now bleachers for the young and old to dance and sing along with the DJ stationed on the bridge above. I drank my Sagres and my ginha in the little chocolate cups, and my eyes hurt from standing too close to smoky grills waiting for my bifana. I felt like a tourist because I was one. The DJ would fade from one song to the next and the crowd would dance and cheer — mostly peppy pop songs in Portuguese, none of which I knew or understood. I didn’t pay much attention until he played something that sounded more at home on late 90s or early 2000s college radio. Sort of fuzzy alt rock, a little jangly. Familiar in its sound but not the words. I’ve heard this song before, or many like it, throughout my whole life. I just didn’t know this one.

But everyone else did.

It wasn’t like a big energy-boosting banger that would kick the party up a notch. It was just something they all knew and liked. It was like “Iris” or “Flagpole Sitta” or “Hey Jealousy” came on at a party. There was a clear comfort in the familiarity in the crowd. I frantically tried to catch a single phrase so I could look it up later, because I liked it and I thought about how there was this whole world of yesterday’s music in other cultures that I knew nothing about. There was something exciting in this idea of something that is old and largely uncool to so many being so new and fresh to my foreign ears. I thought about going up to the guy in the silly hat hanging out in the window by me and asking him about the song.

But then it was too late. It was over and I had overthought this moment that no one else around me even gave a second thought.

The DJ went back to pop music and I went on with my night, but then my opportunity struck again when a similar song came on shortly after. Similar enough in vibe that I wanted to pounce on it and at least come away with one new one. I grabbed Michele’s phone since she had service and yelled over the crowd SIRI WHAT IS THIS SONG and miraculously she told me.

Thinking about being able to unearth these songs that clearly have a space in people’s lives excited me, because I could go home with new songs to listen to while I run around my familiar streets and parks, looking the tourists of my own city as they look at me and project what it must be like to live full time in the place they’re only visiting.

These songs that are just dyed into the fabric of your life, where you sing along almost out of obligation and muscle memory more than excitement. The ones not so much purposefully taught to you but played near you while other things were happening. The ones that remind you of something else, where the song is almost incidental compared to the moment or moments it soundtracked. They’re so tied to those moments that no matter how many times you hear them and how many places you hear them, it still brings you back to something. Hopefully something good. Something happy. Maybe just something mundane like the drive somewhere or the grocery store checkout line back when the store felt impossibly large. Before you had any aspirations to be a 19-year-old east coast beach god.

To go back to this idea of how to be a traveler rather than a tourist, and by extension zero in on travel writing that goes beyond the Instagram reel, it all comes down to shared humanity, right? Common experiences and emotion that doesnt recognize political boundaries. That’s what the best of them did - point out what makes us all similar rather than different.

In that moment I got a window into what life was like here for a lot of the people in the streets and it felt like a shortcut to emotion.

A vacation is not real life. It doesn’t last forever nor should it because then it becomes real life. And real life is mundane.

Choosing to angle your tourism toward the mundane and sit with it for a second might not make you a “traveler” either. Because who even knows what that is and what he meant by that? Maybe it’s ultimately meaningless.

This moment — less the song and more the moment with it — is a souvenir like the kitschy tourist shit I got: soccer memorabilia and a fridge magnet. It’s something I can interact with and I’ll remember a moment in time. We’re good at picking up souvenirs, huh? We do it all the time and we don’t even notice.

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Here’s the song by the way. It’s fine.

A while ago I posted something about soccer (and beyond) and categorized it under the cute little title “Pitch Emails.” Based on the creative fulfillment I got from my Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, I think I’ll try to spend this summer putting together 11 Pitch Emails stories, about soccer (and beyond). I think it’s funny to do this while most leagues’ seasons are over.

Ideally, you don’t have to enjoy soccer to enjoy these posts. We’ll see!

It’s one of the most famous movie endings for a good reason.

Dustin Hoffman has just come crashing into Elaine’s wedding and convinced her to run away with him instead of the other guy at the altar. He defied the odds to get here. His car broke down as the strummed guitar soundtrack sputters to a halt with him, and he starts sprinting. Is he too late??

Oh, Jesus, God, no, etc.

You can see on his face that, for a second, he thinks it’s over, and then decides to act. Hoffman is so good, man. That’s incredible face acting where you can actually see the gears in his head turn from “I’m fucked” to “fuck it.” BANGBANGBANGELAINEBANGBANGBANGELAINE

Again, against all odds, Elaine walks away from the altar like she’s hypnotized by it all and then shrieks BEN and Hoffman sprints downstairs and starts fighting off the understandably pissed off Elaine’s dad. Mrs. Robinson for some reason smacks Elaine around even though literally 57 seconds ago she was smiling while Hoffman banged on the window. Not that anyone should be taking moral cues from Mrs. Robinson, but still.

Hoffman manages to fend everyone off with a big ol’ cross, which is a very cool move to use on humans who haven’t been transformed into vampires or other ghoulish figures who would fear a crucifix, finding a window of time to get through the double door and lock everyone inside with said cross. Multitool.

Elaine and Dustin Hoffman are all smiles as they retreat and catch a well-timed bus pulling up by the church. The people gawk at the guy in the ripped jacket and the woman in the wedding dress as they bound down this very different aisle (irony) and settle into the back seat of the bus, looking into the rear window at what they’re quite literally leaving behind them.

They did it. Against all odds, they did it. They smile at each other and then look forward. This is the part that’s the famous part because the shot continues, and their euphoria gives way to a sort of “now what” or “oh, fuck” or “oh, fuck, now what?” as Simon and Garfunkel sing about darkness their old friend.

Much has been written about this scene and this shot over the years. The way it expertly shows the “ever after” part of “they all lived happily ever after,” where after the climax and victory comes the whole rest of your life part of it. The reality of a moment being the climax is that it’s all downhill from there, or at least flat. The reality of this shot, too, is that they didn’t even know they were supposed to convey this feeling of uncertainty or fear. The camera just kept rolling and the actors didn’t know what else to do, so they settled into their neutral faces. But it’s perfect. The Graduate isn’t quite The Graduate without that ending.

I’m not writing about The Graduate, though. I’m writing about soccer.

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When I try to get someone to watch and obsess over the sport as much as I have, I sell them on the narrative aspect of it all – the promise that even in the off-season, there is so much drama from the immense wealth disparity, personality and culture clash, and maniacal journalist culture. It’s the best reality show in the world in addition to the world’s most popular game.

Teams and players get these reputations, these narratives built around them, based in equal parts on statistics and vibes. That’s really soccer in a nutshell. For every stat wonk shoving things like expected goals and possession percentage and heat maps down your throat, you have stories like former Newell’s Old Boys manager Marcelo Bielsa sneaking into the bedroom of then-13-year-old now-US Men’s National Team coach Mauricio Pochettino and feeling his legs while he slept, confirming that, yep, those are footballer’s legs, and signing him up for the team.

I don’t know if that story is 100% true but I 100% believe it is and until Marcelo Bielsa calls me to deny it I will continue to share it as a tidbit.

Narratives are born from successes and failures. Players and teams gain identities of perennial losers, also-rans, “bottlers,” or serial winners, giants, “big” clubs. For the most part, things tend to stick to the script just due to the fact that, most of the time, money wins. The rich clubs buy the best players and then they win. Simple as that. But Cinderella stories, though rare, do happen.

The natural assumption is that narratives end, or at least change, when that happens. The scrappy underdog gets a win and cements its deserved place on Mt. Olympus. The hard-working person finally gets the recognition they deserve and get their due. That’s just what happens because that’s what’s supposed to happen, right?

This season alone, the narratives across Europe that changed were Crystal Palace, a team that had seemingly cemented itself as a selling club that was perfectly happy to finish 12th in the Premier League season after season, won the FA Cup (if this means nothing to you, don’t worry about it) against team X-Blades themselves, Manchester City. It was the club’s first major trophy in its 119-year history.

Crystal Palace’s trophy-less run was longer than the city of Las Vegas has existed, and yet they are about to get a baseball team.

Newcastle United, itself becoming one of the money-juiced clubs but for now still growing, beat Liverpool in the Carabao Cup (again, don’t worry about it), ending a 70-year run without a major trophy.

Aberdeen won the Scottish Cup. Bologna won the Coppa Italia. Stuttgart won the German Cup. Manchester United, the soccer team version of a kid who says, “Do you know who my father is” ate a big pile of shit in the Premier League and European competitions (the latter being most important for me).

As I’m writing this, Real Betis could beat Chelsea in the Europa Conference League (don’t worry about it) and give Antony the ultimate redemption story and further salt Manchester United’s wound (who spent the afternoon losing to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations All-Star team, which had never played together as a team before today.

And perhaps most importantly of all, Harry Kane and Eric Dier won the Bundesliga with Bayern Munich, and Tottenham Hotspur won the Europa League (don’t worry about it, just know it’s important), giving me a chance to walk around town in a Spurs jersey like hot shit rather than just shit.

This was a team, you’ll remember, that Esquire tasked me with writing about, specifically falling in love with them due to their reputation of noble underachievers. In that story I wrote about talking basketball and soccer with a waiter in Paris. When he found out I liked the Sixers and Spurs, he said, “Oh, so you like teams that never win?”

Garçon, if you’re reading this, eat shit along with your words.

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There’s an attitude shift when things like this happen. Clubs that are regularly the butt of jokes are suddenly in on those jokes while the internet turns its attention to the former bullies (Arsenal). It’s like in a movie when the dorky kid does something cool and stands up to the bully, and the student body cheers as if they hadn’t all been going along with the bully’s lead the whole time.

The crowd in the cafeteria or quad or auditorium all cheer, maybe the main character kisses their crush who didn’t really give them the time of day until now, a very sick 90’s alt rock song plays, the camera pulls away to show the bigger picture as we fade to black.

And we live happily ever after.

But what if they kept the cameras rolling in all of those movies like they had in The Graduate? The song ends, the kiss ends, the applause ends, and everyone goes back to their business. There’s a shift, but it’s likely not permanent. We all fall back into our patterns.

The truth of the matter is that the arc of the universe does not bend toward justice, no matter how many times we try to do so with the movies we write. In the real world, we turn real life into team sports and root for “our side,” and in team sports we attach binary morality – good guys versus bad guys – where it doesn’t actually fit. Unless your team wins, which is rare, the good guys seldom win.

Every swig of celebratory champagne just makes the hangover that much worse. As someone who lives in Philadelphia, I know that after the celebration and parade ends, you’re left with dead grass in the park and a lot of trash to clean up.

So what, exactly, is the point of all of this? It needs to go beyond just the simple pessimism of “Every happy ending actually gives way to a sad or, at the minimum, unfulfilling reality.” It’s not simply a cynical warning about getting too big for your britches, because, to quote Papa John, “the day of reckoning will come.”

I’m worried I’ll veer too closely to the speech Jack Black gives about “The Man” in School of Rock where The Man always wins.

He's everywhere. In the White House, down the hall, Ms. Mullins, she's the Man. And the Man ruined the ozone, and he's burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank! Okay? And there used to be a way to stick it to the Man, it was called rock 'n roll. But guess what? Oh no. The Man ruined that, too, with a little thing called MTV! So don't waste your time trying to make anything cool, or pure, or awesome, 'cause the Man is just gonna call you a fat washed up loser and crush your soul. So do yourselves a favor and just give up!

Or the Gen X navel-gazing philosophy of Dante Hicks in Clerks, who proclaims that life is just “a series of down endings.”

Can things really change? Is it naive to believe so? Is it overly cynical to believe they can’t? Can one moment of greatness really change the trajectory of your life or your circumstances in the long-term?

It has to be something greater than the boring old middle ground, right? We’re all destined for something great, right? Because we are the protagonist. We are the hero. We deserve it.

Anything else would be unfulfilling — the worst thing a life can be.

Without that you’re stuck in beige pragmatism. You hope for the best, you brace for the worst.

You reach a pinnacle and then you look out from the back seat of the bus and your smile fades a little as that reality sets in.

Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit.

I guess this is where the concept of faith comes into play. Faith can be a powerful thing, but dangerous (like when it’s used for fighting off your love interest’s extended family). It’s scary to put your faith into something knowing it might end badly even if today is great. Can faith outweigh cynicism? Depends on the day.

But that’s the point, right? The point of all of this. Not just sports. Not just movies. All of it? That’s why we like sports and movies. We just have to have faith that once the credits roll everyone is still having fun and still in love as the names roll by.

You just have to enjoy the good moment and have faith that things will continue down the good path, or at least not get any worse, even when the evidence points to the contrary. The good guys, as you see them, will continue on the path of righteous victory and will receive their just rewards because they have to. The bad guys will go to hell. Dustin Hoffman and Elaine will get off that bus somewhere and get nachos and continue being happy. Or maybe they won’t. Everyone is still locked in that church and are long dead from starvation. Things really will be different now because they swear it will be.

In 2016, Leicester City completed the ultimate Cinderella story, winning the Premier League out of absolutely nowhere. It’s one of the greatest moments in recent memory of the sport, and will live on as such. Jamie Vardy, a guy who played Sunday league football between labor jobs became an England-capped Striker. Stars and legends of the game were born, and it seemed that nothing was truly impossible for anyone. Dreams were coming true live on TV.

Leicester was never supposed to be here, but the fans kept their faith year after year, putting a few pounds on the Foxes winning the title for a bit of fun and a statement of faith in the team. And when they did win, the 5,000-1 odds yielded tens of thousands in winnings. Their faith paid off.

And then they bet again the next year, and the next year, and now Leicester has been relegated from the Premier League and Vardy, arguably their greatest ever goal scorer if not greatest ever player, is leaving the club.

We’re veering too hard into cynicism again. I don’t want that.

Call it faith, call it blind optimism, call it naivety. We need a bit of that in our life. The magic. The magic has to come from somewhere when normal life doesn’t provide it. We attach our emotions and even our hard-earned dollars to these outcomes. We feel the losses, we feel the victories. We form relationships with people on screens that we’ve never met or that don’t even exist in reality, and we pull for them like our own happiness depends on it.

Because, in a way, it does.

The simple conclusion is that in soccer as we do in life, we come back even when we know we’ll get our heartbroken. We feel these highs, and know that a low is coming, but we’re OK with chasing that high again even if we know we’re getting hurt along the way.

The reason we keep coming back even when we know the future looks bleak is something simple and more profound than faith or optimism or any of these wonderful things:

Gambling addiction.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Drugdealer ft. Weyes Blood.

Conan was always pretty open with his enthusiasm over certain artists, too. Seth Meyers always seemed like the guy I’d probably most like to share a car ride with thanks to his fondness for bands like The Hold Steady and PUP.

Now we’ve got John Mulaney hosting “Everybody’s Live” on Netflix, which is clearly using him and his show as a guinea pig to see if more live content is worth the squeeze. It probably is, and the whole streaming versus TV thing is just gonna get murkier.

Mulaney has used his show as a vehicle to book bands and artists he loves, even if they have names you can’t get past Standards & Practices or might not even have a new album, or might be two artists who aren’t even in the same band. He’s just doing whatever he wants, free from the shackles of cable or network TV. And part of that is he gets to nerd out over bands and artists he loves because there is no forced objectivity or relationship between the network and the label using each other for exposure or whatever.

So, I wanted to learn more about it, and I ended up talking to the music booker for “Everybody’s Live,” Kevin O’Donnell. O’Donnell has been friends with Mulaney for years, and they have a lot of musical interests in common. So when Mulaney got his talk show off the ground, he enlisted O’Donnell to book the acts.

Check out my interview with him for Paste, where we go into how Mulaney and his team pick the artists for the show, the freedom that comes with Netflix versus a network, putting together these fantasy-draft collaborations, who else is on his dream list of gets and, of course, who Richard Kind wants on the show.

You can read it here:

Behind the Music of Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney

It was pretty fun exploring how music is such an integral part of the American variety show tradition, and how Mulaney’s show is changing what that show looks and sounds like. I’m not here to be all “hooray Netflix!” but I am a fan of good comedians getting shows where they can showcase bands like Mannequin Pussy without having them have to censor their name, or get Kim Deal and Kim Gordon to dust off a song from the ‘90s they’ve never played live.

I’ve been trying to work on something larger about the crossover of comedy and music — not comedy music — but you’ll have to wait on that. In the meantime, please read my interview with Kevin O’Donnell.

That time I got diagnosed with cancer, which I obviously wrote about not too long after, all of the usual things ran through my head: “Is this real?” “Am I going to die?” “How much is this going to cost?” “How much is this going to suck?” “No, really, how much is this going to cost? Should I strategically die before the bills come?” But present throughout all of that was the understanding that, eventually, this was going to make for a good story.

It had to, right? Serious illness, namely cancer, has been the focal point of so many great works of art, be it written or on canvas or film or on a screen.

When one commits to a life of journalism and creative writing, something monumental like cancer coming along is a cure for writer’s block. A lightning bolt of inspiration.

It feels crazy to call it a gift, but in some ways it was for me.

Do I wish I never had cancer? Yeah, obviously, cancer sucks. They make T-shirts that say so. But, I’m happy with the person I am now — physically and emotionally scarred but with a wealth of life experience packed into a relatively small period of time and with what I think is some greater perspective that otherwise might’ve taken years or decades to find.

I’m also quite proud of the stuff it has inspired me to write, but at the same time I sort of wish I never had to write it. Duck/rabbit, etc.

Before I had even started treatment, I told some friends that I already had a name for my cancer memoir. How’s that for putting the cart before the horse and focusing on things that mattered? I still think it’s a funny name, and maybe some day I’ll get to write it and have it published and it’ll grace the front of a real, bona fide book and it’ll be in a bookstore, and people will see it and go, “Wow, they really let him write a book called [REDACTED].”

I even mocked up a cover when I was bored one day.

But for now, we’re just doing things in batches online.

May 9 is the anniversary of my surgery where they cut the remaining bits of cancer out of my body (and the parts of my body that it was clinging to). It came at the end of a few rounds of chemo and a couple months of radiation, and left me with a temporary ileostomy bag and some scars.

It left me without some mileage of large intestine, but with plenty of stories over that period.

That was 2022. To celebrate three years of good health, I’ve decided to publish a sort of triple-blog of sorts. Three essays, looking back on my experience having, fighting and then no longer having cancer, hopefully through a funny lens. Because what they don’t tell you about cancer is that a lot of it can be pretty funny.

I’m calling this “Stories From My Chemo Phase,” but that is not the title I really want to use. I hope you enjoy it.

To make things a little less daunting, I’ve published each one as a stand-alone, and you can click the images below to read them if you want.

I think I’m gonna limit myself to cancer content on an annual basis — maybe even less — especially as I put some distance between me and it. If you’re sick of hearing about my cancer, here’s some stuff I wrote about the Tony Hawk Games, and another about a mysterious container of goo.

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Iggy Pop.

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I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you something deeply uncool about me. When I go on work trips, I listen to Interpol every morning because I think it helps me project a cooler and more relaxed vibe into the world.

Most of my work trips involve busy trade show floors where I have to do interviews and generally just interact with dozens of people. I am a naturally anxious person. I like people, I like meeting people, I like talking to people. But I’m still susceptible to social anxiety like anyone. And the sensory overload of a convention center doesn’t help. To combat that, I’ve started this practice where every morning as I leave my hotel room – usually in a suit and often in sunglasses, which helps – I listen to Interpol in an attempt to let the feeling of steely, well-dressed aloofness verging on bored superiority wash over me, setting my baseline at a chiller speed so even if my wheels start turning comparatively faster when I’m working, I’m still a pretty fucking cool guy.

Or at least I pretend to be one. Visualization and manifesting work to a degree.

The enormity of having cancer doesn’t hit you immediately. At least I don’t think it did for me. It sort of unfurls with each step you take. You’re getting the port put in and you still don’t think about the fact that you’re doing chemo until you’re actually getting chemo pumped into you and you think, Whoa, I’m actually doing chemo. I’m doing chemo because I have cancer. If anything big-picture hit me that first day it was the financial part of it, and even that didn’t hit until I was paying the first bills. What a country.

I remember a few times walking into the hospital and seeing the sign out front: Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Cancer center. That would hit me.

Holy shit, you have cancer. You’re going to the cancer center because you have cancer. YOU have cancer. You HAVE cancer. You have CANCER! You’re at the Cancer Center, Cancer Boy!

Yada yada, I got better, because I spent enough time at the Cancer Center.

The bad things didn’t hit in one fell swoop, and neither did the good things. It’s little victories, little reminders about how much better things are now than they were then. There were some milestone moments that felt bigger than the rest. Getting a call that the cancer was responding to the chemo rocked. Having the surgery to remove it and hearing that it was successful was good, but preceded a hellish week in the hospital when my remaining digestive system forgot how to digest and I spent the time throwing up green liquid - often on the floor/myself when the nursing staff was too busy with other patients to help Puke Boy (my new nickname since I didn’t have cancer anymore. I don’t know why they wouldn’t just call me Normal Boy.)

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That first clean scan that fall hit like a lottery win. I remember biking as fast as I could just because I had so much energy to spend – not least because I had spent the morning and early afternoon at various coffee shops, too afraid to go home to an empty house and wait for the news, so caffeine and adrenaline rushed me around the city at what felt like the fastest my bike had ever gone. I’ve made a habit of posting the “OH YEAH” part of the Menzingers’ “In Remission” every time I get a good scan.

Here it is:

It’s fun when one of your favorite bands has a song called “In Remission” where there’s a big fuckin guttural OH YEAH to encapsulate exactly how you feel – even if it’s at odds with what the band had in mind when they wrote it. It feels like a “the world is a simulation” moment to me. And of course it is. It’s a simulation for me, because I am the main character, and the main character can’t die that early in the movie, unless it’s “The Place Beyond the Pines” or something.

It felt awesome every single time I got a good scan result back. The returns never once diminished, and posting the “OH YEAH” part of “In Remission” was still as fun as it always had been. But each good scan didn’t feel like the end, or a victory even. It felt a bit like in a video game where you need to stay up in the air or keep some sort of power-up alive, and you hit a little icon or something to keep it going. Each one is progress and every successive scan makes it less likely that it’ll come back, but it never felt like the end of a chapter or the end of the story – would it ever?

Running the risk of being George W. Bush on the boat with the big “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him while the mission was very much not accomplished, I’ll say that this year feels a little different. Barring one scan whose results weren’t as clearly good as the rest, where I skipped the “In Remission” post, this year has been as close to “done” as I’ve ever felt.

Part of it is the fact that my oncologist – a very straight shooter who once when I joked that everyone thought I was going to die except me she said “uh huh” – used the word “survivor” for the first time, and not as in “hey did you watch Survivor last night? It’s still good, can you believe it? Anyway, you are going to die.”

May 9 will be three years since a surgeon rooted around in my guts, removed a sizeable chunk of it, stapled together what was left, and wished me the best. My doctor says three years is a pretty good indicator of cure, although they can’t legally declare me cancer-free until five years clean.

I got the port taken out of my chest, for one. That seemed like a pretty good “I’m putting all of this shit behind me” moment. Having that put in was one of the first “Oh wow, this is real” moments.

For those who don’t know, chemo is poison, and the trick is to kill me just enough that it kills the cancer without fully killing me in the process, and it’s often better to administer especially gnarly batches of chemo into a larger vein rather than a smaller one in your arm, so they surgically implant a port with a tube into your jugular that they access through your chest. It looks like in a movie where a bug or something is crawling under your skin, but stops just below your collar bone. I asked the doctor if I could listen to a podcast while he put it in, because “waking sedation” sounded like I’d still be too aware and uncomfortable, and he told me “You can do whatever you want.” I don’t remember anything from the episode of Maron I was listening to, but I do remember being wheeled out having remembered that there was a soccer game on, and then giving the thumbs down to the dreaded Arsenal scoring. What anesthesia?

Anyway, I got that port out, and the same doctor who put it in was the one to take it out. I was fully awake this time, and could hear him clearly say “Come to papa” as he pulled it out from under my skin. I chuckled because the stereo was also playing “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)” and when the opening line said “There’s a port” I wanted to say “Not anymore!” but I didn’t want to break his concentration or cause any jerky motions while he had a scalpel next to my jugular vein.

Leaving the hospital that day felt like a win. It feels fucking awesome to leave the hospital feeling like a winner rather than having your soul sucked out of you either through chemical poison, radiation poison, bad news, or a combination of the three.

It somehow didn’t even feel like a win when I got to ring the bell. THE bell. The bell is a huge aspect of the public’s understanding of cancer research. You get pumped full of chemo, your hair falls out, you run to the bathroom to puke, and then when you’re done the treatment you ring the bell. Roll credits.

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I’ll once again write about the power of visualization here. When I was in my little chemo cubby, chillin in the chair with my cold mittens to protect the nerves in my fingies and dozing off to the sound of The Price is Right, I’d sometimes hear someone get to ring the bell. Out in the hallway, the nurses would stand around and recite this cute little poem, and then you’d hear the bell ring, and everyone would cheer. I’d think about how I can’t wait to be the one ringing the bell – partially because it meant that I’d be done with chemo, but partially because it’s fun to be the toast of the town for a second. Everyone loves to be the one who blows out the candles more than one of the people who sings “Happy Birthday.” I think it’s OK that one piece of your end-goal of “being done with cancer” can be selfishly wanting attention. Anything that helps you get to that point seems fine by me.

Anyway, after I had done IV chemo, there was no fanfare, but I figured that just meant because I had to do radiation next (and I’d still take chemo pills every day. They had a little C on them, for “chemo” I assume). Every day I walked back to the radiation area and I’d pass the bell. I’d think about how I can’t wait for my turn, and how I’d ring the hell out of it like I was a minor local celebrity and the Sixers are about to come out. When my last session finally came, there was some confusion about the extent of the treatment on my lymph nodes. It’s a little inside baseball that I won’t get into now, but all you need to know is that we were confused and upset and I, at least, felt like physical shit. That said, I wanted to ring that god damn bell because I would be double dog damned if I went back into that basement again. They obviously weren’t aware that this was my last day, so I told Michele to hold on and asked the front desk if I could ring the bell since it was my last day. They said yes.

I walked over and rang it half-heartedly, because when you ring it you realize it is a bell that can be quite loud and sick people are just trying to chill and ignore the Skyrizi “Nothing is everything” jingle playing incessantly on the waiting room TV and a bell isn’t helping any of that. I got a half-hearted “yay” from the room – sort of the same you’d expect from a half-full restaurant after the waitstaff does some whole birthday song and dance on a weekday afternoon. I flashed a quick thumbs-up to Michele while she filmed me and posted it on Instagram to get that attention that I desperately craved.

After I got the port ripped out of me, the next time I was at Penn was to speak with their board about the phenomenon of colon cancer among young, handsome people. My oncologist has known me long enough to know that I like to riff and talk about myself, so she thought I’d be a good candidate to be there and say “Hey, look at me, I am flesh and blood proof that this is happening to young and handsome people at an alarming rate, money please!”

I hopped off the bus on that warm spring day in my best business casual clothes and looked at the Abramson Cancer Center sign. There have been a few times during this process where I’ve thought about time’s non-linear structure, like when I was in the hospital after surgery and all I wanted to do was go swimming, so I got in the ocean as soon as I could upon release, even though the Atlantic was frigid, I knew there was still that version of me in the hospital bed who would have killed to do that.

On this day, I thought about all of the days where I walked up to the hospital and saw the word “cancer” and realized that they were talking about me, so I made sure to really appreciate the fact that I was now going in arguably the healthiest I’ve been in my whole life as a sterling example of surviving it.

Behind my sunglasses, I was cooling down my brain by listening to Interpol. Because I was excited. I didn’t used to be excited when I came here.

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When I was 9 or 10, my friend got a kidney transplant. Once the new kidney settled into its new environs, he (my friend, not the kidney) got to go to a Harrisburg Senators game with a group of other kids who had also received organ transplants through Gift of Life, and asked me if I wanted to be his plus-one for the game.

When you’re a kid in a town without an MLB team, and you’re but a small child, the Minor League stadium in the middle of the river polluted by Mayflies is practically the Colosseum.

Before the game, my friend and the other kids who had gotten organ transplants were going to go out on the field to be honored by the crowd for their bravery. My friend told me to come with him.

I protested on the grounds that I still had all of my original organs. I was just here for some baseball. Maybe a soda. He insisted, and before I knew it I was standing between first and second base facing the crowd. The voice on the loudspeaker prompted everyone to give these brave boys and girls from the Gift of Life Organ Donation Program a big round of applause, and they did.

I just stood there, absolutely certain that I was breaking some rule and probably, because I was in the throes of Catholic school, very much sinning. I think I still had fun at the game, despite that.

This same friend got to do the Make-a-Wish program, too. The Senators game was not his wish. I don’t remember what it was, but it was definitely better than that.

When you’re a kid and you get dealt incredibly difficult hands like organ transplants or injury or disease, they (rightfully) shower you with praise in how brave you are and you get to do things like making a wish to meet your heroes or go on an awesome vacation because the assumption is that because you are a kid you don’t deserve to get sick. And you don’t! No kid deserves to be sick and I hope every kid never gets sick again, even into adulthood.

Because the tacit part of “no kid deserves to get sick” is that adults do, and when you’re an adult with cancer, even on the younger end of when you “are supposed to” get cancer, people look for something to blame. You deserve to have this for one reason or another, we just have to figure out what it is.

Fast-forward to 2021. I am 29 years old and have been told that I have colorectal cancer and it has spread. I have no family history, no genetic marker or any habits that would make me a shoe-in for that kind of disease. No clear “Oh, here’s why you deserve this.”

I was what the medical community calls “really fucking unlucky” and an outlier in that I was an otherwise healthy guy in his 20s being diagnosed with something we thought only affects guys over 50 who have done enough in their life to make them deserve it.

And yet, I did not get to make a wish. Bullshit.

When you are an adult with cancer, you don’t get a wish, you just get hats.

I didn’t go fully bald when I did chemo. I lost my hair by the fistful, yes. But my hair was one of the few real genetic gifts I got. God damn I had good hair. I remember posting a picture with my chemo bag attached saying “I’ve decided I’m not going to lose my hair.” But I did. I just had so much to start with that I didn’t go fully bald. I just now had shitty hair.

I’d run my fingers through my hair and come out looking like when a toddler pets a cat and has its fur sticking out between its fingers. If I wasn’t in my house, I wouldn’t know what to do with this tuft of hair so I’d often put it in my pockets, until I was told to stop putting my hair in my pockets because it’s gross and weird and also would turn up in the laundry.

There’s a scene in Always Sunny where Mac wears a bald cap to pretend he has cancer, and the person they’re trying to scam says, “By the way, when you have cancer, your beard hair falls out, too.”

Not true. I had to shave every day during chemo, and I can’t even grow a beard. Just my usual shitty, black facial hair that makes me look dirty. Again, bullshit. Almost all downside, cancer.

I say almost all downside because free hats is an upside.

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I got a lot of hats because it’s one of the agreed-upon things that people do when you have cancer. You wear hats, and you receive hats because you wear hats with more frequency now. But that’s about as far as you get as a grownup with cancer, even if you are on the young end.

Being on the young end, though, as a millennial, I feel like we’re still due a wish. Mine is a generation that had to withstand several once-in-a-generation moments before we could even vote, leaving us in this liminal space between adolescence and true adulthood, however you want to define that. We’re the generation that profited off of kitschy decorations that say things about “Adulting” and how we can’t do that today. We’re the most child-like adults who have ever adulted — a verb that I would like stricken from the lexicon.

We open businesses that are just playgrounds where you can drink. If you were to survey people between 28 and 40 right now, most would say they would still trick-or-treat if it were socially palatable (and as long as they could drink while they did it). I’m surprised there isn’t a beer garden/bar crawl that’s trick-or-treating themed yet.

We’re also the ones who are facing an earlier onset of cancers once reserved for adults who deserved it, like breast cancer and colorectal cancer.

So let this be my formal appeal to the powers that be at either the esteemed and honorable Make-A-Wish Foundation, or some aspiring altruist who might want to start a foundation where adults get to make wishes, too. Let people who of any age facing a tough go of it make a wish.

When you get some difficult disease like cancer or something of that nature, it’s natural to feel scared. Something to look forward to, something extraordinary, can be a huge boost. It could make all of the difference. It’s at least a small reprieve from asking the universe or God, “Why me?”

I never asked “Why me” though. For one thing, it didn’t matter. I’d always joke that it’s not as if we pinpoint the cause and we all smack ourselves in the forehead and go, “Oh, there’s the problem!” and the cancer disappears. The why isn’t so important when you’re going through it because it doesn’t make a difference.

But, regardless, I know why I got cancer. It’s simple.

I got cancer because I pretended to be a kid who got a kidney transplant at the Harrisburg Senators game. God saw it and was like, “OK, hot shot. Mr. Rubber Burner. You want some applause for being sick? That can be arranged, but it’ll be when you least expect it.”

Catholic God is undefeated, and you pay interest on your debts.

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If you’re lucky, everything you know about cancer comes from movies. This means that you have never had cancer, nor has anyone close to you, so your understanding of cancer comes from movies where a character has or had cancer. If you’re in this camp, congratulations and I hope you stay there forever.

Before I got sick, I didn’t know much about cancer because I was part of that lucky group of people without any family members having died of cancer. I come from heart attack stock.

The media portrayal of cancer is, now that I’ve seen it up close, mixed. To quote Italian soccer manager Gennaro Gattuso - it’s …

You might say it’s …

50/50.

The most accurate Cancer Movie is actually Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Surprised? I’ll use my own personal experience to back that claim up.

I knew guys in high school who would smoke weed before school. I never got it. Aside from the fact that I was extremely afraid of getting in trouble, it just seemed very unappealing to me. As far as I understood it, smoking weed was supposed to be for fun. You did it and then you listened to music, watched dumb movies or cartoons, and ate shitty food while you giggled with your friends in a basement or in the woods somewhere. I never got the idea of “Hell yeah. I’m so stoned. This is great. You know what would be awesome right now? Geometry.” “Wow, I’m so high. You know who I’d love to hang out with right now? Our history teacher.”

Despite this, by the time I got sick in 2021, the agreed upon narrative is that medical marijuana helps you through the rigors of treatment and cancer symptoms. The doctors told me this and the movies told me this.

There’s that scene in 50/50 when JGL is chilling with his old friends in the chemo chair and one offers him an edible. That is unrealistic in my experience. There were no cool old guys to offer me perspective and occasional tragicomic relief, and I didn’t leave the hospital with a dumb smile like everything was great. Instead, I read the same page of a book at least 12 times until I gave up and then just kind of zoned out.

Usually, I liked riffing with the staff when they’d come check on me or change a bag, but on that day I just avoided eye contact until they left the room. I did, however, have an appetite, which was rare. So, when I was met at the hospital by Michele and picked up by our friend, we raced the clock to get me food before my body decided it would never eat again. My food of choice was Popeye’s. Not the healthiest, but at that point any food is better than no food.

Then when we got there, I was so out of it from the combination of chemicals and poisons in my body that when they asked me what drink I wanted, I yelled (as best I could) “BUFFALO!” Everyone laughed. When they asked what sides I wanted, I told them Sprite. The laughter continued while I pleaded for someone to just bail me out.

And this is why Harold & Kumar is the most realistic cancer movie — because ordering fast food is really, really hard sometimes.

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The cancer experience is simplified in movies and TV because it has to be. Everyone’s is different, for one. And no one has time to watch someone sit through a full meeting with an oncologist to explain the treatment plan. It’s sped up to near-Sorkin levels because the plot has to move. And until they let me make a movie where a character sits down and you watch him watch an entire movie before the rest of the movie continues, you won’t see anyone sit in chemo for four hours or just kinda hang out. It has to be all action, all drama, all lessons. Bang bang bang. That’s what we in the screenwriting world call pacing.

Speaking of pacing, I’m doing a bad job of it. The point I’m making here is that cancer media, be it movies or TV, sort of places itself into a few different categories. There’s the “Person gets sick and it causes them to make a sharp left turn in their life.” Those turns can be, again to quote Gattuso here, sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit. Sometimes they use their illness as an opportunity to be a better person and grab life by the horns in a good way. Other times they become the most prolific meth cook/dealer in the Southwestern United States if not the world, causing all sorts of collateral damage to your family and friends.

I didn’t really change my life too drastically after I got sick. I won’t say these shows are unrealistic, but in my experience, as soon as my life was disrupted to this level, all I wanted to do was get my mundane life back.

There’s a show that just came out called “Dying for Sex,” and the central premise is that a woman is diagnosed with terminal cancer, so she leaves her unfulfilling marriage and has as many sexual experiences as possible before she dies. It’s a true story. I saw the trailer for it one day and thought, “I wonder what I would do if I got diagnosed with cancer,” and then I remembered.

And it’s funny, for a second a thought actually crossed my mind: Did I waste my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to really flip the table? Did I waste having cancer by being boring and extra-medium in sickness as I was in health? Did I miss my chance to totally reinvent some aspect of my life? And the answer, again when thinking rationally, is no. My life rocks and I was and am happy to have it back, even on the days where it feels boring. Boring is a gift!

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Another big media portrayal of cancer is the buddy aspect. These are your 50/50s. I am lucky in the fact that I, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, had many Seth Rogens in my life – friends who care deeply about me and went above and beyond during my treatment. Someone asked me once if I was surprised by anything in treatment, and I could only think of a positive response: Everyone in my life who I have chosen to keep around not only stepped up to the plate, but exceeded my expectations, so it proved that I have even better taste in friends than I was aware. The only surprise was how much better the people in my life actually are.

Sometimes the real cancer is the friends we made along the way hooooly shit.

But yeah to that smarmy lessons-learning point – there are the cancer movies where the plot is “Someone gets cancer and someone learns the true meaning of Christmas.”

By that I mean, quite literally, Christmas movies. Did you realize how many Christmas movies involve cancer? It’s so many. One time we turned off one of the new cornball Christmas movies, I think it was Hot Frosty because it came to light that Lacey Chabert’s late husband died of some nondescript cancer. They tell you this by showing a piece of paper in the basement that basically says something like “TREATMENT - INOPERABLE. CHEMO.”

Even this far out from the bad days, we didn’t really want to be reminded of the bad days during the holidays, so we switched to something we thought was equally silly and less likely to mention cancer. We chose the Emma Roberts flick The Holidate. Guess what: At one point, her mom is shaming her for being single and says something along the lines of, “Who will be there during chemo?” to which Roberts’ character responds, “I don’t have cancer, Mom.” and the mom says, “It runs in our family.”

What the fuck, man? Hollywood, if you’re listening, I am begging you to find another easy stand-in for sad, untimely death than cancer. Bear attacks happen all the time. Start there. Not to throw bears under the bus either, actually, bus accident works, too. I don’t know. Figure it out.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of all from this is to lean on your loved ones when times get tough, even when they are laughing at you as you severely fumble a simple task. And for all of you Hollywood movie producer types looking for an easy plot device to stir up universal sympathy, I get it. I’ve been using my cancer for that very purpose for almost five years now, this very blog included. But, maybe branch off into other diseases. Don’t take the easy road all the time. I believe in you.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

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A bar in my neighborhood closed last week, which was a shame. It’d been open for a while and people liked it. I thought it was a good bar. I thought that because it had all of the makings of, for me, what makes for a good bar: It was close, it was reasonably priced, and the staff was always normal. Normal is an important and perhaps underrated quality in a bartender. I don’t need nor do I want you to go over the top like a Chick-fil-A pastor-employee or pretend that we’re best friends. I just need you to be normal. You notice when someone isn’t normal.

The bar was also good because it was one of the bars that often had on a Bar Movie.

What’s a Bar Movie, Brendan?

That’s you right now.

A Bar Movie is a movie that you might not ever consciously think of watching or picking out from a menu, because it’s likely not on a streaming service menu — or at least not on the homepage. Maybe you only recognize it by name as a relic from the time before streaming.

Bar Movies play in the corner, and you are transfixed by it, even without hearing the audio, and even if you just popped in halfway through and understand none of the plot having missed out on some important context, exposition and dialogue. You stare at it, hypnotized almost, even if your friends or spouse are trying to talk to you.

They are often action movies or thrillers, often with a sci-fi bent, and often with the likes of Arnold or Kurt Russell, but not always. Escape from New York is a Bar Movie. Repo Man is a Bar Movie. Stealing Harvard is a Bar Movie but Freddy Got Fingered is not.

Bar Movies also tend to have at least one scene of gratuitous violence or body horror or sight gag that is so disturbing that one of your friends looks and says, What the fuck is happening, and you say, I have no idea I’ve never seen this, and the sound is off. A Bar Movie can work as a silent movie where you don’t read all of the subtitles, so dialogue-heavy flicks like Clerks or Wes Anderson are out.

If it’s getting or has gotten a reboot that takes itself too seriously in the last 10 years, it’s probably a Bar Movie.

There’s no real good definition of a Bar Movie. So I’ll have to rely on wholly original criteria that I came up with — I’ll know it when I see it.

Sound off in the comments if you have what you think is a favorite Bar Movie or important criteria of one.

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Pretty much every bar has at least one TV anymore. Sometimes 12. If it doesn’t have one, it’s a statement and there’s usually something baked into its business plan and aesthetic that it wants you to “unplug” and “engage,” and also has the word “craft” or “artisan” somewhere on its menu/branding.

A Bar Movie experience is the last 45 minutes of “Total Recall” at 4 in the afternoon. A Bar Movie experience is trying to discern exactly what is happening in “Scanners II” having not seen the first 15 minutes or the original “Scanners.”

And while the Bar Movie might on the surface have little nutritional or artistic value, and might even come at the expense of real conversation with real friends and loved ones, the Bar Movie serves an important purpose.

Bars that don’t show Bar Movies often end up exposing you to the 24-hour news cycle — be it cable news networks riling you up about politics, or sports networks giving pancake-batter-brained former players three-hour bro-fests or making poor magazine columnists scream at each other for the approval of a guy in a power knot.

And when you’re fixated on whatever Keanu is doing on the screen, you’re not looking at your phone.

The Bar Movie not only entertains, it actively protects you. It is an escape from the grind of normal life the same way whatever you’re drinking is, and it is an active buffer between you and the static that we otherwise subsist on and freak ourselves out with.

The Bar movie doesn’t flick on your fight-or-flight. You’re not going to argue with your friend about politics or the Lakers. You’re talking about how gross Sam Neill looks without eyes in Event Horizon.

Because the Bar Movie is a relic from the past. A comfort. Not only because most Bar Movies are from decades prior. A Bar Movie could’ve been made last year, as long as it’s the kind of movie that you just want to sit down and watch without feeling like you need to come away with an opinion or take or having learned anything. They’re in shorter supply now.

They’re the kind of movie that you catch on TV back when you’d catch movies on TV, maybe when you were home sick, maybe late one night that you stayed in.

I like Bar Movies. I like the idea of them, and when I come across one it motivates me to go home and check out some movies I had never seen before that might’ve been before my time. And when I do, I don’t want to watch it as the Second Screen — the first being my phone. I just want to zone out and dial in. I think it’s nice that something makes you want to do that.

I should stop now, because if I were to keep going it’d become some hacky critique of both the contemporary media landscape as well as the state of movie production — both topics that have been written about to death and by those both smarter and dumber than me, and I don’t need to add to the noise when the whole point I’m getting at is that sometimes you just need this very specific amount of stimulation to feel good.

I’ll just leave it on the fact that the new Jurassic World movie will not be a Bar Movie, but if the studios wise up and let me write a spec script for a reboot done right, hit me up. Same goes for if they ever want to dig up the corpse of the Power Rangers IP.

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is The Dirty Nil.

I’ve had a bit of the ol’ writer’s block lately. I’ve still managed to do my job every day, which is writing, and I’ve done a few freelance things here and there with more on the way. But when it comes up to thinking of things, pulling them out of the ether to write about, I’ve been coming up blank.

I’ve been reading Stephen King’s "On Writing,” and it’s had a pretty profound effect on me. It’s fun to get all sparked up about writing, even when I look up from the page and remember the journalism/publishing industries are toast. I’d put it up there with Steve Martin’s “Born Standing Up” as books that have changed the way I approach [pause for vomit break] MY CRAFT.

It’s cool having a guy with such an insanely long and celebrated body of work tell you that it’s OK to just be simple and, more than that, to lead his memoir reflecting on the work of his lifetime with a chapter about getting farted on by his babysitter. It’s silly but it really did make me think, “Wow, most of this really is just writing whatever, huh?”

A lot of the stuff I write on here is silly, but some of it is very not silly, or at least has real emotion peppered in amongst silly. It might not be conscious, but the silly is 100% a mechanism to protect myself from you, the reader, lest you actually see my vulnerable side. Jokes in a serious essay are the “haha” at the end of a text professing your love for the girl at school. Am I joking? Who’s to say?

Anyway, I had this whole essay about the album COPE by Manchester Orchestra and tied it into some real rich emotional shit. But it just never felt right. It wasn’t what I wanted to put out. When I really sat with that feeling for a minute, I realized that I didn’t want to bum anyone out or even try to get attention (because that’s all this is) for seeming emotionally deep and capable of feeling intense feelings alongside music.

When I asked myself what I wanted to do, at the end of the day, I really just like making people laugh. That’s the real magic trick here.

So, at the risk of appearing vulnerable, I have decided to dust off something I wrote that had mostly been kept top secret — unless you were one of my friends I showed this to/talked to about this. I am very good at keeping secrets.

This shit is made up. It’s fiction. I battled on and on about whether or not to publish it, or how to publish it if I ever did. I’m not sure why a work of fiction should make me feel any more embarrassed than a story about My Feelings — or even my ass, which I have written about at length without a modicum of shame.

So, yeah, here you go. It turns out when you are at a loss for mining your lived experiences for internet publication fodder, the easiest route is just to make stuff up.

Enjoy. And if you don’t, please don’t ever tell me because I’ll delete this and deny that I ever wrote it. Haha.

The Ghost

Her first night in the house was a shitty night’s sleep. She was exhausted mentally and physically, but a full, restful sleep never found her. She was still pissed off about the movers, who broke one of her good plates like movers often do, and that meant she was going to have to get a whole new set. What would she do with five plates anyway? It would drive her crazy.

She had spent the afternoon getting things as close to ready as she could with what she had. There was a couch and a few chairs in the living room, but it faced a blank wall. Only one towel hung in the bathroom, and aside from a bouquet of flowers with a nice note sent from her mother, which she placed on the kitchen counter for the time being, there wasn’t much in the way of decoration anywhere.

It was a lot of house and her life from her old apartment didn’t fill it yet. Especially since it was now up to her to fill it with all her own stuff – no one else was there to contribute anymore. The closets, at least, were all hers now. No big jackets or size 12 sneakers to take up real estate and remind her who she shared her home, her life, with.

She tried her best to tell herself that it was a process, and that she shouldn’t – couldn’t – expect a fully finished end-product after one night. So she shut her eyes as tight as she could, turned on the noise machine resting for now on a cardboard box while the new nightstands she ordered were still in transit, and tried to force sleep to come.

It came in fleeting moments – quick fast-forwards in 20 or 30-minute increments rather than anything where a dream might even pop up. She kept waking up confused as to where she was, like the first night in a hotel. Humans are wired to feel on edge their first night somewhere else. They can recognize that it’s not their cave, so they keep their guard up against potential threats.

So she just kept her eyes closed, trying to tune out the cracks and pops of a big old house at night time with the aid of electric ocean sounds.

The Ghost had been planning this all day – or, not so much “day.” A day is a construct for the living to make sense of things. We’ll just say he was looking forward to it for a while. He loved this part. Each time someone new moved into the house, he’d find new ways to drive them out. It was what he lived for – or, not so much “lived” for, but…

He watched her carry her unwieldy boxes in. He watched her put on a brave face to call the moving company and demand some sort of repayment for the broken plate, giving herself a little pep talk and reminding herself that she needs to take action and not let people walk all over her anymore, and then quietly crying after she hung up the phone, having spent emotional energy she didn’t really have to spare at the moment.

“This one will be easy,” he thought to himself – or, not so much thought. Thought requires a fleshy brain. “She’s already at a breaking point.”

This one would be short work. It was getting too easy for him anymore – he shows up, puts on his little show, they scream or cry or run or tremble with the blankets pulled up to their eyes like in the cartoons. You’d be surprised how many people do that – whether it’s learned behavior from cartoons or cartoons are just more accurate than people give them credit for. And, in the end, they leave and someone else moves in.

The ghost thought about how he wanted to approach this one exactly. He’d done this so many times, and he always wanted to make sure he was keeping things fresh if for no one else than himself. He fancied himself an artist in that way. It made him proud. Purely doing it for love of the game.

Would he come in and get her with one big scare, or would he slowly build tension? Terror versus dread, he considered. Maybe make some creepy noises, appear in a flash in the periphery of her sight line. That seemed fun. Sophisticated, as opposed to the gauche jump-scare. Maybe he’d even get a wimpy “H-hello?” and give her some time to really scare herself with her own imagination. The unknown did a lot of the heavy lifting for him.

So, he used his ghostly power to create a few extra creaks into the floorboards. He manifested the window shutters to clack against the old siding.

And then he waited for her to react.

She seemed to stir a little more than she already had been, but she was still determined to sleep. She clearly was dealing with some stuff right now, so he’d need more than creaks and cracks to break through the white noise in her head (and on her makeshift nightstand).

Cliche as it was, he found that a few ghostly groans or maybe even whispering gibberish – especially fake Latin – seemed to get people going, so he gave that a whirl, feigning a long, excruciating groan. He almost had to keep himself from laughing, like he was the Jimmy Fallon of ghosts, ruining the whole thing for everyone by laughing. It felt good in a way to still find joy in his work, but he also wanted to finish the job. The groaning was especially funny to him because it’s not like he even died painfully. There was no corporeal torture following him to limbo. There wasn’t any decapitation, where he’d be forced to wander this plane forever, searching for his head or something dramatic like that. No unjust murder or even a wrongful death at the hands of a negligent corporation’s faulty product. His death was his own dumb fault. He ate something with peanuts and he was allergic. Back then there weren’t so many guardrails against that sort of thing. It just happened.

The Ghost noticed her sit up in bed. The groan must have worked. She scanned the room as best she could in the light, the new corners all unfamiliar to her. Every shadow on every wall was a new experience. Her heartbeat picked up the pace a little.

Another groan, an added whimper.

“What the fuck,” she said, just loud enough to count as “out loud.”

He was in business. Now he just needed to ride the momentum and not blow it.

He appeared beside the window with another theatrical crack of the shutters. Standing – or, not so much standing, but upright, looking at her with a vacant, pained expression. He figured out that a blank expression was scarier than anger. He was a wildcard.

“WHAT THE FUCK,” she said, much louder this time. She reached for her phone flashlight and shined it on the wall, but it didn’t erase what she saw.

He walked a bit closer – or, not so much walked as floated while moving the apparition of legs in rhythmic pattern.

“Geeeeeet ooooooooout,” he droned.

She threw the covers off her and started to run. He followed. He had the benefit of cutting corners through walls and floors, so he could match her running pace pretty easily.

“Leeeeeeeave my hoooooooome.”

She had gotten to the bottom of the big staircase leading to the front door and was struggling with a shoe when she did something he didn’t expect – she stopped.

“Your home?” she asked? She still had just one shoe on, the other sort of dangling off of her toes sideways from trying to put it on in a panic.

This didn’t usually happen, but the Ghost figured he could improv a little. He wanted things to still feel fresh from time to time, right?

“Yeeeees. You are in my hooooooouuuuuse,” he said with as convincing a voice as he could, not letting on that this was now jazz.

Still on the floor, she sat up a little, like an elementary school student who had a few follow-up questions for the teacher after story time.

“So this is where you lived when you were alive?” she asked.

“I’ve lived here a looooong tiiiiiiime and do not want visitooooors.”

,: “So wait,” she broke her gaze with the Ghost and looked down and slightly to the left, as if she was doing long division in her head. “You’re dead. Ghosts are real.”

She looked back up at him, still sitting on the floor.

“Are you trapped here? Are you, I don’t know, cosmically rooted to this house because of some unfinished Earthly business or some trauma that followed you into the afterlife?”

He stared back at her – or, not so much stared, since that requires eyes. He ghosted in her direction. And suddenly it didn’t feel necessary to him to elongate his words so much to be spooky.

“No, I’m not trapped here. I chose to come back here.”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what?”

“I don’t know. It’s just … “ she trailed off. She hesitated. On one hand, she was tired of fighting with people – men specifically – men who lacked initiative and drive even more specifically, who made her feel like the bad person for wanting more out of life and expecting someone to try as hard as she was trying. Did she really want to do that again on what was supposed to be the first night of a new start, and with a ghost of all people – or, not so much people, but….

On the other hand, she wanted to live by her new set of rules and speak her mind more freely.

“So when you die, you get to pick where you go?” she asked.

“Well, it’s tough to explain to someone who’s still alive, but you don’t so much ‘go’ anywhere,” he replied. “But for the sake of conversation, yes, you can ‘go’ anywhere you want, as you understand it.”

“Can you travel through time?”

“Again, I can’t really get into the logistics of how time actually works to the living, but yes, once again for all intensive purposes”

“Intents and purposes.”

He sighed. This time not a scary sigh or a scary groan. Just a regular one. It brought him back to when he was alive for a second, honestly. A novelty. He was still annoyed, though.

“Yes, for all of those, time is fair game. I can go wherever and whenever I want.”

“Even the future?”

“Sure. Again, time doesn’t actually exist like you think it does so ‘the future’ and ‘the past’ are meaningless to me.”

“And,” she stopped to choose her words as diplomatically as possible, thinking about how the therapist had told her and the guy whose shoes took up too much space in the closet to express their emotions to each other without name-calling or putting the other down, even if unintentional. “And you just … hang out in the house you grew up in?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “It was my house.”

“Yeah, no, I got that. You said that earlier. I don’t know. It’s just … you have the entire timeline of human history and presumably any other history that I can’t even fathom. I literally can’t even wrap my brain around everything you can do and everywhere you can go in time and space. It’s just a little … never mind.”

He sat down. Or – not so much sat as ghosted himself in half next to a cardboard box sitting along the wall in what would eventually be the dining room once she got more plates.

“It’s what?”

She winced as if her own word would smack her in the face when she said it.

“Kind of pathetic?”

He blinked. Or, not so much blinked, but…

She had never considered if she could hurt a ghost’s feelings before tonight, but now she was afraid she had – more afraid than when she thought the ghost was about to get her.

That’s the thing with ghosts and ghouls and all of the supernatural things of that nature in movies. They never explain exactly how they kill you. Someone like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers or the clown from the Terrorizer movies makes sense. They stab you or shred you to pieces with a chainsaw. That tracks. But a ghost just gets you. They get you to death? AH! BOO! Got.

“It’s like when you graduate high school,” she continued. “There are those people who hang around at the football games even after they’ve left. Sure, they have their car keys on a lanyard with the name of whatever college they’re going to, but it’s like, dude, if you love college so much why don’t you stay there on the weekends? Why are you back here, you know? It’s even worse if they come back to go to prom with someone who’s still 17 or whatever.”

Suddenly the Ghost was the one playing defense, and he didn’t like it.

“Maybe I just like being here,” he responded. He was justifying it to himself as much as her at this point. “I like being here without people moving into my room or putting up new pictures on my wall. Is that so hard to grasp?”

“I get that,” she responded. “Change is scary. Believe me, I get it. But, I still think it’s healthy to escape your comfort zone.”

How concerned was he, a ghost, with health? Clearly even when he was alive he was not the most responsible steward of his flesh-and-bones form.

He said nothing. The kind of nothing that said, “I understand what you’re saying and understand that you’re right but I feel so bad right now that if I weren’t already dead I would wish I was.”

She knew she had struck a nerve – or, not so much a nerve, but….

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“No, no it’s fine,” he said, standing up again, or whatever his close approximation of it was. The box did not move. “You’re right. It just hurts, you know?”

She said nothing this time, too.

“Maybe that was always my problem during my life, too,” the Ghost continued, looking first out the window then back into his home. “I never took chances. I never expanded my horizons. I was so afraid of failure that I fulfilled the prophecy for myself. I accepted mediocre in my life and now I accept mediocre in my eternity, too.”

“You wasted life, why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife,” she sang quietly. She never used to sing around people so that made her smile a little. Little victories.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s a song.”

“I don’t know it,” he said.

“Forget it. I’m sorry to derail you. It seemed like you were having a breakthrough.”

“Yeah. I mean, is it possible to have a new lease on life even after death? Do you think I could try doing things in a new way?”

She smiled. They don’t usually smile, the Ghost thought, but the validation felt good, especially after she hit him with these home truths in his own home.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned recently,” she said, “it’s that it’s never too late to make a change in life. Or death I guess.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’ll try to widen my range a little bit,” the Ghost said. He was getting excited now thinking of the possibilities he had taken for granted. He turned back around to face his new friend as she took off her one shoe and got back to her feet. “I won’t bother explaining exactly how that works, the cosmos and all, but just trust me that I’m gonna do it.”

“I trust you,” she said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“Forget all of that ‘Get out of my house’ stuff. You can stay here. I’ll leave you be. It’s cool,” the Ghost said. “But I do have one request, if you don’t mind.”

“Shoot.”

“Can you maybe not tell anyone about this?”

She smiled again.

“Who would even believe me if I did?”

The TV commercial seemed louder than the rest of them somehow. An announcer who sounded more at home on an infomercial or a show where people fall off of giant obstacle courses into water than something called “The Education Channel” boomed over quick cuts of the interior of the house. There was more furniture in it now — nightstands, a few more pictures on the wall and an even number of plates on the meticulously set table. It looked more lived in.

“THIS WEEK ON GHOST BULLIES!” the announcer barked. “THE GUYS FOLLOW UP ON A TIP ABOUT A SUPERNATURAL ENTITY THAT HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING GOING FOR IT!”

On the screen, two guys in all black, one bald with a goatee and another in a tight-fitting beanie but also a goatee, carried around plastic devices that looked like answering machines and pointed them at different walls and fixtures.

It cut to the one in the beanie giving a testimony in front of a green screen. He somehow looked worse in studio lighting.

“If the reports from the homeowner are true, we might just have the biggest loser ghost we’ve ever found.”

It cut back as the two crept through the dark hallways of the house, illuminated green by the night vision camera.

“I’m gonna try to summon him,” the bald host said, turning into the darkness. “Hey! Loser!”

The announcers voice returned, still just as loud as before.

Tune in this week to find out whether you can still be as big of a waste of space in death as you were in life. Tuesday night at 7 PM Eastern on The Education Channel.

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Craig Finn, who is now tied with The Clash for my favorite musical artist who mentions Harrisburg in a song.