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.

They keep digging up the corpse of a beloved, lifelong friend. That’s never a good thing. There’s never a dignified follow-up to digging up a corpse. It makes me sick every time I think about it.

It’s partially on me, though. Because when they tell me, “Hey, we just dug up the corpse of your beloved friend and we’re gonna do something with it,” I shouldn’t respond, “Can I see?”

I’ve been a quitter in my life before. Who hasn’t? As I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to be more of a completionist. I try to finish things once I’ve started them out of principle – at least important things. I try to see through the things I tell people that I’m going to do.

It’s good to do that. It’s a righteous thing to make good on your promises and show that your word carries weight. It feels good to finish something that you put your mind to, even if it was hard.

But there’s a line.

It’s also good and healthy to know when to quit something – to recognize when something is unhealthy for you and to avoid the sunk cost fallacy of it all.

It’s a worthwhile trait to recognize when you’ve been fooled once and avoid the shame reverse-Uno-carding onto you.

I loved the book Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. They turned it into a movie with Natalie Portman, who I also love. I wasn’t sure how they were going to turn it into a movie, because the whole book deals with some metaphysical shit that the human brain can’t comprehend, let alone recreate on film. It’s one of the rare 21st century works that seems best fit – or perhaps only fit – for the written word. I read the whole thing in one sitting on a flight from Philly to Vegas, and I think that made me like it more. There was no interruption in the plot, the moods swung while I flew over flyover country.

Loved it. Told everyone they should read it.

Then I checked out the sequels.

Vandermeer apparently wrote all of the “Southern Reach” trilogy, as it’s called, knowing it would release as a trilogy.

I have not written any books yet, but I feel like even when your plot deals with clandestine, shadowy government agencies and other-wordly entities that our puny ape brands cannot begin to comprehend, you should at least know how to land the thing. You should have an ending in mind.

Otherwise you’re just writing LOST, which I also watched all of.

I read the second “Southern Reach” book, Authority, on the beach in Jamaica as I was gearing up to have my guts ripped out on account of the cancer. It was a difficult read. All style, no substance. No real plot to speak of. If you asked me what it was about I’d struggle. Surface level characters. And, the worst part, it was just fucking boring. But middle sequels in a trilogy can often be the necessary bridge between two epics. The vegetables. The palette cleanser before the big finale. Fine.

The final book, Acceptance, was somehow worse. The same boring, the same clunky, the same self-satisfaction. I wanted to throw it into the river, and I told everybody to do the same.

My favorite movie of all time is Jurassic Park. It is the first movie – the first real movie, at least – that I loved, and continue to love it today. I could go on and on, and have, about how well it holds up, the reasons it holds up, blah blah blah. Guess what? The book also rocks in its own different ways and similar ways, too.

But then there are sequels. Sequels, inherently, are not a bad thing. There are many good sequels. But returns diminish. You can only return to the well so many times. I’m not here to rehash what other movie critics have written over the years about the quality of the Jurassic Park franchise.

All I know is that when they dug the series back up, dusted it off a little, cast some of today’s biggest and most handsome stars and, to quote the movie, spared no expense with the visual thrill ride, it didn’t work. To quote another movie, sometimes dead is better.

But I kept going. I kept watching. I saw the first one in theaters and, after it was over, I was like a little kid who was so excited for something only to be let down, putting on a facade and brave face that it actually isn’t as heartbreaking as it is, because I was an adult who was so excited for something and was let down. They brought back my favorite movie, and I was able to see it in theaters opening night.

We walked out of the theater and I tried to find compliments for it. At least Jimmy Buffett made a cameo. At least … I don’t know, they said a line from the old ones.

The second one sucked, too, and I’ll limit my words here because I know you’re all worried that I’m going to stray from the point and this will become even more of a rant-fest than it is.

The third one, I once again saw in theaters and my hopes, once again, were high.

Shame on me. I have been bitten enough times that I should have known to be shy by now, but apparently I am just a gullible rube.

After bringing back the original Power Trio of Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, they still managed to find new ways to defile a beloved corpse by doing things like making the central plot about bugs, throwing characters (importantly: played by beautiful movie stars) at problems and leaning too heavily on the Michael Bay sections of the production budget.

Hoooo boy was I mad. I almost left. I’ve never left a movie theater, I don’t think, and I was pretty damn close. I huffed and puffed all the way home after that one. I might’ve even cried. I had just had surgery where they ripped my guts out on account of the cancer so I was in a vulnerable state at that point.

This past Christmas, I went in to the Barnes and Noble in Philly looking for a book for my dad. I saw a table display of new fiction, and there was one big one with a shimmering alligator, a familiar font, a familiar name, and a title that started with “A.”

Turns out my man Jeff Vandermeer had written a prequel to Annihilation. I picked it up. I considered it. I looked around to make sure no one was watching and would tell my loved ones what I was up to, that I was relapsing. To quote another movie, I was practically tearing up telling the book that “Just don’t know how to quit you.”

So I bought it. I had to see things through, right? More importantly, I had to give him one more chance. I’m not sure how many times we’re at the “fool me” order of operations or who the shame now rests upon. Probably me, cause the book fucking sucks for all of the reasons it ever did.

And you know what? I called it. With about 50 pages left I realized that this was not going to get any better. This wasn’t going to be fun. This wasn’t going to end in a satisfying way. And when I logged this DNF on Goodreads I warned others that “I am going to throw this book into the river” in the hopes that they don’t find it like Jumanji or something and naively check it out.

That’s a good movie that they dug up, too.

They just keep fucking doing it, man.

They’re making another Jurassic Park – or Jurassic World, I guess. I had read they were doing it but tried to push it from my mind. I started taking meditation seriously after that surgery where they ripped my guts out on account of the cancer, and I’ve been pretty good at keeping up with it.

Eventually, though, the trailer crossed my YouTube suggestions and I was once again powerless in the face of something I knew wasn’t going to be good for me. And, naively, because I am perhaps a sucker, I said, “You know, maybe they got it right this time?”

The trailer did not immediately piss me off. I even thought, “OK, I’ll check it out,” but maybe with parameters that I won’t follow like “I won’t see it in theaters” or “I won’t wear my Jurassic Park shirt” or “I won’t tell people I’m on my way to see it so they won’t say, ‘Oof, sorry,’ knowing how bad it is before most people even saw it because word travels fast nowadays.”

I will see it because I have learned nothing. But, I have at least learned enough to know that if they’re going to dig up the corpse of my beloved friend, I should at least get to say what I think they should do with it. And, since we all know they’re won’t hear me out when I say, “Put it back in the ground and let it live in our memories,” I have some suggestions. Rules, I’d even call them:

1. No one signs on for a franchise.

The first Jurassic Park worked, first as a book and then as a movie, because it was a standalone. You watched it (or read it) believing with every second that Drs. Grant, Sattler or Malcolm could die, even though they were played by very good looking and famous people. In Jurassic World, we knew full well that they would not kill off the humorless and muscular husk of Chris Pratt, nor would they defile Bryce Dallas Howard’s white outfits with too much gore. With the likes of very attractive and lucrative stars like Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, I fear they will once again not heed my warning, and all dramatic tension will be gone. Because that’s what works so well with the first JP. I have seen that movie a gazillion times, and each time I watch my heartrate still goes up at certain points. It’s not terror – it’s dread.

The Jurassic World cast was on for a trilogy, so the stakes were nonexistent. The only characters we knew would get their comeuppance were either throwaways introduced with barely a name mentioned or the clear villains. Which brings me to my next point.

2. No mustache-twirling villains.

In Jurassic Park you could argue that the villains are Newman (real character name Dennis Nedry) and John Hammond. I am here to argue, though, that they are not villains, merely normal men who fall victim to one of the most common things normal men fall victim to: greed. Wow. Newman works for Jurassic Park as a computer man, presumably an underpaid and underappreciated computer man, and starts dealing with a competitor to steal and sell dino DNA. He dies in the process, in a scene that is horrifying in the movie and somehow even more fucked up in the book. Gives me the shivvies thinking about it.

Hammond is the stand-in for man’s hubris, playing god to, wouldn’t you know it, dig up the corpse of something that should’ve been allowed to rest and thinking that he’s built different so it won’t blow up in his face. But neither of them are long monologue-delivering caricatures. They’re believable men. How many of those guys exist right at this moment that you can think of? Tech dorks who want more power and influence and generational wealth-wielding demigods believing themselves immune to consequences? It’s real. And guess what, they don’t always get their due. They often get away with it.

Especially in the World franchise, the baddies are just different Monsters of the Week for each movie, and they each get their big cinematic death. It’s never undignified. It’s never out of the spotlight. It’s never scary or dreadful. It’s not believable. Which brings me to my next point.

3. Animals do not understand dramatic tension

If you have a pet, think about feeding time. You open the can or bag or whatever, and they immediately go to town, almost knocking you down in the process. This is because they are hungry, and it is their animal instinct to eat as soon as possible to get rid of that hunger. Or think about if you have a cat and they get a mouse in your house. There’s no drawn out scene where the cat backs the mouse into a corner and sneers as it gets closer, giving time for a deus to machina its way in real quick at the last second.

One of the ways I was fooled into believing that the third Jurassic World would end on a high note, or at least a note that seems to show that they understand the source material, was director Colin Trevorrow talking about the plot months before it came out:

Trevorrow did not want to depict dinosaurs terrorizing cities, which he considered unrealistic. He wanted to honor Michael Crichton's novels Jurassic Park (1990) and The Lost World (1995), believing that humans and dinosaurs "battling it out in the city streets is a different kind of film than what he would've done". Trevorrow described a world where "a dinosaur might run out in front of your car on a foggy backroad, or invade your campground looking for food. A world where dinosaur interaction is unlikely but possible—the same way we watch out for bears or sharks. We hunt animals, we traffic them, we herd them, we breed them, we invade their territory and pay the price, but we don't go to war with them."

Fuckin’ A. That’s right! But then he didn’t do that at all and instead had velociraptors practically delivering soliloquies as they stalked their helpless, good-looking and lucrative prey.

The movie is about Chaos Theory, of the chaos of animals – animals thrust into an environment that is not their own – and the chaos that ensues, despite man’s best efforts to tame and pimp out chaos for monetary gain. Do not even get me started on them tearing out that extremely load-bearing wall by letting Chris Pratt control them by fucking putting his palm up in front of them like it’s “Swiper, no swiping.” I could’ve levitated in the theater from pure anger.

Also a note about dinosaurs:

4. Stop making the T-rex the superhero

Much like they create stupid human villains, the producers of Jurassic World also had to give each movie a dinosaur villain that we understood was MEAN and BAD and EVIL. Usually, the T-Rex, the dreaded T-Rex from the first movie that killed Gennaro on the toilet and tossed Timmy into the trees and did countless other shit because she was scared and confused, had to step in and clean up the mess. She has enough on her plate. Stop making her step in to defend the humans from whatever lazy dinosaur they cook up for the movie. Which brings me to my final point:

5. No more god damn hybrids, be them human or reptilian

I shouldn’t even have to say this, but I do. Dinosaurs are the coolest thing in the world. The very fact that they ever existed is a miracle to me. One time one of my friends in college told me she was brought up to believe dinosaurs weren’t real and I almost broke down in tears not because I was mad that her parents were apparently backwards science-deniers, or that this person went to the same college that I was proud to go to, but because she denied herself the existence of fuckin’ dinosaurs. Dinosaurs! DINOSAURS.

You don’t need to make up new dinosaurs to sell us on this. It’s like how the media would keep trying to stretch the truth when Donald Trump would do something stupid. You don’t need to lie to make him look like he did something stupid. He’s doing that already. You don’t need to invent new dinosaurs to impress us, because dinosaurs are already impressive enough.

I’m just so sick of it is all.

If I wanted to write another 3,000 words in an already tedious article, I’d get into how the modern filmmaking world is not conducive to the likes of Jurassic Park, so a good Jurassic World redux is impossible — much like how the world of the 1990s was inhospitable for the dinosaurs of more than 5,000 years ago. (That’s a joke.) But others have done that and will do it better than me, so you already know about that. I just want to vent about what I feel like they could be doing, rather than what they think they should be doing.

On that note, I wish I could say that I was strong enough to not buy tickets to see Jurassic World Rebirth when it hits theaters on July 2. I’ll be there. I’ll probably even wear the shirt. But I’ll know full well that I’m going in with the chance of being once again horrified with what they did with the corpse of my beloved friend that means so much to me. I have been bitten and fooled so many times that it doesn’t even make a difference anymore.

But, if they try to CGI Jimmy Buffett in there for a posthumous cameo, I just might finally lose it.

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is PUP.

Post credits scene:

I actually had a whole plan of looping in the Twilight movies, which I just watched for the first time last weekend. The first three, at least. Same deal, thought “Well that was bad but it can only go up from here, right?” But neglected not to for space, and also, I think at a certain point I became so desensitized to it I didn’t even see it as bad anymore. Not great movies, though. But I do have to see how the whole situation ends for them…

He didn’t say “pedophile.” They wouldn’t let him do that on the biggest stage. But we all know where the word was supposed to be, and plenty of the people in the room said it for him.

Much has been written on the Philadelphia Sports Fan, both by supporters and detractors. They’re referenced almost like animals in a nature documentary. They have their natural states, their inherent traits that can’t be domesticated. They are wild, they are territorial, they are uncouth and fun as hell.

One of the running themes of the Philadelphia Sports Fan – be it baseball, hockey, basketball or football (or the All of the Above “Four for Four Fan” neglecting the MLS) – is this concept of “deserving” something. The teams and outcomes that Philadelphia deserves and thinks it deserves. It changes season to season. Is the Philadelphia Sports Fan a fatalistic self-hater who is only happy in its perceived natural state of despair? Does the Philadelphia Sports Fan feel they deserve a perennial also-ran, a tragicomic loser who talks a big game and gets his pants pulled down on the national stage? Does it feel like it deserves an easy, undisputed champion?

It’s hard to say.

Ray Ratto over at Defector put it nicely in his post-game wrap-up, describing Philadelphia as “a town that hates its own with crystalline brilliance.” Also on that same site, Dan McQuade wrote a whole piece about how Philadelphia as a whole is happiest – or at least most comfortable – on the brink of agony. That narrative fits nicely with the fact that the city has immortalized Rocky, a guy who famously got the shit kicked out of him after hyping you up for two hours on the prospect of him doing the impossible. He isn’t even the winner in his own movie, and his city has deified that feat, rather than him. The idea of Rocky is falling short — the outcome the Philadelphia Sports Fan thinks it deserves, and thus the reputation the city believes it deserves is the overlooked and underappreciated.

So to get a win, a decisive win, with very little scrappy underdog energy on display in favor of absolute dominance and, dare I say, competence, is foreign to the Philadelphia Sports Fan.

Because the Philadelphia Sports Fan is, at its core, a hater, as Ratto said. It hates itself, it hates others. It hates to lose and it hates whoever it just beat. That is the long and short of it.

There are few opportunities for unbridled hate like a blowout win, a “dance on the grave of the losers” opportunity for the biggest winners on the planet.

Kendrick Lamar said it himself that he’s the biggest hater. He said it in the diss track aimed at Drake before he even unleashed the war crime-level diss track “Not Like Us,” which was so merciless in its execution and so bouncy in its production that it ended up as a No. 1 hit song calling Drake and his close associates pedophiles.

Just terrific. The kind of thing you’d hate to watch as someone without a clear conscience as a supporter of the Chiefs, Drake, Taylor Swift or the government.

We knew due to the “family friendly” mandate over the halftime show that Kendrick wasn’t going to be allowed to say the word “pedophile” into the mic. But he didn’t have to. We knew the song. We knew what was coming. And after baiting us and teasing us with the song while he ran through some other hits from his catalog because we all knew what was going to be the grand finale, he still found a way to surprise us. Lock-step with the smooth camera pan, gliding across stage in bellbottom pants staring right into the lens, eyes of everyone in America and hopefully one guy in Canada, he addressed the audience, the target, by name.

There had even been minimal screen time for the alleged Philadelphia Fan singer dating the tight end — one of the prime hater targets with subreddits devoted to picking apart every minute detail or perceived detail of her (and sometimes the tight end’s) life and public appearances, and to project all sorts of accusations and assumptions based on outfit choices, posture, facial expression, not wholly unlike the “cult” of fans they regularly call out on thinking every movement of Taylor Swift’s eyebrows is actually an illuminati signal for something greater to come. Deeply weird people on both sides, fun to hate them both.

By the point Kendrick was grinning into the camera during his victory lap in New Orleans, the Eagles had unexpectedly run the score up against the best team in football, giving Eagles fans a rare opportunity to relax their shoulders a little and fully embrace a song whose energy is pure unmitigated hating and, larger than that, winning. Winning because you were better, more prepared, more talented, cooler, smarter, surrounded by better people.

It was so much fun. It’s fun to see the good guys win as much as it is fun to watch the bad guys lose.

I don’t care for the “Philly vs. Everybody” T-shirts. It’s cliche and I just find it annoying. But it did feel a bit like the Eagles, and The Philadelphia Sports Fan and Philadelphia the city, were some sort of opposition party. Against quarterbacks, tight ends, pop stars and presidents alike. It felt good to have absolutely no chill in victory. History has proven that decorum is loser shit and doesn’t actually do anything. Hating on your enemies and turning them into losers is awesome.

Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Sports Fan, was tailor made for this moment because it thinks it deserves this moment.

And now, much like it had claimed Meek Mill’s “Dreams and Nightmares” during the last run, the Philadelphia Sports Fan will no doubt claim “Not Like Us,” because it thinks it deserves that, too.

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Squid.

Apparently the first ringtone was “My Gift to You” by the Japanese band Chemistry. I learned this from Wikipedia.

It wasn’t my first ringtone. Just the first ringtone.

I had never heard that song. Here it is if you’ve never heard it either. Imagine it means your friend is calling you. Nice way to link a song to an emotion, huh? Novel at the time.

I remember my first ringtone was “American Idiot,” but it was the part where Billie Joe sings the verse line but the drums are different in anticipation for the big last chorus, where it already sounds like it’s being sung through a Walkie Talkie, and on whatever phone I had in 2006 it was even worse.

Weird choice for a ringtone from both the ringtone makers and also weird choice for me. I was 14, though — the ultimate “what the fuck are you thinking?” age.

You can’t really hear good audio fidelity, much less something as nuanced as snare tone through a Motorola Razr that gets dropped on a regular basis. The speakers just are not there. But the point wasn’t audio fidelity. The point was telling people who we were without saying anything else at all. We let someone else do that talking for us.

We used roughly 20-second clips of a song to convey our inner life. Our feelings. Our desires. These snippets that would repeat if you didn’t pick up your phone in time before sending our moms to voicemail said everything we needed to say about the kind of person we were.

And I wanted people to know that I was going to stay inside. I was going to stay inside for good.

“Agoraphobia” is not the best song on Incubus’s 2004 “A Crow Left of the Murder” – the album of theirs that I will go to bat for as their best, and one that remains very important to me 21 years later. It’s not even my favorite song on the album. But it’s the one that heralded the news that one of my friends or perhaps one of my parents were trying to reach me.

The verse is a wonky, uneven hike of bass and guitar playing off of each other before meeting somewhere together for the chorus, glued together by one definitive THWACK of the snare.

I wanna stay inside

I wanna stay inside for good

I wanna stay inside

For good

for good

for good

for good

for good

for good

for good

for good

Here’s the thing. When I was 15 or so and bought this ringtone for 99 cents, I did not want to stay inside for good. I had gone from a small Catholic middle school that I didn’t particularly love to now the big public school with friends that I felt got me and, more importantly, hundreds of people who I didn’t know. A fresh start. That ever-illusive thing that kids dreamed of. You could be anyone you want. The mildly embarrassing sins of your previous scholastic life are – for the most part – mostly forgiven. And what I wanted to convey at the time, I guess, was that despite being desperate to be seen and liked and laughed with not at and admired was that inside I contained the … I don’t know, “intellect” (in the very 15-year-old sense of the word) to want to be left alone. To be dissatisfied with the world in which I was very actively participating.

Kids are dumb as hell and not to be trusted.

I love “A Crow Left of the Murder” very much. The drums especially. José Pasillas’ drumming has always been inspirational to me. Copeland-esque in his use of cymbals. Simple when he has to be, flashy when it calls for it, complementary of the rest of the band, technical, melodic. Just really good, man.

Incubus is a good album for a certain type of teenager. The type who is smart and knows they’re smart but doesn’t know they’re not that smart, so smart-sounding things that aren’t actually that smart sound a lot smarter than they are. Intricate enough for someone who wants to feel superior to others for their musical taste, but it’s typically in 4/4.

I want to underscore here that I still love Incubus and this album quite a bit as an adult.

Eventually I changed my ringtone from “Agoraphobia.” I couldn’t tell you what I changed it to or what prompted the change, but I know I did. I know I didn’t graduate high school with “Agoraphobia” as my ringtone.

When I hear the song to this day, and that chorus kicks in with the THWACK, I still have a Pavlovian response somewhere deep down that someone is calling me.

My strongest sense memory of this album isn’t my phone ringing and getting excited about the prospect of making plans with my friends, though. It’s at about 3 AM in the back of my friend’s mom’s SUV en route to Myrtle Beach for Senior Week.

Myrtle Beach - the Monaco of the Southeastern US.

About a 9 or so hour drive if you do it in a straight shot, the four of us in the car each brought two CD’s. I know I brought “A Crow Left of the Murder.” I think the other CD was actually New Radicals. You know the one. The one with that one song. Another song that namedrops Jehovah, which is weird.

But I know we listened to “A Crow Left of the Murder” while it was still dark as we passed through various Pennsylvanian burgs — Dillsburg, Heidlersburg, Gettysburg — and headed south. The same song that I thought could paint a succinct enough picture of me as a deep emotional being when I started this phase of my life, now much louder and on better speakers, celebrating the end of that phase. The same friends that I started it with, too, I luckily ended it with. Happy in that moment, but looking back on it sort of sad about just how blissfully unaware we were, or at least neglectful, the fact that we won’t all live in the same place, let alone pile ourselves into a car together, for much longer. Like every kid, who I have to remind you are stupid as hell, we thought we were different and immune to time. We’re lucky that we avoided a lot of the pitfalls of time’s march forward, but we weren’t immune. No one and nothing is. Things just change.

Ringtones at their height were a $4 billion industry in 2004 – the same album that “A Crow Left of the Murder” came out. With the growing ease of music piracy and evolving technology, eventually people could make their own ringtones. Then, for some reason, we all decided we didn’t want them at all. We had the most technologically advanced personal computer imaginable in our pockets, capable of playing music to surprisingly high fidelity, and instead we went with the stock ringers or – more commonly – no ringers at all. Just vibrations.

What does that convey? What does that tell the world about yourself and your inner life? Maybe that you’re growing up and that there’s no more time for silly things like that. There’s a time and a place for merriment and it’s not when you’re answering the phone. Answering the phone used to be fun. It used to be “Wow who could that be?” (excited) and not “Who could that be?” (terrified).

It’s not your friends calling, it’s your boss. It’s your doctor. It’s someone who wants you to pay them money. It might be your parents but you moved out years ago so ah jeez that’s probably not good news. You should call your parents more so when they call it doesn’t create an instant sense of dread that someone died or, at minimum, had some sort of accident.

The last ringtone I remember hearing in the wild was once I got to college. A world bigger than I could fathom where I was trying desperately once again to convey who I was inside to a world of strangers in a big city who I felt were much, much cooler than me. I remember sitting in a meeting for the free music magazine I started writing for, run by one of my very cool professors, and a guy’s phone started ringing. He was a bit older than me. He lived off campus, obviously, in one of Philadelphia’s premier Cool Neighborhoods, obviously.

His flip phone rang and “This Is Why I’m Hot” filled the room in its tinny glory. He smirked, knowing we had all heard it. That was the point, right? We all needed to hear that a 22-year-old had a vapid hip-hop track as his ringtone in 2010. That was what he needed to convey to the world in the moment. Irony flooding the moment, as was the style at that period of time in that neck of the woods.

I don’t remember thinking it was especially cool, but of course I didn’t say anything.

Do you know who sang “This Is Why I’m Hot?” I didn’t until I googled it for this. It’s MIMS.

If you held a gun to my head and said “Who sings ‘This Is Why I’m Hot?’” I’d say pull the trigger.

I have absolutely no idea why, but as a real adult with a job and an iPhone, I decided that it was time for a new ringtone. I chose “Night Moves” by Bob Seger, only the version that I bought wasn’t actually Bob Seger. It sounds more like Tom Jones. I still have it, and every now and then I think about bringing it back. Except then I remember that it might ring somewhere like a cool coffee shop and then I’ve conveyed to the rest of the world that I’m the kind of guy who wants a knockoff version of “Night Moves” to play when I get a call.

Best to just keep things on silent sometimes. Maybe we all just learned that sometimes it’s best to shut up. You don’t need to say anything about yourself at all. You don’t need the attention. Our 15-year-old selves would not understand that.

Many reading this definitely remember the songs they had on their Myspace profiles for the same reason — representations of our inner lives laundered through someone else’s voice and instruments. Our most vulnerable feelings or the facade we want to put up to the world but from a safe distance. Plausible deniability that it’s actually how we feel. Myspace is gone now, and Tom isn’t even a maniacal technocrat hell bent on selling America to the highest bidder like his former peers and acolytes. Coward.

We as a society outgrew the need for a ringtone because technology grew us out of it. But we definitely didn’t outgrow the need to convey our feelings without doing something so embarrassing as telling others with our words. We still allow others to do it for us, and painstakingly position those messages in ways that look like we just happened to leave them there with no effort or consciousness at all. Oh, you heard that? Oh, you saw that? That thing?

And you can see the phenomenon on its largest scale in filmmakers with specific needle drops in movies or giving characters a particular musical taste to reflect their own but, again, laundered through someone else — this time someone fictional.

Maybe we start blogs that teeter just on the edge of personal expression but rein it back in with some humor, the equivalent of sending a heartfelt text that ends with “haha.”

At some point, I guess, we just decided that we just wouldn’t do this form of peacocking with our phones. Maybe it’s because we are now terrified of talking on the phone, much preferring texts and DM’s. Maybe we all of this age, who once decorated our phone calls with songs, had to grow up at the same time and decided the way to be an adult professional or professional adult was to have your phone ring like a normal person, or better yet, not at all.

Maybe it was just a passing fad that was frivolous and useless from the get-go and society woke up and put our phones on silent.

I don’t know what I thought I was conveying in my 20s with my “We Have Bob Seger at Home” ringtone. Maybe the same as the dude with “This Is Why I’m Hot.” I guess 20-somethings are just as dumb and insecure as 14-year-olds.

Maybe we never actually outgrow anything.

Remember a particularly funny ringtone you had/heard? Let me know. Engagement is good.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Cloakroom.

Now that “Steamboat Willie” is in the public domain, I can do whatever I want with it. I can pass it off as my own thing if I wanted to.

Like this.

This is the official maritime rat of Brendan Menapace’s Snakes and Sparklers newsletter.

Fun right?

When something is in the public domain, their creators can’t say shit about you using it for whatever you want. You can use it to get any message you want across. You can use it as a symbol for something, even if that something is a message that has been watered down by generations using that very symbol until it ceases to be a person completely and is just a logo, no more revolutionary than a cartoon mouse.

And eventually, you have to start looking for new ways to signal to others what you believe, what you stand for, because there’s certainly no shortage of The Man’s to rebel against.

I had never been to Disneyworld. Or Disneyland, or any Disney property for that matter, until last week at the age of 32, well past what I thought was the target age for the magic (especially as a fairly Disney-indifferent child). But a trip to Orlando for work meant I could parlay it into some business with the Mouse.

It was crowded, as to be expected. The crowd was enthusiastic, as to be expected. I was at various moments overwhelmed, underwhelmed and whelmed. What was thoroughly undeniable was the attention to detail throughout. To quote my favorite movie, coincidentally also about an immersive amusement park: They spared no expense.

With the post-holiday crowds dominating some of the bigger-name attractions, we got in line for the things that didn’t have too much of a ridiculous wait since we only had one day there – the shortest wait, tied with the bathroom, was Muppet Vision 3-D, a 3-D movie featuring the Muppets, where you’re first brought backstage at the Muppets’ theater, full of old junk and half-finished props and clutter – not totally unlike the purposeful “used galaxy” look for the much more crowded Star Wars area. While you wait to go into the theater, you watch the Muppets crew hurriedly fix any AV issues and get everyone into place.

I love the Muppets, man. Like virtually everyone else alive right now, I grew up with the Muppets. I’ve told friends that it’s a dream of mine to work with the Muppets. By that, I don’t mean write a Muppets movie or work for the company or anything like that (though it would be fun). I mean I would like to work with the Muppets themselves – because to me and so many others they do feel real, even though I’ve seen countless behind-the-scenes movies and shows where you see exactly how the felt sausage is made. Like the lucky humans in Muppet movies, I want to work alongside Kermit and co.

After the movie ended and I ditched my 3D glasses, I texted a friend who has been to Disney many times.

“Honestly, shout out to Muppet Vision 3-D,” I said.

He agreed that it was timeless, but told me that its days are numbered. I looked it up, and apparently they’re getting rid of it in favor of a new Monsters, Inc. area.

“Bummer,” I responded. “Though it does seem very on-brand for the Muppets. They seem to always be making do on their shoestring budget, constantly on the chopping block of some evil corporate overlords, relying on each other and their shared talents and what little tangible assets they can cull together."

Outside of Disney properties, the Greater Muppets Ecosystem is in similar danger. This time it’s Sesame Street, which always seemed bulletproof. More an institution than a show you could just cancel. Even when the facade of “Sesame Street is supposed to be easily accessed by every family in the country/world” faded when it went to HBO, it still felt immune to the future, where beloved IP’s are unceremoniously erased with the tap of a button by the clueless ghouls who buy these platforms and companies.

But it’s not bulletproof.

For those out of the loop, HBO’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery isn’t picking up its contract with Sesame Workshop to make new episodes going forward.

The very fact that we’re using the words “Sesame Street” and “cancelation” in the same sentence seems absurd. Like getting rid of the Department of Education oh wait. These ghouls could really just let the most beloved educational children’s show of all time sputter to a halt before they cancel student loan debt or medical debt.

I don’t have to explain who Luigi Mangione is if you’re reading this, because it means you have the internet. We all know who he is, what he did, and why he did it. I can’t use his image like the others, because it’s not in the public domain yet, but he’s still well on his way of becoming less of a human man and more of a symbol — at a rate that would’ve made Che Guevara’s hat spin.

Mangione is the latest example of a person who did something radical against the perceived ruling class and ended up as an icon, a meme, a logo, for those who agree with his motives to use as tacit signifiers of their own principals (even if they don’t agree with his actions necessarily).

In the age before memes, you had Che Guevara posters hanging on the walls or T-shirts in the closets of certain types of young people who wanted to convey a certain thing: Anti-establishment.

Having plenty of time to think as I waited for the Star Wars rides, whose lines looped through the Muppet area and I enjoyed some of the fine details of their fake movie posters, I got to a conclusion that the Muppets could be seen as a similar icon against the capitalist greed and “fuck them kids” mindset of today, especially one could argue the anti-free-learning aspect of the right wing, especially if it teaches community and acceptance of those who look different, or that a group united together can stand against the evils of corporate greed.

Look at the history.

The original TV show was about a little troupe that could, putting together the best damn show they could week in and week out despite not having the capital or clout to be as polished as other programs.

And here are the plots of their movies and how they depict greed as the enemy (all from Wikipedia, obviously).

Here’s The Muppet Movie (1979):

Produced during the third season of The Muppet Show, the film tells the origin story of the Muppets, as Kermit the Frog embarks on a cross-country trip to Los Angeles, encountering several of the Muppets—who all share the same ambition of finding success in professional show business—along the way while being pursued by Doc Hopper, a greedy restaurateur with intentions of employing Kermit as a spokesperson for his frog legs business.

Here’s The Great Muppet Caper (1981):

With only $12 for the trip, they are forced to travel in an airplane baggage hold and are literally thrown out of the plane as it passes over Britain. They stay at the dilapidated (but free) Happiness Hotel, which is populated by other Muppets.

Muppets Take Manhattan (1984):

Arriving in Manhattan, the group meet producer Martin Price, but are interrupted by the police, who have arrived to arrest him as a wanted con artist, whose real name is Murray Plotsky. The Muppets try other producers to no avail, depleting both their morale and their finances.

Muppet Christmas Carol (1992):

Scrooge

Muppet Treasure Island (1996):

Orphans vs. greedy pirates

The Muppets (2011):

The trio tour the rundown Muppet Studios, where Walter sneaks into Kermit the Frog's office. There, he overhears oil magnate Tex Richman and his henchmen, Uncle Deadly and Bobo the Bear, intending to buy the Muppet Theatre from Statler and Waldorf. The old men state that the Muppets could repurchase the theatre if they raised $10 million before their original contract expires. However, in private, Richman reveals he intends to destroy the theatre to drill for oil. Walter informs Gary and Mary, and they visit Kermit in his mansion, who realizes the Muppets would have to reunite and throw a telethon to raise the money.

Over and over and over again, the Muppets are up against it financially, and facing off against the powers of greed and oppression as a scrappy, united force. The only movie I didn’t include here was Muppets from Space, where the enemy was the government using Gonzo for experiments and shit at some secret black site. Still bad and fits my narrative!

Sesame Street is less overt with this messaging, but they teach plenty of more nuanced and subtle lessons like “Sometimes people in your neighborhood look different than you, and that’s cool.” Hell, there was an episode where a character had an incarcerated parent, so there’s a lesson about the prison industrial complex.

After all of the times the Muppets have been placed in fictional battles against greed, they and their human associates are in a real one now. There’s a chance they become metaphorical “martyrs” in the fight against the corporate machine.

And maybe that makes them just as powerful of icons as the guys who have literally given their lives or freedoms for certain causes, or any number of martyrs throughout history.

I found a quote from Che Guevara’s daughter about the whole phenomenon of her dad’s face being used as merchandise.

I don't want people to use my father's face unthinkingly. I don't like to see him stitched on the backside of a pair of mass-produced jeans. But look at the people who wear Che T-shirts. They tend to be those who don't conform, who want more from society, who are wondering if they can be better human beings. That, I think he would have liked.

In the future, there could be a time where a Kermit the Frog shirt or Big Bird pin serves as a reminder of standing in the face of and intolerance, once they’re just memories and eventually symbols. I hope not, because I do still very much dream of one day working with those Muppets in some capacity, of posing provocatively with Grover on the cover of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s TV Week.

But, if it goes the other way, the next strong-eyebrowed face of anti-capitalist revolution and martyrdom may be this guy:

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is PUP.

And it wasn’t until I had made some friends outside of Catholic school, gone to some weddings and funerals that weren’t in Catholic churches, and became more exposed to other ways of doing the religion thing that I realized just how specifically weird Catholicism was.

I of course knew it was weird to some extent. I didn’t particularly like Catholic school, and my parents weren’t super strict or to-the-letter about it. Hence how I ended up with a copy of Kevin Smith’s 1999 movie Dogma.

Dogma is the story of two fallen angels, played by Catholic superstars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who are condemned by God to spend eternity in a place worse than Hell – Wisconsin – for a failed coup. They learn about a loophole that, if executed correctly, would make it so that God is capable of making a mistake and thus undo everything. Everything.

Hilarity, hijinks and most importantly to a middle-school Brendan, blasphemy, ensue. Worth a watch (I think, it’s been a while — I’m positive some bits likely don’t hold up so I can’t give a 100% sweeping endorsement of it), especially if you’ve ever been to Catholic church, whether by choice or force (or both).

It blew my mind a little at the time.

You could make fun of this stuff? Other people thought some of this was bullshit? During my day job as a kid in Catholic school, this kind of thing wasn’t fair game to play around with. It’s not Smith’s finest work, but it’s definitely one of my favorites, and plenty of lines both strangely poignant and silly have stuck with me.

One of my favorite poignant lines comes from Salma Hayek’s character.

“You people don’t celebrate your faith, you mourn it.”

“You people,” of course, are Catholics.

To be Catholic, whether you’re devout and devoted or, as my parents would say, an a la carte Catholic, life still comes with some level of indoctrination, mostly in the form of instilling fear into the impressionable young Catholic heart.

One time I mentioned to a therapist that I went to Catholic school and she gave me a “Well there’s your problem” look/gesture.

Fear is part and parcel of Catholicism. The “balance” of this fear is laid out pretty well in an old George Carlin bit (who coincidentally plays the Cardinal in Dogma that sort of sets the whole plot in motion):

And the invisible man has a special list of 10 things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these 10 things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to suffer and live and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever until the end of time.

But he loves you.

Growing up in a household that was Irish enough on one side to have Celtic memorabilia (i.e. any amount of Irish in the American Northeast), Irish music was frequently played. Traditional Irish folk music while my Mom cooked dinner or graded papers. Tapes in my grandparents’ car. Reflecting on it now as an adult, rather than when I was a child playing PS2 in the other room and therefore much more dialed into the Tony Hawk or Need For Speed: Underground soundtracks, I recognize a lot of the duality of Catholicism in these songs. The good and bad together.

God is, at once, your friend and your enemy. Your greatest ally and your greatest adversary. Sometimes the wind is at your back, other times you’re pushing against it. Two things are true at once.

You people don’t celebrate your faith, you mourn it.

Celebration and mourning occur simultaneously. They are not battling against one another, they are just each happening fully.

Someone else puts it better than I do.

My favorite song of 2024, easily, is “Favourite” by Fontaines D.C.

Leave it to a band from Ireland to perfectly condense this feeling of mournful celebration, celebratory mournfulness, into a song that burrows itself so deeply into your brain that it might never come out.

Stitch and fall
The faces rearranged
You will see
Beauty give the way to something strange

Here’s where Fontaines frontman Grian Chatten puts it better than I do, saying this of the song in an interview with NME:

I can compare it to other tunes in terms of how they make me feel. ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed and some Sigur Rós stuff – those tunes are like a warm pat on the back, but it is death itself. It’s like the final hug. I like the idea of a song being the saddest and happiest or the scariest and happiest song possible.

It’s not about a balance of something being 50 per cent this and 50 per cent that, but it being 100 per cent this while also 100 per cent that. ‘There She Goes’ [by The Las] is one of our biggest inspirations ever for that reason, ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ [by The Only Ones’] too. They’re endless but they’re also ephemeral. They’ve got to end as soon as the lights come on in the bar, but right now it’s forever. It is forever contained in a minute.

One time I was either reading an interview or listening to a podcast (can’t remember) with Michael Stipe from R.E.M., and he was talking about “Losing My Religion,” where he said that the song basically doesn’t have a chorus. It’s a journey. It tiptoes around the idea of a chorus, but instead just explores different rooms of a house never actually finding what you, the listener, are looking for (a chorus).

“Favourite” is perhaps the opposite of “Losing My Religion,” where it is all chorus. It’s all payoff. It is everything your body is screaming for. Where “Losing My Religion” doesn’t let you off the hook and give you the payoff your ears want so desperately, “Favourite” never even gives you space to yearn for the hook because it’s already there.

Relentlessly pummeling you with blow after blow of recognizing that what was here a second ago is gone, different, but it’s not all bad, but it’s not necessarily all good either.

Did you know
Cities on return are often strange?
Yeah, and now
Every time you blink, you feel it change

Yearning for something that’s already there, sad and happy at once, sounds a lot like nostalgia. Funny that the opposite example of a song I’m relating to Catholicism is “Losing My Religion,” huh? Didn’t even plan that.

Here’s a fun fact, “nostalgia” comes from Greek and means “pain from an old wound.” Nostalgic pain is a very specific pain. Bittersweet – wow, a compound word reflective of this duality of opposite emotions.

And the video for “Favourite” does a lot for the nostalgic feeling that’s already there. Here’s the thing with Fontaines D.C. Their first album only came out in 2019, but this is already their fourth. They’ve gone through so many iterations and aesthetic changes already. They’re creating their band arc at breakneck pace, so it’s kind of funny for guys who aren’t even 30 yet to be making a video that uses nostalgia as its visual aide.

It’s also interesting because after starting with their first album “Dogrel” and relying on a sort of stereotypical Irish aesthetic, they’ve progressed to where we are now with much more of a striking Nu Metal-influenced look for the “Romance” era. But it was clear that “Favourite” needed home movies rather than spiked hair and combat boots.

If the song already evoked the simultaneous emotions that Chatten said it would, the video cranks the dial and then breaks it off. You’re suddenly misty eyed mourning the loss of your own youth while feeling happy that you got to experience it at all. It’s really not fair.

It feels like cheating.

With each album they release, I keep finding a song that I confidently say is their best. On Dogrel it was “Too Real.” On “A Hero’s Death” it was the title track, whose repetition of the “Life ain’t always empty” mantra served me well during pandemic-era runs through an empty city where life felt particularly empty. And on Skinty Fia it was “Jackie Down the Line,” a masterclass in building and layering.

They went from “this band is pretty cool” to “this band is required listening and I can’t wait to see what they do next” in near record time.

As an American who cannot reliably trace his Irish roots back, relating too hard to the culture, or what we perceive as the culture, is deeply embarrassing. You think of the guys who wear those hats. And I’d like the record to show that even when I was the target age for it at 14, I thought Boondock Saints fucking sucked. One time I saw a barista with the hand tats and I was chilled to my core.

But there’s something about this song, this band, this idea of battling with the very force or feeling that simultaneously lifts you up.

I still tap into it when I hear Irish traditional music somewhere, or bands like The Pogues or Flogging Molly (but never Dropkick Murphys). Or even when I have a Guinness and I know that drinking isn’t doing me any favors (especially when it’s [redacted] in the morning and I’m watching European soccer.)

And I tend not to think about god (unless it’s Alanis Morissette like in Dogma) too much in my free time, but I can instantly tap into a song where the central thesis is fearing falling from grace with God, a person who is their friend but also their enemy.

I’m not saying I feel it deeper than others. That’s the point here. The Irish or the Catholics don’t have a monopoly on guilt over feeling happy about something or a healthy mix of fear and love.

But, if you’ve been made to look at life through that lens long enough and during formative enough years, maybe you can feel something in songs that tap into that idea just a little bit more.

Or maybe not.

Two things can be true at once.

I’ll back up.

I do my usual scans to make sure that I don’t have cancer anymore, and I’ve grown accustomed to seeing that everything is fine, to the point that the scans never even phased me anymore. Now more than two years out from the end of chemo/radiation and the final surgery, I was feeling the best I had probably ever felt and confident that I had given cancer a harder kick in the ass than it had literally bestowed upon me. Usually after each good scan I’d post the “all clear” on Instagram with the “OH YEAH” part of the Menzingers’ “In Remission.” It became sort of my at-bat music for being told repeatedly that I am, in fact, still in remission

This past Monday, I got my scans, I waited until the next day for my results, and when they finally came in it said something about two lesions on my liver and one on my lung. Not ideal! After many panicked moments and more awakened trauma than I would’ve anticipated even a week ago, we found out that the radiologist who did the report hadn’t looked at my previous scans to realize that, oh yeah, those things on the liver were always there. Whoopsies!

Listen — I fuck up at my job regularly. Everyone does. Even that one person at your office who seems to have it all together in a frustratingly perfect way. But when I fuck up it doesn’t have the existential consequences of causing someone to believe that their cancer is not only back, it’s back in a whole new spot.

After a rushed PET CT on the chest, on which nothing showed up, the oncology team is pretty confident that it’s nothing to worry about. So, I choose to not worry about.

But going into that PET, I took the conscious route of leading with “I can’t believe these fuckers are making me do another test and drive all the way to fucking Princeton to get a scan just to be told that this isn’t anything” rather than driving there in quiet fear that I’ll be told that I now have lung cancer, thus setting into motion my descent in to egomaniacal meth dealership and many Emmy Awards. I do believe in manifestation to some degree, so I figured if I manifest the outcome of “Oh, it’s nothing, sorry you drove all this way and got so stressed out,” that’s what would happen, rather than manifesting the other outcome which was much more terrifying.

So, I still don’t have cancer as far as any modern imaging can tell, so let’s play the song.

Editor’s note: My favorite thing about this song, which I referenced in the title, is the fact that they have this insane chorus hook that they use exactly once and then act like it never happened. Power move.

And, with that, let’s get into some weirdness going on this week. Lower stakes weirdness, that is. Some distracting weirdness

They Have the Cooking Kid Doing State Propaganda for Turkiye

There’s an obvious joke one could make about a culinary Instagram account getting funding from Turkey (lol it’s like the food amirite?), but I will not make that joke, and I will not force you to even entertain the thought of that joke, because I think more highly of you, the reader.

If you’re not on Instagram, or your Instagram algorithm isn’t mostly dominated by cooking videos like mine, you might not know a kid named Kian who has been posting cooking videos on the platform (and maybe TikTok — I’m not over there). We’ve all watched him grow up from a squeaky voiced tween making food from all sorts of different cultural cuisines and generally kicking ass at it. Most kids can’t make a PB&J, let alone Japchae, let alone know what Japchae is.

This week, I noticed that Kian posted a picture of a Baklava made to look like the Turkish flag, in front of what appeared to be a photo Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

“Coolest looking baklava ever!” Kian wrote, with a Turkish flag emoji.

Huh.

Look, I already think it’s weird enough when young social media users get enough hype that they start collaborating with older social media folks. Don’t get me started on that Costco dad hanging out with children that are not his own. Kian has posted plenty of videos where adults are in his house cooking and fooling around with him. Just seems weird to me, and I don’t think my parents would’ve been OK with that. But we live in a different world.

I think they definitely would’ve balked at the idea of the Turkish government funding my online exploits.

The cobranding initiative went on throughout the week, too, as he posted himself cooking different Turkish cuisine, always tagging the Turkish Airlines and Go Turkiye accounts.

But, eventually every social media influencer needs to monetize. That’s the business model. They feed you the content for free until you’re hooked enough that they can charge a premium on it. It’s what Uber and Lyft did too, killing the taxi industry and getting us so dependent on our cheap rides that suddenly we didn’t have an alternative when those rides got expensive.

But for someone whose social media brand was harmless suburban kid with culinary skills beyond his years, going the route of accepting state funding from Turkiye is an interesting pivot. I would’ve guessed it would be like Hexclad or something.

It’s especially funny and weird right now as New York City Mayor Eric Adams was facing corruption charges for basically letting the Turkish government continually pay for him to take luxury flights and stay at luxury hotels.

Granted, our man Kian here is not an elected official in charge of the biggest city in the country and one of the largest in the world, so the stakes aren’t as high. But, it’s also weird that the Turkish government is looking at children’s Instagram accounts and saying “Oh yeah, that’s how we get the youth of the West to think we’re good.”

It’s an interesting reputation laundering technique, and when your kids start asking to go to Istanbul for vacation, you’ll know who to thank.

I Wrote Some Weird (In a Good Way) Stuff

Over at SPIN, I interviewed SNL cast member and premier Trump impersonator James Austin Johnson about his hilarious “Genius III” short film.

In short, it’s a tongue-in-cheek documentary about Johnson spending his time in his native Nashville between SNL seasons with his family, whom he only really respects when they provide good material, and chasing his musical dreams after dropping out of comedy all together. It’s all hyperbole and exaggeration, but rooted in some truth. He really does live in Nashville when he’s not in New York. He really does like playing music. And he really did get a kidney stone that made him rethink some things, but it wasn’t the 30 lb. boulder he shows in the video.

I spoke with Johnson both sort of in and out of this character he creates in the movie about repeatedly fluctuating between reality and exaggeration to find something truthful and funny. He was, understandably, hilarious to talk to, and joined the Zoom call under the name Bill Walton. RIP.

Here’s the link, and here’s an excerpt.

He stays grounded, though, even in the storied halls of his employer, once again through inspiration in the music he loves—“more sort of roots rock, Americana kind of thing, sort of folk, Lomax type thing, Delta blues kind of derived, down home music, kind of bluegrass kind of thing,” as he describes in one of the long-winded overwrought genre descriptors in the film. In real life, his inspiration comes in the form of a Bob Dylan book.

“This is Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song,” he says, pulling it up on camera. “This is a book that I read a lot in my dressing room and I have to read it in Dylan’s voice. But it’s just him taking all of these singles that he likes, that he remembers from like his teenage years in the ’50s. And then just Bob Dylan-izing about that. It’s like he’s just walking you through his house.”

He breaks into a highly marketable Dylan impression. The same one he would do just days after our interview in an SNL ad with John Mulaney.

“Bon Jovi had a song called ‘Living On a Prayer,’ also there’s, ‘I Say A Little Prayer’ sung by Dionne Warwick. But those are merely pop songs. The greatest of the prayer songs is the Lord’s Prayer. None of these songs even come close.”

He snaps back into character. The real character. His character. James. Real James—I think. You can tell because he’s a little quieter, not totally unlike the mumbly creative genius he plays on screen, but not entirely like him either.

“Yeah, man. This guy rocks.”

Also over at SPIN, I took a singing lesson from the vocal coach to pop stars like Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter, who also worked with Austin Butler on the Elvis movie, Timothee Chalamet on the Dylan documentary, and is working with the guy from The Bear on the Bruce Springsteen movie.

They emailed me asking if I’d be willing to take a vocal lesson from this guy for the sake of content, and while I am firmly not a singer, I jumped at the opportunity. You see, being in journalism school in the early 2010s, Vice stunt journalism was everything. I wanted nothing more than to go out in the field in my blue oxford and Clarks desert boots and write up some first-person narrative. Unfortunately, pretty much after I graduated, that all went away and the taste for that sort of thing morphed into YouTube, which I never really wanted to do.

So, to get this opportunity was very exciting, if not a bit nerve-racking because, as I said, I’m not a singer, and the interview would have to be while Michele would be in the house. She wore noise canceling headphones because she knew I would half-ass it if I was self conscious doing it. She’s a good egg.

Anyway, I had a great time with Eric, and you can read my story about how I wanted to control the whole interview and sing on my own terms, but was quickly reminded that this was not my show anymore.

Here’s the link, and here’s a fun excerpt.

Eventually, he has me practice scales, and I realize that for the length of our interview he’s been sitting at a piano. I interrupt the scales long enough to ask if he’s been at a piano the whole time.

He says yes as if it’s the dumbest question I’ve ever asked. Also, no time for that, back to your scales. We’re on to something.

I’m taking deep breaths and carefully pulling my abdominal muscles in to force the air out. 

may may may MAY may may mayyyyy

mo mo mo MO mo mo moooooo

mi mi mi MI mi mi miiiii

Just like in the movies.

All of this because I asked how he prepared White for portraying Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere, the upcoming biopic about the recording of Nebraska. Rather than go into the mental side of it, like watching videos of performances and finding connection points in the songs and act of singing, he teaches me a warm up he’s been doing on White that involves long hissed exhales, and then doing the same thing but with a staccato exhale.

Am I a better singer? Absolutely not. Did I have fun? You bet. Now, which one of you cowardly publications is going to send me to dancing lessons?

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Mk.Gee.

I’ve been really trying to live in the present more. I try to be on my phone less - I’m now one of those people who won’t shut up about how you HAVE to stop bringing your phone with you to bed and how it will CHANGE YOUR LIFE. I’ve still been trying to keep up with meditation on a regular basis. I’ve even been doing yoga!

Right now, in the present, things are relatively stable. The key word being “relatively” here. Shit is still, as the old Irish saying goes, largely fucked on a grand scale. But we know it could always get worse, and it’s nice to be able to talk about the minutiae de jour and not, you know, societal collapse.

So, with that, here are a few things I’ve been thinking about this week.

These Idiots Tried to Pry a Ball from Mookie Betts

Disliking the Yankees is something of a national pastime for non-Yankees fans. Hating on New York mouthbreathers is especially popular in my neck of the woods — the far superior city of Philadelphia.

Last night during the first inning of World Series game 4 at Yankee Stadium, Dodgers right fielder Mookie Betts caught a foul ball that veered just over the wall and into the stands. Two guys — who have been identified but I won’t give their names any more press despite the fact that ESPN for some reason is gassing them up in an attempt to play to the Barstool crowd or somethin in a very uncool way — literally held onto Betts and tried to pry the ball from his glove, as if the umpire would see that and say, “Oh, it’s actually not an out because that guy pulled the ball out.”

I thought about how this would play in my head if Phillies fans did this. Phillies fans have that reputation for being feral and violent and crossing the precious and unspoken boundaries of the honorable game of baseball. Let’s say the Phils were embarrassingly down 3 games to none and the series makes its way back to a simmering Citizens Bank Park. Someone’s cousin from Ridley Park has some sweet seats and maims Giancarlo Stanton as he makes a grab, and then argues with security that it’s all OK. Would I be defending these guys? I’d like to think I wouldn’t. I hope that I’d see through the blinding frustration of being embarrassed that badly in the World Series that I could at least see reason, but baseball is a funny game.

There’s been a lot of meme-ifying these dudes in the moment and this morning, and that’s probably all they should get.

My take is that they are Bulk and Skull from Power Rangers in real life. At the very least, these two should get their own theme music that plays as they exist in the world, and the song would not be flattering to their intelligence. It’d be heavy on that twangy jaw harp thing. Maybe some tuba.

All I know is Steve Bartman is rolling in his grave*

*Steve Bartman is, to my knowledge, fully alive.

Nostalgia Is Running Out of Gas

I’m getting old, man. I know this because the things I liked are now fashionable in the retro sense among the youth. With that comes the nostalgia vehicles like When We Were Young festival in Vegas and even a resurrected cash grab wearing Warped Tour’s clothes.

I went to Warped Tour a bunch of times. It’s not like I grew up fully in the sticks, but Harrisburg at the time wasn’t pulling even close to the quality of bands its getting now. To see the punk and, yes, ska bands my friends and I wanted to see, we had to venture down to Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD, which is, for my money, the only venue Warped Tour should be at.

Here’s me in freebie Vans wayfarers at a Bouncing Souls set when I was probably like 16! My buddy Andrew is in there too. True believers!

Eli Ennis wrote an excellent piece about the value of Warped Tour for kids like us who grew up in overlooked markets of Appalachia, so I won’t rehash his points.

Here’s a bite:

It was an accessible gateway into alternative music for me and all of my friends. It launched innumerable bands' careers and was a primary engine for several whole genres of music. And its impending resurrection in 2025 is all but guaranteed to fail. Maybe not economically; I wouldn't be surprised if its three dates sell out. But as an immobile festival priced and formatted like any other summer rock fest, there's no chance that it'll be able to rekindle the magic of its glory years, or provide the same value to today's teenagers that it provided to my friends and I in the early 2010s – and those before us in the 2000s and mid-Nineties. And that's unfortunate to think about.

What I will say is that by the time this zombie Warped Tour sells out and the amps start humming, the kids might have moved on. Appetites change faster now more than ever.

Even at WWWY, cracks are starting to show. Just like, as Ennis pointed out in his Warped Tour story, the logistics of Warped Tour were nothing short of miraculous, there’s a real unsustainable quality to WWWY. Get the biggest nostalgia names and a huge batch of currently working smaller bands in a patch of dirt in Las Vegas and make it all somehow work. The first year the gimmick was simply “Holy shit, this is all of the bands I love so much.” This last round was “Holy shit, they got even more bands, and they’re playing our favorite albums in their entirety.” The 2025 edition, which was just announced is, “Holy shit … Panic! At the Disco I guess?”

They also got Weezer, which, as I said elsewhere, feels a bit weird. Like, Weezer shouldn’t be able to play a nostalgia festival for the same reason pro athletes weren’t allowed to go to the Olympics.

I think this whole thing is going to start overstaying its welcome pretty quickly. Sooner rather than later, the headlining bands will be less exciting because you can only mine a nostalgia vein so much.

A fun thing becomes tradition and then a fun tradition becomes an obligatory chore that you dread all year. Ask anyone who has to travel more than an hour for family functions.

I Wonder if Paul Westerberg Still Has the Spongebob Hat

I don’t really read books about bands or music, which is weird given what I do for money. But a friend (hey, Nick) loaned me “Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements” an embarrassingly long time ago, and it sat on my nightstand long enough that the pages darkened a little due to sunlight (sorry, Nick). But, I finally read it and absolutely loved it. The Replacements are a band that I always liked but never really dug into their lore much, so this was a riveting story about a group of guys who continually shot themselves in the foot every chance they got.

My favorite part, though, came in the epilogue, where a now-sober and divorced Westerberg was seemingly setting aside the rock n’ roll ambitions of his youth, and was just enjoying being a dad in Minneapolis.

I want to know three things. One, what prompted Paul Westerberg to buy a SpongeBob hat. Two, does he still have the SpongeBob hat. And three, why did the editor feel the need to bracket “[Squarepants]” as if to differentiate from the myriad other Spongebobs one might confuse this with.

If the ‘Mats ever play one of these nostalgia festivals, I am hereby commanding Paul Westerberg to break out the SpongeBob hat just one last time.

His Screenplay?

I’m finally watching “The Sopranos.” I went to go see Trace Mountains the other night with the same friend who loaned me the book, and the bar was just playing Sopranos episodes. I decided that it was time to finally commit, and hot take alert, great show. Trace Mountains was also a great show. New album is good. This song in particular:

I’m at the part of the series where Christopher is hanging out with Jon Favreau and trying to be a writer, and I can’t help but cringe at the whole thing. Not the clunky dialogue he writes, not his half-cocked stories, but the absolute gall to try to be a writer or chase a creative endeavor. It reawakened that feeling that I get sometimes where trying to be a writer or any creative pursuit as an adult is deeply, deeply embarrassing.

One time I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and the voice in my head said “hey, you should delete everything you’ve ever written. Purge your presence from the internet’s publication history.”

I obviously did not, but this is all to say that I definitely suffer from if not imposter syndrome, at least “What are you doing” syndrome.

Side note, I have misspelled embarrassing now four times in this article.

That was fun, right? Fun to feel normal and kind of shoot the shit about sports and music and books, like normal people do during normal times. Hey, maybe next week will be normal as hell and we can just keep living. I have some fun stories coming out next week that I look forward to sharing. I also am sort of starting a new longer-term project that I hope materializes as I’ve envisioned it in my head. Hopefully I can share all of that amidst an appropriate backdrop, and not be like Adam Schefter who will pop in on Twitter while something insane is happening and the collective timeline is all melting down just to tell us that the Jaguars signed some defensive end to the practice squad.

Good luck, everybody! Loosen up those shoulders.

Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Christopher Owens.

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The first job I ever wanted was “bulldozer man.” I think what I meant to say was “construction worker,” but that’s a little wordy for this stage of life. When asked what they want to be when they grow up, most small kids pull from the limited pool of things they know about, let alone things they are interested in, and extrapolate the job from there. Kids tend to keep this simple. It would’ve been weird if you had asked 4-year-old me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said “I’d like to be the content director of a B2B publication while also freelancing in the arts and culture vertical mostly as a hobby as a result of the crumbling digital publishing market.” You typically get more “doctor” and “astronaut” and, yes, “bulldozer man.”

Eventually as my vocabulary and interest in dinosaurs grew, I decided I would be a paleontologist, not knowing that I was better off with the lack of student loans and union benefits associated with bulldozer man.

After that, I decided I’d be a professional baseball player. I think it lined up with when I was playing tee-ball. I could hit the ball without needing the tee often, I thought Ken Griffey Jr. was the coolest man in existence, and still had a child-like understanding of the job market. So, it was settled.

I have this strangely vivid memory of declaring my future job out loud one day. My parents have always both been supportive of pretty much any endeavor I pursued, to the point where they wouldn’t always tell me if I wasn’t especially good at something, but I think on this particular day my dad’s brain went on autopilot, and he responded to 5 or 6-year-old me by basically breaking down to the percentage why being a Major League Baseball player just wouldn’t work out. There are X amount of kids who play baseball in the world. Y percent of them will play in high school. Of that, Z percent will go to college, and an even smaller percent will get drafted by a Major League Organization. And, at that point, it’s far from a guarantee that you actually get called up to the show at all for even a plate appearance or two, let alone for any meaningful years. I think I sort of just blinked. My Big League ambitions were short-lived anyway because pretty much immediately I realized that, despite loving baseball, I was very shitty at it 1.

All of this is to say that the odds of being a Major League Baseball player at all are astronomical. To be one of those players who wins a World Series is almost laughable.

And that’s what I’m using today to cope with the fact that my beloved Philadelphia Phillies all forgot how to bat at the same time and crashed out of what was surely Their Year against their most despised rival.

Baseball teams cannot subsist on vibes alone, it turns out.

I like to think I’m pretty good at not letting bad sports outcomes impact my day too much. Last night watching the game, I pretty much knew it was over. Even if they had pulled off a comeback, there were a lot of games between that point and the trophy, and this team just thoroughly lost the juice. That said, when the final out came, I still had to immediately turn off the TV and do some deep breathing – not to keep from throwing something or anything like that, just to mentally reset from “I am putting all of my emotional eggs into the Phillies’ basket” mode and into “I am a normal man who lives a normal external and internal life and baseball isn’t a real thing” mode.

I think I did OK.

And after meditating on it for a few minutes and hours, and getting a decent night’s sleep, I have gotten to the point where I can see that the Phillies losing is actually a good thing in some ways. Would it be better if the team was still riding the wave they were pre-All Star break where they were hitting home runs almost to the point of being bored by it and hitting so many extra-base hits that it felt like it didn’t even warrant celebration anymore? You bet. Did I want to go to a parade mere steps from my house? Absolutely. 

Am I going to survive? Yes.

And here’s what I came up with:

1. YouTube TV’s stream is almost exclusively political ads, so I’m glad that I get to avoid them. But more than that, I’m somehow even more excited that I don’t have to hear the jingle for Wheatley Vodka or see the “We Have Walton Goggins At Home” actor they used for the commercial anymore.

2. I follow a lot of Philly sports and Philly people on social media, and many of them are pessimistic at best, psychopathic at worst. If I don’t want to see any of the doomsaying, I need to not log on in the first place. So there’s a great excuse to limit my screen time, or at least use it for something more worthwhile, like Duolingo Spanish. 

3. I get to watch the rest of the postseason as a neutral. The huge scope of baseball, I think, allows for second-favorite teams or soft spots for other teams that other sports don’t. Rarely, if ever, do American League teams become thorns in my side, so I can root for teams like the Tigers without compromising any of my morals. I can also root against the Mets and Pete Alonso’s stupid body with aplomb.

4. Speaking of the Mets, their whole schtick of using Grimace as a rally mascot has turned me off to McDonald’s more than “Supersize Me,” the PETA DVD I got at Warped Tour not knowing it was a PETA DVD, and colon cancer ever could. So, thanks, Mets, for removing any temptation I had before when an advertisement popped up on my social media feed.

5. I can spend more evenings in October trying to get into spooky movies. For the longest time, I couldn’t watch horror movies. I think it’s just that I don’t like jump scares or excessive gore, and I’ve been going back and watching classics and new movies alike that would be described as “thriller” but are, in essence, horror movies. (Don’t yell at me, genre sticklers. I’m trying my best here.) My heart rate will still spike while I’m watching TV, but it won’t be watching the Phillies try to get out of a no-out, bases loaded situation.

6. I won’t buy a bunch of stuff, including the deeply cursed City Connect jersey. I had made a pact earlier this season that if they made the World Series I would buy one of these horrific jerseys, specifically the Trea Turner jersey to fully lean into the design with the fucked up 7. I don’t have to pretend I like them or watch the team ever wear them again. They are so bad that minutes after they debuted online, the city literally shook. Had the Phillies made a deeper postseason run, or even looked convincing in the time they did have, I 100% would’ve bought shirts, hats, whatever. I’m an easy target for this sort of thing. Not to mention I would’ve been spending money going out to watch the games with friends, which leads me to my next point.

7. I have no good reason to drink alcohol right now. Plenty of people toy with the idea of Sober October. I’m not necessarily committing to that, though my alcohol intake has drastically declined since I got sick/turned 30, I did still think “Well if the Phillies get to the NLCS/World Series I’m not gonna not have a couple beers.” The Phillies’ ineffectiveness at the plate has erased this dilemma from my life.

8. I get to do this all again next year. If there’s one thing sports fans, particularly in this neck of the woods, have, it’s short memories. They have scars, sure. But once it starts getting warm again and we’re all back at the Bank in March, we’re going to forget all about this and return to blissful Philadelphia psycho mode, declaring this particular group of himbos – even if they trade/release/sign new himbos – the greatest group of himbos this city has ever seen.

Real quick, while I have ya here, I got more of my homework published over this past week. The big marquee story was that SPIN asked me to do their October cover story, which is pretty cool. I read SPIN growing up, so being asked to do the cover story (albeit a digital “cover”) was nifty. It was on the band Glass Animals.

I went to their show at the Mann to take in the whole thing, and being a reporter for SPIN means that you get really close seats. I felt bad kind of. I never listened to them all that much, and people around me and in the countless rows behind me were clearly extremely pumped to see this band — not to mention the fact that they paid to be there.

After watching the show up close, during the encore I decided to explore the big amphitheater’s lawn area to see what things were like up there, and decided I’d find some people who really seemed into the band but didn’t get close up tickets, and give them mine for the last song or two.

It was an easy moment of altruism, like when I hit a certain age and I’d give little kids my arcade tickets on the boardwalk, before I hit another certain age and decided, to quote Michael Jordan, “fuck them kids,” and that I wanted to use my tickets to buy candy or something.

You can read that story on Glass Animals here. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out.

Also over at SPIN, I convinced them to let me interview Balance and Composure about their new album with you in spirit, which was a comeback album we fans of B&C never thought we’d get. It was a really thoughtful conversation with guitarist/vocalist Jon Simmons about some pretty deep topics that unfortunately I had to condense down to about 1,000 words. But they have always been an important and formative band in my musical evolution, so I was very happy to land that gig.

You can read that here.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is The Tisburys.