This kind of feels like the last normal week we’ll have for a long time. We all know what happens next week and, if the last time we did this is any indication, how not-normal things will be for weeks or months (or years) after that.
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.
I know you're not into books about music criticism, bands, etc., but to your point about nostalgia, I just finished Rob Harvilla's "60 Songs That Explain the '90s." I recommend it — or you can listen to his podcast.