Sam Miller For The Win

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Sam Miller, a comedian from my hometown, Olympia, WA, has lived a few lives. As a comic, he has a lot of momentum, performing before increasingly large crowds.

Speaking of momentum, no family ever sits still. Families are organic, every single one always with some degree of momentum, either positive or negative, based upon the adults’ collective decisions. Often, the momentum is barely perceptible. In Sam Miller’s family’s case, it’s plain as day.

Today, online, he wrote this. I’m guessing he pounded it out, not overthinking it. But lo’ and behold, it couldn’t be more profound.

“One time my dad picked me up and threw me off a dock into the cold waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There was no warning. Before I realized what was happening, I was airborne. I hit that water, and even though I was a good swimmer, it was hard to peel my elbows from my side. I wanted to stay curled up in a ball but I also wanted to breathe and so I swam back to the dock. My dad’s hand came down and pulled me out. I don’t remember what time of year it was, but I just looked it up. Temperatures in the strait of Juan de Fuca hover between 41 and 54°.

He told me he did it because we spent a lot of time fishing the Straits. He wanted me to know what it would be like to fall off the boat or off the dock. That way I would know what that water felt like and I wouldn’t panic.

I thought I did something wrong. I thought he was angry. He told me he wasn’t. I believed him then. I don’t believe it now. I think he got angry and he lost control and he threw me off that dock because my dad was really bad at dealing with his emotions.

I bring this up because I just spent 8 days with my kids and my mom on a vacation/comedy tour. There were multiple moments where I became incredibly frustrated. There was a couple moments where I was just downright angry. I feel like I had really good reason to be angry a couple times.

I’m really proud to report that I did not yell or scream or pick anybody up and throw them.

I know it’s not true, but I used to think me and my family was cursed. My dad died when I was a kid. I don’t know too much about how he grew up because he didn’t talk about it that much but I know my grandma on my dad’s side had schizophrenia. When my dad and his brother were kids, she drove them to Long Beach, California from Salem, Oregon and just dropped them off in the middle of nowhere. My dad had to hitchhike back while taking care of his kid brother. Pretty sure my dad was 12 or 13 when that happened.

What I’m getting at is this…

I have such an opportunity today to do better and I’m so grateful that I have the tools to keep trying.

I’m a pretty good dad, I’m a pretty good husband, and I’m even a pretty good son now. It’s hard but it feels really good. There are times I wish I could throw people off docks.

but…

I don’t think I ever would. It’s not fair to them and it’s not fair to me. Whatever curse my family had, I’m going to try to keep doing the work to make it stop with me. I owe it to the people that I love and most of all I owe it to myself.”

“I’m going to try to keep doing the work to make it stop with me.” Amen, brother.

The Gerontocracy

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Why do constituents vote for such elderly incumbents? Full disclosure, I’m complicit and maybe I should reword the question to why did I recently vote for such elderly incumbents, Washington State’s current senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, 75 and 67 respectively?

Maybe the answer is there weren’t similarly appealing younger candidates from which to choose. Which, of course, begs the question, why not? Why aren’t young, socially conscious, vital candidates fairing better? Is it because a larger proportion of elderly people vote and they’re more likely to vote for their peers? I dunno.

But I do know it’s time for a constitutional amendment to add an upper age limit to the lower ones. I propose Congressional and Presidential candidates must be under age 70. The likelihood of that getting approved anytime soon is about the same as the U.S. Men’s National Team winning the 2030 World Cup.

What Well-To-Do Retirees Get Wrong

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Look at me with the click-baity title. Somehow forgot the word “Some”. Some wealthy “seasoned-citizens” sacrifice their present well-being for their heirs’ future well-being. I normally applaud selflessness, but in this case, wealthy retirees are missing the forest for the trees.

Increasingly, as some states, like these ten jack up their estate taxes to make up for budget shortfalls, the monied class in the (dis)United States talk of moving . . .

. . . to these ten states in order to save their heirs lots of money on future taxes.

Relocating, of course, means abandoning established friendships, the exact thing social scientists point to as most important to one’s well-being and longevity. That friend-group coffee, bike ride, dog walk, dinner party, book club, it’s the closest thing there is to a panacea for improved health and happiness.

You protest, “Ron, knucklehead, I can make new friends while saving big bucks at the same time.” Tru dat, but you can’t rush the building of truly close interpersonal relationships. There’s no short cut to true familarity and intimacy. They take serious time.

Also, a common thread of especially close interpersonal relationships is a shared history. My friends and I routinely tell the same stories over and over, stories from our collective past that we no doubt embellish as we do. Those exaggerated stories are the scaffolding of our friendships. There’s no fast-forwarding to a shared history. And spoiler alert, the older one is, the less time there is.

So go ahead, pack up, sell your crib, move out-of-state, hug your spreadsheet, and stick it to your state government. That is, if you haven’t built meaningful friendships and like being penny wise and pound foolish.

Source.

‘Anthropology With A Basket’

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Grocery tourism is trending.

Nice to see others catching up with Nicole James and your humble blogger who has long enjoyed weaving aimlessly through the aisles of foreign grocery stores.

Nicole is my type of person.

“I once stood in a Japanese aisle looking at 15 varieties of bottled tea and felt the kind of reverence other people reserve for stained glass. This is the point of grocery tourism. It’s anthropology with a basket.

Every country gives itself away eventually. This is usually somewhere between the biscuits and the cleaning products. Finland offers Moomins in places no Australian supermarket would dare put a cartoon hippo. Singapore understands the spiritual importance of salted fish skin. Sweden puts things in tubes that should never be in tubes and then offers fermented herring.

And then the Netherlands has licorice. The Dutch have built an entire moral philosophy out of licorice. Sweet, salty, double-salty, hard, soft, shaped like coins, cars, and warnings from your dentist. I’ve always admired the Dutch, but this commitment to black chewy punishment is heroic. Sweden is not to be outdone and has thus flirted with licorice-flavored chips.

Then there are the products that cause the traveler to stop dead and reconsider the whole Enlightenment. In Vietnam, I couldn’t walk past snake wine without dancing an involuntary flamenco of horror. There was a snake in a bottle suspended in alcohol. Sometimes there were scorpions.

South Korea has canned silkworm pupae. Peru has coca tea. Colombia has arequipe. America has cheese in a spray can, which I respect as both a product and a cry for help.”

My grocery tourism friend hitting her stride:

“Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince. . . .

And unlike most modern travel pleasures, grocery tourism remains relatively democratic. Not everyone can bring home a handbag from Paris, but almost anyone can bring home mustard or a jar of something that will be later placed in the pantry and avoided for six months because the instructions are in Finnish.

These are the souvenirs I love. I want the supermarket trophy. I want the tea that tastes of a mountain I didn’t climb and the chocolate I meant to give as a present but ate in the hotel room while watching a foreign game show.”

Damn, that chocolate was for me. I’m sure of it.

A Novel Idea—Have Some Fun

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Slate notes that Erling Haaland, the Striking Viking, is having hella fun while on a Scandinavian run of a lifetime.

“The Norway national team striker scored two goals to send soccer royalty Brazil home. After the game, he’s chuckling to himself, telling reporters that even he’s surprised he won that game. Haaland has spent most of this World Cup looking like two completely different people. On the field, he is still the ‘Striking Viking,’ a terrifying 6-foot-4 goal machine who runs at defenders like a marauding berserker. Off the pitch, he’s posting selfies with Shrek, trying on a Southern accent, and generally behaving less like one of the most accomplished athletes on Earth than a very tall guy having the best summer of his life.”

And then this.

“There’s a clip of him in Dallas trying on a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and then with Team Norway, doing the Viking Row after games with a huge smile on his face. It’s clear: The dude is having so much fun out there doing something that you’d think an 8- or 9-U soccer team would do.”

That Viking Row clip is so great. Everyone, unabashed joy.

Brad Stulberg with another paragraph to ponder:

“Imagine Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the middle of the NBA playoffs—not after winning it all, mind you, just after winning a playoff game—going to half-court and doing a celebration. They’re not doing that. They’re all business. They’re going back to the locker room. The Michael Jordan thing is: You’ve got to suffer for greatness, everything needs to be serious, you always need to be angry.”

Further into the piece, Stulberg shares how he approaches his teens’ athletic endeavors.

“I don’t pretend that winning doesn’t matter, because I think that’s dumb. Competitive kids are going to be like: ‘Dad, that’s dumb. Winning matters. Why else do we keep score?’ So I say: ‘Winning matters. Winning is part of the game. We’re trying to win. And you know how you’re going to have the best chance of winning? By having fun. If you’re not having fun, I can almost guarantee that you’re not going to win over the long haul.”

Then, prob without realizing it, he sprinkles some Stoic “trichotonomy of control” on top.

“Then I tell them that there are things we can’t control. We can’t control the points, because we don’t know how the other team is going to play. We don’t know what the weather is going to be like. All we can control are these two things: What’s our effort—are we trying hard? And are we appreciating the moment and having fun? If we do those things, then we’ve already kind of won the internal game. And if you play sports for long enough—which is the goal, because you’re having fun—you’re going to lose a lot and you’re going to win a lot.”

There’s a lot of ink being spilled about the exorbitant costs of US junior soccer travel teams. And how that is an impediment to the USMNT being among the best in world. This Slate conversation makes me think it’s probably the raised expectations that come with all the $. More specifically, having fun gets lost in parents’ emphasis on some sort of return for their investment. Like winning each match, increased social status, and college scholarships. Again, that combo drowning out Viking Striking-like fun.

Paragraph To Ponder

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From The New Yorker.

Alexis, from Michigan, was in college studying to be a welder when she found out she had metastatic spinal cancer. To cover her medical bills, she created an OnlyFans page. Her first day, she made six hundred dollars. “That was absolutely life-changing,” she says. “Like—I called my mom.” Nowadays, as Alexis XJ, she brings in half a million dollars annually posting videos of herself in a bikini fixing cars. She says that she once made twenty-five thousand dollars in tips for live-reading a textbook on diesel-engine mechanics: “One guy said, ‘I’m learning something.’ ”

I need a new saying. I always say, never underestimate the male ego. Update. Never underestimate the male libido. Both and.

Dear Belgium

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Of course I coulda/shoulda titled this “Dear Europe” or “Dear World”, but it’s you I’m thinking about most today.

I’m sorry. If it’s any comfort, many of us are counting down to January, 2029. Of course that is no consolation for you right now. If the (dis)United States wins, there will always be an asterisk attached. If you win, I will celebrate your overcoming the double whammy of FIFA and DJT corruption.

And if it’s any consolation, I will be in Belgium with my bike and several friends in September. At which time I can apologize in person on behalf of many, many of my fellow citizens.

Backgrounder.

Postscript. Nevermind.

Positively Positive

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I want an executive assistant like Trump’s “human printer”, Natalie Harp.

From Harp’s Wikipedia entry:

“She (Harp) often accompanied Trump when he played golf, bringing a printer and a laptop to show him articles; Harp’s use of a printer, which began from Trump’s preference for paper news, led to her being given the nickname of the ‘human printer’.”

What this excerpt doesn’t explain is that Harp only feeds Trump a steady diet of the best news coverage available at the time.

Yeah, I want someone just like Harp who would follow me around everywhere and provide a constant flow of unrelenting praise. Offloading self-compassion if you will. How great would that be?! Truly, this is an idea that only a stable genius could come up with.

Ironically, I played nine holes of golf for the first time in forever the other night. I somehow started out on fire but missed a short one for par on the par-5 fifth hole. How great would it be for my Natalie Harp to be sitting in a cart greenside at the ready to lift my spirits after a boneheaded bogey. Maybe handing me a printout that documents just how great my drive and five-wood were before the weak sand wedge and failed up and down that would soon be forgotten in all the praise for my amazing long game. And then, on the way to the next tee, she would whisper, “Many people are saying Ron, that was the best drive/five-wood combo this hole has ever seen. I know you’re going to make birdie on the next hole, so I’m just writing it in now.”

Yesterday, after an excellent group ride, I was day dreaming about my own Natalie Harp when I had an epiphany. I already have one in the form of my Strava AI assistant! Strava is a personal fitness app where people upload their workouts and applaud one another’s efforts. Think of it as a pseudo, cloud-sourced executive assistant/cheerleader of sorts.

But with an AI overlay, distinguished by its toxic positivity, it’s even more. Dig this recap of my ride.

“Crushed it.” “You’re clearly dialed in.” “What’s really impressive. . . ” I’m blushing. Never mind that it’s only the fifth day of the month.

Now, if we press pause for just a little bit and reflect on a very real possible downside to continuous over the top praise, there’s ample evidence that one could become a narcissistic sociopath.

But that’s a risk I’m willing to take.