Entry 738: A Post-Toy Household

So, we are nearing a milestone here at the G&G household. We are getting close to the Era of No Toys. Like most families with young children, over the years, we've accumulated a massive trove of cheap plastic shit made in China. Recently, as the kids have been growing out of that stuff (or, more likely, were never into it in the first place*), we've made efforts to thin it out -- giving away what we can, tossing the rest. And now, prompted by the broken TV mentioned in my last post, we've pretty much cleared it all out. We have a few stuffed animals and the odd Nerf dart gun remaining, but that's about it. It's a brave new world! I'm definitely not sad to see the clutter go, but it is always sad (and happy) to see your kids grow up. Lil' S2 doesn't want his Incredible Hulk action figures anymore -- neither the Marvel Legends nor the Diamond Marvel editions. That's cause to both shed a tear and pump a fist.    

*The number of toys we had that the kids played with for less than, like, a half hour total is staggering and kinda depressing -- so much waste.

We are completely recognizing our toy room. Now, it's going to contain more grown-up toys. We're going to get a new TV and mount it on the wall, and then we're going to put in a pool and/or ping pong table. We've been going back and forth on which one, so I think we might get a combo table. My worry there is that it'll be shoddy because each table will be a little bit compromised in order to make the combination aspect of it work, but, doing a little online shopping, it looks like there are some decent products out there. S saw a three-in-one table that also features air hockey, but I don't trust that. I mean, with air hockey, you have to plug it in and the air has to flow and all that. I just bet it's either not great quality, or it's a lot of work to convert it from one game to the next. Also, the tabletop for air hockey probably takes up quite a bit of space when it's not on. I imagine it must be kinda bulky.

The other thing we have to get is a stationary bike. That's become a must for me. I used to go to the gym in my sister-in-law's apartment complex, but the fob she gave me stopped working, so she gave me a new one, and now that one doesn't work, and I just don't want to deal with it anymore. Plus, I'm tired of traveling there every time I want to work out. As I say that, it sounds kinda silly to me, because it's less than a mile away, but traffic can be quite bad on weekdays in the early evening, which is often when I'm able to go, and then I have to park in a public lot, feed the meter (virtually), and walk a bit to get there. That time adds up when you are a busy, important man like me. What I want is to be able to be like, I got 45 minutes before my next meeting starts, just enough time to bang out a 10-miler, and then just go downstairs and do it.

S has been resistant to the idea of a stationary bike, in part because of the Great Treadmill Debacle of 2022, in part because she wants to put a little couch where the bike would go instead. But I struck a deal with her. She gets to paint two of the walls downstairs, and I get the bike. Those walls have been a point of contention for some time now. They look terrible and are super scuffed up from the kids being so harsh on them -- pushing furniture against them, sticking things to them, and hitting them repeatedly with a football (that one is all Lil' S2). It drives S crazy. Every time she looks at them, some kind of OCD gets triggered, and she obsesses about painting them.

I understand that, but my position is, we still have kids. They still don't know how to not ruin shit. Someday, relatively soon, we can have clean walls, but we're not there yet. So, rather than sink a bunch of time and money into repainting them now, just to get re-annoyed as the kids thrash them again, let's wait a few years, and do it then. It's a good argument, and it kept S at a bay for a little while, but she just kept bringing it up and bringing it up, and it got to the point where I was either going to have to let her do it or have a wife who radiates negative energy every time we hang out in our basement -- and we hang out there a lot. So, it made sense to reach an agreement and at least get something out of it for me.

Also, she says that she's going to paint them herself, because she doesn't want to spend a bunch of money, and it doesn't need to be that good. She just doesn't need something professional quality, just something that isn't covered in scuff marks. I'm not sure what to make of it all. It might be a disaster waiting to happen, but it might not. S frequently embarks on ambitious household projects, and sometimes she pulls them off, like when she went to the hardware store and bought a ratchet set and disassembled a bed, all before I even woke up in the morning. But other times she does not, and then I get dragged into it, and our marriage is put to the test, as we scream at each other while staring at microscopic pictorials, supposedly illustrating how to put a desk together. You gotta flip it! No, the other way! See the long piece has to go with the other long piece! The other other long piece! We shall see what this one will be.

 Until next time...

Entry 737: Valley Girl

I'm experiencing a dilemma at the moment. It's an ongoing dilemma with this blog, and one I've mentioned before. One purpose -- arguably the main purpose -- of this blog is to record what I'm thinking about and feeling at a given moment in my life -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. The problem is that in recent years I've found myself much less inclined to write about the bad and the ugly than I was back in the day. There is already so much of that in the culture -- and it's unlikely to get better anytime soon, given the results of the election -- that I don't want to think about it during my "wind-down" time, and I pretty much only write this blog during my wind-down time. Actually, maybe that's the difference. I used to be able to find moments during the daytime to write, but now, as the kids have gotten older and their activities have taken over more of S and my schedules, I pretty much can only write at night, and that's exactly when I don't want to think about negative shit. Remember my mullet strategy for content consumption: business in the morning, entertainment at night. It's the best way for me to stay informed while also staying sane.

All this is to say, I want to put down my thoughts on the election without actually writing about the election. The compromise I've come up with is to outsource it -- or more accurately to glom on to somebody else's writing about the election that I mostly agree with. There are dozens of "What Went Wrong" pieces out there, and I've undoubtedly consumed more than my fair share of them, but the one that most resonated with me was this one by Sam Harris.

The post is lengthy, but I like it because I broadly agree with his criticisms of both parties. It’s very screed-y, but it’s a screed against both sides, with the Trump side deservedly getting the worst of it. The tl;dr version is that Democrats completely lost their way by putting identity politics over policy (and, perhaps more importantly, messaging) that addresses the concerns people actually have. Although Kamala recognized this, and notably did not run an identity-based campaign, it was too little too late (and she really struggled to explain her past unpopular lefty positions). With that said, she still was the best choice -- the only choice, really -- for people who don't wish to see our country slowly slide into something other than a democracy. That's a point I always want to make: As ineffectual and pious and intolerant as lefty Dems have become, they are still far preferable to a Republican party ruled by Trump. One side concedes elections and believes in the peaceful transfer of power; the other doesn't. You don't need to know much more than that.

One area where I think Harris gets it a bit wrong, however, is that he underplays the role of inflation in the election, in my opinion. It could be none of this identity-politics stuff would have mattered a lick if inflation would not have skyrocketed over the past few years. Covid played a huge part in sweeping Trump out of office; the aftershocks of it brought him back. It could just be as simple as that. The irony is that the US economy on the whole is doing okay right now -- much better than in other countries. So, maybe we need to modify James Carville's famous maxim: it's not It's the economy, stupid; it's It's prices, stupid.

People feel higher prices viscerally, and they don't like them. I know this because I often feel them that way too. I bought a box of Honey Bunches of Oats the other day, and it was $6.99, and my initial impulse was WTF?!, and it's not like I then thought, Well, yeah, but unemployment is low and most people's 401ks are doing well. No, I just thought, That's too expensive -- it should be half that. People have sticker shock -- they've had it the past few years -- and they're punishing parties in charge all over the world because of it. The US, unfortunately, is no exception.

Okay, a few other things before I call it a post...

• I'm reading Moon Unit Zappa's memoir Earth to Moon, and it's getting pretty good. There's actually a tie-in with what I wrote above, as Moon was high school classmates with Sam Harris (and she kinda had a crush on him). The book starts out really slow. The first third of it or so is about her early childhood, and it's like, C'mon, get to the part where you're going on Letterman saying "gag me with a spoon" or Michael J. Fox is setting you up with Woody Harrelson. There are not even many good Frank Zappa stories in it because she didn't know him very well. He was basically an absentee father. He was very often touring, and when he was home, he would sleep all day and work all night, rarely interacting with his children. He only recorded "Valley Girl" with Moon because she put a note under his door saying she wanted to work on something with him, and then he was kinda resentful that it was his biggest commercial hit. I do like the song, though (Moon is the best part).
  
  
• The boys and I watched the Mike Tyson / Jack Paul fight last night, even though it didn't start until after midnight for us. The fight itself was very meh -- turns out a 58-year-old wobbling around a ring for 16 minutes doesn't make for exciting television -- but some of the early fights were exciting, and it was fun to stay up. We were all dying when Tyson's bare butt cheeks made an appearance on the program. (I can't find a good clip to link to, but you can Google it, if you like.) The stream, however, was super glitchy. I constantly had to leave and reenter, and it would take a good ten seconds (or more) to buffer again every time I did. Netflix needs to step up its game if they are going to be a major player in the live content world. They tried to do a live Love is Blind reunion a few seasons ago, and it was an utter failure, and now this shoddy offering. They are doing a Christmas day football game, which I will almost certainly watch, so hopefully they get things worked out by then.
  
  
• Lil' S2 is having his friend JP stay the night, and they broke one of our TVs. It was an accident, and they weren't really being irresponsible -- they were building a little fort, and one of the blankets they were using pulled the TV off its table and onto the floor -- so we weren't that mad about it. But, it was the TV with the PlayStation hooked up to it, so now they don't have video games. So, instead they are playing a fantasy game with Lil' S1. He is, in effect, the dungeon master, and he's leading them through a quest in which football players are the characters -- like NFL players, like Nick Chubb and DK Metcalf. It's kinda adorable. I'm not glad they broke the TV, but I am glad they can't play video games tonight.
  

Until next time...

Entry 736: A Post That Is Only A Little Bit About The Election

Well, the election did not go the way I wanted -- not at all. Don't worry, I'm not going to write much about it here -- not now, anyway. I will at some point, just to get my thoughts down, but we don't need the millionth-and-first "What Went Wrong" blog post of the week. I'm much less despondent than I was eight years ago, so that's good, I guess. I'm not sure why that is, though. Maybe it's because I was ready for it this time. I didn't know for sure that he would win, but it certainly felt more probable than not. This is a stark difference from 2016, when it seemed completely unimaginable to me that he'd actually win... until he did.

I also have a different mindset this time around. The first time I was in a full-on resistance mindset. It seemed to me the best approach was to oppose Trump at every turn. But that proved counterproductive, so now I'm in much more of a ride-it-out mode -- take the L, get on with my life, find joy where I can, and hope my worst fears don't come true. That's the plan. I mean, he can't run again (...hopefully), and although I've heard it said many times by many smart people that there will still be Trumpism after Trump, I'm not sure that it's actually true. You've got Republicans who have a type of right-wing charisma (JD Vance); you've got crazies (Marjorie Taylor Greene); and you've got celebrities. But I don't see anybody out there with the right charisma-crazy-celebrity mix to replace Trump when he's gone. I'm eager to put the "Trumpism without Trump" theory to a test, anyway. 

Another reason that I might be taking it better this time around is because my parents happened to be visiting last week. It's hard to be bummed out when you are around family you love and don't get to see all that often. It was a great visit. They are slowing down, to be sure, but they are still in pretty good health, and most importantly, they still have their wits about them. I have many friends whose folks are in much worse shape or not around at all, so I feel pretty lucky in that regard. It was a lot of fun to see my parents interact with my boys. My dad and Lil' S1 did a lot of cooking/baking together, which was really sweet.

In other news, we finally finished watching The Office as a family -- all nine seasons. The last two, the ones without Michael, were a bit of a slog, but we got through them. Actually, some of Season 8, with Robert California, is legit funny, just because James Spader is such a good actor, but the final season is flat out bad. The stretch where Nellie is the manager and the focal point of the episodes is particularly painful to watch. The series ends decently, but that's only because they completely cater to viewers' nostalgia of the early seasons when the show was actually good. It's a smart move, but you can only really do it for an episode or two.

One thing that struck me during this months-long rewatch is the sheer number of episodes there are of The Office -- nine seasons, about 20-25 episodes a season, that's over 200 episodes. (In fact, there were 201.) I know that that's how most TV shows, especially sitcoms, were way back in the day (2005), but it seems so weird now. With that many episodes, there are bound to be some duds. Upon second viewing, you really notice the we gotta run something shows. They are the worst episodes, and, for some reason, they often involve the characters committing crimes--Michael framing Toby by putting pot in his desk (which was actually Caprese salad); Angela hiring a hit man to maim Oscar for having an affair with her husband; Dwight shooting Stanley with a dart filled with bull tranquilizer. There were more than a few "jump the shark" moments throughout the series.

On the whole, though, great show -- possibly one of my ten favorites of all time. If I ever finish my "Top 100 TV Shows" list, we will know for sure. I don't know if I'll do that, though. I sometimes start things on this blog and then peter out and don't finish them properly.

Speaking of which... Until next time...