Every podcast is a time capsule, I guess. Not necessarily of an interesting moment, most of the time, but this is probably true of most things that are described as "time capsules" and certainly true of every literal time capsule that has ever been buried. So when you listen to this week's Distraction—which is about the NFL playoffs, marks a joyful reunion with our beloved old Deadspin pal and current theScore NFL ace Dom Cosentino, and was recorded a couple hours before a mob of swirly-eyed Facebook mutants and armed reactionaries sacked the literal U.S. Capitol Building—you will be hearing something that represents a moment that is notable mostly for how far gone it feels just a day or so later.
Yes, it's just three people yukking it up about the NFL playoffs and trying to find new ways to say "Philip Rivers is a weird guy," but it's also three guys doing that important work happily outside the shadow of Wednesday's strange and stilted spectacle of violent incoherence. So if we sound strangely unencumbered, it's because we were.
But if the games are going to go forward in and through all these different worrying outbreaks, then we will go forward with them. And so you will hear us debate which team in each of this weekend's six NFL Wild Card Deluxe slate is most repellent, and talk about how Josh Allen got good, and how the Bucs got so loathsome so fast, and get sidetracked for kind of a surprisingly long time on former Bills quarterback-of-the-future Rob Johnson. Also we talk about best practices in cold-weather cooking, Jesse Barfield, and the singularly nauseating experience of watching Silicon Valley venture capitalists cynically tone-police the labor movement at Google.
It is all kind of a mixed bag, in the classic Distraction style, but that's what time capsules tend to be. Decades from now, people in my hometown will dig up a time capsule buried when I was in elementary school and find in it, like, Big League Chew and cassette singles. Considering the disappointment that awaits the people opening that capsule, pressing play on this podcast and finding three friends blithely joking around about pro football might actually seem like a pretty good deal. It's a strange thing to be wistful for a moment that's only barely in the past, and doubly so when that moment was itself pretty well haunted and fraught, but that is how this episode made me feel upon listening through to it. But in retrospect it was pretty weird that they had us bury those cassingles as well.
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