As a general rule, when someone asks you how you're doing, they are not expecting a detailed or especially honest answer. Longtime listeners of the pod will have noticed that I live by this rule; the furthest I will go when asked is, if I know that I look bedraggled and am radiating a general sense of crisis, saying "oh, you know" instead of "good." I do this for whoever is asking, but I do it for myself, too. No one needs to hear that I am "really struggling with my Earth Room blog."
Anyway, that's what I tell myself. While I think I'm correct to not explain bloggy frustrations to a barista, people are not always doing well, and it can help to admit as much. And so the first episode of the show featuring both me and Drew in a month found us not really altogether at our best or most relaxed, for various reasons. For better or worse, we talked about that.
Drew talks about some recent family stuff and his harrowing encounter with America's senior-care system. We run down all the various bad/exhausting things that have happened in the world, and how we're dealing with those. I skip pretty much all the fun stuff about my trip to Maine, and talk about breaking my phone and an unhappy encounter with an invasive species. There is entirely too much news happening, and it feels bad. I don't imagine it's giving anything away to reveal that neither one of us has any tips on how to deal with that, and with the feeling of being kind of batted around rudely by things, but we did talk about what that feels like for us, and how we manage it while doing all the other stuff we have to do.
That sounds a bit like a therapy session, and honestly it was a little bit like that, but it felt good and made for an amusingly jarring transition to the back half of the episode, which was more on brand. We discussed the altogether decent state of Major League Baseball at the All-Star break, as well as the unfortunate rendition of the national anthem that preceded the MLB Home Run Derby—due to the timing, we recorded this before learning that the singer said she was drunk and went to rehab. I talked a bit about the promising midseason boomlet of huge guys hitting homers, and the emergence of a few promising and overperforming teams that could force their cheap and cynical front offices to think about committing to something.
The Funbag opened things up further still, as we addressed the question of which prominent public figures we would be most delighted to know were covered in tattoos and engaged in the time-honored pastime of putting Anthony Kiedis's tattoos onto various world leaders. We weren't really a long way from the grim stuff we talked about earlier in the episode, but it felt that way.
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