At some point during the Hall & Oates song that Drew had rewritten such that it was now about how cool it is to piss, I began thinking about how long we've been doing this podcast.
Even if you start at the beginning of The Distraction, there's a lot. The podcast is a few months older than Defector itself; if you think of this pod, as I do, as being in some sense a resurrection of the one we did at the old site, it is even older than that. This seems like a long time ago because it actually was, but there used to be puppets of Drew and me, and you used to be able to see them in promotional videos; we recorded an episode on the day we all quit that site. We've had some fantastic guests, a collection of people that I truly revere from all up and down the cultural spectrum—Bob Mould, Chris Bosh, Mike Schur, Jemele Hill, Pablo Torre, Bomani Jones, Justin Halpern, David Grann, Rohan Nadkarni. I don't really remember which of those icons I was thinking about when Drew sang the words "a piss sure would be bliss" to the tune of "Your Kiss Is On My List." All of them, I guess, looking back at me from little windows on the Zoom call that only I could see. "Damn," their faces asked as one, "you live like this?"
Not that it's any of their business, but yes, I do live like this. Or, anyway, I record podcasts like this when it's just Drew and me on the mic, as it was this week. There is no way that Drew would subject any of the aforementioned valued guests to his Mashup Vocal Stylings, but when it's just me and a lucky Multitude producer he clearly has no such qualms. And we, for better or worse, have the podcast to prove it! It's embedded right up there. There's no singing during the first 20 minutes, if you were worried about that. Which you might well have been.
It's a real goof-around episode by any standard, and we recorded it last week shortly before Drew jetted off to do fancy stuff in San Francisco. We'll talk next week about what that was; for now I am assuming that he walked across the Golden Gate Bridge with Scott Garrelts or something, and when he got to the other side Ray Ratto was waiting there to say that he "looked prolapsed." It'll almost certainly be cooler than that, although I do hope Garrelts will be involved in some way.
This week, though, we spent the first half of the episode talking about ... well, mostly just goofy stuff we say and do in our lives, and how household memes are formed and used, and about different times we walked for too long in less-walkable cities. I'd say that things tightened up after the break, but that was mostly because we started fielding voicemails from the Distraction Funbag Hotline, and also because they couldn't really have gotten any looser.
A question about what Drew and I would do in a Freaky Friday body-swap scenario somehow became about going to the dentist, my curiosity about Drew's Jolliness Chair, and a time I was too high while reading the print edition of The Onion on the subway. A question about wedding guest best practices that got us fired up about how much we enjoy weddings and led Drew to talk about his unfortunate experience at The Mayflower Society and my inclination towards over-thanking. A question about the taste-level issues of relocated teams breaking out the uniforms of their former franchises got us into Statler and Waldorf mode and then, oddly, out of them. The Hartford Whalers were mentioned here. They were, in retrospect, going to be mentioned no matter what. It was that kind of episode. In retrospect, the good news is that no one sang anything about them. It's a good thing that their signature song is instrumental.
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