Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about death, old age, toilets, and more.
Your letters:
Mike:
Give me a ranking of your top three summer Olympic events you’d like to attend as a spectator. Bonus points if doesn’t include the women’s gymnastics all around or the men’s 100-meter final.
Hey, why don’t I get equal credit for wanting to see what Simone Biles and Noah Lyles just did? BOOOOO. The 100-meter race was still thrilling on TV, and I’d be even more confused as to how Lyles won if I had been there in person, but still. I wanna watch the fast people go fast. I wish they’d staged that race in some unsanctioned subterranean race club, with men in sunglasses clenching fat wads of money in each hand and screaming at the runners to finish first or else. That would kick ass.
I digress. I have a long-standing antipathy toward meets of any sort. They take forever, and my mind can’t deal with six different events all being staged simultaneously. We all like multiview at home, right? Well, it’s not quite as fun when you’re sitting on a metal bench in an arena that’s 82 degrees inside. Make it an indoor swim/dive meet and conditions become even more intolerable. I didn’t even like attending my own kids’ swim meets. No parent does. They fucking blow. You’d have to pay me to go a swim meet, and I’ve been to Katie Ledecky’s high school pool. It’s an extremely nice pool, but it’s still an indoor pool. I’d rather stay home and eat a sandwich than watch her lap the field for gold in that pool. I’d probably rather stay home for just about any Olympics event, because I know how locked down Olympic cities are. You’re cattle, and I’m too old to be herded around. But if you forced—forced me!—to attend, here are the events I’d pick.
1. Surfing. This has been my favorite Paris event to watch on TV, probably because it’s taking place in Tahiti. The only time I’ve been to Tahiti in my life was on a layover. That needs correcting. I wanna hit the beach, smoke a fatty, watch the athletes catch some tasty waves, and then nap on the sand. That’s a good day.
(IOC officials might try to remand me to some shitty grandstand to watch this event, but I’d befriend a local and just watch from their villa. I assume this is easy to do in Tahiti.)
2. Boxing. Every outcome is either rigged or used as a flimsy excuse to launch yet another, incredibly tiresome anti-trans campaign. However, I’ve never been to a boxing match and desperately want to see one in person. You know how jacked I used to get if a fight broke out at school (that I wasn’t involved in)? VERY jacked, buddy. I wanna see some ultraviolence.
3. Tennis. I could put basketball here, but that’s an even lazier choice than track or gymnastics. So I’ll settle for watching Alcaraz and Djokovic go to war for Tashi Duncan’s love. I get VIP tickets though, so that I can retreat into the shade and enjoy a fresh Nutella crepe during set breaks.
Tim:
If an alien invasion were to happen, think we could pull our shit together and rally or would the political shit persist? Full disclosure yes I am watching Quiet Place and yes I took a gummy a half hour ago.
The past 10 years have already provided you with the answer. Nothing will stop us humans from wallowing in our own bullshit. Not aliens. Not the Second Coming. Not a fucking asteroid taking dead aim at us. Nothing. Human beings yearn for control over shit that they have no control over, and the easiest way to feel like they have that control is to indulge in petty feuds with their own kind. First contact with Brzaxx from the Oinken Nebula isn’t gonna change any of that. Kristi Noem will try to kill the aliens and then shove them into her gravel pit. RFK Jr. will try to hide the dead aliens in Central Park. Democrats will try to cut a deal with the aliens to enslave only 60 percent of humanity instead of all of us. Then the aliens would be like, “Fuck this place. Let’s go conquer a better planet.” There’s a reason that Independence Day was fictional. Randy Quaid isn’t gonna sacrifice himself for us.
Aaron:
I was unexpectedly uplifted watching the summer Olympics; it was really making me proud of my country and our athletes. I really needed that given the state of things here. But that pride was shattered by ad for Google's new Gemini AI bot where a dad asks it to help his kid draft a letter to her favorite track star. Am I nuts for thinking that totally sucks the sincerity out of the whole deal? Is there really that much of a barrier for a kid to write a fan letter? Or am I now an old man yelling at the clouds? Really though, WTF?
You aren’t alone and you aren’t an old man for hating that ad. Everyone despised it, to the point that Google pulled it from the airwaves just a few days ago. It’s one of those Super Bowl-budget ads designed to pull at your heartstrings, like the old AT&T ads from the baby cell phone days, and it fails on every conceivable level. I don’t believe that this is an actual dad, or that the little girl is his kid, or that Sydney McLaughlin would be moved by an automated form letter drafted by a computer on that kid’s behalf. It’s too stupid of a spot for me to be offended, but I understand why it rubbed so many other people the exact wrong way. That’s not how you sell AI to customers, and Google just learned that the hard way.
They’ll be back, though. All of these companies have pegged their future earnings on AI, and so they’re all frantically experimenting ways to pitch it to wary consumers. If they don’t find anything that sticks, they could be out billions. So they’re gonna come at you from every angle to get you to buy in. Don’t want AI to help you with endeavors where the human element is also the most critical one? OK, well what if AI could give you an easy dinner recipe simply by looking at a photo of your open fridge? Or what if it could adjust the thermostat while you’re asleep because it can tell your body is overheating? Or what if it could give you an INCREDIBLE blowjob? The bombardment has only begun. Come NFL season, Meta will air a classy 90 second ad about an Evangelical housewife in Missouri whose AI assistant whips up a touching video of her baking a pie for Harrison Butker.
Sean:
What percentage of people on a cross-country flight are under the influence? Even when I fly out in the morning, the airport bar is crowded. I myself take a strong anti-anxiety prescription when I fly that makes me kind of loopy. I doubt I'm the only one. I imagine at least a few passengers are also stoned. Is it possible that less than half of the plane is actually sober by the time it reaches cruising altitude?
If it’s a redeye, yes. If it’s not, then a number of us do indeed stay sober from takeoff to landing. Probably more than 75 percent of the manifest on any given eastbound flight will be lucid. I know that a lot of nervous fliers still drink before a long trip to chill their nerves, but you can be a nervous flier and an alcoholic at the same time. You can also just be an alcoholic. There are a lot of those here in America.
In fact, let’s blow out that question for a moment. Over half of all adult Americans drink, and weed is now even more popular than alcohol ever since the legalization of cannabis became widespread. And I haven’t even gotten to all of the prescription brain meds that many of us either need or flagrantly abuse. All of us are on drugs.
And what does society look like when everyone is high? Well, it might look like one where Donald Trump is a major political figure for a full decade. It’s not necessarily hatred or corruption that will drag us to hell, but rather simple neglect. You’re telling me that we have to eliminate all carbon emissions by 2030 just to have a slight chance of saving mankind from an ecological holocaust? That’s too much for me to deal with, man. I’m gonna go smoke a bowl and chill. Don’t tell me it’s 10:00 a.m., man. I gotta do what I gotta do.
JJ:
I met my wife when I was 35, and we had our first (and only) kid when I was 40. Because of my age, I can do important things like buy my kid toys and clothes and diapers. But I’m tired. Part of me wishes I’d met my wife 10 years earlier, but I was also broke and jobless. So, when is the best to start a family: young and broke, or old(er) and with means?
There is no good time to start a family. It’ll always be fucking exhausting. My wife and I had our first kid when I was 29, and the girl ran my ass WAY down. That would have been the case if we’d had more money, if we’d been older, if we’d been younger, or if we’d been God himself. That’s why so many working parents need help: day care, nannies, Rosie the Robot, whatever. They either can’t balance work and parenting, or (as with some of the more affluent working parents) they simply don’t want to. I’m not gonna judge those people one way or the other. My wife and I never sent our kids to daycare because we never had to. We did all of the work, and that work was fucking endless. My back still hurts from it. The same will happen with you, because no one gets out of hands-on childrearing with pristine hands.
So don’t waste your time pining for an alternate dimension where you met your spouse and had your kid a decade prior. That’s not the world you live in, and I promise you that it wouldn’t be that much easier to raise a newborn at 40 than at 30. You will lose sleep. You will ache. You will be reduced to tears of frustration. But you’ll still have a kid, and Gemini by Google™ will tell you that she wants to be “just like you” one day. That really puts things in the proper perspective.
HALFTIME!
Anthony:
What percentage of people that have reached the age of 69 do you think have actually “69ed” on their birthday? 69 percent would be the obvious answer, but has to be lower, no?
So much lower. Retired porn stars and Joe Rogan listeners are probably game to attempt it, but the majority of elderly people aren’t gonna bother. I spent the first 40+ years of my existence retreating inside my dick anytime I needed a break from day-to-day existence, but that codependence has waned of late. Me and my dick go way back, but it’s actually nice these days to not have getting my nut off be the sole focus of everything I do. Jerking off never used to feel like a waste of my time, and now it somehow does. I still do it of course, but it’s a pretty rote affair. Halfway in, I’m already thinking about what I’m gonna eat for dinner.
So when I turn 69, I’m not gonna amble up to my wife and be like hey girl, you what’d be NICE today? She’ll be too tired for that shit, and so will I. I think I should probably start doing HGH.
Steve:
You proudly claimed in an earlier Funbag that, "I love me some me content," which I think is secretly true of everyone, even if they won't admit it. Building on that theory, I wanted to lay out the ideal afterlife, if there actually is one. Basically, take Defending Your Life, but remove the whole "defending" part and instead just let me watch my own personal life highlights forever. Imagine just waking up, housing the best eggs benedict you ever tasted, and watching every athletic accomplishment you've ever achieved, narrated by whomever you choose. Just the good stuff. All killer no filler. Every great joke you've ever told, every singular moment you were cool, etc. That'd be sweet.
I’ve answered questions in this vein ever since the advent of the Funbag at Deadspin in 2013 (!!!), when the column was called Open Mailbag Tuesday. The gist was always, Hey man, I’d love to die and then be able to watch all of the sex scenes from my life on the big screen. And I’d still very much like to do that, along with chatting up the ghost of Lincoln and what not. But I had a truly legit brush with death six years ago—BUY MY BOOK—and realized that I won’t be sentient in the afterlife, and that I won’t want to be. Enter middle age and you quickly become sick to death of yourself. That’s true even for professional egotists like me. I used to get a morbid kick out of recounting my brain injury to people who were in the dark about it. No longer. I’d much rather talk about some football. Doesn’t even have to be my team. Just bring up that sport and watch me spring back to life in an instant.
In all seriousness, though, I’m ready to leave it all behind when I die. If there’s no heaven, that’s all right. If I retain no memories of my life in the transition over, that’s also okay. Death is an act of giving. You’re giving yourself back to the world that made you, so that other life may thrive in your wake. That means letting go of yourself completely. You can make billions and slap your name on shit that outlives you: buildings, tunnels, companies, and other superficial means of achieving immortality. But once you’re dead, none of that will mean fuck all. You won’t care, because you’ll no longer be bound by the constraints of space and time. You’ll be free of all that. Even if you’re terrified of that notion right now, you won’t be once your eyes closed. You’ll be resting in true peace, with nothing weighing you down. That beats watching old sex videos of yourself and noticing that your ass is flat.
Erich:
I constantly see guys complaining how old they are at 30, 35, 40. I’m 57 and had my kids at 37 and 40, but never felt old until I turned 50. What’s the correct age to start whining about how old you are?
You’re talking to a guy who needed his first back surgery when he was 17, so I’ve been pissing and moaning like an old timer before I was even legally allowed to drink. I don’t subscribe the idea that you have to be X age to lament your age, because 40-somethings are, against all odds, not a monolith. As far as I’m concerned, you get your old fogy license the second you hit any of the following milestones:
- Bad back
- Cancer
- Your favorite pop culture is replaced by newer forms of pop culture that you believe, in your heart, are objectively worse
- You freak out about overhead bin space before boarding an aircraft
- Someone “ok boomer”ed you and only you thought they were being unfair
- You take tailgating personally
- You actually care about local politics
- You notice when prices on basic sundries go up, and you dislike it
- You care about the stock market
- You realize that playing Monopoly sucks
You get the idea. Being old and cranky is a state of mind, amigo. Look at the disgust on my face whenever I see the word “goated” and you’ll know it’s true.
Steven:
I swear every commercial at the Olympics is just medicine at this point. I saw one that was for eye injections! At what point is the medicine for something so specific that there's no reason to advertise it?
Oh hey, one more justification to act like an old-timer. I know ALL of those medicines now. My wife and I even give them a capsule review when we see the ad. Watch out for that Dupixent. You won’t like the side effects!
Kyle:
Just repaired a toilet flush/fill valve (not to brag). Took a solid three hours. I don’t have kids. Do basic household repairs get easier when you’re a dad?
As with anything else, you get better at fixing shit with experience. And when you have children, guess what breaks in the house? That’s right: everything. So it’s not that dads have some inherent power that makes them handier than single men, it’s just that they’ve been burdened with enough toy assembly, IT fixes, and ceiling fan installations to be a somewhat capable fix-it man.
To a point. My daughter’s toilet is on the fritz and I gave up on trying to fix it myself before I’d even reached into the tank. I know a losing battle when I see one. Plumbers are expensive but worth it.
Brian:
Office fridges are disgusting. Attached is a picture I took this morning. See the mayonnaise jars in between the butter packets and the bottle of ranch dressing? Does that look like iced tea to you? I bet it's iced tea. Maybe one jar is sweet tea and the other is unsweetened. Or one jar to enjoy and another to share with a friend. I really hope they washed those thoroughly.
You’re right. I’ve seen some awful shit in office fridges in my time, and the worst thing is that there are a lot of items—tupperwares full of alarmingly colored soup, half sandwiches poorly rewrapped in their foil, cartons of egg nog—that just stay there forever. Plenty of workplaces have wised up to this, and have a “This fridge is cleaned out at the end of every night” sign posted on the office kitchen cabinet. But sometimes that sign is a bluff, and Terry’s month-old Jell-O salad will stay in there until it grows legs of its own and runs away. So if you put shit in the office fridge, have the goddamn courtesy to eat it quick.
Also, I’m gonna go urine for the jar contents above.
John:
There are tiny professional boxers out there. The maximum weight for a flyweight is 112 lbs. (and that's not even the smallest division). What happens if I get in the ring with such an imp? I'm a 215-lb. office worker in decent shape (I lift and run a couple times a week). I have no boxing experience beyond sparring with my dad in the living room when I was a kid. Yet I still think the smart money is on me. One of these mosquitoes could outpoint me and win a decision. On the other hand, I think his punches would feel like when my cat bats me looking for treats, while I might actually kill him if I wade in and land a solid punch. It would be like fighting a (small) child! Who ya got?
The shrimp. You wouldn’t last a round.
Email of the week!
Michael:
I work in the Employee Benefits department for a small insurance brokerage, and all three of the coworkers in my department are grandmas over 60, so I don't socialize much at work as there is nothing really I share in common with my team (I'm 35 and a single male). This new guys starts in our side of the building, right down the hall. I wanted to introduce myself as he's around my age and maybe I can have someone to talk to during lunch break or something.
It was by far the most bizarre interaction I've had with a coworker. He has a huge candy jar on his desk that he dumped an entire one-pound bag of Tootsie Rolls into, and he seemed shocked when I told him I don't like candy that much after he offered me one. I know what his job position is, he is not having clients come in every day trying to grab those Tootsie Rolls. Those are definitely for him.
The weirdest part was that he wasted like no time telling me that he was a huge Kevin Costner fan, and that he just referred to him by “Kevin.” He never said Costner at all. He eventually said something about an episode of Yellowstone which gave me the clue, but the way he was referring to Kevin I thought he was talking about a friend of his or something. He then clarified it was Kevin Costner when I asked, and then he proceeded to talk about him for several minutes while I sat in stunned silence. He has since put up posters in his office, two of which are Dances with Wolves and The Postman.
I still eat lunch by myself in my office with the door closed.
The right move.
