oh, not so bad
Hello, friends! Rob here.
Now that everyone has a lot of time on their hands, I've been seeing a lot of chain-style Facebook posts like that thing going around where you list ten things most people like that you can't stand. I was never one for being too cool for stuff that other people are into, so I thought I'd make a list of ten oft-maligned things that aren't really all that bad. This may create a bit of a paradox. By announcing that I'm too cool to jump on a trend of making a list of trendy things that I'm too cool for, I may have goth-served myself. Anyway, here's a list:
1: Singing off-key. It is generally not good to try to pass bad singing off as good singing for commercial purposes (like using studio magic to mask the fact that a “professional” vocalist can't carry a tune), but as a recreational activity? Why not? It's pure. Singing in the shower? Humming in the kitchen? Butchering some top 40 jam in a karaoke bar? All great. It's not hurting anyone, no matter how much performative wincing it elicits from your asshole friend who claims to have “perfect pitch.” It's a joyful noise- a simple expression of joy at a time when joy is exactly what the world needs. Sing like you're dancing like no one is watching.
2: “Sketchy” bars. I like going to a swanky place and sipping a fourteen-dollar cocktail on a crushed velvet divan from time to time, and at this particular moment in history I'd even revel in the opportunity to park myself at some technicolor Bourbon Street slime trap for a few hours so long as I could go there with friends and sit within twenty feet of them. But the best bar is the quiet, surly bar. Far too many people shy away from dives these days. I've gone on record with this take before, but the gist of it is that as long as you mind your own damn business and don't order anything with more than two ingredients, you can have the best of times in the worst of places.
3: Getting sweaty. What do a hard day's work, a bitchin' rock concert, a summer afternoon on the grass, and a good workout have in common? Sweat is the mark of time well spent.
4: Reality television. This is me admitting that I have been wrong for years, and, to a certain extent, continue being wrong to this day. For years I've endeavored to divorce myself from the concept of a guilty pleasure- if you like something, just enjoy it. Anyone who looks down their nose at you for it can go kick rocks. Reality TV is America's guilty pleasure. It's gossip without backbiting people you actually care about. It's rubbernecking without the car accident. As for the shows themselves, there's definitely an art to it in the way they manipulate suspense and expectations, even if most “reality” shows are more scripted than the WWE. And they're captivating. Remember The Jersey Shore? What a fascinating anthropological study that turned out to be. And did you see Love is Blind? Holy shit. For a blind date series hosted by the dude from 98 Degrees, that show turned out to be a bloodbath.
5: Spiders. I've been creeped out by some of the larger varieties before, but it's hard to deny that spiders have your back. They mind their own business, they don't mess with the food in the pantry, and they help keep your house clear of flies and such. Sure, they're bugs, but they're bugs that prey on other bugs! They use their bug powers to capture and eviscerate the truly bad bugs like flies and mosquitoes. They're like tiny Dexters! And they absolutely, one million percent do NOT crawl into your mouth while you're sleeping. That is a harmful stereotype and they're way too smart for it in real life.
6: Competitive eating. I'm going to let the Wayne Gretzky of professional gluttony, Joey Chestnut, speak to the virtues of his own sport:
“After winning his sixth consecutive hot dog eating contest in 2012 by eating 68 hot dogs [in ten minutes], he stated, 'I will not stop until I reach 70. This sport isn't about eating. It's about drive and dedication, and at the end of the day, hot dog eating challenges both my body and my mind.'”
This is what a champion sounds like, my friends. Like Sir Roger Bannister chasing the elusive four-minute mile, Chestnut did in fact reach his stated goal of seventy hot dogs at the 2016 contest. He improved upon his own record again by eating seventy-two the very next year, and again in 2018 with seventy-four, which stands as the current world record. I would pay upwards of nine dollars to see the team behind Netlifx's Cheer do a series about Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest.
7: Rain. This may be a bit of a cop-out, because I know I'm not alone on this one, and even the haters have to acknowledge that rain is a vital part of the ecosystem. But people are WAY too quick to let rain ruin a weekend. Sure, it's gonna make it hard to enjoy a baseball game or a trip to the beach, but there's something fun about a rainy night out, dashing from place to place and getting pinned under awnings like you're in a foxhole ducking sniper fire. Shaking off when you get to the warm interior of wherever you're headed. Sharing an umbrella with your crush. The night my wife and I got married, we told everyone to rally at a bar in the French quarter for an informal afterparty, and just when the gang was starting to run out of gas, it started dumping outside so hard that everyone got stuck in the bar for a while. It's like God WANTED us to spend another hour shooting Fireball and singing along to hair band covers.
And there's a real beauty to it, too. There is no feeling like walking quietly through a darkened home in the middle of the night, safe and warm as a thunderstorm lashes at the windows. It's like the wilderness beyond urban life has brought a taste of its savagery to your doorstep- a reminder that we are all merely guests in this world.
8: The music of Joe Exotic. Given everything else about Tiger King, I really would have expected- hoped, even- that Joe's music would be disastrously bad. Like, truly unlistenable. It turns out it's fine. Don't get me wrong, it's not great. I'm not listening to this stuff for pleasure in my spare time. But honestly, he's a way more competent singer/songwriter than he ought to be. Anyone who says otherwise is most likely judging the tunes less on their own merit and more by the cringe factor of his self-produced music videos starring his perpetually shirtless ex-husband John. The music itself isn't too far out of league with a lot of modern pop-country. I would probably choose to listen to Joe Exotic over, like, Dan + Shay.
9: Social distancing. Relax. I'm not about to ambush you with one of those tone-deaf Instagram PSAs about “self care.” I'm not going to tell you to see this as an opportunity to finish that novel, or get in shape, or- ugh- “unplug.” Everything that you think sucks about social distancing does, in fact, suck.
So why is it good, actually? Because these are extraordinary times. It is awesome- in the biblical sense of the word- to think that, in a world of almost eight billion people spread across roughly two hundred nations, there is exactly one thing going on right now. We are staying away from each other in order to keep each other safe. It is vitally important that we continue to do so. It is a big responsibility, but we owe this to ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and our communities.
Because this is a scary disease. If you've read any firsthand accounts of it, even the “mild” version sounds absolutely miserable. It's weeks of torture. It kills young and old alike. And, I would assume everyone gets this by now, but considering it was news to the freaking governor of an entire state last week, I think it bears repeating: You can catch it from someone without symptoms, and you can spread it for up to two weeks without even knowing you have it. My grandmother was hospitalized the other week with pneumonia. Her tests came back negative and she was discharged, but it gave us all a good scare. We've already lost legends within New Orleans and without. I am generally a fairly positive person, but as the reality of this pandemic sets in, I've been grappling with this morbid, intrusive thought: it's not a matter of if this disease is going to take someone close to me, but when.
Until a vaccine is developed, social distancing is our best means of fighting this pandemic. It curtails the spread of the disease, and more importantly, it reduces the strain on our healthcare system and gives doctors and nurses and hospital staff a chance to keep up with the massive influx of COVID patients on top of all of the other regular-ass health problems like broken arms and strokes and cancer, because none of those things stopped happening when Coronavirus showed up. It is a burden, to be sure, but it is our responsibility- mine, yours, and everyone else's- to shoulder that burden as best we can.
And while I'm at it, no, this is not all some Illuminati/New World Order plot to clamp down on individual freedom. If it is, then the cabal of clandestine power brokers who pull the strings of the world are really bad at cabal stuff. Here, let me put on my tinfoil hat for a second and try to think about this pandemic within the hypothetical context of a globalist conspiracy: Wealthy, horrible people secretly run the world. Okay, that part checks out. The rest is iffy though. They choose to expand their wealth and power by... tanking the stock market? Social distancing is ravaging these people's portfolios (cue tiny violin). It's about controlling us, you say. Keeping us tame. Radical crime-reduction. Why? Oligarchs don't give a shit about crime. They care about accumulating wealth and insulating themselves from consequences. If anything, oligarchs are PRO-crime. Who do you think profits when the prisons are crowded? They- and I mean the royal “They”- just don't really stand to benefit from a pandemic.
This is just another example of the truth being WAY less interesting than the conspiracy theory. Because the truth is that there may well be quiet, sinister forces moving pieces on a chessboard most of us can't even see. But they don't corral the population with flashy comic-book schemes like virus-emitting cellular towers and mind-control nanobots smuggled into mandatory vaccines and, uhhh, homosexual frogs. They use quiet, boring methods like data mining, targeted advertising, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. They use charts and math and language and rules. Can you get through this article on the disproportionate tax benefits for millionaires embedded deep within the CARES Act without zoning out? I've tried three times, and I can barely make it out of the first paragraph before my eyes glaze over. An average tax kickback of $1.7 million for the wealthy that does nothing to alleviate the burden on working class people? This kind of story should be incendiary. Instead, it's so technical and math-y and acutely uninteresting that even the cliff's notes version demands to be ignored. These people are never going to declare martial law and lock you in your home for good, because they don't need to. They already know they can do literally whatever they what, so long as they do it as boringly as possible.
Okay, enough with the tinfoil hat. There are actual, honest-to-goodness positives here. The planet is getting a much-needed break from our relentless horse-fuckery. People are finding inventive ways to work around the limitations of social distancing and make moments and memories. It's not the same as just, you know, being with people, but I've seen a share of weird, magical little moments. My friends were supposed to get married in Jamaica last weekend. That obviously did not happen, but they had a zoom happy hour with like a hundred people on, and got some of their friends to perform a few “first dance” tunes. One of their friends covered “Keep Going” on a ukulele, which I was NOT ready for, but I thought he did a great job and his band is called TATTAT and you should check them out. See? It's not all bad. You're probably a better cook than you were a month ago. I made a pot roast and then used some of the leftovers to make TOT ROAST (which must always be capitalized) and repurposed the rest for tacos, because every food deserves the chance to be tacos.
Stay home. This is what we're doing. It's the only thing anyone is doing. It's important. It's awesome. It is hard. But it is good. Stay home.
10: Plain-flavored foodstuffs. Vanilla ice cream, cheese pizza, classic Lay's potato chips. All great! Not everything has to be flavor-blasted.
