Why Do They Mention Mudville in Beginning and Not Itll End Again
This calendar week, I asked Bruce Mehlman where he'd most similar to travel. He said, "Ane hundred years into the futurity." Hands downward, my favorite respond to anything lately. Well, this week The Experiment features some of my favorite writers and make up half of my dream dinner tabular array. Folks, this is a expert one. If this were a impress magazine, the oil of your fingerprints would smear the ink on darn nearly every page.
Let's kickoff with Josh Berthume, back again with a call to action to prepare for an election 24-hour interval that could accept a calendar month. Offer a different dystopian prediction is Frank Bound, who says recasting the office of president won't remove Trump from the stage. Sit with those awhile. They capture the urgent madness of now and are of a pair. Then we ease in some elixir with longtime Texas journalist and best-selling writer Wayne Slater, who tells us stories of how nosotros've been hither before. And of course we offer a missive from the '90s with a chapter from Robin Whetstone's Red Ticket.
And as always, we call up who we've lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, spotter, and listen to. Tiffany Yates offered some advice to writers that has fabricated my way clearer. Peradventure information technology'll help yous. And there's a video for Fantastic Negrito'south new single that reminded me of Ryan Holiday's latest post. Trust me, you need to see the video. You will exist lifted and set to rights.
Simply first, did I ever tell you the proficient news most the Baltimore Orioles?
That motion picture, patently, is from the Before Times, five years ago, in fact, when I achieved a life goal of owning season tickets to the Baltimore Orioles. This is my family. From left are Henry, who finished his first twelvemonth of college in his bedchamber, Hatcher, who doesn't know when school is starting, much less whether he will have to attend in person or online when it does, me, and my wife Sonia, the political consultant in the family unit who rises daily, surveys the hellscape that is our democracy, and sets herself to piece of work of fixing it.
Until recently there were no ballgames, which frankly was a relief for me. I am, manifestly and notably, a fan of the Baltimore Orioles. They went to the World Series the year I fell in beloved with them. In that location was some other championship a few years afterwards, and and then a long, fallow catamenia of misery so bleak it affected my self image. Let's just say that being a Texas Democrat during their current losing streak felt completely normal. Then, around the time that photograph was taken, the Orioles were good once more, suddenly, and to much delight. And then, in the middle of 2017, all of a sudden, despite having a roster total of good players, they became the worst team in baseball game. At that place was a burn sale — the team traded all of the accomplished players for young prospects who might be good in a few years — and for the terminal two years, null but misery. I stopped watching baseball. There was no joy in Mudville.
Then the pandemic stopped everything, Spring Training included, and there was talk of cancelling the entire flavour. This speculation occasioned many expressions of relief, because if the Orioles were the worst show on turf for the previous 2 years, 2020 promised to be fifty-fifty worse. Their best role player got phase 3 colon cancer. Their highest-paid player was coming off, statistically speaking, the worst flavor in the history of baseball. Baltimore'south roster was so full of failed prospects, journeymen, and recycled castoffs that "claimed off waivers" could have served as the team's motto. This season was going to exist bad on a planetary scale.
And then information technology happened. They figured out how to do a 60-game schedule, downwardly from the usual 162, with no fans in the stands. They rejiggered Leap Training to limit exposure. All exercise games became intrasquad games, necessitating ghost fielders, just like when we were growing up and didn't have enough kids to field two complete sides. They change the rules; each game in a doubleheader would exist 7 innings, not nine, and in extra innings everyone would first with a runner on 2nd, making information technology easier to stop the damn game.
For a while, I felt angry they were even trying to have a flavor. The only fashion to defeat the pandemic is to shut things downwards, and baseball, for all the joy it can bring me, is not an essential activity. Honestly, I didn't mind the cynicism. Our economic system just survived, if that'due south even the right word, its worst quarter since the 1800's. Every sixth American has used a food bank recently. A third of the country is tardily on hire or mortgage. More than a million people a week have filed for unemployment for then long that it was large news when only nine hundred or so thousand did. I don't begrudge anyone their commerce.
But when we're all existence told to stay home, starting an inning with a runner on second to limit the spread of infections seemed like a lie adults tell children. I call back once, when I was young and our family was so bankrupt nosotros used plastic staff of life numberless for dejeuner sacks because brown paper bags were an extravagance, my mother'southward second husband came habitation with a big camper trailer. Being told that having a baseball game flavour during a pandemic reminded me of how it felt looking at that damn camper trailer while he told me this was a good idea because we wouldn't have to stay in hotels anymore. We never stayed in hotels. When we visited family, we slept in guest rooms. Our just vacations were camping trips when nosotros slept in tents. I felt like baseball was asking me to accept a camper trailer-sized lie.
It all seemed forced and fake, non to mention, given the coronavirus' lack of concern with our fashion of life, unwise. Outbreaks of infections for the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals forced cancellations. The schedule became a rough draft and COVID its editor, capriciously crossing out entire serial with its red pen, reordering unabridged paragraphs of route trips. Anybody kinda figured the flavor was about to be cancelled, and it may well even so be.
Merely if they do cancel the season, I will still have my memories, considering before they lost last night, the Orioles had not lost for more than a week. Sports Illustrated predicted they would be lucky to win 10 games in a lx-game season, a total they reached afterward playing simply 17. They are winning with a worse roster than final year when they stunk up the summertime similar a tire burn. I used to get cruel texts from friends, mocking my team's comic ineptitude. I still get texts, just now they are puzzled that their squad, invariably blessed with a roster total of star players, is losing to a bunch of nobodies wearing Orioles jerseys.
The game has adjusted. Broadcasters pipe in canned crowd noise when someone gets a hit. You know information technology'south false, but information technology beats the silence of an empty stadium. And because of the changes necessitated by baseball's attempt to play a squad sport without, you lot know, killing everyone involved, they've achieved a lot of weird firsts: the first leadoff, two-run inside-the-park home run, the first leadoff double play, and the kickoff socially-distant celebration at the end of a game.
Nevertheless, I felt like I was complicit in prolonging the pandemic, no different in spirit than people scorned on social media for partying in public. Honestly, I felt the same way nearly football, another professional person sport that wasn't placing itself under a protective bubble, hoping for the best. Information technology wasn't until the football player was thrown off his team for trying to sneak a girl into the players' dorm by dressing her up in team gear in hopes of passing her off equally some other player that I realized why baseball, and as it turns out football, too, are unlike.
"Clear message on the responsibility everyone has in the NFL's COVID-19 world: Put the team at risk, endure the consequences," tweeted a sportswriter.
We're all out hither, rationalizing a socially distant visit to a friend's pool, eating outside and trusting the waiter's mask and the eating place's fan to make interacting with other people condom. And because our country never got a handle on testing or contact tracing, an asymptomatic carrier will likely never know if he or she caused a friend of a friend of a friend to get ill.
But in baseball and football, every player is answerable to the whole team. Every player knows that what they exercise off the field can prevent his team from always getting onto the field. Screw up, and the game gets cancelled. "One person can mess up 20 people so you don't have enough people to fill a roster on game day," said a quarterback for the Washington Voldemorts.
"You definitely accept to police yourself," Washington tackle Morgan Moses said.
"Nosotros're all in information technology together" Fuller said.
In that location. That's it. Football players for a team with a mascot so racist they don't even say the name out loud anymore simply articulated a coherent posture toward the coronavirus. There is no getting dorsum to normal, just a jangly uncertainty with no end in sight. If we are to do annihilation that involves other people, such as going to schoolhouse, seeing a show, or taking the family unit to a abortion, we're going to have to cease thinking of it in terms of "other people." There is only us. There is no them. Like those football players said, nosotros are all in this together, and so you have to police yourself.
Nosotros accept to adapt in real time. Maybe starting an inning with a runner on second will help. Maybe making kids clothing masks and face up shields and face the wall will piece of work. The choice nosotros've been given in the United States — shut it all down or open it up and deal with it — just guarantees either burdensome economic pain, hunger, homelessness, and poverty, or a death toll that resembles genocide. Right now, because our asymmetrical failure to govern ourselves has politicized epidemiology, we're getting a lot of each. We are the casualties of this cold civil war.
Our chore is to alive during wartime while knowing that our choices touch everyone'south chances of survival. Life goes on not in spite of but because of our adaptations. Hatcher and I are taking Henry back to college on Mon. He's rented an apartment with a friend from high school just then he can attend an organic chemistry lab in person and take the rest of his classes online. In truth, he just wants a life bigger than his sleeping room, and despite all the parental reflexes wanting to continue him there, I desire him to have a life, besides.
After we drop him off, Hatcher and I are going to keep driving. The boisterous one sitting next to me doesn't know when school is starting, and then we're going to socially distance ourselves all over Texas. I've always wanted to run across the Palo Duro Canyon and the Cadillac Ranch, just what I'yard really looking forward to is sitting next to him for hours, talking with him about podcasts and music, listening to any he wants to say while we look at that big sky over the West Texas horizon. All that blue filling up a windshield well-nigh makes a guy experience like there are amend days ahead if you just go along gas in the tank.
We Know How This Ends
past Josh Berthume
In June,Josh Berthume wrote nearly his prescient and dystopian nightmare, "7 Hours in November," nigh how a delay in calling the election could go out united states vulnerable to disinformation and atomic number 82 to chaos. Events in July and August only confirmed his worries. At present he's dorsum with a phone call to action: It's fourth dimension to prepare for an election that stretches into December.
This is troubling because it is unusual, and like and then many considerately grim realities facing us, it isn't obvious. It is hard to imagine.
Read it here.
Neither Gone Nor Forgotten
by Frank Spring
Frank Leap, one of my favorite writers and dearest friends, was the offset person I turned to when I needed people to guest host this newsletter while I was decorated with a volume project. He is singular. Now he's working on his own book while adjusting to fatherhood, which is like learning a new language while traveling to the moon outside the rocket. Still, he was kind of enough to write u.s.a. a letter most the ungracious time to come that awaits us. Never will you accept every bit much fun reading about something and then horrible.
Trump is likely to lose this election, and he'll leave function. Merely, to our collective horror and dismay, he simply won't go away.
Read it here.
We've been here earlier
by Wayne Slater
My old friendWayne Slater, is the one-time senior political writer forThe Dallas Morn News and co-author ofBush'southward Encephalon: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential.He now lives in a vineyard in Florence, a minor boondocks north of Austin.
I mentioned to Bush-league that the ex-governor was in the oversupply.
"Really?" Bush-league asked. "Why didn't he come upwardly on the stage?"
"Prison, you know," I said.
Read it here.
Crimson Ticket: The Sadistic Couplets
by Robin Whetstone
Every weekend we serializeRed Ticket,Robin Whetstone'south memoir of her time in Moscow in the early on '90s. In this affiliate, Robin, in lodge to get Russian boys to recite schoolyard poems, fakes a marriage to sell pins to Americans.
The woman jerked her caput dorsum in surprise. "You're an American!" she said. "What are you doing here?"
I knew that "trying to write an article about the Sadistic Couplets" would only misfile her, so I put my hand on the shoulder of Shaun Cassidy, who had stopped singing, and said, "I'm selling pins with my Russian husband to endeavor to help finance his singing career. He is a musician, you come across. And as well an artist. Yes, he made these pins."
Read information technology here.
RIP
Trini Lopez
How we're getting through this
Giving pets away
Getting horoscope read
Paying off household debt
Paying off credit card debt
Resurrecting extinct rhinos
Watching live sports for free
Posing with architecture, artfully
Staging multi-sensory virtual events
Resetting stress levels in v minutes
Going to nutrient banks in record numbers
Making roasted chicken with peaches, basil and ginger
Reissuing works by women reissued under their real names
Never wearing cervix gaiters again because they're literally worse than nothing
What I'm reading
Taylor Goldestein: "Texas Rep. Poncho Nevárez reflects on 292 sober days since cocaine arrest"
HBR: "Microsoft Analyzed Data on its Newly Remote Workforce"
While weekly meeting fourth dimension increased by 10% overall — we could no longer catch upwardly in hallways or by the java motorcar, and so we were scheduling more connections — individual meetings actually shrank in duration. Nosotros had 22% more meetings of xxx minutes or less and 11% fewer meetings of more than ane hour.
Ryan Holiday: "nine Short Quotes That Changed My Life and Why"
Jezebel: "My Dark Journey Into the Soul of a Model Young Republican Candidate"
Charles Pierce: "If the Republican Party Get Wiped Out in November, Information technology'southward Going to Lose What's Left of Its Mind"
I hope I'yard wrong, but I don't call up that the Republican response to a thumping Trump-inflicted wipeout in November is going to exist a Kasichian return to simple Reaganaut extremism. I think that, driven by the base it has worked so hard to create, the party is going to respond past losing what piddling is left of its listen.
Ross Ramsey: "The election won't humble the coronavirus. Information technology's the other way around."
We wanted haircuts. Now we want football. The coronavirus doesn't intendance.
Tiffany Yates: "On writing similar an editor--and how bestsellers revise"
What I'm watching
A bunch of talented people saying overnice things about Eugene Levy was the nicest and occasionally funniest matter I've seen in a long time.
The second season of The Umbrella Academy, which imagined 1963 Dallas in which JFK'due south assassination was not the worst thing possible, was a fun diversion and surprisingly emotional, though I'll be honest, it doesn't take much these days for me.
What I'm listening to
Been thinking a lot about time lately. Ryan Holiday, Austin'southward stoic philosopher in residence, writes a lot virtually fourth dimension, and did again in Fri.
Seneca writes that we think life is short, when in reality nosotros but waste it. The present moment—it is the most valuable thing you ain. It is the but thing you accept. Don't waste information technology. Seize it. Live it. In this article, we list some of the time techniques Seneca used to make the most of his time. Meditate on them. Come back to them frequently. But near importantly, apply them
Fourth dimension is not simply a unit of measurement of temporal measure but of capacity. Whether you exit it empty or fill it upwardly, and with what, is up to y'all. That is the animative concept behind the video for Fantastic Negrito's danceable, marvelous Chocolate Samurai. Oh my people, enjoy this song, and I hope you are filling your time with good stuff.
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Source: https://jasonstanford.substack.com/p/joy-in-mudville
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