: lower black pain.

Back before she was here, when we thought about raising the baby, we felt we had a handle on the whole thing., or at least the general concept. We understood, for instance, that the child would be empty a great deal of the time, and our first job was to keep it filled with love and food (in that order).

To that list we added the arts, which we started with right from the very beginning with music. Within her first 24 hours on the planet, our daughter listened to the jaunty jazz of Raymond Scott, the lyrical poetry of George Gershwin, and I believe a bit of Miles Davis, though it’s hard to remember because we were all really sleepy that day. We do have video of the Raymond Scott - she really liked it. Oh, and Patsy Cline, I believe.

I wished that she could enjoy music wherever she went in the world; it is such a balm and foundation for me - if only she could just call out whatever song in the world she wanted and it would play for her. Oh. Really? Thanks, Apple. Now she has that power, and uses it daily. I am so proud to watch her walk around the apartment in her headphones, singing along to AC/DC, Dean Martin, and Billie Eilish.

Music? CHECK.

We read somewhere that newborns are most stimulated by black and white images… many baby blankets and mobiles are based on this theory. I freely interpreted this information: one afternoon during my paternity leave, my wife came back from work to find us watching a movie. We had a projector that made quite a large screen on the white wall of the bedroom.  My wife’s attention, of course, was only on the baby sitting up in my lap - she marveled at how the child was so transfixed and focused.

Although she did suppose that the child would be happily distracted by the event of Her Mother entering the room, which did not occur - instead the child leaned to the left in an attempt to look around her.

“Is she ok?” my wife asked me.

“Yeah! Yeah, we’re just at the end of this movie.”

“She watched an entire movie? What are you watching?”

My wife at last turned to look behind her at the screen, where Death was just finishing up a game of chess with a Swedish knight.

“Is that “The Seventh Seal”?”

“It’s black and white! It’s stimulating!” I told her nervously, since the tone of her voice made it seem like this had been a questionable choice. “She really likes it!” I added. I don’t know why I added that; rarely do film critics less than six months old get taken seriously. But my daughter did like it, so my wife joined us on the bed for the last ten minutes of the movie, and when it was over, our daughter smiled, held her arms high, and went right into my wife’s arms. No harm done.

Well. We’ll see.

Unintentionally, our first forays into literature followed a similar path.

Andrew Lang’s collection of Fairy Books collects over 300 tales from around the world; these are told in more or less what can be considered their original versions. We thought this would be great; no commercialization, just a legacy of storytelling, surely the purest way to get the child used to bedtime stories, narrated in those National Public Radio voices we’d been practicing.

But as it worked out, we weren’t the first to read the books…my mother was. In an effort to help us out at the very beginning, she visited for a week, allowing us to shower and nap and then go out for an hour together to “do something fun and relax”. We chose to have a glass of wine, staring at each other the entire time with an intensity born not of romance, but impatience to get back to the fun new thing in our house. It was like being at work and waiting to get back home to brush and feed your new unicorn.

We had left my mother with a few of the fairy books, complete with post-its marking familiar titles, so that she could read to the baby. When we got to our apartment, the baby was blissfully asleep, but my mother was curiously silent.  We lightly poked the baby’s little feet and then made it back to the living room.

“What kind of book was that you left me to read?

We proudly explained the century old legacy of the Fairy Book series, still in its original 1890’s format, not filtered through he magnanimity of corporations but instead an unfiltered collection of the legends of every continent, told simply and plainly, captured for all of time in budget paperback editions with plasticine overlays by the good people of Dover Press.

“Those are fairy tales?”

“Yes,” I replied, “We left them bookmarked for you. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty…”

“Have you read these before?”

“Well, no, they’re new, we didn’t have the chance.”

“Why do so many people get killed in ‘em?”

Well, here we were stumped. “Uh… which one did you read?”

“I tried to read all of them. I tried to skip all the killing, but it was too much of it. In Cinderella the stepsisters cut off their own feet. In Snow White the Queen was a cannibal, and I knew better than to start Little Red Riding Hood because of the wolf.”

“Wow. Sorry. How did the baby react?”

“She seemed to like 'em. She was listening really closely.”

“Well, I’m sure it was just the sound of your voice.”

“Yeah, maybe. She fell asleep during the last one. Maybe you should save those books ‘til she’s older.”

“Yeah. What’s the appropriate age to introduce cannibalism?” my wife asked.

“At bedtime, no less.” I added.

The three of us, exhausted in variations of the same way, silently contemplated it for a moment.

“Maybe 13?” my wife offered.

We all nodded slowly in agreement.

So, we have that to look forward to this year.

My daughter has seen the Nicolas Brothers dance, along with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Barishnikov, Parris Gobble and Mark Morris (live). She commented quite freely at a Cindy Sherman exhibit when she was a year old and adopted Basquiat as a key hero at five. She can scramble eggs and make salad dressing and is currently designing and sewing skirts with her mom for her new school year.

The child is indeed filled with art, and she generates it as well, in drawing and painting and writing. Most importantly, she is steeped in the patience and empathy essential for artistic expression or appreciation, which is a great thing in a world of chaos.

Full disclosure: she’s also been shown endless Bugs Bunny cartoons and episodes of The Partridge Family, listened to Weird Al Yankovic and Frank Zappa albums, and been subjected to tons of old comic books. She heard Ravel’s Bolero the same year she was introduced to KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Shake Your Booty”. We are not the Royal Tennenbaums. This isn’t about art being fancy, just art being tangible, a tool to navigate and motivate and communicate. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Though I really should ask her how she feels about chess…just in case.

.

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There aren’t many shows that I watch on television at the time that they are broadcast anymore.

Five percent of the reason for this is that I am the kind of person who leans into new technologies. I embraced streaming video, navigating its twists and eddys as an intrepid explorer might, until it isn’t just the technology that’s new, but the way I am able to live, work, and communicate. I embrace the future, look it right in the eye while holding its shoulders, then make it a cup of coffee and offer it a scone.

The other ninety five percent is that I have entered a new phase of life akin to hibernation; I am unwilling (read: unable) to stay up past 10PM to watch a tv show at night when I can so easily see it on my phone during next morning’s commute. Yawn. Silly old bear.

But very recently I have indeed been up late watching tv: not action or comedy or drama, but watching people give speeches. A lot of speeches. You might be doing this too. I just can’t help myself…it’s…what’s that phrase?  Must See TV. It’s like the Olympics kept going and this is the Oratory event.

Thus I am, without a doubt, a special brand of exhausted, but very much looking forward to a gold medal contest tonight, so I’ll keep this short.

Political conventions are Live Events. Everyone in the hall is electrified, generating excitement for the home viewers as they participate and in many ways create what is going on. It’s a nationwide Panto play, where the crowd is meant to interact with those on stage, gleefully shouting answers to their questions and responding when called upon. And we are there, on that floor, holding up colorful signs and cheering, all through the magic of television. I like it better from home, where there’s a hot meal and no line for the bathroom and I’m wearing unpatching pajamas.

My grandfather actually attended one of these, as a delegate from Kansas City. I am not aware if he was on the line up for the dias, but he was an incredible orator: we even have a book of his speeches that my mother put together. I’ve given quite a few speeches, but at the end of each I looked up to find a sea of warmly agreeable yet undeniably puzzled faces. I am enthusiastic as a speaker, if not quite “inspirational”.

That’s what’s fun about the speeches at political conventions: they are all engineered to lift and motivate us. And it’s fun to “be there”, LIVE, as it’s happening.  The only tv shows that everyone wants to watch live anymore are key sporting events and fancy award shows – this seems a perfect combination of both those things.

While the format had long been a staple of radio broadcasts, in 1951 I Love Lucy became the very first television show to be filmed live before a studio audience. Seventy five years later, if you watch that show, it is still effervescent, joyous laughter spilling from the speakers as the action unfolds. Because people were there, in the room, and even though you can’t see them, their electricity adds to what is being recorded, and somehow transmits through time and space along with the performances.

These political parties every four years are fascinating to watch no matter your personal stance, because America is RIGHT THERE, all together, happening right in front of us. We are, each of us, Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy.

Oh, I know, it’s gonna get crazy later, but just look at all of us, standing there, even the Northern Mariana Islands.

Wait a minute, WHO?

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I wasn’t a particularly fussy baby, or so I’m told. My mother says that I was an easygoing roommate who didn’t make trouble: a good boy, who made a lot of racket at night.

My mother decided to comfort me with a radio in my crib. This worked - sort of. I did respond very well to music, but not the music she initially preferred… I only calmed totally down when one of the country music stations was on. Laden with sleep deprivation, she looked me right in the tiny eye and fairly pleaded for pop if not R&B, but the twang of the steel guitar was the only sonic soothing I’d accept, so she took the win.

Even today my affinity towards bluegrass somewhat challenges my immediate family… I bought a mandolin a few years back and every now and then start chopping away on it with amateur glee. I love music of all kinds, but I don’t perform music as a career. I used to, as a kid, in amusement parks and nursing homes and church and San Francisco… mostly standards and original novelty songs.

But for a brief and awesome moment, I did get to be in the lead singer of a southern rock band, which was a surprise to everyone. Including the band.

Early 90’s San Francisco was lush with music and venues to enjoy it. This was pre-internet and before cell phones, so homemade Xeroxed flyers were stapled and taped everywhere to announce local shows. Most often you’d just show up at a venue and listen to whoever was there, discovering favorites as you went along.

This five piece group was incredibly popular. Then the singer suddenly left, and they were looking for a possible replacement. So somebody told me about it and I “auditioned”.

Ok: the guy before me was… cool, I mean he was tall and had the look of a rock star and the hair of a rock star, while I had just graduated from a cappella harmonies of Cole Porter classics and comedy acoustic guitar sets. But I put together a song on my 4 track cassette recorder - I didn’t know what to sing, so I chose “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family.

(I’ll just let that settle.)

Not only that, but I sang it a cappella with overdubs in 5 different styles, including gospel, for some reason.

They called me in out of curiosity and perhaps a deep sense of pity, but when they played an actual rock song I didn’t do too bad, and I learned very quickly, and they needed a singer for a show right away and I was oh-so-enthusiastic.

We rehearsed 3 times a week. For the first 3 months they were polite, but seemed to always wince a bit when I showed up, like I brought everyone a sliver of the brain freeze you get from drinking an Icee too fast. Then something wonderful happened.

My girlfriend dumped me.

That night happened to be not only a rehearsal, but a songwriting night, when everyone tossed around ideas and new riffs. I came in cursing like a sailor with a chum bucket full of heartbreak and frustration.

I started singing, but my voice was different, as was my attitude. I wasn’t performing, just growling in honest expression.

90 minutes later there was a song, that everybody liked, and I’d helped.

“What happened to you?” the lead guitarist asked. His tone was cautious, as if he thought he might break the spell I was under if he spooked me.

I briefly told them of my situation: she had initially warned me that if she found a man assertive, she grew to resent him, but if she could in any way dominate him, he disgusted her. I apparently had told her that would be fine. It didn’t work out.

“I’m gonna hire her to break up with you every week.” he responded. From then on, I was in the band.

They played just this last weekend, over 4000 miles away - a 33 year reunion? There was no way I could make it, and they didn’t really need me there because their original singer was back, cooler than ever.

I did love that experience. I wasn’t performing, I didn’t have to be polite or entertaining, just honest. It took a while to learn how to do that because I was raised on TV variety shows where the smiles were wide and the jokes all knee slappers. I never paid attention to or actively cultivated rock and roll emotions before that, because where would I have processed or shared them? It didn’t change the fact that if bad things happened, you just had to take ‘em and keep on going… the difference was that on that stage, you didn’t have to be happy about it. #meaningfulsigh.

My most favorite memories are hard to describe, but I remember the night we were invited to play a show for a deaf audience because we had been awarded (quite by accident), the loudest band in San Francisco at the time (an actual scientist verified it). That time we for no reason started playing “That’s The Way of The World” by Earth, Wind and Fire and went crowdsurfing. Recording in a real studio with an actual engineer for the first time and hearing what my voice sounded like channeled through money. Playing either the Roxy or the Whisky a Go Go in L.A. and singing while hanging upside down from the ceiling.

But mostly I loved rehearsals; right afterwards we’d eat budget spaghetti or curry and watch PBS shows. Being in this group didn’t make me cool, but I was a part of it - my utility made me cool adjacent, which was good enough for me, because I had the opportunity to tell thousands of strangers about questionable life decisions I’d made in a musical style I was heir to, but not exactly expected in.

And now there is Shaboozey, an African American country rock star with no asterix generating barely a raised eyebrow. I’m proud to be part of the prehistoric past of this future.

https://on.soundcloud.com/MCHveJEvUmyuyc989

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The 2024 Olympic mascots are Phrygian Caps that look like gnome hats…the ones you’d see if I suddenly said “Hey! Look up! Are those GNOMES across the street?” and you looked out your window and indeed saw mythical creatures only about a foot tall with little hats on. These would be the hats they were wearing.

As mascots, these hats are fully self-ambulatory, with eyes and mouths and so forth. They are triangular. I thought they were samosa.

We took a house vote as to whether they were disturbing: “…yes.” was the nearly unanimous answer.

I was the dissenting vote for two reasons. One, they are a symbol of French freedom and have been well designed to represent both the Olympic and Paralympic games. And two, they are better than the previous Olympic mascots, a rogue’s gallery of illustrated nightmare fuel.

https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/olympic-mascots

I grew up in a world surrounded by mascots, but the animal-based ones ruled the day. There was no way to move through life without crossing into their domain.

NBC had a peacock. RCA/Magnavox an attentive dog. Sinclair’s dinosaur and Mobil’s pegasus loomed above us at gas stations, the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull and Budweiser horses lurked in our coolers, and the Energizer bunny was in everyone’s Walkman™.

There were some icons who seemed to carry tragic backstories which had set up their current situations:

* Charlie was a “pick me” tuna, trying again and again to be chosen by Starkist for processing -

* The Vlasic stork’s career had devolved to delivering pickles rather than babies -

* The Nestle Quik bunny had an unhealthy relationship with chocolate milk (“You can’t drink it slow if it’s Quik!”) which he deeply craved, but never found true satisfaction from -

* The Tootsie Roll owl exhibited a sadistic arrogance when asked how many licks it took to get the center of the pop (he finally bit it) -

This was not capitalism… these were animated cautionary nuggets every Saturday morning; creatures who, like Marketing Pokemon, were always in plain sight, sharing our world.

But there was one specific category of life that absolutely belonged to them.

While animal mascots were well represented in the food category - from the Taco Bell chihuahua to the Icee Bear - no meal was as well covered as breakfast. Most incredible was the range of species -

birds represented by Toucan Sam’s Fruit Loops and Sonny the Cuckoo Bird from Cocoa Puffs,

bears by Super Sugar Crisp’s Sugar Bear (get that “Golden Crisp” outta here),

amphibians had the Sugar Smacks (which I still think is a total rip off of Sugar Crisp) frog,

and the King of The Breakfast Jungle, the big cat, was Tony the Tiger and his Frosted Flakes.

Combined with ice cold Borden’s milk from Elsie the Cow, you were all set. By the way, Elsie was married (I am not making this up) to Elmer the cow, who did not sell milk, but GLUE. Look at a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, even today, and there he is. That’s Elmer. That’s his glue. He MAKES it, apparently… I did not ask how because I didn’t want to know.

There are local favorites. Ours was a seal named Smaky who repped a regional hamburger chain named SMAKS.  He was their “seal of approval”.

Maybe we’re all too sophisticated for this kind of thing now. Maybe we don’t need convincing by a bear to not set the forest on fire, or an owl to recycle (“Give a hoot! Don’t pollute!). Perhaps we as a species have grown and no longer require a hand-drawn kawaii menagerie to draw our attention.

Oh, wait. I forgot the elephant and the donkey. Yeah. Well.

At least they don’t talk.

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We are halfway through summer.

There is a heat advisory here today.

The same sun we seek on the weekend seems disdainful toward us at work, either mocking us with a “come out and play” bright blue sky through our office windows, or broiling the world right at lunchtime when we try to grab a bite to eat.

We expect heat in summer, but it’s been extremely hot in some places, the sort of heat that makes us sad when stepping outside. The sun is so bright and the air is so thick that if feels as if summer doesn’t like us at all, which is weird, because we were getting along so well at the beach, and it seemed like we were kind of vibing during that hike last Saturday.

Today, this summer is exactly halfway over. Next stop will be the autumn equinox, so today is the summeriest that summer gets.

It’s the beginning of the harvest season. I feel like I should do something significant to mark the day, something harvesty…but it’s hot.

Hmn.

Ok, i think I’ve got it.

I may not have a field full of corn, but I do have 55,000 unread emails.

Not at work, of course. At work, every email is precious, a diamond, a priceless treasure containing hidden information like on the back of the Declaration of Independence (allegedly).

No, I’m talking about my in-box at home. 55,000. Unread emails.

Let me explain that I do not have 55,000 friends, or acquaintances, or contacts, or even hairs left on my head. On the whole, these emails are absolutely not precious diamonds. A few are probably significant; within that pile are at least seven excellent coupon codes for things I shouldn’t buy, which is ok because they’ve probably long since expired…there may be one or two receipts for something that I should probably keep, just in case (for some reason).

55,000 emails. A vast and curious digital field of nonsense information.  As I sit at my laptop, I imagine myself atop a digital tractor - like a farmer in TRON, squinting my eyes as I peer toward the horizon at this bumper crop, looking grizzled in my glowy glowy blue overalls.

It’s not just the season that makes my crop particularly bump this year, it is the year itself.  Around this time, ‘bout every four years, political rainstorms soak the digital landscape, creating fertile ground for emails of a specific sort.

They used to be general run-of-the-mill requests for financial support, but then technology was employed that added your name to the subject lines. And then the subject lines became action movie cues:

“Only Two Hours Left!”

“It’s a RACE AGAINST TIME!”

“Everything is at stake!”

“Please read before midnight!”

Oh sure, unsubscribe, I hear you, but you cut down one and two more appear, like heads on a dangerous and imaginary hydra. I don’t even remember subscribing to most of these, I invited one person over and they told two friends who told two friends, and now my in-box is loaded to the top with freeloaders.

I faced a similar challenge trying to make a holiday playlist from our iTunes library; there are thousands of songs, but I just searched for specific keywords, like “snow” and “Christmas”, which worked out pretty well, with a few key exceptions (Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” always sneaks in there).

I tried to clear out the political ads in the same way, but only got about 10,000 of them. Continuing the TRON metaphor, I wiped the neon blue sweat from my digital brow. I was losing daylight.

In years past the clear winner in terms of bulk e-mail was Bed Bath and Beyond. At one point they were sending me two emails every single day. This marketing strategy did not ultimately work for their business.

Perhaps there is wisdom to be learned here, as these incessant election time requests for what essentially are handouts to strangers feel oddly pedestrian. Democracy as a Kickstarter campaign: the most powerful people in the most influential positions on the planet are essentially using the same techniques and technology as artists selling artisanal jigsaw puzzles.

50,000 unread emails. Even if it took only one second each, I’d spend over 16 hours going through all of them. So sure, I’ll GoFundYou, but on your way out could you jump on this bright blue tractor and thresh out about two acres or so of my hard drive?I sure would really appreciate that.

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Last weekend, my daughter and I navigated four cancelled flights due to weather to visit my Mom in Kansas City, which was a very nice treat. I played handyman, dabbling in plumbing and carpentry and wiring and computer programming.  My daughter built a new affordable slow fashion aesthetic through carefully curated thrift store trips, and a few extremely fortunate finds.

I was a bit of the third wheel here…useful to hold the selected items, yet always a few steps behind she and her grandmother. “What do you think of this?” she asked a great deal, and only once did I respond negatively, because children should never wear macrame, even in irony.

Each thrift store was more vast than the last - huge midwestern hangars with not-quite-bright-enough lighting and hundreds of clothes racks surrounded by books, toys, shoes, and for some reason always a section of vases.  As we traveled from store to store, I related brief, unsolicited stories about my childhood, which became harder and harder to tell because so many of the places I remembered had disappeared, razed to the ground and replaced with chain stores.

Somewhere around here was a fancy mall with strangely accurate mid-century Spanish architecture that felt like an open air market in Barcelona that just happened to sell hot dogs and Orange Julius.

Oh. It’s that Lowe’s now.

The movie theatre hurt the most. The Glenwood. I actually saw my very first movie there, Oliver, when I was 4. We dressed in Sunday clothes because it was a fancy thing to go a movie house where they handed out programs. It is also where I saw Star Wars for the first (and second and third and maybe fifth) time.  It was a glorious place with a grand chandelier and deep red carpets and a two story curtain that slowly parted to reveal the screen.

Wal-Mart didn’t even think about moving in to the old space; they just tore down everything to a parking lot level and built a giant big metal box.

Someone did save that chandelier, though.

The past is as slippery as soap in a rainstorm… even as we hold on to it, it’s melting. Where is that drive-in? that shopping mall? that record store? that airport? It’s weird taking your kid home and then having not a lot of what you remember there to show. No wonder we take so many pictures nowadays.

I have some photos of the apartment I grew up in, but not on purpose, mostly birthday cake blowing-out pictures or Easter Sunday clothes snaps. My mother moved into her current house when I left for college; it’s a wonderful place, definitely “home” now. But metaphorically, as well as logistically, we can’t go back to that original house.

My mother can’t visit her childhood house either, it was sold years ago. Same with where my wife grew up. And even my daughter can’t visit the first little flat where she lived, because the landlord finally made a deal with somebody that demo-ed it down to the studs and then gave it one of those modern featureless plasterboard makeovers with pre-fab hardwood floors and mid-level brushed brass fixtures.

My current mid-life wist-a-palloza is clearly the fault of the turtle.

As a child I was told that the turtle “carried its house on its back, living in the same one all their lives”. They clearly couldn’t invite anyone over, but there was an enviable consistency there.  Bears lived in caves. Rabbits in holes. Now I am mature, having watched many a nature special – I understand what an exoskeleton is, and that bears don’t live in the same cave forever (they actually leave right after they hibernate and rarely come back), and that rabbits may live in many burrows in their lifetimes.

Come to think of it, a great deal of my early nature knowledge may have been based on cartoon animals. That same part of my brain has a clear memory of Aquaman speaking to seahorses.

I can’t go backwards looking for where I came from; I’m neither as energetic or delicious as a salmon. I’ve felt at home in quite a few places, and honestly, that gold shag carpeting in my childhood bedroom would not have retained its effortless grooviness 50 years later. Better to tell the stories, appreciate the where that was, and build new memories as we go along.

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If you attended American grade school you probably remember the blackboards, topped with long card stock banners depicting the alphabet in red letters as print and cursive, complete with little arrows explaining the best way to render each character. But just as ubiquitous was the bulletin board, usually filled with thematic collages depicting current holidays or collections of student work.

The boards at my school also sported a rotating roster of GOOD EXAMPLES, cardboard cutouts of American Heroes, the hard working folks we were supposed to STRIVE TO BE.

Abraham Lincoln. George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.

Martin Luther King, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Neil Armstrong.

No matter who the featured icons were on this bulletin board, the title, in carefully cut out red construction paper letters, remained the same –

“Good Better Best: Never let it Rest, until your Good becomes Better, and your Better becomes Best.”

I mean, that’s a lot of pressure for six year olds, and the averages are crazy - it doesn’t take math into account at all. I’m incredibly lucky that my grade school made a clear distinction between personal best and outwardly competitive best;  it was really motivating to try to do our best, to be the best we’d ever been, to best our last achievement. But to be THE best was a radical perversion of the idea, leading to a treadmill of competition against every other human being on the planet.

It’s Olympics time again.

The experience of being an Olympic level athlete must be incredible. I myself find it hard to imagine as my body type is very distant from that level of pliability, but I admire them greatly and watch absolutely in awe of the years of training which led to this moment.

At least once a year our grade school bulletin board had Sports Heroes. Jesse Owens made the list in fourth grade. (His story was a little confusing because we hadn’t learned a great deal about World War II yet; he ran the fastest and we won and the bad guys were super upset about it, something like that.)

Not every athlete can take home Olympic gold. Gold medal winners are inspiring, and will be used to motivate children around the world.  But if you are from a country that doesn’t have a winner, whose photo do you put up? What if your nation’s hero came in fourth? - not a bad showing in a worldwide contest. Do you, as an trainer, speak of how hard they tried, how proud you nation should be?

The answer most likely is no, because as all the Jackson brothers besides Michael can tell you, there is no second place.  You win, or you do not. Best is a singular title reserved for one person per genre. It’s the only thing you’re supposed to want, the One True Goal. Win or go home.

Except, maybe not straight home.

Last Olympics (or maybe the Olympics before) I heard an interesting story about Olympic Village and what happens after each event: while the medal recipients are whisked away to photo shoots and morning tv shows and product placement contracts, the “losers” come back to Olympic Village and become fans, just like us at home. Wiping tears of disappointment from their eyes, after a lifetime of careful eating, early bedtimes and far too early mornings, and limited contact with anyone not associated with either their home or gym, they find themselves surrounded by a Noah’s Arc of the most fit people in the world, with no real plans for the next couple of days.

Relieved of the responsibility of competition, they bond and mingle.

Now there’s a unique experience, an opportunity that may lean a bit toward bacchanalia, but truly creates an Olympic Village. What sort of conversations can you have with a table of people from around the world? The gold medal winners don’t get that.

Of course, America celebrates not only the top, but the bottom of scales as well, which is why “the worst” has become a distinction which some people also strive for, having faced the reality that they’ll never be the best at something, coupled with the comforting fact that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS BAD PRESS. Attention is measured in absolute value.

Alas, there is the middle, a wonderfully broad place, because there is only one best, and one worst, and if you don’t hold the distinction of being one of those you are guaranteed a comfy place right smack dab with everyone else. I’d love to be at a bar where those middle athletes go, drinking deeply and laughing loudly, no medals to insure, no endorsement legal issues to sort out.

No matter what we do, we are always the best at being ourselves. We always take home the Gold Medal in Us. Isn’t that nice?

Of course, due to the lack of participants in the category, we’re always the "worst" us, too. That’s just math.

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You would open the front door to find a party, with TV cameras and confetti, and a man holding a gigantic check with your name on it (for a lot of money). This was the dream in the ‘70s, your entire life enhanced beyond imagining, not because of a lottery ticket but the value rich and somewhat educational gift that you were smart enough to give your family - MAGAZINES.

Publisher’s Clearing House sent thick envelopes filled with magazine covers printed on colorful gummed stamps; you’d take the ones you want and stick them not to an order form, but to a SWEEPSTAKES ENTRY. Each subscription was only a few dollars, so the savings alone was a win, but there was always the chance that you’d be the lucky recipient of a Grand Prize. Hopefully they came by when you were dressed nice.

This all worked. We had tons of magazines around the house that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to afford. I read Time and OMNI and Reader’s Digest (they didn’t offer TV Guide). My grandmother had Good Housekeeping and Redbook and Better Homes and Gardens. If magazines could transform any drab coffee table into a splendiferous buffet of color and shine, what else could they do? Besides, y’know, make you a millionaire?

Now, I get a hundred titles free digitally with my iCloud subscription. Yet I used to pass the magazines each week as they lurk by the checkout stands in the grocery store, and the desire to have a physical copy still haunted me.

It was lockdown, I was younger and foolhardy and ready to be a more cultured type of person. I had just started writing more and wanted something to inspire me, and what better than a subscription to the Holy Grail of American Letters, delivered every week?

It was kind of expensive, but one of those “the first year is just, like, super cheap but since we have your credit card information we don’t want to bother you for year two renewal and we’ll just charge you automatically - ohbytheway its 300% more (is that ok?)” kind of arrangements. But I went for it anyway.

I quip. I do. Many are the afternoons when a sharpish jape escapes my lips, bringing a sly smile to the face of a colleague. I might even jest occasionally, when feeling a measure rowdy. I would have loved to spend my afternoons at a big round table with a collection of my era’s finest wits, liquid lunching until cocktail hour.  But, I’d gain a lot of weight, and it’s too hot outside - it’s important to remain hydrated, you know. I’m not built for all that.

Anyway. I’m letting my New Yorker subscription lapse.

They’re stacking up all over the place. I can never “catch up”… it’s like tangible unread e-mail that keeps multiplying, like Tribbles.

I find them everywhere now, in every room of the house, yet feel impossibly guilty picking one up and only reading the cartoons (“I swear I get this magazine for the articles”) .

I tried taking one with me to work everyday and reading it on the subway. I felt distinctly throwback holding Physical Paper…but I had my lunchbag in my other hand so page turning proved perilous and unattractive, as my most effective means was to bite the top right corner and hold it in my mouth while twisting the folded issue clockwise in my fist.

And then we were all wearing masks, so even that was impossible.

I am seven, standing in our little living room in front of the fireplace, looking up at the wall with poems decoupaged onto wooden blocks my mother had hand stained and painted. She had used a lovely shade of powder blue paper for the poems, and the decoupage brush left a texture of thin, deep lines like grooves in a giant record.

That was where I stood when I told her “I want to be an author. I want to write books for people to read.” and she told me that would be a good thing to be, you can make a lot of people happy that way, and you could write about all kinds of things. She never mentioned the New Yorker, or any part of the labyrinthine submission process to get published. She probably just wanted to keep my spirits up, at least until my age hit double digits.

It was aspirational to buy the New Yorker: cool things I couldn’t afford to do with people I couldn’t afford to know. And none of the fiction seemed to extol the banality I adore - everything was so grown-up. But as I weighed the time to go through an issue versus attacking the unsteady stack of books on my bedside table (cummings, Dickinson, O Henry, Connections by James Burke, three issues of Love and Rockets comics and a DVD of Smokey and the Bandit (whoops - how did that get there?) I realized that while I adore the magazine itself, I am probably not a New Yorker reader.

I am a New Yorker now, having lived in Brooklyn for over 20 years. The noise and crowds and hustle and drive - I can navigate chaos just fine. But I’m not sure how well I would do on a sailboat in white shorts with a long drink and sunglasses on. Where are we sailing? Will these speakers Bluetooth to my phone so I can blast some Queens of the Stone Age? Is there any shade on this thing? It’s not my lifestyle. Give me Prospect Park instead; loads of Quinceaneras and picnics and dogs and ice cream carts.

It’s not the impeccable quality of their editorial choices; legends, heroes and national treasures have penned words for them, but I’m spending the time I should be reading the magazine writing now, and I guess that was the point of subscribing in the first place, and I still have the digital subscription.

Though the cartoons are really teensy on my phone.

Jd Michaels lives in Brooklyn. His writing has not appeared in the New Yorker, Redbook, or Good Housekeeping.

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My mother and her husband wanted us to see a fireworks display. We’d only been married maybe a year, and it was our first Independence Day together in Kansas City. My wife is from Northern California and admitted that 4th of July seemed bigger and louder in the midwest, what with all of the legal explosives and whatnot.

There were more than 20 displays scheduled in the metro area - we went to the closest, which happened to be in the parking lot up by the HyperMart (a gigantic WalMart with a full grocery store attached) over by Benjamin Stables, which was, well, a horse stable. (I think they took the horses away for this week).

It was only eight minutes away by car, and there wasn’t a line or anything because there was plenty of parking, since the parking lot was also attached to the local mall on its other side.

Anyway, when we got there my Mom’s husband parked the car, but left it running so the air conditioning would still work. And there we sat.

Awkward Silence #1.

“Are we here?” my wife asked.

“Yep.” he told her.

Awkward Silences #2 and #3

“Are they going to turn the lights out?” she asked. It was true: the orange lights in the parking lot were fully ablaze, each aluminum stalk sprouting tiny twin suns.

“Nope.” he responded, a true “man of few words”.

Awkward Silence #4

“…ok” she responded, and opened the door to the car.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked.

“I’m getting out to look at the fireworks.”

“Why?” Mom asked. “You can see them right there!”

“Where?”

“Through the windshield. They’re going to be right there.”

We were both in the back seat; we sklunked down as far as we could to look ahead of us between the seats to see this blank space where she said the fireworks would be.

“Mom,” I interjected, “this is a little oppressive; it isn’t even as big as a tv set from back here. We’re getting out of the car to look at them in the sky, the way a human being might.”

My mother was befuddled. “We didn’t get dressed to get out of the car.”

I opened my door. “Then you stay here. We’ll be right outside. Y’know, with the sky.”

“And the fireworks.” my wife added.

We stepped out into a tailgate festival. There were lawn chairs and coolers and babies running around with bare feet and conflicting styles of music from car radios. No one else seemed to have gotten dressed for getting out of their car either, yet were in no way pressured by social guidelines and were having an excellent time.

The car next to us had fully set up a mock backyard in the empty parking space next to them, with a tiny barbecue (definitely against some municipal code) three deluxe folding lawn chairs with those plastic weave ribbon seats, a boom box radio and a cooler filled with both beer and juice boxes.

One of their daughters, maybe four years old, was dancing around in a tight circle, singing a song she had made up, which went

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Fourth of July! July! July! July!

Happy Fourth of July!

And then the fireworks started, right where my mother said they would, loud as everything.

And eventually my mother and her husband did get out of the car.

The display was gigantic, so low in the sky that it seemed only 50 feet away (definitely against a municipal code). But what we remember best is that little girl, who must be 30 years old now; dancing and laughing and singing her song as her parents chaise-lounged in the twinkling glow of Freedom, ringing.

My daughter now knows that song. We sing it every year. It is the song of the Fourth of July, an established fact, a fixed point in our family timeline. The glee of that little kid has echoed decades forward, sustained us on rainy 4ths, emboldened disappointing picnics and fireworks displays. Sometimes we sing it other days too.

The summer of lockdown many of our Brooklyn neighbors apparently took day trips to either Connecticut or Pennsylvania to fill their cars with professional grade fireworks. On that Fourth that July, our fourth floor windows were blazing with charge after charge of the Really Large Explosives (again, municipal code) which decorated the air right outside. Like, directly outside.

It was the best fireworks display we had ever seen; as close as we could get to being inside a fireworks display. Along with “ooo!”s and “ah!”s there were a couple of “WHOA!”s, but that made it extra exciting. In the impromptu video we took of the event, you can hear us all singing “Happy Fourth of July, July, July, July!”.

It doesn’t take much to make a holiday special, just family and tradition. And, ok, maybe a blatant disregard of municipal codes.

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the storm rolls in, like a boulder, like a freight train, and then there is the briefest of silences, when the air is still and warm and heavy

then a drop. then another. then rain, which is different from a storm, we think, because rain is just water falling from the sky, all friendly-like

but then the drops somehow get bigger, each of them a separate splash of liquid fireworks on the rapidly darkening sidewalk

the wind picks up – suddenly howls

then lightning

+

two (1000)

three (1000)

four (1000)

fi-

thunder.

that’s when we put on our Hunter boots, because you never know how long it’s going to last (on our phones it’s just a little orange patch in the middle of a big blue patch on the weather app radar)

we never take an umbrella because the point is to walk in the storm, be a part of it; to shiver when it all first hits us, then dash back and forth down the block and back

(in any given season there are 40 million annual lightning strikes in the USA. that’s 40 million thunderclaps, but because of where we live, we only hear maybe 40 of those a year

so we get out, at least once every summer, for the surround sound full spectrum immersive high fidelity live sonic experience. maybe eight minutes. or longer

if it’s during the day, we clean leaves from drains and wave to those huddled in doorways / under awnings…

if it’s after dark, there is dancing and stomping and wild waving of arms

who is that family out dancing in the rain? Oh, they’re the ones from the fourth floor, who still dress up for Halloween

there’s magic in a thunderstorm

and when we’re out in it, part of that magic is us

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