No Thugs in Our House

 

The Odyssey

starring Zendaya, Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Anne Hathaway, Matt Damon, John Leguizamo, Samantha Morton, Himesh Patel, Robert Pattinson and Charlize Theron

directed by Christopher Nolan (Inception, Memento, several Batmans, that one with John David Washington we don't talk about, Oppenheimer, etc. [the "etc." here is doing an embarrassing amount of work])

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Spider-Man: Brand New Day

starring Zendaya, Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Tramell Tillman, Mark Ruffalo, Florence Pugh and Marisa Tomei

directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (some indie stuff, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Wonder Man)

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OK SERIOUSLY THIS TIME, THERE WILL BE MAJOR SPOILERS IN THIS FOR A NEW-ISH MOVIE, SO THIS IS A GENUINE WARNING. NOT FOR THE ONE THAT IS BASED ON A 5,000-YEAR-OLD STORY THOUGH, COME ON

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It's not easy to make a summer blockbuster anymore, I get it. You have to contend with the changing paradigms of what a movie studio is and how it manages (or doesn't manage) risk, and that doesn't even take into account the fact that most studios are run by spreadsheet dipshits whose only real responsibility is to keep an eye on how leveraged their private equity patrons are and whose only common denominator seems to be how much they kinda hate movies and TV.

I'm not minimizing the fact that these types of big-rollout films are a massive financial investment that carries actual risk to some degree for studios, not just "risk" in the way noodgey consultants talk about it. Like there are rooms right now in corporate offices where a hired outsider is giving a presentation where at least one of the slides is going to quantify as a percentage how much sexual harrassment is "survivable" and a pros/cons breakdown on whether or not the health care plan should include support for transgender employees. What constitutes a good financial decision these days is so much more complicated than the Golden Age of Hollywood where the primary consideration was whether a studio executive wanted to bang one of the leads. Now it's a spaghetti-map flowchart of knock-on decisions for global entities with a dizzying array of holdings and assets across an array of industries. If a massive film fails, they'll have to balance out the expenditure with write-offs and insurance claims and offsets in other lines of business. Maybe that means if, say, The Flash underperforms, we have to lose a few thousand acres of rainforest or fire everyone in an athleisure-wear sweatshop in Bangladesh, but the only measurable "evil" in 2026 is if the number doesn't go up at the correct angle on the graph. We can all agree on that.

The fact is that sometimes these films do miss relative to their investment, without even addressing the quality of the product, and vice versa. It's not like Star Wars Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker lost anybody any money, even though we'd all rather do 600 burpees over a puddle of our own sick than watch any of it again. But we keep getting more Star Wars because it's time not necessarily because someone has a good idea. This has been the issue that has plagued the post-Endgame Marvel movie franchise system as they keep cranking and cranking and cranking out product to meet concepts of tempo and expectation to statisfy the investor class and prediction markets, not because, say, someone as reliably awesome as Ryan Coogler has a burning need to make something that results in a wonder like the first Black Panther movie. And every move nudges the risk meter in one direction or the other, pushing them to make wronger and wronger decisions, so you end up with a super messy Doctor Strange movie that everyone is frustrated with (even though it's mostly fine), but somehow Blade with Mahershala Ali gets cancelled, in some ways explicitly because the Doctor Strange one turned out to be a miss.

Reliability is hard enough to find in this marketplace run by crouching, shuddering, mewling hedge fund babies and the people they hire in their image, but we knew already that there are a few poles on which we could pitch our tents in any weather: Spider-Man and ancient Greek myths of dubious authorship (as directed by the guy who made a blockbuster out of a very talky movie about a science dork). All know this.

Even as superhero movie fortunes (in a literal sense) wax and wane, with varying levels of think-pieces generated by their failures especially (doubled if a woman is featured as a lead or co-lead), for some reason the two reliable exceptions are films about Batman and films about Spider-Man. Even The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the film so worrying they had to reboot the whole thing with a whole different English person pretending to be a Queens boy, made over $700 million worldwide, almost the exact same number as 2022's The Batman, which was hailed as a return to form for the character, despite featuring the sleepiest of all the Batmen to date.

Brand New Day had a lot going for it then, separated from the chaff and clutter of a bunch of Avengers baying for screen time and character arc. Totally unfairly, then, Destin Daniel Crestin and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers also hit us over the head with a truly excellent expression of the genre. They were helped immensely by an insanely gifted core of performers, which feels like shameless overkill, but these are the factors that result in the second highest box office opening week of all time.

Also, hey, remember Troy? It's kind of a meme because Brad Pitt is so weird in that movie and Orlando Bloom is such a little bitch, but if you're going to be portraying a demi-god with priorties outside the scope of human morality and a sniveling princeling who runs off with a powerful king's wife, respectively, those are the right outcomes, in terms of characterization. OK, Greek-poetry-based films maybe aren't quite a "franchise" in the modern sense. I know it feels like a reach going back to Troy to talk about Homeric epics on screen since that was over 20 years ago, but in the whole scope of how long the stories have existed, that's lightning fast really. Spider-Man has only been around since like the 1960s. Dude is WAY behind.

Both The Odyssey and the latest Spider-Man rely on epic and spectacle in different ways, and both do so exactly to the sensory-pummeling levels we've come to demand. Both are, in their ways, about journeys of transformation and self-discovery, The Odyssey you'd think in a more literal sense but Spider-Man is out here sort of maybe becoming a whole-ass spider? That part wasn't entirely clear, but it came with a cool blacked-out eyes effect for Tom Holland. Not exactly shipmates-being-sculpted-into-pigs, but it was going for something.

The Odyssey itself exists at much more of an emotional remove than Spider-Man, mostly because we've had three other movies now to live in the character dynamics (Peter Parker, MJ and Ned) that are centered in this iteration the way fan service and (literal) magic were in the previous one. In fairness to No Way Home, they made that into something really good as well, but Brand New Day is a rough and poignant metaphor about post-high school separation, isolation and the struggle with becoming someone separate from the safe context of your childhood friends and family, although here in a sci-fi extreme case where literally everyone forgets who you are (instead of just feeling that way because you're 19).

Odysseus has the opposite problem is that nobody forgets who he is, which is a real pain in the ass for his wife and son, a super-power-free Tom Holland again. Everyone back in Ithaca is stuck in a grinding stasis because they just can't get past Odysseus as an idea, as a place-holder, with Penelope literally doing and undoing her weaving night after night just to keep her grubby swarm of Tinder stalkers off her ass. They're in his house, fucking up all his shit, eating up his food, asking where the hell he is, while he's out there literally on a 20 year boys' weekend that includes all the stops at every roadside attraction including, literally, hell.

I'm not going to compare the two directly... but OK Spider-Man is way better. You have to mark it out as even with the casts almost since there's so much overlap (if I'm Jacob Batolon, I'm pretty mad I'm not in The Odyssey. There's already all this bullshit "race controversy," no reason you couldn't have also had a Filipino), but Spider-Man also has a truly excellent and story-crucial turn from Sadie Sink, who isn't in The Odyssey at all. AND Brand New Day has ninjas. Red ninjas. And they fight Spider-Man. I know The Odyssey had a lot of cool enemies too, but they didn't really fight, they just made the Greeks yell "BACK TO THE SHIPS!" as they just barely avoided having their shit wrecked over and over. Ninjas win.

Now we wait for the next Window of Film Distribution Profitability, which will be around Christmas time, this time with a built-in spectacle of so-called "Dunesday" when Dune Part 3 releases on the same day as Avengers: Doomsday, two films which will of course in the aggregate also include Zendaya and Florence Pugh and Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland and what I like to call the off-brand less-American version of Tom Holland, Timothée Chalamet. You can't really manufacture reliability on your returns, but I guess when it comes to blockbuster movies, you mitigate by using the same 8-10 bankable movie stars, pair them with some franchise IP and that's it. Literally nothing else works. Sorry, Paul Rudd, apparently you don't make the cut.

Desmond Has A Barrow in the Marketplace

Don't worry, I'm fine. We don't really know each other (unless we do, in which case you've already rolled your eyes because you can feel I'm about to attempt to be either humorous or clever, with reliably mixed results), so I don't really imagine you are or would be all that worried. I'm not such a narcissist. Besides, I should make it clear, that first sentence was exclusively for me.

"Don't worry, I'm fine" is a thing I say to myself a lot the last few months as I make shuffling, unwilling steps along a boringly pedestrian (ha) health journey with profoundly common and predictable features that shouldn't give anyone much pause at all. There are simply Things That Happen when you crash into your 50s, an impact your 40s don't really prepare you for except maybe planting in your head the perspective "Oh you thought you were 'old' before now, did you?" Really the curse of aging is a constant reframing and stockpiling regret regarding your just-passed previous era and how well you were actually doing in retrospect. The trap is, of course, that you're always older than you've ever been and you have no experience to tell you how to be that old. And look, that moment passed and you just totally wasted it and now you're even older. And now you're even older. And now you're even older.

You should brace yourselves now. Everyone you have crowded around the screen to read this with you at your regular Ochlocracy In Action Blog-Drop Group Read Party should probably take a seat, partly because of how shocking the following news is and because sometimes, I can really go on and on. You should be comfortable.

I had the follow-up appointment with my specialist after my VIOLENT SCOPING of a month or so ago and here are the results:

There's nothing visibly wrong with me.

I'll let that sink in, I know it's a shock to a lot of you. But, and I hate to say this, there's more.

Also, I've managed to lose some weight.

I'm sorry to give you all that at once, I know it's a lot. In a demographic space where the main/possibly only thing to reliably talk about is ongoing/nagging/developing health issues and the ways in which our once taut and viable bodies are sloughing and morphing into something like eight pounds of wet oatmeal in a five pound sack, finding out a) I'm fine and b) keeping it kinda tight is something a disaster, social-currency wise.

Independent of the inevitable ostracization from my peer group on a level I haven't experienced since I joined the marching band in junior high school, this is actually somewhat worrying in a few other ways.

First, I still don't feel great. The complaint that had me VIOLENTLY SCOPED in the first place is still extant, still an irritant (literally), though very manageable and not a massive degradation in my quality of life, by any stretch. The medication I have for it doesn't seem to help a ton, but some lifestyle changes around meal sizes and food choices seem to mitigate. None of this should be a surprise as anyone in middle age knows mostly it's a series of winnowing out, bit by bit, of all the things you like to eat for various health reasons. If we follow the trendline, if we make it to 80, it'll just be starchy pap force fed into our toothless mouths by a syringe, like abandoned kittens, except without the payoff of developing into something anyone would want to pet.

Second, weight loss is way harder as you hit a certain point in middle age, but I've dropped like 5-10 pounds in the last two months. Is this because of the minor changes to my diet (see above) that still includes (in small amounts) Ben & Jerry's plant-based ice cream frozen dessert, plus the fact that I've changed up my exercise routine in favor of tennis rather than the boxing conditioning group classes that I'd been taking for nearly 20 years due to some nagging hand and arm injuries? Nobody seems to be able to say!

Either way, what this means is that my surprisingly healthy and correctly colored esophagus and stomach--absolutely on point for their on-camera debut last month--plus the weight loss plus the continuing issue means I get to do some more medical imaging. This will be my third round after an ultrasound (everything OK!) and VIOLENT SCOPING down my throat (everything OK!) frustratingly found that I'm 100% healthy, and not just "for an older fella," like objectively.

There's a CT scan in my future which, by all indications, will also show that I'm fine and having to deal with a gurgly tummy is just my cross to bear for the near-to-indefinite future.

In the meantime. though, in the absence of that final clear bill of health, Schrödinger's Cat has nestled up cozy in my solar plexus, purring away, meaning right before I go to bed every night, I get to scroll away on my phone looking up symptoms to reassure myself I don't have, like, pancreatic cancer or a vengeful gall bladder. Literally NONE of my symptoms line up with either of those things, but yeah, in this transitional time before I know-know, I get the luxury of wondering the Big What If.

This all really tracks though, for when I'm comfortably in my 60s and I look back at how I wasted my stupid 50s worrying about nothing and I wish I was as healthy in that future-now as I am in the now-now. It's good to know yourself, but even if you can say you see it coming, you can only really process and internalize it in hindsight. Like a car crash, but in incredibly slow mothion and nowhere near as visually interesting.

Variations on a Theme

This has always been a variety blog as I don't really do series. I do give the same metadata label to all the film/TV reviews that I do, but that's really only so I can call them up quickly to see if I've done them already. I've been at this Blogger thing since before they had labels as an option, so when they arrived I treated them with the same kind of arch bemusement as I treat everything else here that I might have used to purposely grow an audience or betray in any way that I took this seriously. It's a specific GenX kind of personality flaw that ensures I'll be able to keep putting in the work to produce these every week, but without any of the burden of expectation of quality, ease of use or betrayal of my emotional needs. In retrospect, I guess posting these once per week for 20-odd years is in the aggregate a small indicator of what my emotional needs are, but we're not allowed to talk about that directly.

And also, OK, I don't purposely do series except how, again, in the aggregate this is also a chronicle of my inner life, lightly-to-moderately obscured by jokes, comedic premises, obvious exaggeration and more than a few well-placed lies (but only if, like nudity in films, they're tastefully lit and serve the plot). So sort of topic-agnostic, the whole thing counts as a series accidentally, kind of like how if you put enough marbles in a big enough bag, one at a time over a long enough period, eventually you end up with a planet.

I did not take astrophysics or really any sciences past basic physical science, but I'm pretty confident that's how planets are born. Just a big enough bag of marbles.

What I'm trying to get at is just recognizing that sometimes my actual interests interfere with the curated presentational interests of by blog-writer persona and I end up with de facto series about things that betray what I'm actually in to, especially if it lasts, says, four to six weeks and is probably the only truly global cultural event in this age of post-internet attention-siphoning.

No, I'm not talking about The Odyssey coming out in IMAX (more on that in short order when I run out of things to write about during these summer doldrums), I do of course mean the just-concluded FIFA Men's World Cup. And see, you can read my own feelings and exeriences regarding said thing in these several places because, apparently, I couldn't help myself.

I've said before, quite often out loud to people around me to the point where they just put a hand up to indicate they'd like to auto-skip that part of the conversation like it's a dialogue option in a role-playing video game, the the World Cup is my favorite thing, past any movie or TV show or book or whatever. As a point of cultural experience or consumable entertainment option (depending on your level of cynicism, but given how many commercials starring David Beckham I watched, it's at best some level of both those things) unique on that level, it stands to reason that I struggle to shut the fuck up about it. The challenge is being reflective when it's over instead of just being all twitchy, palpatative, sweaty and hyperventilating like a junky forced to go cold turkey. To paint you a picture, I'm sitting here on a weekday morning typing this with the television off entirely, zero games on in the background, for the first time in I'd like to say... maybe forever? Is that possible? Was there a "before"? Who am I if I'm not calculating group standings in real time based on current scorelines? Do I even exist, and if I do, what would even be the point of it?

For all the drama and surprise--the elements that make live sports the last lingering vestige of the pre-streaming paradigm where people all kind of watched the same thing--the ending was still an ending, recognizable in the way almost all World Cup endings are. The final was actually pretty dramatic in retrospect, though while you're watching it, it never feels like it lives up to the month-plus of building expectation. That's unfair of course, but it's also ruined by the aboslute banger that was the 2022 final between Argentina and France, the exception that really fucks up the rule.

Spain were both dominant in a specific way and kind of boring through a lot of the tournament, but they were fairly active in the final. And Argentina knew it didn't have much shot (or any shot) past a lot of hysterical jumping around and judo kicks to the body parts of their opponents. The match was way better than a team that doesn't score that much vs. a team employing a nullification strategy implies, and the result was predictable if Argentina is relying on a statistically unreliable (but somehow repeatable in all their previous knockout round games) intervention from heaven (in the form of Lionel Messi, in some notable way).

Was the third-place game comparatively insane? It sure was. But a) it takes a while to warm up to that as a viewing experience since everyone watching feels so so bad after having their dreams shattered by a semifinal loss, and b) I didn't watch it as I was at a function (sometimes I have to go to functions) so, as far as my experience goes, I can't factor it in. So we'll pretend it was a shared fever dream some of you had and leave it there.

Now we're back on the clock, T-minus four years until the next iteration for the fellas. We can start the cycle of picking up the USA men's side again after a hard switch-off of interest or attention the second after they were knocked out, after a reasonable period of letting that interest lay fallow for a brief period, like two years or so. Will that be long enough to forget their non-competitive pulverization by a mediocre Belgium side? Likely yes, but odds are they will endeavor to remind me of it with subsequent underwhelming performances.

In the meantime, I will revert to being a normal person with healthily variegated and diversified interests for... OK, definitely not for the entire four years. The qualifiying campaigns for 2030 will reach a peak in 2029, so I'll be into that. And the Euros will be in 2028. Oh and the Women's World Cup will be in Brazil next year, so... Eleven months or so of hinged normalcy, then we pick up this series again. Back to our irregular programming.

Melissa Benoist Is Doing Fine, Everyone

Supergirl

starring Milly Alcock, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, David Corenswet and Jason Momoa

directed by Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl; I, Tonya; Cruella)

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IT'S BEEN OUT LONG ENOUGH, YOU EITHER ALREADY GOT SPOILED ON IT OR WON'T CARE. EITHER WAY, YOU HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED

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Did I want to go see Supergirl? Come on, I'm a heterosexual man, what interest could I possibly have in a superhero movie starring a girl? And this one is practically a dare, it's got "super" and "girl" right in the the title. It would be less of a provocation if it was just called I Bet You Won't, You Little Bitch. What was I supposed to do, just sit there and take that? As confused as I am by the idea of a woman who doesn't need rescuing by or guidance from a man, I was obligated to go pay money for a ticket and sit through the experience of viewing to confirm my pre-existing completely rational hate for this film.

Ha, I'm just kidding, everyone knows the online dipshits who review bomb every movie that has a female lead don't actually go out and see the movies they so loudly (allowing ALL CAPS to count as "loudness") decry as anathema to something something birth rates something something testosterone levels, etc.

Me, of course I made a special effort (leaving my house, buying a ticket, meeting up with people I like, seeing a move I either like or dislike, discussing it afterward) to take in Supergirl. Like most of the rest of the woke mob, just about everything I do is about virtue signaling. Movies are about escapism, sure, but sometimes they're also about escapism-ing from little things like patriarchy, am I right? It's an effort to spend my money on things that everyone objectively knows without experiencing them are "bad" (a Star War with a girl, a Greek myth film with a black lady in it) so that I will be seen by... someone (TBD) to have done the "right thing." It's the exact same kind of smug contrarian satisfaction people like me revel in. Like if you see trash on the ground in public near a trash can, what is the point of picking it up and putting it in if no one is around to witness you doing it? Sometimes I'll stand there for like ten minutes waiting for a quorum of citizens to be in eye-sight. Think of this review like that. If you're reading this, I've been waiting a week-plus for you to see me. Your validation is both implied and appreciated.

I trudged along to do my self-deputized civic duty, with my partner and one of my adult children, stiff-backed in a reclining theater chair and ready to do my totally passive part in the fight against whatever coherence-free agglomeration of points of view drive review-bombers and the rump remnant still inexplicably active on Twitter.

Imagine the conflicting emotions when I'm out there, trying to bring down centuries of misogyny and oppression by buying a movie ticket and sitting completely still in the dark for two hours after enduring 40 minutes of advertising about a range of things from Milk Duds to a local home re-piping service, and I find myself entertained at certain points. A complication and a distraction, neither of which are going to win me any kind external value from any kind of online crowd on any sort of social media, 98% of whom are probably bots.

Ah, but then I remembered I'm not active on any kind of social media. If you really are looking for a constant, clean hit of pure dopamine, just exist in this world and have it wash over you every now and again that you've been too lazy, contrarian or pre-emptively overwhelmed to be a Very Online Guy. It's the same feeling of relief you get as waking up from a bad dream you're sure was real at the time. Except, OK, the circumstances of the dream do follow you around in real life in all spaces, public and private, but you're just not hooked up enough to let it hurt you in the squishiest places.

Even here, though, I'm seven paragraphs in and I've only talked about the online discourse, with no mention of the actual film at all. You can call it hypocrisy if you want, I call it reliable content generation in volume.

Is it true I see all the woman-led superhero films that reflexively get derided by a very small, but determinedly unfuckable minority of online dudes and their robot friends before release? Yes, but please understand that I also went to see The Flash, so it's less a gender-specific political statement than a sign of terminal completism on my part. Far more an act of compulsion than defiance, but as long as it looks like defiance because it accidentally aligns with my politics, well, not every good thing we do is the heaviest of lifts.

Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El/Supergirl was introduced in a sort of epilogue scene at the end of Superman last year, and James Gunn's new effort to make DC movies into a thing picks that up directly. This movie is a re-telling of the acclaimed "Woman of Tomorrow" storyline that ran in the Supergirl comic book earlier this decade. This is always a good move, to pull from a fleshed-out and well-received narrative, though it doesn't always come out (see the two major swings taken so far at the "Dark Phoenix" X-Men storyline, yikes).

The criticism has been that the setting is grim and dull, the color palette is beige and gray, the story is dark and dour (people trafficking)... I do definitely agree that it feels like a tonal and aesthetic step backward (chronologically, not necessarily artistically) after the explicitly intentional decision to make Superman optimistic and brightly colored to the point of being, dare I say it, frickin' goofy. But Superman paid off and did well even in a dimming market for theatrical-run superhero films. I do agree that this film is kind of sludgy in bits, which in context makes some of the decisions feel retread, recycled, past sell-by. Films can look however the filmmaker can pull it off, of course, but this was asking for trouble.

And though this isn't a James Gunn film, it absolutely has his Guardians of the Galaxy fingerprints on it as some of the thematic overlap in its planet-hopping setting amongst space scoundrels and its reliance on a pop-music soundtrack to add propulsion and layers to both interstitials and action set-pieces. Not poorly done, but it does feel like a copy of a thing, with just a slight degradation in clarity and resolution.

That said, the central relationship between Milly Alcock's Supergirl and Eve Ridley's Ruthye feels rooted, a well-realized vehicle linking the character development in the A-plot with the interspersed telling of the Supergirl origin story.

Jason Momoa's Lobo doesn't need to be there, that's all fan-service, as fun as the character is (inherently I mean, not necessarily in this application). And of course this story has to clear the same hurdle as every other Krytponian superhero story, like why don't they just smash all the bad guys in Act 1, Scene 2? Making her jaunt to red-sun planets intentional is smart, setting us up for a payoff we see coming when she's powered up and fully unleashed in the dénouement, but they doubled down a little too hard with a whole "green sun" section that stepped on the momentum of the narrative. It's not dissimilar to the section of The Mandalorian and Grogu where "Pedro Pascal's" character gets incapacitated, giving the sidekick time to shine, but as much as I like Eve Ridley, she's no Baby Yoda. Plus all they really gave her to do was wait in a cave and get captured. It's even less inspiring than it sounds.

Overall I've been struggling with movies of this type and intent, like the B-tier characters in a shared narrative. The mass appeal of Superman and Spider-Man and Batman and a team-up Avengers movie are apparent and will draw the biggest budgets, the most advertising money, the easiest amount of cultural awareness and cachet that will all justify (at least in intention) a theatrical release in the movies-as-a-second-screen-on-our-phones era. We're a lot of years and a lot of filmed frames-per-second removed from 2008 when B-tier Iron Man came out and was accidentally really good. Then Thor came along in 2011 and gave us the mistaken impression that we should expect automatic success from comic book movies regardless of the prominence of main character. Since then Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and all the sad fuckers in Sony's Spider-Man intellectual property stable (except Venom, those movies did OK) re-set the expectations levels to pre-2008 calibration, though studios seem a little slow to recognize this.

Colored by the anti-buzz, I surprisingly genuinely liked it, but there's no denying, though the rhetoric around female-led films is still poisonous and embarrassing, this movie lost a shit-ton of money. That's certainly not Milly Alcock's fault, it's more a lesson of: make these movies with smaller budgets, but don't try to make it look like it had a larger one. Otherwise you set yourself up for a kicking on an Ant-Man sort of scale. Which can be way bigger than it sounds.

Ball Don't Lie

It's not safe or reasonable to be a fan of things. The word "fan" of course carries with it the connotation of unseriousness, something frivolous and disposible to attach some portion of your finite emotional energy to. You can be a fan of, to make the obvious example, the Los Angeles Lakers say, in a way that people aren't really "fans" of dialectical materialism or quantum gravity. Or I guess you could be, but people who know better would peg you as a dilettante and a poseur. Yes, I'm still talking about the Lakers.

Being a fan of a thing is/was/should be a notable and consequential category shift that separates the laity from the experts, but like many things that underpinned our intellectual and social equilibrium in the past, those immanently separable ideas have been hurtled at one another with a terrible speed until they collide and we all end up with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. Sounds exciting and novel until you realize we're all like two weeks away from a government-funded program promoting the health benefits of botulism.

All things being equal, I'd have taken the sweats, the cramping and the gut-liquifying invasion of food-borne illness over watching the U.S. Men's National Soccer Team get stomped into oblivion by Belgium in the round of 16 at the World Cup this week. The emotional investment in something like this--a World Cup, even more fleeting and ephemeral than a fixed annual league sports team one might follow--was a mistake I (knowingly, excitedly, monetarily) chose for myself 32 years ago when the World Cup was first in the United States. I, like many others, ended up one of the success stories of a marketing push, which is itself embarrassing, but also puts me in the same group as novelist John Green and many others more prominent and interesting than myself. Or to put it another way, it's really them who should have known better, those media savvy elites. I'm just some blinkered schmuck with two degrees in history, what do I know about critical thinking, context awareness and perspective? I had no chance.

A lopsided 4-1 drubbing should carry some kind of poetic leitmotif bookending to wrap things up neatly since we opened with a surprising 4-1 win, but that's not really how sports works. Well, it does, but if you try to bring it up, you just end up the guy who wants to talk about sports that nobody wants to talk about sports with.

I didn't write about the steady, professional, grind-it-out win over Bosnia and Herzegovina (both at once!) last week, as much as I wanted to, for a couple of reasons: 1) I was very aware that I was "in it," that a World Cup experience only exists really between your team's opening group match and the final one, which is almost always a loss, so I decided glide with the experiential current, without commenting on it, and 2) I actually really meant to, but sometimes when I start typing these blogs, I get distracted by my first paragraph and go way off the rails. Instead you got some kind of rant about job seeking that ended with a joke about sexting with an AI. Given the result against Belgium vs where my head was at last Thursday post-Bosnia, in retrospect I went with the much less embarrassing option.

Yeah, the US won a knockout-round game for the first time since 2002, but it was a made-up knockout round that never existed before 2026, which means we ended up going out at exactly the same stage as we always do. The high water mark of modern US men's soccer continues to be a Torsten Frings handball on the goal line that wasn't called, pre-VAR era, in our lone quarterfinal appearance. Stupid, frustrating, painful lore still gets to be foundational lore, unfortunately, moreso when there's nothing better presenting itself as a replacement.

It's been a lot, emotionally, over something that means literally nothing. Did I cry real human tears after the Bosnia and Herzegovina win? I did, it's true, and I'm not a cryer. I honestly hadn't cried since I randomly watched a YouTube short about a stray puppy that was very cold but was brought inside and got warm. And that was like 4-6 days before the game. It had been ages. I'm a rock, typically.

There's a real danger to hope, of course, but it's not the one you're normally thinking of, that it exposes you to the risk of a real soul bludgeoning when it inevitably crashes against the rocks of experience. The real danger is that, in the crush of disappointment, deciding on the cynic's truth that all hope is delusion, an indulgence a genuinely happy human would never/could never afford themselves if they were being truly responsible.

I've considered this all week and the best counter-argument I can come up with is: what if your team gets mollywhopped 4-1 and are never really in it from the first minute? Then you got to hope beforehand AND get absolutely inoculated against the negative effects by the numbing ice-burn of cold reality way, way before the last whistle. You can watch the whole game in a state of digusted disbelief and low-burning rage instead of the annihilating weight of near-miss devastation. I guess what I'm saying is, if we had to go out at this stage, was it easier to be me or to be an Egyptian fan?

Thanks for the run, U.S. men's team. And, in retrospect, thanks for being so awful in the last stage that you never let me get so delusional to think you were actually going to be competitive. You didn't have to do that for me, but a show of such incompetence can only be interpreted as an act of love and care for your supporters, to ease us out of the tournament; so we can transition back to focusing on things that really matter, like electoral politics and the spectre of unemployment. Bless you, boys. What a public service.

Some Star Sneezed, Now They're Paging You In Reception

I was about to start complaining about the false promise of technology and how it doesn't eliminate work, it more transmogrifies existing (analog, physical, three dimensional) work into a more abstracted (emotional, time-management, expectational) work. It's similar to the law of conservation of energy, but applied to labor: you can never really create or destroy labor, you just transfer it into another form. The romantic version of this is the idea that every bit of creation was released in the Big Bang, meaning we are all made from the same stuff that makes stars and planets and bugs and sand and in the end we will return thus, back into the cycle of generation and regeneration. If nothing else, it's a thing to say on a first date if your actual personality starts to lose coherence under the pressure.

I'm not being ungrateful or naïve, I don't think, to note that things are just different since the promised Digital Revolution actually had the mundane audacity to actually occur, slowly and incrementally and in the midst the distraction of a thousand thousand false dawns and blind alleys of so many Microsoft Zunes and Google Glasses. I'm not going to pretend that I didn't fall for any of those gimmick-based Great Leaps Forward because I'm some kind of stoic visionary impervious to marketing. I bought a Wii U for god's sake. No, I've just been saved by my antipathy toward spending money. Yes, there were people who laid out thousands of dollars for 3D televisions when those were a thing, but I think of the version of myself who is capable of doing that and I don't know him. It's a dark and foreboding alternate timeline where I'm certain I spend an embarrassing amount of my time and energy trying to figure out how to access the boutique pornography purpose-made for the device. Eh, maybe he's happier, who am I to judge?

To be certain, sure, the world has become less physically burdensome in some material ways, but I'm not sure how that has directly translated into any kind of an easier life. It was supposed to liberate us from the drudgery of a work-centric life and fulfill the promise of the buzzwordy "work-life balance" concept that every new job lies to its employees about. The problem is that there's no technology that is not corrupted by its contact and deployment by people, who tend to ruin everything. Like sure, you could work anywhere now, but that just means you can work anywhere, at any time, regardless of whether or not you should be off the clock, and be monitored while you are or aren't doing it. Oh yes, but also, just to be clear, you can't actually work anywhere when or why you want to, according to your own needs, because, again, people are in charge and people are petty and stupid and bad at everything. You still have to have the same commute, the same shackling to a building that isn't the one your family lives in, but now when you get there, everything is digital and therefore obviously so much more efficient! Look, we used to do this on three sheets of paper and now we do it on 11 PDF files! Which nobody quite 100% understands how to format or use in the same way, so they all come out a tiny bit differently formatted or tweaked, which someone else has to put out an email about that no one will read, and then attempt to reconcile! And which, honestly, you should probably print out a copy anyway just for your own records, you know, just in case!

Please do not misunderstand me: this is not "the Good Old Days were better" here. That's not me. Although, objectively, in a lot of ways things are pretty bad right now and we could do with some reversion, but I'm only talking politically and I mean, like, 2022 at most.

Materially, for someone like me who is in the process of looking for a job, this is a great example of exactly what I mean. Go to any job-posting site, LinkedIn or Indeed or whatever, or a more specialized site like your state's career board or USAJobs for federal work. All of them present the same promise--the same lie--in the exact same way: click this one button to apply! If you're on LinkedIn, though, clicking the "one button" opens a new window to take you to the site of the company to which you'd like to apply directly. Now technically, from LinkedIn's experience, they are correct. You pushed that one button on their site and now you can go apply, but that's not what's implied. There should be a process triggered when I hit that button that involves satellites and lasers, 1,000 secret workers in India, whatever it takes (barring AI because AI is stupid and broken and is bad at everything you ask it to do) to trick me--I'm begging you please trick me--into temporarily losing sight of the border between technology and magic. Like back in the early days of smartphones where you could get that app that made it look like you were drinking a beer.

Alas, the job listings take hours to sort through because now the sites are using AI to "help" me find listings, more than half of which aren't suited to me at all. So I'm being presented volume as though it is abundance, which aren't really synonyms when you factor in quality or usefulness. And then the application process for every single place is arcane, byzantine and discrete. Some are fairly simple, sure, but I will tell you--and this is absolutely true--so far my record for one application is five hours. There are so many assessments, so many questionnaires, so many just basic formatting quirks and "helpful" capture technology that I'm basically re-entering my résumé line by line every single time.

At least the end-to-end process is faster though, right? Well, the accessibility of every listing means the amount of applicants is going to be silly vs. the old analog days, so there's software to help curate the pile, but the pile is now nine miles high. I have no desire to going back to showing up with a paper CV to hand to a receptionist and then sit around in blind hope the right person saw it. That labor still exists and the anxiety isn't any less, it's just now the blind hope is around the AI-powered pre-sorting metadata-and-keyword-scrubbing alogrithm deciding if your own application is worthy to advance to actual human eyes for review. It's just now I can apply to way more things than I used to be able to. Great. Who doesn't love an online quiz?

If this just was nostalgia, I'd be feeling OK about it because honestly, the future is the past is the present. Literally everyone I know who has gotten a job in the last 12 months has gotten it because a friend or family member worked there. If I really wanted to be on the cutting edge I'd get myself a chatbot girlfriend. I'm sure the same basic LLM is in charge of one or several AI departments somewhere. Degrading yourself sexually and emotionally in exchange for work is as time-tested as anything. I'm on it.

Quacks

Nobody wants to be sick. Well, excepting hypochondriacs, but I would argue even they don't actually want a disease or infirmity, they either want a) to be perceived as being ill for the sympathy or more likely b) just some relief from the all-encompassing terror of the idea that you might one day become actually sick. See, you can't get tuberculosis if you already have tuberculosis, so for the duration, you get a little bit of a break from living in constant dread of it. I was initially going to say "you can't get cancer if you already have cancer," but that's literally how metastasization works. I didn't want to be responsible for putting that idea in the heads of any hypochondriacs who happen to be reading, but who am I kidding, they would have gotten there way ahead of me.

It's weird on a personal blog to have a medical procedure get crowded out by anything else as a topic, but apparently I thought it was much more important to let you know about the time I cried at a soccer game, which happened the same week. I live a full life.

About ten days ago then, I found myself following a familiar doctor's instructions to roll on my side while I was laid out on a gurney and explaining to me the three-part cocktail of drugs they'd be dosing me with before forcing a probe-mounted camera into one of my existing orifii.

It shouldn't have been surprising that it was the same doctor who performed my colonoscopy three years ago I suppose since I've been getting my care from the same medical group, with the same primary care doctors, since 2000. Considering the order of events meant we were going ass-to-mouth, I figured the intervening three years between scopings was more than enough time to give the equipment a thorough wipe-down.

In this case I was being knocked out and probed not for preventative reasons but in response to a persistent complaint that put me in the care of a gastroenterology specialist in the first place. As anyone who has been annoyed (me), inconvenienced or debilitated (not me, thank god) by a chronic issue, the impulse for some kind of actionable information eventually far outweighs any anxiety that might come with a medical procedure. Yes, a lady I didn't know had to stab me in the hand to insert the IV port for my drugs, but that was really the worst of it. I guess I could have been anxious that the primary drug used to knock me out was fentanyl, but I'm neither a habitual user nor a police officer, so I'm not cursed with that casual sensitivity that only cops seem to get.

So yes, nobody wants to be sick, but if they do find something--and I want to emphasize, I'm looking for something treatable here--they can give you a pill or a modified diet or schedule a second (minor!) procedure and you can go back to eating whatever you want without feeling nauseated for no reason, just as a random example. But to my minor chagrin, I've now been told I have a world-class esophageal tract, stomach and duodenum. I don't know what a duodenum is, but mine could apparently walk the runway at Paris Fashion Week, that's how fit it is. They even gave me a printed out page with a grid of pictures of my absolutely faultless innards which was, yes, equal parts as reassuring and gross.

The takeaway is I still have random bouts of nausea not seemingly triggered by anything specific. I have a prescription for a proton-pump inhibitor from my GP, but that's speculative, as much to give me something probably as it is specifically indicated. I also have a follow-up appointment with my gastroenterology specialist for late July. Of course I live in fear now that she's going to tell me that I'm doing great.