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.

Clear Plastic Bags

OK, I spent all of last week's post lubing you up with what I consider normal foreplay--apology, minimizing my own needs out of embarrassment, talking too much about price--so it would be cruel and inconsiderate to deny you any further. The best I can do is a description of the act, but that feels appropriate for our level of intimacy and, well, it works for me. You're into what you're into.

What I got into was USA vs Paraguay for the team's first 2026 World Cup game. The locale was "Los Angeles Stadium," stripped of its corporate-sponsored name, which I normally would approve of as an anti-capitalist pinko, but I know it's just because FIFA don't get a cut of the sponsorship loot. Like any social media user with more than three followers, the mantra is the same: no free clout.

It should be noted that, like a lot of these stadiums, it's not in the city it's named for at all. Before we got to the stadium at all, we had to negotiate parking, which I found for $90 in the small lot of an old 1930s-ish theater converted into a church along Manchester Blvd. in Inglewood, where the stadium actually is. I know: $90 for parking?! Yes, but that was just because my partner and I were willing to walk the 0.7 miles to the stadium to avoid a) the inescapable triple-digit prices for locations nearer the event site, with the highest I saw over $600 and b) the ingress and egress traffic in the immediate vicinity of the other suckers who got duped into paying face-value-or-more prices for admission that should by rights have come with two bedrooms and one-point-five bathrooms.

Hoofing it in and out might sound like kind of a bummer, but we got to see a little bit of Inglewood, which is leafier and quieter than its media coverage during my 1980s childhood would have suggested. It's unsual as a Southern Californian to spend any time on foot in a community not your own (or even your own. So many hills! And you don't want to risk running into any neighbors), so that part carried novelty of its own, not to mention a chance to build up the atmosphere on the way in and decompress on the walk out. Plus it's a real dad-coded treat to walk out of a stadium right past lines and lines and lines of unmoving cars and then drive out unimpeded from the little off-site parking lot that feels like it's just for you. That's almost worth $90 of anybody's money. It's only worth $10 of my money when I do it at Angels baseball games, but these days I'm not sure there are enough attendees to qualify as "traffic."

Getting to the stadium, which I've been to for other football (soccer) and football (American throwball type) events, like everything else touched by FIFA, it was the worst version of it the could be managed. It was surrounded by a 15-foot-high fence, forcing all 70,000-plus in through I think three or four narrow entrances. We arrived on site around 90 minutes before kickoff to a line along the fence that seemed to be a mile long.

It was at this point that I began to despair. I could hear roars from the stadium I couldn't yet access and began to die from FOMO. In retrospect, all I was missing was a naff "pre-game ceremony" touched with that FIFA magic combination of corny, extravagant and unnecessary, but I began to complain to my partner that there was NO WAY we were going to make it through the ENDLESS line in time to get in by kickoff.

It was at this point I should have realized that I was emotionally NOT OK. Being faced with an exceptionally long queue outside a well-attended event, even a pointless queue badly run by disinterested staff, is not an appropriate trigger for genuine human despair, especially if you're there at 4:30 for a 6 pm start. The line snaked through fine, we passed through security and got into the stadium to our last-row (literally last row, top deck) seats in plenty of time for kickoff and I started to notice I was actively, visibly shaking. When my ass finally hit the seat, I lost the ability to resist occasionally softly crying as I realized a thing I hadn't really dared posit I'd be able to do since the idea was planted way back in 1994.

This is where I shout out and celebrate my partner for her patience as I spun out, composure-free, for a good 40 minutes during the security-line pseudo-crisis. She made a much better showing of it when we finally went to Acadia National Park in Maine back in October, a lifelong goal of hers. She climbed up mountains and walked trails and smiled alot, bosh, job done, no fuss. But it's to be expected. Men are so emotional.

I won't go through the blow-by-blow of a phenomenal, cathartic, comprehensive performance and victory by the normally profligate and masochistic US Men's National Team. I was there for the experience of being there, so a sweeping victory and mostly stress-free dominance of their opponents were all cherries on an unexpectedly rich, many-layered cake.

Once I calmed down, I was more or less present enough to appreciate the thing as it was happening all around me. Sometimes you just need a prosaic incident to ground yourself, like someone spilling beer on you or considering whether you want to spend $9 on a bottle of water. For me it was the first time I refused to participate in the "U-S-A! U-S-A!" chant. Nothing will bring you back to yourself like second-hand embarrassment and a gentle contempt for your neighbors. That part didn't cost $2600, so that at least I can recommend without reservation.

You Just Might Get It

I've never really been a "bucket list" type of person. Certainly I've had notions of things in my life I'd like to experience at some point, but once I got past "touch real boob," nothing else could really match that particular goal for urgency. I do not miss being a teenager. Or, OK, in my early 20s.

I've absolutely been lucky enough to see and do things that will go down as whatever the opposite of regret would be. The younger goofy Anglophile I was got to spend some real time in London and criss-crossed the UK by train on more than one trip. As a even goofier lifelong Tolkien dork, I've gotten to walk along the bottom of the sheer-walled cleft valley in Switzerland that inspired him to merely describe a thing that exists--that you can exist in--and only make you feel like it was otherworldly.

Also I had three kids. That was definitely something I aspired to, but I knew enough people who either achieved that goal accidentally or were biologically locked out of achieving it at all, so a lot of that felt too far out of my hands to count as a goal. Plus I feel like I should say a lot of the work of gestating and birthing I outsourced to my now-ex-wife at the time, so I can't claim a lot of credit for the labor involved. Like that regrettable pun, it's just a thing that kind I just put myself into the right position for and waited for it to redound to my benefit.

I have been the plus-one to a few other people's bucket list realizations, which has been great. This accounts for 100% of my visits to any national park or national forest or national monument. Every time I was the correct amount of amazed and appreciative, but none of those trips were ever going to be my idea. It turns out that most national parks occur almost entirely outdoors, which is also where they keep the bears.

I find myself on the brink of doing a thing tomorrow that I never seriously bothered to hope for, but is happening anyway. I have two tickets to the opening game by the US men's national team in a World Cup hosted here in the US. I don't really think I can call it an unbridled positive given a) the tickets were extortionately expensive and b) all of that money is going to the most hilariously corrupt world organization that isn't the Trump Administration. My two nosebleed seats cost a grand total of nearly $2600, but I've decided to call it a bargain and a boon considering the sequence of incredibly unlikely events that led to them being available. Consider:

-The World Cup was awarded to the U.S. as a co-host instead of some other petro-state as a vehicle for their sportswashing programs (see Qatar 2022 and Saudi Arabia 2030).

-There was a lottery for tickets. I happened to "win" mine but my girlfriend didn't. Totally arbitrary.

-Not only is the tournament partially here, but the U.S. team was based on the west coast, including the first game, in the greater Los Angeles area which is exactly where I live.

-Workers at SoFi Stadium negotiated a settlement this week, avoiding a strike and a picket line that I would have refused to cross.

There's no getting around $2600 is a lot of money, especially in my precarious employment situation. But, just like my human-child-creation experience, I didn't have to go out of my way at all to make attending a World Cup game live a reality. No travel or hotel or extra food expenses. A bargain, in that context! But that's the evil genius of FIFA, a cabal of cartoonishly brazen pirates banking on how happy and grateful the fan base will be to shovel over their disposible income into the money furnace they've built out of monopoly and graft.

It really, really sucks that I can't wait.