Shortly after she resigned as editor-in-chief of Deadspin, Megan came back to the offices to record a podcast. It is worth considering for a moment just how perverse this was, for a number of reasons. The offices themselves were a drab warren of cubes and pods, rife with bugs and pinned under stupendously bad lighting and permeated by a stifling air of collapse; the outline of the previous tenant's corporate logo (BET Network!) stood out in a pale negative on the wall by the main entrance for months until the new owners finally bolted their own dumb thing up nearby.
You could still see the shadow on Megan's last day, and also on all of ours; the ghost was still much easier to see than the new sign was, although that might have just been me. It was a place to be escaped from, at a high rate of speed, and without even a glance cast back to see what kind of cretinous mischief the lords of that haunted manor were getting up to. And yet Megan returned, because she was just that dedicated to the work of going on a podcast with two people she plainly (and justifiably) finds to be totally exhausting. The circumstances have changed since then in a number of ways, and yet Megan still returned—to this new podcast, and her two idiot tormentors. Let's just agree to call it principled.
Did we show Megan a good time? Leaving aside that "a good time" is not really something this podcast aims to deliver, we did our best. Our limitations are what they are, of course, but we did talked to Megan about a wide range of subjects: stubborn dogs in general and one delightfully afflicted pug in particular, the damn Oakland Athletics, the grim spectacle of college sports during a pandemic and the grimmer spectacle of watching the most powerful people in American government act like unusually cynical SEC coaches. I will not spoil the tenuous reconciliation of one of Megan's most legendary and ridiculous personal beeves beyond saying that the battle has once again been joined on the question of Which Breakfast Foods Are Good, Actually. Also Drew sang part of a Whitesnake song. It would be unfair to blame anyone but Drew for that.
We all love Megan, of course. She did right by us at the old site, and we would not have been able to start this new one without her. On that last Megan Greenwell podcast appearance, with our old podcast computer locked and inaccessible and no engineer available to record us, we had to rely on Kirk Hamilton a lot—he recorded and produced the episode, and then improvised and recorded a version of our theme song because the original file was unavailable. He's doing the music for The Distraction, too, which means that at least for this episode we had everyone back together. The circumstances are not ideal now, either, obviously. We are in the most literal sense all now entirely too far apart. But there are worse places to be, and it was nice to get together for at least a little bit.
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