Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about cleaning up before dying, ketchup, being a new stepdaddy, and more.
Sorry for the abbreviated bag today, but Why Your Team Sucks has begun and I need to stay on point for it. But don’t worry, the bag will return to its normal length soon enough.
Your letters:
Lauren (not Theisen):
Bojangles now uses an AI chatbot to take your order. As an AI skeptic, I have made little personal use of these LLMs, but the fast-food drive through is a place that touches the life of every red blooded American sooner or later. This is not intended as a “should you” but rather a “will you” question: if you would otherwise say please and thanks to someone in an interaction, will you consciously choose to do the same when interacting with an AI chatbot?
Probably, just out of habit. I try to make good manners my default option, so I say “please” and “thank you” in every exchange of goods and services, I use my turn signal even if I’m driving on an empty road, and I put the seat down after pissing in a public men’s room stall. Gotta keep those manners sharp. If AI becomes more widespread in commercial use, and I have little doubt of it, I’ll likely keep these reflexes, especially in situations that normally involve human interaction. Like a drive thru! Shit, I might even be grateful I’m talking to a computer and not to the “And then?” lady.
I’ll tell you where my manner function shuts right down, though: the iPad ordering kiosk. We managed to shame many restaurants out of using the dreaded QR code menu, but Big Restaurant opened up a new front in the war on humanity by forcing customers to tap their orders into an iPad rather than tell another human what we’d like to eat. As a veteran mayonnaise avoider, I get the appeal of using automation to make sure your order is exactly the way you want it. But life is built on the shoddy little interactions between us all. You have things you need to do or to buy, so you spend some small fraction of your day talking to cashiers, tellers, teachers, vendors, restaurant staff, neighbors, the mailman, and whoever else makes up a functional community. Take those interactions away and your ability to communicate with other people slowly erodes, to the point where you’d prefer to never speak to anyone at all. That’s bad. One of the many reasons we’re in deep shit presently is because tech has rendered other people incidental to users. You can’t care about others if you never interact with them.
That goes for objects, too. I was just talking with a friend about this while we were sharing a dogwalker joint together. It’s not just verbal interactions that technology has robbed from people, but tactile ones as well. Take a new car, for instance. A lot of new cars, especially Teslas, use touch screen controls almost exclusively. It’s dissatisfying. I want doodads to fiddle with when I’m in a car. I want to literally feel things, because my mind then associates that tactile feeling with the action it catalyzes: the crank of a volume knob, the punching of keyboard buttons, the stoking of a pen, the flick of a light switch. All of those sensations are quietly indelible, and part of being a modern human. Swap all of those out for a series of generic taps on a pane of flat glass and you become about as interesting a person as that pane of glass. You’ll also be a terrible lay.
Bryan:
Enough time has passed that we can all admit the COVID championships were bullshit, right? Does anyone *really* care about a Dodgers World Series win played at a half-empty neutral site after a 60-game season? The NHL and NBA were similarly janky. The exception is probably the Bucs Super Bowl, since the NFL was hellbent on having a normal season even if it meant playing games on a Tuesday afternoon.
I still consider all of those titles legit. These certainly weren’t memorable championships, but they all required a championship level of sacrifice from those involved. NBA players had to live in a fucking bubble for weeks on end. In Florida. Ew. NFL players had to play an entire season in empty stadiums. And I think NHL players staged their entire 2020 season in Svalbard; I can’t remember. The point is, all of that shit was hard. That MLB season was the jankiest of the lot in my opinion. But I’ll still give the Dodgers credit for that title because they decided to have a superspreader party right there on the field afterward. That takes courage. Of a sort.
That means that, while we can’t all admit* those titles were bogus, we have crossed the threshold where you can affix your own personal asterisk to these titles if you hate any of the teams involved. As a record-keeping method, asterisks are stupid and useless. But for HATERS, they’re a necessary tool in the arsenal. If you hate the Lakers, and you probably do, you’re never recognizing that bubble championship. That’s your right, and I’ll always respect it. Unless you try to asterisk my team if/when it wins something big. Then you can eat a dick.
(*NOTE: I do not like phrasing your opinion as “We can all admit it, right?” because you didn’t check with the rest of us before speaking on our behalf.)
Charlie:
Drew.
Drew.
DREW! Five ketchup packets on a burger?!? Wtf??!?
Let’s give everyone else some background here. Two weeks ago, I wrote a review of Hyphy Burger for SFGATE, in which I declared it the finest burger I’d ever eaten. But no one gave a shit about that takeaway. All readers cared about was the video from that story that showed me emptying five packets of ketchup onto my burger, which they deemed to be a party foul. I may as well have been wearing that Chopped polo while I was doing the deed. I’m not gonna fight back here. I’m gonna take my food shaming like a man. Also, I’m gonna keep putting a shitload of ketchup on my burger, because I do nothing half-assed.
This scandal—call it “The Ketchup Files”—would have been somewhat minimized had Hyphy Burger had a ketchup pump instead of those tinyass packets. I’m not criticizing the restaurant here. They could have served my cheeseburger in a toilet and it still would have been my top burger of all time. I just rue the continued existence of the ketchup packet when superior dispensation methods are now readily available. If you’re like me and enjoy drowning your fast food in ketchup, the packet situation will always remain a thorn in your side. That’s why I plan on installing a pump in my own home. I used to dream of owning my own kegerator, now I dream of this. My life is very exciting.
Dane:
Throwing a home run ball back onto the field is bullshit, right?
Not if it deprives Zach Hample of adding one more ball to his memorabilia pile. Otherwise yeah, I don’t think opposing ballplayers become emotionally distraught just because Frank in the bleachers didn’t want to keep their home run ball. Mookie Betts isn’t gonna be like, “Wow, these fans in Chicago mean business!” It’s a home run ball. Keep it and sell it on eBay, hand it to a nearby kid, or get caught on the Jumbotron gifting it to your road beef. No one else gives a shit.
Also, I would probably throw a ball back if everyone else around me was doing it. This is because I’m secretly a follower, not a leader.
Barry (not Petchesky):
Is a potato chip a French fry? It's a potato fried in oil and then salted! It doesn’t matter if it comes in a bag and not in a restaurant!!! Chik-fil-A sells waffle fries, which are just newly formed Ruffles! I got 50 bucks on this.
Then you’d better get ready to fork that money over, my friend. Because chips are only fries in the UK. In this country, if I ask you for fries and you hand me a bag of Lay’s, I’m legally entitled to set your house on fire. In fact, I get quietly testy if a snack bar only serves chips with food and not fries. You took the cheap way out, snack bar man. I bet you don’t have a ketchup pump, either. Pathetic.
Greg:
What’s the best place to work in prison? Library? Kitchen? Gang enforcer? Laundry?
I’d prefer to work in the prison’s theater company, keeping the production schedule robust and making sure my leads hit their marks right on cue. By night, I think I’d enjoy taking a shift in the prison’s hookah lounge, refilling pipes with scented apple tobacco for the boys and what not. That would be quite enjoyable, really. Ooh, and I could captain the warden’s private yacht!
(The actual best job is black market kingpin; The Shawshank Redemption taught me that every prison has one of those, and that they’re widely beloved by every member of the jail’s population.)
John:
Last week I wiped out on my bike in the forest preserve. Good news: No broken bones. Bad news: I managed to get myself a pretty healthy case of poison ivy. Normally I would suck up and deal with it like a man. And by "like a man," I mean bitching and whining to everyone about how much I hate poison ivy. But I have a date in a few days, and there is a non-zero chance that things might get interesting. Should I tell her up front, before the date? I've been hoping that things would clear up before the date, but we're still at the 'nasty crusty healing blister' portion of the program. Context: We've gone out a few times before, we like each other, and no, things haven't gotten interesting... yet.
You gotta tell your date, especially since you guys have been out before. You have a rapport, and you like each other. There’s no need to act like you’re in a sitcom by hiding your rash behind a novelty-sized Snoopy Band-Aid or some shit. Besides, your accident makes for a good conversation. You tell her you got got by the dreaded poison ivy, she goes oooh lemme see, and then you both have a laugh over it. Then you have sex. It’s just that easy!
By the way, my wife goes out of her way to warn us about poison ivy anytime we go anywhere that has ample vegetation. And if she sees poison ivy, she will bring us to it, like a trail guide, and then warn us six more times to avoid it. None of us have ever gotten poison ivy. In fact, I might be one of those special folks who is naturally resistant to urushiol: the chemical in that plant that makes human skin go buck wild. This will never stop my wife from staying on red alert for leaves of three. If there’s poison ivy the South Pole, she’ll know about it. Ditto sharks.
HALFTIME!
Michael:
Are you impressed by someone wearing a nice and/or expensive watch? Is that still a thing or a flex grown men try to do? I know people spend loads of money on clothes but those are easy to see. Spending thousands on a watch the vast majority of people won't recognize, or even notice, seems like lunacy. I'm perfectly happy with my $100 Casio I've worn for like 10 years.
A watch is an accessory, which means that a nice one only works if it’s part of a whole look. I like wearing my Swiss Army watch on nice occasions, because it [John Witherspoon voice] coordinates with my wedding ring, my suit, and my freshly groomed face. Wearing it with my day-to-day athleisure ensemble renders it moot. That would be true even if my watch were a $75,000 Rolex. Any grown man who thinks a watch alone can turn heads is one who has zero self-awareness. And probably watches UFC.
Pete:
What’s your plan for all of your shit after you die? The reason I ask is that I’m cleaning out my in-laws’ house and have found the typical silver sets, heirlooms (no value to anyone else), and even a handwritten note from Elvis that I’m authenticating. My own plan is to purge beforehand.
We actually just threw out most of my dad’s former belongings a few months ago. Turns out the old man was quite the hoarder, so we had to chuck hundreds of burned CDs (remember those?), CD-ROMs, outdated reference books, and 500 metric tonnes of office clutter. My mom had been waiting for decades to get rid of all that shit, so this was not a sad housecleaning. My siblings and I unearthed a few things worth keeping, an original LP of Sgt. Pepper’s foremost among them, but otherwise we were more than happy to dumpster all of that shit so that none of us would have to deal with it ever again.
That goes for my mom’s house, too. She’s downsizing to a townhouse because she doesn’t want us kids having to deal with the original house after she dies. This is one of the nicest things you can do for both your descendants and for yourself. I’m not gonna go into the finer details of estate law here, but suffice it to say that everything goes much smoother after you die if you’ve already taken care of your proverbial affairs. Fighting over mommy and daddy’s shit isn’t just for NFL owners; normal people get into these scraps too, even if they never intend to. My mom doesn’t want that to happen to me, my brother, and my sister. So most everything has had to go. Without dad around, those objects had lost their magic anyway. We didn’t need any of it to remember him. In fact, we all pissed and moaned that he never bothered to throw any of this crap out himself.
So I’ll try to get ahead of all that before I die. My wife and I have a will, which takes probate courts out of our posthumous busywork. And I’ll happily go Marie Kondo on all of my possessions when the time comes. My own office is just as cluttered as my dad’s once was; I’ll clear that out. I’ll donate all of my Vikings shit to Goodwill, I’ll sell any piece of furniture that’s not my beloved chair, I’ll stuff 800 books into the Little Free Library down the street, and I’ll log out of my Netflix account. Oh, and my wife and I aren’t requiring a burial. All we’ll leave are the essentials, because that’s all that anyone ever needs.
Isaac:
In a couple weeks, I will be moving in with my girlfriend and her two kids (ages nine and six) from a previous marriage. It’s very exciting, and we are all looking forward to starting a new chapter in our relationship. She and her ex have a healthy 50/50 coparenting setup, and I have met him a couple times and things have been cordial. But I am still nervous about transitioning from being “mom’s boyfriend who is around a bunch” to “father figure who lives with us 50% of the time.” I would welcome whatever insight you’d be able to provide!
This is tricky, because I have no experience as a stepparent. My kids are mine, which means they don’t get to play the “You’re not my dad!!!” card anytime we get into a fight. However, my brother is a capable stepdad to two grown boys, in part because I think he understands his role in their universe. He’s not their dad dad, but he makes himself available to them if they need help with anything, he stays out of their proverbial way otherwise, and he’s good to their mother. Kids can have more than one good male role model in their lives (in fact, they should), so step-parenthood is a chance to make yourself into one. It’s not that high a bar to clear. Just don’t be a prick.
Pete:
My daughter is seven and loves to read, which is awesome. She likes to read by herself, but tolerates it when I read to her, if she finds the book interesting. I chose The Hobbit, and so far, she loves it. What was the first, non-animal book you read to your kids?
The Harry Potter books, which allowed me to test out every British accent in my repertoire. I loved that shit. Also, I read The Hobbit as an adult and was let down by it. Never watch the original Lord of the Rings movies before you read a word of Tolkien, otherwise you’ll be ruined for it.
Email of the week!
Thomas:
Sometimes, on a medium length drive, when we are getting nearer to our destination, but there has been no traffic, I will notice that the GPS time estimate is MUCH longer than would be expected from where we are. For example, on a two-hour drive home on a recent Sunday, I noticed when we were 20 miles from home that the time estimate was 50 minutes. This is not good! I knew immediately there was traffic up ahead. As we got closer and the traffic had not hit and the time estimate continued getting even more disparate, my anxiety only grew. Sure enough, when we got about 10 miles from home, we ran into significant traffic. I live in San Francisco, and so the traffic was on the Bay Bridge, where traffic is common but not a foregone conclusion. But this traffic was particularly bad. Those 10 minutes or so when I realized we'd be running into that traffic, it felt like walking to your own execution. Brutal.
As someone who drove 15 hours over the weekend, this felt all too real.
