It is a dangerous thing to hand a couple of middle-aged dorks a blank check on matters of nostalgia. People like that, which in this case is to say Drew and I, will absolutely fill in that check, cash it, and then blow the proceeds on hour after debauched hour of talking about NFL On TNT–era punt returners and the situational relievers of Barack Obama's first term. This is not so much a risk as it is an extremely dorky certainty—Chekhov's gun, more or less, but the gun is in this case a surprisingly detailed and comprehensive memory of Az-Zahir Hakim.
It was with that in mind that we introduced the Let's Remember A Guy segment to the podcast, and it is with that in mind that, this week, we announced that we are retiring it. In what is otherwise a classic goof-around two-hander, that is something like the big news.
We're retiring it from the podcast, that is, not from our own personal day-to-day praxis. Nothing on heaven or earth, in this life or the next, is going to stop me from remembering Bilal Powell. That's my right, and those are my values. But we thought it wasn't really adding much to the podcast at this point—the one exception I can really think of is a time when Albert got really mad about Antawn Jamison—and at some point asking like David Grann what he remembers about Eddie Lee Wilkins is just time that we could and probably should be using to ask him about something else. Some of this was the result of the complicated Wheel Of Guys experience at our live show earlier this month, which we recapped a bit in this episode, and some of it is just the sense that we need to keep things fresh.
That is especially true because, as the rest of the episode bears out, we are categorically and completely dedicated to continuing to do all the other goofy stuff that we do in our two-hander episodes. This episode has all of that, and in generous helpings. We've got Drew breaking down his lifelong struggle with being a Nervous Pisser and how a surprising medical intervention has helped with that, and you've also got me helpfully adding "doing a number two, or a number three" to that discourse. You have Drew chastising me for not using the phrase "hand job" and me refusing to take the note. I guess this is something like "the usual."
But mostly what you have in this episode is us running through what's going in the world and our lives and getting kind of upset about the sort of stuff that usually upsets us. In this instance, it's Steve Garvey's hilariously misbegotten Senate run in California and the enhanced fuckery levels of American politics, and Rudolph Giuliani's sozzled endgame and the strange afterlife of American public figures, and somehow also Ben Simmons's perplexing current state and the tragedy of The Yips. And, for one last time—or, anyway, the last time that we'll call it by this particular name—it's us remembering some guys. Some of this we did on our own—again, if you leave a microphone on in front of us for long enough, we are going to talk about Najeh Davenport and Onterrio Smith and their respective legacies, and this cannot and will never change. Some of that was in response to a question in this week's Funbag, and and some of it was probably just force of habit. The segment is dead, but the lifestyle endures. The uh cosmic ballet continues.
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