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 crutches, eye black, the wave, potluck, and more.
This'll be a more expedient Funbag than usual, given that I'm spending all week at the Defector offsite meetings, where we'll make subtle tweaks to our blueprint for global domination. The Jamboroo will also be lighter than usual. But don't worry, our commenters are adept at taking discussions from here and running with them. So join the scrum down below and the full-length Bag/Roo will be back before you know it.
Your letters:
Nick:
I have recently been diagnosed with an acoustic neuroma (benign brain tumor) that was found in an MRI following some severe vertigo episodes. Apparently these are very rare for someone my age (30) and, given the near certainty of its continued growth, it's better to do something about it now rather than later. The likely path forward is brain surgery to remove it, which will very likely leave me completely deaf on the one side. As someone who went abruptly deaf while you were relatively young (yes I read all your books), how do I get myself emotionally prepared to walk into the hospital with perfect hearing and walk out with none (on one side)?
You don't. The hardest lesson I learned this decade is that empathy has defined boundaries. There are times when you can only imagine what it's like to be in someone else's shoes (future you included), and that imagination remains woefully insufficient. Enter your 40s and you start experiencing things that, truly, other people will not be able to understand.
I was not ready to go deaf. Even if I had been warned beforehand, I still wouldn't have been ready. I had to go deaf first, and then spend years living as a deaf person, to get the idea of it. This is because my wife and kids are not deaf, and just plugging your ears for two minutes isn't enough to grasp the impact of having your ears plugged (one, in my case) forever. "Live and learn" is the most annoyingly true of all annoyingly true clichés. You have to be in the shit to know it.
The good news is that you DO come to know it eventually. Nick, going deaf will fuck with your head at the outset, but then time and experience will teach you to manage it. You'll learn that crowd noise wears you out quick. You'll learn that some restaurants have friendlier acoustics than others. And maybe you'll learn that getting a cochlear implant is a massive help. But I can't prepare you for any of that, same as I can't prepare you for jumping out of an airplane. You just gotta take the leap.
Also, I'm VERY sorry you have this thing, Nick. This may be controversial but I am anti-brain injuries. Not afraid to be cancelled over saying it. Please get better, and all my best to you and yours.
Cliff:
My wife recently began taking Wegovy, except she hasn't actually told me so. Without passing judgment, was this something you kept secret from your wife, or did she drive you to the pharmacy for that score?
I told her in advance, although I was definitely afraid to, because I feared her judging me for it. This kind of trepidation is baked into the American experience, to the point that virtually every pro I talked to about Ozempic and other semaglutide drugs said that the number-one reason their patients initially refused to take these drugs was because they weren't the "right way" to lose weight. If you didn't go on a shitty diet and punish yourself with 10-mile runs every day, did you EARN the right to lose weight? This is a stupid line of thinking, but it's endemic among the tens of millions of Americans who struggle with their weight. You become so sensitive about it that you can't even have an honest talk about it with those you love the most.
We're not going to break this stigma overnight, but I can already sense (Peggy Noonan voice) that we're on our way to doing so. I went on Wegovy because another parent freely disclosed that they were on it, which made it more okay in my brain. I told my wife I was considering it and she said, "Whatever works." Then I got the drug and used it and was like oh my god this is definitely okay, and immediately cast off any lingering shame I may have had about it. I won't be alone, because the gold rush for Ozempic is well underway. Word's out. In five years, everyone will be on this shit.
But for now, some people will still feel shame. Again, that's normal. No one wants everyone else to think there's something wrong with them, even though we all have something wrong with us. More living and learning. BO-RING.
Luke:
I just noticed during this Chiefs/49ers game that Tom Brady calls the red zone the "red area." It's very annoying. Is he banned from using "red zone" now that he's an owner?
I wouldn't put it past the NFL to issue such an order, but since every other color guy says "red zone," I'm guessing that Brady calls it the "red area" just because he's weird like that. Speaking of red areas, have you SEEN my hemorrhoids lately? A bull would charge these fucking things!
Sam:
Which word have you written most often in your career, ignoring prepositions, conjunctions, or articles? Are there nouns, verbs, and adjectives that you use the most? In the probably millions of words you've written across countless blogs and a bunch of books, is there a word you find yourself using constantly?
We're ignoring curse words for this too, yeah? Because I'd have the most predictable answer on earth if that were the case. But let's work clean for Sam's question, because he's clearly not looking for me to scream FUCK and SHIT for the millionth time.
Every writer has their go-to words, and every writer knows exactly what those words are. I've had it come up in conversation with my peers as a matter of routine. You could conduct a quantitative study of my word use (using AI! What could go wrong!) that gave you a definitive answer, but you don't read this column to be assigned homework.
Besides, I can name my biggest overused word off the top of my head, and it's "just." I just use that word all the fucking time. It's adobo: a handy seasoning for virtually any dish you'd like to make. It's a great adverb for cheap emphasis, AND it's a quietly hifalutin adjective that you can shrewdly use to sound like a political thought leader. Just the best word ever! Here are a few more words that I need a trial separation from:
- Etc. (Barry is the one who actually warned me that I was puncuating every list with this)
- Crazy
- Really
- Very
- God
- Entire
- Whole
- Occasionally
- Incredible
- "Well,"
- "Of course,"
This is a partial list. I have an even more cluttered well than JUST that. I don't freak out over using this word or that too much. It happens when you have a career that spans millions of words. You develop a writing voice, and that voice will inevitably have familiar beats. As long as your copy doesn't suck shit in the macro, it's perfectly normal.
Chris:
On Wednesday night, there's no football. Every Thursday night game almost definitely will suck, but if it were on right now I'd watch it. What to do? How about splitting the NFL into a Sunday/Monday conference and a Wednesday/Thursday conference.
Do NOT give Roger Goodell ideas like this. I know you mean well, but if the Ginger Hammer ever gets a chance to split this league like a growing stock, he'll take it. Then you and I will be stuck with every Super Bowl being a showdown between the NFL Raw and NFL Smackdown champions. I don't want that.
In fact (add "in fact" to that list above), my chief worry as the fan of a team that hasn't won a Super Bowl is that the NFL will be bastardized so thoroughly over the course of the next few decades that a Super Bowl title won't mean as much as it did before. That sounds impossible, given the NFL's current stranglehold on American culture. But what if MBS over in Saudi Arabia decides to start up his own league, and then offers Patrick Mahomes and other superstars $1 billion each to join up? Saudi Arabia just bought all of professional golf (lawsuits pending), so it's only a matter of time before the Crown Prince either tries to buy an NFL team, or gets the stiffarm from Goodell and company and starts up LIV Football. Then my team will finally win the Super Bowl but no one will give a shit—me included—because all of the best players decided to join the Riyadh Battlers. They can ruin college football all they like, but I'd prefer that pro football remain insulated from all of that horseshit.
HALFTIME!
Shane:
Seems we're getting kinda goofy with the eye black in football. Some guys just do one eye in artistic ways. Some write phrases like "KILL EVERYBODY" on them. I understand it's flair and swag, but surprised some of the old football guard aren't ruffled.
The old guard is surely ruffled by this, but you'll never know about it because CBS fired them all before this season started. Also, football players have been fucking with eye black since before the turn of the century. Painting crosses on your face was NOT Tua Tagovailoa's idea. He cribbed that from some other Tebow out there. Thou shalt not steal, my child…
Personally speaking, I don't give a shit what players do with eye black. Because I was an O-lineman, I never had to (got to) wear eye black when I played, and I still wish I'd gotten the chance. Teenage me still believes that eye black looks extremely cool and will get you girls. So if some enterprising NFL player out there wants to do himself up like Paul Stanley every time he takes the field, I'm not gonna ding him for taking advantage. You gotta express yourself.
John:
What's the protocol for "the wave" at sporting events? I was at a college hockey game this weekend and the student section got the whole crowd to do the wave mid-way through the second period in a close game but with the home team down 2-1. This is crazy, right? I thought the only time it's acceptable to do the wave is to rub it in the opponent's face when you are up a billion points on your rival with no chance of them coming back? Is the wave now a rally cheer?
There's a protocol for doing the wave? I thought fans just did it when they were bored.
Brian:
What's the most outlandish thing you could bring to a potluck that people would still enjoy? My answer has traditionally been a whole rotisserie chicken but I recently attended a potluck and someone brought a bunch of Olive Garden salad and breadsticks. It had a real audacity to it, but it went faster than everything else. What do you got?
Oooh, I'd house some Olive Garden at the church picnic. It's always darkly funny when everyone brings some lovingly homemade pasta salad to a cookout and then someone else rolls in with a stack of Dominos boxes and wins the buffet instantly. Pizza guy cheated! He didn't cook that pizza! WHAT OF JENNY'S RAISIN ROUNDIES?!
(My wife is a preschool teacher, and every fall that preschool hosts a potluck cookout. I used to get hyped for that thing every year, because another parent always brought Popeye's. I'd stake out the table waiting for that chicken to make an appearance, and then I'd strike with a quickness.)
But bringing popular fast food is more canny than outlandish. The ballsier move is to bring something that you know everyone will attack but doesn't fit the theme of the event at all. That's right, I'm talking about Entenmann's coffee cake. Bring that to a Super Bowl party and see how many confused looks you get before it's reduced to crumbs half a second later.
Matthew:
Here's an idea to get the NFLPA to agree to an 18-game season: No player can play in more than 16 games a season. It would make for some interesting coaching decisions. Do you sit WR1 and QB1 on the same day? Do you sit QB1 when you play Jacksonville or New England? Plus it would have the positive side effect of totally screwing with fantasy football leagues.
OK, but I don't enjoy having my fantasy team screwed. I lived through the double bye-week experiment and it made fantasy football a death march all October and November. Goofing on fantasy players for enjoying fantasy is tired shit. And I'm not just picking on Matthew when I say that. Fantasy Smarm is all over the internet, and I don't care for it.
Back to your question, though. Let's assume that the NFL goes to 18 games (because it will) and re-installs the double bye-week format (because it will). When that happens, the league won't have to add in that "You can only play 16 games" wrinkle because smart teams will take it upon themselves to practice load management. It's already started in earnest with the addition of the 17th game. "If you can play through the pain, you don't risk injuring it further" is one of the biggest lies in this sport, and certain teams are already holding out injured guys an extra week (even two) to make sure those guys don't end up right back on the injured list. They'll do that more often with an 18th game, using injury designations even more liberally than they do now to essentially give important players a personal bye week. This will be a scandal to the ESPN car wash and to the ESPN car wash only.
Walker:
Can I drink a completely non-alcoholic beer at my desk job? If it's a 0.0 it's basically a malt seltzer, and I might enjoy a crisp one on a hot afternoon. But I still think I would get called into HR, or at least get an AA pamphlet dropped off on my desk. How can we break this taboo?
I guess if you drank one with lunch every day, you'd go from being suspicious to being Walker The Guy Who Drinks O'Douls For Some Reason eventually. But then you still run the risk of having certain colleagues (tight-asses) silently disapprove. So my advice to you is to bring your near-beer to work, but then drink it in the shitter. It can be your little afternoon secret. I finally found an N/A sour I like (made by Uncool), so I'll join you in the next stall over. We can have a sober toilet kegger!
Michael:
My high school graduating class's 10th anniversary reunion was last month. I missed it. I live four states away and work weekends, making traveling costs tough to justify if I head home for any period of time less than a week. Pictures of the event indicate that maybe 20 people showed up out of our class of just over 200. With social media and cell phones thrown into the mix, is the high school reunion item #538,092 on the ever-growing list of things millennials allegedly killed? And, if so, should it stay dead?
I went to my 25th high school reunion and it'll be the last one I attend. Pretty sure I told this story before, but I'm in a rush so whatever. None of my closest friends from school were there, and everyone else was a middle-aged parent looking to network. I may as well have been at fundraiser. I go skiing every winter with my crew from back then (most of them were a class behind me), and that's all the reunion I need. I don't need to go back to any official reunion and see who's still hot because A) no one is anymore, B) I'm married, and C) I can just look up decade-old photos of them on Facebook, where they still got it going on. If millennials kill reunions for good, I won't gripe.
Email of the week!
Nick:
I was just listening to the latest episode of The Distraction and Boston Pizza came up again. I wanted to give a little more background about Boston Pizza's place in the culture here in Canada: As you and Roth guessed, it's among the most mid pizza you can find (in a country where good pizza is admittedly scarce).
The vibe is also remarkably mid. I recently went with my wife and my in-laws after not stepping foot in a Boston Pizza for roughly 20 years. In that 20 years, society has changed. I've changed. Boston Pizza has stubbornly refused to change. It's a daycare for suburban dads who are just a bit scared of gay people, but where you can also bring your kids when you have custody for the weekend and don't feel like cooking. It's like Chili's without the edge. It's how I imagine, like, what Scranton is like. On the menu, there's a note that literally says, "We don't serve craft beer but if you ask your server, we may be able to find something in the back." They *want* you to know that they're suspicious. But you can get homemade kettle chips on the side, so there's that.
I do like homemade chips.
