As a general rule, I do not relisten to episodes of the podcast. I spend all day hearing my own voice, inside my head and out, and the idea of going back for more me is ... well, I was going to write horrifying, which seems harsh. I will just say it's not what I want. I would honestly love less me, if that option were available. But of all the episodes of the podcast that I have not relistened to, the one that we put out last November, in which Drew and the excellent sports-and-politics newsletter writer Denny Carter tried to get me pumped up for the election, is the one I have not relistened to the most. Not because it wasn't a good episode—I remember it as having a good number of laughs and an ideal 50/50 split between politics and not politics—but for reasons that are very obvious. We are, of course, wrong all the damn time on this podcast; it is something like our brand, give or take Talking About Lunch and sudden monologues about the Minnesota Vikings. But some ways of being wrong sting more than others.
We had Denny back this week for another 50/50 episode, with the first half of it amounting to all three of us trying to work out how we're dealing with all this. I have written a decent number of words about what happened and how, and how bad it has gotten, as has Denny, and while we talked a bit about how we approach writing honestly about such incredibly dispiriting and infuriating stuff, we mostly stuck to our respective coping processes. It's a lot of work, as you have likely noticed. I wouldn't say that we solved the challenge of managing the feeling of falling that comes with living within the slippage between what is legal/allowed and what is actually happening, and more broadly, living in a moment of such astonishing cruelty. But there is not really any solving that, at least at this moment, and so we talked about how we deal, and what we owe each other and ourselves, and how we're reckoning with the end of the only political reality that we've known and the fact that whatever comes next is not going to be like what came before. There's some reason for hope in that, and there's some hope in this conversation, too.
But I wouldn't necessarily blame those of you looking for more distraction in their Distraction for banging it to the 30-minute mark. That's where we take stock of the absolute collapse of the Mavericks, for what I am tempted to say is one last time. We've talked about this a lot since the Mavericks dealt Luka Doncic away in an instantly ill-fated deal that has gotten worse and worse in the weeks since, although in our defense it just keeps getting worse and there is so much to talk about. We discussed the nascent protest movement surrounding the Mavs since the Luka trade, tried to put the instant failure of this gambit into context with teams from other sports—it's basically the Deshaun Watson Browns, almost, and no one else—and considered The Adelson Experience in its totality. From there we discussed the right and the wrong way for a team to get worse, the challenge of ethical rebuilding and the obligation to try, and the New Orleans Saints as an example of how it can be even more annoying for a team to refuse to rebuild in defiance of any long-term consideration.
After that, it's nothing but Funbag. A reader invited us to discuss Doug Gottlieb's amazingly purgatorial Grim Men's Experience as a first-year head coach at UW-Green Bay, and we met that challenge with a great deal of vigor. A question about giving up stuff that makes you sick went in a number of directions, from the horror of living without sugar to my unwillingness to learn what nitrates even are, to a conversation between Bill Maher and that jarringly damp billionaire guy who is trying to reverse his own aging process that led, dreadfully, to a conditional Handing It To Bill Maher. I ended the episode by talking about our visit to the iconic Miami eatery Joe's Stone Crab, imagining its grand and charming spaces during the smoking-in-restaurants era, and considering the possibility that some things can actually get better. Every little bit of hope helps. Ideally, as at Joe's, you'd get some hash-brown potatoes and a little ramekin of creamed spinach with it.
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