Even when it is working on your brain at full strength, summer does not feel endless so much as it does abundant. It ends, it has to end, but when you are in an appropriately summery cast of mind it just feels like there is enough of it to make that ending feel abstract. The weeks sort of roll over without seeming to add up; things are happening, but nothing of any great consequence; it is the third week of July for an entire month. And then, abruptly but inevitably, you are staring down the barrel of Labor Day, and the resumption of all the things that, while they were never really gone, had previously been so easy to forget. You already know that there is no way around this. And if you are familiar with that feeling, the sort of overlap between the last days of dazed inconsequence and the increasingly less faint intimations of consequence's return, then you will recognize the energy on this week's episode.
There is, to be clear, plenty of summer stuff in the monitors. I talked about my recent family time in Eagles Country, the qualified do's and extreme don'ts of South Jersey Shore flag culture, and the lessons I learned during my trip to the Wildwood Boardwalk with Dan McQuade. Even here, though, there were some bittersweet notes. Drew recorded shortly before dropping his eldest child off for her freshman year at college, I recorded shortly after encountering the deranged and inspiring range of Donald Trump-themed T-shirts and other cultural derangements at the boardwalk, and as such we were both in less carefree moods than we had been in recent weeks. And so we talked about those Donald Pump T-shirts, but also what they mean and a little bit about Trump's strange status as a living meme; we talked about Drew's pride in his excellent daughter launching from the nest, but also about what was a difficult summer for his family. We were having fun, but there was some stuff on our minds.
And then we got into the politics stuff. Drew and to a slightly lesser degree I have both been in a much better mood since the presidential election flipped from a grim mummy-vs.-mummy trudge into something more like a referendum on whether voters actually want there to be a future or not, but again some of that late-summer unease crept into the proceedings. We talked about the Democratic convention and the Democrats un-fucking their electoral and rhetorical approach, the use and abuse of the concept of The Middle Class and the strange illusions of conservative politics in that regard, and the way that class is discussed and misunderstood in political media. And, after the break, we talked some about Israel's ongoing war of annihilation in Gaza and the shadow that horror has cast on the Democrats' attempt to build a campaign around joy and optimism.
And then, after a classic Drewbear pivot, we were back to sports. We celebrated the new unlocked achievements of the 40/40 version of Shohei Ohtani and discussed the experience of trying and failing to be reasonable as a fan, which is something that I have been dealing with of late w/r/t a Mets team that has pretty much met my expectations while still continuing to piss me off. I gave Drew an opportunity to talk about how he plans to approach being insane about the Vikings this year, and he took it. At that point, this light pre-long weekend episode was already nearly an hour, and so we extracted just one question from the Funbag. It was about being extra nice when you're drunk, and I think provided a nice closing note. The world is still out there, and we are all about to be back in it. It's how summer works. It felt like the right thing to do to greet that reality with a big drunk hug.
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