It is strange how normal it has been to work with Dan McQuade during the illness that he wrote about at Defector a few weeks ago. There are some times when he's not available or just not feeling his best, and occasionally he will mention in passing that he is "radioactive," but also he is still around and doing good blogs and getting upset about the Eagles and describing specific episodes of Baywatch Nights and Pacific Blue as the spirit moves him. If he hadn't written about his experience with neuroendocrine cancer over the last year and change, I doubt any reader would have known about it. So it fits that while we talked about his illness and recovery on the podcast this week, we mostly just talked about the stuff we talk about when Dan McQuade is on the podcast.
We began with the heavy stuff, with Dan addressing both his illness and the wonder-working power of public-sector union health insurance plans, and delivering the strongest possible endorsement for morphine. Dan and Drew talked about how work and recovery can work together, and we all considered the ways in which we leverage what's wrong with us into the work we do. And then, after a discussion about the timelines and limits of recovery, Drew hit one of the boldest segues in the history of the podcast and we started talking about Carson Wentz.
Given that Wentz is the starting quarterback of the Vikings for the next month or more, it made sense. And given Dan's personal experience with Wentz in Philadelphia, the conversation was decently illuminating about what Wentz currently can and can't do as a quarterback, what he was once good at, and his singular talent for complaining to the officials. Dan's passionate advocacy for Jalen Hurts becoming more of a complainer, which has been a mainstay of intra-Defector discourse for some time, made its public debut. The Eagles chat that followed, after the break, was both Classic McQuade Stuff and pretty brief; even he has a difficult time getting upset about a team this good. Besides, there was too much other stuff to talk about—the possibility of the Chiefs actually being on the downhill side of their dynasty, the credibility boost of having seen the pre-Fergie Black Eyed Peas in college, and what is and isn't Joe Burrow's fault about his most recent injury. Everyone agrees that turf toe needs a rebranding.
There was also some baseball to discuss, and Dan and I, despite being fans of National League East rivals currently trending in markedly different directions, managed to be acceptably normal about it. The capacity to be totally sick of watching a postseason-bound team and absolute faith in the randomness of October baseball, it turns out, are more powerful unifying forces than all the things that traditionally pull Phillies and Mets fans apart. The Funbag opened things up even further, with office snack discourse, an uncompensated endorsement for Goldfish crackers, a qualified defense of transition lenses, and a consideration of the state of wallet-chain couture and Mark Zuckerberg's creepy Meta glasses. It was, in the end, a perfectly normal and perfectly delightful McQuade episode—a treat in its own right, and an even bigger victory all things considered.
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