A few times per day, my wife calls me on the phone from the front of the apartment. Wherever I am in the germ chamber to which I am currently confined while recovering from my second bout with the honestly no-longer novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2—there are only a few places, although I try to mix it up to keep things fresh—and whatever I am doing in that moment, I am very glad to hear from her. I'm getting better more or less as scheduled, which means I'm more bored than anything else. Bored and embarrassed, weirdly; an online friend who also currently has it compared getting COVID-19 in 2023 to just now starting to watch Tiger King. I would have said, before listening to this week's episode of the podcast, that beyond some mild "getting weird" and a striking uptick in my jazz intake—I am either locked in here with my college-era CaseLogics or they are locked in here with me, depending upon your perspective—that I was holding up pretty well. I now think maybe that is wrong.
I mean, I'm fine, I'm improving, I can uh definitely pace around our little office/guest bedroom for four days and not completely lose it. But after listening to this loose n' goofy pre-vacation episode, which Drew and I recorded last week before he and his family headed off to the beach, I am aware of how just a few days away from the usual dumb shit has spun me out a little bit. This is the power of an episode this heavy on Sandwich Chat: it really does make you miss your favorite sandwiches, and to a lesser extent everything else that's out there in the world.
This would be the natural spot for me to say that there's More Than Sandwich Chat in this episode, and while that is true there is also honestly a lot of sandwich chat in this one. Drew and I discuss our favorite summer foods, and ballpark foods, and our respective idiotic young person lunches gone by, and while none of these are entirely sandwich chat, they're all absolutely close enough to qualify. There really is some other stuff in there, though, although it's very much in the vein of what you tend to hear on our goof-mode two-hander episodes. Drew talks about the Dad Humor bits he can no longer do; I talk about the dad-joke stuff I do despite not actually being a person-of-child. The literal power of friendship comes up and is addressed in a fairly straight-faced way. I tell a story about Eric Gagné that has no real point. That kind of stuff.
But the heart of the episode, and more literally the back half or so of this one, belongs to the Funbag. We field listener questions about the dumb songs we sing to our spouses and pets about the house, and then respond to voicemails about euphonious sports names—I somehow made this about chance encounter with a Tony Twist jersey in a scuzzy bar that I used to go to—and '80s masculine aesthetics as embodied by that era's MLB closers and, in a shocking finale, the after-the-fact qualms that result from dating a demi-sociopath. It's a journey, in short, and I guess given that I am not really "leaving" this room very much right now I suppose I appreciated that. Mostly, though, it just made me want to go out and get a sandwich.
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