If it is true that the episodes of The Distraction that are just Drew and me are a little bit looser than the average, it is also relative. I believe that it is true, for reasons that mostly resolve to us being comfortable with each other and not feeling compelled to try to "be normal" or "act less feral" around a guest, but even the goofiest pre-vacation mess-around episodes still have some order to them. And this episode, which is once again just the two of us, is in my opinion actually pretty substantive and wide-ranging. It also begins with us picking up a decently heated dispute that began before we started recording when Drew was (in my opinion) unnecessarily tendentious and legalistic re: the definition of "hand stuff" as it relates to Rep. Lauren Boebert's instantly infamous date at Beetlejuice: The Musical. This is what I'm talking about.
But we got past it! We did not necessarily get to a consensus, and I still take some issue with what seems to me an excessively persnicketty distinction vis-a-vis pants, but we got past it. There was a lot to talk about, the vast majority of it having to do with actual sports, and for most of the episode that is what we talked about. This includes, but is not limited to:
- A discussion of the ethics and aesthetics and latent smarmery surrounding showing bad football injuries on television
- Me talking a bit about the Giants, uh, inspiring comeback against literally the Arizona Cardinals, and how it made me feel. I may have also falsely accused both the Giants and the Jets of eating a lot of parm-style sandwiches, which they almost certainly do not do. They probably eat regular football-player foods, and not New Jersey Foods.
- The NBA's simultaneously overwrought and underbaked plan to stop the kind of load-management goofery and strategic player shutdowns that infuriate the league's broadcast partners, when the obvious solution is to just make the season shorter, which they will never do. I got a little upset during this part, and am getting a little upset again now. Some of that might be the list format, though.
So let's try it normal again, I guess. My parm-related detour notwithstanding, the two topics on which I think we engaged most intensely were decently disparate. The first of those is the supercharged spectacle and surprisingly entertaining reality of the Coach Prime Administration at the University of Colorado. While we talked a bit about the team, which has been spunky and fun in ways that exceeded basically every expectation so far, most of our conversation was an attempt to make some sense of the alternately giddy and charged Deion Discourse. It's not media criticism, exactly, and it's only sort of about college football as a game that gets played on Saturdays, but our consideration of college football culture as the strange, seething, multiply coded thing that it is went in some decently unexpected directions. I wound up describing a pickup truck; Drew parsed the finer points of Coach Prime's Buffs as an unprecedentedly potent heel presence.
This is not outwardly similar to Elon Musk and his latest round of apocalyptic fuckery at Twitter, and the conversation that we had about that topic was not really all that similar beyond the fact that both of us got all worked up about both. My feelings on Musk-mode Twitter, and its latest grim throes, are a matter of public record, and while I surprised myself by debuting an Elon imitation, I don't imagine that many of my points about Musk in particular or the Heroes Of Capitalism genre of hagiography in general will come as a surprise to anyone who has read those posts. But while there is more personality in the most tossed-off Deion Sanders promo than is evident in Elon Musk's entire public life, there were some commonalities in our consideration of the spectacle industry that has whipped both up into figures even more outsized than their already-quite-outsized personalities would suggest was even possible.
An especially free-associative Guy Remembering session gave way to the Funbag, where the questions were rather jarringly me-oriented. I did my best with a question about where to eat in Acadia, although given my particular lived experience in that area I felt much more confident in shouting out the Ellsworth, Maine, Dairy Queen; Drew's answer was much more useful. We also spoke about our experiences running into listeners/readers in the wild (reliably delightful), and a Guy-centric celebrity sighting I enjoyed while in Los Angeles. It's a lot of podcast for just two people, or two people with the occasional cameo from our producer, but we carried it. Next week, we'll have some help. We will not ask that guest about "hand stuff."
We are going to be doing a live Distraction at Littlefield, in Brooklyn, on October 4; if you would like to get tickets for that, you can do so here. And if you would like to subscribe to The Distraction, you can do that through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you might get your podcasts. Feel free to discuss this week's episode in the comments below. Thank you as always for your support.
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