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I knew, surely as I knew that I drew breath or that the sun would rise in the morning, that Barry Sanders was a better running back than Emmitt Smith. Teenaged me would insist everybody should just watch them run throughout the 1990s, thinking the disparities between their talent and their opportunities were obvious.

But back then, most football discussions started and stopped with whoever had The Most. Most rings, most wins, most yards. Emmitt had more than Barry, so Emmitt was better. Even the most basic attempt to capture how Barry did more with less--like dividing the yards they'd each gained by the number of times they'd each run--would be dismissed as witchery, spooky numbers concocted by nerds who hadn't been given enough swirlies.

Imagine my joy when twenty-something me discovered Football Outsiders. Founded by Aaron Schatz and staffed by many future peers, colleagues, and friends, FO has been teasing "The Hidden Game Of Football" out of the box score with math, passion, film review, and opinions well informed by all of the above for the last 20 years.

Yesterday, Schatz resigned as Editor-in-Chief.

Ten years ago, at age 31, I had achieved nearly all of my dreams. I was a national NFL columnist for a top-five global sports outlet, with a salary supporting a house in the suburbs, two cars, and a growing menagerie of pets for my wife and our three active kids.

My daily routine was waking up, helping get the kids to school, and writing the best damn football column I could. I'd started writing science-fiction and fantasy short stories on the side, laying the groundwork for a second dream career. In a couple of months, I'd be flown out to a ritzy Manhattan skyscraper overlooking Central Park to meet all my colleagues face-to-face and welcome our new cable-TV overlords.

I thought I was on my way to becoming the next Mitch Albom--or at least the next Mike Tanier.

Instead, the very concept of writing for money online was attacked to the point where I had to go back to a day job before I lost the cars and the house. Turner Sports spent the next decade paring Bleacher Report down to just branding and vibes, which a few months ago made them both easy targets for their new cable-TV overlords.

[CONTENT NOTE: This issue discusses partner abuse, sexual assault, and transphobia]

Two different podcasts recently hit my phone, ricocheted through my ears, and smashed into each other inside of my brain: The latest episode of The American Prospect’s “Left Anchor,” and “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.” from Bari Weiss’s The Free Press. I had no idea the former existed before two of my favorite media critics joined as guests; I had been anticipating the latter in much the same way Damocles anticipated that sword.

As Rowling says in its opening minutes, her Harry Potter books enchant children with wish fulfillment. But they’re also wish-fulfillment for Rowling–who, as I’ve written before, was born with much of what Harry, Ron, and Hermione lacked. And while her characters happily settled down to repeat generational cycles of provincial English life, Rowling struck out for Europe–and returned not long after as a traumatized and destitute single mother, in desperate flight from an abusive ex-husband.

I am a Michigan State Spartan, but I don't want to be #SpartanStrong. I shouldn't have to be.

My heart should be allowed to break for the senseless murder of Brian Fraser, Alexandria Verner and Arielle Anderson, and grievous wounding of five others. I should be able to be shocked that a man with a history of gun crimes and erratic behavior was able to buy another gun and go on a killing spree. To fully express my rage that gun nuts immediately used this tragedy to call for more guns.

I should not have to have spent a night texting with loved ones on lockdown, obsessively refreshing social and messaging apps for read receipts and recent posts. My personal Twitter list of Lansing-centric reporters should not have gone lowkey viral, and I shouldn't have had to constantly remind myself and others of the Breaking News Consumer's Handbook.

I wish I could believe that this is going to mean anything. That the students' powerful Capitol sit-in, and enormous, haunting vigil, will be honored with real change. I wish I could believe that the leaders of a newly-installed Democratic trifecta will be able to back up their words by actually passing the kind of common-sense gun laws an overwhelming majority of Americans support.

NOTE: The ultimate inspiration for this essay, Matt Taibbi, went on Twitter and called it”one of the dumbest things he’s ever read,” which kicked off a whole thing!

So, hello and welcome. If you’d dumb things like this in your inbox every week or so, totally for free, subscribe here:

I had just been cast in my first high-school musical–in the lead role! I was thrilled.

Since the last issue of Gimme Schalter went out, we found out the platform it had been run on will be permanently unplugged in a matter of weeks, Mediaite declared my reaction to Matt Taibbi's first #TwitterFiles drop one of the Internet's "Most Embarrassing," and the Detroit Lions became a legitimate playoff contender.

Meanwhile, I covered the World Cup for FiveThirtyEight, producing three pieces I'm incredibly proud of:

• The U.S. Played To Win Against Iran -- And It Worked

• Kylian Mbappé Is Having A World Cup For The Ages

• You're Not Imagining Things. There's Way More Stoppage Time At This World Cup.

Also meanwhile, I drummed in the pit for Riverwalk Theatre's production of "A Year With Frog And Toad," an extremely cute and fun musical put on by an awesome cast and crew. I had a blast, and it was a hit.

"If this is to be our end, then I would have them make such an end as to be worthy of remembrance."

—Théoden, King of Rohan, Lord of the Mark, Horsemaster, Father of Horse-men, as quoted by Peter Jackson's film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Two Towers"

We all thought last night might have been Twitter's last--and it was one of its best nights ever. After the deadline to check yes or no on Elon Musk's ridiculous internal "extremely hardcore" email passed, reports of mass resignations went up side-by-side with defiant, bittersweet farewell posts by Twitter employees (many collated in this thread):

I know that for many Americans, it’s not easy or convenient to vote. You have to vote anyway.

I know that in many U.S. states, your right to vote is being suppressed on multiple fronts. You have to vote anyway.

I know many people believe their vote won’t matter–just one of the millions all going to the same candidate, or gerrymandered to irrelevance. But local races like school board, judges, and drain commissioner that directly impact your life are frequently decided by triple-, double-, or even single-digit margins. Your vote matters. Vote.

My mother went to Michigan State, as did her father before her. My stepmother also went to Michigan State. My in-laws met at Michigan State, and my wife and her two sisters all followed in their footsteps. I’ve lived my whole life within minutes of the Michigan State campus; most people from around here attended, worked, or works there, or cares about someone who did. For every kind of small business there is, there’s one in town called “Spartan [SMALL BUSINESS].”

So when I was like nine years old, and my babysitter’s older brother showed me some glossy pamphlets boasting about the greatness of the University of Michigan, I saw a golden opportunity to stick it to practically every adult in my life.

Rivalries are fun. They’re a low-stakes way to engage in the kind of senseless tribalism humans usually fight wars over: I wear this color, you wear that one, and when the people wearing my color beat the people wearing yours I get to drink your chocolate milk. Lording it over my parents, teachers, and friends because of our harmless elective affiliations was a hoot.

Before Adult Swim, there was Nick at Nite: Nickelodeon’s post-bedtime programming plan to draw bleary parental eyeballs with re-runs of classic 1950s TV. Baby Boomers were delighted–and 80s babies who tuned in off-hours got a taste of the stuff their parents grew up on.

Around the time I became a parent, Hot Topic started selling T-shirts with old-school Nintendo games on them–and capitalism has been selling our childhoods back to us ever since. From “Stranger Things” to endless re-releases, remakes, reboots, and remasters of all our favorite formative media, GenXers and Xennials are constantly being sold idealized versions of youth.

So we all knew exactly what was happening when Twitter user @wokal_distance called for a return to the simpler, purer, more wholesome days of the 1990s:

A decade before “Shrek” hit theatres, I discovered the incredible tweenage feeling of getting the reference.

I’d just gotten into comic books, and all the cool kids were telling me that I should go back and read the Phoenix Saga. Legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont told the story over many issues: A core character appeared to die in a space-travel accident, but then popped back up with firey new powers and started going by the name “Phoenix.” By the end–spoiler alert–she’d repeatedly died, transformed, and/or come back to life.

Get it? “Phoenix,” like the ancient Greek myth! And she does what phoenixes do! It’s an allusion!

Decaffinated Rainbows (“Decaf”) Schalter was a terrible dog, but a wonderful person.

She was a year or two old when we adopted her; they told us she was so scarred by neglect that she would never play like a regular dog, never act like dogs should act. We realized on the way home from the Adopt-a-thon that her chill vibe was in fact terrified catatonia.

She learned to run and bark and wag and play, but she never got very good at acting like a dog should act.

Like Cindy Lou Who, I was not more than two, flipping through the pages of “Uncle Art’s World of Drawing” on an otherwise unremarkable evening. Suddenly, the black markings beneath the pictures just sort of…snapped into focus.

“Giraffe,” I said. The black markings were letters that formed a word, and the word was name of the animal being drawn on the page. Giraffe. Flip. Lion. Flip. Hippo.

I was reading.

“Well, you did it,” my eldest said in mock frustration a couple of years ago, during the intro of Final Fantasy VII Remake. “You made me nostalgic for stuff from your childhood.”

It’s the ultimate goal of a storyteller: Conveying your love of a story to the next generation. Do it well enough, and those kids will tell their kids. That story you love will outlive your ability to re-tell it.

That’s what Halls of Fame are for: Building a list of people who matter to whatever the interest, industry, or institution is. They assure every enshrinee, and everyone who cares about them, that they’ll be remembered. In professional football, as in many sports, it’s the sportswriters–the storytellers of the game–who decide which “characters” are worthy.

“Writer’s Block,” as people who are not writers understand it, is mostly bullshit.

That’s not to say writers never spend hours, days, weeks, months, or years lamenting their lack of progress on a work-in-progress. I don’t mean to insinuate that no writer has ever stared into the white abyss of the blank page, guided to nowhere by the incompetent Sherpas of alcohol and nicotine.

But so much more often than not, in my experience, being blocked isn’t about having no idea what to write. It’s being crushed under the weight of all the ideas and possibilities I want to commit to the page.

I know Hamish McKenzie is a writer, because writers process their most difficult feelings by pouring them all out onto the page and hitting “publish,” with no regard for their self-interest.

The Substack co-founder’s latest newsletter issue, “Escape from Hell World,” is a gift I’m glad for: A glimpse into the mindset of a man who set out to make the world better for people like him, but is realizing now realizing he’s not actually ‘like’ all the people he thought were kindred spirits.

Last time I wrote about Substack, I said I was hesitant to do it again. Now, I’m doubly so–but this is a newsletter about life as a producer and consumer of digital media, and I pointedly did not build it on Substack.

Twitter truly felt like The Hell Site to me this week, for the first time since Joe Biden’s blessedly uneventful inauguration. Every time I opened it there was bad news—and not just bad news, but self-perpetuating bad news. Multi-faceted bad news. A dystopian rainbow of bad news: for victims of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence, for people who don’t want to get shot to death, for trans kids (and cis kids). There was even bad news for soccer fans who’d like to get into games they bought tickets for without getting pepper-sprayed by cops.

And of course, to cap it off, the terrible rocket car emerald man’s series of increasingly preposterous decrees culminated in a declaration that Tesla would lay off 10 percent of its ~100,000-person workforce due to his “super bad feeling” about the economy.

Elon Musk, wittingly or un-, perfectly encapsulates why everything’s so terrible right now: The rich and the powerful sense they’ll soon have the opportunity to claw even more wealth, empowerment, and freedom away from us—so they’re getting started early.

For all the controller-throwing, off-switch-pushing, mom-yelling-that-if-I’m-not-having-fun-I-should-do-something-else gamer moments in my life, no video game ever pissed me off like Chrono Cross.

But 22 years after I bought it, beat it, cursed its name and vowed never to play it again, I paid Nintendo $19.99 for the privilege of downloading the HD remaster to my Switch.

I played it again.

I was in my high-school library, assigned to do some kind of school thing but actually browsing the official forums of NEXT Generation magazine, when I clicked a link that blew my mind: the April 28th, 1999 strip of Penny Arcade.

It's a comic! On the web! A Web-Comic!

A full-color comic like the ones in the Sunday paper, but created by and for video-game weirdoes like me. My hacked-up hand-me-down PC was not a “tiny god,” but I was just as pissed that Mac users—MAC USERS!—would have exclusive dibs on the initial public demo of Quake III.

The NFL draft allows a cabal of billion-dollar companies to control the labor market for an entire industry. The draft caps young workers’ earnings, mandates which company they work for, where they’ll live, and how long it will be until they’re able to seek a market-value wage.

And I’m all for it.

This is not the popular position among pro-labor sportswriters; fellow travelers like Patrick Hruby have long argued for the draft’s abolishment. And now that real money is finally, legally flowing to college athletes, draft-slotted rookie salaries might actually be a pay cut for some players. Why not let prospects sign whatever pro contract best suits them?

The first thing Melissa Mayer did after acquiring Tumblr was promise not to screw it up.

Then she screwed it up.

Mayer, then the CEO of Yahoo[!], didn’t just misjudge Tumblr’s culture—she misunderstood what a social network is: an intricate web of human beings who’d collectively found it useful to communicate on certain terms.

I had grand plans for a one-year anniversary post about my ADHD diagnosis–but my plans kept getting grander while I kept getting distracted, and now it’s kind of moot.

*pauses for laughter*

I was going to write an essay about playing through the new remastered Switch edition of a classic video game I hate, but first I have to actually play through the whole entire game.

I used to work all day in a steel shop, pretending I was a writer. I’d get off work, come home, realize the stink of rust and dust and cigarette smoke permeated every bit of me, shower it all off, sit down at the computer and not write.

Working construction felt like work: it was hard, and I only did it for the money. I punched a time clock when I came in, again when I went home, and got paid for every half-hour in between. Writing? Writing was a fun cool thing I thought I’d like to do someday—maybe all day—instead of work.

Not quite ten years later, I started a blog in hopes of writing for real. I set goals, schedules, deadlines. I thought about marketing and promotion, tools and platforms. I scoped out competition and sharpened my craft. I treated writing like work: I showed up every day and did the thing, even though I wasn’t punching a clock—or getting paid.

If you spend all day thinking about writing but never put fingers to keyboard, spend hours typing without adding to your wordcount, or spend all your time writing but never publish? You just might be a BAD WRITER.

That’s the name of a new indie PC game by Paul Jessup, who’s also an author with publication credits at many of the biggest, best science-fiction and fantasy outlets around. BAD WRITER is a cozy little role-playing adventure where you play the role of a struggling writer.

Perhaps inevitably, the game raced its way through Writer Twitter and soared to the top of the Itch.io charts:

Has a sentence ever felt like a knife at your throat?

Have you ever read a piece of news and dropped into freefall, the world blurring around you and your phone while your stomach sinks because what you’re seeing can’t be real?

Has someone written something so wrong that it makes your bile rise and your hands shake? That you didn’t know a person could contain enough malice and ignorance to even think those words, let alone type them out and hit “Send”?

I was pacing around the parking lot of the dayjob I was about to quit with my cell phone to my ear. The voice coming through the speaker was a managing editor trying to sign me to a full-time-equivalent freelance contract.

Permalance, in industry parlance: a job’s worth of work for a job’s worth of pay, with no actual employment promised or implied.

“So far only one writer has managed to become an employee with benefits. So I’m not going to say it’s likely,” he told me. “But if you come in and kick ass for us, it is possible.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed buildings, killed people, and thrown global geopolitics into chaos. It’s tested our global ability to tell truth from lies, right from wrong, good from evil.

It’s also smacked a lot of online smartypantses right in the credibility.

As much as I care about political analysis (I went to school for it), I write about sports because there are concrete rules and definitive winners. You can make evaluating performances and modeling outcomes your life’s work—but at the end of the day, your subjects are what their record says they are.

[CONTENT WARNINGS: Death, grief, drug use, curse words and Detroit Lions football.]

I have no fucking business writing a memorial for Neil Bulson.

First of all, he should still be here. He should not be gone. I should not have heard via mutual friends that Neil died unexpectedly at home last weekend. But he did, and he would not appreciate my wallowing in bullshit hypotheticals.

At one point late in an evening otherwise lost to the dark, dank haze of Five South Case, one of the guys I was hanging out with uttered a phrase that can only precede something amazing or terrible. On this occasion, it was both.

“Check this shit out,” he said, and popped a VHS tape into his player. This is what appeared on screen:

The sun has set on Tom Brady’s quarterbacking empire. For 22 seasons he was inescapable, inevitable. His utter dominance didn’t just stand out over multiple discrete eras of the game, it erased multiple discrete eras of the game.

He led the league in passing yards again this year; 26 of the next 31 quarterbacks on the list were former first- or second-round draft picks. He out-passed eight former No. 1 overall picks, per StatHead: elite prospects with incredible traits, all between age 22 and 33. At 44, Brady has just broken his and Warren Moon’s shared record as the oldest quarterback ever to make the Pro Bowl.

But Brady’s career started when he, a sixth-round pick who wasn’t even the unquestioned starter at Michigan, was put in the game to relieve an injured former No. 1 overall pick.

Writers know the power of a good lie.

As authors, we put quotation marks around words that have never been spoken, and attribute them to characters that exist only in our heads. As journalists, we know that as soon as something is 50.1 percent of something else, we can go to our golf bag of words and pull out the big dog: “most.”

As PR flacks, we describe bad things as if they’re actually good:

Millennial and Zoomer creatives are leading the charge for labor rights in North America–and they’re racking up incredible wins, from video-game developers beginning to organize to #NewDealForAnimation leading to better contracts and newly unionized studios.

Artists have been more effective than anybody of changing the discourse around NFTs, explaining all the exploitative and terrible aspects of blockchain-minting art. Scroll through any working artist’s Twitter feed, and you’ll see screeds against theft of intellectual labor.

Right next to tweets about stealing books:

It’s been killing me to watch so many of my friends Tweet about how nobody cares if they die. Brilliant and lovely people. Writers, artists, activists, musicians. The immunocompromised, the high-risk. Souls whose presence on Earth makes Earth a better, brighter place. People who’ve made me a smarter, better person just by sharing their thoughts and art.

People crying out in desperation as they feel like the world is giving up on them. Like everyone’s pretending they don’t exist, deeming them expendable, throwing their bodies into the furnace that fuels the engine of capitalism.

But the evolving nature of COVID, and medical science’s race to out-pace it, means public-health guidelines not only can but must change to get the best possible outcomes for everyone.

As long as I’ve been writing about sports on the Internet, I’ve been apologizing to sports fans for how much of a nerd I am—and for as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been apologizing to my fellow nerds about how much I love sports.

But as we approach the 13th anniversary of the blog post that started my writing career, I’m more comfortable than ever being unapologetically myself in any forum or crowd. For several years, my pinned Tweet has been one positing the existence of advanced Quidditch analytics:

I’ve sent smarter, funnier, and lots more popular Tweets. But this one, in one sentence, tied together everything you could expect from me and my Twitter feed in a pithy little bow.

This week I went back to the office for the first time in 21 months.

All I was doing was picking up a new laptop—but it might not be long before I have to go back there to regularly do, you know, work. I swung by my desk, just to see the state of the place, and found a couple of friends waiting for me:

Mai and Trunks, standing guard

It’s hard not to have an inflated self-concept when your country dedicates a national holiday to doing your personal favorite things. So every year, when we all get together with our loved ones and set out inexhaustible spreads of fatty and carbo-loaded foods, then watch Detroit Lions football and possibly fall asleep in our chairs a little bit? T-Day stands for Ty Day.

It’s also Ty Day every time I sit down to write this week’s Gimme Schalter and remember 375 busy humans have voluntarily signed up to read whatever I feel like writing. It’s literally humbling, in that I feel very small as I wonder how I’m going make it worth all of your time. But it’s also “humbling” in the same sense some use “literally,” i.e., the exact opposite of what the word means.

So, in that spirit of overstuffed ego and belly, I offer you the recipe to my Actually Good Green Bean Casserole. Not that the standard version doesn’t have a certain appeal, but this is good. I end up making a couple of pans for both Thanksgiving AND Christmas, by request.

Gimme Schalter is supposed to go out at 10:00 a.m. every Thursday, which will come as a shock to many of you who’ve come to expect it sometime around lunch on Friday. I haven’t stressed (too) much about blowing my own self-imposed deadline—but this Friday, the Friday my younger half-sister got married, I really really blew it.

Between driving to Minneapolis and back, recording and producing the giant 100th episode of Three & Out, attending the wedding and generally prioritizing more pressing tasks, I failed to get an issue out during a week for the first time since Gimme Schalter launched in July. In a way, it’s not a big deal; I haven’t accepted any payment for the work of this newsletter, and I’m going to try to get two out this week to catch up.

But in another way, it’s huge.

My son and I walked into the gym 17 minutes early, and froze. Out on the gleaming blue court were a bunch of ripped dudes in workout clothes and pinnies, playing a game like soccer but about a zillion times faster.

In the middle of it all was the guy who’d invited us to drop in: Jeremy Klepal, member of the U.S. men’s national futsal team. A few months ago, he was representing our country in the FIFA Futsal World Cup–a competition we hadn’t even qualified for since 2008. Now, my son and I were watching him run the floor with nine other guys we couldn’t hope to compete with.

Football culture is a specific subset of sports culture, and not a particularly great one. All the major coaching trees that propagate approach and mentality from generation to generation have strong roots in the WWII-era U.S. military—and while we’ve thankfully moved on from ideas such as drinking water during practice makes a player soft, the idea that a football player is a soldier whose duty is to sacrifice everything for the team, without question, is still imprinted on the minds of many coaches, fans, and media members.

So in some circles, there’s nothing worse than calling a football player “selfish.” I usually push back on that, because it’s most often applied to football players (whose careers are shockingly brief) trying to make the most money they can in the time they’ve got, or taking care of their body instead of aggravating injuries trying to gut out one more game.

Aaron Rodgers is selfish.

In the blink of an eye—or in the panicked flop-sweat of an incompetent rich man—decades of brilliant, stupid, funny, tragic, important, meaningless, original, and copy-pasted digital-media work was wiped off the Internet this week.

According to Gawker, G/O Media leadership (almost certainly CEO Jim Spanfeller) ordered the images be removed from nearly all articles on G/O Media sites (including The Onion, Deadspin, Kotaku, Jalopnik, etc.) that pre-dated the company’s purchase by private-equity firm Great Hill Partners. Everything from original art and illustrations done or commissioned by in-house staff to the raison d'etre of the legendary Deadspin post, “Butthole Eaten at Lions Tailgate,” gone.

The loss is practically incalculable, especially for writers and readers of a certain age. The current stable of G/O Media sites contains months, years, decades of full-time work from many of the best and brightest writers and editors of the Aughties and Aughtteens. Much of that work has now been degraded or destroyed.

The forces of truth and justice stood victorious.

A furious siege by authors and their followers had reduced the enemy citadel to rubble within hours of the battle-horn sounding. Naught was left of their internet presence but a screencapped surrender flag:

…and there was much rejoicing.

When now-former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden’s old racist, sexist, misogynist emails were leaked to the media, I had the same two reactions almost anyone connected to football did:

1) “This is horrible,”

and

Every sportswriter will tell you that covering a sport for a living, especially in an access-driven role, changes your relationship to that sport. You lose your “fan card” pretty quick when the players stop being heroes on TV and start being Guys At Work.

It becomes impossible to watch the sport without your analyst brain kicking in: spotting formations and matchups, scouting positive and negative traits. Even if you’re covering the team you grew up loving, your emotional reaction to its every success and failure is dipped in layers of your emotional reaction to what it means for the players involved, what it means to the fans (who are your audience), what it means for the reaction-story idea you’ve been nursing, the season-long narrative you’ve been spinning, the Bold Prediction you made on Friday.

It becomes impossible to casually talk sports with people, because they ask for your professional opinion – and then cut you off and tell you their opinion, and expect you to certify it as Correct even if they’re talking out their absolute ass.

I love roller coasters, but I hate free-fall rides – and whenever anybody asks me why, I have a pat answer:

And yet, I participate in the digital-media economy. Curious! I am very intelligent.

Carlos Watson is very intelligent, too; just ask him (or any of the glowing media profiles that have been written about the OZY.com founder over the years). Way back in 2015, OZY became one of Silicon Valley’s digital-media darlings; Watson made headlines in more traditional outlets because he named his site and company after what appeared to be a total misreading of the poem “Ozymandias.”

I’ve never read A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of books better known as the source material for the TV show “Game of Thrones,” but these two simple lines (which thankfully made it into the show) have stuck with me.

I tried to hook this topic with a bunch of different idioms (‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating,’ ‘a man is only as faithful as his options,’ ‘everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth’) that all kind-of engaged with my recent thoughts. But this idea, that courage can only exist in the context of fear, comes closest to what I was really thinking about: That you can only claim to live by principles when those principles have been tested.

When I was in middle school, my best friend’s dad was thrown an “Over the Hill” party. Their basement was slathered in black crepe paper and filled with gravestone balloons. His friends, colleagues, employees, and everybody’s kids all ate off black plates and drank from black cups and jauntily celebrated the impending doom of this now-40-year-old man.

It was a joke…except, it kind of wasn’t. The median retirement age at the time of the party was 62. The honored man’s life expectancy at birth was 73. His story isn’t mine to tell, but he didn’t live to see either retirement or age 73.

At the time, I’d long since noticed adults’ preoccupation with age and aging; it was the subject of countless movies and magazine articles and comic strips. It felt like every ad break during grownup TV shows featured a pitch for wrinkle cream or Grecian Formula or both. And when younger Millenials and Zoomers checked out the pop culture Boomers produced in the 80s, they not only saw it, they saw why:

I’ll always remember pulling up my then-favorite Internet hangout and seeing the top post, “THE GLASS DESERT,” full of comments about how we should nuke ‘em 'til they glow.

I’ll always remember the guy who drove his pickup truck into the Islamic Center of East Lansing the day after.

I’ll always remember the U.S. Senate voting 98-1 for a plainly unconstitutional law that to this day allows our police, military and intelligence agencies to spy on us basically as much as they want.

“We thought we were part of a revolution,” rock icon Grace Slick once said when asked about a potential reunion tour with the original members of Jefferson Airplane. “Going up on stage now with gray hair and singing all those songs for a bunch of bankers who paid a hundred dollars a ticket would just be sad.”

…at least, that’s what I remember her saying. I can’t find the documentary she said that in, but there are plenty of similar quotes from her throughout the three decades since the final reunion of the original lineup. Sober, stable, and decades separated from the radical countercultures her band made anthems for, Slick realized she’d done all she could from behind a mic—and maybe, given the uncut cringe that was Starship, should have done a little bit less.

Immediately after that 1989 reunion tour, she retired from singing and picked up a paintbrush.

When I was 15, a magazine I was subscribed to said the hottest new video game in the world, Final Fantasy VII, was literally unplayable.

Sure, the review said, it was a technical tour-de-force that raised the bar for what video games could be. But readers of this particular magazine could never play it.

Why? Because it created a new religion.

Today I made seven meals before breakfast. Today my wife and I bought lattes 45 minutes before either of us usually check our email. Today we took our three teenagers back to physical school for the first time in 524 days.

Today I set up our new-to-us pop-up camper, in a fashion not designed not to catch the eye of the neighbors who bought a new-to-them boat a few weeks ago and have conspicuously been shining it up ever since. Today I picked my son up from JV soccer practice at 5:00, made dinner, and drove him back out at 6:30 to help his coaches trim the soccer field because I’d convinced him of the power of showing up—and they took note when we were one of just a few families who’d bothered.

Today we got an alert that our eldest had missed a class and nobody knew where she was and we couldn’t get a text through to her and we had no idea what was happening. Today I laid a hand on my wife’s shoulder in a vain attempt to comfort her as she shook, crying under the strain of everything that was going on. Today my wife finished a presentation for her job’s annual board retreat, for which she’ll already have left by the time you read this.