[AKN #63] I'm not sick, but I'm not well
LAUGH: Jim Gaffigan on Spousal Murder, LOVE: Where does all the water in the USA go?
Sup homies?
Columbus Day was yesterday. A day which we now call Indigenous People’s Day.
The renaming of this holiday got me thinking about history and how the victor’s write the history books.
In particular, it got me thinking about Frodo Baggins and about how his story gets remembered.
Frodo is the lead protagonist in the Lord of the Rings series.
As it stands today, Frodo Baggins is the hero of the story.
But I invite us to revisit this conclusion.
Frodo is tasked with a single job. Destroy a ring by throwing it into a volcano.
Do that and you will save everyone.
You don’t have to fight.
You don't have to do anything particularly difficult except hike up a mountain.
We will even give you a sherpa in the form of this weird skinny dude Golum and a great friend, Samwise, to help calm your fears and fight off massive spiders.
But let’s just say that over three, three-hour films, Frodo turns this menial task into a masterclass of incompetence and privilege.
Frodo fails forward again and again.
He succumbs to his vices and allows himself to be corrupted by the power of the ring. Which was LITERALLY THE ONE FUCKING THING HE WAS TOLD NOT TO DO.
This all gets forgotten since the ring ends up in the volcano.
But how did it get there?
What if I told you FRODO HAD BASICALLY NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT.
As Frodo is about to throw the ring into the volcano, he chickens out last minute and attempts to slink out of there with the ring on his stupid Hobbit finger.
The ring ends up in Mount Doom because Golum’s alter ego Sméagol’s lust for the ring brings him to bite Frodo’s fucking finger off in one of the most metal scenes in early 2000s cinematic history.
Newly de-fingered, Frodo — who is still acting in pure selfish self interest — goes and slap boxes Golum on the edge of the volcano as he, and I repeat, TRIES TO GET THE RING BACK FOR HIMSELF.
This altercation culminates in Golum slipping into the volcano and plunging to his doom with the ring in hand.
And thus the Shire — and all of Middle Earth — was saved.
But the weird thing is that despite what happened, none of this stops Frodo from taking credit for this victory.
Instead of getting reprimanded for endangering all of his friends, Frodo takes all the credit and rides off on a dope ass boat.
THE END.
Frodo is the weakest “hero” of all time.
Anyway.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: I’m not sick, but I’m not well
The other day I was in a high end coffee shop that charges an eye popping amount of doll-hairs for a single cup of coffee.
If you live in the Bay Area, you know this place as Philz.
I love Philz.
I have been hooked ever since the first time I laid my lips on the majesty of their coffee mixed with heavy whipping cream.
Not only is the coffee fantastic, but they have this personal feel because they make each individual cup separately.
No pouring from a pre-made vat of coffee flavored sludge like they do over at 7/11.
Philz doesn’t make the coffee before you get there.
They make it when you told them what you wanted.
The craftsmanship is inspiring and the scalability of their operations is dubious at best.
Pre pandemic, it used to be a great in person experience.
You walk in off the street and wait 30 minutes just to talk to the barista. Then you would give them your order and you would wait another 15 while they carefully balanced the ingredients out.
The perfect amount of beans. Just the right amount of cream. And a pinch of sugar.
They finished your cup, put it on the table, looked you longingly in the eye and said “let us know if anything is wrong with it and we will remake it.”
It was never wrong.
It was always so lovely…when you were not in a rush.
I didn’t always have 45 minutes to indulge in this coffee ritual, but when I did, it was worth it.
You had an amazing coffee experience AND you had the type of human interaction they wrote about in children’s songs. Sunshine. Lollypops. Rainbows. Etc…
Armed with the delightful experience, you were ready to start your day with a smile instead of a scowl.
Which is what PISSED ME OFF so much about my experience at Philz the other day.
The pandemic drove most of Philz orders to their online service. So when you go inside it doesn’t have that same buzz.
No one is talking to one another.
No barista is explaining the complexity of the bean flavor to some guy with a man bun.
And said guy with a man bun is not sitting there nodding along enthusiastically saying “oH fAsInAtInG!”
It feels a bit colder now. More efficient. Everyone walking in grabbing their cup and walking out.
But the coffee is still damn good. So I go there.
And that is where we join our hero.
There I was.
Ordering two cups of coffee off my phone. Walking into the store with my mask firmly over my face to go grab my coffee.
No one greets you like they used to greet you, but its whatever, there is my coffee sitting on the counter after all.
Now after years of ordering from this place, I am conditioned like Pavlov’s dog to know what to do when my coffee is placed on the counter.
So I grab the cup. I slip my mask down. I sip the coffee. I replace my mask.
I sense a disturbance in The Force.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a barista charging towards me. On a mission.
Steam rolling through the crowd.
Dropping a Derrick Henry-esque stiff arm into a grandmother to make it to me with all deliberate speed.
They look at me with that pandemic deranged stink eye that we have all come to know over the last two years and say:
“SIR IF YOU ARE GOING TO DINE WITH US, I AM GOING TO NEED TO SEE PROOF OF VACCINATION.”
Dine with us.
The phrasing annoyed me because it was a deliberate misinterpretation of my actions to legitimize this conflict.
If I am “dining” then I should have proactively presented my vaccination card.
Thus — if I am “dining” — I am not following the San Francisco law.
If I am not following the law then it is culturally acceptable to publicly chastise me.
It pissed me off.
My internal dialogue starts: “Fuck that…but let it go…it is not worth it…you come here too frequently…Don’t say anything…let it go. Let the storm rage on.”
I walked out of the store, but my internal monologue raged on:
I took a fucking sip of coffee and replaced my mask immediately. That is not dining. That is existing in a coffee shop.
Also I don’t want to sit here and mansplain Bayesian probability to you, but what are the fucking odds that I am not vaccinated? Think of your priors. I am someone who just spent $6 for a single cup of coffee in a city where 80%+ of the adult population is vaccinated.
With my argument fully formed, I felt that familiar urge to go back and re-start the conflict.
The awkward tension of knowing you are right but knowing better than to go back and explain how you are right. Because that always somehow makes you seem wrong.
Ultimately, I held myself together and walked on.
I didn’t engage. Because people with normal emotional regulation just let things go like that.
They assume “oh she probably had a bad day” and move on.
They don’t assume bad intent.
This barista did the opposite.
She assumed bad intent and emboldened by our culture of publicly shaming people with bad intent, I was just wrong place wrong time.
This is the hidden effect of the pandemic.
People are mentally fucked.
It got me thinking.
How far gone are we at this point?
What is the amount of time we are going to need to recover from this collective psychosis?
Has anyone even measured the impact of the pandemic on mental health?
While I don’t have answers to the first two questions, a recent study sheds light on the last piece.
COVID and Mental Health
This thread highlights a study done looking into the effect the pandemic had on mental health.
TL;DR - People are mentally unwell at unprecedented levels right now.
According to this study:
we estimate that the locations hit hardest by the pandemic in 2020, as measured with decreased human mobility and daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rate, had the greatest increases in prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders. We estimated an additional 53.2 million cases of major depressive disorder globally.
Those of us who escaped the pandemic with our physical health, may not have escaped it with our mental health.
Better than death, yes.
But a malady that we can’t articulate can be dangerous.
We run the risk of rebaselining to “this is how things are now” or worse “this is how I am now.”
Look. I am not trying to sit in my rocking chair and say “back in my day, people were polite.”
I am also not here to tell you “the solution is being a united people again.”
However, I am here to say that in the last two years, we have all gone through a huge psychic mind fuck.
But yelling at strangers and isolating yourself are most likely going to make it worse, not better.
You might not be sick, but you are not well.
LAUGH: Jim Gaffigan on Spousal Murder
I enjoyed this Jim Gaffigan bit about lying and Dateline.
In particular, I liked the joke about how there are two acceptable times to lie:
To spare someone’s feelings.
To cover up a murder.
Then I liked how he tied this together with Dateline.
Real crime dramas are such a cultural phenomenon in the US and Dateline was first to market here.
His two Dateline observations that really got me were:
If you watch Dateline, you think most marriages end in murder.
Every episode starts the same “they had the perfect marriage…”
Jim Gaffigan has such a distinct style.
Like when he is telling these jokes, I can hear him telling his joke about how all Mexican food is a derivative of the same 4 ingredients.
Mexican food’s great, but it’s essentially all the same ingredients, so there’s a way you’d have to deal with all these stupid questions. ‘What is nachos?‘ ‘Nachos? It’s a tortilla with cheese, meat, and vegetables.’ ‘Oh, well then what is a burrito?‘ ‘A tortilla with cheese, meat, and vegetables.’ ‘Well then what is a tostada?‘ A tortilla with cheese, meat, and vegetables.” -Jim Gaffigan
LOVE: All the US’s water ends up in Louisiana
This graphic is WILD and illustrates how nearly half of the water in the United States runs through Louisiana (runs north to south).
Compliment this with the River Runner animation which lets you simulate dropping a single rain drop anywhere in the continental United States and then it tells you where that rain droplet ends up.
Mind blowing.
Closing time
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Mahalo,
Kevin