Red Flags Dead Ahead
See: Hotels, Sinatra, Big Gulps, C-suite bros, and Adam Drivers' Fuckboy Cologne Horse
At some point, we’re going to have to admit that since money and religion are made up, nostalgia is all we’ve got—and even that is in short supply now.
This is a very basic, maybe even corny thought. Or maybe it’s something I should’ve recognized long ago. Dying empires, endless wars, pandemics turned permanent because of anti-Semitic and anti-science junk individuals, and billionaires shooting themselves into space on the very day a half-century AFTER we already went there and did that as a nation should have tipped me off.
Those are the big red flags: along with the racists, the charlatan Bible thumpers, the confused yoga moms, the always bullying, interchangeably white c-suite Bro-Dads with the shaved bald heads and the flat-billed ball cap and the wicking fabric shirt looking at porn or for a tee time on their phones as they sip away their triple-hopped stink water with a perma-dead look in their eyes; it’s them, driving battery-powered disposable cars that are all a part of a grift—the image that they’re doing something good while flying everywhere and eating the rest of the fish—all of them at the family dinner table watching passively as their kids grow into monsters—all built-in condescending tones to the otherwise invisible wait staff.
These are some of the millions of tiny alarm bells that ring out whenever one chooses to dip their toe in the outside world and see life as it unfolds on the final page of human history. It’s not great.
But also, it’s all we got. The wild rumpus of the final going-away party has begun!
I was, I guess you could say, part of the problem—or at least part of it—for one night last week anyway. I had a free night at a hotel about to expire.
The parent conglomerate that gave me this precious gift of temporary release in the form of bleachy sheets and a giant TV I can't seem to ever figure out extended the offer twice during Covid—and even though Covid is going to be with us forever, the electronic coupon for the room won’t be.
So I packed a modest amount: swimsuits and sunscreen—buried deep in the drawer of old brushes and band-aids and chalky upon its release—and headed a couple of hours north to Monterey.
Monterey is, in itself, a mostly nostalgic bubble. It’s golf courses sucking away what’s left of the diminished aquifer, it’s old car shows and old car show enthusiasts. It’s the only radio station you get is the old AM sports flagship out of San Francisco where a revolving cadre of old white guys—some former professional athletes, some not—talk about football like it’s still a part of the public consciousness.
It’s Carmel’s melty bronze sculpture galleries and $35 burgers. It’s the freebie-on-the-street-corner glossy lifestyle magazine with an old Hollywood starlet on the cover, a picture from the early sixties, her prime, their prime, our prime.
It’s the $6 million tear-down. It’s the women schlepping purses that cost more than a year of college, or at least the very wealthy bottom half of the very rich doing their best to ignore people like me with their puffy, injected, expressionless faces.
…As I walked through the hotel parking lot, I saw that every third or fourth car had a vanity plate that said something like “RINGADIN” or “HISWAY2” or “CHAIRMN” or “BLUEYES”—it took me a couple of passes to realize there was some Sinatra convention going on. What was it exactly? A listening party? A literal rolling parade of appreciation for the crooner?
On the way back to the room with coffee and banana in hand, I saw an old-timer beep-beep his car’s alarm and approached him swiftly but as gently as I could.
“Hi,” I said, temporarily forgetting we’re not supposed to talk to strangers anymore. “What’s going on—some kind of Sinatra thing?”
My greeting, I guess, came off as more of a threat. At home he has Ring to monitor the comings and goings of people like me. Out here in the wild, it’s a different story.
Or maybe his hesitancy was more because nobody gets approached when they’re trying to get into their car anymore—or if they are, it’s not usually a good outcome.
“Come again?” He said.
“Sinatra,” I pointed to his plate.
“Oh yes,” he said. “There’s a group of us who come here every year; some of us since the sixties. There’s not many of us now—a few kids of the originals. We mostly just meet and have a couple of cocktails. That’s about all we can do.”
I nodded. He was seemingly in a hurry or at least wanted out of this conversation. I knew there was a Sinatra song called It Happened in Monterey, but I was pretty sure it was about Mexico. I didn’t know what else to say, so I just kept on.
“Well, that sounds nice,” I said. “Enjoy it.”
He’d already shut his car door and started up the engine. He left the spot in a hurry.
Dodgers vs. Giants
It’s hard to believe a lot of things right now. In the Before Times, I’d probably be able to write 10k words arguing back and forth with myself about whether the Giants are really just grifters pretending they’re the best team in baseball or about whether they’re the best team in baseball. Either way, they are who they are, and right now, that’s the best.
Last night they squeaked one in over their rival and reigning world champion Los Angeles. If there’s been any marker of this season thus far, a single—perhaps errant—narrative of these two playoff-ready teams, it’s that the Dodgers will lock in then self-destruct just a few moments sooner.
Why are they off? I guess the answer is what makes anyone make mistakes, unforced errors? Usually, we like to pin a single event on whatever sends us into individual or team spirals, but more likely, it’s the culmination of things.
For instance, when one of the greatest athletes in the world—ever—who’s also a black woman, who’s also a sexual assault victim, who’s also one of the oldest on the team, who’s also forced to go faster, stronger, higher not only than her current cohort but than anyone in the sport—ever—knows herself well enough to remove herself from the competition which shouldn’t be happening anyway because a pandemic is surging and the world is literally on fire, we have the fucking audacity to ask HER THE QUESTION: what is this? What did this?
I don’t know, fucking EVERYTHING?
I feel the same about the Dodgers (or anyone who’s in it right now) like, bruh—do you even have to ask?
For me, the easy finger to point is on the team flying too close to the sun and bringing serial anti-trans/abuser/misogynist (fill in the blank of bad white guy shit here) Trevor Bauer on. If you want to read harrowing but necessary coverage of Bauer’s misdeeds while in Blue, read here, but know this: he basically almost killed a woman, and she somehow found the presence of mind mid-trauma to compile evidence against him. Were it not for her, he’d still be starting every five games, and his abuse would be one of those well-known but casually kept clubhouse secrets.
The Dodgers aren’t a good organization, even if they let Bauer go and take the $102 million write-down. Ditto MLB. They got caught because he got caught. Otherwise, he’d be beating women from Encinitas to Bellingham, plain and simple.
On the field, the Dodgers currently don’t have the mental edge, and maybe that’s because they’ve got well enough to distract them from the game. Why they’re still taking the field at this point is a mystery that can only be solved by the notion of contractual obligation.
As a result, the Giants, a team that’s not their equal on paper, but moving quickly in that direction, have won four of five against the Dodgers over the past nine days, with the last three wins happening in late innings by the thinnest of margins.
Giants’ veteran catcher Buster Posey does his bland soundbites, saying it’s his “guys just being prepared.”
Cool, whatever.
But really, it’s a matter of the other side making mistakes. A Mike Yastremski base hit in the bottom of the eighth Tuesday, Posey was off the bag at third in the ninth, and Cody Bellinger tried to gun him down from the outfield. His throw would’ve ended somewhere in the Pacific with Adam Driver and his fuckboy horse, was it not for the protective netting down the third-base line, and Posey took home for the go-ahead run.
“It slipped out of my hand,” Bellinger said after the game. “There’s no excuses. I just threw it too high.”
Yeah, I don’t know. It probably did slip but slipped balls also don’t usually travel on a rope like they’re illegally in the HOV lane late for an interview. It was a mental lapse in a time of all the mental lapses.
Take the Giants (62-37) +115 vs. the Dodgers (61-41) -135 at 6:45 p.m. PST at Oracle Park