#12. LeBron James and You
Hi everyone!
I’ve been home in Brooklyn this week and catching up on TV, which has been a time-consuming project! We are bouncing between Andor (which so far feels like watching a season-long movie, with episodes that seem like slices of a bigger thing rather than their own discrete installments of a series) and Poker Face (where each episode is super fun and largely self-contained, but has a structure that doesn’t lend itself to binging because the momentum kind of stops in its tracks between episodes). It’s an interesting contrast!
Also, while Emma Choi, the brilliant host of NPR’s Everyone & Their Mom podcast was on vacation, I got to guest co-host an episode with Karen Chee, who is also amazing! We had so much fun, and I hope you enjoy it! Plus, I was invited to be a part of a panel discussion on MSNBC last Saturday night, and I once again did some silly little jokes during the news.
DOUBLE ALSO: This Friday (2/3) at 10pm I’m doing another What’s New? show at Union Hall in Brooklyn. I’ll be doing a bunch of new jokes, and I’ve got some special guests coming by to tell jokes too! People have been asking about NYC dates, and while this isn’t a full headlining set, it’s the closest thing I have scheduled in town at the moment!
Sorry the newsletter has been a few hours later than usual. The problem is that I decided to publish on Monday morning, which directly follows the weekend, when I keep having to go places and do things.
Let’s groove, pep cats. (Wow I am scraping the bottom of the barrel with this wordplay already.)
PEP TALK FOR LEBRON JAMES
LeBron (if I may address you on a first-name basis). You stand on the precipice of breaking the NBA’s all-time record for points scored. That is really exciting! But, as a fellow 38-year-old who has dedicated himself to (and occasionally achieved) long-term goals, I imagine you’re pondering some pretty big questions about what happens next. Is there more you can possibly hope to achieve? What realm will you attempt to conquer next? Michael Jordan’s total championships (6)? Kobe Bryant’s number of Oscars (1)? Kevin Durant’s comfort with his (let’s say) evolving hairline (considerable)?
As time has passed, you’ve gone from being incredibly good at basketball to unbelievably good at basketball. Like, people literally cannot believe that a man of your advanced (lol, throw me in a volcano) age is still this good. I have to imagine it feels thrilling to do things no one imagined you could (take that Father Time/Jason Momoa). But there must be some nagging resentment about the constant incredulity, the same way it comes off condescending when people are like: “Wow Hillary Duff is 35 years old and still is very pretty. I would have expected time to have ravaged her visage the way the Colorado River has eroded the walls of the Grand Canyon by now.”
You call yourself the Washed King, which is self-deprecating and a little tongue in cheek considering that you still dunk way more than most people. (I, for example, have not been able to dunk a basketball in…ever.) So aging must be on your mind, especially since you’re about to take the scoring title from a 75-year-old man. That’s weird, right? To be like: “Sorry, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I have defeated you!”
Not that you need to consider this, LeBron, but it’s also weird for me that you’re about to make basketball history. Our birthdays are within one month of each other, and I’m not closing in on being the all-time leader at anything. I’m a television writer by trade, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is basically as accomplished/skilled as I am at that too. WHO AM I? WHAT AM I DOING? ANSWER ME, LEBRON JAMES!!! (This is to take nothing away from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who is a legend.)
You’ve worked really hard to prepare yourself to answer the kinds of looming existential questions that you’re causing me to have, and I imagine you are also having. It’s hard to change careers on the cusp of middle age, but you’ve set yourself up for a productive and rewarding second act. Hell, you waited until your mid-30s to move to Los Angeles and pursue your show business aspirations, and you’ve already got your own production company! That’s huge, man!
Also, you’ve got a lot of people in your corner. Your family. The Lakers front office (a mixed blessing, tbh). The teammates who are eager to advocate for you when times are tough. (Even if you are not a sports person, please enjoy this video of Patrick Beverly showing a referee camera footage of LeBron getting fouled at the end of Saturday night’s game against the Celtics.) That’s the kind of devotion you inspire in colleagues!
LeBron, you’ve got this. Which I have to believe means I’ve also got this. Even though I have yet to be named to a single NBA All-Star team. But if I’ve learned anything from this pep talk, it’s that there’s always time to grow and change.
PEP TALKS FOR READERS
(This week’s pep talk request was not edited in any way the the writer of this newsletter. It was pretty concise to begin with.)
Surprised with a divorce after 10 years of marriage. Not set up to be on own financially. Fuuuuudged.
- C.
C., this sounds legitimately horrendous. I barely like surprises when they’re good. The idea of my friends throwing me a surprise birthday party makes my whole body go rigid with anxiety, like someone pulled an emergency brake in my brain. What if I don’t act excited enough when everyone yells surprise, and my friends get sad? What if it’s a bad party and I feel responsible even though I didn’t do any of the planning? What if that party is too good and I begin to worry that I’ve been throwing subpar birthday parties until this point?
Not to go too far out on a limb here, but in many cases a bad surprise is even worse than a good surprise. It sounds like in addition to not expecting a divorce, you also didn’t want it to happen. Or else you would have written: Surprised with a divorce after 10 years of marriage. How did they know exactly what I wanted? Let’s party!
Let’s start here: One positive that will come out of this is that you no longer have to be married to a person who (it turns out) would surprise-divorce you. And yeah, that’s cold comfort. It’s like saying that you don’t have to replace your old kitchen cabinets anymore because I burned down your house. But still! It is true! You have been forcibly removed from a (secretly) suboptimal situation and are now able to find a better set of circumstances.
In terms of money stuff, that sounds really hard and complicated, but probably it’s not your fault. General economic conditions make it tough for a lot of people to save for a rainy day, and even when they do, it’s hard to anticipate a day this rainy. There’s a difference between umbrella-and-galoshes money and a-tidal-wave-swept-my-car-into-the-sea money. (Also, if this financial situation is your fault, and you spent all your savings on Leathereum, a novelty cryptocurrency I made up whose logo is a leather bondage harness, you will probably still bounce back in the long run.)
Regardless of the specifics of this situation, lots of people love and support you and want to help you. In America it feels humiliating to need anything because we are all supposed to be ruggedly independent cowboys who know how to change our horses’ oil and build tobacco from scratch. But that’s not how life works. We all need community support sometimes, and it’s not embarrassing to want or ask for it from the people who care about you. You are lonely, but you’re almost certainly not alone!
PICK-ME-UP SONG: boygenius - “$20”
Much like previous That’s Marvelous pick-me-up song “Jellyfish” by Laura Stevenson, “$20” is kind of a spite anthem more than a feel-good song. But I love the indie rock chug and the themes of being excited to follow through on a bad idea and an eagerness to die on every hill. Sometimes you some encouragement to be your best self, and sometimes you need a little push to be your best worst self. This song is about the second thing, which is sometimes incidentally also the first thing.
(If you read this letter, there’s a good chance you already know, but boygenius is a supergroup made up of Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus, who are all excellent songwriters and songsingers on their own, but I like their collaboration even better than their solo work!)
UPCOMING TOUR DATES
If you want me to come to a city I haven’t been to in a while, let me know!
2/3 - What’s New? at Union Hall in Brooklyn
2/8 - Helium in Philadelphia
2/16 - Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me live taping in Chicago
3/5-3/12 - JoCo Cruise
More info and dates available at joshgondelman.com/schedule!
Okay! That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! And as always, if you enjoyed the newsletter, please subscribe and/or share it with a pal!
dear josh,
this is great. you are great. i particularly like this line:
"Surprised with a divorce after 10 years of marriage. How did they know exactly what I wanted? Let’s party!"
love,
myq
Busy week, so only just got to read this. I want to say that this
“One positive that will come out of this is that you no longer have to be married to a person who (it turns out) would surprise-divorce you.”
not only made me laugh, but it feels deeply comforting. One of my dear friends got surprise-divorced after 20 years of marriage, and I’ve never seen that kind of grief pour out of someone. It was awful. Eventually he understood that his (now ex) wife was the kind of person who refused to speak openly about her feelings. That’s on her. He deserved better and deserved to be married to someone who *didnt* behave like that.
The money sitch, tho. Woof.