#124. Cybertrucks and You

Go truck yourself.

Mar 24, 2025

Hi everyone,

I imagine many of you are looking for a Maggie update, so let’s start there: She’s still very small and squishy and cuddly. She is a real bed hog at night, which is adorable but not ideal for my sleep schedule. She sometimes overlooks the treats people are trying to give her because she’s so excited to say hello and receive pets and scratches, which is almost too charming. We even got her to pee outside three (3) times by bringing her her pee pad outside and putting on the sidewalk. So, all in all, basically an angel. Would die for her. Hope it doesn’t come to that for any reason.

The other (much) big(ger) news this week was that Maris’s agent threw her a little party to celebrate distributing some advance reader copies of her book (out 7/1, but available for preorder now), and it was so lovely. I did not drink at all for fear of becoming too belligerently supportive of my brilliant wife’s excellent work. Many friends in the book world were there, and I met some nice new people and talked to them about what a genius Maris is, and it was a really good night.

Me and Maris at Maris's galley party. We're both holding up advance copies of Maris's book. She looks so pretty!!! — On the way to the party, a stranger on the street complimented my sweater, so I was feeling EXTRA good in this picture.

On Thursday, Maris went to the National Book Critics Circle Awards, and I stayed home with our slightly clingy pug. The NBA action that night wasn’t much to text home about, so I watched Roy Wood Jr.’s new standup special (Lonely Flowers, on Hulu) as well as Ian Karmel’s new special (Comfort Beyond God’s Foresight, on YouTube) and really enjoyed both. Everything I’d heard and read about Roy’s special mentioned how spectacular the closing bit is, and it truly was, but not in the way I was expecting. Without spoiling too much, what blew me away was the specificity of the joke, and the absolute ease with which Roy delivered it. He grounds a poignant observation in an unexpected personal experience and delivers it with such fluidity and precision that it felt as if he covered every relevant detail and a surprising emotional heft with no extraneous effort or wasted motion. A paragon of the fabled “making it look easy.”

Ian, on the other hand, draws more attention to the form and construction of his jokes. They take unexpected and delightful tangents and sustain longer and more powerfully than you expect. He’s so playful without ever losing the thread that holds an idea together. It’s kind of like bopping a balloon around while you hold onto the string. There’s whimsy, but it’s always under control.

As long as we’re here, I also liked Liza Treyger’s recent Netflix special Night Owl very much. Liza has such a powerful level of self awareness and a strong comedic point of view that everything she says sounds perfectly like herself and completely unembellished in a way that I, a writer of sweaty unwieldy jokes at times, admire very much. The biggest compliment I can give Liza is that whenever her name comes up, a zillion women will say: “There is no one like her.” She just kills and kills and kills.

I posted a teensy bit of my own standup this week too! It’s a slice of a longer joke I’m working on. Relatedly, as you will see if you watch: One fun aspect of having a new dog is getting reacquainted with the other dog people of the neighborhood, out at weird hours, coaxed towards socializing with each other by the impulses of our pets. I met a really sweet couple with a dog and a baby (whose names I remember but will not share here) who had recently seen me perform live, and guessed that we live near each other because they recognized the landmark from this bit. It is, literally, a small world sometimes. (The show was less than a mile and a half from my apartment.) I am lightly concerned that the neighbors mentioned in this joke will come across it, but I don’t dislike them! Just their doorbell!

joshgondelman

A post shared by @joshgondelman

And, this may be controversial, but I loved the Severance finale. I found if full of exciting and imaginative surprises that felt deeply consistent with the characters we know and love. I didn’t mind the slowness of parts of this season; I don’t really care if a lot happens when we’re hanging out underground with our cast of weirdos. But it did seem like a few episodes lacked a sense of humor that I find really crucial to the show’s success. To me, seeing an occasional melon shaped like John Turturro’s head is as important to the show as finding out what a bunch of mysterious numbers mean. This is almost certainly my comedy writer bias. But I just don’t love when a show or movie uses Very Serious as shorthand for Good and Important. Also, no spoilers once again, but there was an animal noise in the finale that made Maggie do this.

Maggie the Pug with her front paws up on the tv stand, watching Severance. — Maggie says screw your second screen experience. ONE SCREEN ONLY.

Have you seen the finale yet? What did you think???

PEP TALK FOR CYBERTRUCKS

A dumbass-looking cybertruck parked on grass which seems dangerous because that stuff can catch on fire! — A Cybertruck doing what it does best…not driving. (Photo from Wikipedia)

Last week, almost every Cybertruck on the road was recalled because two side panels are affixed to the vehicles with the discount glue that killed George Costanza’s fiancé on Seinfeld. I get it, Cybertrucks. You go to pieces easily. Some of my best friends lack a similar structural integrity, and I don’t call them pieces of garbage that cost $100,000 each. Physically, I probably wouldn’t stand up to traveling at 70 mph either. Parts of me would start flying off too. But you’ve got to realize that that’s not a great look for a truck, being bad at driving I mean.

I’m sorry that your design looks like graphics from a cutting edge computer game in 1994. If it were super functional for you to look that way, it wouldn’t be so bad. But your steel exoskeleton seems not just clunky, but dangerous and flimsy. Your aesthetic does appeal to the kind of guy who wishes he could drive a pair of wraparound Oakleys, though, so there’s that.

There have been lots of bad cars in the past. You are not uniquely unsound, from a historical perspective. Most time a car is ugly and breaks down like Claire Danes on Homeland at any provocation, people show their displeasure (or desire to not be on fire) by not driving that car. But you, for reasons we’ll get to in a second are being protested across the country. That sounds hurtful. The Department of Justice agrees, but I was being sarcastic and they’re being sincere.

Yes Cybertrucks, you, like the Insane Clown Posse before you, can are not able to deal with the presence of magnets. But really the problem isn’t that you’re a tinfoil death trap that looks like a bike helmet from a Bladerunner movie. It’s that you’re being championed by a guy who somehow turned Henry Ford into the U.S.-based auto mogul with the second greatest fondness for Nazis.

I’ve been saying a lot of negative stuff, but here is something beautiful about a Cybertruck: It looks stupid, and it confers that it is most likely driven by a total dipshit. What an incredible melding of form and function. There are lots of cars that can seem douchey when they are driven by a douche. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are badly designed. Just that they appeal to bad people. A Cybertruck has a structural and aesthetic quality that reflects the moral condition of the person behind the wheel. It’s cohesive. It’s elegant. It’s frankly spetacular for that reason only. Well, that reason and all the flames.

You’ll be back on the road soon, once the Tesla corporation ponies up (pun accidentally stumbled upon, but kept in regardless) for higher quality glue. And until you are next recalled because your tires are made from cracking birthday party balloon rubber or your side view mirrors keep flying off and lodging into pedestrians’ chests like ninja stars (both design flaws hypothetical, if you are a lawyer), you’ll be out there on the streets, being exactly what you are…a rickety chariot for the rich and easily-tricked who might otherwise go unrecognized as such.

PEP TALK FOR TWO READERS

I’ve combined these two pep talk requests for reasons that will be come clear pretty quickly!

CFPB worker here. Not thrilled that Musk/Trump are trying to destroy my agency that helps so many people. But very proud how hard my union brothers and sisters are fighting to save the CFPB.
- Solid(arity) State
My wife and I are planning to move to Portugal in the fall due to the downfall of America. We're excited and thankful that we have the means to do something like this but it's also hard and exhausting and sad! Would love a couple words of encouragement
- Great Ex-patations

The Trump/Musk administration (with insincere apologies to J.D. Vance who seems tangential to the whole operation) is causing so much pain and chaos already. Between the cruelty of the deportations/detentions, the resegregation policies, the apparently-intentional damage to the economy, and the selling off of the federal government for parts, lots of people (people of color, non-citizens, LGBTQ+ people, basically any protesters outside of the Capitol Rioters, and women, to name a few groups) are (understatement incoming) having a bad time lately.

After nine weeks (is that all it’s been???? really???) under this new regime, stuff I hadn’t even considered could go wrong is on the table. It’s dizzying to try and predict which new horror might befall us. Is RFK Jr. going to mandate every vaccine contain lead chips for the sake of balance? Is Elon Musk going to pour oil all over the national highway system and then tweet “lol street lube”? Is Linda McMahon going to dispatch WWE wrestlers to individually body slam high school students who try to read books by gay authors? It’s legitimately all on the table.

The U.S. right now feels like a diminishingly safe for many people to live or even visit. I understand that some people who are able are making the decision to leave the country. That sounds like a hard choice to make. I remember how much consternation I felt moving from Boston to New York, and that took very little paperwork, and I wasn’t fleeing anything except for my own fear of success and hard work. For some people there’s a real question of whether it’s healthier to stay or to go (scientists call this quandary “Strummer’s Dilemma” okay sorry not the time I get it). For some, it’s the best available option.

On the other hand not everyone has the ability leave to or the interest in leaving. It’s incumbent on all of us still here to stand up for the most vulnerable people around. I know I’ve said this recently. But it feels worth reiterating. I think I also said this next part right around the election last year, but thinking about organizing and activism and contributing money to causes you believe in as ways not to do the least harm but as the chances to do the most good can sometimes ease a fraction of the psychic toll imposed by, well, much of reality. Not every choice is a Trolley Problem. We’re striving to do the best we can for each other, not the least worst. That means both that we shouldn’t limit our political imaginations through conventional wisdom, but also that we can acknowledge that doing a little good where you is the foundational element of making things better.

This all feels a little duplicative with previous newsletters, but it feels like history isn’t just repeating itself, it’s hitting rewind as soon as the track finishes. Sorry to the journalists and late night comedy writers who have to parse what’s actually going on here make it all digestible. It seems worth reiterating some of this stuff because the same feelings keep resurfacing as the same horrors pop up over and over again. We’ve got to do what’s within our reach. Sometimes that’s taking care of personal health, and sometimes that’s looking out for a neighbor. Usually those two things are related. Shout out to labor unions and mutual aid groups and teachers and doctors standing up for the people they work with. And of course, shout out to heretofore undiscovered genetic disorders in the bodies of the current Cabinet as well as all DOGE employees. Everyone’s gotta do what they can.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Obongjayar - “Not In Surrender”

I came across this song in friend-of-the-newsletter Christian Finnegan’s

New Music for Olds

, where I frequently learn about good songs. Christian describes “Not In Surrender” as a song that makes him want to run naked through the streets. It makes me want to turn my life into a wicked-focused workout montage for the sake of getting ripped enough to fight my greatest foe (hypothetical) or to get in a car and just drive on the highway until I escape some looming danger (probably hypothetical). It makes me want to plan a heist or have a chance encounter (platonic) with a stranger that changes everything.

The beat is just so relentless, and when the guitars chime in I feel like I could climb a hundred staircases without losing my breath, or jump down a hundred staircases without shattering my bones. If I were a runner, I’d listen to it while running, but honestly putting it on in my headphones makes me want to run somewhere at least a little bit.