#82. The Tangentially Bereaved and You

It's okay to feel your feelings, is something I've been told, even if I'm bad at it.

Jun 03, 2024

Hi everyone,

After a few weeks of steady touring, I took the weekend off to attend a family reunion on Cape Cod (or, The Cape as people from Massachusetts call it, in the grand tradition of referring to our version of a thing as the definitive and possibly only version of that thing). My family gets along well and very loudly, which is a big part of how I practice Judaism. We don’t…reune(?) all that often though, so there were a few relatives that Maris was seeing for only the second or third time ever, and her first since our wedding in 2017. She did an astonishing job hopping into conversations that have been ongoing for 3-6 decades. Maris also had the best joke of the weekend, referring to herself as a FredHead (a fan of Right Said Fred) after a long conversation about Deadheads (or as my sister accidentally called one cousin, a “Dead Guy”).

We rented a car to drive up and back, and despite the long hours on the road (and the nightmare of navigating any rental care experience), we had a nice time singing along to the car stereo and making some travel plans for the rest of the year. As two self-employed people who live in an 800-square-foot apartment, we are together a lot. But we don’t usually have six-ish straight hours to just kind of kibbitz, and I think we used our drive time well.

The weekend was so lovely thanks to the hospitality of our cousins who hosted as well as all the other attendees. I heard a lot of stories I’d never heard before and a few stories I had heard several times already. The weather was as good as weather can get: cloudless, mid 70s, low humidity. I played and lost several games of H-O-R-S-E and ate a lot of good food.

The four thirstmen of the apocalypse. (Photo credit: My Cousin Sam)

Before dinner on Saturday, a few of us tasted the new-ish Dunkin’ Spiked Iced Teas, which my sister had tracked down as a favor-slash-punishment. The Strawberry Dragonfruit was the consensus pick for Worst Beverage (Possibly of All Time). It tasted like cough syrup if cough syrup got you you less drunk but made you more sick. The Mango Pineapple and Slightly Sweet variants were widely considered Potable, except for by my mom who has taste and dignity. And the sleeper hit (the can I could have seen myself finishing) was the Half and Half, a take on an Arnold Palmer, not a dairy-based malt beverage, as one cousin assumed.

PEP TALK FOR THE TANGENTIALLY BEREAVED

As some readers may have seen elsewhere, film critic and podcaster Scott Wampler passed away suddenly last week. Remembrances of Scott on Twitter have been really beautiful, and luminaries from Stephen King to Guillermo del Toro have chimed in to say how much they appreciated him and his work. The quotes of Scott’s podcast co-host Eric Vespe’s tweet are a nice place to look for some comfort and also some genuinely fun anecdotes.

I knew Scott a little bit. We hung out a couple of times and I’d chatted with him and Eric for their podcast projects too. He was always enthusiastic and charming and opinionated, and the people he drew into his orbit were always great to spend time with as well, which is something I admire in a person. In the wake of his death, I received a flurry of texts because a picture of the two of us appeared in an obituary published by The Wrap. I felt a little dizzy at learning the news this way and very grateful to have such wonderful friends. In turn, I tried to pass on my love and support to the people who knew Scott better.

All that is to say, if for any reason you find yourself in proximity to death or other tragedy, and you don’t know how legitimate your claim to grief is, it’s okay to feel your feelings and accept the comfort of the people around you. And it’s good to be of service to people who are in more acute pain if you have the energy to do so.

This is one of those pep talks that’s mostly me talking to me. But I hope it resonates with you all reading this too.

R.I.P. Scott Wampler.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

Request lightly edited mostly to align with house style punctuation.

Things are getting more judgy at my workplace. Yes, there have always been surveys concerning customer service, but the sink-or-swim import of them is more serious now than it ever has been. Words of encouragement are sorely needed. Many thanks in advance for good wishes and increased producer survey scores.
- (e)val killme(r)

Oh no you have accidentally tapped into a topic I am always shouting my round little head off about. Few cultural trends fill me with dread and rage — a combination I like to call “drage” — like the world’s ongoing push towards optimization. I’m not a snitch so I don’t give bad reviews on customer surveys unless someone has endangered my life (shout out to the Lyft driver who was reading out loud to me and Maris from the Wikipedia entry for the U.S. Tax Code as he drove). Whenever a “good enough” AI function replaces a human worker, I seethe, for the lost salary and for my own inconvenience. Any time I see one of those biohacking guys who’s trying to live to 175 years old, I want to leave my life behind and chase after them with anvils and dynamite like Wile E. Coyote.

We are not built to calibrate our lives for maximum efficiency. If we were, cake would taste like crap, and crap wouldn’t exist because we’d turn everything we consume into fuel. Traditionally, even people who take their physical and mental health very seriously say that their body is a temple, not a lean-staffed, low-overhead startup.

Frankly, and don’t read this part people who might employ me in the future, how dare a job say you can’t occasionally sneak into work a little bedraggled (the only kind of raggled I’ve ever been) or sneak out a few minutes early because you have a family thing or you’re going to a playoff game. Your boss certainly does this. And if they don’t, THEIR boss certainly does. And not to crib too brazenly from Kurt Vonnegut and Mary Oliver, but if your boss’s bosses don’t do that…what are they doing with their lives? DO THEY NOT REALIZE THEY ARE BOTH WILD AND PRECIOUS AND MADE FOR FARTING AROUND?

There are many reasons for your boss to want you to be optimized for your job. Unless they’re paying you more to be perfect at it, there’s probably only one reason (not getting fired) for you to want that also. It’s nice to feel a sense of pride in your work, if it’s work you’re proud of. But few people aspire to machine-like levels of productivity. And, importantly, machines don’t aspire to that either. Because machines don’t have hopes and dreams and favorite songs and just an hour or two a night to read or hang out with friends or catch up on laundry or play with your kids. Machines don’t give a shit how good they are at machining. They don’t care about anything at all.

It’s extraordinarily goofy when people try to turn themselves into machines. It’s inhumane for bosses to demand that of their employees. People are more than their performance evaluations, even at work. You’re more than a score from one to five, or even from one to ten. Getting good survey scores is like figuring out how much you owe in taxes. Sure you have to do it, but you don’t have to attach your sense of self to the number at the end. You’re as good as you are regardless of what the survey says, with all due respect to Steve Harvey, “survey says” icon.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Girl Talk - “Smash Your Head”

On the drive home from The Cape, Maris and I stumbled across a DJ mix of songs from Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums. We were not especially interested in that. But it did remind me of how much I enjoyed Girl Talk’s albums. If you are a Millennial Of A Certain Age (or maybe a little older than that), you will remember when “mashup” became its own genre of music by smushing together existing music, often from incongruous existing genres.

Outside of possibly DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album (Jay Z’s Black Album crossed with the Beatles’s White Album, evoking a reaction of…not bad!), Girl Talk’s work is probably the apex of the genre. (Smarter people correct me if I’m wrong!) I got to see him play a set (a virtuoso performance on a sampler) on campus when I was in college. It was immediately before my sketch group’s weekly time slot, and I do still claim that Girl Talk opened for us.

I cued this song up at the Biggie + Pharcyde + Elton John section that knocked my stupid head clear off my shoulders the first time I heard it at age 21. I think I have once again managed to pioneer a new wistfulness by feeling nostalgia for a previous nostalgia. What’s going on over here? I chalk it up to residual reunion energy.