Our annual mailbag newsletter is coming next week. Send me questions! Ask me any question you want at williamfleitch@yahoo.com. The rule around this here newsletter is that I have to answer whatever you ask. So send ‘em over. I’ll answer all of them, every single one of ‘em, right here.
This is what my weekday mornings are like. Sometimes there is a change in the routine. But not if I can help it.
I wake up around 6:15. My wife is already long gone: She is a fitness lunatic and has already been up running or lifting weights for an hour by that point. I would love to say that, upon awaking, I open up a window and inhale the limitless potential of a new day, but I do not. I instead pick up my phone, largely to make sure the world has not exploded overnight. I also check how many people have yelled at me over social media while I was sleeping, which is not a good thing to do but something I do nevertheless. I then brush my teeth and use the restroom and put on clothes and all the things people do so they don’t get arrested when they eventually make it out to greet the world.
The children are usually already awake, watching television if I’ve forgotten to hide the remote the night before, sitting on the couch and scowling at me if I have. I turn on the light to their room, pull up the curtains for some sunshine and holler at them to pick up all the toys that are lying on the floor from whatever the hell they were up to after bedtime, most of which I have stepped on with my bare feet. I then unload the dishwasher, put out place mats at the breakfast table and make breakfast. This process takes five minutes longer if they’re in a frozen waffle phase, but these days they just want cereal, Kix for William and Honey Nut Cheerios for Wynn. They hoover up their meal like the ravenous little monsters they are, and they are then to brush their teeth and make their beds while I pick out their clothes for the day. I usually pick out something with a sports logo on them, which is corrected when Mommy comes back from her workout, “yuck, Mommy, you’re so sweaty and gross,” and chooses something a little classier for the school day.
Everybody goofs around for a while, and I shut the television off because we don’t watch the news in the morning anymore because no family should start off its day with that man’s constant braying in their ears. I go upstairs to my office and check my email for about five minutes. If I need to, I’ll email an editor about what I’ll be working on that day, or I’ll dig into an edit waiting for me from the night before, or I’ll make some notes for a larger project that’ll require more focus in the afternoon. I set up the work day as fast as I can, because any minute a little boy is going to come upstairs with a bunch of questions about the world or his homework or why won’t his brother stop bothering him or why are their wars and what’s a war and some kid at school says his dad can make a whole car disappear with his mind, is that true, can he really do that?
Dragged back downstairs, the boys gather up their backpacks, say goodbye to Mommy and sprint out to my car. We live close enough to school for a 15-minute walk, but the time crunch of the morning, go go go, makes it so we usually just drive to a parking lot across the street from the school and walk in that way. They race to get to the car first, and then have another competition about who can get buckled in before the other one. They always want to listen to music in the car. Their most common requests are “the clapping song” (Wilco’s “nothing’severgonnastandinmyway(again)”), the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” or, recently, “the Santa song” (Bob Dylan’s “Must Be Santa”). We’re always the first ones in the parking lot. They race to get out of the car, say hello to the same crossing guard woman every morning — “have a good day, boys,” she says, and she always makes sure to tell me when I walk back to the car that “you have the most well-behaved boys,” and I always tell her she should see them at bedtime—and sprint ahead of me toward the school. If they get too far, I yell “Red Light!” and they stop, or at least slow down.
When we get to the courtyard, we usually have about five minutes before the school doors open at 7:20, so we play tag in the yard. Other kids have started joining in our games recently, even big-kid fifth graders. One of them, when I picked the boys up from school the other day, said, “hey, are you William’s dad? That kid rocks” and I am not sure I have ever been prouder. Then the doors open, and everyone sprints inside. After my experience being Dashman at the Barrow Dash a few weeks ago, most of the kids recognize me, and while I let them know I am not in fact the actual Dashman—I must keep my secret identity so as to best protect by loved ones from Dashman’s dastardly villain enemies—I know Dashman and can convey to him any message they want to send. Most of them really want me to tell him that they’ve been running so much.
The boys always have breakfast in the cafeteria before school, so I walk them in there, hug them goodbye and high five a bunch of random kids out the door. I head back out to the car, say hello and good morning to the parents I recognize, talk about my kids with the crossing guard and drive back home. I then go for a run, sans cape, come back, take a shower and then sit down at my desk to begin my workday.
This is what my weekday routine is. It is mine. You have yours. There are many times in my life, before now, that old me would have been appalled by such a regular routine, the strict wakeup times, the repetitiveness of it, the same things happening today just like the same things happened yesterday. He might have found it banal, or basic, or some sort of concession to a bland, vanilla existence. He might have found it a defeat
But he was wrong, because he was very stupid, about that and many other things. It is now it is the place I always want to get back to, the clothesline of my life, a warm, pleasant reminder of what I have and how lucky I truly am to have it. I also know that at some point it will be a fond old memory, when the boys can make their own breakfast, when they just put their own headphones on and don’t care what music I’m playing in the car, when the last thing in the world they would want would be for me to walk into school with them. When someday they don’t live in my house at all anymore.
I suspect I will not look back at the big moments, the birthdays, the baseball games, the recitals, the graduations. I suspect I will look back at this routine, when everyone’s taking everyone and everything for granted, when there’s nothing spectacular or emotional happening at all, when everyone is just going about their day. It’s just what you do to get going. Knowing that it’ll someday be gone makes me want to savor every last second of it. Because someday it will. Someday it will be gone.
Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality. You may disagree. It is your wont.
The Ten Biggest Sports Stories of the Decade, New York. This is less a listicle thing and more a framing device to look back at the last decade of sports and what mattered … what changed. Also, because some have pointed this out: Colin Kaepernick absolutely should have been mentioned in No. 2 on this list. His omission was unintentional and, frankly, boneheaded.
The Ripple Effects of the Gerrit Cole Deal, MLB.com. I wasn’t at the Winter Meetings, but I could react to them from Georgia like I was there the whole time!
Five Teams Most Affected by the Anthony Rendon Deal, MLB.com. I think the Red Sox might be in some real trouble?
Debate Club: The Best Five Non-Human Star Wars Characters, SYFY Wire. Can you tell there’s a Star Wars movie coming out?
The Thirty: Questions Heading into the Winter Meetings For Each Team, MLB.com. Considering the Winter Meetings are now over … there probably isn’t that much reason to read this one right now.
PODCASTS
Grierson & Leitch, it was our big end-of-the-decade, Best Ten Movies of the 2010s episode. You have to listen to the episode to get our top 10s. (Though I’ll surely list them in a newsletter in the coming weeks.
Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we recapped the SEC Championship Game, which, I gotta tell you, did not go well.
Seeing Red, we did a Winter Meetings preview, but the Cardinals didn’t do anything at the Winter Meetings, so it holds up just fine. Sorry about the audio on this one, by the way: It seems like they had some audio issues in Bernie’s studio in St. Louis.
GET THIS LUNATIC OUT OF HERE 2020 POWER RANKINGS
This is your reminder that you should sign up for Jim Newell’s weekly The Surge newsletter. It is outstanding. A great, and harrowing, bit from this week’s, about Donald Trump’s week:
One hour after a press conference with a few committee chairmen unveiling two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared at another press conference, flanked by a much larger group of Democrats, to announce a deal with the White House on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Passage of the USMCA will be the president’s biggest legislative victory since the 2017 tax bill. It will be bipartisan, and it will be the fulfillment of one of the president’s signature campaign promises. There will be a big ol’ signing ceremony with big ol’ AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. It wasn’t the president’s only legislative win of the week, either: A deal that Democrats and Republicans struck on this year’s National Defense Authorization Act will create the president’s long-desired Space Force too. So. Does getting impeached suck? Almost certainly. But impeachment isn’t hurting Trump’s approval rating, he’s getting things done, Republicans aren’t breaking from him—they’re not even bending—and soon they’ll be running the show, on their terms, in the Senate trial. It’s only appropriate that in our broken times, the week in which impeachment articles were approved in committee was one of the president’s best weeks of the year.
Oof.
1. Elizabeth Warren
2. Joe Biden
3. Bernie Sanders
4. Cory Booker
5. Pete Buttigieg
6. Amy Klobuchar
7. Julian Castro
8. Deval Patrick
9. Michael Bennet
10. Michael Bloomberg
11. Andrew Yang
12. Tom Steyer
13. William Weld
14. John Delaney
15. Marianne Williamson
16. Tulsi Gabbard
17. Joe Walsh
ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!
Every single person who has sent me a holiday card has gotten one in return. So send ‘em! I love holiday cards.
Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO
“Must Be Santa,” Bob Dylan. Seriously, this song—and this video—is amazing.
Illini back!
Have a great weekend, everyone.
Best,
Will