Volume 5, Issue 61: Toodle-F---ing-Oo

"I think you should take away my Discover card."

My upcoming novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, will be released on May 20. I believe you will like it. I hope you will pre-order it. Send me your pre-order receipt and I’ll send you a book plate and enter you into a contest to, like, hang out with me. Details here.

This is the time of the year when it feels like your face is melting off. You wake up on Monday morning and you find yourself strapped to a rocket. Work. More work. Kid’s baseball, kid’s soccer, kid’s other soccer team, meeting, another meeting, the busiest season for essentially every journalistic beat you cover, more kid’s baseball, more kid’s soccer, how is that game entirely on the other side of the state than that game?, one of your primary employers sends out a nonsensical but still somehow craven edict out of nowhere, you’ve got that doctor’s appointment you scheduled months ago, the car needs an oil change, can you get these edits back to me by 5, wait how is another game oh that’s right that one game last month got rained out, Dad has a doctor’s appointment too, wait R.E.M. is on stage right now how far from your house?, yes you can put that piece together about Gene Hackman, right right you forgot you promised you’d pick up that medication, did we ever nail down the date for that event, wow how many soccer games are there, the dry cleaning needs picked up, this parent-teacher conference has been scheduled for weeks, my god you have a lot of W-2s, oh wonderful your cough is back, and oh yes by the way the world is on fire.

It all came to a head on Thursday. After a morning of baseball writing and book publicity meetings and an afternoon of trying to figure out whether or not I still wrote for The Washington Post (I do, for now), I picked my son Wynn up from school and drove him to his weekly riding lesson, or, as I call it, to the annoyance of his instructor, “horse practice.” Drop off successfully executed, I then drove 45 minutes to Oglethorpe County, Georgia, a county that has to set some sort of national record ratio of Dollar Generals per resident, where William had his second baseball game of the week. I spent the 20 minutes pregame huddled in my car, trying to keep warm, laptop scrunched into the driver’s seat with me, as I tried to keep the chaotic madness of this week at bay before first pitch and did everything in my power not to scroll through the cascading fresh hells my phone never fails to provide. The game began at 5:30 p.m., which felt like an early enough start, for a kid’s baseball game, to end in time for me to attend a long-scheduled-but-completely-forgotten-about concert I’d agreed to go to with my parents that night.

And then the game began, and I have never been more desperate for a pitch clock. The thing I’ve noticed about youth baseball players today is, well, they sure do like to take their time. Every inning, before strolling ever so casually onto the field, the Oglethorpe team would meet at first base, give each other some sort of pep talk and initiate a chant. After every at-bat, the entire infield would gather around the pitcher, and they would all individually dap each other up, like a shooter at the free throw line at a basketball game. This happened every at-bat. I began to wonder if maybe time worked differently out there, like we were in outer space, like there were time dilations, like it was Interstellar, like one minute in their life was like a year in mine.

This is what the third baseman looked like by the time the game ended. (This is a great joke if you have seen Interstellar recently.)

Because this was a youth baseball game, the most common at-bat result was “walk,” though I’m pretty sure every count went 3-2 and featured at least six foul balls. Entire ecobiological life cycles began, ended, and began again of the course of this game. The only way to determine the score was to use carbon dating. By the fourth inning, every kid on each team had grown a beard. It was a long game, is what I’m saying.

Meanwhile, the clock ticked closer to the time of the concert, which was a problem, because I was the one with the tickets, which meant my parents would have to meet me before the show so we could go together. We were already two-plus hours into the game, and we were only in the third inning, as the melting polar ice caps checked their GameChanger app and wondered what was taking so long. As I watched a 13-year-old kid step out of the box and look toward the skies, presumably attempting to at last determine the exact value of Pi, or perhaps unravel the mystery of man’s place in the universe, one of my editors called, and we spent 10 minutes nailing down one particularly thorny paragraph, and then my mom called saying she was worried we weren’t going to make the show in time, and then another news alert came in jesus christ what in the everlasting shit is this?

As we approached the fourth inning, or, as it was known in Oglethorpe County that night, The Final Turn of the Grand Epoch, it became obvious that I would not make the concert in time, which meant, because the ticket vendor is part of the ongoing enshittification of everything and wouldn’t let me just take a screenshot or, you know, have an actual physical ticket I could hold in my damn hand, I had to transfer them to my mother’s account. My mom is a smart, active and sharp as a tack, but she is still in her 70s, and it was now my job to explain to her, over the phone, how to set up an AXS account, how to verify it, how to accept tickets, how to load them into her wallet and how to present them at the venue. This is an experience roughly analogous to instructing a toddler to disarm a bomb.

An actual toy for kids once sold in stores.

So there I was, in the cold wind of Oglethorpe County, watching a baseball game at the pace of a civilization being born, rising, peaking, falling, collapsing, walking my mother through the process of capitalism’s rapid decay so we could watch a group of men in their 60s pretend to be Led Zeppelin, juggling about eight different work projects, all of which I felt just behind enough on that I’d never get caught up, being infringed upon from all directions by Elon Musk, that fucking guy, hoping my son was enjoying his game and worrying he wasn’t, wondering if there would be any room in the world to write about things that weren’t about the free markets and personal liberties, curious if this all is what being drawn and quartered must be like. Eventually, I cracked. I walked as far away from the field as I could, told my mom I needed to call her back, hung up, and then screamed “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!!” into the sky.

It can feel like this sometimes. It can feel like this a lot.

But then I caught my breath.

Someday, we will look back at this. Someday I will look back at this. Someday my children will be out of the house, making their own lives, forgetting that they haven’t talked to their dad in a while. Someday I will not have the opportunity to write for all these places, will not have editors breathing down my neck, will not have commenters calling me a jerk, will not be a part of any of this conversation at all. Someday there will be no baseball games or soccer games to watch my kids play. Someday my home will be quiet. Someday all the long drives will be ones I make alone. Someday my parents will be gone. Someday I will be.

Someday I will miss it all so desperately I will stay awake all night, staring at the ceiling, wondering how it all went by so fast.

And when I look back at this time, I will not remember Elon Musk, or the madness of this moment, or the fear that we’re not going to make it through this, presuming we, in fact, do. (I will, though, remember what happened in the Oval Office yesterday, unfortunately.) I will not remember the stress. I will not remember feeling overwhelmed, drawn, quartered. I will not remember my to-do list, I will not remember my schedule, I will not remember the cold, I will not remember the Oglethorpe batters who, like Dewey Cox, need to step out of the box and think about their entire lives before they bat.

I will remember, when I think back, about what I had—about what I will have lost. If I remember explaining to my mom two-factor verification, it will be fondly; it will be with gratitude for even having the opportunity to do so. I will remember the drive home after the game, talking with my son about what happened, talking about all that will. I will remember the activity, and the whirlwind—I will remember all the life. And I hope that I will be grateful. Grateful that my life was full enough to be overwhelming, grateful that there was so much happening that could make me so exhausted. I know that I will miss it. Because it will be gone.

This coming week, and many more after it, will bring with it the same tornado of bustle—more games, more work, more chaos, more stress, more exhaustion. The world will be uncertain, and it confuse, bewilder, even occasionally, increasingly, infuriate. It will come at me, and you, and us, from all sides. But I will still be grateful for it. I will accept it for what it is: A sign that a life is being lived fully, engaged, taking all the risks and disorientation and fear and love and excitement and the brisk air of a February event in big huge heaving gulps. It’s scary out there. It’s all-encompassing. It can knock you over. But I will not hide from it. To have these moments, even the hard moments, especially the hard moments, is to be alive. Sometimes life makes you want to scream expletives into the sky. That’s good. That means your life matters. That means you’re still out there, in it. It’s worth valuing, appreciating, and holding onto. While you can. While it’s here.

Seriously, though, kid: Get back in the goddamned batter’s box. Seriously.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. The Depressing Defeatism of Stephen A. Smith For President, New York. Are we serious people, or are we not serious people?

2. Anora Is the Movie for Our Times, The Washington Post. This is a piece for the Washington Post's Opinion section about how a privileged few rampage through the world as the rest of us desperately attempt to attend to their needs and try to keep our heads above water. (It's about "Anora.")
   
   To answer the people who have asked, by the way: I will be continuing to write for The Washington Post. They have not told me to write anything I do not believe, and they have not refused to run anything I have written. I have received no sense nor inclination from anyone over there that anything like that is in danger of happening. If it does, I will stop writing for them, as I would stop writing for anyone under those conditions—it wouldn’t be worth it for either of us, and certainly not any fun. But for now, I’m on board, writing for an editor I trust and a publication that I do still respect. Still, as I think everyone involved with the Post is doing: Watch this space.
   

3. MLB Season Preview: Award Winners From Each Division, MLB.com. It was difficult not to double up teams here.

4. Illini Power Rankings, IlliniBoard. Uh, it’s not going well. But I remain hopeful!

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “The Monkey” and “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius),” and we previewed the Oscars.

Morning Lineup, I did Monday’s and Friday’s shows.

Seeing Red, Bernie Miklasz and I have Wetherholt fever.

HOW CAN I HELP?

As established, we’re compiling the stories of individual people who are trying to find ways to make the world a little bit better in whatever fashion they can, no matter how small. Send yours to howcanonepersonhelp@gmail.com. Today’s entry comes from Marcus Meeks in Silver Spring, Maryland:

This past week, my eighth grader informed our family that his history teacher had confessed to the class that he was feeling a little anxious and not getting a lot of sleep. Is it any surprise? Imagine being a teacher of U.S. history at this moment in time, and an eighth grade teacher in particular. Eighth grade is when students in many states take a year-long course devoted to U.S. history. These classes are often the first time students learn about our founding documents, the principles upon which our government is built, ideas about who we are as a country, and the many ways in which we have worked together, and against each other, to abide by those principles and strive towards those ideas. So when many of these same principles and ideas are being disrupted, if not outright attacked, what's a history teacher of middle schoolers to do?

I don't have an easy answer to that question. But as a parent, and also the son of a high school history teacher, I wanted to support my son's teacher. So a few days ago I gave my son a thank you note to deliver to his teacher. Here's what I wrote:

Dear [teacher],

I have greatly enjoyed hearing from [my son] what he has learned in your class about America and its history. Thank you for being his teacher. We are living through a moment in American history when teachers like you are vital to helping students understand the past so they can make sense of the present and envision a future for this country. The historian C. Vann Woodward wrote: "the historian under modern conditions fulfills a vital role -- that of guardian of the future." You are serving that role of guardian for all the students you teach.

My son told me the teacher said that the note was "awesome." I hope so, and that my small gesture of support helps the teacher during this challenging time.

Ooh, that was a good one. We have gotten so many of these already. Please send me yours.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

What Was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius?, Dan Kois, Slate. Allotting for the fact that this piece feels written specifically for me, this Dan Kois appreciation of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—which remains one of my favorite books of all time—on its 25th anniversary is just fantastic. I’ve read it three times already.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers! (Got some more of these out this week, stand by.)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“With Arms Outstretched,” Rilo Kiley. They’re doing a reunion tour! I’ll be seeing them in Atlanta in September. This is very exciting.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

Also, there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Ever wonder what my desk looks like? This is what my desk looks like:

Go Illini. Be safe out there, all.

Best,
Will