Pour Me A Story, Vol. 14
feat. Jake Martinez, a very unsettling TV show and more
greetings pals, and welcome back to another edition of Pour Me A Story. it’s certainly been Quite A Week again, and as Scott Hines posited in the Action Cookbook Newsletter earlier this week, I wonder what it’s like to live in uninteresting times.
for once though, politics wasn’t the only news beat to have a batshit crazy couple of days. we also had a blockbuster NBA trade on Thursday that sent Mid-Pandemic Strip Club Attendee of the Year frontrunner James Harden (or, in his current physical shape, James Soften) from Houston to Brooklyn.
perhaps you’re not a sports fan and thus this doesn’t really mean anything to you. it doesn’t have a ton of bearing on my everyday life either, because I’m neither a Houston nor a Brooklyn fan. for some context, I spent the better part of four years as a sportswriter before I immigrated to the U.S., and while I thought it was one of those “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” jobs, it turned out I was wrong. it very much spoiled sports fandom for me, in the sense that working every single weekend and writing literally dozens of game stories per week burned me out on anything more than casual interest in sports.
but I’ll never truly lose my passion for one element of sports: the chaos. the aforementioned trade sent Twitter into an absolute frenzy of absurd jokes, which is arguably more entertaining than the game of basketball itself. give me trade chaos or on-court chaos or locker room chaos any day of the week baby.
Anyway, We Have Company
this week’s guest is someone who has sent me a text pretty much every Friday since I started writing this newsletter to bullshit about one point or another, and I love to see it. even my parents haven’t brought it up that frequently, so it was a no-brainer to have him come aboard. he’s also a very new parent, having welcomed his baby girl into the world mere days before we did, so we’ve really learned some shit alongside one another in the past year.
AC: Jake my man! welcome to the show. how are you this fine Thursday evening?
JM: Living the dream! Just another day in paradise, about to leave the office (haha send beer plz). But honestly not too bad, considering. How are you big guy?
AC: doing alright! trying to limit my beer intake to weekends right now to drop a few, but we’re close enough I think. now we’ve found ourselves in a similar situation this year, so lemme ask: how’s new baby fatherhood treating you?
JM: The wife is an absolute champion. As an owner of a set of worthless nipples, I’ll never be able to do a smidgen of the stuff she does for the baby. But it’s so surreal. Baby girl took her first steps on Sunday (8 and a half months, BEAT THAT!), and is just blossoming into this adorable sweet sassy thing. It’s so wild that she literally came from us? Science, man. Every day it seems to be something new. In all the craziness of the world right now, having that sweet little face just happy to see you at the end of the day makes it all better.
AC: buddy don’t be so down on your nipples, I’m sure they’re great. and she’s walking already?! that is incredible. ours isn’t far behind and it scares the crap out of me. what do you think has been the biggest learning curve?
JM: Most definitely patience and nurturing. Maybe it’s a little envy, but my wife is an absolute wizard with her. I’ll be doing the mental check list “ok she’s crying, poop? No. Bottle? No. Pacifier? Still no.” And the wife will just walk in the room from making dinner and be like “oh you silly goose? You gotta fake tickle her 3 times in the left side of her stomach before she wants her bottle, here just hand her to me”. As you mentioned in one of your other blogs (I read it weekly 😉) there’s no book for this. You learn as you go. And then once you learned that, there’s a million more things to go.
AC: ain’t that the truth. I admit that it was a lot harder than I even expected. and yeah huge kudos to our respective partners for doing the hard parenting work while we’re remaining gainfully employed. I’m full-time remote still, how’s it been going in to work every day knowing you may come home to a walking talking baby at any moment?
JM: My wife spoils me with pictures of them all day while I’m at work, and I swear I want to squeeze and pinch my phone every single time. But I’ll tell ya, that month I had off when baby was first born, I was probably more tired than when I get up for work every day. But it’s so damn hard to leave em in the morning. My wife says it’s her favorite part of the day, when I walk in. You know that hits a fluffy fella like me right in the feels.
AC: oh man I can imagine. even the way this little monster smiles at me after I spend a couple hours in meetings or when she wakes up from a nap is day-making. look at us, parenting in a pandemic. are you managing to find some time to do something for yourself to stay sane?
JM: I wish I had a better answer for this one, but maybe this will be the kick in the ass I need to start doing literally anything. Atop the list are getting back to working out (ha, fat chance) and getting and learning to fly a drone. I’ve wanted one for a while now, but I can’t get myself to pull the trigger cuz I know the 6 year old will be better at it than me, and I don’t take 2nd place well. Do NOT challenge me to a competition on the Apple Watch cuz I will be forced to get off my fat ass.
AC: you’re in no danger from me there, I’d never willingly subject anyone to a watch contest. I’ve always been the begrudging recipient (you’re guilty of sending them though.) but now that you’re back on the bird app, you can get your heart rate up in anger. how’d your return to Twitter come about?
JM: After I got the permanent ban, I had attempted to make a new account, and each time it’d get zapped about 15 mins in. New email, everything. Even had @mickbricks offer, and make me an account. As soon as I logged in, Jack was on me like a Hawk and it was gone. This was all over a year ago. So just recently, with news of that dunce getting the boot, I figured I’d try and sneak through the cracks. And unless Jack is one of your readers, I seem to be in the clear for now. (Could be gone before this is published, who knows). I will say, ignorance is certainly bliss. There’s a lot that I missed, and I’m thankful I did. I kept up on the news on Reddit (which is a beautiful dumpster fire in itself). But of course I missed chumming it up with The Pals ™, and live tweeting sports, how bout them Dodgers? 😎
AC: haha I vet my subscribers very carefully and if he’s among them he’s using a very convincing burner. I think you’re safe. the separation from The Pals is tough, even speaking after losing my main account in October I’m still stumbling across folks I couldn’t find initially. the site is a goddamn disaster for a lot of things but it really does build some good friendships. and you’re a Lakers fan right? that must have been just the cherry on the cake last year?
JM: Well, chronologically speaking, the Lakers one came first, and riddled me with even MORE anxiety about the Dodgers, because what if the Lakers won but not the Dodgers?! 3 WS losses in 4 years would’ve been early 90’s Bills-esque and I’m not sure I would’ve recovered. But what an absolute dream ending of a terrible (sports) year. Between the shitshow of 2020, and losing Kobe, it was certainly nice to win one. Oh, and in very 2020 fashion, I had to watch the NBA finals through the sliding glass door. The 6 year old had been in close contact with someone who tested positive, so I bit the bullet and quarantined in the RV in the front yard with him. What a year, huh.
AC: wait the NBA finished before baseball did? My brain is absolutely fried by 2020, I do not remember it that way. fuck man. well we made it through, and there’s something to be said for that. alright one more then I’ll let you go continue to be Dad of the Year: this is the part where you get to plug something, sky’s the limit.
JM: Oh heck, I knew this one was coming and I was prepared. @qwantitymedia which is ran by @YoungQwan on Twitter, and he may be short and fat, but he’s damn good at video editing/photography and anything that has to do with the camera. He’s also funny, which makes up for that face.
AC: I knew there had to be ONE “fatass” reference in here somewhere, and if it was Cita she’d have come and murdered both of us in our sleep. Thanks so much for sharing your time with me man, and for supporting the newsletter every week! Love ya bubba.
JM: Thanks for having me broski 😘 now get to loving on that sweet angel of yours. 💙
Editor’s note: Jake sent me a text 12 minutes later to confirm that the Lakers did indeed win their championship after the Dodgers did. I knew I wasn’t crazy.
Old Habits Die Surprisingly Easy
apropos of nothing, once a month or so I’ll have the most minor of panic attacks when I’m out of the house on the way to therapy or the store or coming back from a run at the local high school track or something. you know the one, you’ve probably experienced it before.
“shit. where’s my wallet?!”
at some point during the early months of the pandemic, I decided to score myself one of those little adhesive rubber things to stick on the back of my phone case to hold a couple debit cards or my ID or whatever, in case I didn’t want to bring my wallet somewhere. and now I couldn’t tell you five places I’ve been since last March where I’ve actively brought my wallet at all.
sure, I’ve brought it out of habit on the couple trips out of town we’ve made, because that’s where I keep my credit cards, but I think it’s stayed in my bag the entire time. I can’t even imagine going back to carrying a wallet with me at all times like I’ve spent the past 20 years of my life doing.
am I alone here? who else has picked up a curious habit over the past few months? (baking your own bread doesn’t count, everyone did that.)
Worthy Consumables
in last week’s edition I mentioned having written about Ted Lasso being the perfect wholesome counterpunch TV show we needed to combat the misery of 2020.
well, turns out I never wrote about Ted Lasso in this newsletter, even though I could’ve sworn I had. no, like most of my offhand thoughts and musings, I had tweeted it.
anyway, I also tweeted something else about another Apple TV+ program earlier this week. and boy, did I not know the HALF OF IT.
Servant (not The Servant, like the idiot above tweeted) is centered around a pretty well-heeled Philadelphia couple mourning a family tragedy and who hires a nanny for help. we were immediately hooked (thanks in part to the 30-ish-minute episodes rather than the 42-to-60-minute run times you can expect from premium TV), and it’s creepy as hell from the word go.
I won’t give away anything more about the premise of the show, but know that M. Night Shyamalan is the executive producer, so you can expect some of the aforementioned unsettling sequences and little twists that are customary in his work.
but parents of young children, a very fair warning in advance: this might fuck you up. I was so uncomfortable with the second-to-last episode of season 1 that I could barely stand to watch it. and then to add to the creepiness, we got into bed right around 10 p.m. Mountain Time, or midnight ET, and I immediately got a notification on my phone saying season 2 was now available for viewing. oh no you don’t!
Parting Note
as I was mindlessly scrolling Twitter tonight and procrastinating about putting this edition of the newsletter to bed, I came across a bunch of tweets about the death of a guy I followed whom I interacted with semi-frequently. I didn’t know Shelton Lee, or Scorcese by his rap name, all too well, but I sold him a pair of sneakers last fall and he seemed like a really easygoing guy.
when I nervously posted a link to the first edition of this newsletter on Twitter, he was the first person to share it. we didn’t know each other in real life or for much longer than a year or so, but that kind of gesture and support seems to have been a microcosm of who he was. this week’s song is off his group Nation GVNG’s self-titled new record. rest in peace, Shelton.
thanks for sharing some of your time with me once again, pals. let’s do this again next week, huh?
— adrian ✌🏻