1.

During the NFL season, Paul Moore’s Sunday mornings are like clockwork. His alarm rings at 9:30 and he’s setting fantasy football lineups by 9:35. The groggy teenage reluctance that colors his typical mornings is absent. By 9:45 he’s reviewing his prop bets and parlays. By 9:50 he emerges from his room and checks the fridge before heading downstairs to don his Vive headset and watch the early games in VR. This Sunday, however, his dad was waiting, with a different plan in mind.

“Morning Pauly!” Mr. Moore said to his son who appeared in the stairway precisely on time. “Want to watch some football?”

“I’m gonna watch on the Vive, thanks tho,” Paul mumbled without looking up from his phone.

Paul shuffled across his mother’s kitchen floor, eyes down, crocs squeaking on the spotless tile. He planted himself in front of the fridge, and for an eternal thirty seconds he stood there while his thumbs danced dutifully on his iPhone screen. It was 9:52. Eight minutes until lineups locked for the early games.

From across the open-concept kitchen-dining-living room, Mr. Moore watched his son standing motionless in front of the fridge. Over the past few years, Paul had developed the habit of freezing in the middle of doing things to tap on his phone. Mr. Moore coined the term “glitching” to describe this phenomenon. Paul was currently glitching in front of the fridge.

“You’ve watched on that thing every week this season,” Mr. Moore said from across the room. “At least sit down for the early window with me. There’s eight games on RedZone, I have that on the big screen. The Hawks are on my laptop. We can compare fantasy scores on our phones. It’s a total-immersion NFL experience in here!”

Mr. Moore waited for a response. It often took 15 or 20 seconds to get one from his son who always had one last text to send. Mr. Moore had coined a term for this, too: “lagging”.

Unable to bear the lag, Mr. Moore finally put all his cards on the table. “I’m making French toast at halftime.”

Paul’s head lifted fractionally from its slumped position. He pocketed his phone and opened the fridge doors. While he scanned its contents he spoke into the cold, glowing box. “I’m down for French toast. Sounds bomb. But honestly, I think I’ma watch on the Vive. There’s a simulcast I want to put on over the player POV cams — you don’t get that up here.” Paul shut the fridge without taking anything, pulled his phone back out, and squeaked across the kitchen to the basement door. “Ping me when toast is ready,” he said without breaking stride.

“Will do!” Mr. Moore lobbed toward the basement door as his son disappeared into the abyss.

Mr. Moore double inhaled and let out a long sigh. He grabbed his coffee from the coffee table and sat there, smelling it, while the 70-inch 4K Ultra HD flatscreen, his laptop’s liquid retina display, and the screen from his iPhone 20 projected a flickering, multicolored balm onto his dejected brow.

2.

The two raw eggs in the bowl Mr. Moore stood over were old, with translucent whites and yolks that looked sun bleached. He gazed at them, resolutely isolated and yet so exposed, their thin membranes sealed hermetically and yet only a fork’s poke away from complete unraveling.

“Bijan Robinson cuts upfield!” Jim Nance’s voice pulsed out of the living room speakers, “… makes a man miss at the thirty five! And he could, go, all, the…”

Mr. Moore looked up in time to see his fantasy opponent’s starting running back score his second touchdown of the first quarter. He set down the fork he was preparing to mix the eggs with, grabbed the kitchen counter with both hands, closed his eyes, and hung his head. He waited a beat, noticing how heavy his head felt — 9 lbs, according to the neck-pillow ad he’d seen on ESPN that morning. When he opened his eyes the old eggs were staring at him.

“Don’t give me that,” Mr. Moore thought. The eggs didn’t blink.

“You know what? Fine!” Mr. Moore straightened up, sipped his coffee, and let out an exaggerated “ahhhhh.”

“I’ll do it,” he growled, glaring down his nose at the unflinching eggs, “I’ll go down there. I’ll say something. Watch.” He set his coffee cup down and spun it gently until it was positioned exactly in the center of one of the counter’s tiles. Reflexively organizing things was a procrastinatory tic of his. That and ArmorAll-ing the dashboard of his dad’s ’69 Plymouth, which had been left to him in the will. Mr. Moore glanced at the garage door, shook his head as if flicking rain water from his hair, then turned and strode across the room, through the basement door.

3.

The smell struck Mr. Moore first. It was confusing. Weeks-old Taco Bell wrappers, which somehow still smelled appetizing, mixed with the smell of a used medical cast. He stepped delicately down the carpeted steps.

The sound struck him next. It was… joyous. Mr. Moore couldn’t remember the last time he’d shared a laugh with his son. Paul’s giddy, exhausted giggles rippled off the walls, up the stairs, straight through his chest.

Mr. Moore ducked to look across the basement while his feet navigated the last few steps on their own. The guts of the room were the same as fifteen years ago when he and his wife bought the place: the same washer-dryer, bonus freezer, shelving, the load-bearing pillar in the middle of the room, and the home theater setup that took up the other side of the space. Pasted over these familiar features were more recent additions, the functions of which Mr. Moore didn’t fully understand.

Ten fist-sized plastic circles with green blinking lights were stuck to the walls near the ceiling. These, Mr. Moore assumed, were WiFi hotspots, or spacial recognition sensors to interpret people’s movements. Foam padding on the walls was either for safety or to muffle sounds. Probably safety, seeing as the load-bearing pillar had to be cleaned of blood last year after Paul’s friend, Joey, split his head open on it while shooting bad guys in hyperspace. Mr. Moore knew what the giant machine in the corner was, he’d paid four grand for it. It was a three-dimensional treadmill, complete with straps that kept you in place while you scurried around virtual worlds. It looked like something human scientists would use to restrain a mutant supervillain. A large, square, yoga-mat-looking thing was laid between the TV and the couch. Paul, who still hadn’t noticed his dad’s presence, was resting his bare feet on it now.

Paul matched the decor. His torso was encased in a vest that looked bulletproof. His arms and hands were inside black shoulder-length gloves, and his head, from the nose up, was inside a helmet with techno bug eyes that glowed green. Paul looked like a Chat GPT response to, “Kafka’s giant insect enters the Matrix.”

Despite the theater’s custom surround-sound system, the room was silent, save for Paul’s giggles. And it was dark. The only light came from the green bug eyes, and the blinking hotspots.

“Hehe,” Paul giggled blissfully.

“Hey Pauly.” Mr. Moore entered. No response.

“Pauly,” he said a little louder. Nothing.

Mr. Moore got next to his son, found a space in the body suit and poked him, “Pauly!”

Paul’s grin went limp and his shoulders slumped. “Vive pause,” he groaned. “Open visor.”

The bug eyes slid back over the top of Paul’s helmet. He blinked, adjusting to the darkness of the basement. “French toast?” Paul asked.

“Hey bud. No, not yet.” Mr. Moore parried. “Actually, I was thinking, since Joey’s not over, that I might put on our other space helmet and watch some football with you. You mind?”

“Uh,” Paul winced.

“You might need to show me how to use a button or two, or, if it has buttons. I don’t know. But I pick this stuff up quick.”

“Uh,” Paul winced again, “I mean, I don’t think you’ll like this simulcast. It’s not exactly Nance and Romo. And we’d have to log you in to your fantasy account to get the graphic overlay of your player scores. It’d be a pain in the ass, you know?”

“We’ll figure it out.” Mr. Moore said, planting himself on the couch next to his son. “So, you just put this on like this, right?” Mr. Moore removed his frayed and faded Seahawks cap, the one that fit with the precision only thirty-year-old favorite hats can fit with, and slid the space helmet over his nine-pound head. “How do you turn it on?”

“Oookay,” Paul surrendered. “Before we turn that on, put the vest and sleeves on.” Paul pointed at two hollow manakin arms and a vest leaning against the wall. “And take your shoes off so the haptic mat can sense you.” Once Mr. Moore was properly suited, with his bare feet planted firmly on the mat, Paul reached over and pushed a small button near his dad’s ear.

“You should feel the cranial haptics fire up. When they pulse twice, it’s on. Feel that?”

“Pulse Tw — Oh, haha. Yeah. I think it’s on.”

“Okay, now you just say, ‘Vive, close visor.’ and then we can pair our headsets to the same feed.”

The two sat back into the couch, side by side, wearing bulletproof vests, mechanical sleeves, space helmets and no socks, and, in unison, said, “Vive, close visor.”

Giant bug eyes slid down both of their faces and turned a lush, glowing green.

4.

Mrs. Moore left the keys in the front door while she shuttled two overflowing grocery bags to the kitchen.

“Oh, Jesus Fucking H,” she hissed, realizing that the countertop was full of, something. French toast ingredients? But it was 3:45 in the afternoon. She doubled back to the living room couch, dropped her groceries on the cushions, and scanned the space like an alien sentinel building a target profile.

“Greg!” The shrill frequency slithered through every room in the house. No response.

“Greg!!!” She repeated at a volume that would saturate the back yard, too.

“Paul?!” Paul’s keys were gone. And shoes. And, that’s right, he’d texted saying he was going to Joey’s to watch football. But where the fuck was Greg?

Mrs. Moore did a lap around the upstairs. Empty. She stepped off the deck of the primary bedroom and peered over the back yard. Empty. And it needed a mow.

As Mrs. Moore re-entered the open-concept kitchen-dining-living room, she noticed the basement door was ajar. Paul always shuts it. He’d lock it, too, if he could.

She opened the door three quarters and poked her head through. It smelled like burritos and socks. Nose scrunched, she began descending the steps when suddenly the Sock-o Bell smell was overridden in her consciousness by an unexpected sound.

A familiar giggle — giddy, exhausted, one she hadn’t heard in a while — rippled off the walls, up the stairs, straight through her chest.

5. (Author’s Notes)

Press play on Lil Yachty’s 2023 album, Let’s Start Here., and you know immediately that you’re in for a trip to a different dimension. The first sound you hear is a deep, pulsing, undulating, electronic organ, that sounds like consciousness being downloaded onto a hard drive, or a spaceship booting up. The last sound you hear on Let’s Start Here. is the same undulating, electronic organ.

Between these bookends is a swelling, heaving collection of supremely listenable songs — grand gestures and luxurious detours that occasionally wade into neurotic self reflection but always land somewhere close to positive affirmation. It’s friendly music that should steer you clear of bad thought loops should you be, I don’t know, on molly in a festival crowd or something. The album isn’t without its lows (“pRETTy”), but on the whole it’s as cohesive, inventive, and curiosity-piquing an album as you’re likely to hear from anyone in the pop music mainstream this year— and it’s most definitely as cohesive, inventive, and enjoyable a thing as Lil’ Yachty’s ever put out; a pleasant evolution.

There are traces of Yachty’s early work in Let’s Start Here. — the melodic falsetto, drenched in autotune; an overt willingness to be different — but the album is mercifully devoid of him bragging about how much he gets his dick sucked, and also, very notably, of trap drums.

Let’s Start Here. is not rap. It’s only vaguely hip hop. It shares a few recessive genetic traits with the mumbletune vibe rap Yachty came up making, but you need the DNA test to prove it. What Let’s Start Here. really is, is electro-psych-rock for the Euphoria generation. It’s all vibes and feels, with towering crescendos, delicate breath holds, and contemplative interludes including one of Bob Ross caressing would-be painters with dulcet encouragement. It’s thoroughly emo, too, and it features drawn-out sonic explorations that inject elements of psychedelia. Let’s Start Here. gives you the impression that the music multiverse is folding in on itself.

Despite its genre-juking, multi-hyphenate-inducing sound, what the creators (15+ producers, writers, and performers) achieved with Let’s Start Here. is cohesive. The album is woven together by curious spaceship sounds, rock drums and guitar, and Lil Yachty’s trembling autotune. Even more, though, it’s woven together by its epicness, and a potent feeling of otherworldliness — a feeling of treading on previously unexplored ground, buoyantly, like Neil Armstrong must’ve felt walking across the moon in gravity 1/6th that of earth’s. It’s like going on a safari, in space.

If Yachty is the tour guide of this space safari, you can’t very well understand his guidance. The album has few intelligible lyrics. The vocals instead serve as another instrument. Of the lyrics you can make out, the very best is one of the first lines on the album. “African Rambo, with more ammo,” Yachty sings, bigging himself up with a playful non-sequitur.

Co-guiding the safari is Let’s Start Here.’s true revelation, Diana Gordon, who caps the album’s first, and best, song, “the BLACK seminole” with a primal howl that confirms our suspicions: we’re a long ways from earth and not re-entering orbit anytime soon. She reappears on “drive ME crazy!” with an opening verse dripping in swag. Then again on “IVE OFFICIALLY LOST ViSiON”, reeling us back in from Lil Yachty’s molly trip with invigoratingly crisp vocals. On an album that occasionally gets caught gazing at the clouds, because, dude, they’re like moving and changing colors, see? Diana Gordon is a grounding presence.

Gordon’s reappearances throughout Let’s Start Here., along with the decidedly rock and roll elements of the production, help the album sound very different from the trap-rap landscape Yachty came up in, and from the monolithic, dictionary-definition “hip hop” that all of modern rap descended from. It’s a brand new flavor combo.

If the inventiveness characteristic of early hip hop has felt noticeably absent from the pop-rap that’s topped charts in the 2020’s, Let’s Start Here. serves as a refreshing call back to those early days, but in spirit only — the rest of it is hardly recognizable as hip hop. It’s a bold new manifestation, a foreign variant, a mission into space. You could even, if you wanted to give a random, very specific example, liken it to the experience someone might have if they plugged in to watch football in virtual reality for the first time, after having only ever watched on a flatscreen — a surprising evolution, chalked full of novelty.

Say Something was originally published in OffTop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1.

Gary and Justine walked in silence down the beach under the Southern California stars. They never took vacation. Mostly because of Gary, but both of their jobs as accountants for San Francisco-based fortune 500 tech companies kept them busy. It was only under special celebratory circumstances that they took this Friday off to visit her Dad’s beach house in Santa Barbara.

The waves breaking forty yards to their right reminded Gary of the hisses and gargles that the coffee maker in his office’s break room makes.

By Gary’s calculations, in his eight years working at IntuiCom, he’d drank 4,000 cups of coffee from the coffee maker in the break room. 48,000 ounces, give or take, from that simple Mr. Coffee coffee maker, with its shiny black plastic parts and glass carafe marked with crisp white lines indicating how many cups of joe it contained. It was a humble machine considering the size of IntuiCom.

Two cups a day. One at 8:45am, one at 12:00 noon. 50 work weeks per year. Eight years. 4,000 cups. 48,000 ounces. Black coffee, every one. With a packet of Splenda added to the cup at noon.

His bosses praised him for his consistency. “Mr. Reliable,” they called him, or “Gary Gold Bars,” a moniker he picked up after finding a tax loophole that saved the company 2.75 Million dollars in 2007. Since starting at IntuiCom, Gary had steadily climbed the ranks of the finance department from Coordinator, to Manager, to Sr. Manager, to Strategist, to VP of Finance. It was a war of attrition mostly. Gary watched his coworkers retire, change companies, change careers, get sick, addicted, or go insane. But Gary was built for the long game, and it was all about to pay off. Before Gary and Justine left for this long weekend, he’d received an offer from IntuiCom to become the next CFO. The salary was seven figures.

Receiving the offer was Gary’s pinnacle, the crescendo that all the weekend hours and skipped holidays had lead up to. All the golf outings to exchange pleasantries with the C-suite, even though he hated golf, and all the trips to the dry cleaners to touch up his white dress shirts even though though they really didn’t need a touch up — that all lead to this. Getting the CFO offer was to Gary what reaching nirvana is to a buddhist monk. That’s how it was supposed to be, anyway.

After reading the offer sheet, in all its seven-figure glory, Gary felt less like he’d reached enlightenment and more like he’d swallowed a billiards ball. There was no parting of the clouds or heavenly light shining down. He didn’t pass out, but his brain felt empty of blood. His muscles, atrophied from years at a desk, tightened, and his bones, misaligned despite the ergonomic chair he’d spent $1,700 dollars on, ached. He’d expected a momentary high, at least. But as he gazed at the neatly bound five-page contract on his desk, and the shimmering gold IntuiCom emblem on its front, all he got was a rattling inner dissonance, and a little heartburn.

They gave him seven days to mull it over and prepare a counteroffer. That was four days ago.

Outwardly the mulling over was borderline nonexistent. What was there to think about? He’d done it. Their future was set.

Inwardly, the mulling over was severe. In addition to the repetitious thought loops and endless if-then chains, it consisted mostly of the same recurring nightmare. He’d had it every night since receiving the offer.

Gary’d had this nightmare before. Off and on for almost two years, in fact. But never had it been so frequent, or so vivid. The past four nights he’d woken up sweating and gasping for air. He’d wake Justine, too, on accident. He told her that in his dream a homeless Rudy Giuliani was chasing him with a gun through alleyways in downtown San Francisco, which wasn’t true.

“I’m so proud of you, Gare.” Justine said, breaking the silence of their beach walk. “C.F.O. Gary Schusterman.” She waved a hand across the horizon as if to conjure the letters “CFO” among the stars.

“Pretty wild, isn’t it?” Gary replied.

“Gare,” she said sternly. “What’s up? Pretty wild? You just got your dream job. The thing you’ve been working toward for over a decade and all you can say is pretty wild? You’ve hardly said a word since we left Berkeley. Aren’t you thrilled?”

“Of course I am. Just a little dazed is all. It’s a lot to take in, you know?”

“I know.” She grabbed his left arm and squeezed.

Gary looked down at their pale ankles swinging across the dark sand and thumbed the corner of his business card in his pocket. The hissing, gargling waves filled the silence again.

“Actually,” Gary started, feeling like a sky diver who forgot to check his chute before jumping. “I’ve been thinking, and… uh, well, hmmmm.”

Gary paused. hissssss. grggggllgrglggrrgl.

“Taking this job means we’d be rooted in San Fran for the next ten years, probably for life. And that I’d be rooted to IntuiCom for the next ten years… probably for life. I know we love the Bay and all, but… What am I saying? This is a no brainer, right?”

“I mean, yeah. Don’t you want to take it?”

“The money is insane. The security. I can’t not take it.”

“What’s the alternative?”

hissssss. grggggllgrglggrrgl.

“We could start that food truck,” Gary said, mustering a sheepish grin

“The one we talk about when we get drunk?”

“We did write a menu for it, remember?”

“Most of a menu. It’s a sandwich short. But yes.”

“I know it seems like it’s just a parlor game we play at the bar,” Gary said, his enthusiasm mounting, “but the tech hipsters in the Bay would gladly pay $16 for a Lee Scratch Porky — Smoked pork shoulder with a jerk rub? Pickled red onions?? Coleslaw??? And Tim’s Cascade Maui Onion chips inside two slices of toasted rye?! I’m getting hungry just saying it out loud.”

“What about logistics, overhead? A financial model would be nice.”

“We’re accountants, Jus’. We could make a three year forecast in our sleep.”

“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. You’re the CFO of IntuiCom. We’re talking about sandwiches?”

“Plus,” Gary looked down at their ankles again. “What if I told you those recurring nightmares I’ve been having are actually about work?”

“You mean you’re not being chased by a homeless Rudy Giuliani?”

“No. I made that up. They’ve been getting worse, too.”

Gary unconsciously bent the business card in his pocket.

“What actually happens is this: I’m in the break room at work, enduring another one of Charles’s golf stories and the coffee maker won’t stop making coffee. It’s overflowing and filling up the room. I look around but the doors and windows have disappeared. Charles doesn’t notice a thing. The scalding coffee is climbing up my legs one inch at a time, searing the skin on my ankles, my calves, knees. It keeps rising and I’m yelling at Charles ‘We have to get out of here, Charles! Charles!!!’ but he just keeps going on about an 18-foot par put that he read “just perfect”. The coffee rises to my waist, my chest, neck. I can feel the blisters forming everywhere. And just as I take one last sip of air and prepare to go under, I wake up.”

“Jesus Christ, Gary.”

“And the worst part is, I’ll be sitting at my desk the next day and not know whether I’m in the nightmare again or not. I have to walk to the break room to make sure it has doors.

This job’s been everything to me for the past eight years. Except you, of course. But lately I get the feeling it’s eating away the lining of my stomach a little more every day. And the food truck, I legitimately think we could do it.”

“I’m sure we could.”

Justine squeezed Gary’s arm again.

hissssss. grggggllgrglggrrgl.

“You really should see a therapist about these nightmares. Kathleen told me about a great psych in SoMa — works with a lot of the big tech executives. Why don’t we give them a call while we’re down here and set up a session? Before you say no to a seven figure salary, it’s worth seeing if some professional assistance helps.”

Gary sighed. “Yeah, good idea.”

Gary vacantly scanned the starlit scene around them, his thoughts still audibly whirring in the back of his mind. In the distance, about level with the horizon, a small flickering light caught his eye. It wasn’t a star. “Is that a bonfire?” Gary said, squinting.

“Not your granddad’s bonfire, either.” replied Justine. Why don’t we make that our turnaround point and start heading back?”

2.

The bonfire’s girth and height were striking. Gary and Justine’s eyes widened as they realized the kind of pyrotechnics that were being conducted. And no one seemed to be tending the fire. Instead, a group of about twenty people sat cross-legged in a circle around it. Around them, four circular tables were arranged, set with plates and silverware. And around those tables were five more tables, long, rectangular, and covered end to end in large golden serving dishes — domes, pans, boats — hiding what, by the smell of it, was a feast.

Even from where they walked, outside the reach of the fire’s light, a stampede of aromas rushed up Gary and Justine’s noses. Gary swallowed to clear the saliva that had involuntarily filled his mouth. He turned to Justine.

“Not your granddad’s bonfire is right.”

Their walk slowed to a creep, then a standstill. At some point, a few steps back, they’d crossed the invisible sonic forcefield outside of which the waves drowned out any chatter from the bonfire and inside of which human voices were audible. Everyone in the circle had their eyes trained on a fat, bearded, shirtless man with tattoos covering his torso and arms, and loose fitting pants that had fabric so light it fluttered in the nearly windless night.

“I picked up the severed head of the Himalayan demon and hoisted it toward the sky,” said the Fat Man, raising a fist in demonstration. “Blood that had been circulating his corrupted brain only moments earlier dripped out the open arteries and on to my silk attire, steaming profusely in the frigid air 20,000 feet up on the cliffside. I couldn’t feel the cold. I could only feel wisdom coursing through my body. It was quite warm.”

Justine grabbed Gary’s wrist reflexively and scooched toward him. The Fat Man glanced momentarily in their direction before lowering his fist and refocusing on his audience.

“And that’s the story of the first time I smoked DMT.

But now, everyone, it’s time to eat. And after dinner we’ll turn this fucking boy scout starter kit campfire up a few degrees. Salud!” he said, bowing slightly.

Out of nowhere a troop of wait staff, dressed in black ninja garb materialized and removed the lids from the serving dishes. Gary swallowed again.

“Okay. Let’s get out of here,” Justine whispered.

Gary and Justine turned to leave but as they took their first step they nearly ran face first into the protruding belly of the Fat Man.

“Come join us!” invited the Fat Man, smiling, his eyes — blue, hopeful, glassy — a mere foot from theirs.

“We were actually just on our way home,” replied Gary, pursing his lips in feigned disappointment. “But we appreciate the invite. Whatever you cooked smells fantastic.”

“Doesn’t it? I’m not sure what you’re smelling but it might be the rare bison I had braised, seared and then slow roasted in a garlic butter herb bath. My wife basted it by hand every hour on the hour for 12 hours. She cooks naked so the scent of the kitchen can absorb into her skin.”

“Oh,” Gary replied, staggered. “Actually, it smells more like sausage, rice,” Gary sniffed the air, “and cream. Or something. But regardless, we have to g — “

“The beer gumbo! The sausage is hand kneaded with a French-Spanish spice blend. You have to try it. I insist you both come have a plate. It’ll make your walk home more pleasant.”

The couple smiled at each other, each one searching the other’s eyes for a valid excuse to leave but finding nothing, so they caved to the Fat Man’s hospitality.

They walked up to the dining tables, and on their way could peer down the serving tables which looked like edible mountain ranges viewed from the window seat of a plane. Justine could make out a charcuterie board that had to have been five feet long.

Their were two open seats at a table that included the Fat Man, two muscular Japanese men, one with green hair, one with blue, a voluptuous woman with white dreadlocks and a see-through top, a norse-looking couple of indiscernible age that could be brother and sister, a stout man with a salt and pepper afro and glasses who looked like Dr. Cornel West in miniature, and a bald, expressionless man in a red adidas track suit smoking a cigarette.

“These are for you,” said the Fat Man, pointing at the two chairs. “Make yourselves comfortable. The wine in your glasses is a 1993 vintage Bordeaux from Phillipe’s vineyard.”

“I stamp everghy grape wis my own feet,” said the little Dr. Cornel West in a heavy French accent. “Ninety sree we ‘ad fantastique weazer.”

“And the food is all fair game. Literally, in some cases. Please, go. Fill your plates,” directed the Fat Man.

Gary and Justine were borderline catatonic at the circumstance they suddenly found themselves in, but managed to smile, nod, and take their plates to the outer circle of tables and its labyrinth of food.

At the start of the first table they stood on opposite sides of the biggest dish of salmon either of them had ever seen: an entire king salmon, gutted, halved, and cooked skin-on over some kind of open flame, judging by the charred scales on its underside. It was dressed with lemon slices, thyme, and capers, and the juices that had run off it were now bubbling gently in the bottom of the dish which was heated from below by a small bed of coals. Vapors rose off the fish and engulfed them. They looked across the table, into each other’s eyes, smiled, shrugged, and grabbed the serving spoons.

They proceeded down the interminable smorgasbord, dish by dish, stacking their plates like two professional thanksgiving attendees. This was, by their own admission, a talent they shared: the ability to construct a perfect plate from a buffet of food. Gary analyzed the Caesar salad in front of him — freshly tossed, judging by its subtle lemon fragrance — and used the tongs to place three bites’ worth next to the still-steaming salmon on his plate. He looked up to see Justine placing a bite of caesar salad on a half a roll of brioche, then using the tongs to add a chunk of the salmon on top of that, and finally spooning a dollop of cream of tartar on top of the entire stack. Gary felt a rush of what could only be love well up in his core and roll across his body in a wave of euphoric tingling. “Nice,” he muttered, grabbing a half-roll himself for which he had plans that involved the bison, iceberg wedges, smoked gouda, pickled peppers, and gravy that lay ahead.

They went on like this painting Rembrandts with feta cheese, prosciutto, and steak frites. When they returned to the table three minutes later, they felt like they’d been gone fifteen.

“Did you just stack the bison, gouda, and peppers into an open-faced sandwich?” asked the green-haired Japanese man across the table from them.

“Close-faced, actually,” Gary said topping the sandwich with a buttered half-roll and smashing it down. “And it’ll dip in the bison gravy. Kind of like an au jus.”

“Where’d you find these two, chef?” the green-haired man asked the Fat Man.

The Fat Man smiled. “Lost on the beach.”

3.

The meal carried on and soon Gary and Justine forgot about their walk home. Time dilated and they became immersed in the guests’s stories — tales from every corner of the globe. They ate a second plate that included chicken cutlet, and the beer gumbo. More wine. A third plate — a dessert plate with two kinds of cake, mousse, three pies, and chocolate-covered candied figs. More wine.

The Fat Man stuffed a pipe with strong smelling weed. Puerto Rican Thunderfuck he called it, an ideal digestif. He lit it, inhaled deeply and exhaled through his nose like a dragon sitting contented on a pile of loot.

Gary and Justine hadn’t smoked pot in years, but, riding a wave of good cheer, they accepted the pipe when the Fat Man offered it. He handed it to Gary and graciously lit it so Gary could focus on simply inhaling. A small puff sent Gary into a coughing fit. He teared up and it took him a minute to come back to his senses. When he did, he found himself in a moonlit world of blue and white duotone. Every visible movement left a trail of light lingering in its wake, and though his chair remained in the sand, he felt as if the ground was rolling like ocean waves.

“Puerto Rican Thunderfuck, huh?” Gary thought. Or did he say it out loud?

Gary looked across the table at the lady with the see-through shirt. The dreadlocks on her head were growing like Jack’s beanstalk, slithering across her shoulders and down to the sand, then slowly wrapping each person at the table in a gentle embrace. The dreadlock tentacles were soft, and warm, not scratchy, like Gary thought they’d be.

“Fire time!” the Fat Man declared.

Gary blinked and the dreadlocks were back in their place on the woman’s head.

Everyone got up, filled wine glasses, doused cigars. The expressionless man in the red track suit snorted a bump of powder from off the back of his hand. The group navigated from the tables to the fire like a school of fish in turbulent water, sensing as much by instinct as by vision the people and objects around them. Gary and Justine sat down next to each other in the circle.

The Fat Man, seemingly as lucid as ever, began lifting giant logs from a nearby pile and placing them surgically on the coals. The bonfire’s flames gradually rose to six feet tall, ten feet, fifteen.

A pipe of the Thunderfuck came back around, and Gary took another pull.

Gary laid back on the sand. From his perspective there was no telling the true height of the fire. The rising flames licked the stars above. Gary’s heart rate accelerated. At least he thought it did. Right? Yeah. It was definitely beating fast. His peripheral vision became dark and all he could see, through a long black tunnel, was the tip of the fire and a few far-off stars. He regretted smoking more weed.

As anxiety rippled across Gary’s skin, his body began accelerating toward the fire at the end of the tunnel. He flew faster, not by his own power, but by some electro-magnetic pull. Faster still. He was the Millenium Falcon at Lightspeed. Faster. Until he emerged out of the tunnel and into… the break room of his office?

He could hear the voice of his coworker, Charles, and a surge of terror paralyzed him.

Now? How?! He was awake, right? He blinked hard and opened his eyes. Break room.

He looked at the coffee maker which was beginning to overflow. Panic pulsed through his veins. This was it. The scalding coffee was climbing up his legs, searing his skin He yelled at Charles “We have to get out of here, Charles! Charles!!!” but Charles just kept going on about his 18-foot par put. The coffee rose to his neck, chin. He could feel the blisters. Just as Gary took one last sip of air and prepared to go under, he held his breath and CRACK, a log popped in the fire and sparks shot over the circle of dinner guests.

Gary was breathing heavily. As he reached out and grabbed Justine’s hand, trying to regulate his breath, the voice of the Fat Man came into focus.

“On my third night in the cavern under the mountain I found my entire spirit to be in complete stillness. The only sound audible to me was the dripping of ground water that had seeped two thousand feet down through the rocks and was falling into the underground lake. I sat at the lake’s edge and heard the steady drip, drip, drip, which never sped up.”

Gary’s heart rate slowed.

“Drip, drip. drip,” the Fat Man continued, “Finally, a light in the lake’s center stirred me from my stillness with its aura. It rose from the water and set the whole cavern alight in moonlight. A moonlight that seemed to permeate every cell in my body, slowly saturating my flesh like — you ever seen X Men? You know how Rogue can suck the superpowers out of other mutants? It was like that. Like I was sucking the super powers from this brilliant light source over the lake.”

Gary had seen X Men, and just as the Fat Man said these words Gary saw a swirling, pulsing, vortex of light leave his own mouth and and arc toward the fire. It was the color of the moon, and in its churning glow was every shred of self-consciousness in his soul, every particle of doubt and grain of insecurity that had ever kept him from living fully in the paradise of pleasures that life has on offer. The tail of the vortex exited him and as it all emptied into he blaze the flames turned an unfathomable shade of blue.

Darkness washed over Gary.

4.

A sea lion’s bark rolled through the early morning air, ricocheted off the ocean, off the cliffs on the north end of the cove, the old Douglass firs in the yard, the concrete patio, and finally tumbled through the cracked window of the basement guest room in Justine’s dad’s house and into Gary’s ear. His eyes peeled open.

Aaaarf. Aaarf. Aarf.

The cove was set in a still mist, the low morning sun not yet strong enough to burn it off.

Gary rolled his head to the right and saw the curvature of Justine’s body beneath the covers, gently rising and falling.

He rolled on to his left side and surveyed the bedside table. His phone was there, plugged in. His glasses were there. Next to them was his business card, bent, scuffed at the corners. On it, small blue scribbles were visible over the IntuiCom logo and tagline. Gary reached out for it.

He rubbed his eyes, put on his glasses, and blinked.

Toasted Sourdough

Butter

Salt

Zesty Cabbage Slaw

Caramelized Onion

Spicy Sausage Links, halved lengthwise

Chicken Cutlet (thin), breaded and fried

Melted Gouda

Beer Gumbo Reduction (dipping)

Carrot and Celery Sticks (side)

— The Beery Manilow

5. (AUTHOR’S NOTES)

I first came into the Action Bronson multiverse years ago through the giant side door of Fuck That’s Delicious, his TV show about food, without ever having heard a song from the New York based chef-turned rapper. I took a lap around his Spotify and found his music inaccessible, too obscure. “Good TV show host. Meh rapper,” I concluded.

It wasn’t until recently that, by some invisible pull, I re-entered the musical orbit of Action Bronson. This time I listened to his discography from the start, beginning with his debut album Well Done, and it clicked.

The difference was my willingness to engage in active listening, to participate.

Here’s the thing, and Well Done exemplifies this, Action Bronson at his best is an intensely visual lyricist. He makes off-hand references to pop culture jetsam that can make verses sound like overenthusiastic stoner mishmash. But the strangeness, vividness, and specificity that make his raps inaccessible, is also where the beauty of his style resides. When the intricate did-I-just-hear-what-I-think-I-heard scenes click into focus, you’re suddenly seated at a table with one of rap’s richest visual smorgasbords spread across it. It’s hedonic, psychedelic, absurd, and unapologetic — prioritizing fun over intricate wordplay, while still lacing in plenty of the latter.

“I’m like a young Bill Casmire, swollen from the juice,” spits Bronson as he emerges on “Respect the Mustache,” Well Done’s opening track. I still don’t know who Bill Casmire is but I imagine an alcoholic 1950’s movie star, whose drinking prematurely aged him out of roles in black and white blockbusters that involved fancy cars, fedoras, and cigarettes. I could *Google him, but this is more fun.

“Preem-o rollin’ in my hemoglobin, puffin on the spruce,” Bronson continues, wasting no time introducing one of the albums common themes: weed, particularly good weed, smoked in large volumes. As a listener, you’re already being asked to drop everything and use your imagination. You must envision an (in my case) overweight retro movie star whose arteries are pumping THC-binded blood cells to the nether reaches of his musculoskeletal system. It’s a lot to ask of a listener, but if you’re willing to participate there is a there, there.

*I’ve since Googled Bill Cazmaier. I was very wrong about him and his juice.

Along with weed, the album’s major themes are food, women (of various races, some of whom accept money for sex), alcohol moderation, fine garments, and miscellaneous pop culture references to both real and fictional characters. In one of his most endearing and effective tone-setting maneuvers, Action re-brands himself in the likeness of some of these characters:

• Young Bill Cazmaier (… swollen from the juice)
• Sean Connery (… salt and pepper beard, distinguished look)
• DiCaprio (… a heartthrob that’s straight off the screen)
• Morimoto (… roll the drugs like [he rolls sushi])
• Bas Rutten (… I’m ass bootin’, I’m past shootin’)
• Leslie Nielson (… of the weed and the word)
• Ricky Henderson (… of rap)
• Derek Harper (… with the low Caesar)
• Dr. Lecter (… digging in your sister’s rectum)
• Mason Storm (… hard to kill like)
• John Bon Journo (… hopping out the volvo)

If I’ve failed so far to establish the kind attitude the album leans into, it’s the kind where the artist calls himself “the Leslie Nielsen of the weed and the word.” He says this as a proclamation, as he should, and if that doesn’t make you smile, then you may be past saving.

On the whole, Well Done stays true to rap’s traditional “pussy-money-weed” ethos, but it places well-cooked elk and Russian gangster movies up on the pedestal, too. The songs are laced with enough obscurities that the music becomes not counterculture, but hipster-adjacent, fully aware of its separation from the mainstream, even if it’s only by an arm’s length. It celebrates this separation—its individuality—and by extension invites listeners to be themselves, too.

Be yourself. Enjoy yourself. None of this is that serious.

Jim Carey once said, in an interview in his documentary Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond that when he was a young aspiring comedian, he had an epiphany. He realized one night, lying on his bed, his mind racing, that what people wanted was to see someone on the stage who was completely free of concern. So that’s who he became, they guy who’s completely free of concern. I don’t know whether Action Bronson’s nonchalance is the result of such a conscious decision, but he provides a similar icon.

Jim Carrey is Woke as Fuck

At its core, what makes Well Done so special is simple: Here’s this big, fat, bald guy who’s having the time of his life no matter which angle you look at him from. “If he can be that free, there’s no reason I can’t,” listeners are invited to conclude.

Bronson exemplifies the absence of self-consciousness. Via this example, we’re all given permission to be free of concern. And to explore whatever odd synaptic connections might form in our minds — our unique, ridiculous, caged-in minds that need to get out in the yard and stretch their legs.

Bon Voyage was originally published in OffTop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1.

I smiled courteously at Black Thought and he reciprocated the gesture.

“We’ll let you know soon,” he said, shutting his front door.

He was a good dude, and a pro’s pro, too. Exactly the kind of industrious artist I was known for signing at Interscope Records, back when record labels existed. It’s hard to believe that was only seven years ago.

Memories from those days, the heyday, swam past my mind’s eye as I walked toward the train — the label parties, the signing bonuses, the gifts of rare music memorabilia that would show up unannounced on my desk, the occasional weekend off with my family, our favorite ultra-luxe cliffside Air BnB in the Arizona desert where I’d sit on the porch before the kids were up and listen to records in my headphones, gazing out at every shade of blood orange the desert could adorn, set off under a purple sky from the not yet risen sun. The way my kids would look at me like a hero.

Glass shattered underneath my sneakers. A hypodermic needle. The odor of the city made my nose involuntarily crinkle. Paper mill off-gassing. The only functioning paper mill in the country was in Philadelphia, completely unregulated, of course. Black market. The city smelled like one big asshole bleaching parlor.

Now I was only a block from the train, one of the few public utilities the government has been able to keep running since The Disintegration. It wouldn’t smell any better down there.

Black Thought unwound into the leather lounge chair in his basement studio, letting out a prolonged exhale while the turning gears in his mind slowed to a stop and arrived in the present moment. He sipped his lemon saltwater, percolating it in is mouth by pulling air in through his front teeth.

The freshest they could make the seawater running through the taps still had trace amounts of salt, even after three rounds through the filter. That is, unless they used the home desalinator. But that was too energy intensive to run often. So they mixed cubes of crystalized lemon flavoring and sugar with mildly salty water. In the early days after The Disintegration, Black Thought, or his mom, who lived with him now along with a handful of other relatives, would make these cubes themselves, mixing sugar and lemon flavoring packets in hot water, then reducing it down. Now, they bought their cubes pre-made on the black market, along with most other staples.

Danger Mouse, hunched over a mixing board on the other side of the room, twisted a knob and cocked his head the way a doctor might lean in while using a stethoscope. He was tweaking a 1971 Philwit & Pegasus sample to match an energetic drum track he’d put together.

The fact that Charlie had a job at all was remarkable. Not that his great grandchildren would share stories about his legendary days staring at a computer screen, monitoring new file uploads to a free torrent site. But in a job market with 57% unemployment, having enough cash in his e-ledger to buy street tacos and sodas felt amazing.

If he one day became Chief Content Officer, however, his great grandkids might have something to talk about.

In the meantime, his quickest way up the corporate ladder of the burgeoning underground torrent juggernaut, Napster 2.0, was to further their mission: “Provide Americans with free, reliable, user-friendly access to music — a human essential.”

Specifically, that meant he needed to curate newly uploaded songs and albums for Napster 2.0’s genre-specific landing pages, and do it better than anyone else. If Charlie recommended records that drove outsized spikes in downloads, shares, or backlinks from other sites, he’d catch the eye of his higher ups.

2.

Stepping on to the train felt like entering the inside of a bottle of black market hooch, all the city’s scraps shaking around together, begrudgingly fermenting into something sour. Up and down the car, figures in heavy jackets were silhouetted by the graffitied walls. Over the loudspeaker came the cheerful voice of the US President:

“This beautiful train you’re riding is just one of the many public sector upgrades that are sweeping our nation under the Reimagination Project. Internet service, fresh water access, even the social media apps we rely on to connect with one another every day are being reimagined. We’ve evolved the relationship between public wellbeing and big enterprise to provide unwavering oversight that protects your true interests. Those HEPA air filters overhead that provide lab-quality air cleanliness? Your idea.”

I looked up at the fan above my head. A string of dust and hair was dangling from the still blades.

“Please relax and enjoy your ride. Be kind to your neighbor. And be well.”

Two stops later the smell of tacos flooded through the train doors as they opened. My stop. Only a couple miles to home.

Recently, Danger Mouse and Black Thought hardly left the basement. They were in a deep creative state and their hermetic behavior amplified it. There was no release date looming over them, or record label pressure compelling them into this state. Record labels, along with all the trappings of the traditional entertainment industry had gone during The Disintegration.

Only now were a few nascent, unregulated record labels emerging via the black market. Label artists received modest pay, but it was pay. They got a chance to make money from their craft again, have organized tours, and collect download fees.

“This one’s ready. Check it out.” Danger said, turning the volume knob clockwise on his mixing board.

Bass fwump’d out of the subwoofers, pulverizing any notion of a world outside the basement. Kick drums, urgent monotone beeps, subtle inhalations, and spiraling whistles combined in a cyclone of organized chaos that sounded like a car chase, or a Ralph Steadman painting.

Black Thought’s nose reflexively scrunched into a gas face. “Mmmmhhmmmm,” he said, grinning. “Let me lay down a verse before the other guys get here.”

Charlie wiped the sour cream from the edge of his mouth, tossed his plate on the pile of trash next to the taco stand and hustled through the train doors before they closed. He took a seat opposite a girl about his age. She had her hood up but looked cute. Cuter than the vagrant at the far end of the car who was muttering something hostile to an imaginary assailant.

Charlie put his hood up, too, and pulled out his iPod Touch. 4:44 from the album 4:44 was playing in his headphones. He thumbed the surface of the vintage mp3 player until he landed on Streams of Thought Vol. 1, which he played from the top.

Hardly a second passed when Charlie didn’t have an album playing in his headphones. And if a computer was handy, he’d usually be scanning Napster 2.0’s internal database at the same time, looking for patterns among downloads and pageveiws.

Patterns were part of elite curation — knowing how user behavior tendencies favored certain new releases. Taste was another part of it — can you hear something, listening from the perspective of an average site user, and know if it’s good? Charlie’s personal taste often differed from the user base, by a lot. But he’d become adept at switching between their ear and his own. Every once in a while, though, an album would get uploaded that he loved and that he knew they’d love, too. Those moments were like crack.

The third part of elite curation is timing — simply being online when the next well-received piece of music hit’s the database.

The lyrical barrage of 9th vs. Thought from Streams of Thought Vol. 1 gushed through Charlie’s ear canals and he could see the words he was hearing in the graffiti on the wall above the girl’s hooded head. It was rapid-fire closed captioning presented in some apocalyptic post-modern Basquiat typeface. In his periphery the concrete tunnel walls outside the window whipped past, the lights fixed to them creating a strobe effect. The train accelerated. He got dizzy and closed his eyes.

3.

I flipped on the light in my house’s entryway which cast across the open-concept floor plan making visible the full laundry basket I’d moved from the bedroom and failed to load, a single very clean, vintage Reebok Pump sneaker laying on its side under the coffee table, and a dozen or more empty microwavable ramen bowls. It looked like a page from I-Spy: Divorced Middle-Aged Man Edition. And this was actually pretty clean.

Only since an old music industry pal had called, offering me a job at the underground record label he was working for, had my depressive fog cleared enough to even attempt to clean anything. For two years I’d wallowed in this house. I’d wake up from recurring nightmares only to live out my days in a real one. When I did eat, it was microwavable ramen. They had chicken, shrimp, and beef flavors at Grocery Reimagined, but they all tasted the same.

While I was wallowing, a robust black market developed across the country. Everything from paper products, to computers were sold there. From this primordial capitalistic sludge a music industry sprouted, offering artists an alternative to the “torrent and pray” approach Napster’d normalized. Labels didn’t have the reach of the torrent giant, yet, but we looked out for artists.

I threw myself onto the couch, kicked my shoes off, and pulled my phone out. The screen lit up. No new messages.

A$AP Rocky, El-P, Killer Mike, Black Thought, and Danger Mouse were buzzing after an explosive creative session. Black Market vodka had been added to their lemon saltwaters, and Killer mike had a huge bag of homegrown marijuana, some of which he rolled into a joint and sparked. Heads were nodding in sync as they played back their song, Strangers, over the speakers. Everyone had a look on their face like they smelled ammonia.

ASAP’s verse weaved nonchalant rhymes into melodic ear-worms, never in a hurry.

El-P bent cryptic, artistic visuals into shape — one part autobiographical braggadocio, one part gonzo journalist.

Killer Mike compared himself to god, Godzilla, and Ghostface, while threatening violence against extremist bad actors and politicians.

“Cyclops eye?! The fuck?” joked Rocky.

“Says the guy who quoted Dr. Suess,” El-P retorted.

“Ayy, at least neither of us are gonna get a hit put on us by the president.” They all turned toward Killer Mike.

“I’m the least of his worries,” Killer Mike said, “You kidding me?”

Black Thought was nodding his head to the music but it was his conversation with the A&R from earlier that was playing in his head.

His drink sat on the side table next to him. The vibrations from the music caused ripples to radiate across the surface of the liquid, bouncing off the glass and back toward the center to intersect ripples from the next vibration. The motion kept the crystalized lemon flavoring and sugar from clotting.

Charlie sat awake in bed, his face aglow in the light from his laptop. His girlfriend was sleeping next to him while he compulsively bounced from the New Uploads page on Napster 2.0’s internal database to the Most Downloaded chart, scanning data from the past 30 days, 90 days, 365, looking for patterns. Streams of Thought Vol. 2 played in his earbuds.

The little, black, Arial font letters on his laptop screen began dancing and warping in front of Charlie’s eyes. They lifted off the screen, forming a cyclone of symbols that he seemed to be witnessing from above, like satellite footage over a gulf hurricane. Lyrics from the song in his ears, History Unfolds, flashed among the whirling characters, disappearing almost as quickly as they became visible. Then he descended.

Charlie fell in slow motion, as if from a plane, toward the eye of the storm as a’s and g’s and %’s swerved past him. This happened sometimes when he looked at his screen too long. It used to happen maybe once a month. Now it was weekly, at least.

He squinted hard and let out a long exhale. When he opened his eyes, the letters were back in their places on the screen. It was time to call it a night.

As Charlie reached out to shut his laptop screen, seven small words caught his eye at the very top of the New Uploads column: Cheat Codes, Black Thought and Danger Mouse.

Ice Cold Lemonade

4. (Author’s Notes)

There was a 0% chance a front-to-back collaborative album with Black Thought rapping and Danger Mouse producing would be bad. It was just a matter of making it.

Their twelve song, thirty six minute project is an exercise in hip hop purism — beats and rhymes, samples for hooks, a few colorful guest verses, crate digging, social commentary, braggadocio. It feels so fundamentally of the genre that it conjures visions of school kids banging on lunch tables, homemade cassette mixtapes, and rap battle circles. Even the rapper/producer egalitarianism harkens back to the emcee/DJ partnerships of early hip hop.

Danger Mouse provides the project’s skeletal structure with beats that oscillate between gritty and ethereal, and create a sonically cohesive whole. His production is consistent, start to finish. He opens the album with a sample from Gwen McCrae’s Love Without Sex—belting, guttural, a warning shot—and he closes it with a sample from Tony Joe White’s For Le Ann—crooning, punctuating, gentle. To weave disparate sounds like that into beats that someone can rap forcefully over the top of, takes true creative finesse.

Black Thought enters the fray smashing shit like Bruce Banner in one of his moods. However, and perhaps this can be credited in part to the occasionally delicate production of Danger Mouse, he brings impressive variation in his tone, slowing down and meting out emphasis more sparingly on certain tracks (Identical Deaths, Violas and Lupitas) when he could easily have just kept spraying.

It’s tempting in writing about the album to simply quote at length from Black Thought’s lyrics — line after line after line of wit, word structure, ferocity, melody. Three syllable rhyme schemes, four syllables, five, all couched in a broader cultural awareness that lends the project a sense of weight. This line is just one of many that’ll make you hit the ‘rewind 15 seconds’ button:

Never no matter like a vacuum now

I turn your speakers in the back room to mushroom clouds

We on that jet fuel, about to go to Neptune, wow

That ain’t a flesh wound, they ‘bout to lay your headstone down

And there’s this one…

A thumping kicker for me to slam like Hulk Hogan

Is something like a plain bumper sticker, no slogan

And this one, too…

The black Colin Farrell in The Lobster

That’s living like an obstetrician but not a doctor

Cheat Codes landed somewhere very close to hip hop’s molten core, and its relative brevity allows you to take the full dose in one sitting. Afterwords, you’re left with the impression that they would have made this album for free, just for fun, for the sake of the art alone.

And if they somehow found themselves in an America where government reform lead to the complete disintegration of the economy, including the entertainment industry and its hefty financial incentives, they’d still make this exact album. And if they were confronted with the choice of either restricting the audience for the album in order to earn a few dollars, or releasing the album for free on the internet to give a downtrodden nation access to their art, they’d release it to the world.

Strangers was originally published in OffTop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rodney Mullen is skateboarding’s spiritual core. Not like a mega-church pastor who drives a G Wagon and tells you Jesus will return your tithes tenfold. More like a Buddhist monk, quietly giving lectures that by their sheer profundity compel listeners to endorse the tenets therein. He has the radiant calmness of someone who’s died a thousand deaths. It’s rumored that he makes his skateboards from the wood of poplar trees that he’s planted himself after eating the seeds and mining them from his own feces, Kopi Luwak-style. He fertilizes these trees with the compost from his composting toilet, thus creating a closed loop system, an unbroken ring of vitality, or what the Chinese call Qi (“chee”). He only eats one meal a day, either fish soup or fermented veggies over rice, and he only drinks rainwater, as it falls to earth. When he’s skating, seagulls are known to congregate and drop off gifts — small fish, and french fries they’ve gotten from tourists. Complaints from skatepark maintenance teams about the rotting fish and seagull poop reached Mullen who now pays the parks’ additional cleaning fees, and sometimes joins in the cleanup efforts himself. He once did a five-second nose grind that made a screeching sound onlookers swear sounded like the violins from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Another time he started a session on a board with a completely blank deck, pure beige poplar, and by the end of the session the skid marks on the board’s underside created a millimeter-perfect portrait of Ghandi. He sold this board at auction to raise money for homeless youth. During his daily skate sessions, which start at six am, he’ll ride for 20-minute stretches with his eyes closed, skating based on subtle vibrations felt in his wheels and echolocation from seagull squawks bouncing off the coping. The debate over these stories is ongoing, but what’s undeniable is that Mullen is the spiritual fulcrum around which skateboarding sways. His role in Tony Hawk’s documentary, Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off, is proof positive of this.

Mullen’s posture is straight, sturdy. He leans in when conveying something particularly poignant, searching optimistically in your eyes for a hint of shared understanding. He speaks in a syncopated, sing-songy cadence akin to spoken word. Every sentence or two he’ll take a word and stretch it out, belaboring it in breathy exasperation, not so you know it’s an important point, but because it is, at its core, such an important point that to say it any other way would be sacrilege.

Mullen talks about skateboarding like a religious practice, a gateway for commingling with the divine. In this heightened state he doesn’t speak in tongues, but in kick flips¹. He might speak in tongues while doing kick flips, too, maybe that’s what attracts the seagulls. Who knows.

People talk about skiing, surfing, climbing, and other action-adventure sports in the same way Mullen talks about skating. Steven Kotler or any of the capital-F Flow experts whose work has rippled through the zeitgeist over the past few decades would probably label Mullen as some version of a flow junkie. But a lot (all?) of the top skateboarders in the world would fit that description. In contrast, Mullen’s brand of flow is more akin to a painter’s or writer’s. The kind of flow the painter Phillip Guston described:

“When you start working, everybody is in your studio…the past, your friends, enemies…and above all, your own ideas all are there. But as you continue…they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”

Mullen looks like a painter, too, at least when he appears in Hawk’s documentary — wide-eyed and wiry, wearing a simple red and white striped tee shirt. He’ll occasionally move a few wandering strands of jaw-length hair from in front of his eyes, the childishly optimistic glint in which is amplified by the skin around them, loosened by the sun, and squinting, and gravity. He appears both seasoned and brand new, like he’s seen otherworldly vistas, perhaps even stepped across dimensional divides, yet he has the enthusiasm of a kid who’s just discovered where in the freezer mom hides the popsicles.

There are Mullen-like characters across sports and entertainment — people who aren’t the face of their team, but who provide its spiritual scaffolding. Draymond Green on the Warriors, or Marcus Smart on the Celtics play this role. Marshawn Lynch during his run with the Seahawks was undeniably the driving spiritual force for the team. You get the sense that Marshawn would have been playing padless tackle football in the park for free if the Seahawks weren’t paying him to do it in pads on Sundays. Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers is another example — not the front man, but the backbone. What Lauryn Hill was to the Fugees, what RZA is to the Wu-Tang Clan, Rodney Mullen was to the Bones Brigade, and is to skateboarding as a whole.

In Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off, we’re introduced to Rodney Mullen early on. He’s one of the key subjects whose interviews are spliced throughout the film. At first his “enlightened” tone casts him as a sort of self-serious cook, especially against the content of the early part of the documentary which focuses on competitive skate contests and the emergence of the skateboarding industry in the mid-late eighties. The sponsors, tours, and oversized-checks of it all were very splashy, anathema to Mullen’s monk-like demeanor². As the documentary progresses, however, Mullen’s sagacity blooms.

About halfway through the film, Tony Hawk, having reached the pinnacle of the skateboarding world at just eighteen years old, was burning out. He was winning almost every event with impressive yet formulaic runs. City after city after city. Bus rides. Flights. No true peers in sight. Hawk was overcome by the sameness of it all, struggling to find fulfillment. Mullen had, it turns out, gone through something similar about a year earlier. He’d even quit skating competitively before eventually rediscovering his spark. So Mike McGill, the ring leader of Hawk’s and Mullen’s skate crew at the time, set up a phone call between the two.

On the call, Mullen told Hawk how he’d undergone a paradigm shift. Instead of focusing purely on winning — micromanaging the scoreboard, perfecting repetitive runs — he’d begun taking more chances, competing against possibility itself. He was using skating to explore the limits of his creativity. In this way the sport opened up. It became less about winning the next competition and instead about progressing the sport as a whole. With this mindset, competitions regained a lightness of spirit, and, perhaps more importantly, sessions outside of competition became a laboratory³ in which new frontiers could be unlocked. Hawk was inspired by this approach and credits it for reigniting his passion for the sport.

Mullen’s coronation as skateboarding’s spiritual fulcrum comes at the end of the documentary, when he gives an all-time monologue and frankly, the coup de grâce for the movie that you’d expect to come from Hawk. This monologue even included the films titular phrase, until the wheels fall off. The film is exploring what drives people like Hawk (and Mullen) to continue skating so hard into their old age, despite the health risks of broken bones and concussions. That’s when Mullen leans in and speaks, over uplifting piano keys, in his breathy profoundness:

“This is the luxury of having spent my life doing what I love. The cost of that? It sucks. I’m not blind. I’m not numb to the pain. I would argue I’m more conscious of it than anybody else. But I’m also more conscious of what that gives me. And when I’m done with this, that will be what it is, and I’ll find a way. But there’s something inside of me, propelling, that I’m not going to give up until the wheels fall off. That’s what I’m made of. And I wish — I see all the arguments against it — but I wish I could relate the intangibles to you. My guess, is that we’re all built the same. None of us are completely stupid. A little deranged, I think there’s a strong argument there. I do. But ultimately, we also know what we have. And to go and lay down in that sense of it, that’s like, embracing what we’ve done with our lives. You know?”

Consider the intangibles related, Rodney. As much as they can be, anyway, through words alone.

[1] Mullen invented the kick flip, and the ollie, and hundreds of other tricks

[2] This monk-like demeanor is apparent most clearly in late-stage Mullen. He always had a sacramental dedication to skateboarding but was a lover of competition and an absolute killer during his peak pro touring days

[3] As of this writing (May, 2022), Tony Hawk has invented over 100 skateboarding tricks

Rodney Mullen Is Skateboarding’s Spiritual Core was originally published in OffTop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve all felt it. Our shoulders tighten, toes begin to tap, eyes darting a little more quickly with each passing thumbnail. It’s the “what to watch” scroll. Seconds turn into minutes turn into deep meditations on the transient nature of life as rows of content flit past — Popular on Netflix, Just Added, Critically Acclaimed, Blockbuster Collections, Gems for You, Irreverent TV Comedies, Provocative Docuseries, Relentless Crime Dramas, 90-Minute Movies (becoming a more likely choice by the second).

The anxiety of deciding what to watch is an epidemic. But a mirror experience exists, equal and opposite in its effect on the psyche: The post-watch browse. As opposed to the pre-watch search, the post-watch browse is aimless, open-ended, and fail-proof. This is the browsing experience after you’ve finished watching the thing you pulled your hair out deciding to watch earlier. The post-watch browse asks, “What exists here? What’s even on the menu?” Instead of narrowing down choices to find a single one, the post-watch browse is at its best when it’s opening up entire new universes of possibilities. “Epic Anime Sagas? Seems like such an addicting genre. How ‘bout a trailer?”

Post-watch browsing is heavy on trailer consumption. It’s like going to the grocery store on a full stomach. If you’re lucky you’ll find yourself in the hot sauce section thinking, “Truffle-infused Thai Chili and Lime Sriracha? Who knew?” Post-watch browsing unveils limitless potential futures, unfolding like a tesseract of timelines. (The beauty, of course, is that you don’t need to commit to any of them.) It also provides portals into the past. Temporary tours of the artistic manifestations of earlier cultures. It’s the uplifting counterpoint to the pre-watch search, an elixir for our anxieties.

It was late. I had just finished an episode of Succession and was post-watch browsing on HBO, looking for something to wash the elitist narcissism off my brain before going to bed.

Nick Cage in One Man Army? He takes a samurai sword to Pakistan on a hunt for Bin Laden? On paper it’s got legs. The trailer was less convincing.

The Rush Hour collection came into view. In my 12:30am mental haze, I wondered if the original Rush Hour even has a trailer, it being so old and all. “Of course it does,” my inner voice corrected me, “It wasn’t made in the 1930’s.” Following this whim, I found the Trailer button and clicked it. What transpired over the next 150 seconds was a glorious tour of late 90’s movie trailer culture, and, when looked at from the right angle, a wisdom text, bottled and preserved, tossed to sea, waiting to be uncorked by the future-people of the 2020’s as they comb the beaches of the internet.

The middle of my wide-screen television filled with lit pixels, the sides remaining a dormant black. The trailer was shot in 1:1*, and the equilateral dimensions caused a faint but familiar squeezing sensation on my peripheral vision. “Would the epigenetic mutations that have shaped my ocular architecture have given me taller, more circular eyes had we never made the transition to wide screen TVs?” I thought. Never mind.

The trailer immediately established the stakes of the plot.

“If you want the girl back alive, listen and do not talk,” said a Chinese gangster with a leather jacket and a bleached blonde buzz cut. “The drop will be made tonight. 11pm. The amount will be 50 million dollar.”

“50 million dollars?! Man, who you think you kidnapped? Chelsea Clinton?!” Chris Tucker squawked back through a corded landline phone.

For those keeping score, only 15 seconds in and we have a trailer shot in 1:1 dimensions, a Chelsea Clinton reference, and a corded landline telephone. Bask in the ‘90s-ness.

That’s when the voiceover came on. You know the one I’m talking about. It’s the one that became a trope and would only ever be used ironically now. The one that always starts with “In a world…”. So the “In a world…” Guy came on over clips of Tucker getting chided by his jowly LAPD boss, and proceeded to unpack the plot in that oh-so-familiar, grumbly baritone that sounds like Marb Reds and Coca-Cola had a baby.

At this point the trailer had communicated this much: Chris Tucker is supposed be rescuing the kidnapped daughter of a Chinese Government official, but he’s fucking up, and his colleagues aren’t happy about it. So, the kidnapped girl’s father is sending over his top man from China to help out.

That’s when the trailer cut to an airplane parked on the tarmac of LAX. As the plane door opened and its stairs unfurled toward the camera, my speakers exploded with a massive “GOOOONNNNGGG!!!” The sound effect that became an audio avatar for all of Asia crashed out from my TV, rippled across the room, through my brain, vibrating loose myriad competing emotions — shame, anger, hilarity, hunger. Jackie Chan stepped into the plane’s doorway.

A montage of the mismatched duo unfolded from there: Tucker gives Chan his now-iconic line “Don’t you ever touch a black man’s radio, boi!” after Chan turns the dial to a station playing the Beach Boys; Chan mishandles a dap; the two compare kung fu moves; “In a world…” Guy continues to spoon-feed the viewer, letting us know that these are “two cops with nothing in common, except the case they can’t walk away from.”

The montage wrapped with Tucker and Chan dance-stepping down the street in sync, arms raised to the sky, akimbo, firing off finger guns like two Yosemite Sams fresh off a successful train robbery. Buddy cops!

The giant cell phones, the loud and simplistic text graphics, the hyper-exaggerated fight sounds, and the oversized-suits of it all is pure, uncut 90’s. It creates a time-capsule effect that’s reason enough to watch this trailer anytime you want a hit of 1998 nostalgia. But it’s the lightness of spirit oozing from this trailer that transcends eras. Rush Hour was unburdened by the weight the subsequent twenty-plus years have placed on popular culture, and its simple naïveté is refreshing.

Is the trailer cringe-free? No (e.g. the massive gong sound that introduces Jackie Chan). Could you make this movie, exactly the same in 2022? Probably not. But looking back at just the trailer from the somewhat more woke America we inhabit now, it’s surprisingly prescient.

Rush Hour had BIPOC leads, and supporting actors. It showed the ineptitude possible within the higher ranks of any bureaucracy, and it demonstrated the power of a common cause to unite people from disparate cultures. All this, draped over a through-line of healthy, cross-cultural ball busting (not the spiked-bat variety you see in YouTube comments).

From a more eternal vantage point, Rush Hour, in just the two-minute-and-thirty-second trailer, shows the fundamental commonalities between all people, even if we’re from opposite corners of the globe. (Cue “In a world…” Guy: “The fastest hands in the east, meet the biggest mouth in the west.”) We all share an instinct to protect helpless kids, especially cute ones, a self-consciousness when we’re in a foreign setting, and an ever-shifting internal dance between ego, hierarchy, duty, and autonomy. And lord knows we all love jokes cracked in the middle of fight scenes. This is something the human citizens of New Muskland, Mars in 2275 will still, no doubt, cherish.

The Rush Hour trailer is from a time before Twitter, a time when, for Americans, China still seemed far, far away — only connected to the US by long distance phone calls on corded landlines and overnight flights that you could board without going through security. It’s a gleaming snapshot of the late 1990’s, that after 25 (or so) years has proven to be both extremely of its time, and well ahead of it.

*This square version of the trailer is on HBO but not, apparently, on YouTube.

The Original Rush Hour Trailer is Gloriously 90’s and Surprisingly Prescient was originally published in OffTop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1.

It doesn’t usually rain in Long Beach, California, but Vin could hear drops beginning to speckle the windows lining the front of the diner. Outside, the clouds covering the midnight sky were lit from below by LA’s endless sprawl. A neon Tecate sign in the diner window made its humble contribution to the city’s glow. The rain got heavier.

Vin sat opposite the bar, in the middle of seven booths, facing the window. He always faced the window, because he had enemies.

The waitress brought his order, a large lemonade and a basket of fries.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“This is great, for now. Thank you.” Vin replied.

His phone buzzed. Two short bursts, which meant a new text. He hesitated to even look at his phone. For the past two days, everything on it was about Keef, his longtime friend who was murdered in a gang assault only two days ago. Looking at his phone tended to suck him back into a scroll of RIP posts on Instagram and emotional group text threads in which half baked revenge plots were shouted down by righteous calls for peace.

He looked at his phone anyway. It was a text from Monica.

How you gonna leave without saying a damn thing this morning?

Vin took a bite out of four ketchup-dipped fries and exited the thread to his All Messages screen. Five conversations below Monica was Ramona. No new messages since Tuesday, still.

The bells attached to the front door jingled and three girls holding jean jackets over their heads scurried inside. Through the door drifted the sound of animated banter — two old heads sitting outside the neighboring corner store were debating would-be NBA careers and calculating release dates of incarcerated friends. The bells jingled again as the door shut.

The girls shook the rainwater from their jackets and slid into the window booth. Vin momentarily caught eyes with one of them and exchanged a subtle smirk. Judging by her red and white Jordan 1’s and her matching belt, though, she associated with the wrong people.

He knew who killed Keef. It was no surprise, in hindsight. But seeing the bigger picture, and having it make sense, did nothing to ease the knot in his chest. He took a sip of lemonade. It felt cool as it slid down his esophagus to his stomach, but the knot remained.

With one hand arranging french fries, Vin’s eyes floated toward the ceiling, taking in nothing in his immediate vicinity, instead visualizing potential future realities. What did Keef deserve? What did the homies deserve? What did his mom deserve? What did the moral code — the one that had guided him through a decade-long labyrinth of constant violence — demand of the situation?

Two more short buzzes from his phone.

Heard back from Paco. Just say the word

It still astounded Vin that $2,500 is all it takes to have a man killed.

Vin had made enough money in the past few years to carve out a nice situation for himself. He helped his mom move to a new house. He’d moved, too. But his day-to-day found him back in the hood more often than not. Something about it made his senses a little sharper. It gave him a buoyant feeling of mild nirvana. Plus, most of his friends still hung out in the same places.

A blur of red and blue lights streaked past the front windows. The blare of sirens followed milliseconds behind, like a royal trumpeter stumbling to keep up so he can announce the arrival of the Queen’s carriage. Vin’s attention reflexively shifted to the revolver tucked in the small of his back, but his facial expression remained unchanged.

Vin and Keef had gone to school together from seventh grade through high school. When a punk senior stole Vin’s Dodgers fitted in ninth grade, Keef stole it back by picking the lock on the senior’s locker. By tenth grade their crew had snowballed into an amoeba of seven to ten homies. Every few weeks someone would move to an uncles house in Inglewood, or catch a juvy charge, or have to play caretaker for their baby sister at home. Usually they’d be back a couple weeks later.

But Vin and Keef were constants. They attended school functions, park parties, and underground concerts together knowing they had eyes on each other’s six at all times. They got jumped into the gang on the same day. Gang affiliation was a form of self preservation for Vin and Keef, but despite their moral misgivings, they honored their roles in the organization. By twelfth grade they’d accepted, if not embraced, the gritty reality of gang life despite compromising their own morals to a point that Vin figured was beyond salvation. They stuck together. And they survived. Thanks in large part to their shared loyalty.

Vin washed down his last fry with another sip of lemonade. It was starting to water down, mixed with the ice at the bottom of the cup.

He looked back at his phone and typed a simple, three word response to the text about Paco.

let it fly

His thumb hovered over the Send button as thoughts slideshow-ed through his consciousness at high speed: a high school beach bonfire, his mother’s smile, being handed his most recent paycheck, Ramona’s perfume, his stolen Dodger’s fitted, the sound of air purging from slashed tires, freestyle circles in the school parking lot, the ca-chunk-a-chunk of skateboard wheels on a sidewalk, the rattle of a spray can, distant gunshots, Keef and his secret handshake.

“How’s the lemonade?” the waitress asked, arriving to grab his empty basket of fries.

Strangers

2. (Author’s Notes)

Murder, fraternal codes, crips, bloods, institutionalized over-incarceration of minorities, guns, money, women, and impermanence are all themes in Vince Staples album, RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART. It’s a sonically cohesive, 16-track, 41-minute, hood-noir tour of Long Beach, California guided by someone who “made it” yet seemingly kept ten toes down in his homeland.

Via a sort of gonzo-journalism, Staples translates stories from his life with a raw honesty that feels like an ethical obligation. When he raps about money — “I can make it rain blue hundreds, can you catch it?” (MAGIC) — it feels obligatory, too, obligatory braggadocio to indulge the pop music-streaming masses. But even the bouncy and approachable MAGIC is laced with honesty that’ll make you pause — “Crip and Blood shit. That’s the only thing I ever been in love with.” It’s delivered in a startlingly matter of fact temper, and the reporting-live-from-hood-America overtones feel necessary in a way so much modern music doesn’t. With RAMONA PARK, Vince Staples sits us down for a frank discussion, somehow giving us what we want to hear and telling us what we need to know at the same time.

Ice Cold Lemonade was originally published in OffTop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I. The Baker

The James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker is reserved for the .01% of bakers. It recognizes the baker who has so comprehensively mastered the intricacies of baking that they operate not in the realm of recipe execution or recipe alteration, but in the realm of true creation, discovering baked dishes like theoretical physicists discover subatomic particles. For five years running, the James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker has gone to Kenny G.

The path that Kenny G took to the cutting edge of baking is a long one, but not a winding one. It involved practice, and lots of it. “Five or more hours per day,” Kenny told me during a recent visit to his Seattle home, a modest three-bed Victorian overlooking the Puget Sound — modest for culinary royalty, anyway. It was an overcast day. Outside the panoramic kitchen windows, low-lying clouds politely offered a view of Seattle’s famous saltwater bay. Inside, the kitchen was clean, immaculately so. And large. It felt industrial. The off-white granite countertops were mostly bare save for a flour-smudged iPad and a few browning bananas in a brass wire basket. Spice racks could be seen through a glass-faced cupboard. Hidden inside the other cupboards lay every conceivable form of flour, sugar, sifter, and mixer. Pans lined the walls and a barrage of pots hung above the granite island where Kenny G and I sat opposite one another on leather barstools. The kitchen looked, to the casual home chef, like a nice, big kitchen. To Kenny G, though, it looked like the cockpit of a spaceship — a constellation of uniquely important switches and buttons, which, if orchestrated properly, promised to reveal heretofore undiscovered truths about the universe.

“I started baking in my high school home economics class. Mrs. Noteboom.” Kenny said.

He’d been a high-achiever throughout his young academic career, striving for A’s and basking in any perfect scores, like a junkie in the warm embrace of a heroin injection.

100/100 was his fix.

“I remember our first Bake Day in that class. We paired off, and each had a small table with our tools and ingredients. When I scraped off that first, perfectly level cup of flour something primal was triggered inside me. The flatness of it. The exactness of it. Pure and undisturbed. Still, it was only one component within a larger, choreographed interaction between ingredients. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that back in home ec. But something flipped in my brain that day. I was never the same.”

Measurements, temperatures, timers, ratios, and specialized tools became the furniture of the world Kenny would inhabit from that day forward. A world, part imagination, that would manifest in the kitchen, with breads and pastries so textbook in their consistency and presentation as to seem inedible.

“You know when food looks so good you don’t even want to eat it?” Kenny said. “I love that. The only thing I love more than that is when you do eat it, and it tastes even better than it looks.”

Kenny received one sub-100 score in his home economics class, a 98. He’d used old eggs with thin yolks and transparent whites in a carrot cake batter. This caused mediocre binding and a semi-crumbly cake. Even a glass-smooth spread of cream cheese frosting couldn’t mask the imperfection. Kenny carries that moment with him to this day. It even inspired the name of his latest baking show on HGTV, Fresh Eggs with Kenny G.

After graduating high school Kenny staged at a few local Seattle bakeries, pissing off the head bakers by repeatedly presenting off-beat menu adaptations. During off hours, Kenny would sneak back into the bakery to test new creations and log the results. On walks home he’d hand his gourmet franken-scones to Seattle’s homeless beggars.

He turned his after hours testing-and-logging into a menu that would become the bedrock of his first bakery, Kenny’s, which specialized in morning pastries and homemade-bread-and-schmear combinations at lunch. He opened Kenny’s when he was 21. A positive review in The Stranger, Seattle’s leftist, bohemian news publication, prompted a scout from HGTV to pay Kenny’s a visit.

“The chives-and-honey cream cheese on sourdough was like tasting bread for the first time.” said Jess Coughlin, the HGTV scout who discovered Kenny. “But what sold me on Kenny was his personality. He radiated a passion for his craft that was contagious. Always smiling. We signed him within ten days of me biting into that schmear.”

Five James Beard Awards for Outstanding Baker, two James Beard outstanding Pastry Chef Awards, Two James Beard Leadership Awards, three television shows, six bakeries, ten cookbooks, forty three magazine articles, two appearances as the SNL host, and a stint hosting Jeopardy later, and Kenny G is the most recognizable and highest earning culinary figure ever.

Martha Stewart times a thousand.

Some in baking’s old guard are put off by Kenny’s celebrity, arguing that anyone so preoccupied with fame — the social media stunts, the biopics, the podcasts, the NFTs, the courtside seats at Seattle Supersonics games — can’t maintain the requisite dedication to their craft to keep pushing the art form forward.

But the bottom line remains: put Kenny G in a kitchen with anyone, and he’ll bake the better bread.

When I visited the set of Fresh Eggs and sat in the studio audience, there was no sign of fatigue in him. He took the stage with long, sure strides and seemed to teleport from station to station, the camera cranes swiveling and sliding to capture every dollop and wry grin.

Today’s recipe: a meat pie with cubed lamb rump, carrots, sweet onion, and capers, in a flaky herb-buttered crust. Kenny G patiently demonstrated each step in the process, indulging himself along the way in brief tangents, and emanating complete rapture throughout.

At the end of the show, per tradition, the audience, along with Kenny, was given a taster of the final dish. Instructed by the show’s crew, everyone waited to take their bite simultaneously.

Three. Two. One.

I lifted the small forkful of lamb pie into my mouth in sync with 115 other audience members. The groans were orgasmic. The sighs, heavy. A room full of grown adults in communal mesmerism involuntarily smiled.

Nobody’s smile was bigger than Kenny’s.

He closed the show, through eyes squinted with ecstasy, with his signature sign off, “Thanks for joining me today. I’ll see you soon for another recipe so good it’ll blow your yokes!”

II. The Haikuist & The Transportation Chairman

“Thanks for joining me today. I’ll see you soon for another recipe so good it’ll — .”

A middle aged man lifted his thumb from the mute button, inhaling the fresh silence of his wood paneled study as a smiling Kenny G beamed out from the TV. The study’s inlaid mahogany shelves were dustless, and filled with books: On Love and Barley: The Haiku of Basho, Leaves of Grass, Falling Up, The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology, Think and Grow Rich. Next to his armchair was a small wooden side table spotlighted by a simple, chest-high, brass lamp. On it, a cup of cold coffee and a pen.

The man fluffed the newspaper in his lap and smelled his coffee, setting it down without taking a sip. He combed the page with his pen, muttering “mmhm,” as he found where he’d left off.

… the new rapid-onset anesthetic has shown zero side effects in both lab and animal trials. And its ability to be dosed across species and weight classes — from elephants to chickadees — has veterinary experts dubbing it the biggest breakthrough since gene sequencing. Whispers of a Nobel Prize are already rippling through the scientific community. Should he win the Nobel, this would be Dr. Kenny Parker Gorelick’s second Nobel award in a seven year span. His first, of course, for eradicating malaria through gene pool manipulation of mosquito populations, first in sub-saharan Africa, then around the world.

In the margin of the newspaper, the man in the study began scribbling.

A silent sparrow

Sewn together carefully

Blinks and chirps again

He lifted his gaze back to the television and swiped through apps and subscriptions, landing on ESPN. The US Open final was almost over and the television cameras were trained on a sinewy athlete, bouncing on the balls of his feet and dribbling the tennis ball with his racket. His hair, a curly, afro-like mullet, bounced with him. Then he served, a fluid blur. The scoreboard flickered. R.Faison: 0, K. S. Gorelick: 40.

The man in the study looked back down at his newspaper and began to scribble again when a knock on the door stopped him mid stroke. It was a familiar knock — two heavy clacks, then a rhythmic ratatat tat — like an advertisement jingle from childhood.

On the doorstep was a man in a blue suit, red tie, smiling with a glint in his eye.

“How was traffic?” said the man from the study.

“Good one.” replied the suit, chuckling.

“Come in. I have some coffee we can reheat and a few of Theo’s cookies if you’re hungry.”

The suit’s name is Kenny Art Gorelick. He’s a lean thirty year old, with an accepting yet inquisitive gaze, and a knack for making good first impressions. His work on vehicular traffic has catapulted him all the way into the President’s cabinet as the National Chairman of Transportation. Three years earlier he’d invented a new system for managing the flow of autonomous vehicles called AVAI (Autonomous Vehicle Adaptive Interaction). Given that autonomous vehicles are the only cars on public roads these days, the breakthrough eliminated traffic altogether. Now, he’s coordinating airports such that there’s never a wait to takeoff or to access a gate after landing, and, when his role calls for it, schmoozing amiably with Capitol Hill’s whiskey-breathed influencer class.

The two reheat coffee. No cream. No sugar.

They exchange family news, talk about the new veterinary anesthetic and the possibility of another Nobel Prize for Parker. They chat tennis. And soon the conversation lands on Dad.

“How’s he doing? Last I heard he was locking the nurses out of his studio so he could practice sax. Denying meds.”

“Yep. Still getting his three hours in per day. And concepting a new album, apparently — Marcy Blues III with Jay Z.”

“Another project with Sean? I gotta give it to Pops. If he finds something that works, he’ll squeeze it until every creative angle is exhausted. I’m just impressed Jay is keeping pace at his age.”

“One of the great poets of his time, that guy.

Well look, I’m glad you stopped by. Good to see your face. You seem to be brushing off DC’s bull crap admirably.

Take some cookies with you. They’re unreal. Theo is putting the recipe in his next cookbook, an all cookies collection. I think he’s calling it Batter & Soul.

And I’ll see you at Dad’s 108th next week? It’ll be the first time all 25 of us will be in the same place since like, what? ’57?”

“Something like that. Gosh. Crazy to think about.

Speaking of… ” the suit paused, fumbled with his keys, a rawness belying his polished attire washed over him, his inner eyebrows lifted and he caught his brother’s eye, “… you ever think about why this all happened to us? Why us? You know? What’s it mean?”

“Sure. All the time. I could ruminate on it all day. But it feels unproductive to me. So I work. That’s what matters. You know what Dad would say.”

Then in unison the two brothers spoke a sing-songy recitation, “Follow your dreams. And practice, practice, practice.”

The man from the study closed the door as his brother’s vehicle reversed out of the driveway, its barely audible electric hum fading from earshot. As he walked past the kitchen island, back to his study, he grabbed the now-cold cup of coffee off a magazine he’d been using as a coaster. Under a circular brown coffee stain, the title of a New Yorker article was legible: Humanity Distilled: What the Latest Collection of Poems from the World’s Most Prolific Haikuist, Kenny Damian Gorelick, Reveals About the Condition of Society.

Below it was a scribble.

As a whole, troubled

Individually, too

I blame Facebook ads

III. The Original

The story of the Brothers Gorelick — all twenty five of them, including The Haikuist, The Transportation Chairman, The Tennis Star, and The Veterinary Researcher — goes back to 2020, when a pandemic-induced lockdown forced Kenny Bruce Gorelick (The Original Kenny G) into a state of deep contemplation.

With government mandated freezes on live music, weddings, and corporate retreats, the world’s foremost purveyor of smooth jazz found himself with time on his hands. He stayed consistent with his saxophone and clarinet practice — three hours per day, every day. And he continued to log productive recording sessions in his home studio. But he picked up the habit of walking, sometimes for hours, around the wooded streets and pocket parks of his Seattle neighborhood.

It was on these walks that he began to confront his own mortality, earnestly, for the first time. He was 65 and figured that by sustaining his current diet, exercise, and sleep patterns, he had twenty five to thirty years left of life. Twenty active ones. He thought about his legacy. He thought about the criticism he’d received over the years, all the public vitriol. He thought about The Last Dance, which he’d just watched. He thought about Tiger King, which he’d watched just before that. Then he thought about a voicemail his agent had recently left him regarding a documentary HBO wanted to do on him, and he called his agent back.

Tiger King Winners and Losers

The pitch was simple when the HBO execs put it to him: “We’ll tell the story of how you became the world’s best-selling instrumentalist of all time, from your humble beginnings, to where you are now. Within that context we’ll explore one central question: Why are you such a polarizing musician, loved by so many and yet hated by so many? You’ll have every conceivable opportunity to tell your own story, address the criticism, and let the world know, unfiltered, where your work comes from and the intention behind it.”

If he wanted to craft his legacy, Kenny figured, this was the way to start.

One year later, Listening to Kenny G was released by HBO Music Box. Kenny is heavily featured throughout, answering questions about the many staunch critics, about claims of “musical necrophilia”, and about accusations of bastardizing the art of jazz. He doesn’t dodge any questions. Instead he sits, with perfect, tireless posture, on a simple wooden dining chair, and says, with an innocent smile, that his music is simply an expression of what he feels. He’s childlike in his candidness. He’s a people pleaser. He repeatedly asks the interviewer, “Was that good? Did you get what you want?” At another point he says, “I’ll sit here for six hours and not eat or drink if that’s what you need. I want make sure this is the best interview you’ve ever had.”

Did Kenny G dumb down jazz for the mainstream? Did his white skin help him cash in on an historically black art form? Did he make your girlfriend think dirty thoughts?

Depends on who you ask.

Ask Kenny, though, and all he did was practice jazz. And practice, and practice, and practice. And put out music, and perform, and meet the right people, until one day, with a little help from Clive Davis, he got some radio play. His seductive saxophone melodies wormed their way out of car radios and into the ears of commuters across the country. Smooth Jazz was born. It went global. And by 2021, businesses in China were playing Kenny G’s “Going Home”, every day, to signal the end of the workday.

What Listening to Kenny G showed viewers, though, other than Kenny G’s seeming stillness in the eye of a perpetual cyclone of hate, is that he’d probably be great at anything he did. He has a compulsive work ethic, hyper consistent. He picked up golf at one point and, for a stretch in his middle age, was arguably the best celebrity golfer alive. At one point in the film, he’s showing the HBO crew around his house and he takes a pie out of the oven. It looks perfect.

The HBO documentary was Kenny G’s first move at shaping his legacy, and it cemented this much: There’s probably nothing he can’t do, if he chooses to. And he’ll do it with an amiable demeanor and a persistence Michael Jordan would respect.

Kenny G’s next legacy-shaping move would bare this out, and it started with an application to Yale University.

The next seven years, from 2022 to 2029, were an epic of higher learning. In late 2021 Kenny G put a freeze on all personal and professional musical pursuits, celebrations broke out in cities nationwide. In 2022 he began his undergraduate studies at Yale. In 2025 he graduated with his Bachelor’s of Science in Biology and Chemistry. In 2028 he earned his PhD in Theoretical BioChem. And in 2029 he earned his Masters in Applied Theoretical BioChem. An academic journey that takes a vampiric, obsessive nerd twelve years to complete, Kenny completed in six. It was as if he plugged in to the Matrix — strapped to a metal dentist’s chair in the Nebuchadnezzar, eyes darting in every direction behind closed lids — downloaded an academic career’s worth of medical science, then suddenly opened his eyes, gasping, and whispered, “I know clone-fu.”

Which, of course, was his ultimate goal: to clone himself. This, he figured, would extend his legacy across generations, disciplines, perhaps even planets.

He knew what he could do in any domain given the time to practice. But time was the elusive ingredient. By cloning himself he could exponentially increase his (collective) practice time.

During the completion of his Masters degree Kenny would slink off into dimly lit corners of the Yale student laboratory and tinker. When the lab was completely inaccessible to students he worked out of a makeshift lab in his guest house. Patching together lab time at every opportunity, he was able to accelerate his practice, and breakthrough in ways established cloning experts never had — or maybe ever wanted to.

By the time Kenny G had completed his Master’s Degree, he had also successfully developed a proof of concept for safe, repeatable, scalable human cloning. After the results of his studies were published in the journal Nature, and he released a string of viral selfie videos on social media explaining the process, a global erupted over the ethics of cloning. The world wasn’t ready.

After close to a decade free of public scrutiny, Kenny G was once again among earth’s most polarizing figures.

Kenny G made mass market human cloning possible. But in 2032, just over two years after the results of his replicable cloning study had been published, the furious socio-political hullabaloo crescendoed with a Supreme Court ruling that indefinitely paused Gorelick’s work on cloning and banned the technology from being offered on the open market, or further developed in any fashion. Cloning was illegal — exactly the ruling he’d hoped for.

The media firestorm lasted another month. The Clone Filter on TikTok — which translated a video version of you dancing into ten independent, visually identical versions of you, all dancing in different ways — dropped from the most used filter worldwide, to the seventh most used. The tweets slowly stopped trending. The four-paneled talk shows eventually glommed on to new fodder. Kenny G was none the wiser, though, because he’d been hard at work in his guest house’s home laboratory.

Before he’d ever published the results of his breakthrough cloning study, Kenny G had retrofitted his home lab with a scaled down version of the Yale science lab. Every beaker, dropper, and incubator was state of the art, gleaming stainless steel and pyrex. He’d even had an underground tunnel built between the main house and the lab in the guest house, to avoid being surveyed crossing the yard in the open.

After the State v Gorelick ruling, Kenny took a three-day at-home retreat, putting work aside and letting the press get their think pieces out. But he didn’t rest long. On day four he donned his lab coat and began the careful process of growing clones in his guest house, twenty five of them, all seeded with his own DNA.

Two months of staging was followed by multiple trial experiments to ensure the home lab could see a starter through from conception to the early stages of proper cell division. Finally, in January of 2035, he commenced his official batch clone cells.

He knew once they had heartbeats, they were free. No government entity would publicly take the lives of 25 human fetuses, with beating hearts and tiny clenching fingers. He’ll never forget the morning of March 23, 2035, when he walked in to his lab and the first little Kenny had a heartbeat. Three days later, all 25 little Kennys had heartbeats and the Kenny G experiment had officially reached cruising altitude.

He gave them each a unique middle name so he could tell them apart, and he raised them in secret for the first year with the help of an assistant who was sworn to silence and remains anonymous.

In their second year, the news got out. It broke Twitter, frying two hundred private servers and crippling the platform for two days. The Clone Filter on TikTok rocketed back to number one. Every conceivable human reaction bubbled up across the internet, including calls for legal action and Child Protective Services to seize the kids. But Kenny was prepared for this. He’d constructed, in advance, a careful legal argument supporting his custody of the Kenny’s and the legality of his private at-home cloning. Ultimately the question became, what was best for the kids? Which, it was decided, was being raised by their dad, around each other.

Time passed. The little Kennys grew to embody their father’s maniacal dedication to practice and desire to be great at things. And to this day they share his affable, unflappable demeanor. Which helped with the unending press inquiries.

The Kennys have been the subject of much debate over the subsequent thirty years. They’ve become, collectively, the most famous humans in earth’s history. There have been be books written about them. Some of those books have been written by them. Their impacts have already been far reaching. Through practice, and an unflinching pep they‘ve each catapulted their respective fields, and humankind, into the future.

Here are the Kennys, and a few of their most noteworthy accomplishments to date:

• The Baker, who became the most prolific, awarded, critically acclaimed, and richest culinary figure in history. Accelerating human evolution, one banana bread recipe at a time.
• The Veterinarian, who revolutionized veterinary anesthesiology, and who completed the first successful underwater caesarean section operation on a birthing blue whale.
• The Haikuist, whose daily email newsletter containing a single haiku became the most read email newsletter of all time, and centered pop culture, for the first time in history, on poetry.
• The Transportation Official, who eliminated road traffic once and for all, and who became the first non-comedian invited on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
• The Tennis Player, who won Wimbledon at 24 and brought the mullet-headband look back to tennis.
• The Other Tennis Player, who won Wimbledon doubles with his brother at 23 and who holds the record for most consecutive serves without a fault.
• The Plastic Surgeon, who changed plastic surgery culture to the point where celebrities publicize the fact they’re going to Kenny G to get their nose done, and then publicize it again when they do it a second time. It’s a badge of honor.
• The Fly Fisherman, who’s been Fly Fishing World Champion for eight of the last eleven years (yes, in 2065 that’s a thing), and whose proudest accomplishment is his record for most river trout caught in a 24hr period, 217.
• The Furniture Designer, who popularized the toilet-chair for the home office, allowing ambitious remote workers to improve overall work efficiency by an estimated 5.2%.
• The Cross Country Skier, who completed the first unsupported traverse of Canada on skis. His contribution to society is debatable.
• The Newscaster, who set a record 4,700 hours of live television broadcasts without saying the word “um”, and who would occasionally host four expert panelists on his show, all of them Kenny Gs.
• The Material Scientist, who made actual flubber.
• The Historian, who wrote early biographies on all 24 of the other Kenny G’s. And one on Arsenio Hall.
• The Game Show Contestant, who, in 2064, made as much money from game show winnings as the three highest paid NBA players, combined.
• The Poker Player, who won the World Series of Poker seven consecutive years, got banned, and now runs clinics for aspiring young poker players. A movie is in development about his life.
• The Ad Agency Creative Director, who produced 35 of the 61 ads that ran during Super Bowl XCVI (96). Three commercial brakes during the game featured his ads exclusively.
• The Subway Franchisee, who opened 148 Subways before buying the entire Subway corporation.
• The Civil Engineer, who built the first fully functioning network of subterranean bullet trains that spans the continental US and Canada.
• The Diplomat, who has held numerous political offices and is best known for bringing peace to the Middle East.
• The Rabbi, whose streamable sermons at one point were among the top ten most watched shows on Netflix for 64 weeks running. He also popularized the yamaka across cultures, largely through collaborations with Supreme and the Jordan Brand.
• The NBA General Manager, whose scouting efforts within the subculture of Korean street ball unearthed a string of MVP point guards. He also made so many consecutive trades that panned out in his favor, that other teams refuse to trade with him. His current team, the Seattle Supersonics, hasn’t made a trade in four seasons and still made the NBA finals in three of those four seasons, winning championships on two of those.
• The City Planner, who revived the movie theater industry through the legalization of marijuana products inside theaters, and heated massage chairs for every attendee. He also popularized the optional theatre seat add-on of a small tank you can soak your feet in that has those little fish that will nibble away your dead skin. He also ended homelessness.
• The Anthropologist, who made first contact with a previously undiscovered Amazonian tribe, and lived with them, by himself for three and a half years before emerging with a root that when mashed, boiled, strained, and consumed, cures gout.
• The Biologist, who discovered three new types of psychedelic mushrooms and who in a joint effort with his brother, The Diplomat, passed a bill with a house majority vote, that every presidential candidate is required to have taken a Heroic Dose of magic mushrooms on at least one occasion prior to running for office.
• The Painter, who basically superseded Bob Ross, but also re-painted the Sistine Chapel, with the Pope’s blessing.

It’s 2065 and the Kennys are 30 years old.

The Immortal Kenny G was originally published in OffTop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Russell Wilson is one of the great healers of all time. If you didn’t know this before Pete Carroll’s week 5 post-game press conference, you did afterword.

“Russ is one of the great healers of all time,” Carroll said in his signature affable mutter. It was a moment so extremely-Pete-Carroll that even Pete looked, momentarily, like he might walk it back. Pete’s hyperbole was good for a brief chuckle and a long pause, because, you know what? He might be right.

In the third quarter of the game preceding Pete’s presser, an eventual loss, Russ hit the middle finger of his throwing hand on the swinging forearm of Aaron Donald while following through on a deep pass. It looked bad right away. Russ jogged over to the sideline jiggling his fingertip around like a cat hoping the dead bird it’s playing with will bounce to life and play back. The finger didn’t bounce to life because Russ had sustained a ruptured extensor tendon and a comminuted fracture-dislocation of the proximal interphalangeal joint. Basically the ligament that allows him to straighten his middle finger had snapped. Plus he’d dislocated and fractured some other stuff. The timeline for recovery was 8 weeks, or longer.

Wilson had surgery the next day (which included a metal pin inserted into his finger).

He was starting again for the Seahawks 37 days after that.

Considering that Wilson hadn’t missed a start, ever, before tearing his finger, his wolverine-like recovery cast Pete’s hyperbole in a more credible light. Questions begged asking, like how exactly does, Russell Wilson stay so healthy and heal so greatly? What kind of special diet is he on that the rest of the league has yet to adopt? What investments need one make to become an all-time great healer? Or can money even buy healing powers like Russ’s?

“It’s mostly belief, a mentality,” Wilson says, smiling from across a small patio table that looks over his sweeping, waterfront compound on the shore of Seattle’s Lake Washington. “The body follows the mind, and injecting the healing process with positivity allows the body to more quickly enter recovery mode. When you believe in your recovery, it’s a whole-body belief.”

The sun is out, bouncing off the wind-rippled surface of the lake and casting kaleidoscopic fractals against the tan siding of Wilson’s home. ‘Home’ being a grossly simplistic description of what functions more like some combination of health spa, physical therapy clinic, and medical research laboratory. Within the off-white walls and panoramic windows that appear no different than the many mansions of Seattle’s upper-crust neighborhoods, things are going on. Big things. Optimistic things. Giant-leap-for-man-kind sort of things.

[earlier that afternoon]

I arrive at the ‘Spa De Wilson’ to a greeting from his three Great Danes, Prince, Naomi, and Hero. They don’t bark as I walk past them up the front steps, instead sniffing suspiciously and exuding a regal obedience. “Siiiit. Good dogs.” Wilson says. He smiles and extends an extra-firm handshake my way (extensor working just fine).

We both know I’m here to interview him specifically about his abilities as a healer, and Wilson, an eager host, jumps straight into things as the the front door lets out a breathy whoosh, locking tightly behind us.

“The whole house is a hyperbaric chamber. That’s healing secret number one. Had it installed after the 2016 season when I had some high-ankle and MCL issues.”

I breathe deep, curious if ultra-oxygenated air has a unique taste. It does not.

“Also, cell phones won’t work inside. There’s a network of cell-signal-cancelling nodes mounted throughout the house, so phones basically go into airplane mode without actually having airplane mode turned on.”

The reason for this, Wilson explains, is twofold. One, it maintains the purity of the sonic frequencies inside the house’s various rooms — sound waves, undetectable to the human ear, that promote circulation, cell regeneration, and the body’s natural anti-inflammatory response. These ‘medi-frequencies’, as Wilson calls them, repeatedly, are a beta product he’s developing in tandem with Bose. The second reason for no cell signals inside, Wilson says, is simply to promote non-distraction.

I glance down at my phone. When I look back up, Wilson is pouring two small glasses of water. He hands me one.

“This, you probably wouldn’t even put in your article, it’s so basic. But we keep a chilled pitcher of lemon water in the kitchen. It’s common knowledge that lemon water helps digestion, liver function, immune function, blah, blah. The one cool thing about this water, though, is that the lemon in it is fresh squeezed from organic, two-month lemons. These are lemons that have matured exactly two months (give or take 48 hours) at time of harvest. Studies show two months is when lemon fruits have the most antioxidants and anti-inflamatories. 7% higher than three-month lemons, and 12% higher than four-month lemons, which are kind of b-grade, but we’ll get those from time to time when that’s all that’s available.”

I imagine baby lemons rolling around in diapers, then a row of gallon-sized glass jars in Wilson’s kitchen snaps me to my senses. The dozen or so jars, lined up on a granite counter behind the pitcher of baby-lemon elixir, are filled with what appears to be sand of various colors — teal, royal blue, sunset orange, deep maroon.

“Ah, you’ve spotted the spice rack.”

“Spice rack?”, I say skeptically, thinking to myself, “Looks more like the Hogwarts potion pantry. Or the dark-web google result for homemade bomb starter kit.”

I can tell this is stuff Wilson spends a lot of time, and money, on. Like a Star Wars buff who dedicates nights and weekends to hand-painting collectible figurines, and rarely gets the chance to show them off.

“Spice rack?”

“That’s what C and I call it anyway. I won’t go down the whole lineup. But check this one out,” he says, pointing at a jar two-thirds full of bright blue powder. “That’s Ghanaian Saffron. Pete turned me on to it, actually.” He pauses and adds, “You really should be doing your piece on him. Half the health stuff I’ve picked up is from Pete. I think he got visited by aliens or something. The stuff he knows is like, where the heck did you learn that? You know? But anyway, this is saffron. One teaspoon in the morning in your smoothie. It’s a mood enhancer. Increases optimism. Pete apparently takes two teaspoons before our ‘competition Wednesday’ practices. Three on game days.

Want to try some?”

I give a ‘why not?’ face. And russ scoops a half-dose into a glass of freshly poured lemon-veal water and hands it to me. The flavor is blander than the color. Hints of cardamom.

“Enjoy it,” Wilson says half kidding. “Stuff is three grand an ounce.”

What’s the Point of “The Beach Bum”?

The tour continues through lofted hallways and over exotic hardwood floors. Every few steps my attention is called to a different custom install or special material — the Nike foam padding under the carpet that minimizes joint impact; the rooms that automatically change temperature and humidity based on thermal readings of the people that enter; the Vietnamese Agarwood floors which emit subtle, calming fragrances; the dimmable, color-changing lights timed to Russell’s circadian rhythm; the recliner in the study that provides a full-body massage; the actual masseuse; the chef; the barber; the pedicurist — all four of whom are playing pool in the game room when we walk by.

“Don’t let Chris hustle you again, Mo! Don’t do it!” Wilson jabs at the foursome without breaking stride.

Wilson’s setup is enough to make you wonder whether there’s a point of diminishing returns on all this stuff. I mean, how much healing can one body handle?

But whether the returns are diminishing or not, he’s chasing them. The tubs room confirms this.

Inside a door engraved, simply, with the word Tubs, is a sprawling, terraced, stone-floored grotto. The air is filled with mist and the sound of tiny waterfalls. Spaced artfully across the terraced layout are twelve different, 7ft-diameter tubs that allow someone to experience not just a hot tub, cold plunge, or salt bath, but a soak in all manner of alchemical brews. One, Wilson tells me, contains sweat secretions from Sonoran toads which he breeds in a terrarium out back. Another is lined on all sides with amethyst crystals and contains a mixture of blended lemongrass and silk from Cambodian swallows nests — good for the appearance of the skin, and overall pliability.

“This one’s my favorite,” Russ says, pointing to a tub with a thick, steaming, mud-like substance. “It’s elk manure. Pure. The ventilation system above the tub pulls the odor out of the room so you don’t notice it unless you’re actually in the tub. But if you’re in there? Oooowee! I wear nose plugs.”

“What’s it do?” I ask.

“It’s like next-gen deer antler spray. Elk live such raw, primal lives that the chemical makeup of their manure is ridiculously nutrient-dense. It ain’t your gandpappy’s cow dung. 10 minutes soaking in that and your body’s natural recovery processes accelerate — blood coagulation, red blood cell count, testosterone levels, everything.”

“I hope you pay your pool boy well.” I said, not kidding.

We cross the marsh of steaming pools through a door leading into a small hallway with more doors, each with ergonomic handles fashioned from chakra-balancing Black Tourmaline stone. Behind one of these doors is Wilson’s healing coup de grâce: The Lab.

We step down a short flight of stairs, through a pair of airlock doors, into a hermetically sealed room, stainless steel from floor to ceiling. Various glass cases, viles, and refrigerators are visible, illuminated with cold recessed lighting. The whole lab is maybe 500 square feet. A subtle hum is audible. It smells like clorox and latex gloves.

“Welcome to The Lab.” Russ says. “When guys come to training camp in shape or with a new move, you hear ‘em say they’ve been in the lab. I really mean it.” He shoots a proud smile at me.

At the back of The Lab is a pocket door which, after Wilson allows two small lasers to scan his retinas as a credentials check, slides open automatically like a walk-in fridge on the USS Enterprise. It slides closed behind us. Inside, the small room glows orange, and the smell of decomposing potatoes hangs in the wet air. On the walls, from waist height up to the ceiling, are racks upon racks of football-sized glass cases. The cases are half full with a viscous semi-transparent solution, inside each one floats what looks like a large tadpole. One per case. Each case has four tubes exiting it and an individual orange grow-light perched over it. At the far end of the walk-in-closet-sized room is a row of glass vats, each partially filled with a pearlescent liquid. This seems to be the output of the operation.

“This is our HPSCEF, Humane Pangolin Stem Cell Extraction Facility,” explains Russ. “It’s an intricate process that we’ve worked with biomedical experts from the University of Washington to pioneer, but the short version is this: We run a free-range pangolin sanctuary out of the Congo. Any time a pangolin becomes 4 weeks pregnant we pull her from the wilderness habitat briefly to perform a minimally invasive caesarean section, removing the embryo. By immediately transferring the embryo into a synthetic womb—that’s what these glass bowls are—we allow it to continue developing uninterrupted.” Perhaps catching a look of mild horror in my eyes, Russ pauses.

“The moms, the babies, they all do just fine. We have a statistically insignificant rate of death among the pangolins.

And here’s the coolest part. After 4 weeks in the synthetic womb, and providing over 4oz of pure stem cell biome, we take the embryo and perform a reverse Caesarean section with the same exact mother who let us borrow her child initially. Rewiring the umbilical system was the hardest part to figure out, but the docs pulled it off. So each baby returns to the womb, where it fully develops for the next month or so before being birthed naturally on the sanctuary.

Meanwhile, back here, we dilute the pure stem cell biome into an injectable solution. Undiluted, the biome is too intense for the most human nervous systems to handle (Russ pauses, shooting another proud smile across the orange space-fridge). It can trigger all sorts of inflammatory responses. But diluted it’s received incredibly well by the human body, aiding in everything from muscle, ligament, and bone recovery, to new neuron development in the brain. I took a shot before a family trip to Italy this past summer and came home conversationally fluent in Italian. Basically, you’re looking at the cutting edge of human performance and recovery research right here.”

“What’s the potato smell from?” I ask, trying to act normal.

“That’s the composting potatoes,” replies Russ, tapping a perforated, foot-height drawer with his foot. “We found that a little bit of off-gassing from decomposing potatoes shifts the air composition, allowing the pangolins to produce 10%-12% more stem cells. Good old fashioned Russets.”

Our tour ends in the HPSCEF, mercifully. My shirt is soaking through with potato fumes and sweat.

We make our way outside to sip baby lemon water and geek out on the whole setup. It’s here, on the sunny porch, with normal earth-grade air wafting up our nostrils where Russ explains the phantom thread that ties all the tech, the research, and the free-range pangolin sanctuaries together.

“It’s mostly belief, a mentality.”

To Wilson, the gizmos and biomedical research are merely support system for the true tool, the mind, which is Wilson’s biggest ongoing project.

“Shifting to neutral. Shifting to neutral,” Russ repeats “ That’s the key to sustained high performance across different scenarios. It’s the mental training that underpins everything we do at my performance company Limitless Minds. By staying neutral amidst chaos — calm, focused, not too high, not too low, not frazzled. This is the key. And physical health is at the root of that, but it’s the cart, not the horse. Or maybe it’s the horse shoes. Or no, maybe it’s the hay they feed the horse. But regardless, the horse is the mind. And a balanced, focused mind — a neutral mind — is how we excel.”

“Is it hard to shift to neutral? What’s the process look like to do it?”

“Not once you’re practiced at it. You find yourself doing it throughout the day. That is, if you’re not already in a constant state of neutrality. But this is hard to achieve. I’ve shifted to neutral maybe a dozen times since we’ve been hanging out.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Absolut– oop. Just did it again. Did you notice it that time? Sometimes you can see it in subtle facial cues.”

Russell whistles. “Prince! Naomi! Hero! Come here. I’ve actually taught the dogs to do it. Watch. ‘Blue Eighty — Blue Eighty, Set!’” Instantly the two dogs sit down, noses slightly lifted, eyes fixed on Russ. Their focus is palpable.

“Wow,” I mutter. “I think I see it. Yeah.”

“Yeah, we’re actually developing a dog training academy here locally with the concept of mental neutrality at its core. We’re hoping to have multiple graduates bring home awards from the Westminster show next year.”

There are some interviews where you have to coax energy out of your subject. This isn’t one of them. Russ and I go on, back and forth for three hours at the patio table, our gregariousness perhaps fueled by baby-lemon elixir, saffron, and elevated blood oxygen levels. We chat until the fractal reflections of sunlight off the water disappear and the pine trees throw long shadows across the manicured lawn. Eventually, despite my journalistic instincts to keep Russ talking, I feel I’ve truly had enough. Plus I’m starving. I angle for a clean exit.

“Well, I need to go get some grub. How about you? I know you’re careful about what you put in your body. What’s for dinner?”

“I’ll need to check with the chef, but I’m pretty sure it’s sou-vide sea cucumber and elk back strap. Both wild-harvested this morning and flown in.” he says, unflinching.

“Oh, nice,” I reply, having become numb to such impossible statements.

On my way out the door, Russ thanks me graciously, and as I drive my car around the horseshoe driveway, past the front door, he smiles at me with a wide, instructive gaze, miming the hand motion of shifting gears in a car, and silently mouths, “Shift to neutral! Shift to neutral!”

I wave and return my gaze to the road, visions of pangolin embryos drifting through my mind.

The Secret to Russell Wilson’s Superhuman Healing Powers was originally published in OffTop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The fear started when I was merging onto the freeway. It crept up my spine and tip toe’ed around my forehead. Soon my whole body felt like it was clamped into one of those heavy duty operating tables used to examine mutants and superheroes. My eyes darted around. I could taste metal. It was then I realized that the fear crawling under my skin like bot fly larvae was originating from my empty left pocket.

I’d forgotten my phone.

I was only going to the grocery store, sure, but without my cyborg extension I felt inept. What if I had a thought worth noting? How would I remember it? What if I saw a funny license plate and wanted to mock it on Snapchat? What if I had to check the weather? What about current events? Sports? Memes? I’d be an untethered cretin by the time I got home.

I confronted my anxiety carefully, my figurative arms extended, palms open, like it was a riled-up tweaker, or feral cat. “Wooosah,” I whispered. Putting more and more emphasis on the “-saaaah” each time. Gradually I talked my anxiety down. With each breath it inched farther back toward my pocket until, finally, it tucked out of sight. I came to my senses behind the wheel, going 85 and weaving past a semi truck.

As I scanned traffic ahead of me, everything slowed down. The world took on a subtle vibrance. My grip on the steering wheel loosened and the white around my knuckles turned pink. My gaze widened. A sense of weightlessness cushioned my limbs. From somewhere I could hear angelic violins. I took the off ramp.

At a red light I rolled the windows down and the smell of burgers on a charcoal grill drifted in along with the sound of skateboard wheels on pavement. Movie scenes began flashing before my mind’s eye, all of them similar: A newly free man walks out from a high security prison. Grinning hesitantly, he squints and holds up a hand to shield his face from the sun. Towering metal gates clank shut behind him. He hops in a friend’s car—always a convertible—and shuts the door exhaling as the car peels off. The light turned green and I hit the gas.

I turned up the radio. It was tuned to the Mexican station. The rapid staccato of the DJ’s Spanish reminded me of playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas as a kid. I thought of those carefree afternoons while I drove. Through my windshield the world became a no-holds-barred playground, free of consequences. Should I steal that candy painted muscle car? Maybe I’ll rob that pedestrian, get a couple stars. Oh wait, I know a cheat code for a rocket launcher!

I browsed my surroundings like a three dimensional Eastbay catalog for criminals and realized that it wasn’t the allure of breaking the law that was egging me on. Instead it was a general feeling of confidence, completely irrational confidence. Illegal or otherwise, the world felt in that moment like my proverbial oyster. I was high on the feeling of being off-leash. My phone was gone and with it any sense of limitation. I ran a stop sign.

That’s when the flashbacks hit. I don’t remember the last ten minutes of the drive to the store other than the ultra-vivid visions from my childhood. They were full body memories. I fell from one to the next, each one catching me only momentarily before I ripped through it like a bowling ball dropped from a tall building through a series of awnings. The one thing all the memories had in common? They were from the years 1994–1999. I turned the car off and found myself parked in a busy grocery store parking lot.

The flashbacks stopped, but for the rest of the day I was buoyed by a feeling of discovery. The future glistened under a translucent coating of optimism. I took the long way home from the store, just because.

By the next day, that feeling was gone. In its place was the occasional, feeble jolt of adrenaline whenever my phone would vibrate, and the reptilian satisfaction of making those little red push notifications disappear.

That I-don’t-have-my-phone feeling—uneasy ineptitude matched by a thrilling sense of being unbounded—didn’t come along again until I watched Mid 90’s. Mid 90’s is built on that feeling.

The Momentum Generation: 99% Great, 1% Reprehensible

It’s easy to credit Jonah Hill for the subtle (and not-so-subtle) details that make Mid 90’s feel like a time machine: The way the movie’s framed, the tube TVs, the Blockbuster references, the general lack of adult supervision, the 40oz malt liquor bottles, the fitted baseball caps, the liberal use of homosexual slurs, the disc-mans, the soundtrack, the Slurpees, the ephemeral notion of becoming a sponsored skateboarder, the allure of landing your first ollie, the bulky camcorders, the oversized clothes, the caricatured Chinese restaurants and, yes, the lack of cell phones.

What makes Mid 90’s impressive though, beyond capturing the gestalt of the era, is the bluntness and matter-of-fact-ness that it slaps you in the face with. Stevie (the main character of the movie, played by Sunny Soljic) simmers with the confusion and excitement and fear and self-consciousness of adolescence. Coughing on his first cigarette, he tells his friend he’s not used to that brand of smokes. On his way home later that day, he washes his mouth out with soap from the gas station bathroom, trying to scrub off the smell of tobacco. Mid 90’s feels like a never ending procession of moments that make you cringe and laugh and want to reach through the screen and shake some sense into Stevie and his friends. I imagine rewatching my own teen years would feel the same.

The band of hooligan skaters Stevie starts running with provide more than enough encouragement to fuel his self-destructive experimentation. As a team they take on the world, or at least their little corner of suburban California. They do about as well as any group of quasi-delinquent, hard-luck teenagers can be expected to. They make a mess of growing up—a social slam reel—and how they navigate their brutal crucible is both surprising and inevitable.

Mid 90’s pins us down and forces us to relive our teenage awkwardness. It also animates the thrill of discovery characteristic of those years. It’s a movie about being raised by your peers, self-inflicted pain, finding boundaries by slamming into them, other people’s approval, the weird ways that young men express themselves. At it’s core, it’s a movie about resolving the tension of not knowing who to be. A tension that eases up as we get older, but never goes away completely.

Mid 90’s is An Uncomfortably Accurate Portrayal of Adolescence in the 90's was originally published in OffTop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you google “The Beach Bum” the first question on Google’s list of commonly asked questions is “What is the point of The Beach Bum?”, which is either proof positive that the movie succeeded or exhibit A for why it was a frivolous way to spend five million dollars, depending on who you are. The dividing line between the pro-Beach Bum camp and the anti-Beach Bum camp—not to make things unnecessarily divisive, or anything—is this question: Does a movie need to have a point?

And by “Does a movie need to have a point?” what’s really being asked is, “Does a movie need to have a point beyond entertaining the audience—which is ostensibly the point of every movie—to have value?” Does it need to address what some would call “topics of high seriousness”—fundamental conundrums of the human condition, weighty themes like morality, longstanding cultural sticking points, societal dilemmas? Or is serious high-ness enough?

In 95 minutes of oversized joints, canned beers, hobo parades, gratuitous breasts and petty crime, The Beach Bum answers that question. And it uses a heavy hitting lineup of comedy actors and celebrity appearances to do so.

Matthew McConaughey plays the lead character, Moondog, “Key West’s Most Prolific Poet”, a walking fruit leather with salt-caked, sun-bleached, shoulder-length hair, billowing tropical shirts, a phanny pack, flip-up sunglasses that when raised reveal a glassy, distant, inter-dimensional gaze, and a deranged smile hung loosely off cheekbones chiseled from laughter. It’s McConaughey at his stoner-est. Isla Fisher plays Moondog’s wealthy, mansion-dwelling, cocktail-dress-wearing, polyamorous wife and number one cheerleader. Snoop Dogg plays Lingerie, Moondog’s longtime amigo, successful marijuana connoisseur and leader of Jamaica’s friendliest gang of weed traffickers, i.e. basically himself. Jonah Hill plays Moondog’s literary agent, Lewis, who wears a panama hat and speaks in a southern drawl that sounds like he just watched Django and is slowly forgetting how to imitate DiCaprio’s character. Zac Efron plays ADHD incarnate—an anime-haircut-sporting, fast talking, golf-cart-stealing, vape-cloud-blowing delinquent named Flicker. Martin Lawrence plays Captain Wack, a dolphin-tour guide and owner of a coke-addicted parrot. Jimmy Buffet plays Jimmy Buffet.

All of these characters influence Moondog’s odyssey, but their patchwork of scenes create the effect of a sketch comedy show that feels somehow thin in the context of Moondog’s grand mission for literary resurrection and existential fulfillment.

McConaughey is the only one in the film who creates a character compelling enough to buy into—or at least interesting enough to have a hard time looking away from. He careens through life like a baby, perpetually about to topple over, making you want to reach through the screen and hold him upright. And, like a baby, you somehow want to forgive him for the horrible things he’s a party to. He doesn’t know any better, right? Every time you’re ready to chalk him up as a lowlife, a burnt out drifter wasting away in the sweaty gooch of America, he shines. In the soft pink of neon bar lights, with smoke drifting though the moist Keys air and bloated barflies marinating in the scent of spilled rum and expired tiki torches, he takes the stage, beckons the crowd closer and whispers profound nothings into the microphone like a bird of paradise in the heat of a Pabst-fueled mating ritual.

Mid 90’s is An Uncomfortably Accurate Portrayal of Adolescence in the 90's

McConaughey’s ability to articulate Moondog’s uninhibited constitution is the rolling paper that holds this movie together. It’s a testament to the stoner-ness McConaughey has leaned into throughout his career. That same stoner-ness is the reason he’s one of Hollywood’s more polarizing figures. To some he’s a glassy-eyed messiah, bestowing wisdom and un-bunching the panties of an egocentric industry. To others he’s a glazed-over fool whose stoner schtick rings hollow. There’s not a lot of in-between.

The appearance of deep thoughts and a sense of secret wisdom is what gives McConaughey, Moondog and The Beach Bum a feeling of profoundness at times. But trying to tease apart any themes of real weight, philosophical underpinnings or cultural critiques from The Beach Bum is tricky once you get past the obvious overtones of hedonism. Of course, an arm chair philosopher could hyper-analyze The Beach Bum and write entire treatises on its societal ramifications. An arm chair philosopher could study a toaster oven and parse out foundational truths about humanity—think long enough about anything and its interconnectedness to the world becomes apparent. But sometimes it’s best to look at a toaster and go no further than to know that people like warm bread.

Toward the end of the movie Moondog is asked, “You’ve got an interesting life. How’d you pull it off?”

To which he replies:

“I mean look. I could tell you that I’m trying to uncover the abyss beneath my illusory connection with the world. I could tell you that it’s all written in the stars. I could tell you that I’m a reverse paranoiac—I’m quite certain that the world is conspiring to make me happy. All three of which are true but, it’s really a little simpler than that: I like to have fun, man. Fun’s the fucking gun, man.”

Therein lies the point of The Beach Bum: movies don’t need to have a point other than to entertain. Some just need a singular character and an actor uniquely qualified to play them. And if that actor, and all the cultural jetsam and flotsam that constitute their existence in your imagination, is your cup of tea, then a pointless movie can equate to a well-spent 95 minutes. Whether you like The Beach Bum comes down to the fundamental McConaughey-ness of the whole thing. You were either in or out from the start.

What’s the Point of “The Beach Bum”? was originally published in OffTop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.