It Gets Easier
I took a trip to visit my son at college. It went well. I think.
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re moving to a Sunday morning delivery because the day job doesn’t leave enough time to write this until the weekend. This week, I visit my oldest son at college as we mark 100 days of the Biden administration. Jessie Daniels offers an appreciation for Joe Biden’s real achievement: being boring while going big. And Jack Hughes asks what it means that Joe Biden sees the world through Irish eyes.
And as always, we offer suggestions on things to do (find plants), read (Chait on the effects of anti-racist messaging), watch (Bob Odenkirk in the Wickian NOBODY), and listen to (girl in red’s “Serotonin”).
But first, let me tell you about the ballgame I went to.
The sky was the color of a George Brett-era Royals home jersey. The grass was as green as you’d expect from an agricultural state university. The breeze was blowing in from right field, taking whatever edge remained from the warm spring day that the beer didn’t get. The fans sitting around us in the bleachers were commenting with fermented volume on events they perceived with startling acuity from a vantage more than 300 feet away, though, to be fair, I also thought that one guy was out. It was my first ballgame since getting vaccinated, which meant it was my first ballgame since… didn’t go to a game last season because there was no season… carry the one… 2019. I didn’t give a tinker’s dam about Texas A&M versus Tennessee, but this was a ballgame. I should have been ecstatic. I was worried.
To my left sat my oldest son. Other than joking about why the A&M center fielder always walked over to shoot the breeze with the right fielder when the pitcher warmed up and never with the left fielder, he hadn’t been saying much. In fact, despite getting double-vaxxed and knowing the CDC said it was safe to be outside among people if you’ve been vaccinated, he never took it off, even going so far as to lift up the mask to put kernels of pop corn into his mouth. We weren’t not getting along. But this wasn’t the visit to my son at college that I’d always dreamed of. He was closed off. He’d answer questions if asked, but his roommate, who was tagging along, was talking with me more than my son was.
A dad showed up late to the game with his two toddler identical twin boys and sat right in front of us. Everything you need to know about this guy is what the were wearing. He was wearing a Reagan/Bush ‘84 trucker hat. They were wearing little blue jeans over diapers, functional sneakers, tiny sunglasses with plastic camo frames, and neatly pressed, immaculate Texas A&M flag shirts. If you don’t know what that is, and there’s no earthly reason why you should, click here, and imagine a thousand times cuter. They looked like teeny tiny people who knew the words to every George Strait song and didn’t vote for Joe Biden but are secretly glad that he won. Also, they had these dark eyes…
Reader, I did not ask to hug them or play with them or smell their heads. Where. Is. My. Medal? But I stared. Oh boy, did I stare.
The dad bought them a small tub of popcorn bigger than their heads and set it between them, and they set to shoving tiny fistfuls of corn into their faces. It didn’t take long for them to fill their tiny bellies, at which point they discovered that if they banged their tiny fists onto the remaining corn they could make tiny, yellow corn explosions.
“No… don’t…” said the dad, helplessly. They were so pleased with themselves. The dad would turn away, and they’d turn back to making little corn explosions.
Soon the boys were climbing over him and exploring the benches and touching things, and by things I mean everything. There was a bent metal rod joining two sections of a walkway that would move and make noise if you waggled it, and waggle they did. The boys took turns walking over to waggle the metal rod while the dad tried to maintain a general sense of order. One would toddle over; dad would grab him, freeing the other to scoot into waggling position; repeat.
There’s a thing I do for young parents when they’re struggling. I remember how much exhausting work it took to accomplish Sitting In One Place. Sitting down for a restaurant meal, for a plane trip, for a ballgame… What was once just sitting there became a harrowing series of benumbing actions. When I see a parent experience what I not only survived but have transcended, I share one thing I’ve learned. As we left for dinner during the fifth inning, I told the dad, “It gets easier.”
“He barely talked at all,” I told Sonia that night by phone after he’d dropped me off at my hotel.
“His roommate was there,” she said. “He’s not going to talk if there are other people around.”
***
I remember one time when he and his brother were young. Their mother and I were either divorced or getting divorced. In either case, I was out with them alone at one of those amazing restaurants in Austin where the outside seating was effectively a cage-free playground. You could sit there and eat a burger. If your kids got bored, you didn’t have to stop eating your burger to go monitor their playtime because the whole damn place was a playground. You were already at the playground. Yes, Max, I can see you!
This one time, he, his brother, and I were sitting at a picnic table eating our whatever, when he says, “Why can’t we do that?” He motioned to a table where people were talking and laughing. I realized I’d been eating silently again, not rousing myself to conversation with my sons. At lest 75% of my anxiety about my son talking to me is due to my lack of ease at having a conversation. Just having a chat with him is a foreign language for me, which is something I’ve handed down to him. Having to reconstruct a reasonable facsimile of normal human social interaction is not an ideal inheritance, and I recognize that I probably didn’t invent parent-child awkwardness. But here we are, and we might as well make the best of it.
***
I researched good brunch places on Yelp, but none of the listings including corrective features for social awkwardness. I chose a place in Bryan, which meant a lesser chance of being in a restaurant with a lot of college kids and more time in the car with him. I might not have the social skills of a fully functioning adult, but I can game a system like nobody’s business.
We sat outside at a table on the broad sidewalk along a quiet downtown street. After warming up with some small talk about his studies, I dove right in and asked him about the real stuff. I shared some things I’d been struggling with and was hoping to accomplish in my new job. I challenged him to study abroad and listened to what his plans were and instead of treating that like an invitation to offer criticism in the form of advice I asked how I could help. Basically, I imagined what a normal father-son conversation would look like and then just did it.
At the next table over was a young couple with a toddler, this time without fetching, Aggie-themed sportswear. This one was just dressed like a normal human boy, and he had no interesting in sitting still, so his dad walked him across the street to look at the bronze statue of a 1940s semi-pro player and then at anything else. Going out when you have a toddler is whatever the exact opposite of the experience is when you don’t have children. That dad experienced the wordless intimacy of holding a tiny hand in yours while trying to interest the owner of said tiny hand in the poster in a bar’s window. (“Look, Max! Dos Equis is on special!”) The soul is both fed and sucked out at the same time. Falling in love with your son is exhausting work. All you want is to be allowed to have your own damn thoughts and to just sit there and not entertain a tiny madman with a napkin because, dammit, whether you must pay the rent or you can’t pay the rent, only time will save you.
The child didn’t scream, exactly, when his dad tried to slip his kicky little body into the high chair so they could eat. I could imagine the meal they had ahead of them. The boy fussing, the mom determined to go out, the dad wondering why they were going to all this effort and expense to go out of their way to have a demonstrably exhausting and unpleasant meal. But maybe the dad would get to hold the straw so his son could take a sip from the massive plastic tankards of water they have here in Texas, and maybe he’d feel the puffs of air when his son exhaled through his nose. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that.
“It gets easier,” I told the dad as my son and I left. Being a dad gets a lot easier once the hand-to-hand nature of the work passes. The other stuff gets harder, but it’s still worth it, even if all you get come in tiny bursts of air.
Man on a Wire
by Jessie Daniels
Jessie Daniels asks if we appreciate that Joe Biden is pulling off: being boring while going big. “The guy people once joked couldn’t open a PDF is now being mentioned in the same breath as FDR, which is a BFD,” she writes.
When Irish Eyes are Biden's
by Jack Hughes
Joe Biden quotes Irish poets more often than I quote Ted Lasso. Jack Hughes takes a look at what it means that Biden sees the world through Irish eyes.
How we’re getting through this
Retiring op-eds
Trying to find plants
Visiting friends and family
Shutting down auto plants
Looking for technosignatures
Coming out in record numbers
Learning about the Inzovu Curve
Finding true product market fit with HXC
What I’m reading
Jonathan Chait: “Study Shows Anti-Racist Messages Hurt Democrats” - A couple of times my head snapped up in surprise. Smart stuff.
What’s odd about this result is that it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Indeed, the conclusion that race-conscious messages backfire is a direct corollary of the premise that racism is a potent force in American life. Of course Republicans are going to try to convince voters that any Democratic proposal is mainly designed to help Black people. And of course those messages, sometimes subtle, will push white people away from the Democrats, even if those white people aren’t explicitly identifying as racists. Racism is a potent force in American life.
Monica Hesse: “Philip Roth and the sympathetic biographer: This is how misogyny gets cemented in our culture” - Hesse is so damn good.
This is how a misogynistic culture is conceptualized, created, cultivated and codified. It doesn’t happen because one dude does a bad thing. It happens when like-minded dudes are allowed to be one another’s gatekeepers, and the gatekeepers of broader culture, when faults are allowed to go unexamined, and so they instead spread: Harvey Weinstein dictated the content of movie theaters for decades; it turns out he was abusing women all along. Roger Ailes, Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer shaped coverage and discussion of sexual misconduct scandals throughout the 1990s and 2000s; they were later accused of sexual misconduct themselves.
Ed Kilgore: “You Cannot Reason With Right-Wing Conspiracists” - You can’t use reason to get someone out of a ditch they didn’t use reason to get into in the first place.
Understanding that differences between left and right aren’t just a matter of reasonable differences of opinion on legitimately disputed facts is the first step towards comprehending the current political environment. The fact that conservatives have a tendency to subscribe to conspiracy theories or dismiss inconvenient facts is not an absolute bar to debate. But as Greg Sargent pointed out recently, MAGA ultras exhibit a more systematic rejection of verifiable reality in favor of ideological systems that interpret (or reinterpret) everything according to an antagonistic depiction of the left as virtually demonic.
What I’m watching
There’s nothing wrong with Concrete Cowboys, Netflix’s movie about Black cowboys in North Philadelphia. It’s a good story about Black people doing things that make them happy. What is noteworthy about the movie is that it’s part of a new trend of using real people from the story that is being fictionalized. See also: Bernie and Nomadland. But I had to watch the last half hour of the movie the morning after I saw it because I couldn’t remember how it ended.
Ugh. Stowaway. It’s not a bad movie, but it sure pissed me off.
People, Nobody is a rollicking good time at the movies, that is, if you like seeing bad guys get punched in the face, repeatedly and with vigor, by an everyman who turns out to be something else entirely.
What I’m listening to
Good One, a podcast about jokes, is absolutely one of my favorite podcasts about writing. The episode with James Acaster, the British Bo Burnham, is a great conversation for other reasons, including a behind-the-scenes look at Great British Bake Off and his honest dealing with his own demons. The James Acaster rabbit hole is large, dark, and deep. I’m currently getting my mail at James Acaster’s Perfect Sounds, his BBC podcast in which he tries to convince his friends that 2016 was the greatest year for music of all time. One of his recommendations, Bruno Pernadas’ Those Who Throw Objects at the Crocodiles Will Be Asked to Retrieve Them, is, uh, science fiction jazz. If you know me, you know how vanishingly unlikely it is for me to enjoy anything described with those three words. I love this album.
Perfect Sounds is also how I discovered Laura Mvula’s The Dreaming Room. This was her follow up to her hit album Sing to the Moon, which won awards and sold a bunch. The Dreaming Room didn’t sell as well, and Sony dropped her as a result, but it’s quite good. She’s got a towering voice. She reminds me of my wife in that way. Why she would ever do anything other than sing is a mystery to me.
Croy and the Boys covered an old Blaze Foley song, renaming it for Austin’s recently retired Police Chief, Brian Manley.
Calliope Musicals is a psychedelic pop band from Austin. I dig this new track, “Can You Tell Me.”
Do you like girl in red? I do.
Trixie Mattel and Orville Peck, play us out.
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