Tony's previous space.

My long term home (promise) is at tonyhightower.tumblr.com. (Up until January 2023, I was posting here, mostly because I couldn't figure out how to switch my primary blog. I've worked out the workaround.) -- I may not be a teenager, but I'm still working this all out in real time. I'm glad you're here. Do say hi.

[tonyhightowerv1]

New Video: Paris vs. NYC Apartments

Okay, new video, in which I compare my Paris apartment to my NYC apartment.

I'm sure it's 100% comprehensive, and there will never be a need for a sequel.

https://youtu.be/PRXJ5h8SqSc

[tonyhightowerv1]

Tumblr Tech Help Q

I really want to be able to change my ID so this blog is my primary blog, instead of TriviaNYC, without deleting my whole account. Is this possible? I'll delete that one if I have to, but I don't want to take this one with it. Tumblr Help isn't living up to its name. Is there a how-to somewhere I’m just not seeing?

[tonyhightowerv1]

PARIS, FRIDAY

So after two weeks here, a couple of disturbing patterns are starting to emerge, and now’s the time to get to fixing them.

First: Except for a half-hour session at a all-expats playdate a week or so ago, I’ve talked to literally no other adults beside my wife since I got here. I knew I’d be socially isolating, but this is definitely going to get to me if I don’t do something about it.

People post on Social Paris Reddit from time to time looking for people to hang out with, but they’re invariably 24 year old backpackers looking to “party.” Now, much as I’d love to do that, that’s not really where I’m going with my life at the moment, and hanging out after hours with people less than half my age doesn’t hold the same allure it used to, even when they were my actual unhalved age.

* * *

Between the pandemic, the birth of my son, and this move, my life has turned completely upside down this last three years.

As a quiz host and speaker, I used to talk to hundreds of people a week. It was great. It was literally my job to be witty, and welcoming, and to tease the smart out of people.

But then the bars all closed, and then I had a baby that required constant attention and for some reason didn’t know any mnemonics for remembering South American capitals or Best Director Oscar winners or whatever (PEMDAS, kid. WORK WITH ME.), and then we moved to another country where my knowledge of the language is… well, I won’t starve to death, but my French hasn’t gotten better since I got here.

And so I’ve gone from 60 to zero awfully quick.

Even seeing it coming, even knowing this was going to be a psychic hit, it’s still jarring.

Now, normally, I’d lean into running to just keep my thoughts in order — it’s worked every other time — but for the first time since I was a teenager, I have a recurring ligament problem in my knee, and so for the last few months I’ve also been in pretty constant pain. I have a brace, but — my kid refers to me as “The Broken Racecar”, and, well, please let that not be how he knows me.

I went to a doctor here, and for some reason he didn’t seem to understand  I wasn’t able to explain to him that I’ve been in constant pain, and I need help.

His office was the most laid-back doctor’s office I’ve ever seen. It looked like a large, well-lit walk-in closet, or maybe a porn set. He took my vitals, his English was about as good as my French, and I kept bringing the conversation back to my knee, only to have him say, well, you have a brace, no?

I have a brace, yes, but —

Well then, you’re fine. You seem fine.

Look, I’m not fucking fine. I’ve been in pain every waking hour of the day since Thanksgiving. Ibuprofen isn’t cutting it. I need help.

Jo is being as sympathetic as she can, but this is clearly weighing on her as well. My role here is not to do what I’m currently doing — I’m only up writing at 4:30 am because I can’t sleep from the pain, but that’s not helpful for the stuff we need to do during the day — it’s to set up Jo’s office so she can get started with writing the two books she’s contracted to write this year.

My job is to take care of everything that isn’t Her Book Projects. Extra daycare, dropping off & picking up X from school, making dinner (Friday is Pizza Day, so that’s tonight’s meal), and keep up the house.

My job is not to get out and talk to strangers, because really, when am I gonna have time for that?

I wouldn’t mind getting back on learning French — that seems like a good use of my time, certainly better than writing these missives before the house wakes up — so maybe that’s useful. If I can’t get out of the house to shoot pictures or interact with this new city I now call home, the least I can do is widen the hole I have to climb through.

[sbrown82]

Black Women of Rock & Roll in the 60s and 70s:

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Marsha Hunt

The Ronettes

Betty Davis

Norma-Jean Wofford a.k.a “The Duchess”

Poly Styrene

Merry Clayton

Tina Turner

[tonyhightowerv1]

Start here.

[tonyhightowerv1]

I made my first video as a Parisian, and it's both a meditation about the benefits of making a huge change in your life, and also the world's worst unboxing video.

[tonyhightowerv1]

Paris, Monday - The Big Unboxing

I tried to make an unboxing video yesterday for my new e-scooter, but I completely botched it -- I turned the camera on when I was setting up the shot, and then I turned it off for the actual opening of the box and the assembly. The footage consists of me clearing the area where I was going to do the thing, and going just outside the door where the box was, and then it cuts to the thing, fully assembled, and I'm trying to clip the thing together to be able to carry it.

It's okay. unboxing videos are silly, anyway, and I was never going to be the kind of guy who did them on the regular.

Maybe, though.

Everyone makes unboxing videos about huge things, fun tech, amazing toys, gadgetry of the highest order, and that's fine, as far as it goes. I mean, I just bought this massive gadget, and I was trying to show it off, even as a joke, even though literally not one soul alive is coming to me to watch me unbox something so big-tech and cutting edge.

(*this scooter is really nice, sure, but it's not the top of the line. You want cutting-edge e-scooter tech content? You're looking for Marques Brownlee, or some Dutch scooter enthusiast with 3 million followers. They're at the other end of the hall.)

But... but!

I could make unboxing videos of getting groceries in the morning.

UNBOXING THIS MORNING'S GROCERY HAUL

NEW HOTNESS: TODAY'S BAGUETTE

TODAY'S HAUL: FRESH CHEESE!

That sort of thing might work.

So instead of having a cool tech video that'll get a million teen boys to subscribe to my channel, only to be disappointed when I never do such a thing again, I'm stuck with my standard Dad fare, and maybe setting up a narrative day or two.

Oh, and yeah, you'll just have to believe me, I guess, but I bought a real nice scooter. In French, it's called a "trottinette," which I think is just so pretty.

It was not cheap, but it was a crucial part of the slightly different person I wanted to transform myself into now that I'm here.

See, every time you make a big move, whether it's a transcontinental change like this, or whether it's just a change in your lifestyle, it's an opportunity to reinvent yourself, just a little.

As you get older, you develop a better sense of who you are, and these massive changes become less necessary. A little tweak here or there can go a long way toward making yourself a different person.

When you're younger, in your teens or early twenties, if you find your life isn't working for you, if you're feeling out of place, like you don't like your friends or your work or the things you're passionate about, then you can literally change your entire personality on a dime. There's no stakes, there's very little downside... you'll have a rough month or two while you figure it out, and that month or two can be lonely, but you didn't really like the crowd you were hanging out with anyway, right? No real loss.

You'll keep one or two friends from your previous iteration, and the rest or that worls, the part you didn't like, becomes just... people you knew once.

It's great. I actually recommend doing this once or twice. Don't make too much of a habit of it -- it can get exhausting, and if you're concerned about your social standing, you might not want to get pegged as someone who ghosts on their friends & a scene too often -- but yes, don't be afraid to channel surf a little when you're young. It'll pay dividends later.

As you get older, you start to accumulate the cruft of a life a little bit. Emotional baggage, a professional resume of one kind or another, a set of skills you can rely on when things get weird, a few friends that you find have stuck around through a bunch of self-reinventions that now know you as well as you know yourself, maybe you've tried marriage or have a kid -- these things happen! -- and suddenly, you're becoming, for lack of a better word, an adult.

Don't be afraid. It happens to the best of us. And most of the rest of us.

At this point, a full life overhaul becomes a lot harder, and kind of irresponsible. You can still do it, but the later in life you try it, the more selfish it is. For all the people who have stuck with you, for all the work you've put into yourself up to this point, tossing that in the trash and trying on a new personality can be kind of a dick move.

I'm not saying don't do it, I'm saying you don't have to go completely "fuck everything, I'ma go sit on a mountain & meditate for the next 20 years."

By the time you hit your 30s, or your 40s, if you have any self-awareness at all, you should have at least a vague sense of the person you've become.

You know the kinds of things you're into, you know what kinds of books & movies you like, you have a sense of the arc of your life, and what kinds of things excite you and get you out of bed in the morning.

And hopefully, you know what parts of your life aren't quite... right.

Your local bar is fine, but there are a few too many assholes who hang out there for you to spend a lot of time there.

You're not getting the fun out of your local beer league team that you thought you would.

You know there's more in the world that you want to see, but the grind of your days is keeping you from even the occasional trip.

You really like fishing, and you're barely getting out to the lake at all.

You go to sleep exhausted, and you wake up still exhausted.

Well... try changing something. You don't have to change everything -- like I said, that can be a dick move to everyone you care about -- but if you want to change something to get yourself closer to the person you are, then figure out a way to do it.

As someone who has, by happenstance more than design, blown up his life a little bit every decade or so, that kind of change does not get easier, and it doesn't get less scary.

In fact, it can get scarier. There's more on the line. You have things you've become attached to. Things you genuinely love. Diamonds in the dirt. You don't want to lose those.

But change is good. In fact, change is going to happen anyway.

If we learned anything from the pandemic & lockdown, it's that everything external that matters is ephemeral. It can come & go, and the core of who we are doesn't really change. Once you have a sense of your own self, that comes with you wherever you go in your life.

So, knowing that: why don't you try something different?

I'm not even talking about "spicing up your life" or any such silliness. Do something else. Your years on this space rock are numbered. Time is undefeated. Make time your friend. 

Blow up your life now. Just a little bit. As a treat.

[tonyhightowerv1]

Paris, Sunday: On Writing

I've been reading, for the first time, Stephen King's "On Writing." I'm figuring, if this move from NYC to Paris is a chance to reinvent myself a little bit, y'know, become someone a little more than who I am, then let's go back and fill in some gaps in my education.

"On Writing" is a very simple book. King was always a conversational-style writer -- even though I've heard maybe a handful of interviews with him in all my years, you read the text and you can hear him saying this stuff to you across a diner table -- so if you're looking for something more formal, you're guaranteed to not like it. He cusses. He worships at the altar of Strunk & White, but he specifically tells you that it's okay to break their rules when it serves your narrative, especially once you know what you're doing.

"Do everything right, and then do one thing wrong."

So I'm finally reading a book about writing that I should have read, god, 40 years ago (I know, it was published in 2000) (also, yeah, I turned 55 this week, sorry), and as I'm going through it, I'm realizing I was doing a lot of things right, even as I was getting no encouragement from my friends or peers.

(Getting encouragement from friends and peers is something he mentions in passing, and were I to write such a book, I'd move that much further up the priority list. Man, having people around you who respect the thing you like doing is such a huge help. Like, every day, even when you're not doing it, even when you're just doing other life things. The sun shines a little brighter, and so do you.)

Write what you know, even when you're writing about space colonies or tiny fish or whatever.

There s no good writing without tons of reading. When you don't read, you can't write.

Feel free to copy styles. You won't learn without trying on things for size. Trust in your skills as a shitty mimic.

Don't be afraid to read shitty writing. Great work can inspire you, and show you what's possible. Shit writing can also inspire you, by showing you what mistakes look like without you having to take the trouble to make them yourself.

I followed these rules religiously as a songwriter for 15 years, and I do truly believe I managed to squeeze every ounce of potential out of myself in a field, for the first time in my life.

It turned out I was good enough to be pretty good. I sold a few thousand albums, I toured across Canada a few times, I opened for some pretty big bands, I got laid a lot more than I could have reasonably expected, and right up until my last year in NYC, people would (very, very occasionally) come up to me and ask me if I used to be somebody before I got into trivia. "I was hunting around, and I found a torrent of this album, and -- is this you?"

Yeah, I used to be somebody. I got way more famous as a quizzer than I ever did as a musician, but yeah, I was a pop songwriter for most of the 1990s.

We can talk about how good I was, and what the hell I was doing, some other time. My point in bringing this all up isn't to brag, it's to say that I was following a better path toward becoming a decent writer than I thought at the time. It's nice to get confirmation about that after the fact, I guess.

[tonyhightowerv1]

Paris, Saturday

So, today's my first Me Saturday, which (according to Version 1.0 of our Grand Plan) will be my day. Felix is in daycare Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday, and I have him on Wednesdays so Jo can work, and then Jo has him Saturdays so I can work. We both get 5 days of work/alone time, and then Sundays we do a Family Thing together. So damn cute, we are.

That's the plan, anyway. It's 10:30am, and X has been out of my space for all of about 20 minutes while they went out for croissants. So much for getting an early start.

I had every plan to start generating videos on the first of the year, or at least when we first arrived here, but that's just not been feasible. X is having a rough transition, and frankly, so have both Jo & I. Every day is a little easier, and we'll eventually settle in, but the transition has left us kind of on top of each other's heads still, in the way we used to be when we lived in the 1 bedroom in NYC. This is a bigger place, but it's not set up yet, and I still feel like I'm floating about without a place of my own (just like in the old country!)

This... isn't great. I'm already feeling like I've left the only home I've ever known, the language I know, the city I know, only to land somewhere new, even if it's wonderful and I know I'm gonna love discovering it and making it my own eventually, only to wind up a nomad in my own house, without a corner I can call my own.

I know this is going to change -- I've ordered a desk & some shelves, and I'll have a good setup in the basement, in X's room, moving forward. But that stuff isn't coming for another couple of weeks, and I'm still floating for the next little while.

I'm still unable to walk much with this knee problem I've been dealing with for the last six months, and I'm startingto get notifications about the Paris Half Marathon & the actual Paris Marathon, which are coming up in not very long and which I really, really want to run, and I feel like the opportunity for those is going to come and go very quickly, and -- and! -- I was really looking forward to writing about here -- and that isn't helping my mindset at all either.

I'm trusting my body will recover and snap into something resembling shape in time to run these races, and I know what 13 (and 26) miles feels like on the body, so I know if I can do it, but still, I know I'm asking a lot of myself.

[tonyhightowerv1]

Paris, Friday

Got up a little late. Early (X woke up yelling around 5am, but then stopped before we could get downstairs, sowe figured let him finish out the night), and then late.

Today. I'll shoot a vlog about my first real trip into the city. Get it done for a Monday upload. (I'm getting Saturday away from the kid, so I can finish whatever I don't get done today, but it's best to not lean on that.

I've been thinking a lot about a Tiktoker, "Tom". He's a former TV executive who now works at an ad agency, and he challenged himself during December (a lot of vloggers use December as "Vlogmas," where you challenge yourself to put out one shorter video a day, like an advent calendar) to shoot a one-minute POV video every day.

These videos were tightly shot, had a shit ton of B-Roll (which is a sign of a well-made vlog -- if you're watching someone's vlog on Youtube or Tiktok or Instagram or whatever and you  can't tell if they're doing a good job, look at how much B roll they've shot. That's one indicator. Written script or freestyling can both work, charisma always helps, good lighting and audio are good choices, but you don't have to go all the way to Every Frame A Painting or such nonsense. No vlogger is Terence Malick, fergodsake), with him doing super-tightly-edited (cutting out breaths in between phrases is one thing, but often the end of one word literally overlaps the beginning of the next) voiceover narration of his day.

He's not long on charisma, but he's not devoid of it. That white-guy intensity will attract the interest of other white guys, I suppose.

Hi.

Tom is a vlogger in the Casey Neistat mold. He's a high-achieving guy in New York City, and he loves showing off how much he can get done in a day. He's up at 4:30 every morning to work out, he's a proud dad in his 40s, and he's a boss with many meetings and responsibilities, and that's ... kind of his personality. Unlike Casey, he doesn't use a lot of tech -- there are zero drone shots, or (he claims) any tripods. He props his phone up wherever he can -- trash cans, workout benches, against walls -- to get his shots. (That feels like a gimmick, but whatever.)

You have to shoot some seriously purty pitchers if you're going to make that interesting.

[tonyhightowerv1]

Paris, Thursday

Okay. My depression is starting to affect the rest of the house in ways I'm very much not comfortable with. (Any affecting of the house by my depression is of course too much affecting, but It's been 10 days here, and J is starting to feel the drag of my not having it together here, so I need to work to get myself a win.)

Get a video done by Friday afternoon. No excuses. Get a script together, shoot some B, just fucking get started.

To wit.

I'm not going to be much of a video essayist -- my research methods have always been more haphazard and random, and amassing a bibliography of data to start at a thesis and arrive at a conclusion is a wonderful way of going about things, and I'd love to be able to put that kind of a string of ideas together on the regular, but that's not going to be where I start, just out of necessity -- but man, stretching myself so that I can create ideas that last more than a couple dozen words at a go is a place I really want to be able to go, and this solipsistic bullshit that passes for "writing" is not cutting it. The only way it's helping is that at least I'm getting used to typing in the dark while J sleeps upstairs & X sleeps downstairs.

So, let's build out some vid topics, & see if I can get a thousand coherent words down on any of them. Let's see if we can find a process.

[tonyhightowerv1]

Paris, Tuesday

Okay, so we're two days into X's school life (and 9 days into our time in Paris), and things are slowly, slowly starting to find a little bit of shape. I don't have a sense of what I'm fully doing yet, but given that the next few months are going to be a time of me finding out what my life is going to look like moving forward, and given that the main task of the house (aside from, y'know, care & feeding of a hopefully happy toddler) is to set Jo up to write the best book (two books) possible, that means I need to be the best support person I can be, at least to start.

Making money is almost secondary, but certainly, it's something I'm going to have a hard time not thinking about, and hopefully starting to set up here.

So, to that end, I think I'm going to commit to the first part of this year being when I really lean into the sponsored French classes that the city provides. It's not like I speak zero French -- even the semi-immersion of the last week-plus has really helped -- but I'm aware that the better I'm able to conduct myself in Paris without leaning on Jo to do all the talking (she's just more comfortable talking to strangers, which... wasn't our dynamic in NYC), the better off we'll all be.

I'm also thinking a lot about a thing Meg said to me at a Thanksgiving party a few months ago. She made a point of telling me that she thought I'd have the hardest time of the three of us when we got here, because I was so obsessed with being The Witty One, and not speaking the language would take that tool out of my bag, and that I would have a hard time with that.

That really made me think, and now it's like a mole on my face. I can't avoid focusing on it. It's like going into a party ad knowing in advance that you're going to say something that's going to piss someone off, and there's no way you'll be able to avoid it.

I'm not sure if it's true, but ... it feels like it might be. And that scares me.

Like, it's not even "Am I the asshole?" It's "I'm gonna fuck this up, and there's no way I can avoid that."

One day, I'll stop talking about myself and how shitty and unprepared I am to do all of this, and that'll be one glorious fucking day.

But until then, until my anxieties stop me from making a mess of unforced errors in my life, the best I'll be able to muster is to take this insecure energy about myself and funnel it into self-improvement.

So, I'm signing up for French classes, two hours a day, four days a week, at this place in the 14th. It'll be a nice scooter ride there & back, so I'll bring my camera along, and I'll hopefully get to know some new people who are also learning at the same level as me, and that'll expand our social circle a bit. I won't be able to do much else -- I still very much want to put out a video or two each week, but between that and taking care of Felix, um, that's my week -- but the rhythm and schedule of my weeks, if this all falls together the way I hope it will, would be really calming for me.

I'm starting to realize that I have developed more of a need for routine in the last year or so. Like, I just feel better when things are where they should be, and when I know what to expect, I just feel a little more comfortable in my own skin. Not sure if this is anxiety or a touch of something spectral or what, but I've just become really aware of it. Now, moving to a new country, on its face, doesn't help that. But that's honestly fine. The issue is more that I'm not sure of my place now that I'm here. I didn't land with a plan for where I fit into this whole operation. That's been the issue for me the last few weeks.

Getting into an all-encompassing French class and using that as a platform to get to know the city while my wife can set up her office in peace feels like a good step forward in dealing with that.

Anyway, X is up. It's Wednesday, which here is a day off from school & work (France has essentially a 4-day workweek: Monday-Tuesday, and Thursday-Friday. Wednesdays are a bit of a mid-week weekend. It's terribly civilized as an idea, and I'm looking forward to it, but it does mean that Felix is home those days, so Jo & I have decided on me taking X out on Wednesdays, her taking him out on Saturdays, and all three of us doing A Thing on Sundays. (Those assignments can be moved around, of course, depending, but that's the general idea.)

Now, there are Wednesday programs of various kinds, for parents who do have a full work week, and the schools are open, but it's more like a day camp than school; the kids can take a dance class, or a sport, or arts & crafts, or some such. And I definitely want X to get involved in some kind of group kids activity (much like I'm doing with the French classes). But this is the first Wednesday this applies, and frankly, the wetaher is ass and we haven't got him set up anywhere yet. So I'm on Dad Duty today. I'm happy with that.

[tonyhightowerv1]

Algorithms & AlGore-isms

I don't want to feel like this anymore.

I don't want to feel like I'm always freaked out by the things I haven't done. I'm overworked, underslept, and I have been for as long as I've been alive.

I'm two days into the Paris part of my vacation, and I haven't relaxed yet. I've shot a ton of footage, because I really (really, really) wanted to vlog this leg of the trip, and yet here I am, sitting in front of a glorious open window overlooking the Parc de Villette, on a gorgeous sunny Paris afternoon, while my kid is napping, and what am I doing? Stressing about the shit I should be doing.

Typing this feels like an imposition on my actual tasks. Even though it's integral to everything I'm doing.

I don't know if it's The Great Algorithm pointing shit at me or whether the whole world is dealing with this a little more than usual, because of Simone Biles & other people having a more candid than usual conversation about mental health, but I'm really becoming aware, more than I've ever been before, of how much I've neglected mine for my entire adult life. Like, how have I managed to function at even a fraction of what I've done so far with the head I've been dealt here?

Tasks. I have tasks. I'm on vacation. For a month. In France. And I have tasks.

It seems like I'm getting a shit ton of ADHD content pointed at me -- on Twitter, on YT, in my emails, among my friends, graffiti, like, everywhere. I'm wondering if this is just me noticing what was always there, or whether this stuff is being drawn to me because I'm acknowledging it in my public self, even partially.

That re-forming of my reality is unsettling, at least, and downright scary if I think about it too much. I mean, if me mentioning something means suddenly the stimuli out in... the world... re-conforms to that and tries selling me on a validated version of that new reality, then what am I now missing that I wasn't before? What am I being sold now that I wasn't before? What other realities are out there, being lived by (millions of) other people, that I know nothing about?

I'm talking a bit about the change in my media diet, and a bit about just what you believe being a driver for what you see, and vice versa. I know the human mind can only handle so much reality at any given time, and even though that capacity has expanded in literally all of us over the course of the technological revolution of the last 30 years -- we all think faster, know more, and can take in information at a rate that would absolutely astound even the smartest minds of half a century ago -- we can all still only comprehend and maintain in our consciousness & our worldview a tiny fraction of the knowledge and reality that exists in the universe.

So when I feel the transition in my own mind from one place -- quizzer, gamer, professional nerd, game show professional, Gen X apologist -- to another, adjacent place -- I'm still a professional nerd, and I am Gen X by definition, but I'm becoming a Content Creator, a runner, someone more interested in rounding out his life experience so I can model a happier life for my kid, a filmmaker, someone for whom happiness & mental health are more important, where that wasn't even on my radar as a thing that needed addressing until embarrassingly recently. When I feel that transition, it's like I'm switching between channels, and there's a short pause, where you can see between the cracks, and I don't want to miss that moment. Once you're plugged into a worldview, like, really locked in, you don't get a chance to look at the gears turning that bring you what you see.

Again, I'm not talking about the computer algorithms at FB or TT or IG or here on the T (although that matters; I reckon you're more aware of your media diet now than you ever were before, and certainly anyone old enough to remember even the 1990s can remember a time when that phrase didn't even exist). I'm talking about looking at the world around you and noticing things in a different way than you did before. Things that made no sense making more sense, and verse visa.

Thing is, the things that don't make sense to you, the things that don't matter to you, those things? They still exist. They still matter to someone, to possibly millions of people. They're just getting a different algorithm than you are. They're looking through different THEY LIVE sunglasses, and seeing different colors that you don't see, or that you don't see anymore.

This is raising more questions than I can answer right now, but this is the beginning of a lot of stuff I want to think about in this next phase of my life.

[tonyhightowerv1]

The NHL, Boxing, & Ignoring The Right Thing To Do

Some days I wake up & pay attention to the news a bit, just to see what's happening.

The NHL Draft was last night, and I shouldn't have bothered with it, because I'm still angry at my Leafs for shitting the bed, again, in the playoffs (it's been 17 years since we last won a playoff round, and they've not won the Cup in my lifetime), but apparently the Montreal Canadiens, the most storied team in the sport, a team currently managed by Marc Bergevin, a guy who 10 years ago, when he ran player personnel for the Chicago Blackhawks, was somehow (it isn't clear) involved in hiring and/or protecting a video coach who sexually assaulted a bunch of teenaged players, the facts about which are only coming out now, and which look pretty damning for everyone involved, Marc Bergevin is now the General Manager of the Canadiens, and in the first round, they picked a guy who's been found guilty of sexual assault.

He apparently circulated pictures of a girl without her consent or knowledge while playing minor hockey in Sweden, and was found guilty under Sweden's assault laws. Now, he's expressed remorse, sure; he specifically asked the NHL to not draft him this year, so he could spend time and focus on improving himself and atoning for this in some way. And he's not some ultra hotshot phenom kid that people couldn't keep their hands off.

He's a guy, and even if you just think he made some kind of youthful mistake -- that would be a very bad take, which says a lot about you, not much of it good -- there's no need to reward him with getting picked, especially when he specifically asked not to.

But Bergevin, with the Blackhawks scandal hanging over him, chose this guy anyway. In the first round.

Not only that, the Canadiens had a statement about him pre-loaded & ready to go. Shareable graphic and everything.

https://twitter.com/CanadiensMTL/status/1418780212469411841

But no, instead, it's about this guy. Not even the girl he victimized. Him.

He tried to warn everyone off drafting him, which is to his credit, I guess. But Bergevin saw this kid, and decided, we need him in our organization. As is.

How good is he? Not that it matters in the slightest, but... he's a late 1st round defenseman. If he continues to develop, he'd basically make the show in 5 years or so. No one's projecting him to be an all-star or anything. There was no urgency; he was never going to make the cover of a Wheaties box or carry the flag at the Olympics. Even without the sexual assault conviction.

Marc Bergevin is a Hockey Guy, to the bitter end. But he's got a history -- and, apparently, a present -- of ignoring sexual abuse. There's no place in the sport, or in polite society, for that mindset. Certainly not now.

* * *

So, all this made me think about boxing.

For most of the 20th century, boxing was the biggest sport in the world. Fights filled arenas and stadiums around the world. The Heavyweight Champion was treated like a Head Of State; they'd dine with royalty, speak at major world events, their fights would be recorded and shown in theaters (and run for months), and then when television appeared, fights would be shown in prime time, and draw ratings better than any other sport.

In the early 1970s, Muhammad Ali was known, famously, as the most famous human being alive. (And Neil Armstrong and Chairman Mao were, like, right there.)

But boxing was deeply corrupt, and many of its stars were more than merely flawed, and every once in a while, someone would die in the ring, and so they stopped showing the fights in prime time, and the champions didn't really add much to the global conversation, and the promoters were ignoring a lot of bad things their star fighters were doing, because they were more focused on getting their cut of the gate receipts than they were in maintaining a product that kept new fans coming through the turnstiles.

And sometime in the mid-1980s, boxing's popularity started to wane. After Ali & George Foreman retired, there was a bit of a charisma vacuum at the top of the sport (I mean, Holmes & Holyfield seem like relatively decent guys, but the Crown Prince of Monaco isn't inviting them to a state dinner anytime soon); the welterweights & middleweights (Hagler, Hearns, Leonard, Duran) were compelling in the ring, but aside from Sugar Ray Leonard, none of them were particularly interested in being terribly showy.

And then Mike Tyson showed up at the end of the decade, and everyone was excited again, until he raped someone & went to prison for it, and got a face tattoo, and the slow decline of the sport became clear to everyone, and that was pretty much it for boxing as a major global sporting concern.

Sure, it still exists, but it's nowhere near what it was. If you want to watch boxing somewhere, you need to find a stream from somewhere on the other side of the world. Fans of hand-to-hand combat sports have gravitated to UFC & MMA, sports that 40 years ago literally no one outside of Brazil or Thailand had ever heard of; fans of the spectacle of fighting, the weigh-ins & pre-fight braggadocio, the As The Buckle Turns, well, they'll always have WWE & the other Steroid Soaps.

Boxing is irrelevant now. They took the biggest sport in the world, and through neglect and ignoring the serious problems at its core, they just... pissed it away.

I'm not usually the kind of person to bemoan moral depravity. (I actually like GG Allin's music. I think it's kinda funny.) But sports are entertainment that uses actual people instead of actors. Like entertainment, you want a compelling story, or at least some kind of ethos, or a thought-shape, that keeps people interested and wanting to come back. You can be heroic, or villainous, but you don't want people to see your product and think, eww, yeah, no.

With actors or songwriters (or pro wrestlers), you can build a storyline out, write a script, point the lights in a certain direction. Each game lasts this long, it builds to a crescendo in this way, when our team scores, we shoot off this cannon, when Mariano Rivera enters from the bullpen we play Metallica; the crowd expects those beats, and they're all part of the drama build. But the players are actual people, and there is no script, so you want to start with a cast that people will want to cheer for (or against) without feeling awful.

If you deny people that basic pleasure for long enough, they'll start looking elsewhere.

I've been a serious hockey fan my whole life. It's been my favorite sport since I was old enough to have an opinion. I've gone in & out on baseball, and over the years, the NFL has lost me to their CTE issues & their tone-deaf billionaire owners treating their players like chattel. But hockey, despite having some of those issues, and my Toronto Maple Leafs, as historically disappointing as they have been, have stuck with me. And I with them.

But the way the Blackhawks have dealt with these abuse allegations, and Montreal choosing this convicted assaulter with their first choice (and there've been a couple of other events; last year, Arizona chose a guy who repeatedly & publicly harassed a disabled person of color, and who has never apologized; they later rescinded their pick), I'm starting to wonder if hockey, a sport that doesn't have the mass momentum of boxing or football in their heydays, has already seen its zenith.

And that thought just makes me so very sad.

[televandalist]

[tonyhightowerv1]

This Is A Markie Post

Okay, I think I know what the problem is here.

I'm one kind of person, and I have been my entire life, and now I'm trying to be a different person.

I've been loud and nerdy, combative and cantankerous, since I was a kid. My mouth has gotten me into all kinds of trouble, and out of it too. Have I lived off my charm? I guess, but I never thought of it that way, and when people say that to me now, I wonder what the hell they mean.

This isn't me. I'm starting somewhere with this, and it's not where I need to start, but I have to start somewhere, or else I'll die.

I'll die anyway.

My name is Tony. I've been accumulating knowledge my entire life, just squirreling it away on the off chance it's useful, to people, to the world, but really, to me. I feel like the world doesn't make sense, and if I get the right mix of facts & theories into my huge 38-triple-D brain, then it'll all make sense, and I can maybe share that universal unified theory of everything with everyone.

Or, again, with myself.

I feel like I've been angry and alone my whole life, and like the song goes, I had my books and my poetry to protect me. I've never liked people, but I knew I couldn't live without them, so I learned how to talk with them, about whatever they were interested in. I'm not sure why I thought that was a good idea, but whatever.

I learned, and then I learned how to talk into a microphone, and then how to sing into one, and then how to think while people were staring at me, and then I made it onto some game shows, and built a little career out of talking with people who thought I was smart. It's kind of worked out.

But there's still that scared lonely hustler inside of me, who is utterly convinced that I'm two weeks away from being forced to sleep under a bridge again. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that at some point, when I least expect it, when my guard comes down, I'm going to feel a tap on my shoulder, and someone is going to smile apologetically at me, and say, Okay, thanks for all that, it's time to go now. And that'll be it.

Part of me knows that's silly, and getting sillier. I took all that knowledge and became a Jeopardy Champion, and then I won a lot of money on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and now I run a company where I run quizzes all over New York City for people. I dare say there's no one better at what I do anywhere in the world. That's honestly a safe bet.

But I also know how fragilely my empire, such as it is, is constructed. I don't have an education to fall back on, and I know that this is a country full of thugs and cheaters, and I have to protect myself from being taken for a ride, and I don't know how strong I am against that. I know there's people will try and take everything away from me that matters, from my company to my reputation to my livelihood to the people I love. I know this to be true, because I have met these people. I know who would do it. And I know who would cheer if it happened.

I'm not being paranoid. I tried to do the right thing, to make this operation bigger than just me, to not make the mistakes of other people I have met who were pioneers in their fields, who created something other people liked, and then couldn't handle it when other people wanted to build out from the original idea. I have no desire to put a cap on this project to assuage my ego. I see the bigger goal here.

Ignorance is coming. It's creeping forward, like a shadow cast at sunset, chilling everything that comes its way, playing tricks on your eyes. Ignorance is in danger of becoming our national dish, our national sport; it's folksy well-shucks-I-don't-know-nothin-but-I-know-yer-an-idiot hyukhyuk taken to its logical extreme. No one wins the way things are.

Now given that: I don't know anything myself, not natively. I never finished high school, and in a lot of ways, I still have a chip on my shoulder about what I've been able to accomplish given that I never learned how to learn. (Gee, you think.) But I swear I'm trying to get out of that. I don't want to feel like a rebellious teenager, trying to stick it to The Man, or pwn n00bs, or whatever.

I'm fifty-one years old, and someday I'll be dead, and I've done a lot of work, and on the off chance that the sum total of humanity's knowledge can move the universe forward in some as-yet-unknowable way, I'd like to empty out my pockets and share what I have with the class.

Ignorance. If I can figure out a way to fight ignorance, then I'll be standing on much stronger ground.

[tonyhightowerv1]

A Quick Reminder

We're doomed as a species. None of this matters. The earth will swallow humanity back up, and then drop into the sun, and none of this will survive.

Greed is artificial. There's no such thing as greed. Same for grace, generosity, god, jealousy, love, knowledge, empathy, or anything resembling human connection. It's all -- not a lie, but certainly not relevant. The universe doesn't give a shit. That's not how the universe works.

Hamburgers are at least real. Have a hamburger. With or without cheese. Your choice. It doesn't matter. Choice is artificial too. Both doors open to the same room.

There is no afterlife. This is the afterlife. You think you're in heaven? You're right. You think you're in hell? You're right. You think you're nowhere? You'd have to split hairs to disagree with that one.

Freddie Mercury had it. Nothing really matters. Anyone can see.

Whatever "it" is, go for it. The end result is the same either way. If you die, you die. You were going to die anyway.

These are not sad words. Sadness isn't real. Neither is happiness. Nothing is real. Or rather, even the real things don't matter.

Consciousness is a parlor trick played by the cells that make up our bodies to trick us into going out and finding more food. That's all. Your body is a committee. Literally, a corporation. There's no such thing as "life."

So eat that hamburger. Do whatever you do. All judgement, all crusades, all religion, all revenge, all everything, all of everything, isn't real. The earth will take us back, break down our molecules for food the same way we break down chickens and wheat into food, and then our components will all fall back into the sun, and everything you see, everything we've ever learned, everything we've experienced, everyone we've ever loved, all of it, all of it, will disappear from the universe again.

Even if we manage to get off this planet and into another galaxy somewhere else, we can't escape that fact. Heat death, the next big bang, we're not going to be able to avoid that. Maybe some species somewhere will, but humanity? Ha. We're still arguing about where Noah's ark landed and whether the glaciers are melting. We're not there. We're not the ones. And that's okay.

This is not a sad story. There is freedom in this fact. Do what you like. Make your time as a conscious being as pleasant as possible. Sleep when you're tired. Drink when you're thirsty. Write that thing that's giving you agita. Run marathons if you think it helps. Have sex with random strangers if it makes you feel better. Do your thing. Ignore the judgements of others. If you're conscious of your own existence, you might as well take that curiosity and do something with it.

If you feel the urge to help your species out, by feeding the poor or starting a kickstarter or building shelters for the homeless, then go right ahead. There is a nobility in that. But understand that nobility doesn't translate to karma points in the next life. There is no next life. Do it because it feels good to do it. Don't do it for frequent flyer miles or a get out of purgatory free card.

Be awesome for awesome's sake. Anything else is a waste of your very short time being awake in the universe. Unless you enjoy being unhappy, in which case, go for it. Either way, it's the same to the universe.

[tonyhightowerv1]

The (Only?) Upside of Margaret Thatcher

The Iron Lady has left (without meeting her hero Sarah Palin), and it's one of those farewells where history has come down pretty decisively on the side of her policies being misguided at best and deeply damaging to the fabric of British society at worst.

Sure, she was the strongest female politician since -- who? Victoria? Eva Peron? -- and she moved the women's movement forward by her very existence, but her devotion to Cold War policies and her indifference to the working class in her own country did not go over well, and has aged poorly.

But there is a silver lining. She ran the UK during a bit of a musical golden age, and so she inspired some fantastic music. These are the songs I'll be singing today.

The (English) Beat's "Stand Down Margaret":

Elvis Costello's "Tramp The Dirt Down" is as angry a screed as I've ever heard him deliver:

UB40's "If It Happens Again (I'm Leaving)" is about her impending re-election: 

Out of dozens of Billy Bragg songs that would fit very well in a post like this, here's "one of "It Says Here," which is a great snapshot of how mean people could be. Now that stuff is so normal that we don't even pay attention to it anymore, but at the time, Billy Bragg on some morning chat show yelling this stuff at people seems a little vertigo-inducing.