Hey, it’s Mackey at the keyboard. This past year, time has taken on an odd dynamic quality that has me questioning my memory if not the entire nature of my reality. Lockdown and constant COVID testing seem long ago. Yet did I last see you last week or back in 2019? Did Zuck really rename Facebook Meta? People are now “back to work,” but are they really? Mask wearing got so normal that I started noticing people have really pretty eyes. Noses and mouths have since returned and, aesthetically … am not a fan. Is it possible to be nostalgic for 2019 and 2020, both?
Fortunately for me, this year’s “family sabbatical” was just a week in July in NYC. Humor-themed, the family scoured the city’s comedy scene. First stop was an aggressively-underground pronoun-curious club with no seating. The leading edge of NYC Gen-Z arrived ready to pounce on any performer’s offhand, yet cancellation-mandating misstep. Comedians had painstakingly crafted and scrubbed bits for this audience, one so attuned to the nuance of every riff and slightest micro-aggression, expressed or implied. The air crackled with impending laughter, anxiety and judgment (not in that order). The tiny bar quickly achieved mosh-pit maximum density, hostile to both the vertically challenged and the merely sober. A sudden wave of probabilistic dread washed over the family. They left abruptly to avoid possibly laughing at the wrong thing and suffering the consequences thereof. It was also stuffy.
Driven by Jennifer’s borderline pathological overconfidence disorder (“Trust me, I’m a doc, a prof, and I wrote a book on humor.”), they hit Caroline’s. Caroline’s headliner immediately zeroed-in on five open, guileless California faces up-front: “I see that the family from the Volkswagen commercial is here tonight.” The rest of the week was more wisely and less-intimidatingly spent e-biking Manhattan. Jennifer, only recently recovered from last year’s Hawaiian e-bike-meets-water-meets-broken-leg situation, got wiped out by a bike-riding DoorDasher who then yelled at her for riding with both noise-canceling AirPods in and heels on. Scuffed and smudged but otherwise unscathed and most definitely unbroken, Jennifer deemed the accident an excuse to buy a new outfit. Not new shoes.
2022 also illuminated a number of automotive truths:
- SF’s parking lot hunter/gatherers will electronically locate your hidden laptop and effortlessly smash your window to get it. At an abandoned hotel they’ll flip it to a guy who wants to beat on it with an Israeli cracker then steal your identity. FindMyMac affords masochists a user-friendly way to to impotently track its progress to Russia (Andy).
- TOW AWAY ZONE signs aren’t just decorative. The late-night Uber to a San Jose impound lot, the junkyard dog encountered there and the $1,000 fine make this most memorable. Persistent optimism has its limits (Jennifer).
- The Mini Cooper’s British-polite low tire warning message may seem like just a suggestion, but it is not. Persistent optimism is apparently a genetic predisposition (Téa Sloane).
- Side mirrors break off really easily (Cooper).
- Sometimes wheels just fall off when you’re driving on the freeway (Devon).
- It can take over a year to get your EV’s battery fixed, if you choose the right repair shop (Andy).
When not driving 3-wheeled cars with no clue what’s behind them, C&D are exceptional at beer consumption. After six years apart, they are in school together, in the same fraternity, and live across the hall from each other. They give me hope for America.
Devon is interviewing for internships, but they are mostly imaginary. On the upside, his imaginary opportunities pay well and have great benefits. Devon is the only member of Gen Z known to have contemplated a fake ID solely for tax purposes. An ID indicating he is over 50 would allow him to put the max $7K annually into his IRA. Devon spends his non-retirement fund dollars on sly prank items like a 30-foot inflatable santa, fake parking tickets and giant diapers.
Cooper has yet to start imagining plush internships, but his charm, wit and great hair have gotten him this far so why mess with success? Coop deployed Apollo mission moon art to make his room both stylish and celestial but has wrestled with independent living challenges: flat bike tire repair (grr! requires tools!), furniture assembly (more tools!), laundry (soap!). He’s looking forward to summer.
Téa also did a sustainable retail internship. A late-AM internship on a Wednesday. It was great but exhausting. She continues her love affair with “cooking” which involves mixing cereal, creamer and chocolate chips in a bowl but also onto the floor – leaving a trail of opened packages of Stevia, corn flakes, and matcha in her operating radius. Logic: anything cleaned up or put away might soon be needed again so why put it away? I have calculated expected value for each of my humans, scoring them by the likelihood of me getting food: spilling during food prep, compulsive refrigerator cleaning, or actual meal feeding. Téa is my favorite.
Beyond his focus on startup investing and advising, Andy continues in his never-ending quest to make the perfect homemade beer, moonshine, and non-alcoholic honey. AirPod-enabled Jennifer frequently dances in the kitchen to Macklemore, Erik B. & Rakim, and Notorious B.I.G., seeking to reveal profound lyrical truths and provide data for her research on finding beauty, wisdom and equanimity in life (“It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.” — Rakim).
With love, hope and dreams of chocolate chips where you’re at — Mackey