1.
I was walking outside on Sunday which I knew was a bad idea and a bug zipped a straight hard line up my nose and got lodged there. Still don’t know what it was. I froze on the sidewalk and did snarly line-of-scrimmage noises and positions to try to get it out. I stared at the sun hoping to sneeze and when the sneeze arrived it was shattering.
Woke up the next morning with a sinus infection and that’s what I’m dealing with now. Reading in bed. Watching YouTube. Sneezing.
I wanted to have a new post for today but felt so sick I thought, Better just to wait.
Then I thought, What’s more professional?
2.
One of the YouTube channels I’m catching up on is Beyond the Trailer. It’s a movie/TV/business channel hosted by a journalist named Grace Randolph. The first person I ever heard call Grace Randolph a reporter was Grace Randolph. At first I didn’t see it that way but now I do.
She can be cartoony. Like it's a show for kids. Singsong cadence you can drum on your thigh in advance. It can feel like shtick.
Where Randolph shines is in livestreams. She does two or three a week. Extemporizes on three major stories with just a sentence-fragment outline. Sometimes talks for two hours like this. Hundreds of paying participants opining in the chat as she goes and Randolph reading their comments the whole time. Thanking people. Googling things. Muting trolls. “Happy birthday” and “80sModel it's good to see you.” A couple people have popped into a livestream just to announce their suicide and it’s hard to describe the finesse with which she keeps them in the chat, fosters conversation around them, and stays engaged with the crisis while finishing the report.
Go ahead and call a shtick a shtick but it's a pro who's doing it.
3.
Congested and mouth breathing this afternoon I watched a livestream that I missed last week and Randolph is having a bad day. After a stammering start she puts her hands up and explains it: eye problems, trips to the doctor, expensive remedies and fights with insurance…
Gets it off her chest and then the show goes on.
4.
But it's weird. Tense.
Randolph is private. Seldom talks about personal stuff on camera and in fact goes lengths to avoid it. Almost seems like part of her professional code: No Personal Stuff.
(No doubt safety's a factor, but she's also just…private.)
So it seemed like a breach of that normal professional getup to put her hands up and tell the livestream why her day sucked but then I thought, well, maybe she’s been doing this long enough, knows herself well enough, she realized the best way to get through this livestream was to lance that cyst of sad and just get it out: My day is sucking and here's why…
It reminded me of when David Letterman was hosting Late Night and delivered a monologue saying, I’m being extorted by someone who claims that, if I don’t give them $4 million, they’ll tell the world I cheated on my wife. So I wanted to take this moment to let the world know: I cheated on my wife.
Then the show went on.
5.
Marie showed me the eight-part Netflix documentary about the Dallas Cowboys’ spectacular success through the 1990s when they won three Super Bowls. If you’re not from the US you might not know what that means. A Super Bowl trophy is like a Pulitzer for violence. It is a great American honor.
But really it's a biopic about the team's owner. 82-year-old billionaire Jerry Jones.
It's strange viewing cuz I know almost nothing about football. If they said the third quarter is the one that’s played on horseback I would touch my chin and nod. But these men are speaking so earnestly about football that it becomes a meta delight.
Their identities bleed together: the pro and the fan. Retired and vulnerable. They’ve brooded over the story of their lives and testosterone levels are down and their emotions at hand.
Of the elderly protagonists it's murkier: when are they recounting fact and when are they spinning legacy?
6.
The documentary’s heroes are two elderly men: the Cowboys’ owner, 82-year-old billionaire Jerry Jones, and the Cowboys’ former head coach, Jimmy Johnson, who is also 82. Their interviews narrate the whole series and the footage of those interviews is striking.
They wear dark clothes. These elderly men. The sets glow mahogany-amber. Godfather lighting. They are photographed at angles that hide their bellies.
Telling stories of their midlife prowess they will ball a fist or lift a finger and say things like, “I told that motherfucker to his face I said…”
There’s a scene in which the 82-year-old billionaire Jerry Jones teases an 86-year-old former coach about taking Viagra.
The coach drops his smile like contraband and says, “NO.”
7.
My favorite part of the series so far is the ending of episode three. 82-year-old billionaire Jerry Jones, is being chauffered into a forest via pickup truck. He gets out of the car wearing neon orange camouflage. He’s carrying a rifle. He looks into the depths of the trees as if to ponder them while a voiceover talks about football. Then he walks a few paces away from the truck into a squat, squarish, bunker-like structure.
Inside the bunker-like structure we see Jerry Jones slide his rifle through the wide rectangular opening made specially for that reason. Google tells me it’s called an embrasure.
The camera hangs behind him as he levels his rifle and takes patient aim and then fires a shot. His body jolts at the recoil and a bullet casing flies out toward the camera — CUT TO BLACK.
Optics of machismo. The truck, the rifle, the forest. Like he’s John Rambo. No sense of irony at having been chauffered here, with neon camoflauge, killing an animal at great distance while flanked by able-bodied escorts. Protected within the walls of a bunker.
The thing about costumes though is if you wear them long enough they become uniforms and the uniforms in time become skin.
And the skin becomes a sarcophagus.
Stomach-dropping that you write better when sick as a dog (Oz slang) than I can when caffeine-powered & muse-struck. Wholehearted thanks for sharing despite the sinuses & bug complications.