Phthursday Musings: Pfizers on Stun

Wednesday evening at about 6:30 I achieved DOUBLE PFIZER. In another 13 days, I will unlock the next goal, at which time I suspect I’ll need to use 29 Nanab berries or play 17 games with a non-standard tile set or whatever the hell else my phone says.

I received my shots at the St. Elizabeth campus of AMITA Health Saints Mary and Elizabeth Medical Center, which for us is ridiculous for multiple reasons. First, there I was, suburban dude driving into the city, which wasn’t supposed to be how all this worked, but my primary care physician is in the AMITA network and that’s where the webpage sent me. Second, the missus worked at St. Mary’s for eight long, ridiculous years. Of every random hospital in the Chicago metro area, it was particularly odd to wind up there.

A side effect of these two sojourns for shots was that I was actually in the city, and not just the relative outskirts of the city, for the first two times in quite a while. It felt familiar, and it felt fast, though I think fast may not be the right word.

This time around I decided I was actually going to eat something I wouldn’t normally eat. I fiddled with Yelp for a minute and decided to make the short drive to Sultan’s Market. I lived in the city for 11 years. I had been on North Avenue countless times. I had never actually been to Sultan’s Market. I had never had a falafel sandwich from there. Well. Another achievement unlocked.

I left figuring I would just park somewhere to eat. I forgot how stupid an idea that is in Wicker Park. I eventually found a spot on a cul de sac which was sort of a parking spot of last resort back in yon courtship days. For whatever reason, as I went to park, a Chicago cop pulled up behind me. I sat in the car eating for 10-15 minutes or so. He left about 9 minutes in. It was the sort of thing which just happens in the city, I suppose. Maybe he’d received a 10-87 call about a falafel on the move.

At the corner of North and Ashland, 15 years ago, there was a gas station. We walked into it one night and I bought a pack of gum which has haunted me ever since. I rarely ever bought gum. Excluding airplane related needs I’ve averaged fewer than one gum purchase every two years since. But I still get shit about Hubba Bubba.

Well, the gas station is gone. Instead there is now a Hyatt Place. As I drove on home, I went through the Circle, where the Kennedy and Ryan and Eisenhower Expressways meet, and… it’s like they’ve finally made progress on it all. The city evolves. In weird ways. It’s a weird city, after all. But it evolves.

As do we all. I joke about unlocking achievements, but really, aren’t a lot of us keen to do exactly that? I very much look forward to getting out of town, to a destination more, erm, enrapturing than Yorkville. There’s a world to see and we’re finally getting to where we can really go out and do that again. Let’s not waste the opportunity.

On the subject of unlocking achievements, today is the 90th birthday of arguably the greatest baseball player of them all, Willie Mays. Who unlocked more achievements than the Say Hey Kid?

There’s not a lot I can add to Tim Kurkjian’s wonderful piece for ESPN. Read it now.

There was no specific intentionality behind it - it is, for whatever reason, his mom’s favorite number - but it so happens that my boy wears #24 out on the field:

He is not yet Willie Mays. But he’s heading in the right direction!

After I wrote the above section and before I wrote anything else, the stunning news broke: the Angels are releasing Albert Pujols.

Pujols in his prime, like Mays in his prime, was the best player in the game. Today, I think that’s still Mike Trout, soon to give way to, maybe, Ronald Acuña Jr.

Much of what Mays did wasn’t televised at all, certainly not nationally in prime time. He was legend as much as reality.

Unlike Mays, every notable thing Pujols did was on SportsCenter.

Today, every notable thing Ronald Acuña Jr. does is immediately on our phones.

I know it makes things different. I’m not sure how to characterize that difference.

I do think though that a kid today having had a chance to see Pujols matters. I think the connections across the generations provide an important fabric.

My son’s head coach, just last week, actually tried to explain to the boys who Ozzie Smith was. I don’t think the immediate lesson took very well! But good on him for trying. Things like that might not sink in right away. But he throughline matters.

I hope Pujols lands in a good spot. I’d like to make a point of saying, hey, look, Albert is up. He’s going to retire soon. Make sure you watch.

But, yes, like us, like the city, the game evolves.

I’ll be, well, stunned if more than one of you picked up on the other reference in this week’s subject: to the song “Phasers on Stun” from the 1996 album We Are Urusei Yatsura by Scottish indie-rock band Urusei Yatsura.

This song and album pretty much epitomize mid-90s indie-rock: fast, noisy, shambolic guitars, over the top of a fairly simple pop-rock song, which is kind of about a girl and kind of about stringing fun-sounding words together. If Pavement were from Glasgow instead of Stockton, and had named themselves after a Japanese manga cartoon, and had grown up listening to, uh, Pavement… well, there you have it.

This stuff is probably too fast and shambolic for my tastes these days, but I’ve got to admit, I don’t see how this isn’t still close to what the kids would listen to. It’s weird, loud, and fun. DID THIRD-WAVE EMO DESTROY EVERYTHING? TELL ME.

Speaking of which, the main music writer for the Chicago Reader, who to the best of my knowledge is the last remaining full-time music writer for any publication in the city, wrote this past week about “fifth-wave emo” as though it’s a thing, and one of some sort of grave importance, which, uh. Hrm. Well. Let’s move along now.

Couple months ago, Smithsonian Magazine showed up in my mailbox. I did not order it. Nobody had yet copped to ordering it for me.

It’s very good! I actually like it a great deal. Thank you, mystery person.

Thirty-odd years ago, the same thing happened to my grandmother, sort of. Magazines which she did not order started showing up. Not Smithsonian though. Time maybe. Golf Digest possibly. At least four, maybe more.

The only one which we actually read? Tennis, of course.

Yes, yes, for a hot minute ca. 1992, with several issues of Tennis available to provide useful tips, we were tennis enthusiasts, we being me and my cousin and a couple of his friends. One of his friends, his sister played tennis, and this undoubtedly had something to do with it all. But tennis was cool! Tennis is always cool.

Tennis was so cool that not only did we play tennis, I wrote a tennis video game.

I mean… video is maybe a strong way of putting it. It was all text-based.

You would specify how you wanted to hit the ball: forehand, backhand, lob, trick shot. Enter the number, and depending on your skills, and the skills of your opponent, you’d get or not get a favorable result.

Your first opponent, John-John, had a good lob, but so long as you didn’t keep trying trick shots - which might cause you to hit yourself in the knee - you could beat him pretty easily.

Today? Nobody would write something insane like that. You can do something like that in a crappy app and have it actually be graphical and can probably pull it all off in 3 hours.

My parents’ generation, they just didn’t have computers around. We did, but that’s what passed for programming. I almost feel like it a kid today might be better able to understand what it was like to have No Computer than what it was like to have IBM 286. They’ve been in rooms without computers and can imagine a house with no computers. How exactly though can a kid today imagine a house where the only video game was Pong?

Grandpa, what did you do?

We played outside.

Oh, okay. Dad, what did you do?

Let me tell you about Yars’ Revenge.

Uhh what?

My kid, at least, has seen the TI 99/4A in action, apparently finding it mostly incredibly boring. He likes Zero Zap, I think.

I have no idea where I’m going with this.

Oh, yeah, I want to get a couple of rackets and teach him tennis. Is this a good idea? A terrible idea? I think it’s a good idea. A great idea, really. Hey, whoever sent me Smithsonian, can you throw in Tennis?

The other day I was asked something like this:

Dad, did you drink juice boxes when you were little?

And the stumbling answer was: They didn’t make juice boxes when I was little. I tried to explain this but look: 7 year olds don’t want indepth explanations. Neither do wives. Trust me.

Now, see, we don’t usually have juice boxes in the house. Juice boxes live at Grandma’s house. That’s how it is.

And when I was his age, while we didn’t have juice boxes, we did have juice cans, and these lived at… Grandma’s house.

Do people remember these things? I mean, they probably still exist. Orange juice in tiny tiny cans, with a weird plastic thing on the top to peel off, revealing a tear drop shaped opening. The juice, for obvious reasons, tasted metallic.

I never saw them anywhere else, except in grocery stores. I mean, my grandmother didn’t go shopping at weird exotic import outlets, she just went to the freaking Eagle Foods on 11th Street. I think. Who else was buying this stuff? Was she single handedly keeping canned juice afloat?

That’s what Grandma’s house is for, right? Products which you will literally never find anywhere else in the wild. It’s as though they know secrets. I mean, they do know secrets.

I’m 44 and to this day I still think in terms that there are “corn potatoes”, “non-corn potatoes”, “potatoes corn”, and “non-potatoes corn”, because my grandmothers, respectively, served mashed potatoes and corn that were better separate, and mashed potatoes and corn that were better mixed together. I’ve explained this to my main squeeze before, but… being a wife, this was far too indepth an explanation for her.

I know, I know, now, for the large proportion of my readers who are neither wives nor 7 year olds, or, who might fall into one of those two categories and is hellbent on proving me wrong, which is understandable, because I’m being ridiculous, I now have to explain myself. Non-corn potatoes were just mashed potatoes with, I think, a lot of butter and milk. Corn potatoes were a mixture of potatoes and boxed potatoes (?) and came out with a less creamy flavor. Potatoes corn was… canned corn. Non-potatoes corn was… frozen corn.

Grandmothers don’t dwell upon how grandchildren process things like this, because they’re focused on more direct things, like, you know, sustenance. With much experience as mothers under their belts, they tend to be excellent at provision of sustenance.

Grandfathers? I mean. My god.

Dad, I’m hungry.

Uh, okay. Want a sandwich?

Grandpa, I’m hungry.

We had some baloney in there last month…

Grandpa might have made himself a baloney sandwich 17 minutes ago, but his ability to externalize this into provision of sustenance for someone else simply does not exist.

Also. In case you’re one of those wise guys thinking dude, it’s BOLOGNA, not baloney, you know what? You’re not a grandpa. Grandpa doesn’t say bologna. He says baloney. His sandwich is made of baloney, you are full of baloney, the government is a bunch of baloney.

For that matter, this entire post is a bunch of baloney.

I honestly thought I’d have more to say about getting the vaccine, but it seems like, instead of being knocked out for the day, I was just hovering at that tired-enough-to-be-loopy stage most of the day.

I think, just over the course of days, and as embedded in what I’ve written, I’ve been giving a lot more thought to the past than the future. I wonder how much of that will break now. While I don’t think Things Can Just Be Normal, I do think things can be fairly close, and now I guess I will more reasonably think about going out and doing more, especially outside. There’s all kinds of things out there to look forward to! I know this, because I have a subscription to Smithsonian Magazine.

In the end, I did have a weird side effect: my fingers on my left hand turned white. It was 52 degrees out, not super cold, but cold enough, I guess, that when my hands got cold, it led to them turning white. It’s a half hour later now and my fingertips still tingle. If this is the worst of it, I got by pretty well. But it’s kind of disturbing to look down and see your fingers turn white! That’s freaky!

And that ain’t no baloney!