Teaching the Next Generation of Dumpers
After making a Dump joke or pun in at least 100 versions of the Dumps over the last 15 years, let me be honest. I never once thought about the nature of taking a dump, in the original sense of the word, aka pooping.
I will spare you the details of the whole ordeal, but recently we started potty training with Eliot. Honestly, intentionally, going to the bathroom is something I took long for granted. If you have never potty trained a child, I suspect you have never given it much thought. Can’t say I blame you. It’s a lot of work, but we’re making significant progress. We’ve been at it for nearly a month now, and I think he mostly gets it. I’m working on teaching him to yell “POOPING” so an adult nearby can whisk him to a toilet if he is not near one and nature calls. So why did I start with an anecdote about potty training? Well, because what is this, if not a place for me to tell you about what’s happening with my child’s bowel movements.
In other news? The big event over here is that our daycare decided to up their prices. I know that some may consider it gauche to talk about money, but like at this point, you’ve heard me go long on politics, potty training, The NBA, music, and so much more; it’s hard to keep listing.
So what’s a $7,000 price increase amongst friends. Would now be a good time that I am going to turn the dumps into a Substack, and subscriptions start at $7,000?
IT ONLY WILL TAKE ONE SUBSCRIPTION TO COVER THE INCREASE IN DAYCARE COSTS ANNUALLY.
The way they get you with daycare is that they charge per week. So, they were like, “Ope, don’t mind us, we’re just upping the fees associated with Roman and Eliot by $70 and $50 a week.” And my first reaction was: oh, sure. And then I did the math, and I was like: OH NO, NOT SURE.
Anyway, it’s caused some minor panics and some major cursing. But these are the costs associated with having a child, or in our case, two, in America. I have looked into labor laws regarding when it will be okay to get Eliot to earn an income, but my tax guy should wait until he is 13. So substack fees are my current plan.
Additionally, the man who sent us the email regarding the price increase recently started arriving at daycare in a new Tesla. This is not suspicious. Nope. Not at all. Lots of people have Tesla’s now. Totally normal behavior to jack your prices and then start driving a Tesla after having a sedan from the early 2000s with a lot of rust. Bet it had excellent trade-in value. That’s all.
And now the Dumps:
Because it has been an actual minute (read: months!) since I last shared any content with you, this story may not be “new,” but it’s still “good.” And if you weren’t in the Know, maybe you missed it. Like many young men in the 90s, I got into wrestling. I can’t tell you exactly when it happened, but suddenly, I was paying attention to WCW and WWF matches and rooting for my favorite heels and faces. My favorite wrestler of the era, and probably still today, is a guy called Shawn Michaels, aka the Heartbreak Kid. If he is number one, there is a big competition for number two.
Well, recently, one of my number twos passed away. He was a guy called Razor Ramon. He threw toothpicks at opponents, wore a sweet leather vest, had very greasy hair, and carried himself with a real air of superiority to the rest of the wrestlers. His finishing move was called the Razor’s Edge, and it was dope.
Eventually, he left WWF, joined the WCW, and teamed up with Hulk Hogan and star of the Magic Mike films (Kevin Hall) to form the new. I won’t get into the whole timeline of the Attitude Era or what happened to these wrestlers, but what you need to know is that Razor Ramon is one of the inspirations for me naming my child Roman. Just kidding. Wouldn’t that be wild? Like: Hey Sam, Ramon and Roman aren’t even the same name, are you crazy?!
If you find yourself sitting around thinking back on if you ever heard a kid say “Too Sweet” and then putting his ring finger and middle finger together and touching their thumb, raising their pointer and pinky’s to the sky, just consider that a fitting gesture for one of wrestling’s greatest showmen.
Remembering Razor Ramon
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Remembering Razor Ramon 〰️
RIP Razor Ramon.
What good story doesn’t begin with the opening, “I just watched a YouTube video.” This was a video about Bitcoin. Sometime in 2020, I tried to invest in some coin — Polkadot — but figuring out where one could buy Polkadot eluded me.
My $1,000 just went into the stock market instead.
This video was a two-parter. The first part tells of a Crypto conference in Miami. The who’s who of Crypto. It cut in clips from the “first” conference of its kind back in 2013 to show how far the world has come since then. The real meat of the video came in the last half when the host sat down with a Crypto PR person and a Crypto reporter to get to the bottom of Crypto.
I spent a lot of time passively watching Bitcoin and thinking:
There she goes.
What a wild ride to be on. Wish I had been an early adopter.
But after watching this person try to defend/explain it, I’ve changed my tune! First, she tried to make the case that Crypto was going to change the world, a rising tide lifts all boats, but at some point, she dropped a quote from the supposed creator of Bitcoin that goes: “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.”
And if that’s your take on this thing that’s supposed to rise all boats and change the world, then, like fuck you, bud. Seems like a pyramid scheme. A different type of 1% wealth. I am not saying there aren’t paths to inordinate wealth via hitting the right coin. But, as of April 2022, my take is that it’s a wild ride for some but not a game-changer for all. Where are you at? Is this my pathway to paying for daycare? Got any hot coin tips?
Bitcoin video
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Bitcoin video 〰️
3. DOHA
The last photo I took in Qatar.
This story comes to you thanks to my Dad. I honestly have no idea if he reads the Dumps. Still, he subscribes to just about every magazine and newspaper imaginable, so he never has to worry about paywalls or monthly limits. He asked me if I had read the story about Doha. I expect many “stories about Doha” to start flowing out between now and the World Cup in November. Some will be absolute hit pieces, paid for by Qatari enemies, and others will be total puff pieces, paid for by Qatar. This is far more the latter than the former.
There was a brief period when a group of my friends and I discussed writing the definitive Qatar book in advance of the World Cup. Unfortunately, we never got our acts together, and so someone else gets to tell the Qatar store. This one fits what I expect the narrative of most of these pieces to look like. The country has too much money and spends it lavishly on whatever they want, and it could come off as new money gauche spending. HOWEVER, Qatar does it well, and you hardly even notice. Qatar is great! What a great place!
If you’d like to read this and then ask me to go long on any of his commentary, I will happily supply you with personal anecdotes about Msherib, Qatari History, Souq Waqif, Sheik Faisal, and sandstorms. So consider this pre-reading for the World Cup or for talking to me. You pick. I want you to feel something, not think something.
Doha, a Think Piece
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Doha, a Think Piece 〰️
Two things I read a long time ago that I have open in my browser, but I do not remember what they were about other than that they were worth reading:
1. The Real Problem with Realtors is “Freedom.”
2. Do you remember your first TED Talk, and was it “Inspiresting”?
4. Destroyer
Few things generate a more divisive musical reaction from my wife than when I put on a Destroyer song. One time when my friend Matt and I were traveling through Spain and Portugal, the bartender gave us the Aux cord, so to speak, and told us to play whatever we wanted. Unfortunately, he took the cord back about six minutes into a Destroyer “epic, unwieldy 11-minute masterwork” called Bay of Pigs.
So what I am saying is that Dan Bejar is not for everyone.
But it is for people who like great music and outstanding lyrics, sung/talked by a guy who may kneel and face away from the crowd for the entire show.
Someone just asked me if I ever got into the Neutral Milk Hotel, and I basically said I missed out on NMH and hopped aboard the Destroyer train instead. It’s not that I only have room for one great storyteller in my musical bandwidth; it’s just that I like listening to Destroyer talk shit about snow angels. So if you want to read more great quotes, I present to you this Pitchfork interview. Or just go stream the album labyrinthitis on Spotify.
5. A Defense of the Dump, or at least, Emails.
I joked earlier, and by earlier, I mean about six weeks ago in typing time and about four paragraphs in reading time, about turning the dumps into a substack. If you’re “new” here, you may access the dumps via The Samplings.
Or perhaps via my active Instagram, where I screenshot pertinent clips from the Dumps and then post them as a story for those who like to consume my Dumps in ten-second bursts.
But my realheads, diehards, who were with me when I was dumping two times “a week from Coffee News on Grand Ave, know that I used to send this shit straight to your inbox.
I made a pitch recently to a boss that we should cut down on emails. In hindsight, this was a bad idea. As the work I do is Very Email-centric. It was a bit like someone at Ford saying to a higher-up… but what if we built more bikes? Who needs cars anyway.
So who needs email anyway?
Jay Caspian Kang, an NYT contributor and newsletter author, posited that email can be precisely what we all need if we used it correctly, or maybe just, differently.
The piece discusses the instafacation of everything, from work to banter, to dating, to banking, to shopping, to chatting. Everything all at once, all the time. From the piece:
“Sometimes I find myself deep into a conversation in one text thread or another, and I realize that I have no idea what is happening in this person’s life; I only really know what tweets they find annoying, what basketball highlights they are gawking over and what they think about the daily gossip in our industry.”
Who among us hasn’t felt that way? In some realm, the purpose of the Dump is my way of sending out a mass status update about what’s truly going on in my life to people I’ve met, heard about, or knew once in college but haven’t talked to in a decade. Kang suggests we need to start emailing people, even the ones we “talk” to daily, to get caught up in their life, not just caught up on what they’re up to at the moment the way a group chat might do.
Me getting ready to write a good email
Personally, getting a response to the Dump is the mark of a successful email/campaign.
Someone who’d been meaning to reach out but hadn’t sees a story they also read and chimes in.
Someone I “interact” with elsewhere in the world tells me something different from what I thought I knew.
It’s no accident that I try to elicit my readers to respond, comment, or engage at the end of every Dump.
Sometimes this can be a one-way street. Me sending out info into the world about daycare prices, chemical burns, immigration woes, mold, etc., but I don’t know what’s up with you. What’s genuinely up with you.
I am not saying you HAVE to take forty minutes and write me a long email, but I am saying if you do, I’d read it and respond. Eventually.
I get that we’re busy. But busy doing what? Staying in touch? I’ll let you be the judge.
That’s it for the dumps. I feel like you know what I should say here, so I am not going to!
PS: I need you to immediately call into question any list that lists Minnesota as a so-called Climate Haven. It snowed earlier this week. And I am talking Mid-April snow. If this what “havens” are meant to look like then yeeesh, we are not prepared for the hellscape that is the future. I am not going to share this list, just google “Climate Havens” and select News. It’ll pop up. What I am saying is: See you in Toledo. Or at least Knoxville. Here’s a take I am workshopping. It’s not that I am anti-winter, but more that I am anti 8 months of winter. Does that make me a bad person? What do you think about 8 months of winter? Normal? Abnormal? The New Normal?
