Wednesday Shit Talk: Making Out With the Tongue of Another MUTHR
On how leaving the country changes you and the Kamala, Grohl, and Swift of it all
That’s right—this week’s Sunday Shit Talk is giving Wednesday. That’s because I took the weekend off, packed up the fam, and fled across the border to Montréal to take care of some personal biz and celebrate a kid’s birthday and our anniversary. Rest assured, a good time was had by all.
As we pulled into the driveway late the other night, we marveled how a mere 48 hours away could feel like a full week. International travel forces you to take up residence in your flesh in such a good way. Consider the seconds, minutes, hours, and days we spend barely conscious, chained to routine, fumbling through myriad daily obligations as if we were comatose. Leaving your home country for another, especially one that deploys a different mother tongue, has this way of aligning you in the present and expanding your consciousness like saltwater taffy. Your brain is so clogged with interpreting parking signs and trying not to FCK up your rudimentary passé composé there is significantly less room for the less constructive ruminations that typically occupy a good 75% of my monkey brain.
But now I’m back to let you know we can really make romance…or some shit.
There goes our hero
Hours before the debate, the Dave Grohl of it all hit the feeds and the judging commenced.
Public admissions like this serve as a prompt for us to consider how we might feel or what might do if we were in the same situation. Before processing (or maybe to process), we tend to fling those errant thoughts out through the internet, and the noise we make compounds into the Greek chorus of the moment.
Why do we feel so compelled to hang heteronormative constraints on celebrities we don't even know and judge them accordingly? Seriously, who cares where he puts his dick?
I suppose it's because we've all experienced the dude in some way. I saw the Foo Fighters play a small club in Boston on their very first tour. In the decades since, Dave Grohl has become something of a national treasure. To Millennials, he's that fun uncle with Muppet energy who might get you high in the garage at a barbeque. To Gen Z, he's the Gen X music nerd dad who took you to a punk show when you were ten. If you're a Swiftie, you're public enemy number one for calling her Eras tour the "Errors tour." The Swifties feel vindicated, claiming that "karma is her boyfriend."
No excuses, but being a globally renowned award-winning rock star is rewarding but hard, and touring plays with your mind in so many ways that boatloads of money can’t ease. Mind you, two of Grohl’s bandmates met untimely deaths, and carrying on with touring and marriage as if it were business as usual had to be challenging. He’s always portrayed himself as a family man but maintaining a family is hard work, and if you aren’t around much to do it, it’s even harder.
Ultimately, what went on within the sanctity of his and his wife’s marriage is none of our business. We can glean from the context clue of his worded apology that his marriage may not have been open, or at least not open to expanding the family.
As a Gen Xer (and Dave's peer), he’s the guy most straight Gen X men wanted to be or hang out with, and the guy most straight Gen X women would be happy to FCK, and my feeds almost audibly groaned at how sadly expected it all was. Our collective hall pass revealed himself to be tragically, typically human. He stepped out with a woman who was young enough to have another baby, meaning she was at least 15 years younger than him. This feeds into the tropes of a middle-aged man trying to FCK his way back to youth. Pardon the pun, but there goes our hero.
All I know is, anyone who tells you the midlife crisis isn’t real can go FCK themselves. When you’ve lived long enough to consider the limits of your timeline trajectory realistically and have seen more than a few close friends die, all you see when you look forward are things winding down, and what (or in this case, who) you’ve yet to do or don’t get to do anymore can taunt you as it hovers in the ether like a holy grail full of water from the fountain of youth, just out of reach. For Dave, this apparition appeared in the form of getting some strange.
When you’re old enough to be the parent to at least half of any room you walk into, society expects you to conduct yourself as such while figuring out how to still meet your needs. It’s not always easy. It’s not always fun. But it’s what’s expected of you, for better or worse.
Kamala FTW
It was a debate to end all debates. Her face said, “Enough of your nonsense.” Her words did, too. She ate him for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and she managed to do it without so much as an eye roll, which I’m sure required Herculean strength.
I’m not a political commentator so I’ll leave those nitty gritty observations to those qualified to make them, but I will say each time she put that menace in his place (throughout) I pumped my fist and laughed my ass off, just as I knew I would.
We are at an unprecedented turning point in gender parity. If she wins, equality might FINALLY be within reach for women. If she doesn’t, we’re FCKD forever in this country. Not just because a woman will be President, but because we stand to gain back the dominion we lost and reach for a dominion we truly never had, a future where our daughters can make the same money their brothers do. And so, so, so much more.
The catlady factor
Immediately after the debate, Taylor Swift entered the chat with an impeccably timed post backing Harris/Walz because she “fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.” Also, she was pissed about how the menace made an AI version of her endorsing him and had to check him into place.
In a genius move, she signed her endorsement, “Childless Cat Lady.”
No one on the planet does PR like Swift. That woman can take a moment in culture, bend it to her will, and maximize it to the full extent of the law.
Would she have come forward so boldly had the menace not used AI to conjure her image and spread AI falsehoods about her endorsement? Her post wasn’t worded as such. She’s notorious for wanting the last word over how she is represented in the world. Regardless, this is a whatever-it-takes election. And it takes Taylor Swift and her ilk to seal the deal. Thanks, girlie!
Why New Yorkers Can “Never Forget”
I don’t know where you were on 9/11, but I was maybe a couple of miles away at my gym in Brooklyn. I came down the stairs to find everyone gathered around the TV, aghast at how a plane could’ve plowed through a single tower when we saw the second plane hit the second tower in real-time. I remember announcing, “That’s not an accident, that’s terrorism!” before fleeing the gym to look toward them with my own eyes. Until I lived a few blocks away from corpse-filled refrigerator trucks in the early days of the pandemic, it was the worst tragedy I’d ever witnessed without the buffer of a TV screen.
Within an hour or two, the blazing blue sky had turned grey. The wind blew the ash of the towers and the dead into our neighborhood, papers off of their desks littered our stoop. For weeks, “Have you seen…” signs seeking neighbors who’d never come home were festooned on every street corner. Suddenly, we lived in what felt like a war zone.
This trauma deeply affected every New Yorker for years to come. If we didn’t lose someone we loved, ten of our friends and acquaintances did. In New York, just walking to work every day exposes you to some degree of human suffering, but this level of devastation—even if you weren’t connected by first-degree to a victim—took a good 10 years to process. We were so lucky not to lose anyone directly in 9/11 (my father-in-law’s office was a few blocks away) but it affected every single thought I had and decision I made for years afterward. And I know I’m not alone.
This is why, admittedly when I see someone who wasn’t there all like “Never forget!” I deeply appreciate the sentiment, but it makes me a little itchy. I lose patience. Because even if we wanted to, we couldn’t.
Until next time….
xx
MF
Grohl is making it all about him. Again.
Airing his family’s private trauma publicly. Setting up the expectation/demand for an eventual pass/forgiveness/“healing”.
This is the epitome of shameless MANipulation.
HE made it public business. HE skipped the condom. HE put his family on the spot.
He is just too old to be a ‘bad boy’ any more. I see these pathetic old punks all over Seattle, clinging to their dated rags, literally tottering around in biker jackets and walkers. It was 40 years ago!
My x still has his ponytail… but nothing left on top, so we call that a ‘skullet’.
Great newsletter Viv!