Mere Being - 024 - September - Moving, Football, Laughter

Mere Being readers–

I am moving. I am probably moving. We^[1] are under contract, we have paid earnest money, we have a closing date but it needs to be updated, we have uploaded all of our documents, we are waiting for the mortgage to be decisioned.

I don't want to jinx it by writing about it too much, but there's a real chance this will be the last time I write to you from San Francisco. Next month: Minneapolis. (Or: why not Minneapolis.)

Mostly this month I've been thinking about football.

It's weird. I'm into a bunch of nerdy shit. But I never feel nerdier than when I'm talking about football. Never more at risk of lapsing into a monologue that my counterparty does not care about and cannot understand.

It is deep, football. There is an arbitrary amount of detail. Cover 2, run fits, RPOs. I started listening to a bunch of football podcasts late in the season last year, and the conversations genuinely sounded like they were in code.

It's tremendously popular. Watching football I am reminded that the rest of the country exists. I see commercials for cars and insurance. The presence of the mass audience is clear.

But it's entirely in the negative space around the thing, an iceberg. None of my friends here watched it before I started. When I talk about it outside my friends, it's about 50%-50% "polite puzzlement" and "active hostility to the idea that football might be interesting."

At the same time, many of my closest friends are perfectly happy to watch football. Their parents watched football, or they have fond memories of watching college football at their schools. They've renewed hometown fandom or gotten into one for the first time. There's a deep background radiation of interest.

We have beenw watching a tremendous amount of Dropout. It is Good. Maybe the finest consequence of the Subscription business model. Sam Reich, their CEO, gave a long interview about how the business came to be and how it works now, where he calls it "Comedy as a Service." Yes.

One of the things I like about it is how the people making it seem to really understand their own value proposition. A lot of times entertainers are, let's say, tremendously self-deprecating about the value of their work. Dropout is pretty clear: We make people laugh. People enjoy laughing.

I don't actually more than that this month! Buying a house is a lot.

More soon,
Nat