B Michael Tumblr

I have never been the type of person who remembers athletes’ numbers. I know Josh Allens’ because he’s ubiquitous around here. Jordan, Lebron, etc. I had forgotten that Ken Griffey Jr.’s number was 24 until I saw this hat, which I shortly thereafter bought.

Obviously, everything’s too expensive these days. 2026 is the year I am not buying myself anything (non-essential). This is the second of four things I’ve so far bought myself (non-essential). I got a really good deal on it, especially since it’s one of the older Ebbets Field hats before they were acquired and the construction and materials are quite nice. I really ended up saving a few hundred dollars, though, as I almost bought this beautiful chore jacket instead. I found the chore jacket on Alex Kwa’s site, which I visited probably because I was online window shopping Outlier stuff, which, more to come. Before pulling trig on the chore coat, I looked online for some notes on fit, and came across this Reddit post about the chore coat, which also featured the Ken Griffey hat.

And that’s how I saved a few hundred dollars by buying a non-essential ball cap (the 100th one I own probably).

Getting to know yourself is so important. When I’m locked into a manic-like shopping and research spin, it’s almost like I have to buy something. Even though 99% of these sessions don’t really end in a purchase, you fall into enough of them and you end up buying way too much shit you don’t need.

Writing up this story is my way of doing ‘penance’ for the purchase, but I really don’t regret it. I think I spent 25 bucks on the hat, which was a total steal. But, I think, the endless ability and accessibility to research and online shopping has been utterly disastrous to me. I’ve always been a coveter and a window shopper and an outside-my-means-liver. Online shopping is like my version of smartphone sports gambling. Utterly arresting, socially acceptable, financially ruinous.

It’s really funny to me that most of the people who see me in this cap think it’s for A24.

It started with The Pitt, of course. A real TV show, made in real TV show proportions, made on a real TV show schedule. While I was waiting for a new episode to ‘air’ on HBO Max, or right after finishing one, I turned on the ER pilot episode. It immediately blew me away. Its feature film length also made me stop halfway through, and I never finished it.

The pilot was based on a screenplay Michael Crichton wrote in 1974 based on his experience as a Harvard med student. Did you know Michael Crichton went to medical school? I didn’t! Elite institutions are GOATED at producing dumbasses. See: this American Journal of Medicine editorial from a Crichton classmate about how the ER creator’s dumbass pseudoscience novel State of Fear made a lot of good points about climate science being fake…

In any case, the pilot is quite good.

The arc leading up to Julianna Margulies’ character attempting suicide is completely absent. The way it bops between the hospital and Anthony Edwards’ character’s outside life is disorientating. But it’s ultimately a potent fusion of drama and melodrama that makes for incredible TV viewing.

I’m watching the rest of ER now. I’m through season 1 episode 5, and every one has been good to great. The cinematography and lighting are unusually strong. The writing, especially for Eriq La Salle’s character, is outstanding. I was a little too young to be interested in ER when it was first on. I’m so glad it’s easy to stream right now. It’s probably more entertaining than The Pitt if I’m being honest. Way less libcodedly tendentious at the very least.

The weirdest thing about watching ER for the first time right now is that there’s no 'rewatch content ecosystem’ around the show. There’s only one rewatch podcast, and it has series-long spoilers from the first episode. I don’t see tons of YouTube videos about the show (unlike similar videos about, like, Lost or Game of Thrones). No one on social media is talking about it. Even though it seems like a pretty fertile show for creating loads of that type of content.

The main theme and credits go harder than they have any right to!

Do you wanna fuck? Like you know I do?

— “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”

I’ve started doing this thing that feels a little unsafe but is edifying. My phone, on a mount in my car, is perfectly in my eyeline to the road, and on my phone when I’m driving I usually have the Music app open with the lyrics on display. Driving a lot, this practice has helped me learn (and, more importantly, sing along to) the lyrics to a lot more music.

Overall, I’m just not a lyrics guy. Except for when I am. Which is like 1% of the time.

So it’s unsurprising that my ignorance of this Vampire Weekend lyric is almost old enough to enlist in the army. But still, seeing this lyric today caught me out.

“Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” is a 2008 song that I’ve listened to, IDK, a bazillion times? And I never understood the lyrics to be “Do you wanna fuck?"1 At least now, circa 2026, the line feels very un-Vampire Weekend-y. But it makes sense, them being young'uns and all at the time. It’s also a clever inversion of how this type of song usually goes. (Or is it?) I remember reading a Dave Hickey essay in Air Guitar, I think it’s the very first one, about how love songs are where the cultural rules of courtships are written. And "do you wanna fuck?” feels like a very mid-2000s type of way to court. Or maybe that’s jsut because I was in my early 20s at the time. Being unexpected, it’s a really fun flip to how courtly and spry the song sounds. Like, you’d expect a more direct, raunchy line from a song that sounds direct and raunchy. right?

I also feel like there’s some sort of connection to how this video ends and the I Think You Should Leave sketch “Baby Cries,” for which Vampire Weekend provided a song. That sketch talks about the attitude and impunity with which young people go through life, and it similarly ends on a beach at night. I don’t know, maybe I’m grasping, or maybe in the a-temporal/cross-temporal/completely timeless cultural galaxy we occupy, it makes sense to say a music video from 2008 and a comedy sketch from 2021 work together to make a strong point about time.

1. To be fair, I don’t really know any of the lyrics to Vampire Weekend songs up until around Modern Vampires of the City_and really really _Father of the Bride, which might be my favorite album of all time (for now). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎