MY WORLD:
I now regularly eat hot dogs for lunch. What used to be a once or twice A YEAR treat at a baseball game, is now an almost DAILY dietary staple (Almost daily means not every day! That’s a victory!) A few days back, I sent a picture to my friends of my hotdogs in the refrigerator and said “sometimes I just like to watch them sleep.” Yes, it was a joke…but, was it though? There have now been multiple days where I open the fridge around 11:45 (don’t lie, you know you consider lunchtime 11am now) and I just look at the hot dogs in my fridge. Am I smiling creepily while humming “Rock A Bye Baby” in the direction of my Ball Park Franks? No! (Is that a victory for you at this point?) But I do look at them…and…yeah, dream of how good two of them would taste at 11:13AM on a Tuesday? YEAH, MAYBE I FUCKING DO!
Peak levels of stress now include the phrase “only about a week’s left of relish in there.” There’s a guy across the street from me who just sits in his window now and looks outside, and while I was eating a lunch dog (no need to say “hot dog,” THERE’S JUST NO TIME!) I caught eyes with him and raised my hot dog up to him like a “cheers!” Yeah, that’s right. I cheers’d a stranger across the street at 11:13AM on a Tuesday with a hot dog. THEN! When he didn’t nod back or show any form of acknowledging my dog cheers in any way, I got offended. And you know what? I just….
Guys.
Jimmy stop.
I made up the hot dog cheers’ing thing.
I didn’t make up the lunch dogs infatuation, but my brain is becoming so warped, that midway through writing about my lunch pups (is that funnier than lunch ‘dog’? Yeah, it is. Stick with it!) I actually did catch eyes with the guy across the street who looks out his window and I thought “next time I have a lunch pup, I’m going to cheers him with it. That’ll brighten his day!” So I will do that next time and report back re: his reaction to the lunch pup cheers. (And you thought you had nothing to look forward to!)
Aside from lunch pups and asking the VP of Ops to waterboard me with IPAs, I figured that buying a house in the middle of a global pandemic/economic meltdown, while my job skates on ice thinner than that picture of you from high school, was a prudent financial decision. (Just googled the word ‘prudent’ to make sure it meant what I thought it meant, and IT WAS CLOSE ENOUGH!) The VP and I closed on our first house on Friday, while my heart attempted to close on my body simultaneously.
What should have been an exuberant, exciting moment for us, felt more like a red carpet event for the premiere of “Jimmy’s First Stroke in the Citywide Title Office.” When asked by those nosey paps who she was wearing, The VP of Ops smiled and said “the same leggings I had on while eating Munchos this morning!” Meanwhile, I carried her purse and used it to hide the grease stain on my 2007 Cincinnati Bearcats sweatpants. It was quite the affair, indeed. Fortunately, or unfortunately (who knows right now? Stay positive though because the super negative people are awful to be around…but it’s so easy to just…STOP!) I did not suffer my first stroke while signing the closing papers to our first house.
Instead, I kept my big leather winter gloves and big puffy winter coat on the entire time we were signing a BAJILLION pages while constantly reminding myself to NOT TOUCH MY FATTER-BY-THE-SECOND FACE. If you have never signed closing papers on a house before, here’s what it’s like: ten million pages are put in front of you and you have to go through them, one by one, slow enough that the guy thinks you’re actually reading them, but you’re really just looking for the lines with your name under them so you can sign there and feel a momentary sense of accomplishment. (I found my name! Mom! Dad! I found my name on the page!) On page nine thousand, four hundred and seventy six, you’ll look to your spouse with blurry eyes and say something like “I no read,” before drooling and then slamming your head on the table while scream-crying “I DON’T THINK I’M MATURE ENOUGH FOR THIS MAGNITUDE OF A PURCHASE!” (That did not go over well with the guy in the office but, thankfully, he yelled at me to get ahold of myself while staying 6 feet away.)
Then, once you’re done signing page four gajillion, you’ll sit alone in a lame office while hearing the office person dude mumble things like “are you sure?” into the phone on their desk. (Is who sure? Do I want them to be sure? I’m not sure! Should I tell him I’m not sure?! SIR! I’M ALSO NOT SURE!) Eventually, he will come back into the room, still wearing surgical gloves, remind you to take the pens with you, and congratulate you in a way that sounds more like “can I finally go home now and cry into my pillow about the future of our country?”
Closing on our first house in the middle of Shitstorm 3000 felt like trying to celebrate a birthday in New York on 9/11. “Uhhh…yay!” As hard as I was trying to stay positive and act excited, all I felt was this overwhelming squeeze of the unknown. (Squeeze? Strangle?) But while I drove back to our city apartment with The VP of Ops, I kept telling myself one thing over and over and over: “we’re all in this together.”
And it’s true. How many times has there been a situation that you’ve dealt with where LITERALLY EVERYONE YOU KNOW IN THE UNIVERSE is dealing with the same thing? As terrifying as this is, no one is exempt. And the ones that you’re thinking aren’t worrying about it because they seem the same as they’ve always been? They’re just better at acting than you are. I’ve never felt more connected to everyone than I do now.
I’ve also never enjoyed hot dogs more than I do now.
OUR WORLD:
We’re all living in an excruciatingly elongated moment right now that will change the world forever. The way we look at World War II documentaries and the Civil Rights movement and think “Jesus, I can’t believe that actually happened!” is what smelly fatsos will be thinking about the movies about Coronavirus that come out in 2056. And while I’m sure those movies will focus on the most terrifying aspects of what is going on right now, I’d like to note some of the other byproducts that will probably be overlooked by PBS’ 2056, Six-Part Docu-series “Covid 19”.
Hangovers were confused for coronavirus
I was going to write something about how internet is officially the best invention ever, but then I was like “but what about booze?” The person who invented or discovered booze had to have done so in the middle of some terrifying episode in human evolution.
I’m imagining it was some woman with a broken leg who just heard from her friend that dinosaurs exist. “What’s a dinosaur?” she asked, before hearing a T-Rex roar and squeezing a bunch of grapes harder than grapes had ever been squeezed before. Then, because Mrs. ‘BoutToBeEatenByMegaYoshi didn’t want to waste the only juice she’d be able to reach until her bum leg became unbummed, she started sucking the ground where the grape juice ran for days on end. By day 6, with her broken leg throbbing, she sucked the ground harder than ever before and…felt some relief. A bit of the spins and, finally….peace! Then she heard a rustling in the bushes and went back to freaking out that she was about to be dino feed.
Anyway, that’s basically how alcohol is working for me right now. As day turns to night, and stressors multiply to the point of swallowing me, I pour a beer. And then another beer. And then an old fashioned. And then a pilsner because now I’ve got to cool down. And then just a smidge of whiskey because I don’t need the sugar. And then I’m snoring on the couch in the middle of the sixth episode of “Mad Men” we’ve watched tonight.
Mornings then become a fun little game of “hangover or Corona.” The first few hours of every day are now set aside for chugging water and coffee and telling yourself not to google corona symptoms for the nine thousandth time this week. By the time 3PM rolls around and you’ve come out of the hangover enough to realize that maybe you don’t actually have this terrifying virus, well, there’s only one thing to do: Celebrate.
Home workouts that lasted more than 8 minutes were treated like Olympic training sessions
Not to brag (but maybe a little bit? Fine, yeah. Check out this shit!) but I ran a marathon not that long ago! I wasn’t a hardcore “look at me I go to the gym”-guy, but I did go to the gym and didn’t shy away from mentioning that if it came up naturally in a conversation. “Oh, your mother got a haircut? Weird you mention that because I had my personal best incline bench yesterday!”
However, since this whole “You should stay home and use this as the ultimate excuse to be a blob”-order has come down, working out has fallen to the back of my priority list. I’m sure I’m not alone in this either. Yes, it’s true that moving around and exercising makes your brain feel better, but when your job is hanging by a wet fingernail, you have asthma and YOU JUST BOUGHT A FUCKING HOUSE, getting a sweat in doesn’t exactly register as “something I should focus on getting done today!”
This means that completing a sponsored Instagram ad showing you how to do a 15-minute at-home workout without equipment, is the equivalent of completing a Michael Phelps training session. I came across one of these smiley Instagram trainers imploring me to “stay active indoors!” yesterday and thought “he’s smiling, so maybe I should listen to him.”
So I followed his “workout”. This was the kind of workout that I would’ve made fun of in my physical peak, but now I got two minutes in and thought “could The Rock do what I’m doing right now?” (Yes Jimmy, The Rock could do Jumping Jacks for 2 minutes and 14 seconds). When I finished the “workout” 11 minutes later, the thin layer of sweat on my forehead might as well have been an Olympic Gold Medal. I went up to the VP of Ops acting more out of breath than I really was and said stuff like, “just finished a little workout” hoping she would swoon and ask if it was okay to tell her friends about her husband’s physical accomplishments.
She didn’t do that.
Employees at restaurants are fucking brave
I think we’ve all maybe thought this for a while, but if this whole ordeal doesn’t drive home the fact that people working at our favorite “I’m getting something that makes me feel good”-institutions, are brave as hell, then get your dumbass brain examined. Seriously, if you’ve been through a drive-thru or ordered delivery over the past few weeks and enjoyed the dopamine rush that comes from eating your favorite foods, make sure you take a second to think of the people that went outside, in public, around others, to make that thing for you and get that thing to you.
Fucking restaurant people are awesome.
PODCAST:
The Bill Simmons Podcast with Pearl Jam from last Thursday.
MUSIC:
The new album from The Weeknd and all of these Instagram Live concerts that bands are doing. Here’s The Weeknd from SNL before the world blew up:
TV:
Watching “Mad Men” for the first time. If you’re looking for EVEN MORE inspiration to drink, start watching this show.
MOVIE:
The VP and I watched “Catch Me if You Can” yesterday. It’s worth it because it’s Leo and Tom Hanks, but was I blown away? No. I was not blown away.
K, bye.
Jimmy's Chair 