november 19, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Prologue: I thought about writing a review of Heretic, the new A24 movie with Hugh Grant playing an eloquent “um Ackshually” guy taking two Mormon missionaries captive, and tying it in with some larger comments on A24 movies in general, but instead the following 2,000 words will deal with a pointless diatribe about the Jake Paul/Tyson fight and my 26th birthday, which was Saturday.

Saturday, I turned 26 years old. To celebrate, I watched a 27-year-old beat up a 58-year-old live on Netflix. Well, at least, that was Friday night, after Maddy and I won a trivia night at a bowling alley. And well, I don’t know if he beat him up as much as he just chipped at him for points, but I digress.

Like I said, we won trivia. We subsequently used the $50 gift card to soften the blow of the bill we had run up. Booze, in acute and enthusiastic bursts, is an intellectual performance enhancer for me—or, at least, so I tell myself. Apparently, the evidence (that we won), however limited and anecdotal (Maddy carried the team), supports this. And this bowling alley, which, for reasons related to the mystique and tone of this as-yet haphazard blog, as well as selfish gatekeeping, will remain nameless, offers “tall” pours of local IPAs and various other high-alcohol-at-low-price-point offerings that result in its bar being perhaps the soundest economic option in the area—that is, if you’re trying to get sloshed. Not that I was. But if I was, I could, because this weekend marked 26 years since my birth, and nothing celebrates the looming expiration of my health insurance like reckless consumption of what is, essentially, poison. 

The tone of the night was celebratory. 

I have not historically celebrated my birthday with much enthusiasm, for various reasons related to my psyche that are likely not all that interesting. But this year, my loved ones convened to pleasantly impose celebratory plans upon me in such a way that I was able to comfortably accept celebration of myself. 

Forgive me—I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace recently and the long-sentences-full-of-subordinate-clauses-and-a-pained-self-consciousness-whose-maximalist-radioactive-profileration-yields-something-like-a-dweebish-sense-of-comic-recompense schtick is proving highly infectious, just like it did eight years ago when I started trying, in a lazy and unprolific if also earnest way, to write fiction. I’ll drop it (the schtick).

Buzzed, with a stoked intellectual ego, I returned with Maddy to watch the Jake Paul/Tyson fight. The fact that I can only refer to one of these two via mononym is telling: one looms over the history of American athletics, and the other looms over American culture in such a way not unlike a Staph infection or some other similar skin malady. It is also telling that, though my brain knew a 58-year-old had a next-to-nothing shot at winning the thing, my heart, foolish as it is idealistic, hoped for a Tyson knock out. It turns out, having an extremely punchable face and then challenging guys who used to be very good at punching faces is a very profitable business model, at least for Jake Paul. And who among us hasn’t wanted to mash the Paul brothers and/or other YouTubers of similar ilk in the face a time or two before? It makes sense why people tune in, at least if you consider the collective hope that a guy that annoying consents to potentially getting hit really hard in the face and then actually does get hit.

It was more than hope. It felt like fate. A Tyson KO on the eve of my birthday felt like a cosmic correction in a country where it feels like, lately, all the bad guys keep winning. 

Luckily for all of us watching, there were entertaining fights on the card aside from the main event, which was really a predictable snooze fest. At least, it was predictable in hindsight. I think a lot of us were holding out hope that Iron Mike could get it done, and when he couldn’t, didn’t feel disappointed, but simply saddened at the inevitable march of time and its sheer omnipotence. Icons, culturally boundless as they are, still live according to physical laws. 

I’m curious what it says about a culture that produces such a spectacle, though, which may be making some of you who know me roll your eyes because, of course I am, but seriously: what kind of culture thinks a grandpa boxing a twerp of a YouTuber turned amateur boxer is a good idea, even if that grandpa was once a boxing legend? 

There are two primary aspects to the question, for me, related to three types of viewers. There are the viewers who watch it and see no problem with it and enjoy it unquestioningly, viewers who watch it due to what essentially boils down to social FOMO (which seems to govern almost everything related to Gen Z socialization, which relies so heavily on referentiality and Never Missing the Viral Moment), either so they can talk about it with friends the next day or just so they can be with friends to watch it, and viewers who see it as the farcical spectacle it likely is and, for a combination of reasons, whether related to FOMO or a sense of obligation to cultural awareness or simple train-wreck-can’t-look-away-irresistibility watch it and simultaneously wring their hands with a sense of superiority and faux moral outrage over what they’re watching. But all three are watching, and all three are helping fill the wallets of the people that made it happen. You can decide which of the three camps in which I sleep.

It’s unlikely that this type of person is even bothering to read this post at this point, but I’m anticipating someone reading this and thinking “ok but also it’s just fun to watch, so what’s the problem?” Which, you know what, maybe you’re right. And you know what, maybe I didn’t drop that DFW schtick I alluded to several hundred words ago. But also, we’re talking about a boxer who already gave US culture the best years of his life, prizefighting being one of those industries that is notoriously cutthroat and dispensable with its talent and hard on the body at best or potentially life-threatening at worst, notwithstanding our growing awareness of the risk and debilitating nature of CTE and other maladies associated with repetitive trauma to the head. Which, if you’re still reading this, you may feel as though I am subjecting you to with these sentences (repetitive trauma to the head, that is). 

The argument just mentioned boils down to “it’s not that serious.” But lately, it seems evident that everything is that serious, and that maybe many of our messes have gotten worse because of the impulse that says “it’s not that serious.”

My point is, as short as I can make it, that I think the whole thing was kind of stupid and physically risky for Mike Tyson, but I couldn’t help but watch it anyway, and though I had a good time, I may have subjected my poor girlfriend to a disorganized IPA-and-gin-fueled tirade on this very subject. Some of you may also be screaming at your screen in a voice I will, mercifully, never hear (as long as you don’t text me or threaten my profoundly fragile ego in any way), that Mike Tyson was also paid something like twenty million dollars for it and it’s not like we held him hostage and forced him into the ring against his will. But at a certain point, I think it’s irresponsible of the larger “us” to even posit it as an option to a guy like Mike Tyson who, while I don’t know this for sure, I would feel comfortable assuming has an ego and mindset that would make it impossible for him to turn down such an opportunity even though it’s dangerous and kind of silly.

We should just leave the guy alone, is what I’m saying. Or, can’t we watch a documentary about what he’s already done in the world of boxing and give him some money that way? At what point is it cruel to make somebody like that put their body on the line for it?

Whatever, maybe this is starting to come off as morally prudish, and maybe you’re curious about how the rest of my birthday weekend went. It was great. Which is part of the reason I feel comfortable and justified spending, as of now, 1200 words on something that will get swept up in the ceaseless torrent of the American culture of the spectacle we find ourselves in, and will therefore be irrelevant in like five minutes, and will likely inspire the kinds of conversations in two years where we’ll turn to one another and go, “hey, remember when Jake Paul fought Mike Tyson?” and the other will go, “oh yeah,” having forgotten and now needing to search the dusty annals of memory to think about it again because nothing now ever seems to matter or even last longer than five minutes. And once the memory recrystallizes maybe we’ll say, “I really wished Mike Tyson knocked that motherfucker out.” 

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, basically.

I’m aware there are way more important things going on, is also what I’m saying. 

Like Saturday night, watching Jon Jones TKO a 41-year-old-previously-retired-Stipe-Miocic instead of fighting the young and hungry Tom Aspinall because he, very logically, wants to preserve his legacy as perhaps the greatest mixed martial artist to fight in, at the very least, the modern era, and maybe also ever. It was a weekend full of watching old men get beaten up, which seems to relate to turning 26 and being on the cusp of losing my health insurance somehow, if not at once in an obvious way. Which also seems to relate to the fact that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and RFK Jr were ringside at the UFC fights Saturday night, and Jon Jones did the dual-wielding ski pole Trump dance after he won, which made my stomach turn at the fact that I had just given the UFC $79.99 to watch the fucking thing. 

The bad guys just keep winning, at least in the realm of the spectacle. 

But maybe when the good guys win, it’s when there aren’t that many people watching, like the usually unknown people who do the nuts and bolts work that keeps society going while I use my lunch break to write 2,000 word essays about, essentially, nothing—the firefighters, the pavers, the counselors, the doctors, the garbagefolks, the teachers—and everyone else doing their best to find their place to contribute and to not be an asshole to each other. 

I just gotta get better at focusing on things like that, I guess.

In the meantime, I will entertain myself and no one else by writing long, breathless sentences about things like boxing and the UFC– if nothing else, as a late birthday present to myself.