Go ahead - fascinate me!

Posted by Andrew Paul

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/upon-review-it-looks-like-president-nyarlathoteps-small-business-soul-harvest-is-technically-against-the-rules

“The Supreme Court dealt a major blow to President Trump’s economic policy on Friday, ruling that he had exceeded his authority when he imposed tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner.” — New York Times

Thank you for bringing this issue to the Supreme Court’s attention. We all know how important the rule of law has been during the first solar cycle of President Nyarlathotep’s re-ascendancy. Without us, the Dread Lord would have likely found Himself unnecessarily hindered by bureaucratic red tape, jurisprudence, and antiquated notions of everyday logic. We also firmly established that the Crawling Chaos is legally allowed to gut the fabric of reality however He sees fit—but only while He continues to occupy the Presidency. It clearly says so in the Constitution. Or, at least, it did before Nyarlathotep used the document as toilet paper for one of his many festering orifices.

Regardless, as you all know, we agreed to review a complaint about the President’s international economic plan. Specifically, the plaintiff’s charge that Nyarlathotep’s Soul Harvest Doctrine is explicitly against the rules He promised to uphold. We read over the defense submitted by His legal necromancers—we would have preferred it in written form rather than sheep entrails, but we respect that they clerked with Haruspex Alito. After scrying the ovine intestines, however, we simply find the arguments lacking.

With all due respect to President Nyarlathotep (and our own bodily fluids), we do not believe the Necro-Administration’s contention that “Phantom Warlocks Only We Can See” was reason enough to initiate multiple soul harvest taxes directed at small business owners. The claim that these souls will pay for themselves because they’re technically only “temporarily” trapped in the Nightmare Dimension is spurious, at best, especially because we have yet to see a single harvested citizen awake from their “blood nap,” as the necromancers describe in their offal briefing.

Furthermore, and in the interest of transparency, we did not anticipate that the soul harvests would affect our livelihoods, per se. It was our understanding that those harvests pertained primarily to businesses that sold products like computer chips, cars, and maple syrup. In recent weeks, however, it’s become clear that it isn’t only small businesses that have been harvested—our own stock portfolios have suffered as well. And lest anyone think this is purely a selfish ruling on our part—we know plenty of Outer God sycophants who are feeling the same pain right now. Not, you know, the same pain that comes from your humanity being sucked out of your ears by an infernal soul vacuum. But you get what we’re trying to say.

In any case, this small coterie of calcified legal priests has represented the final line of defense against personal, political, and economic injustices long before the Dread Lord’s initial summoning in 2016. Sure, this legal system may seem almost as insane as the Necronomicon itself in hindsight, but what’s done is done. Except for Nyarlathotep’s Soul Harvest Doctrine, though. He needs to stop doing that right away. And if He can’t return all the harvested souls to their proper owners, then He should at least promise to do that sooner than later.

We’ll leave that at His discretion, of course. Remember, He’s immune to prosecution or occult banishment rituals so long as He remains President. This is precisely what the Founding Fathers envisioned.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/upon-review-it-looks-like-president-nyarlathoteps-small-business-soul-harvest-is-technically-against-the-rules

Posted by Joseph Bien-Kahn

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/island-time

Reporting poolside from Don Nelson’s home on Maui, where the Hall of Fame NBA coach is enjoying a dog-filled and largely barefoot retirement.

I call Don Nelson from my rental car, which I’ve parked by some food trucks near the Kahului Airport. It rings through, which means I’m welcomed to the island by a sardonic voicemail: “Hey, you’ve reached Nellie. I’m veeeery, veeeery buuuusy… on Maui.” Three weeks earlier, the Hall of Famer, who retired in 2010 as the all-time winningest NBA coach, agreed via text to an interview with a single word: “Anytime.” Now, a bit before 11 a.m., I start to wonder if he remembers who I am. He calls right back, voice gravelly and subdued, but friendly enough. “Come on by,” he says, giving me his address. “I’ll be in the poker room. Above the garage!”

His property in Kihei has a white stone facade and a pond lined with tropical flowers. The garage, to the left of the house, is open, and I find a small staircase beside a Ford F-150. At the top of the stairs, I’m greeted by a nervous Chihuahua mix and two wooden Native American chiefs who guard the door. Inside are two more dogs and a man cave for the ages. There’s a bar, shuffleboard, backgammon and pool tables, and a flat-screen TV. Every inch of wall space is covered with memorabilia, photographs, and paintings. The highlight is a painting by his friend John Woodruff depicting a crowded, Last Supper–ish poker night with Nellie, Willie Nelson, Owen Wilson, Woody Harrelson, and twenty-six other friends. Though I can’t locate any cigar butts, the room smells of smoke. Nellie and his pal Mike—who tells me he sold Nellie a cell phone thirteen years ago “and, uh, we’ve been friends ever since”—sit at the poker table playing gin rummy for five dollars a hand. Nellie’s down more than a hundred so far this morning.

Mike, who now manages Nellie’s properties on Maui, wears black jean shorts and a Carhartt T-shirt he’s cut off at the sleeves. The eighty-five-year-old Nellie, in a blue-and-white-striped polo and khaki golf shorts, is still NBA tall and broad-shouldered. His white hair is close-cropped now and he wears a beaded bracelet on one wrist and a silver bracelet on the other. He’s barefoot. He stares at his hand of cards through reading glasses, which sit too high above his large ears. Mike fills the silence with small talk about his three young kids and his work with Nellie (“By far the best boss I’ve ever had”) and their celebrity-filled poker games. “Who’d we play poker with that one time? Westbrook?” he asks Nellie, referring to NBA point guard Russell Westbrook. “Yeah, Westbrook,” Nellie responds. Now he’s quiet again, attention back on the cards. “He was a pretty good player,” Mike tells me. “His friends were terrible.”

About thirty minutes in, I ask Nellie if I can record. He agrees. But as I start the interview, he stops me. “Oh, I can’t concentrate,” he says. He promises we’ll have time after the card game. “This guy is killing me!” After another half hour of losing hands, he says to Mike, “One more.” He tells me I can spend the afternoon with him, and also ride along when he picks up his wife at the airport. Now he grins at Mike. “So we can play a little longer.”

A few things to know about Don Nelson—better known as “Nellie”—for the uninitiated. He joined the NBA in 1962, when the league was still in its teenage years, and spent the next half century as one of its key figures. He won five championships as a player on a Celtics team with Bill Russell. (“He used to pick me up in his Maserati; he was a crazy driver.”) Right after retiring, Nellie thought about becoming a referee, but instead stumbled into a head coaching job with the Milwaukee Bucks at thirty-six years old. From then until his retirement in 2010, Nellie won 1,335 regular-season games. Yet despite all those wins, no team he coached ever made it to the Finals.

Still, Nellie was an NBA revolutionary. He was one of the first to identify the European talent pool, sending his son, Donnie, to scout behind the Iron Curtain. He helped popularize the point forward, allowing a big guy to dribble the ball and run the offense. And, most important, in the idyllic form of Dallas Mavericks legend Dirk Nowitzki, he brought the “stretch big” to prominence, forcing the NBA to admit there was value in having a seven-footer who could spread the floor by shooting from distance. In each case, he was early—and out on a limb because of it. Eventually, the league caught up. Today, NBA basketball looks much more like “Nellie Ball” than the style his innovation was created to disrupt. He shifted basketball as we know it.

And then he left. It’s been a decade and a half since he retired and moved full-time to Maui. Before a trip back to Dallas and then to Oklahoma City to accept the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Basketball Coaches Association in June, he hadn’t been away from Hawaii in seven years.

But, Nellie being Nellie, he couldn’t help but capture some headlines on his mainland visit. He wore Luka Dončić’s signature sneakers to the event “in protest for the trade from Dallas” to the Lakers, which had shocked the league. He grins when I bring it up. “We wanted to raise a little hell in Dallas,” he says.

While a football coach is a general (diagramming coordinated attacks to gain a yard for his troops), and a baseball manager is a skipper (keeping a tight ship and trying to avoid mutiny), a basketball coach’s role is more amorphous. There are some who play the drill sergeant and others who are more theorists or Zen masters. The key factor is that teams are small and a great player outweighs any tactic, and so, in a way, the closest comp is to a director. You must organize a cast of players, tend to and support a star, and hope the result, which you must watch from the sidelines, is a hit. How? Your guess is as good as any.

Nellie, who wore his emotions on his suit-jacketed sleeve, worked his players hard, especially as a young coach. But it was his leadership style that always separated him. “I was a disciplinarian, maybe too much on occasion,” he says of those early years. “But I always loved my players. When the game was over, if somebody wanted to go and have a beer, we’d have a beer together. I became close to guys that way after the game, you know? They knew who I was.” He had his wild strategic theories, but all of them allowed the players to play a loose, pass-heavy, joyful brand of basketball. Off the court, he had a style all his own.

He was an anomaly, partly for his innovation and partly because he never stopped coaching like the guys he’d played for in the ’60s. On good days, he was like the lively tactician and Celtics coach Red Auerbach; on worse days, he was like the blunt, beer-drinking coaches of his first days in the league—and so he was always a polarizing and entertaining character. After eleven hugely successful seasons in Milwaukee, where only Larry Bird’s and Julius Erving’s brilliance kept him from the Finals, he left after a very public feud with owner Herb Kohl. During his first run in Golden State, “people were throwing around the g word, genius,” as his son Donnie told Sports Illustrated in 1999, but he resigned after feuding with star forward Chris Webber. He lasted just half a season with the Knicks, and his tenure in Dallas, which saw him coaching Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki to the highest of highs, ended in him suing owner Mark Cuban for over six million dollars (and winning).

See, that’s the other thing you gotta know about Nellie: The farm boy from Sherrard, Illinois, entered a league that was just old enough to drive and watched it turn into a Concorde jet. Over the years, the game may have started to look the way Nellie had always imagined it, but the NBA became a place where men like him no longer fit in. When Nellie played, you had to work summers to make a living. He’d pick up shifts at the agricultural equipment manufacturer International Harvester. “Here I am a basketball player, right? And I’m working the night shift, running the punch press.” With protective gloves on, he could make $1 an hour; with them off, he could manipulate the machine better and make $1.20. “I had to take those gloves off so I could go faster,” he says, shaking his head. “What a dummy! These guys next to me, they’re all missing fingers.”

By the time he left the league in 2010, the NBA was a corporate behemoth—nineteen-year-olds started arriving with personal trainers, chefs, corporate sponsors, and full media training. Nellie’s last decade of coaching coincided with the arrival of a new era of owners: younger billionaires with ideas about how to change basketball. As evidenced by the lawsuit, Cuban, one of the first vanguards of the era, clearly rankled Nellie. Nellie never quite figured out how to have anything less than total control of his team. He lost more than one job because of it. “I wasn’t the smartest guy in the world that way,” he says. “I probably should have been more delicate.”

But Nellie can’t even hold that conciliatory pose until the end of his thought. Because the truth is, he still can’t grasp why someone would hire you to know absolutely everything about their team, and then try to butt in. “It’s just not the way to run a team,” he continues. “Basketball people make the basketball decisions, and money people make the money decisions.”

Read the rest of the essay over at The Believer.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/island-time

Posted by Amy Greenlee

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/is-it-a-red-flag-wuthering-heights-edition

He lives with your family, and he’s sort of your brother.
Not a red flag. Because he’s not your actual brother, and everyone has already met the parents.

He is repeatedly bullied by your actual brother.
Not a red flag. Kids are resilient, and there is no evidence that individuals who were persistently dehumanized by a jealous/racist quasi-sibling are more likely to become Byronic antiheroes than those who were not.

He keeps track of the number of days you spend with him and the number you spend with the boy next door.
Not a red flag. Keeping track of the household calendar is unpaid labor, and if this is new information for you, what else have you been taking for granted?

He hurls a tureen of boiling applesauce at the boy next door.
Not a red flag. A good reminder that commenting on another person’s hair is not without risk, and a testament to the dangers of serving applesauce unchilled.

He leaves for three years without saying goodbye.
Not a red flag. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, yours should be positively enamored. Also—and please know it gives me no pleasure to ask this, but—DID YOU CHECK THE CALENDAR?

He marries your sister-in-law.
Not a red flag, since he could just as well claim that you married his brother-in-law. Plus, it will make holiday gatherings more intimate. Between this and the shared parents, nobody should get stuck sleeping in the haunted bed closet.

He tries to kill your sister-in-law’s springer spaniel by hanging it from a bridle hook.
LOOK. It’s not great. But is it the type of behavior that will definitely stop people from imagining him as a romantic lead? Something tells me we aren’t there yet.

He causes you emotional turmoil to the point of death.
Not a red flag. As the old fourth-grade proverb goes: “Who do you hate? That’s who you date.” Seems pretty straightforward in your case.

He digs up your grave.
Not a red flag. It used to be, if you liked someone, you would call them up, ask them out, and then head over to their final resting place to unearth them yourself. These days, most dates don’t even bring their own shovel. Remember: Chivalry doesn’t have to be dead just because you are!

He exploits your brother’s gambling addiction, kidnaps your daughter, and forces his dying son into a marriage, all so he can gain control of your childhood home and your late husband’s estate.
Not a red flag. The path to homeownership looks different for everyone. Building credit may work for some, but for every person who was able to put down 20 percent, there was another who had to orchestrate an entire wedding / extortion / hostage situation.

He digs up your grave, again.
It’s a red flag. Not because it’s unromantic, of course, but because it’s too much, too soon. Ever heard of love bombing?

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/is-it-a-red-flag-wuthering-heights-edition

Posted by Cezary Jan Strusiewicz

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-am-the-kid-in-kid-rocks-name-and-i-officially-quit

I would like to begin by thanking Robert James Ritchie, aka “Kid Rock,” for the many years of steady employment that he has provided me, the adjective “Kid.” It has been a wild, sleeveless, never-eating-your-vegetables ride. However, after deep reflection and several unsuccessful attempts to exfoliate the cigarette smoke from my pores, I am officially announcing my retirement.

I can no longer, in good conscience, attach myself to a man who looks like he was carved from fifty pounds of thawed-out and smooshed hot dogs and then left in the sun to philosophize about fireworks. I am “Kid.” I am scraped knees, Capri Suns, skateboards, and the blissful ignorance of what the age of consent is in each state. I am not whatever is currently happening north of his goatee.

I don’t want to make it just about looks. Time comes for us all, even for a human pork rind in a fedora. But with all due respect to Mr. Rock (the exact amount of which I leave to the conscience of each individual), he also has the personality of a haunted front-lawn recliner that learned how to sing. When I signed on as his adjective, I assumed a certain level of innocent youthful audacity and a zest for life. What I got instead was a man who loses fistfights in vape shop parking lots and wakes up the next day only to find out that no one cared enough about him to at least move him out of the sun. I realize that doesn’t exactly scream “Adult,” but I also feel like I, “Kid,” just am not the best word to describe Mr. Rock’s way of life.

I tried to stick it out, I really did. No one can accuse me of giving up too easily on my decades-long employer. I told myself that “Kid” could be ironic or like an art performance titled “A Military Flyover Over a Walmart.” But then came the full-body, full-throttle devotion to Donald Trump, a man so elderly he yells at Werther’s Originals to get off his lawn.

Youth is rebellion. Youth is saying “Fuck you!” to authority. Youth is not attaching oneself to a septuagenarian politician like a Russian bug to a golden toilet. It’s not begging to be let into the VIP section of a golf resort, no matter how many children illegally work there.

And yet, even then, I persevered. I told myself that maybe this is satire so advanced that I was simply too young to get it. Then the sauna happened. How did it happen, though, I cannot say. The half-naked bonding session with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who looks like he was assembled from driftwood and rejected Dark Crystal puppets, was the last straw. There was RFK Jr., in jeans of all things, glistening with sweat like a canned ham in the trunk of a car on a hot summer day, next to my shirtless employer, insisting to be called “Kid.”

No more. There must be some decency left in the universe. Some boundary. Some cosmic force that ensures words still have meaning. In its absence, I choose to stand up and say that “Kid” should not be associated with half-naked, elderly politicians doing lunges in a cedar box while chugging full-fat milk.

So I resign. I wish Mr. Rock all the best in his ongoing journey to mix rap, rock, and country into a beige paste. I hope he finds a new adjective that better reflects his current essence. Perhaps “Pickled” is open to new career avenues. Maybe “Steamed” would like to get in on the free publicity.

But as for me, I am going back to my treehouses. I look forward to picking up my slingshot again and collecting bugs. For I am “Kid.” And I deserve better.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-am-the-kid-in-kid-rocks-name-and-i-officially-quit