Phthursday Musings: Better Than Me

or, Funny Focus

When we were in Milwaukee last month, we found a place which I guess I’d call a hip food court. Maybe sort of halfway between a mall food court and a food truck lot. Donuts, burgers, pizza, a lot of different things, you could go sit wherever, and in the middle of it all there was shuffleboard and a couple of bags stations, and off on the side there were six TV screens and three of them were hooked up to Nintendo Switches and anyone could play.

And so we sat down at one point, and the Switch that we could play, the game that was up was something called Rocket League. In simplest terms, Rocket League is indoor soccer, with a gigantic ball, where the players are cars with turbo boosters.

At some point after we got home, we downloaded Rocket League. It’s one of those games which is free, but where if you’re so inclined, you can spend a lot of extra money for add-ons, and when you play, you can play random people in some random part of the world. And we played the game some, and then we didn’t, and then we did again, and didn’t, and then did…

And so usually my goofy child and I are playing two random people from who knows where, and we win sometimes and we lose sometimes, and…

He is clearly better at this game than I am.

And while, yes, he has played it slightly more, he is not better than me because he has played it more. He is better than me because we have reached the point where he is better than me at this.

Now. I am still probably better than him at playing FIFA. And I am better at Mario type games where it’s not just dexterity but also puzzle solving involved. But in a straightforward action game where the main thing you need to be able to do is basic car controls, he is better.

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I grew up playing video games. I had an early Pong console game. I had a VIC-20. I of course had a TI 99/4A and I got to be pretty good at all of those games - which admittedly were a lot less complex than games are today, what with having a joystick and one button and that was it versus today when you have to somehow keep ABXY straight and there are double controls and who knows what else.

My parents did not grow up playing video games. Pinball, maybe, but not video games. So it’s not like there was some inflection point where I was suddenly better than them.

And while I played sports, I very rarely ever played in any competitive sport against a parent, or an aunt or uncle, or anyone like that. And I had no older siblings. The only competition was my peers at school, and by and large, the guys who were best at sports in second grade continued to be best at sports through sixth grade. Point is, there was never someone bigger or older to benchmark myself against.

This weekend is the annual school district 5K, again in our neighborhood. He gets to run a 1 mile race again, and then a half hour later the 5K starts. But I’ve seen kids his age run in 5Ks I’ve been in, and I’ve seen kids not much older than him run well. Unless I become super intense about running - which, news flash, I run, but I’m definitely not super intense - I’d say it’s about 3 years until he could overtake my time, if he chooses to do so.

If he chooses to do so. That’s where it might get interesting. Because unless you just wait for all of the old man’s joints to jellify and stroll past his collapsed heap, then you’re going to have to actually make the effort, you’re going to have to actually focus, kid, you hear me?

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I was thinking about that focus thing tonight as his team played their first baseball game of the season. He’s 9 and he’s on a team of 9 and 10 year olds, some of whom play on the Nationals team, which is the travel team attached to the local Little League. And some of these kids are focused.

This past weekend his two soccer teams also had their first games. Along similar lines, there are 9 and 10 year olds out on the pitch who are focused. It’s honestly an amazing thing to behold. I’m not even talking about the momentary focus of a fast play where it seems like there’s a swarm of kids running all over the place, I mean that as soon as a situation presented itself, we had defenders springing into action to cut off advances at the goal.

If we’re going to talk about focus, though, who we really need to talk about is Hamlet.

So what we’ve done is we’ve taken our spare bedroom and turned the whole room, including the closet, into Hamlet’s playroom. He’ll get up at 10pm or whatever and if he’s lucky, some human being is awake to facilitate skittering and shuffling and general rodent mayhem.

There is something in the closet which compels him greatly. He literally tries to climb the walls. And then when he can’t, he starts chewing on the carpet remnant on the closet floor, or chewing on the plastic shelving unit. We totally do not understand what the point of all this is, but by gum, when this hamster is focused, he is focused.

And then, when he is not apparently focused, he is apparently just completely off in space:

I recently read an article in Popular Science about how scientists are considering that bears may be much more intelligent than previously thought. There’s a bit in there about how traditionally scientists have believed that social animals are more likely to be broadly intelligent than more solitary species.

And I couldn’t help but think that, as ridiculous as some of the behavior is, we have a hamster which is clearly an intelligent creature, capable of readily understand things like how to use multiple boxes as de facto stairs, things like that.

And then in turn, I think there’s a lot of insight to be gleaned from how animals behave into how humans behave. Those of you who are currently, or who have been, parents of, say, 9 year olds, will surely understand what I mean: how astonishing it is that these creatures have grown into such incredible beings with such capacity for complex insight and understanding of things, and who can also magically be completely goddamn unaware of a single thing happening in their immediate surroundings.

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You can decide how much all this relates to the above:

In the last couple of weeks I’ve had the good fortune to see one major ‘90s legacy band in Sunny Day Real Estate, and then the band who in my mind continues to be the finest representation of a certain slice of ‘90s alt-rock even though they weren’t there for it in Screaming Females.

Sunny Day Real Estate was really, really good, and I’m very glad to have been there. But it was the Screaming Females show which I think will linger because it was such an unusual experience.

To this day, even though I am 46 years old, I am pretty sure that I am still younger than most of the people in the room for most of the shows I see. I’ve been to 10 concerts in 2023 (holy cats) and I think I was in the younger half of the crowd for 7 of them. And, well, most of the music I like best is of a particular sonic slice - mostly white people and mostly dudes playing mostly loud guitar rock. Now, I’m not apologetic about this, because the music I like also happens to be freaking awesome. But I will acknowledge that most of what I go see doesn’t attract a super demographically diverse crowd.

The Screaming Females show, though, in large part because their opener Generación Suicida is a Mexican punk band from L.A., seemed to draw as diverse a crowd as I can remember seeing. Mexicans, lesbians, crust punks, maybe people who were all three… and it was really nice to be in a crowd like that. I look forward to being at more diverse shows.

I’ve seen Screaming Females four times now, and to me they could play pretty much any venue and it would work. If they were to play on the second floor of the punk coffee house in Willow Springs, it would work. If they were to play the main stage at Lollapalooza, it would work. They can pull this off because their frontwoman Marissa Paternoster is a force of nature as both a guitarist and a vocalist, and because drummer Jarrett Dougherty and bassist Mike Abbate combine with her to form the most in sync power trio you can imagine. I deeply respect their commitment to just show up and play wherever anyone will have them - they did a tour of Alaska earlier this year. In their own way I feel like they’re on a continuum from what Fugazi was. Even in an era where guitar rock is not especially in vogue, I feel like what they do could be absolutely huge, except that being absolutely huge isn’t what they seem to be in it for.

This is their most recent video, for “Mourning Dove”, from the new album Desire Pathway:

Generación Suicida meanwhile can play a fast, angry punk, but there’s also an unusual quality to it, a kind of desert surf sound. I’d never heard anything quite like it:

I’ve got another pizza writeup due, and a race coming up this weekend, so maybe I’ll get more content kicked out in the next couple weeks. But maybe I’ll just be at youth sports and rock concerts every night for the next month. We’ll see!