In Da Club (Sam's Club)

I've long been an ardent defender of the Sam's Club. The monument to American commercialism is indelibly linked in my mind to many positive memories.

Whenever my mom would take Ryan and I there as children, we would get a pizza. Not the Sam's Cafe pizza, but rather one of the club's frozen pizzas, which my mom would have the Sam's Cafe cook while we shopped - it's kind of like when you catch a fresh Marlin off the coast of Belize and take it to the resort chef to prepare. I'm fairly certain that these frozen pizzas were identical to whatever they were slinging behind the counter, but this is how things were always done.

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When I was little, I used to love dinking around in the electronics section of the Sam's. Seeing as it was the electronics section of a bulk household products store in the mid-90s, I mostly dinked around on clunky Dell and Gateway (remember Gateway? Only 90s kids will get this. Man Reddit is a cool and vibrant community) desktops. You could usually play minesweeper or look up the cost of mulch or something.

At some point (I'm assuming after the internet became widespread but before the proliferation of firewalls to keep perverts at bay) they started to lock the PCs, and you could only dink on them if you asked a Sam's Club employee to unlock it for you.

This didn't sit well with a young me, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Half the work was done for me. The username was already inputted into the login screen - something like "BulkDrone2921." I just had to put my child brain to work to figure out the password.

I furtively began typing: s-a-m...

The password was "samsclub." An eight-year-old child cracked the code on his first try - their Windows Calculator program was all mine.

I assume this is still the case and if you want to gain access to Sam Walton's millions, you need only go to some Arkansas credit union and drop that password.

Pictured: Me at 10

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Sam's Club was also weirdly formative in my knowledge of human sexuality. (As I'm sure it was for most of you.)

My mom, aunt, cousins, Ryan and I were traveling somewhere between Ft. Worth and Houston and stopped at a Sam's for some reason. Why my mom and sister would take a van full of kids to Sam's on a road trip, I can't fathom.

When we got out of the car, my aunt slipped something into my cousin's back pocket to embarrass him.

(Side note: My aunt used to make a cottage industry of embarrassing my cousin. It's one of those things that was hilarious at the time but now seems odd.)

The object was wrapped in paper with pastel packaging. I had no idea what it was, but my 15-year-old cousin wanted to no part of it - much to my aunt's amusement.

I asked repeatedly for the object to be identified, but was only told, "You'll know when you're older."

My aunt was right, I'm 24 now and I know what it is. It was a feminine hygiene product. Pretty weird.

(I wonder if anyone else on that trip remembers this occurrence? Almost certainly not, right? It's the kind of thing you'd accused someone of making up, but how on Earth could I have that memory if it didn't happen? Aliens?)

That same car trip I revealed to my assembled family that I knew what "gay" was. I can't remember the context exactly, but I think my mom and aunt were cagily talking about a gay person and I, in my juvenile wisdom, attempted to jump into a conversation above my station by blurting out that I thought a friend of mine was gay. (I was around the third grade, so said friend could very well have been Macklemore.) I really had no justification for saying this, it was just something I could say to sound more sophisticated I suppose?

My mom and aunt both whipped their heads around to the backseat and asked, "What do you think that means?"

I promptly replied, "It's a boy who wants to marry other boys."

Their eyes narrowed, "Where did you learn that?" they asked.

My poor cousin, probably still smarting from the sanitary napkin incident, was assuredly sweating in the seat beside me.

"He told me," I said, playing the part of the stool pigeon.

My aunt spent a few minutes berating him before she and my mom both turned to assure me that "gay" meant happy - the well intentioned parental reprimand that leads to children tossing out "gay" as an epithet and then deflecting any criticism by claiming they meant "happy."

Also, if you're trying to convince a child that a word doesn't mean what they think it means, it's probably best not to hem and haw like Jeff Goldblum when you're correcting them.

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My only negative memory of Sam's Club comes from my adult life. At this point I was established as a member in good standing with my very own Club Card, so it was with confidence that I strode to the entrance of the club in Lubbock.

Now, in every Sam's that I've been to outside of Lubbock, one enters freely and shops, only utilizing the club card upon checkout.

Not so in the heavily guarded paradise that apparently is the Lubbock Sam's.

As soon as I stepped foot in the building, a wizened but terrifyingly spry old man rushed at me.

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(This was the second time in my life that I was pursued by an octogenarian. The first was when I tried to sneak into a screening of Borat the day before my 17th birthday. They sold me a ticket, but the Methusalean guard would not grant me passage to the theater. With the cunning only a 16-year and 364-day old can muster, I promptly returned the ticket and purchased one for another movie. I entered the theater unmolested and waited ten minutes or so before trying to join my friends in the Borat screening.

Little did I know, the guard had been eyeballing me and immediately leapt to stop me. Six steps in, he busted comically and yelled for his teenage stooge to stop me while he recovered. Not being the type to flee from any authority figure, be they ancient annoyance or clearly bored sophomore, I remained in place. The old man rested on a chair and summoned the manager to come corral me. She asked to see my ticket and I produced one for a movie that wasn't Borat [The Guardian, possibly]. In the process of pulling the ticket out, my pocket bible was jarred loose and fell on the ground.

As I gathered my scripture, she told me I had to leave, so I texted my friends about the situation. My buddy, Nick, came barreling out the theater to see what the issue was. When I related the story to him, he was incensed, "THAT'S NOT RIGHT!!! You didn't go in the theater, they can't kick you out!!!"

I had to admit, Nick had a point. That old man had miscalculated, he didn't know the kind of man he was dealing with (Nick, not me, he had accurately judged my level of spine and found it wanting).

Emboldened by Nick's righteous anger, I approached Teen Stooge #2 at the box office and demanded a refund for the ticket. The manager (later named "Dragon Lady") burst from her lair in the back of the box office and snatched the ticket from the teen's hand.

"You can't get a refund on this, you snuck into a different film," she said, sneering.

"No he didn't!" Nick interjected.  "He never actually went into the theater. How do you know he wasn't just bringing me something?"

The Dragon Lady reeled at Nick's logic assault. She turned to me, nostrils flaring with dormant brimstone.

"Were you trying to sneak in?" she asked.

All hopped up on Nick's vigor, I evaded.

"I didn't sneak in, if that's what you're asking. He ran at me while I was just in the hallway," I replied.

"Give him a refund!" Nick demanded. "And give me one too."

Dragon Lady fumed. She wouldn't capitulate this easily.

"No. No refund."

I had expected as much and started to turn back to the car.

"I'll give you a gift card, and that's it."

We won! We live in a universe where a Cinemark is apparently bound by technicalities pointed out by 17-year-olds.

As the Dragon Lady gave us our cards, she made me promise never to try to sneak into an R rated film again.

At this point I was satisfied and refrained from pointing out that in order to sneak into an R rated movie, I would have to try at that same theater at some point within the next four hours.

In the time immediately after this escapade, I felt somewhat bad. I did technically try to break the rules, but then again, they did sell me a ticket in the first place, so who's to blame really? As I've aged it just seems sillier and sillier. I do feel bad about the old man busting, but he didn't need to come at me like I was Charlie rushing his buddies. He'd have been just as effective stopping me with a yell. Where was I going to go? The Sunday matinee screening of Borat with literally three people in it?

No. Now I look back on that incident with a sense of righteousness. If they are going to deny me entrance to the film on the cusp of 17, then I was right to demand my money back for never straying beyond the cusp of the theater. An eye for an eye, a nitpick for a nitpick. Also, Nick will be a father soon. I hope one day his child gets to see him shining as brightly as I saw him shine that day. The babe will respect him forever.)

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The codger caught me and demanded to see my Sam's Card. I dug around in my wallet and realized that I didn't have it on me. He coldly pointed me to the member station. As I headed that direction, he turned to his buddy manning the exit, another codger, and cracked a big smile. He was elated to have gotten one over on this bearded ne'er do well - no doubt attempting to sneak into the Sam's and get a great rate on some Maui Jim's or a seven gallon box of goldfish.

I had them print me a new card and showed it to my nemesis. Then I went and bought tires for my girlfriend with her credit card. TURNS OUT IT WAS AN INSIDE JOB!!! He was right to suspect me all along.

That night, I went to my friend, Jordan's, house for dinner with his family. I was still reeling from the assault on my good conscience by the old man from earlier and, as I prepared to launch into the story, who should appear, but THE SAME OLD MAN! He is my friend's grandpa or step-grandpa or something!

In a further twist, Jordan worked at the movie theater at the same time as the guy from earlier! He knew him too!

Time is a flat circle.

(Jordan's grandpa didn't recognize me.)

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All that to say that I love Sam's. I like samples, I like bargains and I especially love the Sam's Cafe. I'm a bit of trend-setter there. One of the best kept secrets in the culinary world is the Sam's Cafe hot dog combo. For $1.50 you get a Nathan's dog and a Coke. For $2 more, you get a jumbo slice of pizza. Order them both and you get what I like to call the Big Dawg Double Dip.

I did this once and all three men behind me in line got the same thing. I am an inspiration.

So it was that I turned to Sam's last week when I needed new tires.

As great as Sam's is, buying big ticket items is a hassle. For reasons unknown to me, they don't accept   Visa credit (though they do at the gas pump). This means that you have to get whatever you're buying priced and then run to a Walmart and buy a gift card of that value with your credit card.

Since I was buying tires, I needed to obtain a cool $800, which I did.

I ordered my tires, and, as they were installing them, I enjoyed my Big Dawg Double Dip and contemplated my gift card. Just how much could $800 get you at Sam's?

Well readers, we're about to find out!

You could buy 228.6 Big Dawg Double Dips. This is, conservatively, 204,597 calories, or 58.45 lbs of fat. Guys, don't eat 228.6 Big Dawg Double Dips.

You could buy 80 containers of Axe body wash (endorsed by VCU coach Shaka Smart).

You could also get 80 pocket hoses, or mix and match to make an outdoor shower.

You could buy any number of terrible books. Who buys books at Sam's? That's like buying lumber at the barber. 

At this point in my investigation, I realized that most of the stuff Sam's sells is pretty cool and available for a reasonable price and I was wondering if this bit would pay off. I thought I may have to pad it with unrelated stories to make it interesting (you were right, past me).

Then I found this.

That's right you guys - a three liter plastic bag of pre-mixed Chili's On the Rocks Margaritas. 

For only $11.28 (which I have paid for a pint of rarer beer), you can purchase enough booze to kill two people. This is the kind of dangerously stupid excess I had been hunting for the past hour. It's even Chili's branded! The only thing that would make it better is if Guy Fieri's mug was on it giving me big thumbs up for the purchase he knew I would be biologically incapable of not making. 

Instead of getting new tires, I got 71 bags of Chili's marg. I hope my parents forgive me. 

I Saw a Movie (It was Grand Budapest Hotel)

My friend, Daniel, and I went to an advance screening (if you don't live within the vicinity of the four theaters that it opened at last week) of The Grand Budapest Hotel last night. I now have unique foreknowledge and therefore will distribute it to all of you in order to grow my #brand.

As many reviewers have already noted, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the most mannered Wes Anderson movie to date. Being both a longtime footsoldier in Anderson's toy army and bound by pride of old alma mater I was naturally delighted by this. I know that Anderson's meticulous staging can grate on people, but I've never found it anything but charming.

The fantastical set decoration also makes sense within the narrative, as the bulk of it takes place as a story within a story within a story - each level with progressively less real-world verisimilitude. The movie is a meditation on old-world romantic elegance, and the way it was irrevocably extinguished by the rise of fascism. This progression from resplendent to ordinary to sad is ably communicated by the presence or absence of trademark Anderson whimsy on screen.

The story centers around M. Gustave, the dandyish and efficient concierge at the opulent Grand Budapest Hotel, and his lobby boy, Zero, as they try to run the hotel and simultaneously elude a pack of nefarious heirs, headed by Dimitri (who tips his villainous hand immediately with his facial hair choices).

It's easily the most plot heavy live-action Anderson film since Bottle Rocket. It eschews the now expected "characters wander around chasing a macguffin while discovering themselves" vein of storytelling and instead embraces a Fantastic Mr. Fox-esque caper atmosphere. It's Anderson's most violent film - there are shootings and stabbings and the requisite foul end of a pet - with these occasional forays into the grotesque reminding the viewer that bad things are coming everyone's way in the 1930s. There's even a chase sequence (albeit one rendered in stop-motion style).

Zero gets a romantic subplot with the local pastry chef, Agatha, but it's M. Gustave's movie and Ralph Fiennes (whose name I'm still not sure how to pronounce) steals the show.

Fiennes as Gustave is effortlessly charming, but beneath his posh exterior there is an undercurrent of world-weariness, a weariness that often manifests itself in the form of one of my favorite jokes - the artful and judicious deployment of unexpected profanity. He's an atypical Anderson character in that he's entirely confident in who he is, which helps the plot maintain its brisk pace. He's also the bravest character since the Bond Company Stooge in The Life Aquatic.

The simmering undercurrent of violence and melancholy comes to a head at the end of the film and lends a real world honesty that's somewhat unexpected in an Anderson film. Rather than using a heightened reality to explore emotional truths, in Grand Budapest Hotel, the sweetness of his fictional country of Zubrowka is undercut by the brutal truth of history.

Go see the movie, it is good.

Kyle's Wes Anderson Film Rankings

1) The Royal Tenenbaums
2) The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
3) Rushmore
4) Bottle Rocket
5) The Darjeeling Limited

Unranked
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Moonrise Kingdom
The Grand Budapest Hotel

(I find my opinion on Anderson films varies with each viewing, and I've only seen the unranked movies once. I feel I can't provide an accurate assessment until I see them again.)

I Visited My Grandparents (Money pt. 2)

I visited my grandparents last Thursday, not the ones that I live with, but my dad's parents. I was going down to New Orleans for the weekend and staying in Houston overnight. I try to visit them whenever I go to Houston, but I don't always have the opportunity.

I left work around 3 p.m. and started trucking down 45. I'd texted my dad about my plans and he'd told me to call my grandmother and tell her that I was coming. Being the neurotic that I am, I opted to put this off until I was 90 miles outside of Houston. I'd been feeling bad lately because I'd forgotten to call my grandmother on her birthday or to thank her for my Valentine's Day card, a call to announce an unexpected visit seemed like a distinctly selfish use of Alexander Graham Bell's invention. (I know this is a contested history fact).

I called her from a Buc-ees while being fleeced for gas to the tune of $3.30 and told her that I'd be stopping by.

She was excited at first, but asked for confirmation that I was coming that night and not on Friday. I reaffirmed the schedule and she paused momentarily and said, "Oh, I wish I had known."

This stutter only deepened my antagonistic relationship with the telephone.

She continued, "Our lawyer is coming over tonight to work on our will. He's supposed to be here at seven."

I mumbled and stumbled a bit. Granny asked if I was going to be here any other time that weekend. More mumbling and stumbling ensued and I finally just offered to swing by for a few minutes and say hello. Granny said she would like that, but cautioned that it was going to be "one of those nights."

I should mention here that my grandfather was in the hospital last week. He's getting older and his heart isn't in great shape. He appears to be better now, but both my and the lawyer's visit were being conducted under the shadow of that event.

I didn't really know what the proper course of action would be. I didn't know if I would be intruding on something I wasn't meant to privy to. It was, after all, a discussion of both mortality and finances, two things that Gregorys don't discuss and rarely have any reason to discuss. My girlfriend is always mesmerized by this. It's baffling to her that I've made it 24 years so far without any truly significant losses in my life. This is, obviously, a blessing, but it's one that I know will not last forever.

Mostly, I thought about how much I didn't know about my grandparents. I had only the vaguest notion of their life before I came into this world, and I'd never really bothered to ask about it because I just assumed that there would always be time for that. I figured that I had better try to learn what I could that night, assuming the atmosphere wasn't too bleak.

I drove on. I tried to take my time traversing those 90 miles, in hopes that the visit with the lawyer would be perfunctory and maybe he'd be gone by the time I arrived, but that wasn't the case.

I pulled up in front of their house and saw his truck in the driveway. I peered into the kitchen window and saw the three of them seated around the table, with the lawyer scribbling on the yellow pad named for his profession.

After a short game of who's on first with the front and back doorbells, the lawyer, my dad's friend Dean, let me in and I sat with them at the table.

This appeared to be uncomfortable for everyone but my Paw Paw. Dean tried to make small talk with me, I tried to small talk back, but was mostly interested in talking to my grandparents. Granny just kind of sat in her chair.

My natural disinclination toward idle talk eventually turned the conversation into one between Paw Paw and Dean, and I joined Granny in kind of sitting in my chair.

Paw Paw talked a bit about his health and ran through a litany of doctors that he had visited, adding in little backstories about why he liked or didn't like them. I couldn't tell you the name of any doctor that I had ever visited, but Paw Paw was running through them like he was discussing the merits of different quarterbacks. It seems that doctors are the fantasy football players of the elderly.

Conversation eventually turned toward my trip and Paw Paw's eyes lit up when he heard I was going to New Orleans. He started grinning and laughing, talking about how he used to visit with friends.

He told me a story about when he and Granny went with another couple and walked down Bourbon, popping into a bar with people dressed in drag.

"There were men dressed like women and women dressed like men in there. My friend looked in and couldn't believe what he was seeing. Then his wife wouldn't look - she just covered her eyes," he said.

Then he laughed and Granny interjected, "She'd led a very sheltered life."

(I don't know how often Granny encountered drag performers in East Bernard, but apparently it was often enough to elevate her worldliness above this other poor woman's.)

It was getting past 8 p.m. at this point, and it was clear that my stated goal of a quick pop in wasn't going to happen. I slyly went to the porch for a Dr Pepper and then recused myself to another room while my grandparents and the lawyer resumed discussing the task at hand.

I drank my coke and ate a few of the cookies that Granny makes special for me while politely trying not to listen. I caught up on whatever I'd missed on Twitter while I'd been driving, occasionally picking up on things like "DNR" and "mineral rights" from the other room.

After another 45 minutes or so, Dean seemed satisfied and left.

At this point, Paw Paw complained that he was aching from sitting so long, so he stood and ambled around the living room. Granny moved to her rocking chair and I sat in another rocking chair beside her.

I thought about what I had written about Paw Paw's time with the gas company. I essentially only knew what I had laid out in the post from a few weeks ago.

Seeing as I am now the third consecutive Gregory to earn his keep on the back of America's most efficient heating fuel, I figured that would be as easy an egress into the story of my grandfather's life as any. It turns out my romanticized notion of Paw Paw working his way up from the bottom to a comfortable position wasn't an exaggeration at all. In fact, it played out pretty much as I imagined it.

I told my brother about the conversation and he wanted me to write down as much as I can remember, so I'm going to try to do that now. I mostly asked about his life as an adult, and almost all in relation to his working life, so I'm not sure how the entire timeline works out. I'll have to ask more about that later.

My grandfather was born in 1930. He grew up in Rosenberg, Texas on a farm. He had several brothers and sisters (the exact number of which I don't know). Two of his older brothers served in World War II. His eldest was in the Pacific, and was an honor guard when Gen. MacArthur signed the formal surrender of Japan. Maybe he's in this photo somewhere?

Paw Paw lit up again when he told that story - "Imagine that, a country boy from Texas with a third grade education being there when they ended the war." 

His other brother, Archie, didn't see combat, but Paw Paw said that he wanted to. I wanted to ask more about this, but I got distracted.

Paw Paw himself served in the Naval Reserves. He joined in 1938 and spent four years as a supply sergeant, handing out uniforms and such. He received his honorable discharge from the Navy and set about building a life for himself.

At this point, I assume he was married to my grandmother, but I don't know. 

Originally he was working at a service station (apparently not for the gas company, I'm not sure), but his mother didn't like him doing that, so she had Archie, who was already a gas man, get him a job in Houston.

Somehow, Uncle Sam came calling again. Through some snafu with the paperwork, Paw Paw ended up finding himself conscripted into the Army and living on a base in California.

I find the fact that he seemingly didn't do much to contest this pretty hilarious and indicative of my family's general attitude toward life and authority figures. I'd say my own predisposition to deferring to my elders pales in comparison to potentially serving in Korea rather than risk rocking the boat.

Luckily for him, the base he was at had been recently reactivated after a long dormancy and was thus infested with mold and rot. Paw Paw suffered from asthma and the nasty blankets rendered him unable to breathe. (Despite him washing it, he informed me.)

He ended up in the medical ward and the chief officer on the base happened to be a physician. He was making rounds with the sick soldiers and asked my grandfather what his situation was. Paw Paw explained what was going on, at some point articulating that he already had his discharge, which he fished out of his pack and showed the officer.

The morning after he finished recuperating, the officer fetched him from his bunk and told him that he was having a meeting with some sort of review board. At the meeting, the officer told them Paw Paw's story and asked why a man who had already served four years was coughing and sputtering up California when he had a wife at home in Texas. The other officers saw the validity of this question and he was sent home that day. It happened to be the 89th day of his service. GI benefits kick in after 90 days. 

Back in Houston, he rejoined the gas company and began building a life part two. He started digging ditches and eventually moved up to a more general service technician position, working on pipelines and meters and what-not, before moving on to a fabrication shop. 

I can't remember the exact timeline, but at some point he started going in on weekends on his own time to observe and learn more about some process that the company was doing, and when his supervisor found out, he just moved him to that team. From there, he held a series of jobs within the company, most of the seemingly awful. 

Near as I can tell, Paw Paw figured out which job was the least coveted and set out to do it. He was in charge of telling people that their gas was being shut off, he was on a team that swapped out meters (boring and tedious), and, eventually, his superiors realized that he had a knack for dealing with unpleasant situations, so they sent him out to shape up service centers that were having trouble with the unions. 

From there, he became a kind of roving clean-up man - turning underperforming service centers into performing ones. I asked him how he did this, whether he was imposing or conciliatory. He told me that all he did was sit down with whoever he identified as troublemakers and told them to shape up. This seemingly did the trick for all but one recalcitrant rogue, but he was undone by smoking a marijuana cigarette in his company vehicle. 

He worked his way up in the company, eventually becoming a district manager. The company sent him to training at Texas A&I at once point and it was an experience that seemed to profoundly affect him. He was so grateful for the instruction that he had Granny help him draft a letter of thanks.

At this point, the conversation took a short digression into how much Granny had helped him over the years. He smiled radiantly at her as she sat rocking and occasionally chiming in.

I was charmed by the old worldliness of this story. His simple expression of gratitude enacted with the helping hand of his wife. It was a move entirely devoid of cynicism in a way that I think is almost impossible these days. 

At some point, my aunts and father were born. He bought several houses, but he seemed to have a shaky hold on the real estate game. Each time he told me about a new house, it sounded great, but then they'd get robbed or something and they'd feel compelled to move to a different neighborhood. 

It was around this part in the story that I glanced at the clock and realized how late it was. Paw Paw was still going strong, but Granny had nodded off a little in her chair.  

He moved on to telling me a little about his home life, about how he coached my dad in little league, and how he thought he was really special pitcher.

When he brought up my dad, I did something that I'd never really done before, which was study his face. There's a penciled portrait of my Paw Paw that hangs in their living room. It was a retirement gift and it shows him sitting at his desk in his office, holding a pencil and smiling a big, broad smile. It's my go-to mental image of Paw Paw. 

If I had to pick one word to describe my grandfather physically, it would probably be broad. He has big ears and his smile stretches the corners of his face. 

In my mind, he's always been a physical presence, not fat, but substantive. This may be vestigial memory from a time when I was tiny and therefore every adult human had some heft, but the truth remains, when I conjure up an image of my grandfather, there's a physicality to it that is almost outside the realm of normal people. 

However, sitting in that chair, listening to him talk about my dad, I started to search for the resemblance, and I saw it. Their noses are nearly identical and he has the deep-set eyes that all three of us share. It was one of those unusual moments where you realize that you've always viewed someone a certain way and then find yourself seeing them differently. 

This visual observation coupled with the story he was telling fundamentally altered the way that I viewed him. He ceased existing in my mental category of "grandfather" (which is mythic and unassailable and also profoundly unknowable [essentially by design]) and started to take on a life of his own, as a fully realized person with emotions beyond delight at seeing me and frustration with Gary Kubiak. 

So he went on telling this story, about how he thought my dad had the potential to be a great pitcher and it's at this point that I interjected, and told a story that I had only recently learned from my dad about how high school baseball affected him, about how he didn't get along with his coach and about how it made him get up in his head and play poorly.

As I was telling that story, I experienced this cathartic state that I can't fully articulate. I almost stepped outside of myself and glimpsed, however briefly, how the stories of my grandfather and my father led to my story and reflected my story in an almost recursive pattern. I felt how deeply Paw Paw believed that my dad had a special talent, which informed further how I felt about my dad telling me his story about how he felt playing baseball, which in turn added all of these new layers to my own experience playing.

I remember when my dad told me about him getting the yips in high school. I wondered why he waited until I was 23 to tell me. It made me think of one day when I was 16, driving down the loop in Lubbock in my red Galaxie 500, crying because I hated baseball and hated my coach, but more than anything, hated the thought of letting my dad down by quitting. It made me wonder how I would have approached the game differently if I'd known at 16 that I wasn't alone in having this experience. That at one point in his life, he too had been so demoralized by the situation around him that it had started to affect his play. 

Hearing Paw Paw talk shed new light on that story. It made me realize that my father, too, had a dad that he didn't want to disappoint. I wondered if Paw Paw ever told my dad that he thought he was a special player. I wondered if that was why my dad never put any pressure on me to aspire to certain levels of play - if he felt like he was doing me a service by letting me figure out what I wanted on my own.

If that sounds like a negative realization, it wasn't at all. It may have been bittersweet, but what it really was was deeply grounding. In that moment, I felt a connection with my father and grandfather that was, for lack of a better word, orienting. In understanding those two men better, I understood myself better and my love for both of them deepened. 

It made me regret not taking the time earlier to explore my family story, especially for someone like me who claims to be so invested in both story and family. 

The conversation sort of trailed off after this, and I sent Paw Paw and Granny to bed before making my way back out into the muggy Houston air. It was a city that I never really knew, having moved away when I was only three, but at that moment, reflecting on my father and grandfather and all of the Gregorys way back to when Stanislas first came over from Poland, I felt at home. 

True Detective (Part 2)

True Detective wrapped up its sixth episode last night, and what I assume to be the shows second act. The interview framework of the show appears to be disposed with, as both Marty and Rust left the police station in states of anger. Good news though, as the two men reunited in 2012 at the end of the episode - hopefully leading to some resolution on the Yellow King case.

After all of the breathless Chambers, Lovecraft, Ligotti commentary that followed the previous few episodes, the show narrowed its focus for this most recent adventure, where we learned why exactly Rust and Marty had a falling out in 2002.

It's here that I confess that even I, the infallible television giant that I am, may have been misreading the show. When Rust met Martin's wife, Maggie, in an early episode, the two shared an immediate chemistry. Knowing that Rust and Marty would eventually split and having seen TV before, I automatically assumed that the dissolution would involve Rust sleeping with Maggie. However, as the series progressed, I started to wonder if that might be a red herring. Then I started to expect it to be a red herring.

Turns out it was no fish at all, and Rust and Maggie do end up having a dalliance, but not in the way that I expected.

Instead of Rust casting aside his carefully cultivated isolation to grasp at a human connection with Maggie, the coupling was instigated by Maggie, in a fit of well-earned pique after having been once again wounded by Marty's philandering.

The event itself was anticlimactic. Maggie comes to Rust's apartment, where she finds him in a state, drunk and reeling from the apparent willful apathy at the police department and in Louisiana in general. There's no doubt about what her intentions are, as she brings over a bottle of wine and almost immediately begins kissing Rust. He very briefly resists before giving in and the two share a love scene (to put it dishonestly delicately) that takes less time that it probably did for you to read this paragraph.

When Maggie reveals that she only did this to ensure that Marty would never bother her again, Rust is upset for reasons that aren't terribly clear (or audible, the sound mix was very weird in that scene).

I'm not one to get hung up on the way that True Detective handles women, but there is a vocal contingent that is. Most recently, Emily Nussbaum (whom I generally agree with) wrote about the "shallowness" that she perceives the show to be wallowing in. She lambasts the "macho nonsense" of the show and believes that Rust is presented to us as a sort of alpha-male fetish object.

As with Andy Greenwald early in the shows run, I feel like this is a fundamental misreading of what Pizzolatto is trying to say, there is an argument to be made, but it's not a strong one.

(Both reviewers are hung up on the "crazy pussy" line from early on, which I interpreted to be Rust passive-aggressively mocking Marty, not a disparaging comment toward the actual woman in question.)

(Also, Rust is not a fetish object. His philosophizing is clearly not meant to be taken entirely earnestly. Even if Nussbaum asserts that he's a fetish object by potentially being right about everything, it's not his philosophy that's guiding that quest for knowledge, but rather, a deep humanity at odds with everything he's saying. Rust is compelling because his actions stand in stark relief to his words. If anything it's an anti-fetishization - certainly less egregious than say Deadwood presents Al Swearengen.)

I think saying that the show is overtly misogynistic is an impossible claim. The entire crux of the narrative is based on the fallout from toxic masculinity. Yes, the women on the show are largely presented as either victims, prostitutes, conquests or tortured wives, but all of them are that way because of a pernicious patriarchal culture that allows these kinds of thing to happen.

(I also take issue with the way that some critics demean Maggie as nothing more than a "cop's wife" plot device. That seems both a shallow reading of the text and an instance of them prescribing their views of ideal womanhood on Maggie. For what it's worth, I've met a lot more women like Maggie than I have the "strong, confident woman" cliche.)

Rust actually addresses this theme directly in the episode when he claims that there has been a rash of killings targeting "...women and children - they get no press. The way things in the bayou get no press." The verisimilitude of that statement aside (I imagine that missing women and children get a fair amount more press in the real world than they do in Pizzolatto's Lousiana), you rarely see the conceit of a show laid out so explicitly.

(The line about things in the bayou getting no press is interesting to me as well. Most of the reviewers who are lukewarm on True Detective tend to be coastal liberal types and I'm wondering if there's some sort of classist response to the show. Is it easier to invest in the life of an urbane anti-hero like Don Draper or a genius chemist like Walter White than it is two backwoods detectives, one of whom routinely appears to punch above his assumed intellectual weight? This episode in particular addresses the way that systemic failures have contributed to the blight of South Louisiana, as Rev. Tuttle expounds on the promise of the charter system, while its stark results are clear to the viewer and Cohle.)

As I said, there's no way to label this show misogynistic, but some things did concern me this episode, chiefly the gratuitous T&A. I don't think the nude scenes from earlier in the season or tonight really did much to add to the story and both featured a conspicuous amount of "male gaze." This being HBO, it's not unexpected.

You can argue that it's inherently patriarchal that the two people charged with rescuing these vulnerable women and children are two white men, but somehow it doesn't seem like a crazy supposition that these two would be the ones working the case in the world that P has created.

Most interesting to me is the way that the show addresses women and sexuality. The most "liberated" female characters on the show achieve their liberation through sexuality. First the gals on the bunny ranch early in the season and then Maggie in this episode (and, I suppose, Marty's daughter, Audrey). Women asserting their agency through sex is pretty well-worn trope and, in the world of True Detective, appears to be the only reasonable means of female self-actualization.

For the men on the show, sex is shown mostly as a compulsion, as a snare that can't be avoided. Marty can't stop himself from being infidelious and Rust can't resist Maggie's come ons. The debilitating effects of male sexuality only grow more depraved as you consider the people that Rust and Marty hunt. This is an area where I feel like the show could say some more profound things if Maggie were more developed, alas, it appears that it isn't meant to be.

Beyond making me reconsider the gender politics of the show, this episode (and the Maggie/Rust pairing in particular) also made me reconsider my view of the overall narrative.

Perhaps because I've been conditioned to believe that good stories contain surprises and reveals, I was somewhat disappointed by the seemingly pre-ordained hook-up. I'm also a little bummed that it appears that Rust might be right, and there might actually be a vast conspiracy protecting the killers that he's investigating. It honestly feels a little rote, but Pizzolatto has said that he's "not trying to trick us," so that may just be it.

There's really no shame in telling a straightforward, predictable narrative, as long as its well told, (I point readers to Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Marquez), and True Detective has proven that it's more than capable of telling a story well.

I'm hoping there's more going on, and there are some signs that Rust may be unraveling - his creepy Se7en-esque apartment mock up, him telling the infanticidal mother to kill herself - but if it turns out to just be a monolithic conspiracy and not a more interesting story about the banality of evil, I'm fine with that too. I'm in.

Money (*Cash Register Sound Effect*)

For the first time in my life, I find myself in possession of a decent amount of money.

It's nothing crazy, in six months of being a working professional, I've still not amassed what my roommates did over the course of their summer internships while still in school. It's more than I'm used to though.

In the months between when I graduated and when I started working, I thought a lot about money. I thought about how I didn't have any, and I thought about how much my parents had spent on me over the course of the past 22 years.

Beyond that, I thought about my grandparents. I thought about how they grew up dirt-poor on a farm and how my grandfather worked his way up at the gas company to provide for his family. I thought about how my dad went to school to be an engineer because he knew he could earn a living, regardless of whether or not he loved building bridges and pipelines.

I'm a man particularly bound to familial piety. I rarely make any decision that I know would actively displease or, more accurately, dishonor my parents.

I thought earning money would give me a sense of moral rightness. That it would satisfy me in its own sake. Weber writes about that moral compunction to be a good steward being the basis of capitalism. With the specter of Calvin lingering over the reformation era, good believers had no real assurance of their election except the favor of God upon them in their everyday lives. Weber posited that the accumulation of capital was one way that these pious folks proved their heavenly bonafides. Being good Christians, they didn't use their newfound money for licentious or craven purposes. They just put it back into their industry, building capital over and over. Weber thought that the accumulation of wealth without exercising the attendant pleasures that it could bring was a form of worldly asceticism. Rather than beating his breast in the desert, the modern hermit sheltered himself in his factory - a constantly evolving altar to a God whose love was remote and unknowable with any real certainty.

Not being a Calvinist and instead choosing to take God's love as a given (perhaps too carelessly), this accumulation of capital hasn't done much to assuage the persistent dissatisfaction that his hung over my life since I graduated from college. I get a little thrill when I see the graph of my personal finance app raise higher and higher, but it's fleeting. When I look at it, I mostly just ask myself what I intend to do with that money. Why am I earning it, other than out of my aforementioned sense of familial devotion?

It's no secret that my real ambition is to be a writer, but, by all evidence, it doesn't appear to be a very pressing ambition. In fact, I've pretty much actively sabotaged any opportunities at writing that the universe has put in my way.

As a sophomore, I was one of two students in my journalism class to be recommended for an internship at the Statesman. Having developed a loathing of journalism (partly the result of my overly stringent and, frankly, not terrible pleasant TA), I put off applying until the last minute, when I was informed that the position had already been filled. That decision proved particularly biting each of the four separate times that I applied for jobs with said publication - jobs that I was more than qualified for.

Of course, journalism has only ever been a stepping stone for TV writing. A way to amass stories and find my voice before I became the next David Simon.

My closest brush with the entertainment industry ("the industry" they call it Tinseltown [Hollywood, CA {California}]) came the summer before my senior year. I applied to the summer program on a whim after the conclusion of a meeting for a website of specious quality that I was writing for at the time. As I typed, sweating in an overheated meeting room in the PCL, my heart pounded and my brain flooded with the addicting chemicals that correspond to possibility. In my essay I said that it had been my ambition to be a TV writer since I was thirteen years old and first read Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (a book my brother, by happenstance, just bought me for Christmas. Here's hoping that's portentous). I wrote about how the summer program would be my first foray into certain...if not stardom, then at least productivity and fulfillment.

Instead, I panicked when none of the internships in development got back to me, so I worked for a magazine and toiled in the content management mines for eight hours a day. It was an educational experience, but not the one I had imagined all breathless and sweaty that day in the PCL.

Twice I've been offered jobs at the radio station where I once interned and loved to work, but both times the timing has been off.

The only writing job I've turned down that I'm happy I withdrew from was in Lubbock. I think it's probably better for my character to be discontent and making money rather than content (in the same way that the denizens of an opium den are content) and making no money.

Luckily, I've now realized what I can do with my newfound largesse.

This whole time, I've felt beholden to this narrative I've concocted about my family's finances and I don't even know if it's true.

(To be honest, I don't really know anything about my family. We rarely talk about ourselves to one another, and even more rarely do we talk about our history. In a movie this would be the sign of a nefarious past, but in this case, I think it's merely a sign of generations of Catholic steadfastness.)

I think all of my internal (and unshared) lamentations and mental anguish may have been mirages. Never once has my father ever actually told me that he expects me to enslave myself to a salary. If anything, his actions have shown the opposite. He's been, honestly, too generous. Beyond that, I think he really wants me to pursue my dreams and to be happy.

A few days after I applied to film school, he sent me an email to a youtube video and said, "You should appreciate this, as a filmmaker."

Now, even I wouldn't have the gall to call myself a filmmaker, but that's kind of how he is. When I was writing all the time, he called me a writer. From what I've gleaned from our conversations, my dad may view me as a writer even more so than I do myself.

So I don't know exactly what I'm going to do yet, but now (thanks to the sacrifice of untold Gregorys before) I have a little money, and I'm going to try to do something meaningful with it.

I don't know when, or how, just yet - but I'm going to try. I'm not going to look back a year or five or ten from now and wonder why I wasted my youth. I'm going to try.

True Detective (We're Back to TV Talk)

HBO's True Detective was basically made for me. It combines several of my favorite things, including - Matthew McConaughey, HBO dramas, pulpy cop stuff, and the state of Louisiana.

The first half of the season wrapped up last Sunday, and I'm in the rare position of being able to write about a show while it's actively airing, so I've got to take advantage. 

I'll start by saying that it's not what I expected. When the show was first announced a while back, I thought it would stray more toward the kind of high-concept stuff that HBO has been producing recently, your Trues Blood or your Games of Thrones. I didn't anticipate that it would be a hyper-masculine, but neutered, drama that mostly involves two dudes driving around and annoying each other. My subverted expectations turned out to be a good thing, because the show is actually pretty great. 

I don't think it's the best show in the world, but I think it's a show that works and is very deliberate about the themes that it's trying to explore and the atmosphere that it's trying to cultivate, and, for the most part, the internet agrees with me.

(As one of the web's preeminent iconoclasts, I'm naturally wary when my opinion lines up too neatly with the zeitgeist, but one is only as valuable as one's truth, so I won't be contrarian just for the sake of it.) 

One prominent member the internet, Grantland's Andy Greenwald, does not agree with me. Greenwald has been wary of the show since its beginning and the simmering unrest of the commentariat came to a head this week after he posted his recap of the most recent episode. 

I'm not one to begrudge a man his opinion, Greenwald is a talented TV writer who seems to know his stuff, but this opinion did actually bother me, because I think he's fundamentally misreading the show. 

But with Hart in free fall, it’s clear that writer Nic Pizzolatto doesn’t think Cohle is loopy — he thinks he’s awesome. I’d prefer a show that offered more than halfhearted resistance to Rust Cohle’s whiskey-courageous speechifying. But more and more it’s clear that wherever this show is heading, he’s the one in the driver’s seat.

This is a criticism that I don't understand. If the show were presented as a straight mystery-thriller, one could maybe see Pizzolatto as glorifying McConaughey's Rust Cohle. He gets to deliver lots of weird, nihilistic speeches and is repeatedly praised as some sort of super-detective. A lesser show might lean into these traits to turn Cohle into your classic badass antihero type dude - House with a gun.

However, this is impossible due to the framing device employed by the show. Not only are we seeing Cohle and Harrelson's Martin Hart attempt to puzzle out a murder in 1995, but we also see them talking to a new crop of investigators in 2012. (Investigators 2: The New Batch).

The Cohle presented in 2012 is in no way awesome. He's a washed up drunk waiting for death. However he may be presented in the past timeline, we're not supposed to see Cohle as an aspirational figure.

True Detective has also been criticized in a broader sense for two reasons, both, I believe, unjust.

Some say that it's just another show about a white, male, antihero trying to figure out his place in this world. In this sense, the show is simply being punished by chronology. We've had many successful dramas in this mold over the past decade plus, so it stands to reason that viewers may get burned out. (Is it fair to judge TD on the shows that came before it? Probably not, but it's inevitable.)

The other criticism is that the show leans on the spooky occult serial killer angle that has been done to death on both cable and network TV. Again, the show is being punished for arriving in 2014 instead of 2007.

As far as the serial killer thing goes. Pizzolatto himself said that that angle is a secondary concern to him. The real story he's telling is the construction and destruction of Cohle and Hart's relationship.

I think it's here that Pizzolatto most succeeds as both a storyteller, and as someone trying to separate his characters from the aforementioned pack of similar heroes.

Cohle is a fundamentally broken man. His entire life has been a series of traumas, starting with his childhood, to the death of his daughter and the dissolution of his family, to his time as an undercover drug-runner, all the way up until where he find him, as a detective in Louisiana.

These traumas have turned Cohle, in his own words, into a big-P Pessimist. He's constantly spouting off about the pointlessness of life and human existence. His entire ontological underpinning is one of nihilism and materialism. Cohle is where he is because of some unfortunate causality that he has no power to alter one way or another, but still troubles him deeply.

If this was all there was to Cohle. If he was just some sort of misery-cliche spewing automaton, then, yeah, he'd be a kind of trite character. But the show doesn't present him that way. In my mind, it's never clear how seriously Pizzolatto (and, by extension, the audience) takes Cohle's ramblings. Furthermore, it's not always clear how seriously Cohle takes them himself.

For all of his philosophizing, Cohle is still capable of moments of humanity. He takes clear pleasure in being around Hart's family, and he's injured when Hart's wife, Maggie, tells him that he must have been a bad husband. He even hints at having a sense of purpose, when he tells Hart that although he's a bad man, his job is to stop other bad men.

Hart is similarly complicated. He's presented at first as the antithesis to Cohle. He's a God-fearing family man who just wants to do his job and live his life without thinking too much about it.

Just as Cohle is afforded brief glimpses of humanity, Hart is slowly revealed to be more sinister than he would ever think himself to be. He's disengaged from his family, he's a philanderer and a hard drinker, and, when crossed, he flies into violent, self-destructive rages. Cohle, and the audience, can clearly see this, but Hart is blind to it.

As these two characters with serious personal blind spots get to know each other, the audience, through the flashback device, is afforded a glimpse into the reality of both men. We know how the story ends. Cohle is a sad drunk; Hart is a successful, but no longer married. Neither get a happy ending.

By already showing us what's going to happen to the characters, Pizzolatto has freed himself from the trap of the antihero. There's no temptation to glamorize these men as their adventures unfold. Each time they do something badass, the camera cuts back to 2012 and reminds the viewer that, no matter how cool they may be now, it's going to ultimately be empty. All that's left is to just watch and enjoy the atmosphere.

In short, Andy Greenwald is wrong and I am right. Andy's assertion is doubly meritless because he loved Breaking Bad which subverted the fundamental conceit of the show by fetishizing Walt.

Hire me, Grantland.

Love,

Kyle

Pitches (American Horror Story)

It's no secret that I'm one of the hottest young writers in the game right now. My pilot has been rejected by three (three!) screenplay competitions. One of which offered me the note, "The other characters aren't well defined and the humor could be funnier." So I'm basically on a rocket to the moon.

It's in this capacity that I thought I would offer to help embattled showrunner Ryan Murphy (creator of Nip/Tuck, Glee, and American Horror Story) with some ideas on how to improve the next season of American Horror story. The season that ended just last week was a big pile of awful campy garbage, in a bad way, not in a good way like the tolerable Murphy excretions, so it's clear he needs my guiding hand.

First off, Murphy has expressed his desire for the next season to be a period piece, like season 2's mostly successful American Horror Story: Asylum. It should be noted that this is a season that featured a bunch of aliens that were never explained, Dylan McDermott nursing from a prostitute, and a woman who may or may not have been Anne Frank.

I know Murphy's natural inclination will be to look for eras where he can cast divas to chew scenery for 13 hours worth of episodes - Revolutionary France, Victorian England, the Roaring Twenties - basically any place with costumes, stupid accents, and horrifically tasteless things for Murphy to appropriate as entertainment (the natural terminus of this show is a season that's just set in an abortion clinic). It's here that I'd encourage Murph to go against his first instinct and instead of looking backward for a period onto which to lay his piece, he look forward and produce American Horror Story: SPACE!

I was originally going to actually break 13 episodes worth of story, but that proved daunting and also boring. So here are the broad strokes.

Cast

Sarah Paulson - Dagny Coleman, a sensitive research scientist who lives alone on a space station with her husband, who she isn't sure if she loves.

Lance Reddick - David Palmer, great-great-grandson of the former president, David unrepentantly loves Dagny, but he's unable to open up emotionally because he is still scarred by the troubling legacy of spacism (racism against people who live in space).

Dylan McDermott - Johnny 5, an android who is plagued by existential questions and also an addiction to moon rocks.

Taissa Farmiga - A broom.

Story

Episode One: The Space Between
Dagny and David live aboard the space shuttle with their android, Johnny 5, trying to find a cure for feline diabetes. A meteor shower destroys their communications array. Johnny and Dagny bang while David tries to repair it. David spies the couple through a window and begins to cry, but only briefly, as he is almost immediately shredded by another meteor shower. A mysterious furry appendage drags his body away.

Episode Two: Ants Marching
Johnny is jonesing for a hit of Buzz Aldro (moon rock slang) and turns hostile toward Dagny. Dagny seeks David for comfort and finds him, but something is different. He is unusually placid. David makes her eggs. Johnny gets in a fight with his dealer over the telecom. On the underside of the ship, it's revealed that the real David is trapped in the web of a giant spider played by Jessica Lange.

Episode Three: Crash Into Me
The spider agrees to spare David if he promises to teach her how to dance. A montage set to an original Randy Newman composition shows the pair hitting it off, eventually banging. Inside the station, Johnny's dealer, Chudge (Ron Perlman) arrives. He is a bigfoot, the last bigfoot. Out of guilt for her actions, Dagny dotes on the mysterious non-David, cooking whatever he wants, not realizing that the satellite was never fixed and no fresh food supplies would be coming. The ship is rocked by an explosion and a gang of space hunters arrive, led by John Lithgow. They aim to kill the last bigfoot.

Episode Four: #41
The crew of four still within the ship hide in a secret compartment in the ship's attic, while the hunters tromp around looking for signs of Chudge. They find scat and fur, but are unable to determine if they are from a bigfoot or from a known species. In an effort to keep his men from being bored, John Lithgow starts hiding behind corners and throwing rocks, then looking at his men all like, "Did you see that!!!???" Then they start a campfire and tell spooky stories. Chudge starts a diary in the attic.

Episode Five: Mercy
With food and moon rock supplies exhausted, Dagny and David are both at each other's throats. Chudge is confused by the new experience and doesn't fully understand why everyone is fighting. Non-David remains placid. Without outside stimulation, the hunters start to develop space madness, clawing out their eyeballs and tongues. On a walkabout around the outside of the station, Real David finds a rose that he begins to nourish. The rose (Frances Conroy) begins to talk with him, issuing curt one-liners like a pez dispenser. The spider spies this interaction and grows jealous.

Episode Six: If Only
Being a simple spider and therefore largely unable to distinguish between humans, the spider sends her brood of tiny spider babes to gobble up the inhabitants of the space station, as revenge for David's relationship with the rose (which she believes to be a smaller human). The horde of little spiders enter the station and lay waste to all but John Lithgow who grabs hold of the broom and sweeps them out of the airlock, along with the broom. Driven mad by what he's witnessed, Lithgow gains the second sight, and learns where the core four are hiding. He marches up there with an old timey blunderbuss, fully intent on slaying them all.

Episode Seven: Two Step
David falls more and more deeply in love with the rose, but she won't return his affection. Rather than live without her, he pledges to die and flings himself off of the station. Realizing that she has lost  her one chance at true love, the rose withers away. Inside the station, Chudge throws himself in front of John Lithgow's musket ball, sacrificing himself for his friends. The real David, caught in the ships orbit after his failed attempt to jump off, comes careening through the entrance to the attic, totally splattering John Lithgow's head against the hull.

Episode Eight: You & Me
Through Chudge's sacrifice, the gang realizes that friendship is most important thing. Also, it turns out that the mysterious David was the real David's doppelgänger, who had been pulled through a trans-dimensional rift when the meteor shredded David Prime. Also, David Beta didn't actually have to eat anything, he was just being polite. The gang shares a laugh about that while Chudge's corpse is roasting over the fire pit. From outside the ship, there's an ominous rumble, followed by the evil voice of the spider lady. She's come for revenge!!!!

Episode Nine: So Much to Say
The Spider Lady slays everyone aboard the ship. The next 37 minutes are a ham-handed monologue about loneliness and what it's like to be an aged lady. Jessica Lange wins an Emmy.

Episode Ten: Lie in Our Graves
Flash-sideways to an alternate universe where everyone's genders are reversed. Things that seem normal in the previous world seem shocking and oppressive. There's gratuitous sexual violence. Everyone learns a valuable lesson.

Episode Eleven: Cry Freedom
Devastated by her newfound loneliness, Spider Lady begins to sing an old fratro spiritual from the dark days of frattel slavery. She spies a beam of light come through the hull. It grows brighter and brighter before finally materializing into the form of Dave Matthews. Dave and the Spider scat-sing a bunch of nonsense. He then reveals himself to the be singularity, an omniscient, omnipotent merging of man and machine. Moved by the spider lady's faith, he restores the lives of everyone on the station. The broom floats back in.

Episode Twelve: Drive In Drive Out
Flashback to heretofore unseen character, Blord, the vampire. A montage of Blord and his father fixing up an old space shuttle runs under VO of Dagny explaining that research scientists and vampires have always been at war - since time immemorial. The montage continues with the vampires invading space stations, building ornate castles in them, seducing the scientist and then running away with their proprietary research. Flashforward to present day and the characters learn that there is a cabal of vampires headed their way. The threat is presented as incredibly severe, but when the vampires arrive, Chudge runs them all over with his motorcycle.

Episode Thirteen: Satellite
David and Dagny complete their research, eventually learning that the cure for feline diabetes was to start an ad campaign encouraging cats to seek out sugar-free sodas. (Cats are capable of thinking and feeling just as deeply, if not more so than humans, but are bred as a food source by their tyrannical simian masters).  Also, everyone learns that what's really important is to let the world know who you are. The characters return to Earth and come out as research scientists, an inter-dimensional clone, a spider monster, a bigfoot, an android, a bunch of hunters, and John Lithgow. Everyone applauds their courage, and, more importantly, the courage of the person who created their platform, Ryan Murphy.

The End...









The End?

Modern Fart (A Critical Review of I, Frankenstein)

This piece is officially under a Raphael Warning. I will henceforth be cool, but crude. Please stop reading now if you're offended by hypothetical penile trauma and/or you are my parents (or Aaron Eckhart, I guess?).

This evening, I stumbled upon what I believe to be the world's greatest hypothetical.

For those of you who can't see it. The question reads as follows:

Would you rather take a three second minor shock to the dick hole for free, or pay $25 to see I, Fartenstein?

Ignoring the iPhone's questionable take on the proper spelling of "dickhole," I feel like this is a question that bears dissection. (Though I fear that I've tipped my hand by christening it I, Fartenstein in my original question.)

For a refresher, here's the trailer.



The film (which I have not seen) apparently stars Aaron Eckhart as Frankenstein, a naming convention that I assume to be a decision of convenience by the filmmakers. His character should rightly be called Frankenstein's Monster or Monster T. Frankenstein, if he's adopted his creator's surname. Bill Nighy plays some kind of generic bad guy, who I've named Business Jerk. Yvonne Strahovski is also in it, playing Blonde.

At the start of the trailer, Frankenstein declares, "I am like none other," before confusingly announcing, "There's an entire army of monsters like me, tens of thousands of them," roughly a minute later.

I assume there is a reason for this, but I'll probably never find out what it is. I bet Frankenstein was cloned or something, or maybe someone found Dr. Frankenstein's notebook. Also, there are gargoyles? (And not cool ones like the Manhattan Clan.)

This appears to be your standard steampunk inspired bust 'em up featuring a some sort of superhuman protagonist with vaguely defined powers. You've seen this movie before.

Now lets turn to the other end of the hypothetical, the dickhole shock.

I haven't really worked out the delivery method of the shock (I'm not a weirdo), let's just assume it's convenient and you can do it without the presence of an audience. As defined in the question, it only lasts three seconds and is mild (think 9-volt battery on your tongue).

Let's do a comparative analysis of the two experiences.

• Dickhole shock is almost assuredly something you've never experienced before. I, Frankenstein is just Van Helsing all over again.
• Dickhole shock lasts 3 seconds. I, Frankenstein is 92 minutes.
• Dickhole shock costs you nothing. I, Frankenstein (in this scenario) costs you $25. With that kind of money you could see any other movie twice. 
• I, Frankenstein stars Bill Nighy, which is, admittedly, a point in its favor that Dickhole shock can't match. 

Being a consummate researcher, I've decided to expand my inquiry beyond just a simple comparative list. I presented eight of my friends with this very hypothetical and have catalogued their responses below:

"Dick shock for sure."
"I would rather see I, Fartenstein. That dick shock sounds unpleasant."
"Both."
"Yeah, put me down for simultaneous."
"Both as well. Have you seen the scars on his chiseled chest?"*
"It's really not that bad."

Unfortunately, my scientific survey went about as well as my score on the AP Stats test (2) suggests it would have. Out of eight responses, we got one for dickshock, one for the movie, three unsures, a non-response, one that was a mean joke that I won't reprint and one endorsement (?) from someone who had already seen the film.

*

You may ask why this film in particular has so raised my ire, especially now that I'm trying to follow Mack Brown's advice and abandon snark to embrace sincerity and kind-thinking. I, Frankenstein, has forfeited that mercy by being the latest in a long line of cynical, shallow, stupid and derivative movies that attempt to capitalize on the name recognition of characters that are conveniently out of copyright.

I, Frankenstein and its ilk are testaments to the laziness of the modern studio. It is grist for the mediocrity mill, and the mediocrity bakery never tires of producing soggy, inedible loaves of garbage-bread. That the film has gone so far as to deface our hallowed institutions like Muscle & Fitness magazine with seedy buzz marketing is unconscionable.

Let's be clear, I don't blame the thousands of cast and crew that worked on I, Frankenstein. I don't even blame the writer for churning it out. People have to eat, and I don't begrudge them work. I just wish their talents had been directed toward something better. You can make big, dumb action movies that don't hinge on high-concept nonsense to be successful. The best and most successful current action franchise is doing that every year.

I think the worst part about I, Frankenstein is that it was CLEARLY DOOMED TO FAIL. One look at the trailer was enough to know that it would never succeed, and it's not. It grossed $8 million on its opening weekend, which isn't a good sign of it making back its modest $65 million budget - especially factoring in whatever payola was involved in that magazine cover. That doesn't even show up on the official books!

I'm upset because I like movies, you guys. I want movies to be good and I wanted talented people to produce things of value. I don't even mind a bad movie if it at least tries to be interesting, but we're currently at peak steampunk monster capers and that's no good for anyone.

Stretch your wings, Hollywood, fly like the mighty gargoyles in the trailer. Crush your fears like so many Bill Nighys beneath Frankenstein's boot-heel. Heed my prophecy (you guys are into those right?) otherwise, audiences will continue to stay home and opt for dickhole shocks, and you'll have none to blame but yourselves.

Writing about Dr. V (A Losing Proposition)

Because the world is what it is and because I live in it, I feel obligated to write a response to the recently published, praised, criticized and now apologized for Grantland piece "Dr. V's Magical Putter" by Caleb Hannan.  Clocking in at around 8,000 words, the piece is the perfect low-culture, high-drama story for a journalistic atmosphere that puts increasing emphasis on the Longformification of news. After all, there can be no think pieces if we have nothing to think about.

As I write my response to this, it should be noted that I am only a journalist in the barest sense of the word. Like Hannan, my reporting has largely been confined to the world of sports. Unlike Hannan, I've never published anything that took up more than a few days of research, much less the seven months he spent reporting this story.

Unlike Hannan (as far as I know), I studied a field (religion) that actively intersects with many issues at play in his piece, namely, privilege, in-groups vs out-groups, patriarchy, oppression and LGBT issues. 

Despite this, like Hannan, I would have been utterly unprepared to report the story he eventually published. 

The gist of the story, if you haven't read it, is that Hannan was inspired to research a new putter he saw pitched on Youtube. The enigmatic Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, inventor of the putter, agreed to let Hannan do a story on her work, on the basis that he focus on the creation and not the creator. 

(In order to avoid doing what Hannan did and exploit the mystery of Vanderbilt for the sake of narrative, I'll say up front that he learns that Vanderbilt is a trans woman.) 

Over the course of his investigation, Hannan discovered that Vanderbilt was not the brilliantly educated inventor that she told him she was. Vanderbilt claimed to be a doctor of physics with degrees from both MIT and Wharton, she did not possess those degrees. Nor did she work on the stealth bomber for the Department of Defense, another one of her claims. 

The "science" that Hannan was ostensibly reporting on turned out to be as scientific as those stupid focus necklaces that baseball players wear. 

This in itself is a pretty good story that would probably have occupied 10 minutes of your average Grantland reader's day.

Hannan didn't stop there.

In addition to uncovering Vanderbilt's phony credentials, Hannan also learned that Vanderbilt was a trans woman, which served to simultaneously explain why he was having so much trouble with his background check and also to "send a chill up his spine." 

Armed with this new information, Hannan tries to flesh out more of Vanderbilt's background. It's certainly chaotic - featuring several lawsuits, out of control finances and a suicide attempt. 

Vanderbilt is undoubtedly duplicitous. She is also a trans woman. These two things are not to be conflated, but the way Hannan writes the story, it sounds like they inevitably must be. 

In his efforts to confront Vanderbilt about this new information, Hannan only served to agitate the inventor. His excitement over his find eventually led to him outing Vanderbilt to an investor.

The story ends with Vanderbilt dead from suicide and Hannan wrapping up his piece rather abruptly, claiming that, "Writing a eulogy for someone who by all accounts despised you is an odd experience." 

This story came across my radar on the day it was published, with many of the sportswriters I follow praising it as a solid piece of reporting. I opened it, but didn't read it, because, well, I don't care about golf that much and I have a job and can't devote all my time to reading 8,000 word articles about a sport I don't follow. 

It came across my radar again a few days later, when the activist side of my feed started tweeting angrily about the story and responding to it. This is when I decided to read it.

Well first, I read a piece that my friend Audrey wrote on Autostraddle. Audrey's critique is relatively even-handed and instructional. She focuses less on the uproar the story caused within the activist community and more on educating people on how to report on trans issues. What I find most admirable about her work is that she manages to communicate a profound sadness that doesn't overwhelm the didacticism of the piece. 

Then I read Josh Levin's piece at Slate, because it had been recommended to me on Twitter. Levin's piece is more of a meditation on ethics and empathy within journalism. When you're in journalism school, you learn a lot about the first and only a little about the second. I remember in an early journalism class (one I shared with Audrey, in fact) being offput by the cavalier way my instructor talked about the subjects of some of her previous stories, as if they were merely performers in a narrative, rather than living human beings. As I understand it (keeping in mind that I have very little newsroom experience), most of the time, empathy is less important that a good story. 

It's through these two lenses that I actually first read Hannan's story. 

As I read, I looked for signs of malicious intent within what Hannan wrote, but I struggled to see it. What I found instead was inexperience, ineptness and a lack of compassion. 

(The paragraph that I just wrote is troubling to me as a human being. Regardless of Hannan's ambitions, his story likely deeply traumatized Vanderbilt and assuredly traumatized many trans people and allies that read it. I should, by all accounts, accept this as justification enough to let the story be what it is and not offer my own commentary. I will never understand what it's like to read this story through the eyes of a trans person, and any observations that I make are so much chaff to the winds of the internet. I have the luxury of writing about it almost dispassionately. 

[I'll confess that my lack of passion {or compassion} for a story in which someone takes their own life probably doesn't bother me as much as it should. Death, even tragic and avoidable death, is an aspect of the human experience that one inherently becomes desensitized to - unless it strikes you in a vulnerable part of your own soul. I don't believe this to be an admirable trait, but it's also probably necessary if you want to function - particularly as a journalist.]

I will say that I have no desire to defend or to vilify Hannan, and I don't know how much of that I can ascribe to my own privilege. Do I, as a young, cis writer, somehow feel a subconscious urge to defend/identify with someone who made several mistakes that I could easily see myself making? 

[Again, this line of questions raises further doubts within me. Is it appropriate for me to even consider my own thoughts and feelings on this story when nothing will change except that maybe my friends on Facebook will be made aware of this controversy? The trauma that the story inflicted will remain, and I will remain incapable of fully processing it.

{Of course, is this line of questioning inherently devaluing of my own contribution <however meager> to the discourse? Should I automatically recuse myself from writing about things just because I can't feel them in the way that others can, or in the way that I would like to?

<We descend down the nautilus further and ask, Does it matter how I feel? Are my thoughts germane to the discourse on any level? Is all of this just an exercise in stupid hubris? This whole exercise sort of makes me feel like I'm being callous in the face of tragedy, and that's not the person I want to be.>}])

I found the following issues with Hannan's piece:

He was clearly trying to tell me something, which is why he began emphasizing certain words. Every time he said “she” or “her” I could practically see him making air quotes. Finally it hit me. Cliché or not, a chill actually ran up my spine.

Hannan's eureka moment is remarkably poorly worded. Not only does the spine chill imagery conjure up a sinister vibe, it's at this point that he (perhaps unintentionally) begins to suggest a correlation between Vanderbilt's gender and her duplicitous business practices.

Here is what I now know about Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, inventor of the Oracle GX1 putter. She was born a boy on July 12, 1953, in Philadelphia. She was given the name Stephen Krol, a person who has not received degrees from MIT or the University of Pennsylvania. She has been married at least twice, and the brother of one of Krol’s ex-wives says Dr. V has two children, possibly more.

This information may be pertinent to Hannan's investigation, but it isn't necessarily pertinent to the story of Essay Anne Vanderbilt, professional huckster. Also, a cursory viewing of any of the style guides for writing about trans people (which, in the wake of this, have been widely tweeted) would have immediately let Hannan know that the phrase "she was born a boy" is not appropriate.

(I am kind of interested to see how the language that we use when we talk about trans people evolves. "She was born a boy" contains an inherent disconnect between pronoun and noun, but functions as a piece of descriptive [if offensive] language. I wonder, as trans people and their stories become more integrated into the mainstream, if the rhetorical edifice that has been created around the group will begin to naturally erode? I suppose not anytime soon, especially as some of the more perverse denizens of the internet seem to take great joy in misusing pronouns solely for the purpose of hurting people. There's also the move toward gender neutral pronouns, which I don't see taking off, for no other reason than that people can't be bothered.)

Things get more complicated from there. Were I Hannan, I would probably have done my best to report the story without outing Vanderbilt or revealing her previous name, but he's already decided on his course of action.

She worked as general manager at Trax Bar and Grill, an LGBT bar in Kent, Washington. She was the subject of three separate harassment claims from her time there, including one from a male coworker who said she made “inappropriate comments about her breasts and genitalia.”

Again, we have a seeming conflation of Vanderbilt's identity with her aberrant behavior. Relating these harassment claims themselves is a bit of an ethical quandary outside of the outing issue. Hannan is clearly painting a picture of an unstable person who is defrauding her investors, but are these misdeeds germane to his story? (I don't think they are, but I also don't think anyone would have attacked Hannan for publishing them if the story had just been about a shady inventor, with no mention of Vanderbilt's trans status.)

Hannan continues with some more pronoun waffling, but seems to be doing his best to use masculine pronouns when referring to Vanderbilt at the time she identified as male and feminine ones when she identifies as female. (Again, style guides say to always use the pronoun that the subject requests, but I don't think Hannan was being deliberately hurtful in this instance.)

The darkest discovery was something that occurred after Krol had decided to live as Dr. V. In 2008, she tried to kill herself with an overdose of prescription drugs and carbon monoxide poisoning from closing herself in a garage with her car running.

What should have been a warning sign to Hannan about the potential destruction that his story could unleash instead turns into another chalk on the "Vanderbilt is Unstable" ledger. Upon realizing the depths of her troubles, he should have tried to find a graceful way to wrap up the story or spiked it.

(I'm not naive enough to believe any editor would spike a story like this.

[Also, this isn't to say that a history of self-destructive behavior is reason enough to stop reporting a story. In this instance, however, Hannan was reporting on what appeared to be a particularly at-risk person from a particularly at-risk group.])

What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself.

Stop doing this, Hannan. Stop equating her deceit with her identity.

Things get even weirder once Hannan backs off of his quest to uncover Vanderbilt's past. He goes back and talks to the investors that he seems to believe he is protecting, and they all seem to like the putter and take no issue with Vanderbilt's fabrications. So this whole expose eventually comes to naught, which could have been a funny ending, if Hannan had just written about his obsessive quest to expose a fraud who didn't actually hurt anyone. Instead, he exposes Vanderbilt's trans status to her investor and provokes her further. Vanderbilt eventually breaks off contact.

Over the course of what was now eight months of reporting, Dr. V had accused me of being everything from a corporate spy to a liar and a fraud. She had also threatened me. One of the quotes I was able to type down during our last conversation was this: “You have no idea what I have done and what I can do.” It’s not all that menacing when transcribed, but her tone made it clear she believed she could harm me. Yet despite all that, the main emotion I felt while reading her desperate, last-ditch email was sadness. Although there were times when I had been genuinely thrilled with the revelation that Dr. V’s official narrative didn’t line up with reality, there was nothing satisfying about where the story had ended up. People had been hurt by Dr. V’s lies, but she was the person who seemed to be suffering most.

Well, no one appeared to have been hurt in any lasting way, and any suffering imposed on Vanderbilt appears to have come from Hannan's prying. How much is related to her being exposed as a fraud and how much is related to her being exposed as trans, I can't say.

This doesn't excuse Vanderbilt's behavior. Had Hannan published the story without outing her to anyone, I would say that she earned any consequences that came her way. When you defraud people and agree to a story about said fraudulent enterprise, I can't blame a journalist for digging.

That's beside the point, though, as we'll never know what would have happened if Hannan had published that version of the piece.

Not long after she sent her email, I got a call from a Pennsylvania phone number that I didn’t recognize. It was Dr. V’s ex-brother-in-law, who represented the closest I had gotten to finding someone who could tell me what she’d been like in her previous life. “Well, there’s one less con man in the world now,” he said. Even though he hated his former family member, this seemed like an especially cruel way to tell me that Dr. V had died. All he could tell me was what he knew — that it had been a suicide.

The fallout from Vanderbilt's suicide (and it's reveal) are handled almost clinically. Hannan wraps up his piece and that's about it. There's no mention of the high incidence of suicide amongst the trans community and no real soul-searching by Hannan about whatever role he may or may not have played. It just ends, and then the commentary begins.

Some of that commentary suggests that Hannan's story is the reason that Vanderbilt killed herself. This is reductive and a bad way to talk about suicide and mental illness. Suicide is a uniquely personal act, and, just as it would be unfair to blame Vanderbilt's partner for her previous attempt, so would it be unfair to blame Hannan for her death.

Beyond all of the points I made throughout Hannan's piece, the thing that most baffled me was that it seemed that no one at Grantland thought to ask for the input of a trans writer or editor. Grantland is bothersome in many ways, but it is an outlet that strives for inclusivity. That they wouldn't think to use this simple stop-gap truly baffled this blogger.

(I didn't know at the time whether they had any trans writers. I would soon learn that they do not, but ESPN as a whole does.)

Other points about the gross insensitivity of the piece stand, and as I read them, I somewhat morbidly awaited the official response from Grantland.

I truly had no idea what to expect, as deliverer of said response was to be Grantland's Editor-in-Chief Bill Simmons.

Simmons is an avowed bro who has never done any reporting in his life. He somehow ended up the head of the most prestigious of ESPN's many appendages with his scintillating insights into which 80s starlet Rajon Rondo most embodies. Why any outlet looking to do serious reporting would entrust him with editorial oversight is beyond my ken.

I was surprised by the thoughtfulness of his piece when it went up this afternoon.

In it, Simmons apologizes and offers up the best explanation that he can.

To be clear, Caleb only interacted with her a handful of times. He never, at any time, threatened to out her on Grantland. He was reporting a story and verifying discrepancy issues with her background. That’s it. Just finding out facts and asking questions. This is what reporters do. She had been selling a “magical” putter by touting credentials that didn’t exist. Just about everything she had told Caleb, at every point of his reporting process, turned out not to be true. There was no hounding. There was no badgering. It just didn’t happen that way.

I have no way of knowing whether Simmons is telling the truth here, but if he is, I understand why Grantland and Hannan didn't seem to recognize how destructive the story could be to Vanderbilt. As far as Vanderbilt (and Hannan) knew at the time, the story wasn't going to out Vanderbilt.

Of course, Vanderbilt may not have believed Hannan when he claimed that he wouldn't out her. She may have seen his unearthing of her past as a violation of the "science not the scientist" agreement, and therefore been disinclined to trust him.

(I, personally, don't believe that Hannan violated said agreement when he researched Vanderbilt's credentials. He did not do so with malicious intent, and, when he discovered that she was a fraud, the story of the science and the scientist became inseparable - gender identity notwithstanding.)

Caleb’s biggest mistake? Outing Dr. V to one of her investors while she was still alive. I don’t think he understood the moral consequences of that decision, and frankly, neither did anyone working for Grantland. That misstep never occurred to me until I discussed it with Christina Kahrl yesterday. But that speaks to our collective ignorance about the issues facing the transgender community in general, as well as our biggest mistake: not educating ourselves on that front before seriously considering whether to run the piece.

This is unconscionable and speaks to the worst parts of sports reporting. It's a male dominated field that, up until the past decade, was the bastion of the "moralist" using thinly-veiled codewords to perpetuate racist and sexist ideas that were really only tenable in the backward world of sport. Recently, it's been a field at war with itself, as the progressive voices doing battle with the fuddy-duddies are dismissed as illegitimate by established powers.

Grantland is one of the outlets that attempts a synthesis of these styles, and it's baffling to me that Hannan (who is only 31) didn't realize how inappropriate it was for him to out Vanderbilt, even in "private." It's even more baffling that someone on the Grantland staff didn't recognize this.

As we debated internally whether to run the piece, four issues concerned us. First, we didn’t know about any of the legal ramifications. That’s why we had multiple lawyers read it. Second, we were extremely worried — obviously — about running a piece about a subject who took her own life during the tail end of the reporting process. How would that be received externally? Was the story too dark? Was it exploitative? Would we be blamed for what happened to her? And third, we worried about NOT running the piece when Caleb’s reporting had become so intertwined with the last year of Dr. V’s life. Didn’t we have a responsibility to run it? The fourth issue, and this almost goes without saying: Not only did we feel terrible about what happened to Dr. V, we could never really know why it happened. Nor was there any way to find out.

1) Don't lead with that, Bill. It seems callous.
2) Justifiable concerns.
3) Irrelevant.
4) Tasteless, but honest?

Maybe that should have been enough of a reason to back off. In fact, we almost did. Multiple times. We never worried about outing her posthumously, which speaks to our ignorance about this topic in general. (Hold that thought.) We should have had that discussion before we posted the piece. (Hold that thought, too.) In the moment, we believed you couldn’t “out” someone who was already dead, especially if she was a public figure.

Not knowing that post-humous outing was wrong is ridiculous and stupid, but believable, and again leads me to think that neither Hannan nor Grantland had any malicious intent in reporting the story. This could be wishful conjecture on my part, and I acknowledge it as such. Simmons is also really stretching the definition of "public figure."

(I don't know why I seem to want to believe that Hannan and Grantland didn't intend to out Vanderbilt while she was alive, especially after their bungling makes it clear that their grasp of trans issues is less a grasp and more some sort of half-hearted swat. I do though. I don't know if it's because I want to believe this all could have been avoided. Come to think of it, I don't know why I'm seeking a justification for this story to exist at all. My life would not be any different if this story had never been reported, but Vanderbilt may still be alive.)

Whether you believe we were right or wrong, let’s at least agree that we made an indefensible mistake not to solicit input from ANYONE in the trans community. But even now, it’s hard for me to accept that Dr. V’s transgender status wasn’t part of this story. Caleb couldn’t find out anything about her pre-2001 background for a very specific reason. Let’s say we omitted that reason or wrote around it, then that reason emerged after we posted the piece. What then?

Simmons is correct in saying they should have solicited input from the trans community. He's incorrect in saying that Vanderbilt's identity is a part of the story, had Grantland not reported it, Deadspin or some other blog would have eventually unearthed that part of it and Grantland would likely have been praised for doing the right thing in not reporting it.

Before we officially decided to post Caleb’s piece, we tried to stick as many trained eyeballs on it as possible. Somewhere between 13 and 15 people read the piece in all, including every senior editor but one, our two lead copy desk editors, our publisher and even ESPN.com’s editor-in-chief. All of them were blown away by the piece. Everyone thought we should run it. Ultimately, it was my call. So if you want to rip anyone involved in this process, please, direct your anger and your invective at me. Don’t blame Caleb or anyone that works for me. It’s my site and anything this significant is my call. Blame me. I didn’t ask the biggest and most important question before we ran it — that’s my fault and only my fault.

I don't have much to add here. Simmons takes responsibility, but in a way that really has no consequences or meaning beyond being a symbolic act that any editor would do.

That mistake: Someone familiar with the transgender community should have read Caleb’s final draft. This never occurred to us. Nobody ever brought it up. Had we asked someone, they probably would have told us the following things … 

1. You never mentioned that the transgender community has an abnormally high suicide rate. That’s a crucial piece — something that actually could have evolved into the third act and an entirely different ending. But you missed it completely. 

2. You need to make it more clear within the piece that Caleb never, at any point, threatened to out her as he was doing his reporting. 

3. You need to make it more clear that, before her death, you never internally discussed the possibility of outing her (and we didn’t). 

4. You botched your pronoun structure in a couple of spots, which could easily be fixed by using GLAAD’s style guide for handling transgender language. 

5. The phrase “chill ran down my spine” reads wrong. Either cut it or make it more clear what Caleb meant. 

6. Caleb never should have outed Dr. V to one of her investors; you need to address that mistake either within the piece, as a footnote, or in a separate piece entirely.
(And maybe even … ) 

7. There’s a chance that Caleb’s reporting, even if it wasn’t threatening or malicious in any way, invariably affected Dr. V in ways that you never anticipated or understood. (Read Christina Kahrl’s thoughtful piece about Dr. V and our errors in judgment for more on that angle.) 

To my infinite regret, we never asked anyone knowledgeable enough about transgender issues to help us either (a) improve the piece, or (b) realize that we shouldn’t run it. That’s our mistake — and really, my mistake, since it’s my site. So I want to apologize. I failed.

It's here where I admit that I don't know what I would do if I had been Bill Simmons in this situation. Neither his publication, nor his writer, planned on or threatened to out Vanderbilt. Still, she killed herself, possibly due to pressure from Hannan's reporting. What do you do with the story now that she's dead? You could do what they did, you could spike it, or you could try to rewrite it tastefully. Honestly, none of those options really appeal to me.

So for anyone asking the question “How could you guys run that?,” please know that we zoomed through the same cycle of emotions that so many of our readers did. We just didn’t see the other side. We weren’t sophisticated enough. In the future, we will be sophisticated enough — at least on this particular topic. We’re never taking the Dr. V piece down from Grantland partly because we want people to learn from our experience. We weren’t educated, we failed to ask the right questions, we made mistakes, and we’re going to learn from them.

"Learning experiences" are often overvalued. It's a sentimental trick we play on ourselves to try to escape the shame of past failures. In situations where a life is lost, the "learning experience" maxim rings even more hollow.

It's also the only response Simmons can have in this situation. You may think it's a deplorable sentiment for Grantland to whitewash a death with this hackneyed idea, but what's the alternative? At a certain point, the phrase "blood from a stone" comes to mind. Grantland fucked up in a profound way. That's the thing about tragedy, it's profoundly pointless and people will do whatever they can to construct a meaning around it. Grantland (and the media at large) using this experience to ensure that something like this never happens again in the world of journalism doesn't in any way mitigate the loss of Vanderbilt's life, but it will hopefully serve as a sobering reminder of how journalistic intentions can have mortal consequences.

If you've somehow made it all the way through my drivel, I'd encourage you to read What Grantland Got Wrong - a piece by ESPN baseball writer and trans woman Christina Kahrl. She's a better writer than me and offers a real perspective on this issue.