Dear Mister Met
Hanna-Barbera, a leprechaun, and the ontological uncertainly of the postmodern male
One of the most important things I did since my last letter was get incredibly high and watch a forty minute compilation of Hanna-Barbera theme songs on YouTube. This was on a Friday night while other people were out having fun with other people and I was getting incredibly high because, no matter what people say, it is better to be out having fun with other people than it is to stay home by yourself, just like it is better to win in the first round of the playoffs than it is to lose in the first round of the playoffs. Comparison is the thief of joy, however, and mindset matters, and we all have agency, so I stayed at home alone on a Friday and I got very high and I watched the Hanna-Barbera compilation on YouTube and I declared it important and so it was.
Additionally, I was accepting hospitality, which is also solemn, and also important. An explanation: In early October, a leprechaun gave me and Amelia an extremely generous amount of weed. We were on Union Street, in Olean, New York, and we saw, between two buildings, each well over a century old, a door. The door opened to an alley. The alley was covered with a ceiling which was decorated with pressed tin. There, in that alley, were two counters. At the first counter, the counter closest to the street, was a woman selling plants. She gave Amelia a plant and a waterer made of blown glass. Sometimes, even in Olean, New York, people are kind and magic is real. It’s not for nothing that they call the surrounding mountains Enchanted.
Enter the leprechaun. This was not a leprechaun like that one in Mobile, Alabama, this leprechaun was real. It’s fair to doubt, but he was short, stout, had a shaggy red beard, wild red hair, and a green shirt that declared he was “100% Highrish”. All that and a pot of gold.
By pot of gold I mean drawer full of weed.
He gave us so much weed. An insane amount of edibles. To deny that gift would be to deny the reality of kindness and magic. We had a moral obligation to accept the gifts given to us. We all have a moral obligation to celebrate good things when they happen. To notice them and say yes to them. That obligation is equal to the obligation to grieve bad things. To notice them and mourn them.
“Roles are changing for both men and women. Women are being pressured…to believe that their past status was brought about by male oppression. At the same time men…are being accused of being oppressors – and angry oppressors at that. The whole process of change is taking place in a atmosphere of the greatest bad temper, and a tremendous amount of secondary hostility is being generated that in itself poses a threat to a good outcome.” – Margaret Mead, as quoted in Of Boys and Men Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves.
The Hanna-Barbera theme song montage spans the late 1950s to the mid 1980s. We are more removed from the mid 1980s than the mid 1980s were from the late 1950s, but culturally and politically we’re only just now coming straight outta Compton even though that album came out in 1988.
I blame syndication, mostly. Cable television packaged up reruns and placed them on the same shelf as current events. Streaming takes that same limited context, flattening programming, flattens it even more, and removes any and all context. We can encase ourselves in amber and live there for hours at a time. We can spend most of our days there and lose track of the world.
Night Court debuted in 1984. In 1984 it was zany to have lady lawyers. The percentage of lawyers who were ladies in 1984 was in the single digits. Now ladies make up over 40% of lawyers. There are so many lady lawyers that it is my understanding that we can do away with the lady modifier and simply call them lawyers.
Nick from Family Ties was good for a laugh. He was a beloved, harmless goof. He was kind, sincere, and loved Mallory, but the rest of the characters and everyone watching knew what he didn’t know which was Mallory couldn’t marry him, nobody should marry Nick and nobody wants their daughters to marry Nick, not even Good Liberals like the Keatons. He was a sensitive artist for godssake!
Where is Nick today? In and out of prison, hooked on opioids, currently living with his mother. [Laugh track!]
Which brings us to Seinfeld. I know you’re a big fan. Seinfeld is as dated as these other sitcoms even though it came of age in the 1990s and, broadly, culturally and politically, we haven’t caught up to the 1990s. One of the most adorably dated aspects of the show is the premise that men have friends. If Seinfeld were made today, Jerry would be married with kids on the Upper East Side and a typical scene would go something like this:
EXTERIOR, DAY, ON A PARK BENCH
JERRY and TIM WATLEY are each sitting with a toddler strapped to their chest.
JERRY: Lemme ask you something: When’s the last time you reached your full potential?
TIM: Full potential?
JERRY: Yeah, you know. Your [looks down past his child to his crotch] full potential.
TIM [Beat]: Oh! [Thinking, looks down at his child].
JERRY: That long?
From there JERRY would bring up BOB SACAMANO.
He have kids? TIM WATELY would ask.
Yeah, four.
He ever take them to the park?
Nah.
How’s his potential?
It’s full. Very full.
How do you know?
My wife and his wife are in the same book group.
So?
Well they don’t talk about books, I can tell ya that.
[Beat.] Oh!
Other plots would involve Jerry getting high on Friday nights and watching YouTube. Elaine would be on Sex In the City, George would be Newman, and Newman would have shot himself. Kramer would be … about the same. There are advantages to being out of step.
None of them would ever interact with each other.
“A model of stable masculinity would include a relatively high degree of congruence between public discourses about masculinity and the public and private practices of masculinity. For individual men, there would be a sense of ontological security.” David Morgan, as quoted in Of Boys and Men Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves.
From the late 1950s to the mid 1980s, in the world according to Hanna-Barbera, which is the world in which we have encased ourselves culturally and politically, there was more or less one hero and more or less one villain. The hero is the American nuclear family and the villain is the collective forces that strain the American nuclear family. (The one exception to this rule was the stoner dog and his stoner crime fighting friends.) Prehistory: the American nuclear family. Space Age future: the American nuclear family. Under the sea: the American nuclear family. In a volcano: the American nuclear family. On the moon or some shit: the American nuclear family. The heroic family includes the breadwinning male, the able and supportive (if long-suffering) female mate, a boy child, a girl child, and one dog or dog-like creature.
Mister Met, you and Missus Met have a good thing going, partners in business and life. Can I ask you, honestly, what would happen if you stayed home? If you took care of a big-headed Baby Met? What if, once Baby Met got grown, you decided you’d rather paint than go back to your old job? Subjectively and objectively, Missus Met is much better at her job than you are. No offensive. Game recognize game. People like her more and she’s a better dancer. You wouldn’t need the money. Would you, existing and painting, be enough? Would you be okay with that? Would she be okay with that?
The dog or dog-like creature can exist and be enough, but you, Mister Met, and I, must create and recreate the justification for our existence.
“The key to the recovery of masculinity does not lie in any wistful hope of humiliating the aggressive female and restoring the old masculine supremacy. Masculine supremacy, like white supremacy, was the neurosis of an immature society. It is good for men as well as for women that women have been set free. In any case, the process is irreversible; that particular genie can never be put back into the bottle.” – Arthur Schlesinger Jr., as quoted in Of Boys and Men Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves.
You’re reading this at home, alone, aren’t you Mister Met? Missus Met is out, isn’t she? She’s out and she can stay out. She’s out and she can come home. There’s a place for her either way. She’s out and she’s just now realizing how out she is. She’s out and she’s just now realizing all the places she can go. She’s out and she’s realizing that she’s uniquely equipped to thrive in those places and she has been all along.
What are you going to do? Club her over the head and drag her back home caveman-style? That’s a pitiful thought. You, too, could get up and go somewhere. She’s strong and she wants you to be strong and get up and go somewhere. What if you got up and went somewhere? Where would you go?
All these connections I see between and among things that aren’t connected. It might seem fun and interesting to some people, maybe, at first. Charming, even. Perhaps exciting. Then it becomes confusing, but maybe intriguing. Eventually, though, in my lived experience, which, being a lived experience, is immutable and unimpeachable, it grows confusing and isolating and ultimately exhausting. I’m probably the kind of friend and partner who is best when they drop in and out of your life. A little goes a long way. The closest you want to get is living across the hall.
I know I said I was going to write a novel in November, but that didn’t happen on account of fall and other work and I bought the wrong ink for the printer even though I checked three goddamn times for what number cartridge to buy. Man, when you still buy the wrong ink after checking three goddamn times for what ink to buy it really takes a toll.
Then there was this whole mess with trying to make a new website and transfer the domain and set up a new email. I made lists and everything, read the How Tos, but I couldn’t figure out how to get them to go from the old place to the new place. Something about a DNS, which they say is like a post office. Helpful, except a post office is a building I can walk to and a DNS is invisible. The whole world of computers is like that. There’s the thing on the surface which isn’t really the thing at all, it’s just the thing your looking at. The real thing is buried underneath a lot of other things and to move the thing on the surface you have to move the thing at the bottom of all the other things.
Lots of people know that what you’re looking at is only the thing you’re seeing at not really the thing that matters, and even if they don’t know precisely how to move the things around, they know that, generally, there is a world beneath the world we see. Even if they are not experts, they have a fundamental understanding of how the world is built. There are people who watch a magic show and have no idea how the person did the trick, and they have no ability to do the trick, but they have an understanding that it is a trick. I can’t emphasize enough what an advantage those people have. If you don’t know it’s a trick, you live in a world of magic, and if you live in a world of magic, you are perpetually confused and often afraid. You don’t think magic is wonderful. If you think magic is wonderful, you don’t actually live in a world of magic, you live in the world of reality and recognize that magic is a trick. There’s a lot going on under the surface that you can’t see but you know it’s there, it’s available, theoretically at least, to anyone.
Have I told you the story about calling the plumber? I was trying to describe the problem to the guy and I says this thing isn’t working here and then there’s this problem over here and then we’ve got this problem up there. Then I says – And when I says this, I think I’m really on to something. Like, I think I’ve really cracked some code. Like, he and I are gonna pretty much be on the same page when I say this. – I says, I think it’s all connected. And he says to me he says, Well…it’s plumbing.
What I’m saying is, interesting though it may seem, it is not always fun and is in fact very isolating and often debilitating to see connections where they don’t exist, all the while being unaware of the connections that form the basis of civilization that are under your feet, over your head, and all around you.
What’s weird is I had set up my email but I didn’t know I had set it up. How zany!
You’re not supposed to compare, but Amelia picked up the right ink on her way from one thing to another. The thing I couldn’t do, she did in between two things. Eric found my emails, the thing I tried and tried and tried again and again to do. When he found them he said, to reassure me that I hadn’t caused him any inconvenience, It didn’t take me anytime at all. I was glad for that, and yet.
All that is to say I didn’t write a novel in November, but I do have a new website. Please visit from time to time. The new website is here. As you can see, it’s not elaborate, but I think it looks nice. You’ll notice there is a new book coming soon, and I’ve been working on a podcast. I’m proud of them both and I’d like you to check them out.
I also said that for every new subscriber I got in November, I would donate $10 to Movember in support of their work to improve men’s mental health. On November 1st, I had 273 subscribers, on December 1st, I had 272. So I guess I they owe me $10? I’m suing them in small claims court and I’ll let you know how it goes.
Have you been following this news about Twitter? I really thought it was going to work out, but I guess not every billionaire with scores to settle can be Steve Cohen. If you are inclined, I’m poking around on a new site called post.news. It seems like it might have some legs. It’s a lot like Twitter as far as giving and receiving information, but much more committed to content moderation. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t, but I’m rarely early to any party and it feels fun to be in on the ground level, as they say. It’s still in Beta, which I think is that thing where you like to watch other men have sex with your wife. I haven’t seen anything like that yet, but, like I said earlier, I’m not that tech savvy.
Yabba Dabba Doo,
Robert Drinkwalter
PS - If you are into that thing where you like to watch other men have sex with your wife, let me know. I have a friend who could help you out.