20 Dec 2024 8 min read

Not That You Asked: Our Year In Things, 2024

You have never asked less

This publication debuted with a best-of-year list of things for 2023: that halcyon age of half-remembered wonder and coconut-scented innocence.

Things are… different now, and it may be hard to see the appeal in reading (or in fact writing) another such list as we all stare gap-jawed while the worst people imaginable divvy up the leftovers of our civilization.

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But let’s indulge ourselves for a moment. Let’s preserve some memories that we can cherish as we toil in our assigned defamation apology camps and Fartcoin mines.

Give 2024 this if nothing else: it’s better than 2025 is going to be.

Athlete of the Year: Bo Nix

Bo Nix shines for Broncos, nearly helping them end the rival Chiefs' perfect start to the season | AP News

I know that Caitlin Clark had a good year, and I’m happy for her. I also know that Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani did pretty well at baseball, an antique sport from the nineteenth century which probably became popular because its main competition as a pastime was church. Baseball is a historical reenactment for nerds after they get done play acting the Battle of Antietam.

The average baseball game takes seven hours, and there are, I’m guessing, fourteen-hundred games in a regular baseball season, followed by what seems like six months of post season.

The primary content of baseball games is a gaggle of indie sleaze-era Williamsburg hipsters in mullets and transparent pinstripe outfits all glancing meaningfully at one another until someone finally throws a ball, maybe, and then somebody else hits that ball, or not, and they all run around a little, but it usually turn outs to not matter at all, so they just do it again until I change the channel.

Whatever, leave me out of it. Not That You Asked is my newsletter, and I can declare that the Athlete of the Year is whoever I want it to be, so it is Bo Nix.

Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson may have better QB ratings, but Bo Nix overcame a tragic haircut and a name that would be more appropriate for a Lovecraftian demon-god to (probably) propel my beloved Denver Broncos all the way to the Wild Card, which a lot of people will tell you has more to do with Denver’s excellent defense. Again, whatever. It is fun to type the words Bo and Nix. Congratulations, Bo Nix.

Runner up: Raygun.

Best Movie I Haven’t Seen: Nosferatu

I’ve been yipping and skittering around like a hysterical chihuahua since I heard that Robert Eggers was doing a Nosferatu remake, just thrilled down to the darkest, gothest cockles of my heart, trying to tide myself over with occasional viewings of my beloved Herzog version. I’m calling it now, sight unseen, Nosferatu is the best film of 2024.

Runner Up: The Brutalist

Worst Movie I Haven’t Seen: A Complete Unknown

Again without even having to see it, I can confidently state that this will be the most unnecessary jukebox biopic of 2024, including Bob Marley: One Love. The good news is that the Criterion Channel is streaming Don’t Look Back for free, and you don’t even need an account to watch it.

Or you could revisit Scorcese’s No Direction Home, or Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. Or see if you can score an invite to a riverhouse karaoke session, where I regularly bust out a heart-melting rendition of Don’t Think Twice, It’s Allright.

Best Movie I Did Actually See: The Substance

People were surprised when this notorious body horror gross-out was submitted as a comedy to the Golden Globes, but me and the roomful of people I watched it with were laughing throughout, I guess just at the gonzo balls-to-the-wall-ishness of it all.

The Substance is a crazy movie about how we mistreat women and their bodies, but I found it personally poignant because it’s also about losing a fight against your younger self, which I think everybody over forty can identify with. My own younger self, that handsome son of a bitch, has been absolutely kicking my ass for years.

Musician of the Year: Sam Gendel

My Replay (Apple’s knockoff version of Spotify Wrapped) surprised me this year: the artist I listening to the most was saxophonist Sam Gendel. What a way to find out that you’ve aged out of punk rock! I am who I am now, I guess, and I need creamy atmospheric jazz burbling in the background as I putter around the house in a cardigan and reading glasses.

Jesus I really went nuts on Belle and Sebastian this year

Apple doesn’t know everything about me though, and the record I actually spent the most time with in 2024 was Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee. Everybody loves Cindy Lee, and everybody’s right.

Restaurant of the Year: Cooper’s Seafood House: Scranton, PA

Quick, what’s the one thing you know about Scranton, Pennsylvania that doesn’t include a cadaverous president so advanced in age that he had to surrender the country to a fascist regime after a disastrous debate performance?

That’s right, it’s the beloved NBC sitcom The Office.

At first you could mistake Scranton’s Cooper’s Seafood House for an Office-themed restaurant:

**The Office** meets the scary pirate ghosts from **Scooby Doo**, or something

Lesser restaurants do not have a gift shop

But then you go further into the vast multi-roomed complex, or up into the lighthouse/bar on the roof, and dozens of other themes emerge.

A fish tank containing a life-sized man in a Victorian diving bell fighting a life-sized shark

Press the big red button to hear the theme from **Gilligan’s Island**

I went with friends in October and they sat us in what they call the Train Room, which was temporarily converted to the Oktoberfest room. When I went back with Maya in November, it had been converted to the Christmas room. There was a wedding going in in the next room. Both times I lacked the courage to sample anything from their list of novelty martinis, but we’re planning to get back the next time we find ourselves in the greater Scranton area.

Runner Up: Uliassi Restaurant Senigallia, Province of Ancona, Italy

The food was better but it was really lacking in the fun themes department.

Essay of the Year: How Do We Write Now?

National treasure Patricia Lockwood wrote the most important essay of 2024, and she did it in 2018.

That your attention is in one sense the most precious part of you, it is your soul spending yourself, to teach you that there’s always more.

That your attention is a resource that can be drafted, commandeered, militarized and made to march — like youth, passion, or patriotism.

That your attention can be diverted and used to power the devil’s Hoover Dam.

That we live in a time where people pay to be locked in a room together and have to find a way out. That this is fun to us now.

That if you’re trying to write through a wall you’re not alone.

That if you’re drinking more you’re definitely not alone.

That if you feel like you’re being slowly digested by a sarlacc pit you’re not alone.

That if your deodorant doesn’t seem to be working anymore you’re not alone. We stink together.

That if you sometimes try to comfort yourself by thinking, Cows don’t know about him, you’re not alone.

But the pure concentration that you live in when you write a poem is still there, is still just beyond us as the green dimension. It can still be accessed through the door of yourself, you can still swing it open, though the hinges scream.

Because it is a place of pure concentration it can wait forever for you.

I think that we go there when we die, but do not have to wait to die to go there.

If you live there all the time you probably grow at a different rate, like Robin Williams in that movie where he was actually a mental child except super hairy all over.

The first necessity is to claim the morning, which is mine. If I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day. If I don’t look out a window right away the day will be windowless, it will be like one of those dreams where you crawl into a series of smaller and smaller boxes, or like an escape room that contains everyone and that you’ll pay twelve hours of your life for. If I open up Twitter and the first thing I see is the president’s weird bunched ass above a sand dune as he swings a golf club I am doomed. The ass will take up residence in my mind. It will install a gold toilet there. It will turn on shark week as foreplay and then cheat on its wife.

I can’t believe that we need to refer back to this now. We thought we were done with all of this! We aren’t, and we should admit now that we never will be. The American form of governance (gerontocracy) turns out to have several fatal flaws: the electoral college, lifetime appointments for the supreme court, and the optional nature of law enforcement for elected officials who lack the capacity for shame. Good luck to all of us!

And now the one we’ve all been waiting for…