Weird day today, as I had one of those nights of constant thought while trying to sleep and found that I could not. Too much background noise in my own head, too many thoughts about a dozen different tangential lines. Too much noodling over possibilities, avenues, right and wrong pathways to take. At two different points I sat up defeated, tried to do something more concrete, felt myself tiring, set it aside, then slipped right back out of that sliding consciousness and into the miasma of thoughts.
Tonight, we’ll try better not to drink the late coffee.
What I read
I spent some time this morning reading the newest issue of Capital Gains, from Byrne Hobart. I came to read Byrne as the natural step from reading Matt Levine and then Patrick McKenzie, who form a sort of cabal of interesting thought on capital, finance, money, and tech. I can’t say I read every thing thoroughly, or that I thoroughly understand everything I read, but building their insights into my wider understanding of the tech world has helped me immensely to understand flavors of Why behind What that I wouldn’t otherwise have any insight into.
What I watched
The final match of the UEFA Champions’ League group stage. International soccer is weird for an American to try and get into, and for most fans, there’s a story at some level of depth about how they came to the team they support. Many are the fans of Real Madrid or Manchester United, who came to that fandom the way Cowboys fans outside central Texas came to root for the star. For others, there’s some ancestral tie, or a love for a team shared with a friend or family member that brought them also into the fold.
I chose to root for Manchester City out of spite.
I’m a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan, which happened before I lived in Tampa, adopting the hometown team of the town my father relocated to after his divorce. It was a way to bond with him from across a country, to have a shared rooting interest in something.
The owners of the Buccaneers, the Glazer family, first purchased shares in the storied club Manchester United the year after they won a Super Bowl, then steadily increased their ownership over the next two years. After pumping all of their funding into United, suddenly their desire to improve the Buccaneers began to wane, to where the team felt like an afterthought.
Right around 2006, after I first moved from Florida back to Wisconsin, I began spending a lot of time with friends who’d grown to be significant soccer fans. Through them I saw the beauty and the appeal of the sport, and after a time, looked for a team of my own to root for. And lo, did I find, that United was not the only team in Manchester. They, the new jewel in the eye of the owners I despised, had a cross-town rival. An upstart with a long history of struggle, who had recently found their footing again in the top division of English soccer, and who would prove to be a thorn in the eye of the Glazers’ jewel. I became a fan of Manchester City.
Not long after I chose the club, so did new owners. Deep pocketed oil wealth was still a fairly new thing in the sport, and suspicion was not unearned. They did, however, do what the Glazers had seemingly refused to in Tampa. They invested in building a champion. In came new players and new managers, and a winning attitude. A revitalization of style and substance, and a growth into what now stands as a dynasty of success. It’s the one way I feel a connection to fans of teams like the Patriots. I had a front row seat (from 4000 miles away) to the carving of a monolith of success.
Soccer, for me, has been an experience that built from ignorance to fervence over the course of the last two decades. It wasn’t a natural fandom, not one inherited or inculcated at birth, but one I came to in adulthood, by way of connecting with friends and with a wider world. And so, at the bleary hours of weekend mornings, or on an otherwise quiet Wednesday afternoon, I find myself, for 90 minutes (plus stoppages), watching a wide green swath of turf, and the murmuration of 22 men across it. A beautiful game indeed.
What I listened to
A bit of Penelope Scott’s two new EPs, who I started listening to from TikToks. Modern music discovery’s weird for me. I was never a big magazine guy and haven’t ever had the kind of wide-ranging taste that brought new bands and musics to me organically in the way others seem to. But now that radio is in decline and algorithmic discovery is so oddly dissonant, I end up finding new music in ways I’d not imagined before. Like as backgrounds to 30 second videos leading to crawls down ladders into catalogues of unknown depth.
So yeah, Penelope Scott. Pretty good!
Projects In Progress
Webapp: As part of that recurrent insomnia, I did register a new URL for the project and get hosting set up for it. So there’s something, I guess?
Writing: I have this scene, that I have no idea how it connects more widely, or to what, that’s been kicking around my head for years now. It’s set in a future that, when I first had it, felt farther off, but for which I keep coming across random reference materials as the present catches up with that imagined future. I really wish it’d go tie itself to a longer plot line, or at least tell me how it becomes a more substantial vignette so I could stuff it into a short story, or something. Instead, just this recurring thought about a mechanical pigeon that doesn’t flutter off with the rest of the organic flock it has hidden within, at the loud report of a gunshot, from an office across the way, that it has sat staring at for hours.