Quickies

🎯 I bet seeing eye dogs look down at emotional support dogs: “This dude will die without me, but, y’know, good luck dealing with all that ANXIETY.”

🎯 “I want to see the leaves change colors” is a nice euphemism for “I want to go on vacation but never leave the car.”

🎯 So much of my life has been wasted trying to connect to the Bluetooth.

🎯 I could never handle an open relationship. I get stressed out just from having too many browser tabs open.

🎯 Is there a city out there that is NOT strong? Waiting for some town to come out and be like “Tulsa Weak (But In The Gym).”

🎯 It’s tough to tell whether you’re a truthteller or just an a–hole. Because people who are a–holes are always like: “I just tell it like it is.” And everyone else is all: “Well, I wish you would tell it like it isn’t then. Because you is a monster.”

🎯 I’m not new age. But almost. Guess you could say I’m new adjacent.

mattrubycomedy

A post shared by Matt Ruby (@mattrubycomedy)

🎯 Pretty privilege: People who are considered pretty are more likely to be hired, have higher salaries, and are less likely to be found guilty. We should all be walking up to hot people and yelling, “Acknowledge your privilege!”

🎯 Re: religious folks. It’s kind of insulting to God that you think he’s going to care whether or not you follow him, like he’s some kinda influencer. He ain't up in heaven going, “Oh, you finally subscribed to my Substack! Thank ME!”

🎯 Team Normal? Just because you’re slightly less corrupt than the most corrupt people ever, it doesn’t mean you’re normal. And I love that the “reasonable” people in his admin were like "I only supported him when he wanted to shoot protestors, not when he wanted to hang the Vice President." Oh, cool.

🎯 There should be a Black-ish but for Jews and we’ll call it Jew-i, um, Jew-esque.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

Men bond by insulting one another without really meaning it. Women bond by complimenting each other without really meaning it.

June 14th 2022

2 Retweets10 Likes

🎯 There should be a p0rn star named Feng Shui and her big trick is always knowing which direction to face.

🎯 We think old people are better at money but really they're just proof that compounding works.

🎯 Ambient - music for airports
Athleisure - clothes for airports

🎯 Happy Pride Month! FYI, cancel culture means there’s only one acceptable guy left from The Village People: the Native American chief. The rest of those guys are (village) persona non grata:

👎 Cop: BLM/ACAB
👎 Construction worker: #metoo/catcalling
👎 Soldier: violent/military industrial complex
👎 Cowboy: Texas = anti-abortion
👎 Biker: prob MAGA/def not eco-friendly

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A grave situation

The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument sits atop a hill in the middle of Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park and is there to remind us of bodies that once floated in the ocean.

To its north is Myrtle Avenue. Back in the day, it was called “Murder Avenue.” This side of the park is home to the Walt Whitman Houses. Despite their namesake, they are more prosaic than poetic, although former residents Ol' Dirty Bastard (ex-Wu Tang) and Bernard King (ex-New York Knick) both created poetry in their own ways. This side of the park has a basketball court and barbecue pits. The hill is steeper over here, and usually less crowded than the rest of the park. Even on sunny days, there’s ample room to lie down in the grass unbothered.

South of the monument, on the Dekalb Avenue side of the park, are tony brownstones in a historic district. The buildings here look like the ones you see during the opening credits to Sesame Street or The Cosby Show. This side faces a French café that serves mussels, contains  tennis courts, and is where young couples sit on blankets and sip wine out of red plastic cups. The park is flatter here and fills up on weekends.

The neighborhood has gentrified steadily in recent years. The invasion flows from south to north, floating past the monument on its way. In this civil war, the rebels are winning: Yoga studios are replacing barbershops.

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The imposing monument is a grayish-white, 149-foot Doric column topped by a 20-foot bronze urn. It looks like something out of ancient Greece and is visible from all over the neighborhood. When you’re lost, that urn can serve as a North Star to guide you home.

West of the monument is the emergency room of Brooklyn Hospital. The emergency room wait takes forever but, if a bee should fly into your mouth and sting you during a bike ride resulting in a lip that swells up in a grotesque fashion, they’ll give you a shot that brings down the swelling. Outside, doctors in scrubs take smoke breaks on the sidewalk. Inside, patients on the upper floors see the green landscape and get a clear view of the monument. Everywhere you go, it looms on the horizon.

The west side of the park is lined with buildings that are part of the hospital. One contains a stable of Ear, Nose, and Throat doctors who do an excellent job of removing ear wax. One doctor, an elderly Jewish man, accomplishes this task with an old fashioned device that looks like a tool once used to change oil in an Edsel. Another doctor, a young Pakistani woman, uses a high-powered water pick instead. Both get the job done.

On Saturdays, a farmer’s market adheres to the east side of the park. Here, kids stop at the ice cream truck while parents ask questions about kale. Late summer brings heirloom tomatoes – knotted, twisty, colored like purple fireworks and orange zebras. This tomato vendor also sells donuts and apple cider. In spring, there are herbs for planting. Winter brings butternut squash. In all seasons, the fishmonger brings in scallops and haddock from Long Island. The lady at the cheese stall will give you a taste of Womanchego while another vendor sells chicken pot pies, quiche, baklava, and fresh bread. There are men with clipboards who want you to switch to green energy and a stall that collects clothes for the needy.

Sometimes you’ll be filtering through fingerling potatoes and hear a siren. Then you’ll see an ambulance zoom past the ice cream truck toward the ER.  

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The west side of the park contains a 100-foot-wide grand staircase leading up to the plaza where the monument is located. The wide steps evoke the ones Sly Stallone jogs up in the first Rocky. In the middle of these stairs is what appears to be a small shed but is actually a tomb. Inside are the remains of thousands of prisoners who died on British warships during the Revolutionary War. It’s the largest mass grave in America.

Adjacent to the steps is one of the park’s two playgrounds. Children swing and run through a fountain’s spray there. Throughout the park, there are trees that scoop and stretch close to the ground. Squirrels and kids perch on their branches, hovering in midair.

Winter brings sledding. The park has a rare commodity in this borough: an incline. After a snowstorm, children emerge, their puffy, brightly-colored jackets vibrant against the vanilla snow. Some have conventional sleds, others use garbage can lids. They slide down the hill, barrel into each other, giggle, and do it all over again. After heavy blizzards, snowboarders build a ramp and get airborne.

On the southeast side of the park is a large open field where pickup soccer games serve as a cultural melting pot. Caribbean dreadlocks flap in the air, Spanish instructions are shouted, and Manchester United jerseys are worn. Small cones indicate the goal; no one plays goalie.

It’s dog heaven around here, too. Before 9am and after 9pm are off-leash hours when canines are allowed to run freely. There is a great deal of sniffing between them. Meanwhile, their owners clot together and there is a great deal of sniffing between them too. At night, many of the dogs wear blinking lights on their collars, giving the odd impression of barking fireflies or a doggie rave.

A few sections of the park are fenced-off. These zones don’t allow dogs, frisbee, soccer, or anything else fun. Fun is bad for grass. Inside the fenced-off areas, the grass is lush and green. Outside of these zones, the grass dissolves in a gradient from brownish yellow to dirt. The more popular the area, the more it turns into dust. 

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The monument has a brief plaque describing its purpose, but only a few people actually read it. It explains how the British collected prisoners on warships during the Revolutionary War. More people died on these ships (over 11,000) than in battle.

Being on those ships was brutal too. A 1778 edition of the Connecticut Gazette recounts the experience of Robert Sheffield, a prisoner who managed to escape from one.

The heat was so intense that [the 300-plus prisoners] were all naked, which also served the well to get rid of vermin, but the sick were eaten up alive. Their sickly countenances, and ghastly looks were truly horrible; some swearing and blaspheming; others crying, praying, and wringing their hands; and stalking about like ghosts; others delirious, raving and storming, all panting for breath; some dead, and corrupting.

Delirious, raving and storming. Oof. The Brits threw the dead overboard or ferried them to the Brooklyn shore where they were buried in shallow (and ineffective) graves. For decades afterwards, bones would surface and float along the shoreline. Locals were understandably disturbed by the occasional floating corpse. Eventually, the remains of the prison ship martyrs were collected and buried in a tomb near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Later, they were moved into 22 boxes inside the 25x11’ brick vault located in the park’s tomb.

Today, fitness boot camp class instructors bring their classes to jog past the tomb. When they get to the top of the stairs, they start doing squats and pushups. Sit on a bench and you’ll see teens from the nearby high school intertwined, joggers stretching, a bulldog huffing, and parents walking with strollers. You’ll also hear a constant din of wheels on concrete. It’s from the skateboarders who do tricks at the base of the monument. They skate along the base, perform tricks, film each other, and point fingers when one of their peers wipes out. Nearby, an elderly Asian man does tai chi in slow motion and ignores them.

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The park was designed by Frederick Olmsted, who also designed Prospect and Central Park. (Fort Greene Park was a collaboration with his partner, Calvert Vaux.) Olmsted had no formal design training and didn’t even commit to landscape architecture until he was 44. Before that, he was a New York Times correspondent to the Confederate states, the manager of a California gold mine, and General Secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War.

His designs invariably include winding paths since he wanted to create spaces where urban denizens could escape city grids. He wanted to remove distractions so minds could wander. In Olmsted’s parks, you’re always a little bit lost and a little bit found. You know the city is just outside the park’s boundaries, but inside you can fool yourself into thinking you’re surrounded by nature. Olmsted’s designs appear so natural that one critic wrote, “One thinks of them as something not put there by artifice but merely preserved by happenstance.”

Olmsted’s goal was to create parks where urban dwellers can forget about the surrounding city, a place where we can get lost and escape the din of traffic. In a way, this is also how we treat death. We know it’s there, looming on the periphery. But we choose to get lost in the living. 

There is now a restaurant in the neighborhood called Olmsted. It serves seared pollock with a tart cherry sauce and a panzanella with cherries and cherry tomatoes. It’s always packed for brunch.

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What if the prisoners on those British ships had received a proper burial upon death? Would there still be a memorial here?

There is something about bad burials we can’t abide. Soldiers, at great risk to themselves, will go back to retrieve the body of a fallen comrade. In 2019, the US negotiated with North Korea to return the remains of US servicemen killed during the Korean War, which ended in 1953. We desire closure. We need to bury; it’s the only way to get on with our lives.

The text on the black POW*MIA flag, a relic of the Vietnam era, reads, “You are not forgotten.” This flag is still flown all over America. But this flag is a fantasy. There is no one to forget, no one missing in action. There are no prisoners anymore. There’s no one left in the jungle.

When we say “you are not forgotten” and “never forget,” we make a backhanded confession. We insist on these things the way a hustler insists he’s your friend. These are promises we know will be broken because we always forget. It’s just a matter of time. Monuments are a way to delay forgetting, to extend the inevitable a few more generations.

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One of the most irresistible forces in the universe is New York City real estate. It is a city of Murphy beds and adults with roommates. Other places may separate their tombs and playgrounds, but not New York. Here, we skateboard and dance on bones and dust because there’s no room to do it anywhere else. 

Whenever my nephew visits, I take him to the park. When he was younger, he’d climb all over the playground but last time he visited, we played tennis. His time for playgrounds has come and gone.

During the George Floyd protests, the park was a meeting point for marches. Protestors even burned a police van to a crisp there. Now, there’s a Black Lives Matter memorial, filled with flowers, at the same spot.

And each summer, there’s a huge party at the base of the monument called the Soul Summit. The scene evokes a less gentrified time in Brooklyn. Hoop earrings and t-shirts are sold, vendors weave through the crowd hawking neon-colored beverages, and Jamaican women sell jerk chicken with rice and beans. The plaza overflows with people, DJs blare house music, and a daytime dance floor erupts. The crowd boogies on the remains of the martyrs. Perhaps the ghosts of the prisoners join the dance floor too. Once again delirious, raving and storming, all panting for breath.

5-spotted

🗯 Robert Thurman explains why, according to Buddhism, only love can defeat hatred.

Buddha said that hatred will never come to an end by hatred; only love can overcome hatred, is what he said, although usually in that tradition — the Burmese, or Theravada tradition — the Buddhists have a midway station where they talk about hatred, and the next step is non-hatred, and then, once you got non-hatred going, you can move over toward love and compassion.

And so even if you win one round in one life over one enemy, then you have become like that enemy by being violent, angry, whatever it may be, and then your rebirth will become something more appropriate to an inner state of anger and violence and hatred. And therefore, you’ll be more in conflict with your environment and with others. So, therefore, to love the enemy is highly rational from your own inner perspective, in that sense.

I keep thinking about how you can’t go from hatred to love, you first need to stop at non-hatred.

🗯 How entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts:

Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about “meritocracy” and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.

🗯 Why Strangers Are Good for Us. David Sax explains how engagement with strangers is at the core of our social contract.

Not so long ago, it was impossible to go through life without speaking, in some way, to a variety of strangers in your life: The bus driver, barista, security guard, receptionist, butcher, government clerk, store cashier and restaurant server were all humans who required at least the bare minimum of conversation. If you were at a playground a generation ago, halfheartedly watching some swing-set drama, ignoring the casual greetings of another parent would be extremely rude...Today, you can spend a week in New York, shopping, traveling, eating and working, and never utter a sound to another human being, or even take your headphones off.

🗯 Don’t hit golf balls in glass houses: In We Are All Phil Mickelson, Paul Ollinger explores willful ignorance and the blowback against Phil/LIV Golf.

Who among us would say “no” when an evil institution offers to pay us an unfathomable amount of money to do the thing we love the most? Phil’s dilemma is very distinct and high-profile, but each of us—consciously or unconsciously—commits numerous ethical compromises every day. [WaPo journalist Sally] Jenkins writes for a paper owned by Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon. With only the slightest effort, she could identify numerous examples of the online retailing giant’s practices that conflict with her stated principles, not limited to the fact that it serves Saudi consumers.

I am every bit as guilty of willful ignorance as anyone else. I read Jenkins’ article last Sunday on my iPhone, which was probably assembled in China and definitely contains cobalt, a metallic element that comes from the Congo where it is dug manually—sometimes by children—out of the ground at god knows what ecological and human cost. While reading, I sipped a Diet Coke, which is also available on the baking streets of Riyadh.

🗯 You know how sometimes you repeat or look at a word so much that it loses its meaning? That’s called semantic satiation.

Normally, when engaging with words, neurons in your brain will fire. Each word causes a specific neural pattern.

As the word is used repeatedly, the neural pattern continues to fire, causing activity in your central neural and peripheral sensorimotor to increase. Simply put, your brain is working very hard to do the same thing over and over again. 

Eventually, you begin to experience reactive inhibition, meaning your brain’s reaction to the word becomes less intense each time it is repeated. Since the normal reaction would be to think of the meaning, this action is inhibited, and we start to become confused about the legitimacy of the word in question.

I hope you’re satiated.

-Matt