That Andy Dalton Feeling

It’s a strange and sad fact of how sports works in this moment that the number of people who cared about poor Andy Dalton being benched by the ultra-moribund Cincinnati Bengals and the Washington Nationals winning the World Series in thrilling and satisfying fashion is pretty close. But when we recorded this Deadcast, we didn’t know that was going to happen. We didn’t know about a lot of things, and while we talked about Andy Dalton and the broader Andy Dalton vibes of the moment, we also talked about all the other things we were then unsure about.

All of those things have since cleared up significantly in the worst possible ways. It felt strange to do the podcast, but also good to be talking to my friends in a familiar setting, about all the stuff that was so heavy on our minds. The Funbag was, as always, full of pure horrors, but also please consider what the rest of the office was like.

It’s hard to know what to say, here, because none of it beyond “thank you and goodbye” is necessary. One of the painful things that comes with hearing your own voice for a living—in your head as you write and edit, on podcasts, in little videos that start playing on a website either with or without your consent—is that you wind up editing yourself very harshly even when you are not really editing. Thoughts or feelings that you have, very much for real, scan as mawkish or hackish or unworthy, which in point of fact they would be were they to appear in a blog post or some conversational bit, but which also doesn’t matter, because those things are what you are thinking or feeling. I am doing a lot of that. It’s exhausting. It is tough to hear myself over the noise of it.

We all say it in the podcast, but I will say it again here: What’s happened here is a shame, and a terrible waste, but we are all very much in your debt. Everything that we did, smart and stupid and good and bad, was made possible for us by you. The joy that we took in doing it came in great part from doing that work together, but also very much from you all being there with us for it. To be able to say “poo poo” and “pee pee” into a microphone every week was one of the greatest pleasures and privileges I’ve had in my professional life, and if that statement looks both profoundly depressing and criminally mawkish then buddy, You should hear what all the other shit in my head sounds like. So I will just say thank you, again.

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