the &&&& edition

NF, One L
Issue #25

1. I've been driving by this billboard virtually every day all summer long. It's at the corner of an interminably long, six-way intersection of the kind only Seattle could conceive of, let alone put up with. Seriously, there are many fine aspects to (formerly) living in Seattle, but I would say without question, and I have driven in some of the worst places around the globe, Seattle is logistically the dumbest on the planet in terms of street layout. 

2. Anyway, that means I spend a lot of time considering the personal lives of Youkie and Brian Chambers. At this point they feel more like real friends to me than many real friends who turned out not to be either real, or friends. That's not a complaint, I think simply a component of life no matter who you are or where you're from. I don't think we are actually designed (by the hand of the Tetragrammaton) to spend too much time in one another's close vicinity, unless of direct blood reproduction, or current fleshy intimacy. It's just too much work being us (by which I mean me) on a day-to-day basis to allot time to otherwise.

3. So, Youkie & Brian, Home & Auto, Bundle & Save, this summer's HOTTEST ampersand power couple.

4. I feel like, as Youkie stares me down on the regular in my idling, extremely powerful precision automobile, while the light remains amber for quantum levels of time, that she's hip to a few things. For instance, the absolute fallacy and worthlessness of the Madoff-style scheme that is selling or owning insurance, whether home & auto, bundled & saved. Youkie, in a very endearing way, is letting us all know she's in on the Big Joke, which is that State Farm, on both an individual and corporate level, will do every last thing within its power to pay you little or nothing in every single accidental/tragic context, since that is really its sole actuarial function, but despite that reality, we can still all have a good chuckle over cocktails down at the local while breaking down insurance as a hilarious concept, and its misguided legal necessity, right?

5. Youkie gets it. Youkie gets me. Youkie knows I know she has to make a living somehow. Like, at least she's not tackling people in the streets with a Kevlar ICE vest on, right? And she's not a meter maid (can you, Beatles Aside, even say that anymore?), which has to be the world's most evil job, even beyond second assistant to the lead assistant on Pete Hegseth's Hair Assist Team. What Youkie definitely is not, I feel, is a Chambers.

6. Brian looks like a good guy. Brian looks like every single Seattle dad I stood on the sidelines next to at my daughter's soccer and volleyball games for ten straight years. Brian looks solid, big sports fan, digs craft beer, a bit churchy when it serves him, not shy with the pomade, rocks the black T and jacket Seattle Vice thing with a certain elán. Brian's smile comes as naturally to him, and therefore me, as tiny mounds of vole dirt do in my yard every August morning. 

7. The thing is, I feel like Brian would sell me sixteen million dollars worth of Soft Prostate Insurance without blinking an eye, and then buy a Tesla and Seahawks luxury box tickets with the fine print. Seems like (and to be fair, I should stipulate this is entirely based on gazing repeatedly at this billboard while inhaling Suburu exhaust, and therefore is a deeply unfair set of presumptions I should probably be made to leave the state for) in the end, Brian is not in on the joke. Despite his ready smile, Brian is dead serious, because Brian believes in insurance like Brian believes in breathing, both as pleasure and necessity. And a conduit to cash money that Brian can spend on things for the betterment of Brian, and to some lesser degree, Youkie.

8. But, you know, just when you're feeling all superior about The World's Brians in relation to your personal non-Brian-ness, just when you've determined, with certainty, that there's something not quite kosher beneath the Pat Riley slick-back, often these blowhardy Brians turn out to be really solid dudes in a pinch, and not at all the Don Johnsons you pegged them for. Like, Brian just might be that Brian who helps you patch your roof in a downpour, or picks you up when stranded on I-5 outside Tacoma, or just leans over and says something real and penetrating and humane, and it is in these times that you begin to think perhaps your sarcasm, endless judgement, and deep well of cynicism say a lot more about you than, say, the inner Brian Chambers.

9. I mean, that's all possible, right? The old gaze into the dappled shallows of Narcissus routine? I guess I feel like, aside from certain aspects of the likelihood of theological claims, overall historical accuracy as judged by deep historical reading, musical deconstruction (in particular the sub-genre of 70s Free Jazz), and betting on the NBA, I might just be wrong about everything. 

10. That said, if you gave me a FREE YUKIE bumpersticker, I'd probably stick it on a bumper. Not my bumper, because I do not endorse or believe in the efficacy of bumper stickers or defacing the aesthetic lines of a very powerful precision automobile with logos or banal statements, but someone else's bumper, certainly. Like, any random Tesla's.

11. We constantly leave, metaphorically and literally, one world behind & newly enter another. 

12. Bundle & Save.