Michael Estrin's Blog, page 17

High flier

Photo by Owen Lystrup on Unsplash

Whenever I fly Southwest I think about the time my sister, Allison, got sideways with that particular airline. Allison wanted to change her ticket, which the Southwest agent was happy to do, but only if Allison paid the change fee. At the time, Allison was a broke-ass college student, so paying a few hundred bucks to shave a lifetime off her trip back to school wasn’t going to happen. The prospect of her ludicrous journey—Los Angeles » Phoenix » Oakland » Salt Lake City » Nashville » St. Louis—probably put Allison in a mood. But it was the ticket agent’s adherence to Southwest corporate lingo that really set Allison off.

“You’ll need to purchase an upgrade if you want to change your ticket,” the Southwest agent said.

“Yeah, you already said that,” Allison replied. “But what I don’t understand is this: how is it an upgrade if I still have to fly Southwest?”

It was a sick burn, I’ll give my sister that. But Allison paid the price—in time, rather than money—for disrespecting the gods of air travel. Thankfully, the six months Allison spent trying to get back to school weren’t a total waste. She learned never to fly Southwest again, and I learned to purchase the most expensive ticket, which includes free itinerary changes.

Whether you upgrade to paid, or ride for free, the only way to get Situation Normal delivered to your inbox every Wednesday & Sunday is to pop your email address in the box below👇

After a week visiting Christina and me in Los Angeles, it was time for my mom to go back home to Las Vegas. A week earlier, I had flown to Las Vegas to drive Mom to Los Angeles in her car. The return trip would go as follows: drive Mom to Las Vegas, help Mom unpack, then hop on the last flight back to Burbank airport. It was a simple plan. But the day before our departure, the news reported that yet another winter storm was barreling toward California.

“Maybe we should wait until Wednesday,” Mom said.

“It’s no problem to change the flight,” Christina said. “Michael specifically bought a Business Select ticket just in case.”

I cringed a little at Christina’s use of Southwest corporate lingo. My ticket may have been Business Select, but on Southwest the words Business and Select don’t mean what they mean on other airlines.

“If we wait, we’ll definitely run into snow on our route,” I said. “Also, Wednesday is the Ides of March.”

“So?” Mom asked.

“So? So beware the Ides of March, Mom! Misfortune. Betrayal. That kind of shit does not bode well for a mother-son trip across the Mojave desert.”

“What time does the storm get here?” Mom asked. “Check the weather.”

I checked the weather report, as if storms, like Southwest flights, always arrive on schedule. Man checks his plans against his iPhone weather app, and the weather gods laugh their butts off, or something like that.

“It looks like it won’t start raining in LA until around nine or ten in the morning on Tuesday,” I said.

“We’ll be in Vegas by then,” Mom said.

“You will? Christina asked. “What time are you planning to leave, Linda?”

“As early as possible,” Mom said. “Is five too early? What about four?”

“Mom rides with the dawn patrol,” I told Christina.

“Linda is the dawn patrol,” Christina said.

Early on Tuesday morning, one day before the Ides of March, Mom and I set out for Vegas at dawn. We beat the rush hour traffic leaving Los Angeles. We got ahead of the rain and the snow that would soon blanket the high desert. Around ten in the morning, as we rolled past the Vegas strip, we saw that we had missed Sin City’s morning rush hour too. We made the trip in four hours flat. Legend has it, Mom’s Subaru Impreza is the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.

“You should change your flight,” Mom said. “There’s no point in waiting around until tonight.”

I texted Christina and asked her to change my flight to something in the afternoon. Then I helped Mom unpack. After that, we refueled Mom’s car, went for lunch, and stopped at the grocery store for some staples. By the time we got back to Mom’s place, I had a new flight, one that left at 3:30pm.

“You should probably get to the airport,” Mom said. “I’m going to take a nap.”

I hugged Mom goodbye, then left for the airport.

[image error]

Sharing isn’t just caring, it’s also the best way to help Situation Normal grow. So please hit that share button👇

Share

At the airport, I breezed through security because there weren’t a lot of people leaving Vegas on a Tuesday. Also, TSA PreCheck rules.

When I checked the departures board to confirm my gate, I saw that there was another flight back to Burbank that left an hour before the one Christina had booked for me. I checked my watch. I could make that flight, if I hurried.

The travel gods were smiling on me, so I honored them by hauling ass to the last gate in the C concourse. I zig-zagged past hundreds of travelers, raced by a modern Siren that took the form of a cupcake vending machine, and hurdled a drug sniffing dog that was having a moment outside a barbecue restaurant.

I reached the gate just in time to hear the Southwest agent announce that the flight had been delayed by forty minutes. If I changed to that flight, I might still get to Burbank a little earlier than if I took the flight Christina booked. But there was also the possibility that the delayed flight might experience further delays. As travel writer and infrequent flier William Shakespeare once wrote, when delays come, they come not in single cock-ups, but in battalions of never-ending cock-ups.

I decided I didn’t want to tempt the patience of the travel gods by changing my flight again. After all, the flight Christina had booked for me was still way ahead of my original plan. So I turned around and walked back to my original gate.

As I walked to the other end the C concourse at a slower, civilized pace, I thought about how I’d kill two hours. I wasn’t hungry, so food was out, even though the drug dog was right about how good the barbecue smelled. I don’t drink, so day drinking was also out. I stopped to browse the newsstand, but it was short on news and long on souvenirs and over-priced candy.1

As far as I could tell, my options for killing time at The Harry Reid International Airport were limited to people watching, paying ninety bucks for a chiropractic adjustment, and doing a deep dive on Harry Reid’s Wikipedia page. But then, above the din of grumpy travelers and garbled announcements, I heard the buffalo call my name.

Now, I’m not a gambler. Math and money stress me out, so I just don’t see the fun of betting your hard-earned moolah on a game where the odds are never in your favor. But when we took an Alaskan cruise last summer, Christina won big on a Buffalo slot machine.

What would Christina do, I wondered? The answer was obvious. She’d put some moolah on an electronic buffalo stampede. So I checked my wallet, the one that says bad mother fucker. I had two fifties and a ten. I knew Christina would bet one of the fifties, or maybe both. But I’m not a high roller like my wife, so I put a picture of Alexander Hamilton into the machine.

Exactly forty-seven seconds later, Hamilton was history. The buffalos told me to feed them my pictures of Ulysses S. Grant, but America’s most underrated general told me to tell the buffalos to get bent, which is exactly what I did.

With just under two hours to kill, I sat down at my gate. My plan was to listen to my audiobook, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris. But I couldn’t find my earbuds in my backpack.

From my wallet, I heard one picture of Ulysses S. Grant tell the other picture of Ulysses S. Grant that I was planning to feed him to a vending machine that vomits earbuds, adapters, and power cords. Typical Grant, I thought, always willing to sacrifice fifty of anything for one of something.

But instead of buying new earbuds, I rummaged through my backpack again. I didn’t find my earbuds because I had left them at home. But I did find a small Tupperware container that held two cannabis gummies.

I didn’t remember packing the drugs. I didn’t intend to transport the drugs across the lines of two states that had legalized the drug in question. But there I was on federal property holding illegal drugs in my hand.

Read more

Housekeeping | Bad Signs | They Might Not Be Giants

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

… and we’re back! I missed you, situation normies. As a careful custodian of your inbox, you know that I didn’t publish Situation Normal last Wednesday, or Sunday. At the top of the last email I sent you, I explained that I’d be taking a brief break. But people don’t read programming notes, I guess, because my inbox was overrun with emails asking questions like:

Are you still alive? Please respond!

Were you abducted by aliens? Please ask your alien overlords to respond!

Were you indicted? Please ask the court to respond to our habeas petition!

Did the U.S. government force you to sell Situation Normal to the Chinese government? Please ask Joe Biden and Xi Jinping to DM me!

Did Elon Musk buy the internet and accidentally unplug it? Please Tweet so I know we’re still connected!

The answers to those questions are as follows: I think so, I don’t think so, ask my lawyer, no comment, and he doesn’t have the money to buy the internet because he blew all his cash on Twitter—the Pet Rock of social media companies.

Kidding! I didn’t reply to those emails because my mom, aka “Gayle,” aka the scourge of the Situation Normal comments section was in town. Picking Mom up in Las Vegas, hanging out with her for a week, then driving her back to Vegas kept me busy. Thankfully, my travels yielded at least one story, which you’ll receive this Sunday.

The other thing that kept me busy was what people in the newsletter game call “housekeeping.” Now, you can eat off the Situation Normal floor. Also, Situation Normal has that new newsletter smell.

Kidding again! I don’t recommend eating off the Situation Normal floor, or any floor, unless the food has been on said floor for five seconds, or less. Then it’s safe because germs need a minimum of five seconds to hurt you.

For real, though, I did do some newsletter housekeeping. I revised the paid subscriber benefits for Situation Normal and updated the About page. You can read the new & improved About page here. There’s stuff about—wait for it—me. Plus, stuff about comments and recommendations on Situation Normal.

But one thing I want to talk with you about here, situation normies, is a change to my business model. Here’s the TL;DR: most Situation Normal stories will remain free, but sometimes Situation Normal stories will be for paid subscribers only.

Why the change? A little background.

For the first two years of Situation Normal, every single story was free. This made Situation Normal an easy newsletter to manage and an even easier community for situation normies to join. But the costs were 💯% on me, and as Situation Normal grew, those costs grew too.

What costs? Well, I spend anywhere between three and five hours putting together the Wednesday edition, and anywhere between ten and fifteen hours writing the Sunday story. In a typical week, I spend somewhere between thirteen and twenty hours making you laugh, and another hour or two making sure that the comments section is a fun and safe place for the approximately 2,600 situation normies who share and lurk in that space.

I’m happy to spend my time making you laugh, but the operative words in that sentence are spend and time. I don’t talk much about my day job here because non-disclosure agreements, like Wu-Tang Clan, ain’t nothing to fuck with. But I’m a freelance writer, which means I’m always balancing my day job (corporate communications stuff) with my side hustle (Situation Normal).

Three months ago, I turned on paid subscriptions to see if I could strike a better balance between my main hustle and my side hustle, without putting any of my stories behind a paywall. Since then, more than 50 situation normies have stepped up to underwrite humor for the larger situation normie community. I’ve been blown away by that support! It’s awesome, and frankly, it means a lot to me that so many people would say: Michael, I dig your work, here are a few bones, or clams, or whatever you call them, to help pay for all of the time you put into making strangers laugh.

Unfortunately, my writing schedule is still out of balance. To remedy that situation, I see two options. On the one hand, I could cut way back on Situation Normal. I don’t want to do this, and I don’t think situation normies want this either. On the other hand, I could convert more situation normies to paid subscriptions. I’m choosing the second option for two reasons.

First, if capitalism teaches us anything—and I hate the fact that it does—it’s more effective to charge some customers for the occasional story than to ask everyone to honor an honor system. Adam Smith may have been an asshole, but as far as economic models go, Adam Smith is our asshole.

Second, some stories like Big Dick Nixon Energy, Porn Conventions Are Decadent and Depraved (and also very mainstream), and We Took an Alaskan Cruise, I Kept a Log, for example, just take a lot of work to bring to you. I love writing those stories, and I know situation normies love reading them. But until the California Lottery makes me independently wealthy, or Christina’s boss lady business prowess makes me a gentleman of leisure, I need to be a little more guarded with my time.

Those are the reasons behind my decision to change things up, situation normies. As for the change itself, I don’t think things will be too different around here.

You’ll still receive Situation Normal every Wednesday and Sundays. Chances are, those posts will be free for everyone. But every now and then, maybe once or twice a month, I’ll send out an exclusive story. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll see the full story. If you’re a free subscriber, you’ll see a preview, and if you’re so inclined, you can subscribe to read the full story.

Hopefully, this new model works better. But like everything I do, Situation Normal and its business model are works in progress, which is another way of saying that these policies are written in pixels, not stone. In a few months, at the end of what business people call Q2, I’ll reevaluate and adjust.

To read every Situation Normal story & support my work, upgrade to a paid subscription👇

One last thing. I recognize that some situation normies can’t afford to pay. If that’s your situation, just reply to this email, and we’ll work something out.

Big Tabasco update

The last story I shared with you was about a phone call with my friend Bridget and how our call took some serious, strange, and silly turns, including a failed Tabasco-run. I called that piece Big Tabasco, and in that story I wrote:

A younger version of me might’ve offered to fix the problem for my friend, somehow. But the older, wiser me knows that you can’t really fix another person’s problem. All you can do is listen, and hear them, and crawl into whatever hole they’re in and just be there with them so they don’t have to go through one of life’s shit-storms alone.

I stand by my words. But after I published the piece, I realized I could solve one of Bridget’s problems. So I got Jeff Bezos on the blower. Then Bezos called one of his third-party vendors. For a few minutes, they bickered because partnering with Bezos is no picnic, from what I hear. But eventually, Bezos and the third-party vendor agreed to disagree in the name of consumerism. At that point, I gave Bezos my credit card number, and in exchange for my moolah, the third-party vendor shipped Bridget a six-pack of Tabasco sauce. One problem solved!

Bad Signs

As publications grow, they often add correspondents in places of interest to their readers. Since my beat is a little off beat, I asked Zach, my brother from another mother, a brother shamus in the Lebowski sense, and an OG situation normie, to be the very first official Situation Normal correspondent. Zach’s mandate: be on the lookout for good Situation Normal material.

“What is good Situation Normal material?” Zach asked me.

“Good material is a lot like poorly written Supreme Court opinions on pornography,” I explained. “You’ll know it when you see it, and since you live in Florida, you’re likely to see a lot of it.”

The other day, Zach sent me a photo of a sign at a Florida strip mall. The sign advertised two tenants. Individually, the signs are OK. But taken together, Zach had found it.

Ask your sandwich artist which flavor of hair is right for you.

Meanwhile, Tab, an enthusiastic situation normie and occasional contributor, sent a photo of a secret pole dancing studio’s self-defeating sign.

Shush! We’re pole dancing here.

Did you take a funny photo, overhear an odd conversation, or spot some slice of life hilarity? Send it to me at michael.j.estrin@gmail.com.

They Might Not Be Giants

Talk to anyone about artificial intelligence long enough and you’ll hear two fears. First, the machines will annihilate humanity Skynet-style. Second, the machines will take our jobs, especially jobs like writing the next installment of the Terminator franchise, where Sarah Connor travels back in time to download the Robinhood app so she can short Silicon Valley Bank stock.

Personally, I’m not at all worried about an AI murdering 8 billion humans, and I think the fear that the machines will take our jobs is way overblown. Maybe that’s why I enjoy messing around with ChatGTP so much. In the short-run, ChatGTP is fun, and in the long-run, like any new technology, it’ll probably have terrible consequences that none of us predicted, even though many of those consequences were totally obvious from the jump, but whatever those consequences are, they’ll result in humans doing stuff for fun and profit, but mostly profit.

ANYWAY, I’ve been feeding ChatGTP song lyrics because it’s fun. I’ve asked situation normies to get in on the fun too. Geoffrey Golden, who writes Adventure Snack, asked me to ask ChatGTP the following: “Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch. Who watches over you?”

Here’s how that conversation went, Geoffrey.

Stick around and chat!

You know the drill. I’ve got questions, situation normies have answers.

Do you follow the 5-second rule? Or, do you discard food that touches the floor, no matter how long it’s been there? Or, do you live dangerously by eating such delicacies like floor-pie, Linoleum-sushi, and carpet-Jello?

Am I right about Adam Smith? Is he our asshole? Or, is he just some asshole giving us an invisible middle finger?

Is Birdhouse in Your Soul by They Might Be Giants in heavy rotation on your personal playlist, or are you dead inside?

What else should I ask ChatGTP? Song answers only.

Is there anything you I want me to clarify about subscriber-only stories at Situation Normal? Seriously, situation normies, I want to hear what you have to say👇

Leave a comment

See you Sunday…

I’ll have my first paid subscriber story about flying home from Vegas on Southwest. Until then, enjoy this Kyle Kinane joke about the bus of airlines…

@kylekinanefairness is there, you just need to look for it   Shocks and Struts is available now on @800pgm for $10 and FREE on Youtube March 30th![image error]Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Big Tabasco

Photo by Simon Hurry on Unsplash

The other night, I wanted to shoot the shit. But shooting the shit isn’t a solo activity, so I called my friend Bridget, who lives in Cleveland Heights, not far from the heart of rock n’ roll, which according to The News, is still beating.

“Mikey, what’s going on?”

Bridget is the only person on Earth who calls me Mikey. Actually, there could be others who call me Mikey, but I don’t return their calls because I’m still a little traumatized from the Life Cereal campaign, which ran in heavy rotation from 1971 to 1983, much to the chagrin of Michaels everywhere.

Despite the tagline, nobody liked Life Cereal because it tasted like soggy disappointment.

But Bridget and I didn’t waste time talking about our childhood traumas. We were there to shoot the shit, like I said, and Bridget fired the first shot.

“What’s new with you, Estrin?” she asked.

I brought Bridget up to speed on my life since the last time we spoke. There were more more ups than downs to report, which was good, but it felt like bragging, so after Bridget was up to speed, I wrapped that shit up.

“That’s the four-one-one,” I said. “Do people still say that anymore? Probably not. I’ll bet kids today don’t even know what four-one-one means.”

“Kids? I hate to break it to you, Estrin, but I’m older than you. I was making bad life choices in the ‘80s, back when you were playing Life, the board game.”

Life was a simple game with a simple lesson: become a doctor, or die poor.

“Spiritually, I’m way older,” I said. “People say I’m an old soul. My dad said I was born an old man. But chronologically, you’re just a little older. You’re squarely in the Gen-X cohort.”

“Fuck yeah, I am.”

“Whereas I showed up a little late to the Gen-X party—too late to make a meaningful contribution, but just in time to experience profound disappointment. The quintessential Gen-X move.”

“I always think of you and Christina as my millennial friends, but that’s probably because you guys seem so young to me.”

“Nope. We’re the last of the Xers, which sounds a lot cooler than it is. If you want to get technical, which I don’t, we might be xennials, but that’s a lame name. Also, the whole micro-generation concept is proof that this generational stuff has totally jumped the shark.”

What I was getting at with all this generational talk, without actually saying so, is that these days there aren’t many friends I can call out of the blue, without texting first. Increasingly, many people believe that receiving a phone call out of the blue, even from a friend who just wants to shoot the shit, is actually rude, bordering on aggressive. That’s a generational thing, I think. The whole text-to-call rigmarole seems silly to me, but that’s probably because I’m old enough to remember a time when you just called, if you wanted to speak to someone, and if they weren’t home, you left a message, and when they got home, one of the first things they’d do was check their messages on their machine, and then, after they kicked off their shoes and used the bathroom and got comfy, they’d call you back, and if you were on the other line, but had call waiting, you’d tell the person you were talking to that they were about to lose a phone face-off. Those were the days, my friends.

These days, the polite move is to engage in the text-to-call rigmarole, or better yet, just text, or send a DM, or best of all, post the shit you want to shoot on social media, so your friends can Like that shit without having to show up for the emotional work of actually shooting the shit with you.

But that’s not how Bridget and I roll, and I think we’re better friends for it. Because after I got done telling her about my shit, she offered up her shit to shoot. And for a few minutes, we shot that shit. But then, Bridget got another call—a business call. And since Bridget is in business to do business, I lost the phone face off.

“Estrin, I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

The first thing Bridget said when she called me back was that she was sorry the other call took longer than expected. But I didn’t mind, and I told her so. I was just happy to talk with a friend, and as it turned out, Bridget needed a friend to talk to after her other call.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“That fucker owes me money, Estrin. And the thing is, he knows he owes me money. He even said so. But he’s also one of those people—a narcissist, or a fucking psycho, or whatever his deal is—so his promise to pay isn’t worth shit. So that call was about me reminding him that he promised to pay me, but he probably won’t pay me.”

A younger version of me might’ve offered to fix the problem for my friend, somehow. But the older, wiser me knows that you can’t really fix another person’s problem. All you can do is listen, and hear them, and crawl into whatever hole they’re in and just be there with them so they don’t have to go through one of life’s shit-storms alone.

“I really need the money,” Bridget said. “I just did my taxes and I fucking owe. Not a lot, but more than I have right now.”

“Are you freaking out?” I asked.

“No. I’ll deal. I just need to find a way to make some extra cash.”

“I’ve been there,” I said. “It sucks.”

“It does suck,” Bridget agreed. “And you know what else really sucks? I feel like I was making good progress this year. I moved, I found a job, and I bought a house, and then I found a better job. But now all that progress feels like it didn’t happen because of this shit I’m dealing with. Do you ever feel like it’s all just a hamster wheel, and even when you think you’re making progress, you’re really just fooling yourself?”

“I worry about that all the time.”

“You do?”

Bridget sounded surprised, which wasn’t surprising because it’s natural to think that everyone you know is crushing it when you’re getting crushed by it.

“Of course. When I think about where twenty-something me thought he’d be at forty-something, I get sad. Well not sad, exactly. More like melancholy. Bummed, actually. It’s a bummer. When I compare Present Me with the image Past Me created of Future Me, I can’t help but think that I’ve wasted half my life, and that I’m going nowhere slowly, but still kinda fast.”

“Shit, that’s a head-fuck,” Bridget said.

“Exactly. Total head-fuck. And kind of an emotional punch in the nuts too.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re worried about, my young friend. You’ve accomplished a lot more than me in less time.”

“Life isn’t a dick-measuring contest.”

“For some people it is,” Bridget said.

“Yeah, but they’re dicks.”

That made Bridget laugh, but as quickly as her laughter came, it went away.

“Holy shit, I gotta get to the store before it closes.”

“OK, but I wanna make sure you’re OK.”

“I’m OK, Estrin.”

“You’re better than OK. Life throws some gnarly shit at you, Bridget, but you always survive, and you know how to find the upside.”

“Hey, you wanna come with me to the store?”

“Sure!”

Through the wonders of mobile telephony, Bridget took me with her to the store, which is the next best thing to actually hanging out with your friend and going with them to the store IRL.

“What are we getting at the store?” I asked Bridget.

“Tabasco sauce.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. I want eggs, and I need hot sauce on my eggs.”

“So this is a Tabasco run?”

“Right. A Tabasco run.”

“Are we gonna make it? How much time do we have? How’s the traffic? I need a situation report.”

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Bridget screamed.

“What’s happening? Are you OK? Is it aliens? A biker gang? Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

“Motherfuckers.”

“What’s going on? Talk to me, Goose!”

“That kid looked like he was thirteen.”

“What kid?” I asked.

“This fucking kid who cut me off. Little fucker pulled right in front of my like I wasn’t even there.”

“But he wasn’t actually thirteen, right?”

“He probably was thirteen. Or, twelve.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s a real problem here. These fucking kids steal cars and go for joy rides. Whenever I see a driver who looks younger than thirty, I keep my distance.”

Thankfully, Bridget didn’t see any other underage drivers on the way to the store. Also, she made it to the store before it closed. But as it turned out, the store was bad news.

“Motherfucker!” Bridget said.

“What now? Aliens? Bikers? Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

“No, no.”

“Did a teenage car thief crash into the store, steal your hot sauce money, and leave you with a tax bill?”

“No, Estrin, you’ve got an overactive imagination.”

“Then what is it?”

“They don’t have any regular Tabasco. All they have are these giant bottles of that sriracha shit. I want the OG stuff. That’s the only reason I came here.”

“Giant bottles? Send me a picture.”

Through the wonders of mobile telephony, Bridget sent me a picture.

20 ounces of sriracha shit

I was about to say something sympathetic, but before I could speak up, Bridget remembered an important detail about her condiment situation.

“I just remembered that I’m out of ketchup.”

“Do they have regular ketchup, or is it gigantor-size? Is this one of those stores where everything has been super-sized?”

“No, it’s a regular store. And they have regular ketchup.”

“Thank god.”

Then Bridget remembered that she also needed a few other things, so she made the most of her trip by picking up some supplies.

“Forty-three dollars later,” Bridget said as she left the store.

“Wow, forty-three dollars ain’t what it used to be.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Did you got your Tabasco?” I asked.

“Fuck no, Estrin. I’m not using that sriracha shit. This big Tabasco-run was a fail.”

“Sure, but there were some upsides. You got ketchup and some other stuff you need.”

“Yeah, and I got to shoot the shit with you, Estrin. That was what I really needed.”

“That’s the real win,” I said. “I’m glad we got to talk.”

“Me too, Estrin, me too.”

Shopping list coda

The next day, I texted Bridget to ask if it would be OK if I wrote this story up for Situation Normal. Bridget said yes because she’s a good friend with a great sense of humor and an OG situation normie. Then, for the sake of accuracy, and because status details are the key to writing creative nonfiction, I asked Bridget what she ended up buying at the store. Here’s what she texted back:

OK I bought Triscuits stoke iced coffee ketchup. Damn what else did I buy half-and-half Lacroix orange flavored? I’m sure there was some thing else and I’m not remembering yet. That kind of stuff takes up valuable real estate Estrin I can’t recall I’m sure there was some thing else in there but that’s all I can remember for now. OK yes stoked to see the peace and I did not get the Tabasco so let’s be clear about that. They only had the gigantic 20 ounce Sriracha Tabasco and they didn’t have the original small one so I left sans Tabasco OK love you bye.

This was voice dictated while driving. 🤣

Situation Normal is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts & support my work, please become a free or paid subscriber.

Special bonus story!

Last September, Christina and I visited Bridget in Cleveland. I wrote a story (paywall) about visiting The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, touring a witchcraft museum, and all the other cool shit people who flee to the Cleve experience everyday! Read the story here👇

Situation NormalWe vacationed in Cleveland. This is our storyHello, Cleveland! If Google is accurate, Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” The thing is, Ralph Waldo Emerson never flew commercial out of LAX. Our flight to Cleveland was a redeye, but we left our house five hours early to get the jump on rush hour traffic, unfuck a ticketing issue that couldn’t be unfucked online, and post up in an airport lounge so Christina could do some work and I could consume my body weight in chocolate chip cookies and cucumber water…Read more6 months ago · 24 likes · 34 comments · Michael EstrinStick around and chat

You know the drill. I’ve got questions. Maybe you’ve got answers.

Do you call friends to shoot the shit, or are you one of those modern people who texts-to-call, or just texts, or posts their shit on social media?

Did you ever play the Life board game? It’s total bullshit, right?

Does Present You feel bummed out when you think about the image Past You had of Future You, or do you, like Garth Algar, always live in the now? If so, what’s your secret?

What’s your brand of hot sauce? I’m a fan of Tapatío, or Cholula, and I’ll do Tabasco in a pinch. But don’t come at me with that hipster Sriracha shit! That’s my hot (sauce) take. What’s yours?

After you read this, are you going to call a friend just to shoot the shit? Please say yes, and then do it!

Leave a comment

Mondays | Mulligans | Mugs | AI love song

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I don’t hate Mondays. With the exception of Saturday, which is the day of days, in my opinion, every other day of the week is equally deserving of love and/or scorn. But when I searched for a Monday-related picture for this post, I saw three types of images: Monday-hate, inspirational messages that aren’t all that inspiring, and photos of coffee. If an alien came to Earth and consulted a stock photo library to understand the meaning of Monday, they’d surmise that humans hate Mondays so much that we need bromides and caffeine just to face the week. Actually, maybe that’s true for some of us.

But like I said, I’ve got zero beef with Mondays. I like Mondays because Mondays are when I draft the Wednesday post that you’re currently reading.

As I write these words, I’m getting ready to fly to Las Vegas, pick-up my mom, aka “Gayle,” aka the scourge of the Situation Normal comments section, and drive her back to Los Angeles. But by the time you read this post it’ll be Wednesday, aka hump day, and I’ll be back in Los Angeles with my mom, aka “Gayle,” aka the scourge of the Situation Normal comments section. Then the following week, I’ll repeat this process in reverse to bring my mom, aka “Gayle,” aka the scourge of the Situation Normal comments section back to her home in Las Vegas.

Technically, you don’t need to know any of this. But I mention my upcoming travel schedule because one of these days you’ll probably see a story about road trips with my mom, aka “Gayle,” aka the scourge of the Situation Normal comments section. But the first round of those potential road trip stories, which might not actually materialize, will be in the proverbial rearview mirror by the time you read this post on Wednesday.

What does this glimpse into the scheduling headaches of the internet’s 57th best humor newsletter have to do with Mondays? Not much. But it is a chance for me to tell you that while I tell stories from my life, those stories often come to you out of order. Life sometimes gets in the way of writing about life.

Is all of that life getting in the way of writing about life stuff too meta? Probably. But it’s Monday Wednesday, and with a round of flying and driving ahead of behind me, and another round after that, plus countless stories that may, or may not, occur, I’m asking the situation normie community to be patient with me and any errors, fuck-ups, or scheduling snafus. Also, welcome to my own private version of March Madness.

Vase Dude Mulligan

Recently, I shared the first profile in Situation Normal history. Unfortunately, in reporting that piece I made the biggest mistake journalism has seen since a Chicago Daily Tribune headline incorrectly called the 1948 Presidential election for Thomas “Screw the Library of Congress Classification” Dewey.

Harry Truman defeated Thomas E. Dewey, then canceled the White House subscription to the Chicago Daily Tribune because it “sucks butt.”

My mistake, according to multiple situation normies who spoke up in the comments section, was that I failed to ask Sophia Locke any follow-up questions about “Vase Dude.”

Who was Vase Dude, and what was his deal? We don’t know because I blew it. What we do know is that Vase Dude paid Sophia Locke to pretend that her arm was stuck in a tiny vase. Apparently, this fantasy gave him enormous sexual satisfaction. Or, as Dennard Dayle put it: “That man is enjoying a simpler, clearer love life than the rest of us. Maybe a simpler life in general.”

Elite journalists would ignore this kind of mistake and gaslight anyone who cries foul. Serious journalists would print a correction. But since the journalism I practice at Situation Normal is neither elite nor serious, I’m taking a mulligan.

I’ve reached out to Sophia’s PR guy to see if she’d be willing to answer a few follow up questions about Vase Dude. In the meantime, situation normies, please take another look at Vase Dude, and leave your questions for Sophia in the comments.

Shout outs to situation normies

Time to pay some debts I can’t really repay. Bringing you funny stories every week takes time, and as the saying goes, time is money. That’s why I’m so appreciative of the situation normies who support my work and subsidize the laughter this community enjoys. This week’s awesome situation normies are:

Jen Zug, who told me she was glad to have found the Comedic Personal Essay Universe (CPEU™️) here on Substack when she signed up for a monthly Situation Normal subscription. Thank you, Jen, and welcome to the CPEU!

Peter M., who I don’t know anything about, but who nevertheless seems like a genius because he had the smarts to buy a monthly Situation Normal subscription. Thank you, Peter!

Joel & Lynne, who are dear friends and who have always encouraged me to share my stories with a wider audience. Thank you for signing up for an annual Situation Normal subscription, Joel and Lynne!

Are you an awesome situation normie? Upgrade you subscription & get a shout out👇

Analyze my coffee mug

I drink two cups of coffee a day. I’m not proud of this fact, nor am I ashamed of it. I like coffee, and I like the buzz I get from drinking coffee. I also like collecting coffee mugs. So when I saw that Andrea C Neil, a situation normie who writes The Thing About That Thing, has a regular feature where she analyzes a photo of your coffee mug, I had to get in on the action. Here’s the photo I sent Andrea👇

Here’s Andrea’s very amusing analysis. And yes, Andrea, you are correct, that mug features Nicolas Cage’s mug. I love Cage all the way back to his Nicolas Coppola days, which was his screen credit in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

ICYMI

Last Sunday, I wrote about a very awkward flirtation I had at the yoga studio, which led to a larger exploration of the dad bod phenomenon and the internet’s favorite daddy, Pedro Pascal. You can read that story (and see a picture of me rocking Burt Reynolds pose) here. Then do yourself a favor and dive into the hilarious and insightful comments left by the situation normie community.

What’s love got to do with AI

I’m obsessed with artificial intelligence. And by obsessed, I mean I’m usually down to watch Terminator, or better yet T2, I’m always up for talking about Skynet situations with internet randos, and I can’t stop fucking around with ChatGTP, even if that fucking around is causing waves in the CPEU.

Recently, situation normie Meg Oolders, who writes Stock Fiction and who created the fantastic Presidential Mustache graphic, asked me to ask ChatGTP a question inspired by a Heavy D song. It was a good question, but I’m not so sure about the answer. Sorry, Meg, I tried. But just so I wouldn’t get slammed in the comments, I did ask ChatGTP a follow-up question.

Stick around and chat!

You know the drill. I’ve got questions, you’ve got answers.

Are anti-Monday? Tell me why you don’t like Mondays. Or, are you pro-Monday?

How do you take your coffee, assuming you take coffee at all?

Nicholas Cage only makes two kinds of movies: great films and films that are so bad they’re good. Discuss & please cite examples.

What else should I ask ChatGTP? Song answers only.

What are your Vase Dude questions?

Leave a comment

Yoga dad bod

Photo by Katie Wallace on Unsplash

I like to arrive five or ten minutes early for a yoga class. That way, I have time to use the bathroom, put my phone on airplane mode, set up my mat and props, double-check to make sure I set my phone on airplane mode, stretch a little, triple-check my phone’s status, center myself, catch up on yoga studio gossip, re-center myself, quadruple-check my phone, and finally, exhale to start my practice off on the right foot.

The other day, my pre-yoga routine hit a snag at check-in. I was about to give the woman at the front desk my name, but before I could do that, she raised her hand, turned her palm out to face me, and smiled.

“Don’t tell me your name,” she said. “I wanna guess.”

She seemed excited to guess my name, like there might be a prize for guessing the correct answer. Maybe a new yoga mat, or enough crypto to buy an unlimited yoga passes, or the greatest yogic gift of all—presence.

“OK…”

“Xerxes. You’re Xerxes, right?”

“No, I’m not Xerxes. I’m Michael. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Michael is a very cool name!”

She was still smiling, and she seemed really enthusiastic about my name, for some reason. A cooler man might’ve taken this opportunity to ask for her name, or maybe hazard a guess from antiquities. Boudicca? Sappho? Cleopatra? But I am not a cool man. I am, by nature, a nervous man. And when I get nervous, I either clam up, or yammer away.

“For dudes born in the late seventies, Michael is about as basic as names get,” I said. “There were twelve boys in my sixth grade class, and three of us were named Michael.”

She laughed out loud and a little too hard, I thought, since I wasn’t joking, and even if it had been making a joke, three Michaels out of twelve boys isn’t that funny. Actually, it’s not funny at all, unless you count the time that the three Michaels tried to convince a substitute teacher that we were actually named Xerxes.

“Honestly, if you see a dude my age and you don’t know his name,” I continued, “Michael is a safe bet.”

I nearly added that Michael is always a better guess than Xerxes, especially in the San Fernando Valley, where I’ve spent several decades of my life without ever coming across a Xerxes. But the wholesale rejection of the Xerxes name felt like too much. Also, another student had arrived, so I figured I should shut up so that the woman behind the desk could do her job.

The other student was a woman, but I didn’t hear her name because the woman behind the front desk just waived her in without trying to guess her name. That seemed odd. What was so special about me that my name was worthy of a guess, and maybe, some cool yoga-related prizes?

I should’ve said something about the name-game double-standard. But before I could speak up, the check-in woman walked around from behind the front desk, smiled at me again, and put her hand on my arm.

“You look really cute in your yoga outfit,” she said.

Cute? Who did she think she was talking to? This kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me—ever. But maybe it’s normal for strange women to flirt with Xerxes. Was I dressed like Xerxes? I glanced down to check my outfit.

I was wearing red athletic shorts and a yellow hoodie. I am not a fashion expert, but I know enough about fashion to know that my “outfit” was nothing to write home about, unless of course, you happen to be a correspondent for the Unfashionable Male.

“My wife picks out my clothes,” I blurted out. “I just grab whatever is clean, and throw it on.”

“You look great,” she said. Then she gave my arm a little squeeze and added, “Enjoy your yoga class, Michael.”

Subscribe now

I tried to enjoy my yoga class, but joy is hard to come by on my yoga mat. Usually, I struggle when I do yoga. It’s a good struggle because I’m struggling to be present, to be patient, to be kind to myself, to quiet my mind, and to push my body just a little beyond its physical limits. Sometimes, all of those struggles come together in a beautiful way that does spark joy and even laughter at the most unexpected moments. But most of the time, I’m trading sixty minutes of yogic struggle for countless minutes of future joy, which is a really good trade in my book.

But this yoga class was a different kind of struggle. For one thing, we did a lot of standing poses, which are difficult for me because my base is weak and when I feel myself wobble, my mind sometimes wanders into self-doubt territory, which is where you can catch the express bus to destinations like self-loathing and self-defeat.

My struggle that day came to a head in warrior pose, which is where yogis work from a lunging-squat stance that was invented centuries ago by a sadist who thought he was a pretzel. Again and again, I felt myself wobble, then fall out of warrior pose. Thankfully, my teacher saw me struggle and offered some encouraging words.

“Our society teaches us to fixate on results, goals, on the destination,” she said. “But then some people say, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”

I fell out of warrior pose again. I went down on both knees to take child’s pose for a few breathes. While I was down there, my inner voice tried to beat me up, but my other inner voice reminded me that it’s always OK to take child’s pose, and that even if I didn’t reach my destination that was OK too because the journey was the thing.

“But I want you to think about this idea of journey versus destination,” my teacher continued. “Is it really an either/or? There are so many destinations in life, and so many ways to get to those destinations. Aren’t we always on a journey to somewhere?”

I found my breath, then struggled to my feet for one more attempt at warrior pose.

“Instead of focusing on the destination or the journey, let’s focus on moving and breathing,” my teacher said. “If you keep moving and breathing, you’re making progress, and the journey and the destination will take care of themselves.”

That was a lovely thought. It centered me, and carried me through the final, wobbly warrior pose, and then on through the rest of my practice that day.

Subscribe now

When I got home, Christina asked me if I had a good class.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“You think so?”

I told Christina about my practice, and how I struggled a lot with all the standing poses. At forty-five, with a little more weight on my frame than I’d like to carry, and two broken ankles at my base, this is normal. But Christina reminded me that I’ve been making good progress since I re-committed to my yoga practice last year.

“Also, it seems like your teacher knows just what to say to motivate you,” Christina said. “So that’s good. Are you going to go back to that class?”

“I think so. Friday mornings work well for my schedule. And I like the teacher a lot, but…”

“But?”

“Well… something awkward happened at check-in.”

“With you and the teacher?”

“No, no. Everything is cool with my teacher. But you know how yoga studios have some people who do administrative stuff in exchange for classes?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, the woman who works the desk on Fridays is kinda odd.”

“You like odd!”

“Yeah, but this was… well, let me tell you what happened.”

I told Christina the story. She chuckled at the Xerxes stuff and agreed that Michael is a basic name. But when I told her that the woman behind the counter squeezed my arm and told me I looked good in my yoga outfit, Christina howled with laughter before delivering her verdict.

“Oh my god, she was flirting with you!”

“No. I dunno about that. She probably wasn’t flirting with me. There must be some other explanation.”

“She was totally flirting with you. This is hilarious. And you got nervous.”

“It was awkward, that’s all.”

“Babe, you’re looking good. But I can’t believe you threw me under the bus.”

“I threw you under the bus, how?”

“My wife picks out my clothes! My wife, my wife.”

Christina said “my wife” with the same accent that Sacha Baron Cohen used for his Borat character.

“I don’t know. Are you sure she was flirting with me? Maybe there was a hidden camera for one of those prank shows, and the producers were like, call this guy Xerxes and see what happens.”

“I don’t think so, honey.”

“How do you know? Maybe Ashton Kutcher is rebooting a yoga edition of Punk’d.”

“Did someone ask you to sign a release afterwards?”

“No.”

“Then she was flirting with you. I keep telling you, babe, dad bods are in.”

That was true, as far as it went. Christina often tells me that dad bods are in. But her source is TikTok, where many of the women extolling the virtues of the so-called dad bod are running thirst trap accounts to promote their OnlyFans profiles. I’ve tried to get Christina to consider the source, but she always pushes back with a two-word answer: Pedro Pascal. According to my wife, her friends, and the various internet articles they share in their group chats, Pedro Pascal, the forty-something star of The Mandalorian and The Last of Us has a dad bod to die for, or at the very least swoon over.

On the one hand, I guess I should feel good that an everyman like Pedro Pascal has pushed aside pretty boys like Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Brady to claim the crown of middle-aged male attractiveness in 2023. Where DiCaprio and Brady always felt light years out of my league, Pascal’s appeal feels obtainable to the average Joe, or Joel, as the case may be. But as sure as Lloyd Bentsen once told Dan Quayle that he was no Jack Kennedy, I am no Pedro Pascal.

Pedro is Chilean, and sure the whole Latin lover thing can be a problematic trope, but as far as tropes go, it has an edge on the nonexistent romantic trope of a pudgy Jewish guy with thick glasses. Pedro is also an actor—a profession that ranks far above writer in terms of sex appeal. Also, Pedro is an A-list celebrity with enough fame to heft a title from the Star Wars franchise and an adaption of one of the most popular video games ever onto his broad dad bod shoulders—at the same time! On my best days, I can muster just enough internet-fame to push my way onto the newsletter writer Z-list.

Not that I spend my time comparing myself to famous male sex symbols. I’m fine with the way I look. Well, mostly fine. Truth is, I’m just as vain as the next guy, and if I’m being honest, the next guy is always more attractive than me. But after forty-five years in this body, I’ve made my peace with my appearance. Young Michael might’ve gone to yoga in a quixotic search for six-pack abs. But Middle-Aged Michael practices yoga because he wants Old Man Michael to have the strength, mobility, and mental resilience he needs to keep doing the things that Michaels of all ages have always valued.

Maybe that’s why, on one level, I picked up on the front desk woman’s awkward flirtations, and yet on another more conscious level, I rejected the possibility that she could be flirting with me. Like I told Christina, maybe she really did think that my yoga outfit was fashionable. But that explanation only made my wife howl with laughter.

“You were rocking a yellow hoodie and red shorts! That is not a fashionable look. You’re ketchup and mustard, but you are one hot downward dog, honey.”

Michael Estrin in “Burt Reynolds” pose.A coda for Xerxes

A few days later, I called my sister, Allison, and told her the story. Right away, she agreed with Christina’s assessment.

“She was flirting with you, Michael.”

Allison put the phone on speaker so her partner, Craig, could hear the story.

“Yeah, she was clearly flirting with you. I knew it the minute she asked if your name was Xerxes. Dead-giveaway.”

“Hey, what happened to the real Xerxes?” Allison asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t a dude who was actually named Xerxes show up?” Allison asked.

“No. I was the only guy in the class.”

“Exactly,” Allison said. “Xerxes was a red hearing because she was flirting with you.”

Situation Normal is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Stick around and chat!

I’ve practiced yoga, on and off, for years. Dudes are always in the minority of every yoga class I’ve ever taken. Why don’t more men do yoga?

How long before matching ketchup-colored bottoms with mustard-colored tops becomes a fashion trend that sweeps across the globe?

Pedro Pascal has been so much stuff recently that I doubt he has time to sleep. Is there a Pedro Pascal clone out there rockin’ its dad bod?

Have you ever met anyone named Xerxes? Explain.

Is it the journey, or the destination? Or, is my yoga teacher right that the journey/destination dichotomy is a false choice that distracts us from focusing on moving and breathing?

I’m not father. Does this disqualify me from dad bod status? Discuss.

Leave a comment

LA snow | AI justice | Gentile paint

Photo by Cedric Letsch on Unsplash

I was born and raised in Los Angeles. My parents were born and raised in Los Angeles. My maternal grandfather was born and raised in Los Angeles, although technically Zeyde was straight out of Compton, where he broke his nose playing high school football during the leather helmet era. According to family lore, some of my ancestors first set foot in Los Angeles County just before the turn of the last century. Supposedly, one of my relatives sang at the opening of the Hollywood Bowl in 1922, although my own Karaoke skills give me reason to take that story with a grain of salt.

The point is, my family has a history with this place, but it’s not like our roots go back to the Treaty of Cahuenga, or the period of Spanish ranchos and missions, or LA’s Pueblo days, or the Tongva and Chumash times. Historically speaking, we’re relative newcomers to Los Angeles.

But in a city where the word “transplant” describes 99.99% of residents, my family’s history with the city that sprang up at the edge of the continent, between an unforgiving desert and the seemingly endless Pacific Ocean, feels historic and rare. According to Christina, who established her roots here in the 21st century when she came to Los Angeles to attend USC Film School, I am a “unicorn.”

Maybe Christina is right about me. Maybe I am a unicorn. After all, most of my childhood friends have left Los Angeles, and most of their parents weren’t born here. This place churns people like no other city on Earth, but somehow I have roots in a place where most people are tumbleweeds just blowing through town.

Those roots came in handy last week, when a snow storm—an actual fucking snow storm—hit Los Angeles. While my fellow Angelenos shit their pants and took to social media to sound apocalyptic alarms, I took a small measure of comfort from the historical record. In 1983, a winter storm dumped several inches of snow on Los Angeles area mountains that supposedly never see snow.1

“Do you remember that?” Christina asked.

Her question made me feel like an old man, so I leaned back in my rocking chair, lit a pipe, and regaled my wife with tales from the days of yore, when Los Angeles children walked ten miles barefoot in the snow to attend their school’s D.A.R.E classes.

“I remember a snowball fight in elementary school,” I said.

“You do? Really!?”

“Well, there wasn’t very much snow. So it wasn’t a classic snowball fight. Actually, there was just enough snow for one snowball, and that’s what we fought over—a snowball fight!”

“That’s funny,” Christina said, but I took note of the fact that she didn’t actually laugh.

Anyway, we weathered the storm. Since we live in the Valley, we were below the snow-level. But we did get some hail, which was wild. And the next day, when the clouds cleared, the mountains just to the north of us—mountains that are usually brown with chaparral and supposedly have never seen snow—were capped with just enough fresh, white powder for the vast majority of Angelenos to say they had “never seen anything like it in LA.”

Snow on the Santa Susana Mountains, just above the communities of Porter Ranch, Chatsworth, and Northridge.Thank you, situation normies!

I love writing Situation Normal! When I say I’d do it for free, I’m not kidding. For the first two years of this project, I didn’t take a dime, or a doge coin. But bringing you great stories every week takes time, and as the saying goes, time is money. So, I really appreciate the situation normies who have stepped up to support my work and subsidize the laughter this community enjoys. This week, those awesome situation normies are:

Betsy B., who I don’t know IRL, but who nevertheless was kind enough to spring for annual subscription!

Lauren, who I don’t know IRL either, but who decided to show her support by making a monthly contribution!

Claire R., who according to her Substack bio is an illustrator, designer, and maker. Claire made my day—see what I did there, Claire?—by plunking down some of her hard-earned moolah for an annual subscription!

Mark & Mia! I know Mark & Mia IRL. They’re great people who served our country, then left government service to open Neon Retro Arcade, which is a very happy place in Pasadena. Also, Mark and Mia make really good homemade ice cream. A place to play classic video games and homemade ice cream would’ve been more than enough, but Mark and Mia don’t mess around, so they purchased a founder subscription, which entitles them to free rides to doctors appointments in Los Angeles County. That’s a smart purchase on Mia’s part because she’s also a Los Angeles unicorn.

Wanna see your name in a Situation Normal shout out? Upgrade to a paid subscription👇

AI justice

I’ve been messing around with ChatGTP, a predictive text AI that makes every human who uses it seem a lot less cool. But who cares about being cool? I’ve got important questions about long-standing pop culture mysteries that only an AI detective can answer.

There you go, situation normies. The killing of the deputy remains open and unsolved, although according to the AI, it’s also possible that the whole story was bullshit. Guess I’ll have to wait for a Bob Marley Bot to get an answer.

Gentile paint

I’ve always believed that you should treat everyone equally, regardless of their religious beliefs. But that view, while idealistic, isn’t universal. In fact, there’s a paint store in Florida selling a shade of purple that appears to be reserved exclusively for gentiles.

The photo comes courtesy of my brother-in-law Zach, who happens to be a brother Shamus in the Lebowski sense of the word. Since Zach lives in Florida, and because I dig his work, he’s now the official Situation Normal Florida correspondent. Paying subscribers can read this Halloween story from the Situation Normal archives about the time Zach helped build a haunted house that scared me shitless.

Got something to submit to Situation Normal? Send your funny photos, odd overheards, and other slices of life to michael.j.estrin@gmail.com.

ICYMI

Last Sunday, I published the first profile in Situation Normal history! The piece is about Sophia Locke, a porn star who spoke with me about returning to adult entertainment, building community as a cam model, TikTok, strange fan requests, consent, step mom content, and singing. You can read that piece here.

So far, responses to my profile have been good because situation normies are good people who enjoy laughing while they learn new things.

Meanwhile, my profile of Sophia Locke has gotten a lot of good attention on Twitter, despite the fact that the free speech bros who run that shit show put a content warning on a story that contains zero nudity and fewer curse words than I normally use. Go fucking figure!

Stick around and chat!

You know the drill. I’ve got questions, you’ve got answers.

Do you think the snow storm that hit Los Angeles is a sign of the coming apocalypse, or was this whole thing an elaborate special effect shot for a new Roland Emmerich film?

OK, but for real, snow in Los Angeles is bonkers, and we’ve really messed up this planet, right?

Given my family’s long-ish, but really in the grand scheme of things, not-very-long-at-all history in Los Angeles, is Christina right? Am I a unicorn?

Seriously, who shot the deputy? Leave your tips and unhinged conspiracy theories in the comments.

What else should I ask ChatGTP?

Leave a comment

1

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/03/...

What I learned talking to 🌽⭐️ Sophia Locke

Back when I covered Porn Valley full-time, one of my colleagues had this idea for a recurring column. Each month, he wanted to profile a performer who had left the industry to find out what life was like after porn.

“People love to read ‘where are they now’ stuff,” he used to say.

Sadly, the column never got off the ground. Looking back, I blame inertia, the relentless onslaught of porn news, and the fact that writing about a retired performer is of little value for a trade publication audience. Also, our editorial team put the fun in dysfunction, so new initiatives weren’t really our jam.

But a related genre of story—the return to the industry—was typical for us. Unlike “where are they now” stories, a story about a performer returning to porn was of interest to a trade publication audience. If you’re a pornographer, this is news you can use, after all.

Those stories always included the same professional details: a recap of the performer’s previous time in adult, the name of the performer’s booking agency, and a few words about their upcoming projects. Sometimes, those stories would also include a quote explaining why the performer had decided to leave the industry in the first place, and why they had chosen to return.

People are complicated, and it’s always dangerous to make generalizations about a group of people, but more often than not returning performers would tell me stories about shame. Usually, their decision to leave the industry was because their family or a romantic partner (or both) gave them shit for being a sex worker. Often times, their decision to return was driven by a falling out with the people who had shamed them, as well as a personal realization that living your life to please others is a recipe for disaster.

I found these stories fascinating. But as a trade reporter, there was only so much space I could devote to the “human angle.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but reducing my subjects to a few professional details and maybe a quote or two about the personal choices that underpinned their major life/career decisions left me feeling empty and a little sad.

Maybe that’s why I was so excited to speak with Sophia Locke about her return to adult entertainment. For one thing, it gives me a second chance to tell these kinds of stories the way I think they should be told. But more than that, talking with Sophia Locke is an opportunity to add some depth to our understanding of sex work by finding the humanity and humor in her experience.

Sophia Locke joined the adult entertainment industry in 2010. Back then, she mostly performed as a cam model. Cam sites were a thing in 2010, but they weren’t the thing like they are today. As a trade reporter, I wrote far more stories about porn and porn stars than I did about the world of cams. And when I did write about cams, the story would usually be about the platform, as opposed to the performer. We took a tech / business angle, rather than a human angle.

Cam modeling appealed to Locke’s exhibitionist side. It also gave her a chance to explore BDSM. Plus, it paid really well! So Locke decided to quit her hospitality job. For the next few years, her adult career blossomed.

But in 2016, Locke left the industry because her partner at the time was uncomfortable with her doing sex work. As it turned out, the relationship didn’t last and neither did Locke’s hiatus from adult entertainment. At the end of 2021, Locke returned to the industry.

When I caught up with Locke on video chat, one of the first things I asked her about was what changes she’s noticed in the industry and herself.

“In terms of the industry, the big change is OnlyFans,” she said. “Cams have been around for years, but OnlyFans really put cams into the mainstream. It’s night and day. I used to have to explain what a cam site was, but now everyone knows.”

OnlyFans isn’t the only adult cam platform out there, but it’s probably the only one that’s a household name. At this year’s AVN show, several cam models I spoke with told me they preferred other platforms because the payouts were better, or because lesser-known platforms did a better job of serving certain niches. But for Locke, who describes herself in her OnlyFans bio as a “slutty, kinky fuck doll,” OnlyFans is a logical place for her old fans to find her again, and for new fans to discover her.

As for how Locke has changed since her first stint in adult, that can be summed up in one word: confidence.

“My first time around, I was confident in my performance, but I didn’t have the kind of confidence that allowed me to be my whole self, especially in my personal life. I felt like I had to be very careful about how I explained my job to people, especially the people I was dating.”

Locke’s answer resonated with me. When I was a trade reporter, I did a lot of compartmentalizing too, especially when it came to dating.

“How did you tell the women you were dating?” Locke asked me.

“I’d try and get it out there as early as possible,” I said. “Most women didn’t care. A few women seemed more interested my job than they were in me, which was fine, but not a great foundation for a healthy relationship. My wife was a different story.”

I told Locke a little bit about my first date with Christina. I had left my trade reporter job the year before I met Christina, but I was still writing freelance stories about the industry and working on a novel about a reporter at Porn Valley’s second best trade publication. What can I say? Art imitates life, especially if you write what you know.

“How did she react?” Locke asked.

“Christina was positive. She was curious about my old job, but she was a lot more curious about me and my passion for telling stories, and right away she understood that porn was part of that passion, but it wasn’t the defining thing about me.”

“It’s a great filter!” Locke said. “Some people see anyone who works in this industry as one-dimensional. They can’t see the whole person. That’s too bad for them, but I’m not one-dimensional.”

We bonded over our shared filter, but our common experience had its limits because I am a man, and Sophia Locke is a woman, and for reasons that are incredibly complicated and very sad, our society embraces gendered double-standards when it comes to sex and sex work. If my job was a dealbreaker for a woman I was romantically involved with, she’d simply say so, and often times her reaction would be a variation of the classic dating rejection: “it’s not you, it’s me.” For Locke, and many female sex workers, it’s much more common to experience judgment, shame, and hostility from romantic partners who have a problem with their career.

That kind of negative pushback creates a lot of emotional scar tissue. But rather than asking Locke to dwell on some of the negative things she’s experienced because of her career, I asked her to expand on how she had grown into her confidence.

“I think I just became more mature,” she said. “I’ve always been passionate about this industry and what I do. But I used to worry about what people in my life thought, and that worrying undermined my confidence. At some point, probably because I’m not in my twenties anymore, and also because you hopefully learn as you grow, I just came to a place in my life where I had to say, fuck it, this is who I am.”

Subscribe now

A 🌽 ⭐️ is reborn on TikTok

Soon after returning to the industry, Locke joined TikTok, where her bio is: “I’m too old for this 👵🏻👋.” I’m too old for TikTok too, but I’m on it, just like a billion other people (and counting).1

TikTok is where I first saw Sophia Locke. Her videos about some the strangest requests she’s encountered as a cam model caught my eye, perhaps because I’m the sort of person who will pull up a chair and happily listen to the strangest stories the internet has to offer, but also because Locke has a knack for telling these kinds of stories.

“My original idea for TikTok was to tell stories about all the unusual requests I’ve either performed or heard about from other performers over the years. But there are a lot of things that can get you banned from TikTok, and TikTok doesn’t really say where the line is.”

This is a common challenge for sex workers and the adult industry more broadly on social media. Each social media platform has different rules governing adult content, but the rules are often opaque and arbitrary. On TikTok, where Locke has more than 180,000 followers, she can’t say the word “porn” without running the risk that her content will be taken down and her account suspended. But porn stars on TikTok have found a clever workaround by referring to themselves as “corn stars,” or simply letting the appropriate emojis—🌽⭐️—do the talking.

While I could describe Locke’s TikTok videos, I’d rather share a few of them instead. I hope you’ll take a few extra minutes to watch Locke tell her stories because I think that’s the best way to understand who she is and where she’s coming from.

[PLEASE NOTE: You have to double click on the TikTok to play the video, but you don’t need to install the TikTok app. Also, these videos have SOUND, so plan accordingly].

Meet Vase Dude! @sophialocke_ @sophialocke_ ♬ original sound - Sophia Locke [image error]Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserThe legend of Cheese Guy🧀 @sophialocke_Not mozzarella, or Gouda. Only the gross stuff. #greenscreen[image error]Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserPush-up Man is problematic @sophialocke_Maybe a humiliation + fitness thing?! 😭 #kinktok[image error]Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

As I prepared for our conversation, I wrote down several questions to ask Locke about “vase guy,” who gets his kicks watching a cam model struggle to remove her hand from a tiny vase.

Have you ever encountered this kind of kink before or since?

Does it have to be a vase, or could you get your hand stuck in, say, a Pringles tube and give him the same thrill?

Given some of the sex scenes depicted on ancient Roman and Greek vases, do you think this kink dates back to antiquities?

I also had questions about the legend that is “cheese guy,” even though Locke’s knowledge of him was secondhand.

How many cheese singles does it take to cover your body?

How much does all that cheese cost?

How do you get the cheese singles to stick your body?

Unfortunately, I forgot to ask about “vase guy,” so that kinky mystery will have to wait for another time. As for “cheese guy,” Locke said she couldn’t perform for him because she thinks processed cheese slices are “gross.” I assured her that all of the cheese in our fridge is sourced from Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and local cheese mongers—no processed cheese slices here! That seemed to put Locke at ease, so I asked about the story that made me uncomfortable: Push-up Man.

“Can I ask about the guy who wanted you to do push-ups, but then made fun of how you did them? It just seems so… mean. What was his deal?”

“Yeah, I never performed for him again,” Locke said. “The issue came down to consent. I would’ve been down for a fitness kink, which is what I thought he was requesting. But I also I would’ve been happy to do a humiliation video. The issue, for me, was the way he presented the request. It felt like a bait and switch, like he wanted something I hadn’t consented to give him.”

Locke’s point about consent is a really important one that all too frequently gets lost in discussions about sex and sex work. Locke didn’t say this, but I have no trouble believing that Push-Up Man thinks he obtained consent, assuming he thinks about consent at all, when he booked the show.

But that’s not how consent works, of course. If Push-up Man had thought about consent—and he really should have thought about it because every person, regardless of their gender or profession has the right to grant or withhold consent—he might’ve opened the door to a wider conversation about his sexual fantasies. Who knows? Maybe that conversation would’ve led to lots of great Sophia Locke performances.

Consider another Sophia Locke story that made me feel somewhat uncomfortable. A client requested a very specific role play that sounds like an X-rated episode of The Handmaid’s Tale. The story, among other things, is a good example of why consent is the prerequisite to fulfilling any fantasy.

@sophialocke_Ah, one of my favorite role plays I’ve ever done. This fetish got VERY specific 🤨 #stories #webcam[image error]Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

In the first part of the client’s fantasy, Locke plays an “angry reporter lady” character covering a proposed law that will force all women to become sex slaves. Then comes the plot twist. In the second part of the fantasy, the law goes into effect, and Locke’s “angry reporter lady” character is forced to become a sex slave. Naked, except for mittens, Locke licks a giant dildo while looking blankly at the camera. It’s an elaborate, very specific, and to some people, disturbing fantasy. But to Locke, her client’s fantasy was fun to perform and talking about it is instructive in terms of understanding the importance of consent.

“Can we talk about the difference between the Push-Up Man experience and the Angry Reporter Lady client?” I asked. “On the surface, Push-Up Man seems like he has something in common with the man who wanted you to role play a very specific dystopian sex slave fantasy.”

Locke said she had never really thought about comparing the two men, but she was up for the conversation. The gist of what I was getting at was this: you don’t have to read in feminist theory to see the misogyny behind Push-up Man’s real life behavior and the misogynistic themes of the Angry Reporter Lady fantasy. But when I asked Locke if she saw similarities between the two requests, she said no.

“It’s a matter of intention,” she said. “I don’t really know what Push-Up Man’s intent was because he didn’t ask for my consent, and when he started trying to humiliate me, I ended the session.”

“But the dystopian sex slave guy was different?” I asked.

“Totally! He was great. He was open about what turned him on. We talked about it. I consented. Making his fantasy happen was fun. That’s my job. I love my job!”

I love my job too because I love bringing you amazing stories like the one you’re reading. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to support my work👇

Jenga + Godzilla + Justin Bieber = Community?!

A good cam show is always about more than just sex. It’s an interactive experience where performers and fans can share anything and everything.

“You have to love talking to people,” Locke told me. “But you also have to be able to manage all the other stuff that goes into putting on a show.”

At a minimum, all the other stuff includes lighting, camera, sound, costumes, make-up, props, and making time to chat with the audience. But that’s the minimum. The real trick to making a living as a cam model is to build a community that supports your sex work.

Early in her adult career, Locke built an epic community by coming up with a novel way to start her shows. Rather than doing something typical like a striptease, Locke hit upon the idea of playing Jenga for her fans. Each time someone tipped $4, she’d seductively remove a Jenga block. When the tower fell, the show would begin.

The idea was a hit. Even better, what grew out of Locke’s gamified warm-up act evolved into something so silly, so transgressive, and ultimately, so idiosyncratic that all these years later Locke can’t fully explain it. But then again, how do you explain a show where Locke, dressed in a Godzilla suit, amped up by her cheering fans, strobe lights, and a soundtrack of sirens and cheap horror film screams, destroys a miniature city built out of Jenga blocks, before grabbing a life-size Justin Bieber cardboard cut-out and “railing him” from behind? Answer: you can’t really explain it, but if you’re Locke, you can try to make sense of it on TikTok.

@sophialocke_#greenscreen why did I always get so weird? 🦖[image error]Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

When I asked Locke about the “Jenga-Godzilla-Bieber” finale, she told me the idea grew organically out of the community’s input and her own “weird” passion for Godzilla.

“It was the kind of thing that happens in online communities where there’s one inside joke on top of another, and it just builds [over several years] as new people join the community, and things take on a life of their own.”

Listening to Locke speak about the community she built reminded me of the advice online platforms regularly share with content creators. Creating great content is important, the advice goes, but fostering a community around that content is the key to success. That’s easer said than done, of course. But nailing the best practices for community building is the easy part. The really hard part, for most of us anyway, is finding the confidence to be so vulnerable. Locke didn’t put it this way, but her confident vulnerability is her superpower. Well, that and a Godzilla suit.

Enjoying this story about Sophia Locke? Don’t forget to share it with everyone you know, or face Godzilla’s wrath🦖🔥👇

Share

Your step mom shoots porn

These days, Locke is more likely to be shooting porn scenes for studios than performing for fans on a webcam. Just like cam modeling, you have to be comfortable having sex in front of strangers, but porn shoots are a different animal.

On the one hand, working for a studio means that Locke doesn’t have to manage a community or do the work of producing a show. As she put it, “I just have to show up ready to work.” But on the other hand, working for studios means that Locke’s opportunities are a function of how the industry views her and what producers think their customers want to see. In Locke’s case, that often means filming “step mom” scenes.

“It’s not something I would’ve felt comfortable doing five years ago,” Locke told me. “But I’m into it now.”

For Locke, the taboo of playing a step mom who has sex with her step son became a lot more accessible when she thought about her own fantasies.

“Calling a man daddy and role playing along those lines is something I’ve done in my personal life. It’s not quite the same thing as playing a step mom, but it’s similar enough. Once I made that connection, it clicked.”

According to Pornhub’s 2022 year in review, “step mom” content ranked as the seventh most popular search term on the tube site.2 Meanwhile searches for MILF (Mom I'd Like to Fuck) ranked third on the Pornhub platform. I asked Locke what the difference was between step mom and MILF content.

“To me, MILF is about wanting to see a woman who is over a certain age. It’s about the woman in the scene. Step mom content is a very specific kink. The performer is someone who could play a MILF, but it’s the scenario that really turns fans on.”

Before getting to the sex, the performer playing the step mom needs to hit certain beats: shock, embarrassment, reluctance, acceptance. For legal reasons, it’s also important to emphasize the word “step” early and often in the scene.

“I don’t consider myself an actor, so that part of the performance is a challenge for me,” Locke said. “You have to strike a balance. The scenario is absurd, but inside the scenario you need to play it as realistically as possible.”

When I asked what it meant to do realism inside of an absurd scenario, Locke told me about a Reddit thread where fans of step mom content critiqued a scene she did with Olivia Jayy called The Best Mother’s Day Ever. Spoiler alert: the fan consensus was that Locke “carried the scene.” But the fans had plenty of constructive criticism too.3

A Reddit user who goes by the handle jackknife00 explained what worked in the scene and what didn’t:

I thought the initial premise of the moms reluctantly modeling the “inappropriate” mothers day gifts was brilliant. And very sexy. I did not care for the the “dick in the box” stunt.

IMO, [it] would have been much better if they had left out the “dick in the box” stunt and just let the foot massages escalate to an “inappropriate” level. That would have provided justification for the swap. That and a couple of accidental interactions during the “69” would have made this an easy 5.

A different Reddit user who goes by the handle hoochimamaya rated the scene a 2 out of 5. Here’s why:

[I] couldn’t get a taboo kick out of it and it simply boiled down to right out of the gate the guys not looking their parts (no significant age contrast, not looking the family type) so they were never going to sell the illusion, even if they tried their best (I doubt they did). I just fast forwarded through it.

+ Sophia Locke’s funny faces when confronted with the dubious breakfast in bed food. The humorous bits/sketches in swap scenes frequently stand out.

+ Sophia Locke seemed like she might have the acting chops to sell her role in a future better scene with a better plot and pairing. Her expressions leading up to the kissing action during the 69 position were pretty hot.

- Most everything else. The setup sequences where ideally you’d try [to] establish the family relationships by showing family body language, family life, etc. were over in the blink of an eye (breakfast in bed). By the time we got dicks in a box it may as well have been a pizza delivery porn plot.

Reading the Reddit thread was a perfect window into the absurdist realism Locke was talking about. On the one hand, the idea that anyone who isn’t part of a Saturday Night Live sketch would put their dick in a box is as absurd as the premise of two dudes banging their step moms for Mother’s Day. But on the other hand, leaning into realism—what comedians call committing to the bit—is often the difference between a scene that works and one that doesn’t.

Maybe it sounds funny to put so much thought into a porn scene, and maybe it really is funny to take porn so seriously. But that’s Locke’s job, and it’s her thoughtful approach that drives her performance and carries the scene.

Still, step mom scenes deal with a fantasy that many people find uncomfortable, in part because that’s the nature of any taboo, but also because people who aren’t fans of that particular role play are likely to assume the worst of the audience. That’s why I asked Locke to tell me what she thinks of the fans of her step mom scenes.

“I try not to make assumptions about the audience because it’s their fantasy, not who they are in real life. I don’t think anyone wants to be judged by their fantasy, and I don’t think anyone should be judged for their fantasy. That’s why I try to think about what the audience wants, rather than who they might be in real life.”

Locke made a fair point, but we don’t live in a fair world. If we did, I probably wouldn’t feel so weird writing about step mom content, and Locke may never have felt reluctant to perform those kinds of scenes in the first place. After all, the fantasy is as at least as old as Sophocles (Oedipus Rex) and popular enough to sustain iconic film characters like Mrs. Robinson (The Graduate), Stifler’s Mom (American Pie), and Maude (Harold and Maude). Then there’s the TLC reality show Milf Manor. Unlike the step mom scenes that are so popular on Pornhub, Milf Manor takes a cringy step into reality by casting real life moms and sons and then documenting the awkwardness when both mother and son are forced to witness their respective budding May-December romances.4

What’s striking about this topic, to me anyway, is how this particular taboo manages to be so popular in both mainstream and adult circles, and yet it still remains on the fringe, where all taboos live. But as Locke made clear throughout our conversation, there’s a big difference between fantasy and reality. Trying to reconcile the two, I suppose, is always going to be fraught, and maybe, if you’re not careful, lead you to a place where you judge people by their fantasies, instead of their real life actions.

My fantasy is making Situation Normal my full-time gig. Help make my fantasy a reality by upgrading to a paid subscription👇

Sophia Locke IRL

During our video chat, I never asked who Sophia Locke is in real life. But then again, I didn’t have to ask that question. Throughout our conversation, Locke shared lots of details about the person behind the persona. As Locke explained at the outset, she’s a three-dimensional person who does sex work, not the one-dimensional version of a sex worker some of us hold in our heads.

Case in point: Locke has a passion for singing that dates back to her childhood. When Locke first entered the adult industry, she didn’t share her singing with very many people, and she definitely didn’t share it at all with her fans. As she explained, her identity was wrapped up in her singing, but she lacked confidence in her talent, and so she kept that part of herself hidden. In other words, sharing her voice was just too vulnerable for Locke in those days.

But after returning to the industry and joining TikTok, Locke’s newfound confidence inspired her to take a chance and share her singing with her fans. Here’s Locke signing one of her favorite songs: The Sound of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel.

@sophialocke_Even though Art Garfunkel yelled at me once, I still love this song 😆[image error]Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

To be honest, I worried a little about how TikTok might react to Locke’s signing. After all, people can be incredibly nasty in the comments, especially to women, especially to sex workers, and especially to female sex workers who dare to share aspects of their lives that have nothing to do with sex work. But as it turned out, my fears—and maybe Locke’s fears too—were misplaced.

“The funny thing is my singing videos are the only TikTok videos where I haven’t gotten any trolls, or mean comments. People have actually been really kind and supportive of my singing! The worst comment I got was someone who asked in all caps: why so many ballads?”

“That sounds like a fan who just wants to hear you sing something other than a ballad.”

“I know, right? But the all caps thing was jarring for a moment because usually when you see an all caps, the comment is awful.”

“But this one was kind!”

“Very kind. They’re all kind, actually. I’m sort of blown away by the kind reactions to my singing. It’s actually made me feel a lot more confident to share my singing with my community on TikTok.”

I don’t know what the kind comments on Locke’s singing videos say about her singing, or what they say about the community she’s built on TikTok, or if the kindness and generosity she’s experienced on TikTok says anything at all. But I do know that there’s something beautiful about feeling the confidence to share who you really are with the world.

In that sense, Sophia Locke is a good example for anyone striving to live an authentic life. After all, Locke lives in public as a sex worker, singer, storyteller, and so much more. I don’t think many people know how to live so openly and honestly. I know I don’t, anyway, and I write funny stories about my life for thousands of strangers twice a week.

Thank you so much for reading this story! To learn more about Sophia Locke, you can connect with her on the following platforms:

Twitter

TikTok

OnlyFans

And if you’re curious to learn more about my time as a reporter in Porn Valley, pick up a copy of my novel, Not Safe for Work 👇

Check out NSFW!

Bonus content: Sophia Locke Takes the Smutty Questionnaire👇

16 Questions with Sophia Locke

1

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/27/tikto...

2

https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2022...

3

https://www.reddit.com/r/daughterswap...

4

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/02/entert...

Sophia Locke Takes the Smutty Questionnaire

After speaking with Sophia Locke about confidence, TikTok, and step mom content, I invited her to take the Smutty Questionnaire. Here’s what she had to say.

What question are you tired of answering?

How do I, as man, get in the adult entertainment industry.

What question do you wish someone would ask?

I’d love to talk more about building community. I wish people would ask about that.

If you were a wrestler, what would be your entrance theme song?

Pony by Ginuwine.

If you were to teach a class on one topic, what would you teach?

I’d teach about consent, or I’d teach a class that looks behind-the-scenes of adult entertainment.

The zombie apocalypse is coming. Who are three people you want on your team and why?

I have a few friends who have stuck with me through thick and thin. They’re my team in the zombie apocalypse because I trust them with my life.

What would the title of your autobiography be?

Sophia Locke: The Life of Responsible Slut.

What is your favorite word?

Slut. It’s empowering to me, but also very nuanced in the ways it’s used.

What is your least favorite word?

Bitch.

What turns you on creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?

Intelligence. Musical talent. Intensity of connection.

What turns you off?

Arrogance. Stupidity. Lack of presence.

If you could commit any crime and get away with it, what would you choose and why?

I don’t want to commit any crimes.

If you could meet any living person for dinner, who would you pick and why?

I want to talk to someone who has crossed over into the mainstream. I’d pick Sasha Grey.

This is Sasha Grey (in case you don’t know)👆

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

My dad told me you teach people how to treat you.

What is your favorite curse word?

Fuck.

After you’re gone, what would you like to be remembered for?

I’d like to be remembered for kindness, intelligence, and as someone who helped push this industry into a positive, normalized light. Also, my adorable pussy.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

Good job! I’m proud of you. I have a praise kink.

Thanks for reading the Smutty Questionnaire with Sophia Locke!

Subscribe now

Quintuple whammy | Catalytic converts

Quintuple whammy

Sometimes the shit hits the fan. Other times, there’s a lot more shit and lot more fans. Last week, I saw five shits hit five fans. A quintuple whammy.

Whammy #1

Around midnight, we left a friend’s birthday party in Culver City. Normally, the drive back to the Valley takes anywhere between thirty minutes and six decades. But at midnight, there’s barely enough time to listen to Do You Feel Like We Do by Peter Frampton.

Just as Frampton was wrapping things up, we exited the 118 freeway. But something was amiss. The traffic lights were flashing red. The nearby buildings were dark. Either there had been a minor power outage in our neighborhood, or the apocalypse had begun.

At the corner of Rinaldi and Mason, we saw the culprit. A Tesla, apparently without the help of another car, had knocked over a fire hydrant. The broken hydrant looked like a fountain, but the broken Tesla looked serious. Christina called 911, the 911 operator called the fire department, and that was the end our involvement.

Share Situation Normal

Whammy #2

Like all Angelenos, I measure my commitment to something (or someone) by the number of freeways I’m willing to travel in order to reach the thing (or person) I care about. For reference purposes, I’m willing to travel an unlimited number of freeways for my friends, four freeways for a good story, three freeways to get to my favorite yoga studio, two freeways for Dim sum, and one freeway for a doctors appointment.

To get to my favorite yoga studio, I take the 118, to the 5, to 170, which is the same route Saturday Night Live writers took to reach a comedy goldmine in 2012. If I time traffic patterns right, make the appropriate sacrifices to gods of the LA freeways, and drive like Mad Max, I can make it to yoga class in twenty-seven minutes. But if the shit hits the fan, all bets are off.

In what would prove to be the second whammy of the week, I discovered that the 5 freeway was a parking lot where everyone was angry. To compound the whammy, and encourage honking, a Caltrans sign informed motorists that all lanes on the 170 freeway were closed because of an “incident.”1 I ended up missing yoga, but my nerves got a 90-minute workout as I fought, Fury Road style, to get back home.

Share Situation Normal

Whammy #3

The third whammy was actually part of whammy number two, making the second whammy a double-whammy, which is the classic whammy form.

After trading paint with a big rig, shooting a G-Wagon driver between the eyes with my crossbow, and running a little old lady from Pasadena off the road, I managed to exit the 5 freeway and run smack dab into another traffic jam! As it turned out, the second traffic jam was caused by a second fire hydrant situation, but this time I got a picture because other than honking, there wasn’t anything else to do while we sat there.

Share Situation Normal

Whammy #4

It was around lunch time when I finally returned home from my failed yoga-run. I didn’t want to go back out there, but Christina said I could pick the restaurant, which was a very clever tactic on her part.

I picked California Chicken Cafe (if you know, you know). But the five-minute drive to the nearest California Chicken Cafe location got weird two minutes into the journey.

“What the fuck is that guy doing?” Christina asked.

The guy in question was the driver of a semi-truck. The trailer of his eighteen wheeler jutted out into the street, blocking both southbound lanes of Topanga Canyon, plus one of the northbound lanes. Meanwhile, the tractor was stuck in the warehouse driveway, a flattened motorcycle crushed underneath its giant tires.

“What is going on in the house of commons?” Christina asked.

“Maybe Mercury is in retrograde,” I said.

“Two busted fire hydrants, a failed yoga run. Now this! Something is going on. I think it’s you, honey.”

Share Situation Normal

Whammy #5

At this point in the week, there had been far too much shit hitting far too many fans for me to take any chances. So I decided to stay home and listen to Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival by Peter Stark. If you don’t know, one of America’s first attempts to establish a Pacific trading colony in what would later become Oregon, was a total shit-show. Also, if you don’t know, French traders who arrived in North America in the early 1600s created something called “The Order of the Good Times,” which is neither here nor there, but nevertheless a fun fact I picked up from Stark’s book.

ANYWAY, I figured that reading a book about a historic shit-show would distract me from the real life shit shows that seemed to be popping all around me this week. But as you can probably guess, I figured wrong.

Around ten in the evening, while listening to my book in bed, I drifted off to sleep. Later, Christina came to bed. Seeing me propped up in bed at an awkward angle, glasses still on my face, and my earbuds still in, Christina thought she could help. Quietly, she walked over to my side of the bed and gently touched my arm.

But before Christina could whisper, “time to go to bed, honey,” I popped straight up like a jack in the box toy. I let out a blood-curdling scream that curdled Christina’s blood so thoroughly that she vowed to let me sleep at awkward angles, with my glasses on, and my earbuds in, for the rest of our lives together.

Subscribe now

Catalytic converts

Situation Normal is many things: a newsletter, a community, a home for my writing, and increasingly, a clearing house for catalytic converter news. If you don’t know, I’ve had my catalytic converter stolen two times in less than a year, and I’m currently in the third month of an eight-month wait for a replacement. Thankfully, several situation normies are here to help with two timely news items.

Tab sent a story about thieves in Las Vegas who stole the The Wienermobile’s catalytic converter.2 What are the odds Big Wiener gets a new catalytic converter before I get a replacement?

Meanwhile, my sister, Allison, my aunt Judy, and my mother-in-law Cheryl all flagged the same story out of Palmdale about a man who was run over and killed after he allegedly crawled under a parked SUV and tried to steal the catalytic converter.3

Submit to Situation Normal? Send your funny photos, odd overheards, and other slices of life to michael.j.estrin@gmail.com.

ICYMI

There are more than 2,000 situation normies reading Situation Normal! Since I began this newsletter with a little more than 100 people, I felt like it was a good idea to share what I learned about confidence, setting goals, growth, building community, the subscription media model, and running a newsletter. You can read those learnings, along with shout outs to some generous writers who helped me grow, by clicking this link.

Thank you, paying situation normies!

As Situation Normal grows, the workload increases. This is what the tragically underrated band Astra Heights called a Good Problem (which also happens to be the name of their first album).

I’m happy to do the work! It’s a lot of fun. But it’s nice to see that each week new situation normies step up to support Situation Normal. This week, those awesome situation normies are:

Keith, a proud situation normie, who bought an annual subscription to a humor newsletter, even though he typically reads about “bits, bytes, and the beautiful game,” which I assume to be super models playing chess.

Nick, a good friend whose only real flaw is an irrational hatred of the Philadelphia Eagles, became a founding situation normie—a status that confers upon Nick free rides to doctors appointments in Los Angeles County, accompanied in Nick’s case, by unlimited Eagles trash-talking privileges.

Jennifer, an OG situation normie who is kinda-sorta-not-really my cousin, but who is nevertheless family, made it official with a founder subscription.

Wanna see your name in a Situation Normal shout out? Upgrade to a paid subscription👇

Comedic Personal Essay Universe Q&A

You won’t get rich quick (or slow) writing in the comedic personal essay universe (CPEU™), but if you stick with it, you will get to meet some cool people. One of those cool people is Alex Dobrenko, who writes Both Are True.

Late last year, Alex asked if I would do a Q&A with him. We spent part of December, all of January, and some of February farting around in a Google document. Eventually, I had responded to enough of Alex’s Q’s with my A’s to have what’s known in the media business as a Q&A.

You can read Alex’s edited Q&A with me here. Or, if you’re a paid subscriber to Both Are True, you can read the “raw,” “unedited,” “uncut” version here. Is the raw, unedited, uncut version of me worth the price? I dunno. But the paid version of Both Are True is the best deal going in the CPEU™ by a long shot.

Stick around and chat!

You know the drill. I’ve got questions, you’ve got answers.

Do you believe in whammies, curses, hexes, dark clouds, retrograde planetary alignments, bad luck, or other forms of supernatural shit flying into nearby fans?

Can you believe that I take three freeways to do yoga? What’s the farthest you travel for an activity you love?

The Wienermobile story feels like it belongs in The Onion, right? Or, maybe it’s a sign of civilization’s imminent collapse. You tell me!

Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival is interesting, but not even remotely scary. What book are you reading at the moment, and has it caused you to wake up screaming?

Frampton’s Do You Feel Like We Do clocks in at just under fourteen minutes. What’s your favorite long(ish) song?

Leave a comment

1

Later, Christina’s Googling would reveal that the “incident” was a fiery car crash that left two people dead, which really puts all that honking into perspective.

2

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...

3

https://www.latimes.com/california/st...

I hit 2,000 subscribers. Here's what I learned

Photo by Ronnie Overgoor on Unsplash

At the start of 2023, I made a list of goals for Situation Normal. I never used to do this kind of stuff because I used to think that setting goals was for people who were trying a little too hard to “crush it,” without realizing that you should only use a phrase like “crush it” ironically.

Then I met my wife. Christina has a knack for crushing it, whatever it happens to be, and she uses the phrase “crush it” however she pleases. How liberating! What was this woman’s secret? I made a list.

Confidence? ✅

Hard work? ✅

Brains? ✅✅✅

After watching Christina in action, I began to wonder why I wasn’t crushing it. I’m smart-ish, I told myself. And I work hard. Really hard. But then it hit me like a ton of feathers, which hurts just as much as a ton of bricks: I struggle with my confidence.

Christina and I have one of those closed marriages that seem to be out of fashion these days, but we make it a point to keep our lines of communication open. So as I prepared to launch Situation Normal, I let her in on my biggest fear.

“I don’t think it’s going to work,” I told Christina. “My friends like my stories, but maybe they’re just being nice. What if I launch this thing and it turns out that strangers hate my work, or worse, don’t even notice it? Won’t that prove that I’ve made a big mistake launching Situation Normal, and an even bigger mistake by becoming a writer? It could flop, and that’ll confirm that I’ve wasted twenty years of my life, right?”

Obviously, I had raised the stakes. That’s what writers do, but it’s also what anxious minds do. Raised stakes are good for stories, but they’re bad for your mental health.

I was hoping Christina would give me a pep talk. But Christina surprised me with a hard-nosed business question.

“Define work,” she said. “What are your goals for Situation Normal, and what metrics will you use to measure your progress?”

HOLY FUCK BALLS!

That was a really difficult question to answer. Actually, it was two questions I had no idea how to answer.

I shit my pants, figuratively. Then I panicked, literally. But eventually, all the figurative shit and literal panic gave way to a good conversation about how people start with nothing and build something.

Obviously, there’s a lot of stuff that goes into building something out of nothing. But all of that stuff has to be in service of a goal. Your goal is your North Star. But as Christina told me, your goal is also the secret to building confidence as go.

“You measure your progress as you go, and that’s like putting deposits in a confidence bank,” Christina said. “Then one day, you hit your goal, and right there you’ve got proof that you can do it, because you done did it!”

Initially, my goal for Situation Normal was 1,000 subscribers. Actually, I wanted the goal to be 500 subscribers, but Christina challenged me to challenge myself, so we settled on 1,000.

I wrote my ass off, told everyone I knew that I was writing my ass off, and looked for peers who were writing their asses off.

Did I hit my goal?

Spoiler alert: I did.

But also, spoiler alert: I missed my deadline for that goal by ten months. I wrote about what I learned on the way to that goal here.

This post, however, is about what I learned on my way to my next goal. But before we get to the learnings, let’s take a look at the list of goals I made at the start of 2023.

I made that list in a private file with a bunch of other information, like my social security number, Elon Musk’s Twitter password, and my recipe for fajitas. Since I can’t share that other stuff, I’ve recreated my goals with ink and paper. Please excuse my messy handwriting.

With handwriting like this, I could’ve been a doctor, or a serial killer, but those weren’t my goals.

For the sake of clarity, I’ll restate those goals in legible bullet points:

2,000 free subscribers

100 paid subscribers

Platform Not Safe for Work (my novel)

Make more original art for Situation Normal (see above👆👨‍🎨🎨💪)

Take more risks on stories I’m afraid to write

Since I made this list in the beginning of January, I figured these would be my goals for most of 2023. But as it turned out, I hit the first goal—2,000 free subscribers—less than a month into the year, and then I kept going goaling!

My other goals remain a work in progress, but I want this post to focus on the things I learned from hitting that first goal on my 2023 list. After all, most newsletter writers probably have a similar goal, so hopefully what I have to say helps a community of writers who have been so very generous with me.

Question: How do I go viral? Answer: You don’t.

If you scroll up to look at the screenshot I shared of my Substack dashboard, you’ll notice a nearly vertical line at the end of January. Looking at that line, you’re probably asking, “How did you do that, Michael, and can you tell me how I can do that too?”

Unfortunately, the answer to the first question is: I didn’t do that. And the answer to the second question is: you can’t do that either. The reason behind both of those answers is the same: my shit went viral. But saying your shit went viral is another way of saying you benefited from something that’s beyond your control. If something is beyond your control, there’s absolutely no way to make that thing happen in the first place, or replicate it as part of a growth strategy.

Now, I realize that every writer in the 21st century wants to go viral, or they’re supposed to want to go viral. Why we’ve come to associate a virus with something that’s supposedly good is beyond me. But back in the 20th century, before social media platforms and the rise of the attention economy, we probably would’ve called this kind of rapid growth “getting rich quick.” And just so it was clear that getting rich quick was nice in theory, but problematic in practice, we would’ve added the word “scheme.”

When I set my goal of reaching 2,000 subscribers in 2023, I had about 1,600 subscribers. At the time, increasing my audience by 25 percent in one year seemed like a goal that was both challenging and reasonable. After all, it had taken me nearly two years to go from about 100 subscribers to 1,000. Also, at the time I set the goal of reaching 2,000 subscribers, I was adding one or two free subscribers per day. I figured—incorrectly, as it turned out—that I’d hit 2,000 subscribers toward the end of 2023 by consistently putting out good work and asking people to share it. That was a plan I could execute on because the things I needed to do were within my control.

But let’s indulge in a hypothetical for a moment. What if I had set my free subscriber goal at 2,000, but moved moved the timeline from a year to a month? I know, I know, that’s what happened. But suppose, for a moment, that I had told Christina that I intended to add 400 subscribers in a month.

“That’s kickass,” she would’ve said, “but how are you going to do that?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” I would’ve replied. “I’m gonna go viral.”

“How are you going to go viral, Michael?”

At this point in the hypothetical, I would’ve been pulling all kinds of marketing jargon out of my ass:🍑👇

Deploy hashtags strategically to maximize reach & engagement.

Engage influencers!

Tickle the algorithm—assuming algorithms are ticklish, which I’m pretty sure they are not.

How would Christina have responded to my stream of jargon? Here’s a guess.

“Sounds like your plan is hope,” Christina might’ve said. “That’s not a plan.” Then if she was feeling saucy, Christina could’ve quoted her dad: “Hope in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first.”

OK, back to reality. In reality, viral moments can and do happen, but usually they happen to other people, and often times they come with fickle audiences and shitty side effects like trolls, nasty comments, and paralyzing anxiety (more on the downsides of viral growth in the next section).

Am I glad I went viral? Yeah, for the most part. But I didn’t plan on going viral because I knew that the favor of the internet gods was beyond my control. Just as important, I would’ve hit my goal anyway, albeit at a slower pace.

Subscribe now

Writing a newsletter gives me ship of Theseus vibes

If you studied philosophy, read John Dies at the End, watched the series finale of Wandavision, or regularly fall into a Wikipedia-holes, you might be familiar with a thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus. Basically, the thought experiment asks: does an object that has had all of its original components replaced remain the same object? Here’s a little more from the Ship of Theseus Wikipedia entry:

According to legend, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, had rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped on a ship to Delos. Every year, the Athenians commemorated this legend by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. The question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if every part of the Ship of Theseus had been replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship?

In contemporary philosophy, this thought experiment has applications to the philosophical study of identity over time, and has inspired a variety of proposed solutions in contemporary philosophy of mind concerned with the persistence of personal identity.

It’s entirely possible that the Wikipedia entry for the Ship of Theseus suffers from its own Ship of Theseus problem. After all, some anonymous Wikipedia editor may have replaced every single word in the entry with new words, leaving us to wonder if the original entry is still the entry? But that’s another question for when I’m feeling super-meta.

The relevant question for everyone who writes a newsletter is this: Is the newsletter I launched in 2020 still the same newsletter I publish in 2023?

The name of my newsletter is the same, and so is the URL, and if you collected the hundreds of stories I’ve written here, you’d say they’re of a piece with each other. But Situation Normal, like many newsletters, isn’t just a static story collection, it’s also an ongoing conversation with an audience that’s both growing and changing.

Which brings me back to the Ship of Theseus. Most days, I think about relatable jokes, not obscure philosophical questions. But after my audience grew by 25 percent overnight, the Ship of Theseus helped me make sense of what was happening to Situation Normal.

For context, I’m going to share a screenshot of the traffic spike I saw when I went viral. Typically, my traffic on days that I post is around 2,500 views. On days that I don’t post, my traffic hovers around 400 views. On the day I went viral, I had 16,644 views.

Looks amazing, right? But what was happening underneath all that data?

For starters, the vast majority of visitors didn’t stick around—16,000-plus views netted around 400 subscribers. This is what I mean when I say that viral moments mostly bring in fickle audiences.

As far as I know, most of those fickle readers were lovely, thoughtful people who just weren’t interested in my newsletter. But collectively, those fickle readers rode in on a viral wave that also carried toxic crap.

For the first time in the two-year history of Situation Normal, I had to delete comments that contained hate speech, deal with a troll who turned out to be my mom, and work harder than you’d think to ignore some really rude comments that were directed at me personally.

But the biggest challenge was the Ship of Theseus problem. Suddenly, I had 400 new subscribers who weren’t part of the conversation the last time the Situation Normal community gathered.

On an emotional front, that was a little scary. My friend Alex Dobrenko, who also writes in the comedic personal essay universe (CPEU™) at his hilarious and heartfelt newsletter Both Are True, calls this kind of anxiety, “big first day of school energy.” It’s paralyzing in the way stage freight is paralyzing. The only way around that fear is to go through it. But to go through it, you have to understand why the Ship of Theseus is relevant to running a newsletter.

Normally, I add a few subscribers per day. One or two new people, or even a dozen new people, aren’t going to be able to pull off a vibe shift in a room of 1,600 people. To paraphrase Walter Sobchak, one or two people showing up in a room of 1,600 have no frame of reference because they are like children wondering into the middle of a movie…

But what happens when 400 new people suddenly enter a chat that holds 1,600 people? At that point, all bets are off, and a potential vibe shift might be underway. Or, put differently, a viral influx of new subscribers is the Ship of Theseus problem on steroids.

Setting aside my anxiety, as if that’s really something you can do, I realize that this is actually a good problem. But there’s a big challenge here because you want to make sure that you’re giving long-time subscribers what they signed up for, while welcoming the new arrivals into the conversation. A few things can help on that front:

Write a special note for your next edition to both welcome the new people and alert your regulars that a lot of new people just joined the party.

Write a milestone post to reset the conversation.

Trust that some of your more vocal community members will help you to continue to set the right tone simply by contributing their amazing comments.

Feel the churn.

Subscribe now

Feel the churn!

My friend Geoffrey Golden, who writes the endlessly amusing interactive fiction newsletter Adventure Snack, likes to say, “feel the churn.” Geoffrey says stuff like this because he’s very funny, but also because he knows his shit.

Churn, in case you don’t know, is what people in the newsletter game use as a shorthand for the people who unsubscribe, or are periodically removed from your email list.

The first time Geoffrey told me to feel the churn, I didn’t really get it. Actually, I was a little annoyed, not at Geoffrey, but at the situation. I was growing by ones and twos, but I was churning by twos and threes. In other words, my growth trajectory felt like one step forward and two steps back.

At that time, I didn’t want to feel the churn because I felt like the churn was the thing that was holding me back. If I could just stop people from churning, I thought, Situation Normal would take off like a rocket ship.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, I continued writing, and the churn continued churning. Along the way, however, I learned to stop worrying about people who unsubscribe and love the churn.

I know, I know, it sounds bananas when I say I love churn, especially if you’re measuring your audience in single, double, or even triple digits. But here’s where I’m coming from, and why I think you should learn to love the churn too. The people who unsubscribe aren’t your audience, and because they aren’t your audience, you’re better off without them.

That’s a hard pill to swallow, but as soon as you swallow it, you get a really special gift: the ability to draw a laser-focus on the people who show up to read your newsletter. Treat them right, and they’ll treat you right by telling you what works and what doesn’t, sharing your work, and standing strong in your corner as you face the indifferent, and sometimes mean, internet.

Subscribe now

There’s no “I” in team and there’s no “Me” in Grow 

When I was a kid, my Little League coach used to say, “there’s no ‘I’ in team.” I wasn’t the best speller in those days, so it took a few seasons for me to pick up what my coach was putting down. But eventually, my coach’s point clicked, and as I grew up, I realized that his lesson was applicable to anything humans endeavor to build.

I’m the only writer at Situation Normal, but growing this newsletter is a team effort. The first member of that team is Christina, obviously. She’s my cheerleader, coach, creative director, and business and strategy wizard. But zoom out a little and there are more faces in the team photo.

There’s Alex Dobrenko, who coined the CPEU™ concept, which is helpful because before he said it, I really didn’t have a word to describe what I do. Also, Alex and I went through the same growing pains just a few weeks apart, and when the shit hit the fan, he was like, “Michael, I got you.”

Alex and I are part of a slightly larger team that includes Anne Kadet, who writes Café Anne, and Jane Ratcliffe, who writes Beyond. The four of us have had similar growth trajectories on Substack, which is why it’s a safe bet that if one of us has a question, the other two also had the same question, and (hopefully) the fourth person has an experience-based answer. (By the way, the Ship of Theseus section came out of a conversation the four of us had about growing pains).

Then there’s Geoffrey “Feel the Churn” Golden, who was one of the first writers on Substack to assure me that the thing I was doing was, indeed, a thing. Also, in case you don’t know, Geoffrey is the co-creator, along with Jackie Dana (Story Cauldron) of the Fictionistas writing community, which is a larger team I turn to for all kinds of useful information and support.

There are my occasional collaborators, Amran Gowani (Field Research) and Dennard Dayle (Extra Evil). They’re both very funny writers, and our collaborations push me creatively, while helping me cross-pollinate my audience.

Speaking of cross-pollination, there are the 56 publications on Substack that recommend Situation Normal to their readers. And of course, there’s the team at Substack that built a sweet recommendation engine, along with all the other tools that help me reach you.

Which brings me to the heart and soul of my team—the situation normies. As of this writing, there are around 2,300 situation normies. I’m proud of that number because it’s a helluva milestone, but what really makes me proud is that so many strangers have gathered around my stories to form a community.

I literally cannot do this without you, situation normies! Thank you for everything you do, and thank you for helping me us to achieve this milestone.

Stick around and chat!

If you’re new here, or a returning champion, this is the part of Situation Normal where I usually ask a few questions to get the conversation rolling. But this is a milestone post, and since the stuff in here is (hopefully) useful to the writers and creators in this community, I want leave this space open for any question you may have. So, go ahead, ask me anything👇

Leave a comment