pre-emptive content warning - discussions of self-harm, suicidal ideation, substance abuse in this
I registered this Substack page a few months ago. I’m not sure why I did at the time, but I’m glad I did now. For the past few years, ever since registering the joebush.net domain in 2014 basically because I wanted the dot com but couldn’t get it, I’ve tried to hop on new things and register my name as the username for it. That’s how I ended up with joebush.substack.com and not joebushonline.substack.com or joe-bush.substack.com or something like that.
I wanted to launch this, like really launch it, like officially, on better terms than I’m doing this now. Really, why I’m posting on this right now primarily spawns from an incident that came from looking at Twitter last Tuesday. To preface this, I’ve been at some level of “trying to find a healthier way to use Twitter” since probably 2014. Here’s what I tried:
Delete the application from my phone, limiting myself only to using it through the web browser.
Make sure to log out of the site on the browser every time I’m done looking at it
Change password to a long random alphanumeric string stored in a file that’s kept on a flash drive which I only go and plug into the computer when I absolutely need to post something
Start any number of alternative twitter accounts with the idea of looking at the main one less - from the private one I used to limit what I saw only to my closest friends, the one that was basically me posting whatever the first thing that came to my brain was, it aligned with my old Beloved Web Patron YouTube channel, twice I started twitters with the intent of following soccer writers because I knew people would get annoyed if I tweeted about soccer on the main twitter as much as I thought about it. Off the top of my head (and many of these weren’t made with the intent of using the main less) I’ve made at least thirteen Twitter accounts over the years. I think some of them are still up, frozen forever, their handles like tears in rain - @SquidHats, @Web_Patron, @EachJonBenjamin, @PipeDecider (which I still think is a funny joke if you remember that “Art Decider” guy), and most famously though the bulk of people don’t know it’s mine, @QUOTESOFDUKE.
These are only a selection of the attempts that I made to have a “healthier” relationship with Twitter. None of them worked. The most recent one worked best, but I was still looking at it all the time in different ways. It’s addictive, and that is the point of the site - Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” lays out an excellent explanation for how that is - and it’s bad for me. It’s probably bad for you too, but I know very well that it’s bad for me.
On Tuesday, June 29th, I was looking at the latter of the two soccer-centric profiles (the prior one I forgot the password to years ago) when I read a headline in that sidebar on the right side of the page that’s supposed to show you ‘what’s trending’ but ends up showing you ‘news headlines that will elicit some sort of an emotion,’ and I ended up in this weird sort of unfortunately familiar blackout state where I sort of forget where I am and what I’m doing and focus entirely on reading what I know is going to be something that snaps something within me and sparks this sort of anxious rush that I think would be classified as a panic attack or something near it. People call this phenomenon “Doom-Scrolling” but I tend to call it “Self-Harm.” because I’ve physically self-harmed in the past and the brain feels the same way about doing this as it did when it physically self-harmed in the past. It’s a mental sort of self-harm, but it’s self-harm.
If I pull myself away from it, I can recognize all of this. What that site did to me (and probably does to you) is just addiction. All the things I think about it, the things that kept me coming back were just symptoms of being addicted.
I know it’s all a sort of surrogate addiction - No, I’m not so addicted to a psychoactive drug that pushes me to have nervous episodes where I physically harm myself. It’s like a step removed - I am addicted to using a website and what I see on that website pushes me to undergo a sort of mental self-harm. It’s still bad, and there’s still no healthy way that I can use that site. And it’s baked right into the crust, this site is actively trying to keep its users addicted.
Ten years ago I had a similar feeling - mostly that I had an unhealthy attachment to a webforum I used (It was the now-defunct YouChew.net forums, based off of the community around a sort of comedic edited-video remixes called “YouTube Poop”) and I said basically, I should stop using this site so much, and so I did. Why was it so hard, after I made the same recognition seven years ago about Twitter, to quit using it?
It’s not just this - I couldn’t access that forum on my phone in 2010 because I had a flip phone and I was in the public school system so most of my time was spent on that back - But I think that the biggest issue is that this site intentionally forms this sort of dependency around using it, one that I am very susceptible to. I am absolutely susceptible to addiction. I don’t use cannabis anymore because I felt myself feeling a need to use it, I don’t keep liquor in my apartment because I’d just sort of absentmindedly have a drink or two every night ‘just because.’
It was this sort of moment of clarity where I really just had to quit lying to myself and accept that there’s no healthy way to engage with this anymore. The last thing that I had was this stupid narcissistic belief that I had to have a way to update people any time that I put something new out - a post on the blog, a video on YouTube, some other thing.
This, I suppose, is an attempt to keep people updated on what I’m doing. I know that Substack lets people subscribe via their e-mail address, so if you’re interested in what I make, you can subscribe here and get it delivered to your inbox immediately. It might publish automatically to my Twitter and it might not, I don’t care. I should delete that Twitter and I may well do so. I’ve quit from so many stupid sites that were bad for me over the years - Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat - and I need to quit lying to myself and do the same with this site. Maybe later on I’ll write something further in-depth about my history with Twitter but at this point I just want to move on and do whatever I’m gonna do here.
I didn’t intend to write a novel about this up there but I think what my preliminary idea to do here is to just sort of bring out a weekly update post where I write about whatever I feel like writing about, and then also an individual post anytime I put something up at joebush.net or YouTube. I generally don’t do more than like two things per week, so hopefully it won’t clog up your e-mail inbox.
I figured what I could do is to resurrect the Monday Update. Longtime readers (which is like my dad and maybe a few friends) will remember how in 2014 and 15 I’d write something every Monday (give or take) about what video games I’d played the week prior. I don’t play that many video games anymore so I don’t think I could limit it just to that but I think I’ll just write about what I’m thinking about, things that happened to me, maybe games or movies or books or whatever’s going on. Sort of like a web-based log of whatever’s going on. A log on the web. I need to make like a catchy little contracted name for that, though, two words won’t do. I think I’ll call this phenomenon… an Intiary. An Internet Diary. That’ll work.
So to start us off here in this post that’s intended to draw in readers, I’m going to focus on the topic that I figured would alienate readers on Twitter: Soccer.
Last week was a very good week of soccer all-around, at least in my personal judgment. MLS had several exciting matches for neutrals, and I could talk for way longer about it but I’ll try to keep these short - Austin’s win over Portland at home on Wednesday was a very fun match to watch. Their first two matches at home were nil-nil draws so their fans were very, very ready to get excited after Jon Gallagher scored the first of four on Thursday.
Just look at how many supporters took their shirts off! Look at that guy holding the bass drum over his head like that! Even as a fan of a conference rival, I am so glad that these people get something like this, especially after the prior two nil-nils at that stadium. I think that, at best, they’ll finish on the fringe of the Western Conference playoffs this season, but when they get the chance to host a playoff game, that will be a fantastic atmosphere. You can see sort of at the top of the above image several people with trumpets and trombones, they’ve got apparently like a twenty-piece brass section to go along with their drummers. That’s cool, I like that. If I lived in Austin, I’d be doing that probably, that seems like such a good time.
This is one of the dumber things that I notice but I love it when an expansion franchise comes in and they’ve only ever had one jersey so all of the fans are wearing the same jersey. Especially considering that the Austin home kit looks so good, and their away kit looks so much like a white tee-shirt with a couple of logos on them.
I also had fun watching Columbus open their new stadium up on Saturday. From where they were only a few years ago, on the brink of… well, becoming Austin FC, it’s very good to see Columbus’ fans celebrating this new chapter in their history. They also were able to witness one of the most impressive own-goals I’ve ever seen.
For that second Crew goal to happen, they needed
1 - Vito Wormgoor’s ball into the box to hit precisely where Andrew Farrell happened to be running at the time, also at precisely the angle that made it difficult for Matt Turner to get to it
2 - Farrell to panic and try to make up for the mistake - I can barely even call it a mistake, I suppose he should’ve been more aware of where he was in relation to the ball but it’s not like he tried to make a play and mishit it towards the goal, it just ricocheted off of his head. - and in the process got in the way of what looked to be a ball that Turner could easily get to. If Farrell is like a step behind, Turner is able to clear it off of the line and it probably just goes out for a throw-in. But since they both got there at the same time, neither got good contact on the ball and Turner’s touch ricocheted off of Farrell into the goal. Alternatively, if Turner had been a step behind, Farrell would have probably cleared it off of the line. It was only the panic that sent both of them towards the ball that forced the sort of half-touch which ended up putting the ball into the goal.
3 - Gyasi Zardes’ clear… guidance of the opposing players into the ball and thus into the net to go unnoticed by referees. I think if Gyasi hadn’t pushed them, it still would’ve gone in. What Gyasi did seems illegal in my eyes but I don’t know how you could argue it made a difference, and I doubt that the VAR could do anything about it either.
Shit I wanted to make these short. I haven’t even got to SKC yet. Let’s get to SKC:
I’ll start with last weekend.
I actually attended the match against LAFC last weekend. My friend Mike and I made a spur of the moment decision to attend this match, and I’m so glad that we did. As a whole, last Saturday was one of the best days I’ve had in a very, very long time, and this match played a significant role in that. It really was a sort of “ah, fuck it, I want to see this match” moment and it was one of the best games I’ve ever seen at Children’s Mercy Park. We looked mediocre for much of the first half, giving up a goal to LAFC, but there was this palpable feeling that a goal was coming right out of the gate in the second, one which came in the sixty-first after LA went down a man. It also started raining really hard around the sixtieth minute and didn’t stop until about the seventy-fifth.
There were so many near-misses during this match on both sides, it would’ve been one of the most entertaining 1-1 draws I’d ever seen if Daniel Salloi hadn’t scored in the 87th.
There are so many things that I love about soccer, and in particular soccer in-person (and I’d been to three SKC matches already this year but two of them were draws and the other was a blowout) , but there’s nothing quite like the sort of visceral emotional blackout that overtakes you after a dramatic late-game goal like that. I really don’t remember what I did for about twenty seconds or so immediately after the goal. I remember hugging Mike and yelling “DAMN DANIEL!!!” but that’s it.
There’s just nothing like that. I remember last summer thinking that this was the one thing I wanted to have again moreso than anything else, having that uninhibited emotional explosion with the Cauldron again, and I had it last weekend, and I really did appreciate it as much as I felt I would when I was thinking about it last year.
Sporting also played a good match against LA Galaxy last night, I was very prepared to be happy with a nil-nil draw on the road in a match like that, but I will take the 2-0 win if they’re offering it to me. I really was all prepared to write something about how it reminded me of a nil-nil draw on the road at the Galaxy that helped me learn the value of a single game within the context of a full season, but then Johnny Russell scored a goal and Khiry Shelton scored a goal and it ended up a win for KC. So it goes!
Shit, okay, this whole thing’s gone on for so long already. I wanted to touch on other things but I’m more concerned with finishing it at all now. I promise not every update will have sixteen paragraphs on soccer. I didn’t even talk about the Euros! I didn’t even talk about San Diego Loyal! So here’s all the other stuff for this week before I wrap up:
The one piece of pseudo-creative work I put out online this week was a review/Diary entry I put on my Letterboxd on A Million in the Morning, a DVD I bought used last weekend because I thought the concept was interesting about a world record attempt at the longest movie-watching marathon in history sponsored by Netflix. It was interesting. It wasn’t good, I guess, just interesting, both as a film and as a piece of history considering that the host of the film went on a few years later to found what’s now considered a domestic terror group in some countries. I guess back then he was just hosting documentaries.
I also have finally actually found a game from this year that I’ve genuinely liked, it’s a golf course management sim called “GolfTopia,” so check that bad boy out if you want to build some golf courses. It’s a good time.
I did finish Ben Golliver’s book “Bubbleball” about the 2020 NBA Playoffs in Orlando. Unfortunately I was quite disappointed with this book, it reads like an extended Wikipedia synopsis with some very milquetoast personal commentary thrown in. Outside of the chapter that provides more detailed information on the process surrounding the decision by the Bucks team not to play a game against Orlando in the first round after a police shooting in Wisconsin, there was so little in this that I didn’t already get from watching the playoffs on TV last year. I really bought this book for research purposes because I think it would be funny to write a story about an absurd fictionalized sports compound thing like what happened last year. But this was really not a necessary read for that purpose.
I think I’ve written enough. If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate you, and I thank you, and I promise I’ll write less about soccer next week.