Have you ever thought about where you’ll be when the world ends? What you’ll be doing when that blinding flash turns night to day, and it all fades to white?
I thought about it as I loitered in the dining area of the Hampton Inn at Düsseldorf Central Station, watching a uniformed frau dismantle the yoghurt1 parfait station while I sucked the marrow from a single-serving Nutella packet.
What if this was the precise moment the Four Horsemen came riding in (Labubu keychains dangling), and my final earthly act was greedily tonguing chocolate-smeared plastic crevices for stubborn morsels of emulsified palm oil?
At least, one could say, I died doing what I loved.
Mainlining Nutella, sure, but also…
EUROTRIPPING!!!!!!
I don’t need to tell you the prices in New York City have gotten out of hand. Not only is the RENT TOO DAMN HIGH, but since when did oat milk strawberry matchas start costing $9.50? And when is someone going to have the guts to introduce a raspberry matcha, goddamit??
For roughly the same price as treating my imaginary family to the worst seats in the house for Stranger Things on Broadway, I could fly nonstop to the Netherlands and bum around my ancestral continent for two weeks. So that’s exactly what I did to swan song this glorious summer.
I wrote about my love for Amsterdam when I was last there in January, so without further waxing poetic about bitterballen, I’ll just say two nights in that fair city is never enough… but that’s all I had if I wanted to maximize my time in Sweden with my good ol’ buddy Dan. And I wanted to! So before I could full understand exactly what that wet grey stuff is inside the bitterballen, I was back in the friendly skies on a plane to Copenhagen, then on a train strait-across to Sweden, and then in an automobile to the country’s southernmost city: Trelleborg.
Life on Earth can be reduced to a perpetual chain of probability events, billions of interlocking cause-and-effects, intersecting at trillions of angles, each interaction holding the potential to branch out into quintillions of possibilities. With each choice we make, each action we take, we shift the probabilities of whatever comes next.
What was the probability that Dan I would find ourselves in Toronto in the summer of 2011, wide-eyed in the creative prime of our late twenties, as invited guests of the CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival,2 selected to screen our respective creations?
You’d first have to analyze the probabilities that he and I would both independently defy our socially conditioned professional expectations to pursue entertainment careers, at that crucial moment in the infancy of this century that bore a revolution in independent digital production, allowing aspiring writers, actors, and directors to bypass the sclerotic studio system and self-produce/distribute films for eager audiences on Vimeo and YouTube — forming the bedrock layers for all that we now call “content.”
You’d then have to examine the moment when we each decided to submit to this random festival, the existence can be traced back along its own algorithm of probabilities. I was a marginally successful comedy writer, hanging on to spare credits as a contributor to The Onion, allowed to call myself a comedian thanks to early forays into stand-up, but never an “actor” — and most certainly not a “filmmaker.”
I had uploaded my first video to YouTube in January 2009 — a four-minute sketch about an imagined NFL writers room that went viral by the standards of the time, receiving over 200,000 views in 24 hours — produced under the auspices of a sports-comedy collective called 12 Angry Mascots. That early success gave us the shot of confidence to make the “pivot to video,” which saw us cranking out silly vidz to fill out our live shows and post to our channel, suddenly swelling with subscribers. It was one such short, the sole silent film in our canon and therefore the one that could most plausibly be considered “art,” that I sent on a lark to the fest. I don’t even recall how I heard about the damn thing…
Dan was a serious actor, starring in a short by his friend and frequent collaborator Jimmy, a serious director, as evidenced by his Bergman- and Tarkovsky-themed forearm tattoos. But Dan’s always been a funny man, too, and we bonded over a shared appreciation for the comedy of Tim & Eric and the general absurdities of the human condition.
We each must have met 100 other people during that festival weekend in Toronto, so what are the probabilities that we’re each the only person we’ve kept in touch with since? And how did it come to pass that our friendship has only strengthened over time, despite distance and… HEY WAIT A MINUTE didn’t I already write about Dan after our destination dude date in Barcelona in January? Well ok, let’s just cut to the chase then… which is…
DAN AND I HAVE STARTED A PODCAST.
You’re welcome, world. It’s called Brain Drain 90210 — and you’ll simply have to find out why, and who our mysterious third co-host is who helped us settle on that epicmaxxed title.
Maybe I’ll follow up with a fuller travelogue of my recent adventures, but for now, sit back and enjoy the smooth sounds of a Scott and a Swede in your RSS feed.
Yeah I’m spelling ‘yogurt’ with an ‘h’ now. What are you ghonna do about it?
“On hiatus” since 2012.
