WCS 26: My truth, from A to zaddy
I didn’t come into your mailbox to deliver a lie
“I give ’em truth, but they love lies” says the UK rapper Dave, who I’m super into this week, on “In the Fire.”
Shout out to the lady in the weight training section of the Oakland 24-Hour Fitness who called me baby, even though this she’s easily five years younger than me.
She didn’t know she was helping to revive my favorite hobby.
It’s probably because I was so relentlessly skinny as a kid that I so get off on being attractive at the gym. Being good-looking is wasted on the young. I was at my most beautiful at age 52, and you cannot tell me peak Brad Pitt felt better than me, inside.
Five years ago I was an attractive man in “middle” age, living in West Hollywood. Because I’m poor, my favorite hobby was catching women half my age lingering on me, wondering why they couldn’t stop looking at this old Black guy in shitty clothes. If my girlfriend Erica hadn’t explained that I don’t have to have sex with everyone who wants to have sex with me I would have gotten, to borrow from Kool Keith, caught up in the booty world.
Learning late is infinitely better than never.
Being middle-age attractive at the gym rules, because folks my age get points for just showing up. But I was doing so much better than that. I was in the hunt to the title of Looks Good, and Not Just for His Age. There was this body-builder kid at the Pasadena gym—probably 30 or so—who would give me these enthusiastic Yeahs when he saw me pumping iron.
Doing great, he seemed to be telling me. Keep it up.
I saw dude recently and he made the very same mouth motions that my earbuds-wearing essence recognized from the aughts. Alas, I could tell that he wasn’t cheering me as enthusiastically.
Why should he have said the same Yeah? My physique changed for the worse, and I absolutely take responsibility for that.
So, shout out to the Oaktown fitness enthusiast who called me baby on Friday. Not even three months into rebooting my bod, and I can see the return of that exclusive hobby. The days of flirting with come gutters maybe gone, but I can still look and feel like a marathoner. Or a masters division porn performer. Or both.
But most importantly, here are 10 notable doings that will thrill, warm, and uplift you!
“I feel strongly called to help the city change and to remember how great it is to remember [Portland’s] roots in small business and arts and music. And I think we’ve lost that narrative.“
10 Kings fail paternity test, are indeed Lakers’ daddy
Photo by Leo_Visions
To say that the Sacramento Kings have the Lakers’s number is cartoonish understatement. Wednesday’s 120-108 win gave the Kings their first season sweep since 1948, when that team was in Omaha and the LA franchise was still in Minneapolis.
Last week’s loss has sent LakersNation directly to wondering whether the LeBron James/Anthony Davis championship window has closed.
Sacramento’s backcourt combinations are far quicker than the Lakers’s skilled-but-slow Austin Reeves and D’Angelo Russell. The Kings will struggle in the playoffs because of the Kings guards defensive deficiencies, but they’ll be dangerous this spring.
Most disheartening for Lakers fans was watching Domantas Sabonis destroy Anthony Davis again and again. The Sactown center singlehandedly discredited AD’s Defensive Player of the Year candidacy.
Lil hit
Are Netflix’s choices to go in heavy on wrestling and stream the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul carny-fest simply a prelude to buying the NBA In-Season tournament rights?
The Town
9 Watch for women’s hoops’ next explosion
Last week’s semifinal matchup between Iowa and Michigan nearly broke the Big Ten Network’s all-time record for every college game the network’s all-time viewership with 1,075,000 viewer. The previous mark of 657,000 viewers was Feb. 8.
Sports Video
Women’s hoops viewership saw a 37 percent year-over-year increase across ESPN platforms.
8 Meet the squatters of Beverly Hills
Last fall, an empty mansion at 1316 Beverly Grove Place began drawing huge crowds on the low. Brigitte Read takes us inside a corrosive party unlike any you’ve ever seen.
Curbed
“The parties seemed to be taking a toll on the pool, which was turning a brackish green. The neighbors witnessed one wasted woman being handcuffed outside the mansion; she yelled that it was a meth den.”
Lil hit
Here’s a novel Anchorage housing solution and a strong feature on Harlem gentrification, just because this Substack has a housing obsession. Housing Finance/The Ringer
7 Cast Tommy Chong for any underground weed flick
According to Propublica, the Chinese have come to dominate traditional market cannabis, and boy, are they leaving a wake of chaos and violence.
Vox
The illicit market confederation is overseen by New York by mafias with southern China roots
“Among the victims are thousands of Chinese immigrants, many of them smuggled across the Mexican border to toil in often abusive conditions at farms ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes.”
Lil Hit
• As of Friday, most of the LA Weekly’s charred remains had left the building, as longtime culture columnist Lina Lecaro explains.
Los Angeles
6 Sex work advocate looks to make PDX amazing again
Twenty-seven years ago, Liv Osthus graduated from Williams College, moved to Portland, became known as of of the city’s most articulate strippers.
She has a TED Talk, a memoir, and an opera based on her life. Perhaps inevitably, Viva Las Vegas, 49, is running for mayor.
Willamette Week
Rather than taking the more traditional approach of running for a City Council seat, Osthus is seeking to be in the newly re-structured office of mayor, which “represents more of a stage, more of a pulpit.”
“I feel strongly called to help the city change and to remember how great it is to remember its roots in small business and arts and music. And I think we’ve lost that narrative.”
Lil hit
Fancy and exclusive Soho House is coming to Portland, but does the city even want that?
Portland Mercury
5 Lee·guh·luh·ZAY·shn: Kamala finally says Mary’s name
For the first time since she became Vice President, Kamala Harris has said that legalization needs to happen.
Marijuana Moment
According to a Kyle Jaeger source, “sitting below a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt after the media was cleared out of the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room, the vice president raised her hands in the air and called for an end to federal cannabis prohibition.
Lil hit
Former Dodgers outfielder Andrew Toles lost his way and became houseless. Here’s how the Dodgers have been covering his insurance.
The Sporting News
4. Nevermind the bullshit, this is strike school
My old Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond reports that SF workers went to strike school last week.
48 Hills
Members of SEIU Local 1021, the Teamsters, and IFPTE Local 21 are preparing “to learn their rights and prepare for a possible strike if city administrators fail to fulfill their legal obligation through collective bargaining to fix the urgent staffing crisis that has resulted in over 3,700 vacant permanent positions.“
Many of SF’s labor contracts expire in June, just before The City’s mayoral race.
Lil hit
The scam artist formerly known as Kanye West actually stood his Black ass on the Rolling Loud stage—un-fucking-mic’d—while his new album played and called that shit a concert.
Variety
3 Turning the page on everything’s-allowed-Oregon
Fans of not seeing street people smoke fentanyl in broad daylight are bound to applaud a new bill that aims to reign in Oregon hard drugs free-for-all.
The new law would decriminalize psychedelics, as well as the unusual bad drug suspects.
Vox
OSHA’s Jarod writes: “By treating all drugs as an undifferentiated category, Oregon is set to deliver a major blow to advocates of psychedelic use who don’t want to see expensive clinics and tightly controlled environments be the only legal point of access.”
Lil Hit
Eighty-five years ago, a Black couple rented a California home to a Chinese American family No one else would do that, so now members of that family are donating proceeds from the sale of the house to San Diego State’s Black students. New York Times
2 You’re not going to see another Aaron Donald soon
In the fall of 2017 I watched Aaron Donald chase Russell Wilson around the LA Coliseum field like something out of high school football. Every Seattle possession resembled a Benny Hill clip, even though the Seahawks were triple-teaming the defensive end. Never witnessed anything like it.
Shaquille O’Neal aside, Donald is most dominant professional team sports player that I’ve ever seen in person play in person. He retired last week at age 32, surprising only those who didn’t lay pay attention to the contract Donald signed two years ago.
Los Angeles Times/NBC Sports
According to Mike Florio, the 2022 deal was a three-year contract was crafted to allow Donald to leave the Rams after two years, “without giving up a penny that he’d already received.”
Lil Hit
Cali weed tax collections are down for the second straight year.
420 Intel
1 Apparently, we’ll never be rid of Aaron Rodgers
This fuckin guy. I can’t even with him and Robert Kennedy.
Intelligencer
Lil Hit
Bay Area lawyer Nicole Shanahan is the other Kennedy Vice Presidential option New York