Issue 16 - 06/--/19

On June 1st, Liverpool Football Club Won the 2019 European Champions League

It was pretty great.

I care about this quite a bit. If you know me in real life, you either know nothing about this or you incessantly hear so much about it that you'd rather the entire sport cease to exist so that you can go back to eating your big mouth bites at Chili's in uninterrupted relative peace.

This alone has made this summer pretty great for me. But it has also presented a bit of a challenge.

In theory, this newsletter is mainly about me, because I don't know how to summarize the exigence of the whole endeavor, but if it's not about the interests of the creator, editor, and primary writer, then what is it about? So one might expect I'd be writing about this a lot, immediately and extravagantly.

And I tried. But it kind of broke me. I simply don't know how to write about Liverpool. I've tried several times. Whether because I have an ingrained habit of not wanting to bother an audience about something I don't believe anybody other than myself cares about, or because this particular season sort of short-circuited whatever part of my brain is responsible for processing soccer-related things and how to contextualize them and how to communicate about them in a sort of post-coital exhaustion that needs to be slept/partied/slept off for a few months before it returns to normal functionality; regardless, no dice, and I have the countless stillborn drafts to prove it.

In fact, I started trying to write this long before June 1st. More like March, maybe April. The briefest of contexts is that Liverpool are a huge club but haven't won anything in a nice long while even though they've developed a great team full of great people helmed by the best man in the world -

- but after playing probably the best season in their 126 year history, for a week it looked as though they'd be coming up just short in both the major competitions they'd hounded after for so long - the English Premier League to Manchester City (essentially Goliath but if Goliath was sponsored with a billion dollars of blood-wrought oil tycoon money but still, to be fair, a pretty chill dude) and the European Champions League to Barcelona (Messi.)

I wanted to write an issue about them anyway because they deserved to be written about and I'd had so much fun (and extreme duress) watching them since August. It was one of those sad-but-still-proud sort of things but I really didn't know where to start and it sort of fell off.

Then they produced probably the greatest European comeback of all time and beat Barcelona 4-0 at home in the second of two semi-final matches after losing the first 3-0, complete with a local teenager creating the winning goal with basically a trick play which is absolutely the best thing I've ever seen, to the extent where I still expect it to be disallowed and the game lost any time I see highlights back.

So then, naturally, my way into writing about all this changed drastically, as the season was kept alive and in resplendent fashion. But I still couldn't do it. I don't remember why. Just wasn't on. Not only that, but I'd sort of designed the issue and committed to it being the next one to arrive, but when it decided it didn't want to emerge from the creative waterslide, stuck at the exit, limbs defiantly spread and locked, it prevented any other writing from taking place in the meantime. Hence, you know, not having released anything lately. I'm sure my absence was positively palpable.

Anyway, soccer etc. etc., Man City won their last 15 games or some mad number and so the greatest title race in league history was lost by a mere point, which hurt more than I expected it to, given the inevitability of it. But there was still the Champions League. I won't get into all the multiple competition stuff. It's not great reading. Suffice it to say, getting to the Champions League final is equivalent to getting to the Super Bowl if there were 500 teams in contention rather than the NFL's 32. It's the last game of the season across Europe and is generally a spectacle.

I also won't be getting into last year's final, which is extremely significant but a different issue altogether.

Etc. etc., they played again, they won, and it was a dog of a game but that doesn't matter.

Kiss your dads, throw your dogs, hug strangers at bars, start moshes at Barbarella, run down the street screaming at 4 PM on a Sunday, crash your car, crash your plane, grow a tree and fight it, take your shirt off a bunch, watch Sahara.

I tried to write it then. Honest to god I did. There were flowcharts, friend.

There were 2000 concise words defending the idea of sports in general, there were full-blooded research papers about the history of the city of Liverpool, god knows there were politics, there were personal anecdotes about bleak years of depression and joy and tears and youth, there were tapestries depicting the personal journeys of over a dozen individuals, essays exploring the concept of the hero, voice-memos concerning justice, cave-paintings depicting the essence of storytelling, ad infinitum.

Didn't really come together though. If nothing I write can capture my experience, then there has to be some alternative form of expression, and that alternative is, I think (weeks later), just lots and lots of pictures and generally living my best life, and at least recording here that this thing happened, for anyone who may care, even if nobody probably will.

I hope you experience jubilee. I hope you kiss someone beautiful, and they kiss you back because you're beautiful. You are. I hope your actual dreams actually come true and not in the trite way but also absolutely in the trite way. I hope you feel vindicated in whatever you felt alone and unheard in before. I hope a meteor strikes your property but in a call-to-adventure-in-an-80's-coming-of-age-movie way and not a fatality-of-every-person-in-the-vicinity way.

I hope you're happy. Text me if you aren't.

Liverspool

Brewmaster-level contributor Alex Speed

Here are literally all the things I know about Liverpool:

If you don't already know, our editor, Matt, has a seven year obsession with a soccer team (he will probably insist I say football - I will not) from Liverpool. Recently he told me my writing is bad(1) and the only way he will continue to publish my articles is if I start writing exclusively about Liverpool(2). Here we go:

Obviously, it is the birthplace of the greatest band of all time - The Beatles. For this reason alone it is the greatest city in the world (fuck you Los Angeles) and deserves our deepest respect.

It is also the birthplace of none other than the lead singer of U2, Bono. Liverpool has really put out some great muscle artists over the years. Thanks Liverpool.

In 1892 there was a nurse named Elizabeth Beckinsale. Everyday she sauntered up the cobbled drive to the home she shared with her husband - J.K Rowling. They lived peacefully in a cottage paid for by a lawsuit involving the historical foundation of royal cutlery.

Scouse is a type of stew. It was eaten by Liverpudlians living in poverty before the 1900s. Ingredients include lamb or beef, cabbage, carrot, potatoes and onion.

The song New York State of Mind is actually written about Liverpool.

Not one single person from Liverpool has ever seen a bear in real life.

On a particularly rainy April afternoon Elizabeth arrives home from her work at the hospital earlier than most Wednesdays. Luckily all the patients in the hospital died so there was no more work to be done for Elizabeth. She decided she would go home and surprise her unemployed husband with plans to support imperialism and complain about the current state of their garden. Upon entering their home Elizabeth found her husband, J.K. Rowling, furiously trying to start a fire. She flashes him a knowing smile as she ascends the stairs to her bedroom.

Liverpool had the world's first passenger railway line.

(1) False
(2) True

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