The internet so often seems like a perpetual nightmare machine these days, a place to hear the worst news about the worst people, that it’s hard to remember a time when it was also a place to make jokes, share stories, and connect with strangers. But every now and then something allows us to recapture that old early-internet optimism.

In the days before the George Floyd video, Chris Santa Maria’s obituary for his uncle, Randall Jacobs, aka Uncle Bunky, was just such a moment. It originally ran in the print version of the Arizona Republic a few weeks back, then a picture of it hit Reddit, spread to a few Instagram accounts, and sort of took off from there. My own share (I thought I was embedding the Tweet above, where I first saw it) is now pushing 60,000 likes on Twitter. I had to mute notifications.

The extent to which Uncle Bunky’s obit became a phenomenon was surprising, but also understandable. It’s not often you get misty-eyed reading something on the internet about a total stranger. From “save it, clown” to his nicknames for his nephews — “mud flap” and “style master” — the persona that Santa Maria’s writing conjured seemed to hit all our collective sweet spots: Dad Humor, Cat Dads, Inappropriate Uncles, and the legendarily incorrigible ne’er do well. Santa Maria’s vision of Bunky also echoed beloved pop culture figures from Uncle Buck and Royal Tenenbaum to all manner of Bill Murray characters, Bill Brasky, and the meme version of Chuck Norris (who’s hard to square with the real Chuck Norris, an asshole, which is basically the old internet/new internet divide in a nutshell).

In part, Uncle Bunky was a funny meme that reminded us of other funny memes, but it was also something of a stand-in for our own departed family members — an example of how to mourn at a time when so many of us have been unable to gather for funerals. We wanted to live more like Uncle Bunky and grieve more like his nephew. For a moment we all became Royal Tenenbaum, staring at a headstone saying, “Hell of a damn grave. Wish it were mine.”

I wanted to find out if there was more to this story, and, let’s be honest, hear more Uncle Bunky stories. So I spoke to Santa Maria this week.

[The black and white photo of Jacobs in the feature image was taken by Jacobs’ friend Scott Hile.]

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So, just to get the factual stuff out of the way, could I get your name, age, occupation — the basics?

My name is Chris Santa Maria. I’m 38 years old. I am the director of an art gallery in Chelsea in Manhattan, but I’m also a visual artist with a studio practice in Brooklyn.

And you wrote the obit.

I wrote the obit. I did have a lot of help from a friend of mine, Mark Sussman, who is a brilliant writer, an academic, and a scholar in American literature. And he actually met Uncle Bunky once in Scottsdale in one of these strip mall sports bars maybe a year and a half ago. So my first draft… it was actually a little too “turnt.” It was pretty wild. I actually sent it to two friends who knew my uncle better than Mark, and they were like, “Dude, this is perfect, but what do you expect? Do you think this is going to go in the Arizona Republic, or are you just going to post this on Twitter?”

And I was like, “No, I was going to submit this to the paper.” And they said, “Uh maybe you should tone it down a little bit.” My friend, Mark, he gutted that stuff out, and, like all good editors, he made better decisions for me in the end. So it was a collaborative effort in a lot of ways.

Did the rest of the family come to you to write it?

I think it was an unspoken thing. Everybody knew I was going to write the obituary because I was the closest to him. When he passed, my mother was dealing with some stuff with the morgue that was handling his body and she asked me all the questions, like, “What do you think that he would want done?”

And he was not the kind of person that would want some drawn-out pageantry of a funeral, where people got up and spoke and stuff like that. He would not have been cool with that. So in a way, because COVID is going on right now, and nobody can really meet together, it was kind of perfect because we didn’t have to go through all that garbage.

Before, when I went to go visit him in Arizona for the last time, he was pretty serious about knowing that he was at the end of his rope. I had already started thinking about some of these things and taking stock in some of the memories, all of these little meaningful interactions, things that he had said to me or others that I had witnessed, I started to subconsciously collect those things. It also felt very morbid for me to think about before he passed away. So I just kind of stopped thinking about that stuff and went home and spent some quality time with him and paid my respects. After he passed away, all of that stuff came flooding back to the front of my brain. When I found out, it was like everything just dropped, you know?

Yeah.

It was just really intense, even though I was prepared for it. That night, I just… I don’t know if you’ve seen that movie Mandy with Nicholas Cage. There’s a scene where he finds out his wife’s been killed, and he goes into his bathroom, and he finds a bottle of vodka, and he just starts drinking it, and he’s screaming. I was taking pulls off of a bottle of Tito’s because that’s the last bottle that I had given him when I went. Before I left, I gave him two packs of the trashiest 100 cigarettes and a bottle of Tito’s and said goodbye. So that night I hammered out a bunch of these stories and then woke up the next day and started to actually edit.

Some of his friends, childhood friends, they’re like kind of trailer trash burnouts. And they’re like, “Man, I really wish that I would have written down some of those stories.” “Man, your uncle R.J. was fucking nuts, dude. He did this and blah blah blah…”

And these guys are like, “Man, I wish I just would have written it all down, but I can’t remember it all.” So I started to do that, and it was very helpful for me in the grieving process, just to kind of get it all out.

Are any family members jealous that you were the one to get to write the viral obituary?

No, not at all. I mean, I ran the obituary by all of my family members just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. They were all like, “Man, you nailed it, dude.”

Once it started going, I heard about the Reddit post from my brother, who’s not even close to being extremely online. He had a friend that was on Reddit that shared it with him. So I heard about it from my brother, Jason, who is an ex-Marine and lives a pretty simple lifestyle in Tempe. And for it to get to him before it got to me was crazy. Because I would consider myself having way too many hours spent just scrolling my feed. So that was crazy.

So Bunky was your mom’s brother?

Exactly.

What was his actual job?

He went from odds and ends and other jobs and mostly kind of construction stuff. When he was living in Telluride, he was working in a couple of restaurants, doing some construction and handyman stuff. When I was in fourth grade, he needed to crash with my folks for a little while, and that’s that summer that he did a lot of that crazy shit because I was around him all the time. And this was when my parents weren’t there because they’d be off at work. I remember that that summer he needed to get a job, because my dad was getting more and more aggravated with him kind of hanging around the house and drinking and being totally like the opposite of a parental figure. And so he was like the “good” guy, he’d let us do whatever we wanted, but my parents obviously had to raise us, and they had to be adults about it, so there was some tension there. And I remember he was like, “I need to go get a job.”

So he got a job at a construction site. But he’d never done carpentry work before, so he just went to Home Depot and bought a brand new tool belt. He tied it to the back of his car, and drove it around in the desert, so it looked like he had been working in construction for years. So he just showed up to a job site with this worn-out construction belt, and they hired him. And he came back, and he was like, “Yeah, I was working today, and then I started to hammer these two by fours together. And somebody looked over at me and like, ‘Man, you’ve never fucking done this before. Have you?”

So he didn’t keep that job for very long. He kind of just … He really bounced around a lot.

What do his siblings do?

His older brother, his name is Larry Jacobs, and… I don’t know if he’s still a NASCAR mechanic, but he lives in North Carolina, like Morrisville and Asheville. It’s very NASCAR culture over there and he’s been working for NASCAR teams for quite a while. My mom still lives in Scottsdale, and she’s retired, but she was a cashier at a grocery store for my whole childhood.

So how did Bunky die?

So he made a joke about, “If COVID gets in my body, there’s no f*cking way it’s going to make it out alive.”

So he claimed that he got sick with COVID, and he was like, “Oh, I’ve got the great grawdoo, man. I’m going down. This f*cking sh*t’s taking me.”

He could have had it. We’re still waiting for the test to come back. But to me, Uncle Bunky killed Uncle Bunky. His life caught up with him. It’s like a combination of all of that stuff catching up with him, which in a way is a very self-destructive lifestyle. I mean, if you’re doing a ton of drugs and drinking and smoking and just going pedal to the metal every single day, it’s going to catch up with you. That’s not technically a suicide, but at the same time, you’re running all the way in.

So you guys weren’t able to have a funeral because of COVID?

Yeah. I mean, I don’t think we were going to do anything. Even if it was possible to get together, I actually don’t even know what that would’ve looked like. He had a lot of friends, and I’ve spoken to some of those guys in the past couple of weeks, and they’re all trying to figure out what to do. We’re basically going to take a portion of his ashes and bury them with my grandmother, his mother. She’s still around. She’s in an Alzheimer’s home in Arizona. But the plan is to keep those ashes together, and then also to give some of them to me, so when I go to Telluride, the next time I can spread them on certain parts of the mountain that were very meaningful for me and my relationship with him there.

Was he ever married?

He was married when I was very young. He married this woman, my aunt at the time, Teresa. And they lived in Anaheim. That was awesome, because we would go visit him and he would take us to Disneyland. I remember her being… as a young boy, I thought she was like super hot. She was wild and crazy. But that lasted a very short amount of time. So, the joke is that if there’s some kids out there that are Uncle Bunky’s, then we don’t know about it.

You told a couple of his stories. What was the shotgun one?

This is, again, before my parents had gotten home. He had this ’70s era Buick LeSabre. Such a piece of shit. It’s funny because he had that car before the movie Uncle Buck came out. And so, John Candy rolling around in this car that backfires– we saw that movie, and we were like, “Oh, my God, the parallels here are too spooky.”

So, it was just a piece of shit car. The backseat was one big pleather couch, no seat belts. And he would drive that thing around with us, and me and my two younger brothers, we’d spill around like rocks in a cement mixer. It was so much fun. So, one day, he goes, “Hey, Chris, let me show you something.”

He opens up his trunk, and he pulls out a sawed-off shotgun. I had been around guns because I’m from Arizona. So I grew up shooting 22’s when I was really young. And I think by the time I was 13 or 14, I had fired off an AK-47 with an 80 round pancake clip. So, I’m in Arizona and there’s a lot of fucking weird, crazy dudes out there with some munitions, but I had never seen a sawed-off shotgun. He said that it was “hot,” and I had no idea what that meant. And then he said, “I got to get rid of this thing.”

When he got rid of it, that was a few days later. I was like, “How’d you get rid of it?” He’s like, “Well, I was on a construction site, and we were building a fence, so when we dug the hole, we just threw it in there and filled it up with concrete.”

But he kept a couple of the buckshot shells. We took apart the shells and poured the gunpowder on my dad’s driveway. And he goes, “All right, step back or you’re going to burn your eyebrows off.” And then he just lit it. And this is happening while he’s got a cassette tape of Metallica’s Ride the Lightning playing in the car. My dad was so fucking pissed, man.

And then he snuck you guys into a NASCAR pit. I guess the other NASCAR connection makes a little more sense now —

Yeah, so his brother was in town for a race that was at Phoenix International Raceway. We had the passes to get down to pit row. So we had a chance to walk across the runway and go into the pit with my uncles and hang out. But before that, we were going through this sort of like tailgate party. So we just snuck into there, and it’s like these tents, where just people are kind of hanging out and drinking beer and nibbling on food and stuff. And we just went absolutely fucking ape shit, shotgunning beers, taking stuff. And they were like, “Get the fuck out of here.”

And he’s like, “I thought this was America, man!” And we just left. Anytime you’re hanging out with Bunky, it was like an exhilarating, thrilling thing, but it was also frightening because you didn’t know what was going to happen. You didn’t know if he was going to push it a little too far, and someone was going to call the cops, or someone was going to get in a fight with us, or whatever. So, he was kind of reckless and bombastic in that sense. But at the same time, I can’t emphasize this enough, he had the sweetest, kindest heart. If he thought that he was upsetting me or my brothers or his nephews or his nieces, he was so sensitive. He never did anything that would be considered abusive. A lot of family members who have maybe substance abuse problems or they drink too much, they end up being terrible to be around, or they get to a point where it’s kind of scary to be around that person because you don’t know what they’re going to do to hurt you or hurt your friends or whatever, but he was just like on the absolute opposite end of that spectrum. So he’s kind of an anomaly.

What’s it been like, getting to relive Bunky’s stories with the world?

Oh, it’s so crazy. I really wish that he could see all this. Seeing all those comments and seeing how people were like, “Man, I really wish I could have burned one with Bunky.” Or, “I’m going to pour one out tonight. I wish I had an uncle that was like that.” Or, “I’m an uncle, and I’m going to try to be better and try to be more exciting and more memorable.” It was like this swirl of this positivity. It’s incredible, man.

It seems like the Internet found their new Chuck Norris in Bunky for a day or two.

My friend joked. He’s like, “This is going to be one of those things that gets shared every once in a while for the next couple of years.” And maybe it’ll go viral again in a year and a half or something, because someone just re-shared it. The Internet is funny like that.

I mean, there was something genuine about it that made it sweet and not just a novelty thing. I found the picture, and I was reading the obituary out loud to my fianceé, and I was almost crying by the end, just because it was so heartfelt —

Oh, thanks, Vince.

And it reminded me of the end of Royal Tenenbaums, where Royal Tenenbaum has the fake obituary on his tombstone.

That’s funny. That’s great. So I’m working with this beer company in Phoenix. We’re trying to come up with a name for a brew for Bunky. The guy who runs this brewery, he’s got kind of a philanthropic heart, and he’s trying to figure out a way in which we can help out some struggling dive bars. We talked about doing a poster that I would design, that would, it could go up in these dive bars and then someone may go, “Wait, what? Where’s my tab?” And they’re like, “Oh, no, man.” And they point to the poster and say, “Bunky paid for it.”

And so, the proceeds from the beer could go to helping these dive bars, just pay some of these people’s open tabs and stuff like that. Bunky had this bar in Telluride called O’Bannon’s, and I went there all the time. It was just kind of an old Irish pub, just had that stale, old beer on wood smell. That bar had a bell in it. And when someone rang it, it means that person buys a round for everybody on the house. So that kind of culture, man, that’s that was Bunky’s vibe.

After HBO Max leaned heavily into its nerd-shaking decision to Release the Snyder Cut, the recently launched streaming service is leaving DC Comics fans might be scratching their heads to learn that many DC Comics movies will be (temporarily) leaving the platform in a few weeks. The list contains 12 movies that will be no longer available on HBO Max (starting in July), including Justice League, a film that was prominently featured in ads, billboards, and again, the Snyder cut announcement:

Justice League
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice
Wonder Woman
Suicide Squad
Batman
Batman Returns
Batman Forever
Batman & Robin
Catwoman
Jonah Hex
Steel
The Losers

Comic Book first broke the story, and Deadline confirmed the news. In addition, The Observer got word from an HBO spokesperson, who explained that the platform will be rotating its selection of DC Comics movies on a monthly schedule: “We have a new batch coming in July and then another batch coming in August.” At this time, the streaming service did not disclose what that new batch for July will contain, but it should be an interesting selection considering the DC Films don’t have as wide of a library as Marvel, and 12 films are already off of the table.

While it is surprising that HBO Max is already losing so many DC Films after prominently featuring them in promotional material (Batman Begins was included in the launch trailer, and neither that film or the rest of The Dark Knight Trilogy has yet to be available), navigating convoluted streaming rights is a hurdle that Disney+ also dealt with at launch. Despite owning the Marvel movies just like HBO Max’s parent company owns the DC films, Disney need to wait for some streaming deals with Netflix to expire before it can have the MCU films all under one roof. And don’t even get us started on the rights to Spider-Man.

(Via Comic Book, Deadline & The Observer)

A discussion about the upcoming VOD film Money Plane, in five parts.

PART ONE — I can’t wait to tell you about Money Plane

Money Plane is a movie about a plane filled with money. Specifically, the plane is “a bulletproof casino in the sky” that contains over a billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency and cash, as well as, apparently, many packages of cocaine. It is, as we learn in the trailer, “a legend in the underground” and “untouchable by any government agency,” which is good for the money plane because the passengers — a collection of the world’s most notorious criminals — can gamble on anything they want, from regular roulette to Russian roulette.

Guess if someone is going to try to rob the money plane.

A professional thief with $40 million in debt and his family’s life on the line must commit one final heist – rob a futuristic airborne casino filled with the world’s most dangerous criminals.

This is easily one of the top five sentences I’ve ever read. Not even just for a movie description. I’m talking all sentences, all-time, every one that has crossed my eyes in three-plus decades. It’s got everything I could ask for: dangerous criminals, a futuristic airborne casino filled with the world’s most dangerous criminals, a professional thief doing one last job. It’s perfect. It’s like Ocean’s Eleven crossed with Con Air crossed with Money Train, the 1995 film that stars Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as thieves who are trying to rob a train filled with money. I hope we keep this trend going and make a new Money [Method of Transportation] movie every 25 years. We can do Money Submarine in 2045, Money Blimp in 2070, and, I don’t know, let’s Money Rocketship in 2095. Most of us will be in the ground by then but it will be comforting to know traditions like this continue after we’re gone.

All of which is to say, this is the most excited I’ve been about a VOD movie since John Travolta hopped into a series of speedboats two years ago I imagine you’re wondering how this can possibly get any better.

Well…

PART TWO — Kelsey Grammer is in Money Plane

See all those quotes in the first section? The ones about bulletproof casinos in the sky and underground legends? They are all said by Kelsey Grammer, Frasier Crane himself, who is in Money Plane for some unknowable reason. He plays the biggest bad guy of them all, the one who sets this whole thing in motion, the one who buys the professional thief’s $40 million debt and forces him to rob the money plane. Here are some things Kelsey Grammer does in this trailer:

• Lights a cigar and asks our hero if he’s “a gambling man”
• While explaining the job, after saying the thing about it being a legend in the underground, literally says “it’s the money plane,” which, as a fan of movies where someone says the title of the movie in a piece of dialogue, made me whoop out loud a little
• Grabs what appears to be some sort of AK-47-type automatic weapon while shouting “NOW BRING ME MY MONEY”

This all raises a number of questions, including “Why is Kelsey Grammer in Money Plane?” and “Is Kelsey Grammer okay?” and “Seriously, why is Kelsey Grammer in Money Plane?” The most important question it raises for me, however, is “Will Kelsey Grammer tell the main character that the two of them are ‘not so different’ at some point?” It seems like a movie where the bad guy will say that. It seems so much like the kind of movie where the bad guy will say that.

I will be furious if he doesn’t. Just inconsolable. I’m actually kind of nervous now.

PART THREE — Look at the rest of the cast of Money Plane

Money Plane stars Adam Copeland, perhaps best known as former WWE champion Edge, as the troubled thief. Kelsey Grammer is starring in a movie where he forces a former WWE champion to rob an airborne casino. And Copeland’s wife is played by, you guessed it, Denise Richards, star of Wild Things and Starship Troopers and exactly the type of person who would play the endangered wife of a thief who is robbing a lawless flying casino at the behest of Kelsey Grammer in a movie titled Money Plane. (It says a lot about Money Plane that Thomas Jane is in the movie and I’ve buried it in this parenthetical.) The movie itself is filled with as much treasure as the titular plane at the center of its plot. You can’t imagine how happy this makes me.

And it gets better. Guess how many of the Lawrence brothers are involved in Money Plane. I’m just going to tell you. Three. Three Lawrence brothers are involved in Money Plane. Joey and Matthew — the former best known for his 90s heartthrob run as Blossom’s brother, the latter probably best known as Shawn Hunter’s half-brother on Boy Meets World — pop up briefly in the trailer. The reason for this, one assumes, is because Money Plane was written and directed by the third Lawrence brother, Andrew.

This is already my favorite movie.

PART FOUR — Look at the official poster for Money Plane

Do we have cutouts of our four main characters in formal attire against a background of clouds? We do.

Are two of the main characters holding handguns while two other unnamed characters shoot automatic weapons in front of an exploding plane? Of course.

Does it feature an objectively perfect tagline like “An explosive casino heist in the sky”? Baby, it’s in all-caps right under the title, which is, again, Money Plane.

I think I’m hyperventilating from excitement. I want to stuff this movie into a feedbag and strap it around my neck.

PART FIVE — Three screencaps from Money Plane presented with no further context or explanation

Money Plane is set for release on July.

We are all going to see it.

I can’t wait.

Money Plane!

MONEY PLANE!

IT’S THE MONEY PLANE!

Beyonce is no stranger to the big screen. Her acting debut in Austin Powers In Goldmember arrived even before her debut solo album in 2003. Beyonce’s latest work in Hollywood was her voice over role as Nala in last year’s remake of The Lion King. But, according to recent reports, Beyonce’s work with Disney is far from over. The singer is apparently in talks with Disney about working on multiple different films, including the upcoming Black Panther 2.

According to Elle, Beyonce is reportedly in meetings with Disney concerning a $100 million deal that would involve her in three major movies. One of the projects Beyonce is rumored to be involved in is the upcoming Black Panther sequel. A source for the publication said that the singer has become “a major player” for Disney, and the company is working to get her to voice some of the new documentaries coming out on Disney+. “The negotiations are still ongoing but it’s the final details that are being thrashed out now,” the source claimed.

While Beyonce worked with Disney for The Lion King, the singer recently appeared in ABC’s Disney Family Singalong in April. Beyonce gave a touching rendition of “When You Wish Upon A Star” and dedicated her virtual performance to “all the healthcare workers who have been working tirelessly to keep up healthy and safe.”

Beyonce has yet to confirm or deny her involvement in Black Panther 2. Other rumors surrounding the sequel have already surfaced, though it’s not slated for a release until 2022.

The recent protests against racist police violence have made waves in the world of wrestling. Lots of wrestlers have spoken out, the New Day recorded a whole podcast, and Becky Lynch posted from a protest. WWE even released an official statement, although it was pretty toothless and mostly served to remind people of all the problems the company has had with race over the years. NXT North American Champion Keith Lee even wore “Black Lives Matter” gear at NXT TakeOver: In Your House. Now a report has emerged about a big backstage argument on the subject that is said to have happened backstagee before NXT TakeOver: In Your House.

According to Fightful Select, an unnamed producer on the show made an ill-considered claim that everyone in the United States is already treated equally, regardless of race. It was apparently Shawn Michaels, of all people, who was angered by this and had a lot to say about how rampant systemic racism and inequality actually are in this country. HBK and the other producer reportedly worked together professionally throughout the show, and the NXT roster apparently only heard about this argument the next day.

It’s hard not to wonder if this story was leaked because it makes Shawn Michaels sound like a good, progressive guy (while the producer who was wrong remains unnamed). It also makes NXT sound like a place where racism isn’t tolerated, which can only help their reputation after some other stories that have come out in the past year.

With the arrival of HBO Max, people not only puzzled over access-related questions but also marveled over the massive number of content offerings on the table. On the original content side of things, Doom Patrol‘s second season will air on HBO Max, which will free it up from solely landing on the DC Universe streaming service, where nerd fare doesn’t reach the audience it deserves. Speaking of which, the show’s new trailer is here to give HBO Max viewers a crash course on DC’s strangest group of heroes. Smart move.

This trailer gives a quick rundown of Cliff Steele/Robotman (Brendan Fraser), Larry Trainor/Negative Man (Matt Bomer), Rita Farr/Elasti-Woman (April Bowlby), Victor Stone/Cyborg (Joivan Wade), and the one who’s closest to my heart, Crazy Jane (Diane Guerrero). Jane/Karen (!) actually asks what the heck Doom Patrol is, a question that might be on a lot of HBO Max subscribers’ minds. Well, the group is here to save the world again with some Yellow Brick Road vibes added to the mix (as highlighted in a previous poster), but they all must grow up first. From the synopsis:

Following the defeat of Mr. Nobody, the members of the Doom Patrol now find themselves mini-sized and stranded on Cliff’s toy race car track. Here they begin to deal with their feelings of betrayal by Niles Caulder aka The Chief (Timothy Dalton), while confronting their own personal baggage. And as each member faces the challenge of growing beyond their own past traumatic experiences, they must come together to embrace and protect the newest member of the family: Dorothy Spinner (Abigail Shapiro), Niles’ daughter, whose powers remain a mysterious but real threat to bringing on the end of the world.

Doom Patrol‘s second season comes to HBO Max on June 25.

An analogy about expectations for my fellow white folks just diving into anti-racism education:

Imagine showing up to a class an hour late. How would you expect the professor to respond to your entrance?

Would you expect them to greet you at the door, tell you how happy they are that you arrived, walk you to your seat and make sure you were comfortable? Would you expect the teacher to ask you if you have everything you need or thank you for showing up? Would you expect them to take time away from the class to do that—would that even feel appropriate?

Or would you expect them to say, “Hi, take a seat.” Or perhaps nothing at all—maybe just give you a glance while they get on with the class as you find a place to sit?

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And how would you enter that class if you were an hour late?

Would you walk in and announce, “Hey, I’m here!” and then give a big explanation for why you are taking the class and what took you so long to get there, diverting the class’s attention and taking away valuable class time?

Would you walk straight up to the professor and say, “Sorry I’m late, but could you please go over what you’ve covered in the last hour with me?” Just imagine the professor’s face if you did that, and then hold that thought.

Or would you quickly and quietly sit down, open your book and do your best to keep up with where the class is now, knowing you’re going to have to catch up on the first hour of material on your own. Maybe even borrowing someone’s notes to help with what you’ve missed.

Would the professor be glad that you were in the class? Sure. Better late than never. But would you expect them to express gratitude or happiness that you finally showed up? Of course not.

Now imagine the professor’s life depends on people like you showing up for class. Imagine that they’ve seen countless students arrive late, sit down for a few minutes, decide the desk is too uncomfortable or the subject matter is too hard, then walk out, over and over and over. Would you expect them to feel relieved at your arrival? Would you expect to be met with a warm welcome, or some understandable skepticism?

Photo by National Cancer Institute

White folks, we are that late student. Only we are far more than an hour late.

If you’re just diving into anti-racism activism and it all feels a bit pricklier, less patient or less welcoming than you expected, this is why. We don’t get a cookie for showing up to a place we already should have been. We should not expect an open-armed, warm welcome because we’ve finally arrived.

We might be embarrassed when we realize how late we are. We might feel like we have some good reasons for it. But lengthy apologies and explanations just waste valuable class time and no one really wants to hear it, no matter how heartfelt or sincere. The class just wants to move on.

We’re undoubtedly going to feel a little lost. But if we raise our hands to ask questions about stuff that was covered in the hour we missed, we should expect the response to be a simple “You’re going to need to get someone’s notes on that” or “That was covered in Chapter 1—go back and read it.” No one would expect a professor to go over material that’s already been covered for the student who showed up an hour into class. No one should expect them not to find those questions annoying.

Yes, it is good that we’re here. There’s no question about that. But we’re late to a class that’s already in session and that’s the dynamic we should expect. The most respectful thing we can do is recognize our lateness, then quickly take a seat, open our books and listen like someone’s life depends on it. The truth is, it does.

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Orville Peck’s actual identity remains a mystery thanks to his Lone Ranger-style fringed mask, but the singer’s debut album Pony earned him accolades and recognition as a queer voice in country music. The singer has been gearing up for the EP Show Pony with his recent singles “Summertime” and “No Glory In The West.” But Peck has decided to pause his EP’s promotion in order to focus on supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. Just two days before the EP was supposed to drop, Peck announced he is pushing it back a month.

Addressing his fans on social media, Peck wrote that he wants to shift his priorities away from his EP to support Black Lives Matter. The singer wrote that the momentum of the movement is “so strong,” but people need to stay committed in order to “dismantle the injustices of oppression”:

“Hey gang, I know it’s only two days away but I’ve decided to push the release of my new EP ‘Show Pony’ to July. We’re undergoing a huge overdue worldwide transformation thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement and that is mainly what I want to put my focus on at the moment. The momentum is currently so strong, and it needs to keep going in order to dismantle the injustices of oppression, so if your voice hasn’t been heard yet just use it, or walk out and hear the protesters, and if you’re scared, tell them Orville sent you! Last week, thanks to the help of some lovely people we raised close to $37k, and this week I’ll be performing a little surprise from the EP at @wynwoodpride where we’re hoping to raise $100k. Lots of great performers, so if you guys like what you see, remember to tip- and y’all, even if you can’t tip, watching to actively educate yourself is also a win for everyone.”

Find Peck’s post above.

Show Pony is out 7/12 via Sub Pop. Pre-order it here.

Since the first rumors about a possible bubble league for the NBA cropped up, one of the chief concerns among those involved has been what to do with older personnel — especially coaches — who are at a higher risk for serious complications should they contract COVID-19. That has seemingly not yet been addressed, with Adam Silver walking back a statement he made on TNT about not having coaches over 65 in the bubble, and the ongoing friction between the league and its coaches continued Wednesday with the news that the NBA league office will ask teams to submit personal health records for everyone coming to Orlando in order to determine risk on a case-by-case basis.

According to a report from Zach Lowe and Adrian Wojnarowski at ESPN, “NBA team personnel are expected to be asked to submit personal medical histories to a panel of physicians who would review their individual risk of serious illness due to any spread of coronavirus in the NBA’s bubble environment in Orlando.”

However, many labor and health-related issues crop up when an employer begins to ask employees for personal health history, even during the time of COVID-19. Rick Carlisle, one of the head coaches who will head to Orlando next month to coach the Mavericks, is also the president of the coaches’ association. He’s recently had to fight to protect some of the older coaches in the NBA while also ensuring their labor freedoms are not infringed upon by the league.

While an optimistic perspective would indicate both Carlisle and NBA coaches, as well as the league office, are all fighting to protect coaches, it’s a slipper slope toward health-based discrimination. A cursory understanding of HIPAA guidelines calls into question the legality of the NBA asking for such information and providing it to a third-party panel, though many such rules have changed during this pandemic. Even the best intentions, though, can lead to problems between employers and their workers, even within high-profile sports leagues.

Per ESPN: “Forcibly excluding such personnel could implicate both the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and (perhaps more important) the Americans with Disabilities Act, experts said.”

Simply put, the league has to balance not violating labor or health law while also figuring out how bets to ensure the health and safety of older head coaches such as Gregg Popovich, Mike D’Antoni or Alvin Gentry, all of whom fall into the primary risk category according to the CDC. If any of them have pre-existing health conditions, their risk only worsens.

This is one of the things you might have hoped would be sorted out prior to the league and players voting to resume play, but at least it appears both sides are working to find a tenable solution.