Every Friday
Club Sandwiches, NYC Budget Issues, and a new way of connecting?
Happy Friday crew. We made it by the skin of our teeth and with our loose commitment to dry February mostly intact (dry feb > dry jan).
We’ve officially entered the part of winter where it’s absolutely necessary to get something — anything — on the calendar for later in the year as light at the end of the tunnel. We’ve got some trips cooking - more to come on that soon.
We hope you’re hanging in there wherever you’re reading this from & take heart: patio season is coming.
The club sandwich, while we’re on the subject, is a curious and too-unexamined thing — something that must have been invented by “the enemies of America”.
— Anthony Bourdain
I can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist.
— James Baldwin
Top of Mind
The first time I lived on a ranch was in northeastern Wyoming while working as a fishing guide, when I was 22. The room I lived in there was named “Cell Block 4.” It had unfinished concrete floors, a dirty spring mattress cot that sagged down to the ground, and my roommate was a growing family of mice. CB4 was a shithole, but it was my shithole. Looking back, I’m glad I had to live in that room, as it forced me to spend my time doing things elsewhere. I played harder than ever that summer and did way more than I would’ve if I had a cushy pad to live in.
Each one of us at Relay, to some extent, has dreamed of running out on some side quest like ranch handing. We have a buddy who pulled the trigger and helps on a ranch offseason. I think it’s very much a part of the male experience to have a group chat that daydreams about dropping out of the grind to disappear onto a ranch or lobster boat off-grid, and Mike does a great job here of painting what ranch life meant to him. It’s a good reminder that you can take a swing make your life look completely different than it does now.
Ground floor alert:
Imagine your favorite substacker’s holiday listicles but in new-age app format. Your content could be a rec from your favorite celeb or your high school buddy. That combination feels like a new angle on this genre of social medium and as online community shifts more and more towards a human-centric attitude (it will undoubtedly continue to do so) this might just blow up.
This seems like a good idea, but I somehow stumbled across an anti-consumerism David Foster Wallace video last night on Youtube so I’m not sure… Regardless, if we’re looking for something to buy online, we’ll take this over having to defend against the targeted ads on every interface we encounter (assuming the timeline remains protected from said targeted ads).
ICYMI: Happy Hour Edition
“This triplicated toast is purely for aesthetics, he writes: it helps the club stand high and handsome on a barroom plate, its erect toothpick as triumphantly American as that flag they put on the moon. (Let’s not get into all that now). But the effect is an inedible, overengineered slip-n-slide of a thing that is prone, in architectural terms, to catastrophic failure.”
Anthony Bourdain on the Club Sandwich
*Relay vehemently disagrees with Mr Bourdain
The Five best club sandwiches in the world (Gentleman’s Journal)
After a campaign that won in large part by celebrating New York City, Mamdani’s $127 billion preliminary budget proposal amounted to a jarring shift in rhetoric. The city, he said, is in a “fiscal crisis” that leaves only two options: State lawmakers must raise taxes on the rich and corporations, or Mamdani will ask the City Council to hike property taxes by 9.5%. But critics weren’t buying it.
Best of Substack this Week
This Week in Relay’s Shopping Cart
Grundens Ankle Boot, (Jack)
Now, these are common footwear on fishing boat decks. However, I will be needing these for protection from the black snow on the NYC streets. It’s bad.
PrimePutt Putting Green, (Zach)
Exactly what my girlfriend and I’s NYC apartment was missing was a severely overpriced putting mat. This 9’ x 3’ absolute pelt is going to fit our living room beautifully.
It’s Not That Deep, Randy
Thanks for reading—or for mega scrolling all the way down here.
The internet is an overwhelming mess of headlines, ads, and mid takes from the worst people you know. Big Tech owns our attention spans. Everything is content. Nothing makes sense.
We’re not here to “fix discourse” or “build a better internet.” Relay is just our attempt to riff on what we’re already talking about at happy hour without feeling like we’ve been hit by a content truck. Some analysis, some memes, call it a day.
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The Tokyo NYC budget thing is mind-boggling. Also didn’t realize the club sandwich was so divisive
The club sandwich is just a leftover artifact from the millennial bacon era. I want nothing to do with it