Hi there, welcome back to Breakfast Club, a newsletter about life in motion. Subscribe to get stories right in your inbox.
This week’s letter starts with a short musing outside endurance or running. If that’s not your jam, just scroll on through for some crunchy recs and links.
It turns out that Social Security rents.
I had assumed when I made an appointment to visit the Social Security Administration that the office would be in your typical government building—granite facade, imposing entrance, maybe a few neoclassical columns.
But the Administration’s East Bay office resides not in austere edifice of white marble, one that evokes a temple of late-imperial Rome. No, it sits hidden inside a forgettable corporate building. Buried in the sort of unremarkable glass-and-steel pile that defines mid-sized American cities. It’s like a DMV wedged into the fourth floor of a regional bank headquarters.
So my visit would lack architectural interest, but since the United States is peculiar in using the random 9-digit number allocating your public pension as a national ID, I was obliged to get one for our new daughter.
Up I went, up the elevator. Its doors opened to a threshold blocked by a burly federal security serviceman, who thoroughly searched my bag, pockets, and self. Even my AirPods were examined, each earbud pulled out and the charging dock scrutinized.
“Isn’t this a little much?” I wanted to ask. Visiting the SSA is the federal equivalent of renewing a driver’s license. But security was warranted. The Alfred P. Murrah Building housed an SSA regional branch. And nowadays a sizable chunk of Americans would cheer the Oklahoma City bombing as sticking it to the deep state. So even your headphones get a cavity search.
After passing through an x-ray scan, I punched an electronic kiosk for a ticket and entered the waiting area.
The office was clean, starkly lit, a largish square room. Folks waited quietly in chairs facing a monitor that displayed ticket numbers. The adjacent wall was a line of carrels, behind which were the SSA agents, separated by two screens of plastic. The monitor announced numbers and people shuffled to the assigned carrel.
Ticket intake systems are expressions of power. Observe this the next time you visit the DMV. Everyone waits, fretting in semi-distraction, eyes flitting back and forth between their phones and the digital sign displaying ticket numbers. Sitting, stewing, anticipating. A number is called and ~whirl!~ a frantic explosion of upward and outward movement ensues. Stumbling, an egg scramble of printed paper and personal belongings, the lucky number hustles to the assigned area to avoid being skipped over.
And thus did I move when my number was called. Lurching in disarray—backpack half-open, folder of documents clenched in hand along with phone and pen and wallet and passport—like an unzipped fly in human form. I moved with the nervous quick-step of one who knows that only the republic can bestow the privileges needed, and with the implicit recognition that this sovereign power was now manifested by a harried, possibly grumpy clerk.
I dumped my things before the sitting agent, who was thankfully shielded behind a couple panes of plexiglass. He took my documents, evidence that my daughter did indeed exist in the eyes of various lower state, county, and municipal bodies, and punched in the request for a Social Security Number.
He barely looked at me, focused on data entry. I was one of an endless line of embodied tasks, a mere proximate cause for a series of interactions with a clunky digital interface. After ten minutes of tapping, the clerk stood up: “Ok, one second.” He left to grab a printed receipt for the forthcoming Number—a lingering vestige of America’s brief flirtation with social democracy now confirmed for my daughter.
While I waited, I overheard conversation beside me. A young woman sat at the next carrel. Blue-dyed hair punctuated her wardrobe of cropped t-shirt and black Doc Martins. The plastic window muted the clerk, so only the blue-haired woman was audible:
“Yes, just the name change . . . No, uh no . . . No, I don’t have it,” she said. “I think it’s lying around the house somewhere,” referring to some document she neglected to bring.
She paused, listening to the muffled agent.
“I don’t care much what it changes to; I just don’t want it to be his anymore. Hah hah.” A divorce, it seemed. Maybe a bad choice she was in the process of undoing.
As I eavesdropped, my clerk returned with the printed receipt. He slid the paper to me under the plexiglass. “Number should arrive in 4 weeks.” I thanked him, placing the receipt with the other papers that proved the bureaucratic reality of our daughter.
As I left, the blue-haired woman was gathering her things. I hope she’s able to change her name. Life is hard enough. Our mistakes stay with us, persisting in our memories as little reminders of our inadequacies and missteps. No need to wallow in that fact by the very sounds through which we are known to ourselves and others.
The elevator deposited me into the lobby. I walked out onto the hard streets of California, stepping over the soupy gutter water that rushed toward the sewers and the San Francisco Bay. Shouldering my backpack, paternal duties fulfilled, I headed homeward toward the bayshore.
Thanks for reading.
Stories I loved
How Far Can You Run in Adidas’s $500-Dollar Super Shoe? by Cory Smith. Adidas claims its hyper-priced racing shoe is optimized for just a single marathon. But how long can it actually last? Smith logged 300 miles in a pair to find out. (Outside)
- . “Functional beverages” now litter the aisles of supermarkets, pharmacies, and gas stations, offering a suite of “wellness” benefits from increased energy, to boosted immunity, to improved gut health. Do they really help and why are they everywhere?
“Drink makers have swooped in to capitalize on the ongoing cultural obsession with hydration . . . That has created an opening for more fantastical functional beverages that promise to be a quick fix for all kinds of health concerns—stress, anxiety, insomnia, and unhappiness.” (Atlantic)
Explosive Levels of Methane at Berkeley Park by Tony Briscoe. I’m fascinated by how we reshape the landscape to meet the needs of the current moment, and the unexpected tradeoffs of those changes. A neat case study is Caesar Chavez Park, a former municipal landfill turned into a popular shoreline park.
What happened? In the 1990s the city sealed off its dumping grounds. Decomposing waste continues to generate methane, which is vented through a system that collects the flammable gas and burns it at a mechanical flare near the center of the park. But the equipment has fallen into disrepair.
“Methane there could explode under the right conditions such as a passerby dropping a lit cigarette on a still day.” (LA Times)
Caitlin Clark’s Childhood Development by
. Epstein highlights how Brent Clark and his wife raised their daughter Caitlin to become a basketball star: “His answer? Get your children engaged with as many different activities as possible, sports or otherwise.”Dig deeper: Epstein also unpacks a new study that indicates specialist youth sports development undermines longer-term development: “Short- and long-term development are often in conflict, whether you’re choosing a career or simply learning a new skill.” (Range Widely)
- . I loved this essay. To be good at an individual sport, you need to be willing to fail, and fail, and fail, and fail . . . and fail, and then fail some more. And through that failure maintain the optimistic audacity that you might actually win.
“So, you work hard, you train harder, you do breathing and focus exercises, you go to the gym, you take care of your body, you sleep eight hours a night, you don’t go out, you don’t have sugar, you don’t drink alcohol, you don’t see your friends and in the end you lose. You can see how it would make one a cynic.” (Finite Jest)
My 2¢: This may be the greatest asset you can gain from an individual sport: the ability to work as hard as you possibly can, to burn hours of time, effort, and resources towards an endeavor, and be generally fine if it all results in failure.
Endurance-ish vids
Season opener, world record. Armand Duplantis pole vaulted to a world record in the <checks notes> first meet of his season. (YouTube)
Cat chase POV. This full-on, ears-back sprinting chase between two cats is a SportsCenter Top 10 in my humble opinion. (Twitter/TikTok)
Man drinks a glass of wine at every mile of the London Marathon. Watching this fellow house a glass of wine every mile and identify a bunch of them by label and year is zonkers impressive. (Twitter/TikTok)
Tweets of the week
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. You can follow me on Notes, Strava, and what’s left of Twitter.
I especially love what you say here about sports and how, at the very least (which is not least at all!), the experience of training for and in a sport teaches you how to endure and persevere and push yourself even when there's no guarantee of reward (in fact, even when it's most likely you won't get a reward).