Everything, everywhere...except the ending

As the world frays at the edges, there’s comfort in skipped endings, shared ice cream scoops and a weekly grocery store ritual with my brother.

Across the country, there are weighty decisions to be made—by the courts, by political leaders, by people in charge of institutions like universities and corporations, and by everyday American citizens.

What’s the best path forward? How should I react to that other person or entity’s action (or inaction)? And how should I, individually, respond to these things—so many of them coming so fast and furious?

But on Wednesday night, at the grocery store with my brother Phil, the only weightiness in the air consisted of how many ice cream cartons to buy and which flavors?

Phil chose two of the Vanilla-Chocolate-Strawberry combo, an efficient and versatile three-in-one package.

The past several months, Phil and I have settled into a reliable Wednesday evening rhythm as I visit for a few hours and we go shopping, unpack the groceries at his apartment and watch a movie.

It’s a domesticated scene, far superior to our yearslong relational strain that I’ve chronicled in prior Brother Love columns. Since his latest near-death experience in September, Phil’s been over seven months clean and sober, the longest such stretch in many years—and certainly longer than any time since he moved to Chicago in 2012.

For our last visit, I brought Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film that won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, a few years ago. We were over two hours into it, just a few minutes from the end, when Phil bolted up from his bed and pressed the eject button.

“I can’t take it anymore,” he said in exasperation, handing me the disk. “That’s the most horrible movie I’ve ever seen.” That’s saying something, since Phil has seen more movies than anyone else I know. He has them on a loop, at the foot of his bed, for about 23 (yes, twenty-three) hours a day.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is, indisputably, a strange film (Wikipedia refers to it as an “absurdist comedy-drama”) and I hadn’t fully decided if I liked it myself. This much is certain: I found Phil’s reaction to be more entertaining than anything I’d observed over the previous few hours.¹

The flip side of Phil's immersion in made-up stories is his decision to ignore just about everything going on in the world, everywhere, all the time. His full retreat provides ample space for a news junkie like me to take a step away from the tug of “breaking news” in an increasingly broken world².

How much of a contrast are the Baron brothers in this regard? Only last month, I had the opportunity to inform Phil that “Elon Musk” was not a kind of scent. Previously, when he heard those successive four-letter words, he’d construe them as a fragrance, not the world’s wealthiest human being.

I pierced that bubble when I referenced Musk’s role with the various Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cutbacks of federal agencies. Once I clarified that this particular Musk was no cologne, my brother worriedly questioned what effect those cuts might have on his fully subsidized housing. It was a good question, reflecting Phil’s wits are very much about him when he chooses to employ them.

I replied that it probably hinged on how much the agency that runs his building relies on federal aid but knew not to dive too far into these real-world weeds. I steered the conversation quickly back to lighter fare and pulled out the Battleship board game I’d brought—a different brand of screen watching.

Maybe, down the road, someone will turn Elon Musk into an ice cream—and a movie. If so, I am confident Phil and I would enjoy a bowl of it and see if we could stomach the plot in its entirety.

1. It’s three days later and I still haven’t bothered to see the last bit of the movie, which suggests I am not entirely enamored of it. No “all at once” about my viewership.

2. Thank God it’s Easter weekend…always perfectly timed and with the perfect message.