Wednesday ORT: New Model Y, EDys-209, Creation Lake, Return Of The Kings

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back up in yo’ass with the resurrection

We’re still in the no-politics zone this week, so I’m going to ask everyone to refrain from discussing the Trump/Tesla stunt in any other context than “will it sell more cars”, as we’ll see below. As always, I appreciate your patience with me. Let’s start.

The old ghosts return, thank God

“my ancestors are smiling at me, imperial.”

The weather has finally broken here at Mid-Ohio, although that doesn’t mean we won’t have another cold snap or two between now and the middle of April. Which means it’s time to celebrate all the outdoor cats who lived through what has proven to be a brutal and capricious winter. Insofar as they all need to sit through a portrait session or two for the upcoming Cat Tales And Other Stories book, every single one that survived is additionally precious to me…

…but I didn’t start openly sobbing in my office until I saw Albino Kitty appear for the first time in perhaps four months. I was ninety percent certain he’d died some time between now and then; it’s not like him to skip meals in winter. Yet there he was on a bright Sunday morning, chowing down as if he’d never left, his damaged eye looking clear and a tolerable amount of weight on his lithe and powerful frame. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but there were a couple of weeks in the middle of all my stupid cardiology drama where I thought that both of us would end up laid to rest somewhere in these woods before the end of 2025.

Of course, his old adversary Tiger Dad is here as well — and for the first time in months, my porch is splattered blood-red after the morning meals. In much the same way that I’ll never not have time to disrespect Justin Bell or Jonny Lieberman or the various other grifters of the auto biz, it’s obvious that the old alphas are ready to pick up their disagreements for the spring. Still, the three of us are very much alive, will remain defiantly so, and you can cue up Layne Staley for the hot take:

In the darkest hole, you'd be well advised
Not to plan my funeral 'fore the body dies

ED And Its Subscription Discontents

One of the toughest parts about being a freelance writer is admitting that someone else is a better fit for the story than you are. Which is what happened at The Free Press when they took my suggested headline/pitch and had Katherine Dee write it as Inside the Erectile-Dysfunction Industrial Complex. She did a great job and found lively interviews, including this one:

Today, Andrew says he needs ED medication for every sexual encounter and even for masturbation. He admits he’s never explored the root cause deeply…

Andrew shares an odd piece of trivia with me while describing his own usage of ED meds, something he noticed while living in New York. Viagra and Cialis are popular in sex scenes, subcultures where people have a lot of casual intercourse. In those cases, people were using them like high-performing students might reach for Adderall. He admits to me that that might describe his own usage, too.

“I guess there could be a psychological dependency,” he told me. “I’ve used them for so long, I’m not sure I’d even know how to go back.”

Without discussing my own sources, I will say that I’ve heard quite a bit that parallels Katherine’s interviews: young men who are unable to engage in sex without pharmaceutical help, who struggle with various performance issues even when using the drugs, and who are experiencing relationship issues as a result.

How young is young? Sixteen years old or earlier, according to Ms. Dee. And at the same time that I was reading her article, an ACFer was sending me a link to the “Worst Boyfriend Ever” Substack, detailing the sexual adventures of a (self-represented) very handsome and fit young man with an Asians-only fetish. Kind of the Delicious Tacos of 2025, actually — which will no doubt come as an unpleasant surprise to the still-existing Delicious Tacos:

Slut Review: Katie from Hinge

In it, the “Worst Boyfriend Ever” details not being able to perform without BlueChew’s “Viagra for Zoomers”. Again, this is not some 53-year-old cripple trying to make it happen while in serious calorie deficit, running on four hours’ sleep, and recovering badly from two hours of weight training and elliptical interval workouts (not that, ah, your humble author is anything less than superhuman at any time) but a kid in his twenties with six percent body fat and a constant string of 9/10 Korean girls performing fanservice for him. What could possibly be the issue?

The answers may lie in some of the conversations I’ve had with younger readers over the past few years. To begin with, there has never been more emphasis on the male body in general and the reproductive organ particularly — in every form of media. You can turn on Netflix and see full frontal male nudity all over most “peak TV” shows. In fact, the whole beauty/body-standards thing is sex-flipping right in front of our eyes. Watch the streaming services. The women keep getting uglier and dumpier — who thinks Zendaya is a knockout? Who’s really interested in Eve Hewson? — while the men keep getting more handsome and more naked. It’s driven by the fact that all media now is female-focused, with very few exceptions. Women have purchasing power, they are more likely to impulse-buy — so everything on a screen at all times, with the possible exception of the “Forgotten Weapons” YouTube channel, is aimed at a female buyer. And it’s all visual. Men now need to be handsome. It’s no longer sufficient to be compelling or interesting, because those qualities don’t come though a Hinge or Bumble interface.

So young men have significant incentive to lift weights up to or past the point of “gear” usage, and they’re also well advised to use Viagra/Cialis/Levitra for every encounter. After all, your competition is using it — and let’s not kid ourselves, it really works for most men. Even if you have no performance issues as you stand, adding tadalafil will significantly enhance what you can deliver in bed, while also allowing you to pull extra cycles in your workout. One highly-buff ACFer recommended it to me for that reason alone.

While it would be irresponsible for me as a current cardiac patient to use any of this stuff, I have interviewed another 206-pound club racer in his early-to-mid fifties who tried it on a test basis. He reported increasing his macebell swings and kettlebell exercises by 50% over the course of a two-week program that would have fatigued him past normal recovery without the medication. He also reported reverting back to the approximate performance of his 17-year-old self in other areas, absolutely reversing 100% or even 105% of his mild but measurable decline between 1988 and 2025.

So yeah, the stuff works just as advertised. If you’re in the dating game, you’d be foolish not to use it. Every other man, especially every other young man, with whom you’re competing will be taking advantage of the benefits. If you can’t bang it out to the same level or better, you’ll be publicly lampooned on social media. But what happens if you get to the point where you need the pills, either physically or — far more likely — psychologically? I don’t know, but the fact is that men are in a bit of an arms race now. The next fellow after you on your app of choice is on tren or TRT, he’s got his Bluechew prescription, he’s using Adderall to earn more money than you are.

As a father, I’m horrified at the prospect of telling my son he needs at least three different kinds of prescriptions to succeed with women and in his career, but maybe he’ll be spared all of it, because even the cutest female Substackers agree that there may be a few other worthwhile qualities besides firmness and duration:

have you heard of the c-130? that’s right. well, john flies the c-182

Ian Fleming wept (tears of joy)

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner, 2024. This is the last Booker Prize nominee I’ll be reading this year, since I have something between amused contempt and unamused contempt for Held and James, the only two 2024 shortlisters not reviewed here at ACF. (The former is a bunch of dream-sequence junk, the latter is race-baiting pap for wine moms.)

I won’t say I saved the best for last, because both The Safekeep and Stone Yard Devotional are outstanding books — but Creation Lake is a wicked bit of work. It follows “Sadie Smith”, the fake identity of a 34-year-old blandly pretty woman with “big breasts that are real as my name” and a perfectly flat stomach. Sadie is something between a professional agitator and a genuine secret agent; her specialty is in getting young male activists to commit violent acts at just the right time, thus serving the interests of her various shadowy employers. As the book opens, we see Sadie settling in to stir up trouble in a hippie-esque French back-to-nature farming commune. Who’s paying her to do it? How far will they require her to go? And so on.

Described as above, Creation Lake sounds like the worst kind of jerkoff pulp fiction. I assure you it’s very far from that. To the contrary, it’s an ultra-erudite, highly thoughtful love story in which the lovers meet either once or never at all, depending on how you interpret one critical scene. It’s a novel of ideas, it’s a digression into early caveman history, it’s a cautionary tale about being swept away in one’s own ideological progression.

I can see Sadie Smith and her (un-)trusty Walter P-38 in my head, I can hear her voice, I can assemble her entire being from bits and scraps of the women I’ve known. There’s something astounding about the fact that Rachel Kushner, who is basically a nice old lady with terrible clothes, can create such a character with such authenticity. Even better, there’s nothing “Mary Sue” about Creation Lake’s anti-heroine. She is, by turns: a fool, a whore, a user, a degenerate, an idealist, and a child staring up at the stars in hopes of understanding a distant, but deeply loved, man. What a shame she’s not real. Now that would be someone worth breaking out the BlueChew for, am I right? Grade: A-

Y? Because we like you. Half of you, anyway

Back in the summer of 2023, I called the Tesla Model Y “the worst new car I’ve ever reviewed.” To be fair, that’s because I didn’t actually review the Volkswagen ID.4 but merely borrowed it from the Hagerty editor who actually wrote a review. The ID.4 makes the old Model Y look good, because it’s everything I hated about the Model Y only slower and with even less range.

How many of my complaints will apply to the new-for-2025 Model Y, which debuted late last week to a tsunami of (largely political) coverage? It’s hard to say. This is obviously not a clean-sheet redesign, the same way the new Model 3 leans hard on the original, but there have been improvements to the interior along with a total re-panel that supposedly reduces the number of components and improves build quality.

It certainly looks better. The old Model Y had the unpleasant appearance of a Model 3 with thyroid problems; since the Model 3 itself looked like the Redditor brother of the professional-athlete Model S, that was very far from being a good thing. This one offers real improvements in front and rear fascia, the proportions seem a bit less ungainly despite being basically identical in reality, and it just comes off as retro-futuristic in a way the original could not.

Much is being made of how Tesla’s existing customer base both here and overseas is abandoning the brand — and having President Trump basically do a version of the “Used Cars” advertisement on the White House lawn does nothing to dissuade those former Tesla-lovers in their disenchantment:

Hear me now and believe me later, liberals of ACF: Elon’s heel turn is the best thing that ever happened to EVs in the United States. Prior to the 2024 election, EVs were ideologically limited to half of the country. Now you have right-wingers actively looking to purchase Teslas, which are still EVs despite their current association with DOGE et al.

In other words, Elon just figured out how to sell his product to the 50% of America that wouldn’t touch an EV. And the 50% that was already interested in EVs on political and identity grounds? Well, you can buy, uh, a Volkswagen ID.4, because nothing says “We hate Nazis” like buying a new mass-market-focused VW.

The F-250 redneck-wannabe white-collar crowd, such as your humble author, can now experience the joys of EV ownership without having to get rid of their “Yellowstone Dutton Ranch” or “Carharrt WIP” apparel. When they stop admiring spicy pictures of Lauren Boebert or Jenna Ellis long enough to actually try a Tesla, they’ll discover in a hurry that there are quite a few admirable qualities to Elon’s little battery buggies — but that there are also significant drawbacks.

Why, I was just talking to an authentic conservative this morning, we can call him “Bark”, who is highly interested in a Model 3 Performance. At first he said “M3 Performance”, which terrified me. The current BMW M3 is a deeply, truly awful car. Objectively it’s not as bad as a 2022 Tesla Model Y, but that’s like saying the Rolex Yacht-Master isn’t as bad of a watch as the average Panerai or Breitling; the problem is that you expect more from a Rolex. For a very long time BMW was a brand from which you could expect more, as well. Now you have to be careful about which one you get.

Your humble author won’t be shopping for Teslas any time soon. I have a nifty new job with no commute whatsoever. I’m not totally thrilled about it, because I like having a work excuse to take my 300C or Super Blackbird out for a spin, but such is life. That doesn’t mean we aren’t changing the fleet around here, which leads me to close today’s thread with an impromptu Classified Ad: one highly-restored stick-shift Mercury Milan with a boomin’ sound system, over $12,000 invested, yours for six grand — and I will take your unwanted motorcycles in trade. Let’s start a conversation. As always, thank you for reading.