lessons from the referee store
how to be anxious in a(n) (urban) society in "how-to with john wilson"
Fair warning: this is another one of those newsletter entries where I talk about New York a bunch. It’s insufferable, I know, but hopefully you’ll stick with me.
Because when I talk to people about living in New York City and I complain about many of its ills like chicken bones on the street that my dog wishes to consume until they destroy him, or random parades you had no idea about resulting in street closures, or Santacon, I’ve been asked, “So why live there?”
Fair question. Because if I’m a naturally anxious person, why live here for more than a decade (11 years at the end of this month)? It’s not like this is a city known for work-life balance or best quality of life or streets devoid of chicken bones.
But recently, I feel as if I have something I can point to to help explain my love of this place, and that is HBO Max’s “How-To with John Wilson,” which is now in its third season.
For those who don’t know, this is a comedic docu-series in which documentarian John Wilson explains how to navigate the practical problems of city life that should have straightforward answers with sometimes profound solutions. Think “How to Make Small Talk” or “How to Find a Public Restroom” or “How to Track Your Package.” These questions frame every episode, which is set up less like a documentary and more like a creative nonfiction essay, braided with related tangents and anecdotes, detours and reporting that enriches the answer to this questions.
My husband likens the style to “a 14-year-old with a camera for the first time, but better,” since he likes to film eclectic little vignettes he sees all around him, most of which seem ordinary and boring, until I look just a little closer. Even his narrator voice is anxious and unsteady. And even though I know he’s reading from a script, I still buy into that anxiety.
Wilson appears to film each and every second of his life, from the most mundane moments in his apartment to the most bizarre subway behavior, editing it together with voiceover narration to make an all-too-human narrative. His adventures to answer his anxiety-ridden practical questions take him all around the city and beyond, searching for answers we all wrestle with in one way or another.
In many ways, he’s narrating a lot of the things I fret about on a daily basis, but merely follows them to their extremes. Wilson spends $15 at a seedy motel in the Rockaways when he can’t find a public bathroom; he visits a “referee store” in Queens in order to learn more about fairness; he studies the history of scaffolding to understand why it seems to be everywhere; he attends a “parking convention” and talks to parking garage professionals about how to find, and keep, a parking spot.
These moments are stitched together not only be voiceover, but glimpses of Wilson’s quirky life as well. Wilson once angered Keith Raniere and members of NXIUM (yes, the sex trafficking cult) at a college acapella competition years before Raniere was convicted. We see glimpses of his own mental health struggles when he crashes an Avatar fan meet-up where one attendee discusses how the movie saved him from suicide ideation. Every time you want to dismiss Wilson as just some lame filmmaker dude who is one of a dime a dozen in NYC, you’re reminded of the individual he truly is, and we all are, when you look deep enough.
He can’t find all of his answers in the city. In an effort to explore his fear of commitment and desire for spontaneity, Wilson takes an impromptu trip to Las Vegas to meet up with his former landlord, an old lady who insists on doing his laundry despite him dropping in unannounced. While exploring an area of West Virginia where people flock to live peacefully without Wifi for 5G, he discovers neighborhood drama that is far from tranquil (and he possibly even fans those flames a bit more before leaving).
Every thread Wilson pulls is handled with earnestness, and always ends with that shock of humanity that always provides me with some comfort. Like, should this former landlady be doing a grown man’s laundry for him for free? Absolutely not. But can we as humans still be tender towards those we’ve felt a closeness with? Yes. Do peaceful places actually produce peace for every single person? Not even close.
Personally, I think John Wilson is the millennial answer (or tangent off of) series like Fran Lebowitz’s “Pretend It’s a City,” in that it plays with the things we love to hate and hate to love about living in New York City, but in a way that feels sincere rather than jaded. Sure, Wilson has complaints about the city, much like Lebowitz or anyone else.
But he has a lot of love for the kinds of people Lebowitz makes a career out of whining about. I see this in the vignettes he finds and highlights: a drunk couple abruptly alternating between screaming and making out outside Yankee Stadium; an unhoused man who tells Wilson about the “cootie water” sewage on his block; a marching band walking up Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint playing hip-hop covers. As anxiety-producing as this place can be, it’s having all these humans around, with all of their flaws, in close proximity that makes this place worth it.
It’s not that Wilon’s experience is universal—it’s not. He is a landlord (and documents the process of becoming one in one episode). He’s a white guy who can clearly walk into certain otherwise unsafe situations with a comfort I certainly never could. But his honesty about his anxiety about his place in the world is what makes the show both so funny and so poignant. And I do wonder sometimes what this kind of series would look like if someone else did it—surely, a BIPOC or queer person’s perspective on some of these questions would look different to a degree (for example, would they be comfortable going to rural West Virginia on a whim? Likely no).
I suppose what has resonated most with me from this series isn’t that it’s explicitly about anxiety, but that it’s about how we live with it in its many forms, big and small. It’s the small fear we have about finding a parking spot, which is really part of a bigger question we all face about where we belong. It’s the seemingly insignificant question of how to make small talk, when what we really feel nervous about is connecting with anyone at all. Throwing out batteries is intricately connected to larger fears we have about what happens to our waste, and the material things we covet, as time rolls along. Our smallest anxieties are often echoes of something much bigger, and more universal, than we might initially realize.