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The last time I talked to Dan McQuade was on May 5, 2020. I was in a Korean pandemic hotel for Chinese businessmen. He was, as always, in Philadelphia. Because of the 13-hour time difference, we didn't exactly talk-talk. We passed a Google Doc back and forth until it was over six thousand words long, and then I posted it on the internet. The last time I heard anything from Dan McQuade was four years later, when he abruptly cancelled his TMM subscription and stopped returning my emails. I'd just redesigned my personal website into a Whelliston Memorial Library; Dan had a Grade 3 neuroendocrine tumor that was 100 percent guaranteed to murder him. So, then, therefore, in conclusion, he likely didn't think my elaborate joke was very funny. When he passed away this January, the New York Times ran an obituary in Section A. Dan McQuade, 43; the print headline read. Was a Catalyst in Cosby’s Downfall. I was in an Italian Airbnb for Olympic volunteers, and I was in utter disbelief and shock. Not because of the cancer, which has killed half my family and at least some of yours too, but the goddamn story framing. What an ironic indignity, a full mouthful of grave spit, for someone who spent so much of his shortened existence pointing out how ridiculous and reductive legacy media is. According to America's right-center newspaper of record, the most important moment in Dan's life was recording a 100-second video of somebody else's comedy show at the Troc, then posting it on Philadelphia Magazine's website. Here in the AI attention economy, the only way to maintain any control over your own identity and image – if such things are important to you anymore – is to write your own obit before they can. (And that's why, dear reader. Do you understand now?) The NYT didn't mention Deadspin once, where he made hundreds of independent truth-to-power posts before the new owners told the staff to stick-to-sports or else. Only the tiniest glimpse into what made Dan's mind such a weird and wonderful alternate world. No attempt to explain how skilled he was in rewiring our brains into seeing things exactly as he did. He had a Twitter account called @kittyonthefield that posted whenever a cat interrupted a baseball game. He could name all the ZOOperstars. He was obsessed with Jersey Shore bootleg t-shirt stores. Try rewatching The Last Dance without thinking non-stop about Michael Jordan's liquor glass. I'm quoting myself here: "Mr. McQuade's particular genius has always been laser-focusing on a single part of a sum, so much and so repeatedly that it comes to define and explain the entire gestalt." Dan's greatest life achievement was not taking down Bill Cosby, who was already pretty much finished by 2014 (as evidenced by the multiple investigations and exposés linked to in his Phillymag blog post). No, it was bending and twisting the entire 21st Century into the shape of Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch (2002). "In the film, one newspaper is shown. It is the front page. It is dated September 12, 2001. But the lead story is not about the 9/11 attacks, it is about Air Bud's baseball team. In the Buddyverse, 9/11 didn't happen or was not a big deal." I can't think about 9/11 anymore without thinking about this, without thinking about Dan's theory that there's an Earth-2 where Buddy stopped the attacks by biting Mohamed Atta. I can't listen to "Regulate" without remembering the time in 2005 when he and I went to a karaoke night at Cavanaugh's University City. (Dan was Warren G and I was Nate Dogg.) I am listening now, as I finish writing this. "I am kind of disappointed I am the only person who cares that there was a hidden 9/11 joke in Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch," he told me, "but whatever. I'll live." Dan McQuade, unfortunately for everyone else, did not.
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