Steven Rubio's Online Life

dreams

I’m not much for talking about my dreams. For one thing, by the time I get to posting to the blog, I’ve forgotten the dreams of the previous night. For another, I don’t think there’s much use in analyzing dreams for their subconscious truisms.

Having said that, I have fairly intense dreams almost every night. This hasn’t always been the case, and I suspect it relates to the number of meds I take for my various ailments. By “intense” I don’t mean that they are emotionally draining, but that they seem quite real when they are happening, and that feeling continues briefly when I awake.

In one of my dreams last night, my brother and I were attending an Earthquakes match. We were watching the match on delay, the way you will when you record a game on the DVR for later viewing. So there’s the first sign this was a dream, not reality: we were living as if our lives were DVR recordings. At some point, I started obsessing (in the dream) about the time difference between the match as it happened, and the match as we were watching it (again, not on TV, but at Buck Shaw Stadium, only on delay). I asked my brother, if it started raining at some point during the match, would it rain on us at the equivalent point in the match we were attending/watching-on-delay, or would it have already rained on us at the time the actual rain occurred? I said this was clearly an example of the space-time continuum.

Later, I had another dream when I dozed off while Robin was reading next to me. She says I was talking in my sleep. When I woke up, I immediately wanted to tell her about a new invention. Invention is the wrong word … maybe discovery is better. I was so taken with this that I looked it up online, certain that I had dreamed about something that already existed. But I was wrong. And so, for anyone who writes virus-ends-the-world fiction, I give you my dream invention/discovery:

The Mobius Virus.

This might actually be real, but I’m not going to spend all day trying to find out. My knowledge of cells and DNA and viruses is skimpy at best. In the dream, the Mobius virus twisted human DNA into a Mobius strip. For all I know, that’s how real-life DNA looks. But in the dream, and for a few minutes after I woke up, I felt I’d made a monumental discovery.

happy birthday, neal!

How did I get a son who is 38 years old? However old he is, he’s still #1 in my book. And he’s my best bud.

my dad’s birthday

If my dad were alive today, he’d be celebrating his 89th birthday.

Let’s see … he was 8 days older than Charles Aznavour, who is still alive. He was born the same year as Marlon Brando, Carroll O’Connor, Lauren Bacall, Truman Capote, Ed Wood, Ruby Dee, Wally Cox, Ed Koch, Mohammed Rafi, and the Professor from Gilligan’s Island. He was born several months before Jerome Waldie … they grew up together in Antioch, and I suppose if I try to imagine a different history for my father, I could put him in his friend Jerry’s shoes (Waldie was a Congressman who voted to impeach Nixon).

I know there are people who have lots of knowledge about their father. I’m not really one of them. But I’ll try.

I don’t think he spoke English until he went to school, although, like most of what follows, that could be wrong. His parents were from Andalucía, moving to Antioch, California in the late-1910s/early-1920s. His parents worked in local factories … his dad died at an early age, from pneumonia I believe … I never knew him. His mom lived into her nineties, and we all knew her very well.

He was apparently a bit of a scamp in his high-school years, but he escaped and enrolled at Cal. He was only there for a year … heck, I think it was only a semester … and then he entered the army for World War II. He never talked about the war. Most of the second-hand stories I heard involved scampish shenanigans. In 1945, he married my mom, who was a Berkeley girl. She’d been his waitress when he was a Cal student.

I don’t know what he did for the next fifteen years, outside of fathering half-a-dozen kids, five of whom survived. By the time I have memories, he was a realtor, but I’m pretty sure he had other jobs before that. My mom worked outside of the home in the early years of their marriage; her mom lived with the family until I was two years old.

In the early 60s, my parents were much admired, or so I’ve been told. The last of us kids was born in 1960 … my mom and dad were in their 30s, and doing quite well. We figured our dad was a good salesman, because my parents often went for a weekend in San Francisco, staying in fancy hotels and playing tournament bridge. One woman, who lived across the street from us for a brief time and later became my stepmother-in-law, said she was always jealous of my mom, who dressed nice and went out on the town.

Then the shenanigans returned. It’s never been clearly stated to me what happened, how much blame should be assigned, who knew what, but whatever, my dad was involved in an embezzlement scheme that resulted in his spending 37 Saturdays in jail. (He would drive himself each weekend, spend 24 hours, and drive himself home.)

It was a sign of his greatness as a salesman that he made a new career for himself as a car salesman, selling to the same people who knew he'd gone to jail as a scam artist. He was quite successful, and stayed at that job until he retired. He seemed like a man who liked to work, but it’s not as if he talked about that, or much of anything. He was gregarious, without giving too much away about himself. He got a huge dose of cancer, and died at 65. My parents smoked like the proverbial chimney (she died of cancer, as well). They also drank like the proverbial fish … Mad Men seems quite realistic to me.

My dad was a nice guy. He took me to the occasional ballgame, he’d come to see me when I was acting in a play … he even came to see our garage band once. Both of my parents loved music, and it wore off on the kids. He stayed married to my mother for 44 years, which set a good example. But when I think of the things he passed along to me, I’m already running out of material. He didn’t talk about himself. He wasn’t the kind of guy who had a lot of “guy” skills, so he never taught me how to make stuff, or shoot stuff, or fix cars. I don’t really remember him sitting me down at any time and saying, “let me teach you this”.  And while I’d like to say that I learned how to be a good, ethical person from him, there’s that part where he was an embezzler.

This all sounds downbeat, and I don’t mean it to be that way. I don’t have many bad memories of my dad … he was grumpy a lot, and look out when he had a headache, but he never abused his kids, or ever made us feel we weren’t wanted.

in my life: baseball, 1953-present

I’ll be 60 in a little more than a month, and today I found myself thinking about how life has changed during my life. When my father was 60, he had lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. He had lived through Coolidge and Hoover and Roosevelt and Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Ford and Carter and Reagan. He lived through the prominence of radio entertainment in the home and its replacement by television. Big band music, rock and roll, disco, and the beginnings of hip hop.

Just to take one example of change during my lifetime, here are some of the ways baseball has changed.

When I was born, there were 16 major-league teams, split into two leagues of eight teams each. The champions of each league met in the World Series; that was the extent of the “post-season”. Now, there are 30 teams, fifteen in each league, and a post-season including division winners and wild cards.

• In 1953, the Boston Braves had just moved to Milwaukee. They later moved to Atlanta. Milwaukee eventually got an expansion team, which had spent one year in Seattle.
• 1953 was the last year of the St. Louis Browns. They moved to Baltimore the next year and became the Orioles.
• The Cincinnati Reds spent several years in the 1950s calling themselves the Redlegs to avoid and tint of Commie Menace.
• In 1953, the Dodgers and Giants played in Brooklyn and New York respectively. They moved west in 1958. In the 1953, the big team in San Francisco was the Seals of the Pacific Coast League.
• In 1953, the Athletics played in Philadelphia. Two years later, they moved to Kansas City. In 1968, they moved to Oakland. In 1969, Kansas City got an expansion team.
• In 1953, the team in Washington was called the Senators. In 1961, they moved to Minnesota. That same year, Washington got an expansion team. In 1972, that team moved to Texas. Meanwhile, in 1969, Montreal got a major-league team. They moved to Washington in 2005.

In 1953, the average team stole 42 bases for the entire season. In 2012, the average was 108. (League average caught stealing totals were 33 in 1953, 38 last year … teams are a lot more efficient at steals than they used to be. The caught stealings are roughly the same, while the successes have increased 2 1/2 times.) Saves were only tracked by a few teams; they wouldn’t become an official stat until 1969. The leader in saves in 1969 was Ron Perranoski of the Twins, with 31. In 2012, 15 different pitchers had 31 or more saves, led by Jim Johnson with 51.

In 2012, the minimum salary for a full season in the majors was $480,000. In 1954, on his return from military service, Willie Mays made $12,500.

At the beginning of the 2013 season, Forbes valued the Giants as being worth $786,000,000. In case you thought all the money these days was going to the players.

In 1953, and for a few decades thereafter, the “basic” stats like batting average, runs batted in, and wins were considered the final word on performance measurements. I can recall my father telling me Juan Marichal was a great pitcher because he got lots of wins. In 1973, Tito Fuentes played in 160 games at second base for the Giants, leading the league in assists and fielding percentage. He hit .277. He received votes for league MVP. Seven NL second basemen played enough in 1973 to qualify for the batting title. Wins Above Replacement hadn’t been invented yet. With hindsight, we know that Fuentes finished 6th out of those seven in WAR for 1973. He didn’t walk, he didn’t hit for power, and he didn’t have great range at second. But he hit for a decent average, he didn’t make errors, and he played every day. Not MVP quality, but by what we knew at the time, he was considered in the general vicinity of awards.

leaving high school

“There’s no reason why, at the age of 60, I should still be listening to the Allman Brothers,” Steinberg says. “Yet no matter how old you are, the music you listen to for the rest of your life is probably what you listened to when you were an adolescent.” Only extremely recent advances in neuroscience have begun to help explain why.

It turns out that just before adolescence, the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that governs our ability to reason, grasp abstractions, control impulses, and self-­reflect—undergoes a huge flurry of activity, giving young adults the intellectual capacity to form an identity, to develop the notion of a self. Any cultural stimuli we are exposed to during puberty can, therefore, make more of an impression, because we’re now perceiving them discerningly and metacognitively as things to sweep into our self-concepts or reject (I am the kind of person who likes the Allman Brothers). “During times when your identity is in transition,” says Steinberg, “it’s possible you store memories better than you do in times of stability.”

-- “Why You Truly Never Leave High School” by Jennifer Senior

My teenage years were filled with the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, and Astral Weeks. I like to think my musical tastes have gotten broader as I got older … I used to get admiring laughs from students at Cal when I would demonstrate the difference between funk and disco by playing “The Big Payback” by James Brown … but I’m kidding myself. In my post-adolescent life (i.e., adulthood), my musical favorites have been Bruce Springsteen, punk, Prince, Sleater-Kinney, and Pink. Springsteen was famously called rock and roll future, but he was always far more a compilation of what came before. Punk felt revolutionary, but the music was a return to roots. Prince could do anything, but ultimately, he was Sly and the Family Stone with Hendrix sitting in on guitar. Sleater-Kinney were riot grrrls, to be sure, but by the time they met their hiatus with The Woods, it was clear they were indebted as much to Led Zeppelin as they were to Bikini Kill. Pink has offered wonderful covers of Led Zep and Queen and Janis Joplin … when I saw her at the Fillmore, she fit right in. I haven’t strayed too far from my teenage roots.

As I type this, I’m listening to “Live with Me” from Let It Bleed by the Stones. It’s part of my never-ending project/playlist, “FM”, with close to 3,000 tracks that were played on “underground” radio in the late-60s. (Coming up on the playlist: Jefferson Airplane, Beatles, Quicksilver Messenger Service.) This is my go-to playlist when I want to listen to comfort music. (There is nothing “comforting” about songs like “Inside Looking Out” by the Animals, but the ambiance they suggest is comforting.) It’s perilously close to nostalgia, which I hate in myself.

So I suppose it makes me feel better to read Jennifer Senior’s article and find that it’s not nostalgia, it’s neuroscience.

I want music to matter to me. Music in general mattered when I was a teenager, by which I mean I had favorites (Beatles, Velvet Underground, Yardbirds, Astral Weeks) but the integration of music and life was truly important (which is why my comfort playlist isn’t focused on a particular artist, but on the FM radio stations that got me through those years). I was 22 years old when we first connected with Bruce Springsteen, and that’s been a constant ever since. And there have always been others who mattered more than most: Dylan, Lou Reed, the Clash, Prince, Hüsker Dü, Sleater-Kinney. When S-K went on their “hiatus”, I suspected that I had experienced my last love affair with a musical artist. I was too old to crank it up all over again. Since then, I’ve seen Wild Flag three times and the Corin Tucker Band twice, but that’s not moving forward. I’ve seen Pink four times, with a fifth coming this fall … she’s easily the artist about whom I obsess the most these days, outside of Bruce. But I always feel like an observer in Pink’s universe. It’s not like with Sleater-Kinney, where somehow even a middle-aged guy like me felt a part of a community.

I spend a lot of time ranting about the evils of nostalgia, and get cranky at people who quit enjoying new music after they reach a certain age. Perhaps I should look in the mirror.

history meme

A meme that actually teaches folks something. At least it did for me, when I read Batdina’s contribution. So I asked her to include me … she chose the age 45:

I lived in the same house I live in today. We moved here in 1987; I turned 45 in 1998. I have lived here longer than any other place in my life (my parents bought a house when my mom was pregnant with me, and I lived there for the first seventeen years of my life, but we’ve been in this house for 25 1/2 years).

I drove … I don’t remember. I’m guessing we had two cars, and one was a Buick Le Sabre. The other was a Honda or a Toyota or something like that. This was only 15 years ago … I can’t believe my memory is failing me here.

I was in a relationship with my wife. We had our 25th anniversary just before I turned 45. I’ll attach a few lo-fi photos from the party we had for our 25th anniversary party. (And if you haven’t heard about our 40th anniversary party, which comes in about a month and a half, let me know … there’s a general Invite on Facebook and Google+, but I know those miss some people.)

I feared everything. It would be another seven years before I finally went on meds. As I once told my wife, “I hate air”.

I worked at Cal as a lecturer in the American Studies program. I’d finished my dissertation and received my Ph.D. the year before. At 45, I was directing senior theses in American Studies. In the spring of 1999, when I was still 45, I taught my final courses in the Cal English department: American Literature 1900-1945, and Post-WWII American Literature and Film. In the summer of ‘99, just as I turned 46, I taught an American Studies course on America in the 1980s.

I wanted to be an underachieving goof-off. I leave it to others to decide if I’d reached my goal, then or later (or always).

Want to meme? Tell me how old you are, and I'll pick a random age for you to remember.

Here are a few pix from our 25th anniversary party:

lunchtime with félix

did i ever

There’s a web site called “Did I Ever Tell You About the Time…” that offers people the chance to tell dull stories of their brushes with fame. The FAQ for the site explains: “Your story must be an anecdote about meeting a Pop Star. It must be dull. That’s it.” They also prefer that the story is short.

Maybe an example would help. Here’s what I got when I clicked the “Random” link:

I had at meeting at a music management company once. As I was going down the stairs, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page was ascending them. He nodded at me as we passed. I was too slow on the uptake to nod in return and had passed him before I could do anything.

I saw him a few weeks later having a coffee on Portobello Road. I didn’t nod at him that time either.

You get the idea.

Of course this made me think about my own exciting tales. The biggest problem is that most of my so-called brushes with fame are with people who are not pop stars. If I adhered to that standard, I don’t suppose I’d have any tales to tell. So I’ll stretch it a bit, include a couple of actors, and also musicians who, if not pop stars, are at least famous to me. I’ve told many of these stories before.

Is Jack Casady a pop star? I suppose he was a bit in the late-60s, but then, I feel obliged to explain who he was, which means he’s certainly no longer a pop star, and likely never was. He was the bass player for Jefferson Airplane, and later, Hot Tuna. He was my favorite bassist when I was a player myself, and it wasn’t a bad choice … he’s great. I had two encounters with him, both of which follow my standard pattern in such situations. First, I notice the person. Second, I freak out because I’m in the presence of fame. Third, I act like nothing’s happening, because in the Bay Area, we’re supposed to be cool about this stuff. I saw him once at a Renaissance Faire in 1973 or so, just wandering around. And in the 80s, I took a leak next to him in one of those urinal troughs at the Fillmore at a Hüsker Dü concert.

Let’s see … fast-forward to the early 80s. We went to LA for the wedding of a friend. Another friend introduced us to her friend, Ralph Mauro, an actor who had just finished shooting They Call Me Bruce?, a comedy starring Tonight Show favorite Johnny Yune and Margaux Hemingway. This probably doesn’t fit the site’s standards … the anecdote is dull, but since we talked for quite a while, I feel like it’s a bit too substantial. Perhaps a better example comes from the same trip, when I met Brian Seff. I knew of him as “Rick” of Rick and Ruby, a comedy/musical act in the Bay Area that appeared in The Pee-wee Herman Show and on Mork and Mindy. In this case, I fear I gushed a bit, and while I recall Seff being polite, I don’t think he was enjoying himself as I badgered him. (I now know that he had just moved to LA, with “The Rick and Ruby Show” having broken up.)

Gee, I think I’m already done. My life has been so boring, I don’t even have any lame stories for that web site. I guess I’ll fall back on Gregory Peck. Here’s how I told part of that story in the first year of this blog:

I'm reminded of the time when I got to meet and hang out for a bit with Gregory Peck for a few days some years ago. At one point, thinking of the awful Boys From Brazil, I asked Mr. Peck if he ever got into a movie, saw it was going to stink, and decided that at least he could have some fun with his role. No, he assured me, that would be unfair to the audience. His job was to do his best, no matter what the circumstances; his audience expected no less. Gregory Peck was an exceedingly charming man, and I consider myself very lucky to have met him for even those few hours. But his answer explained the problem: he was so worried about his audience that he never allowed for the possibility that in a piece of shit like The Boys From Brazil, we were all in on the joke, and so he ended up looking foolish for trying to do his best. Meanwhile, in the same film, Lawrence Olivier tarted up his role as if it was more fun than having a three-way with Vivian Leigh and Danny Kaye. The result? Olivier is the only thing worth seeing in the entire film.

I have a couple of other Gregory Peck stories, but this is the one that actually placed me in fame’s orbit, rather than merely watching from afar. This is also from my blog:

Well, I was just searching myself via Amazon's "search all the books in our store" thingie ... yes, I'm vain like that ... and I find the following, on page 377-8 of the book Gregory Peck: A Charmed Life by Lynn Haney:

Around this time journalist Steven Rubio confronted Greg with an intriguing question. 'At one point, thinking of the awful Boys From Brazil, I asked Mr Peck if he ever got into a movie, saw it was going to stink and decided that at least he could have some fun with his role. No, he assured me, that would be unfair to the audience. His job was to do his best, no matter what the circumstances; his audience expected no less... But his answer explained the problem: he was so worried about his audience that he never allowed for the possibility that in a piece of shit like The Boys From Brazil, we were all in on the joke, and soon he ended up looking foolish for trying to do his best. Meanwhile, in the same film, Lawrence Olivier tarted up his role as if it was more fun than having a three-way with Vivian Leigh and Danny Kaye. The result? Olivier is the only thing worth seeing in the entire film.'

The quotes are, of course, from my old blog post. Haney doesn't get everything right, which makes you wonder ... how hard is it to cut-and-paste, anyway? She changes a couple of words and messes with some of the punctuation, and while it's a matter of contention these days whether or not bloggers are journalists, I don't think of myself as one. What's even weirder is the part that introduces the anecdote, "Around this time."  The context is the critical reaction to Boys From Brazil, which came out in 1978. (On the same page, Haney includes an extended quote from Pauline Kael's review of the film ... yes, I'm on the same page as Pauline Kael! That can be taken two ways, of course ... we're both on page 377 of Haney's book, and we're both on the same page regarding Peck's performance.) But I didn't meet Peck and ask him that question until sometime around 1990 ... I don't remember the exact year, but it was while I was in grad school. I most certainly wasn't a journalist then, just a guy sitting in the audience while Peck took questions about acting.

Maybe the next time I’m desperate for something to post, I’ll review the story about me, Bob Dylan, Joel Selvin, and the wife of Ralph J. Gleason.

And, oh yeah, I once shook hands with Muddy Waters. (That one never gets old.)

big blue plumbing berkeley

I don’t enjoy posting nasty screeds when companies screw up … I just can’t let things slide. But it’s nice when I can say something positive, especially when it’s regarding a very negative situation.

We had some weird plumbing stuff going on for a bit, and it finally came to a head in the middle of last week. By Tuesday, if you ran water in the bathroom sink, it came up in the shower, and made the basement toilet and shower gurgle. We tried various combinations of drain cleaner and snakes, to no avail, other than making the standing water in the shower smell like Liquid Plumber.

Friday, we called in a plumber, Paul from Big Blue Plumbing. He checked everything out, made suggestions for what needed to be done, and showed us how much the work would cost. I have no idea if the prices were high or low or in-between … you don’t do a lot of comparison shopping when you’re afraid to flush your toilet. It seemed fair enough, let’s put it that way. And it was very clear. He doesn’t charge by the hour, he charges by the job, and he carefully explains what each job entails and how/why it will cost what it does. Friday afternoon, he had a guy taking care of the job.

Unfortunately, fixing the original problem only made the fundamental problem more obvious: we needed to replace around 17 feet of sewer pipe. They came out today, worked until late afternoon, and all is well. Almost … the inspector will come out Monday, and until then, they can’t cover up the trench they dug, so we’ve got several containers full of semi-stinky mud lying around. But I took a shower just a bit ago, and I can use the toilet again (thanks to the Homemade Café for having a nice bathroom when we ate there this morning).

The workers were all great, personable and hard-working. Paul is a delightful fellow who is dedicated to getting the job done right. When there was a problem today, he rode over on his bike (he lives nearby) with his dog, and got himself all dirty helping finish the job. They do immaculate cleanup work; the shower, for instance, looks cleaner now than it did a week ago before this all started. Everyone from Paul on down exudes trust. Even the woman who answers the phone is wonderful. When I called to make an appointment, she answered in a very cheerful voice, saying it was a happy day … it was so silly yet so honest my own day got more happy immediately.

Paul made some suggestions for a few other jobs that are, if not necessary, at least good ideas. We agree, and we’ll have him do that work, as well. But again, he was always very clear about what was necessary and what was not, and each job along the way was priced so we could see where our money was going.

Only time will tell how the job works out, but as I was standing in the shower this evening, I knew we’d already done well.

So consider this a recommendation to check out Big Blue Plumbing if you are in Alameda County. And color me impressed.

she did love her bad boys

Richard Kramer recently wrote a brief memoir essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books that was reprinted in Salon. (The titles are instructive: the original was titled “A Broad’s Laugh: On Pauline Kael”, while Salon called it “Pauline Kael was my mentor”. Kramer leads off with an anecdote about visiting Kael at her home in 1969, when he was 16 years old.

She led me to a table, and as she got me a soda, a large man emerged from the bathroom, tucking in his shirt. He nodded to me and didn’t offer a hand.

“Oh, fuck you, Bob,” she said. “You can shake hands with him. He’s not going to take a job from you.” “Bob” obeyed. “This man,” she told me then, “is our Next Great American Director, honey. And so far, I’m the only one who knows it. But that’ll change.” Next Great, etc. (yes, Robert Altman), left us and she told me about the movie he’d just finished, a comedy about the Korean War that was so good and so fresh the studio was talking about not releasing it — that before I arrived, he had been in tears.

“Peckinpah is a crybaby, too,” she said. “The tough guys always are. I don’t know about John Ford, but I’m not sure I want to know about John Ford.” (Thirty-five years later I sat across the aisle from Altman on a plane. He slept the whole way, so it wasn’t until we were both at baggage claim that I got up the nerve to introduce myself and share the scene of that long-ago afternoon. He thought for a moment, mumbled something, and then, adjusting his expensive suede cowboy hat, said, “Pauline Kael … Pauline Kael … Oh. Right. That’s the cunt who destroyed me.” And that is why one should never approach one’s idols at baggage claim.) I’m convinced that Pauline would have laughed at that, though. She did love her bad boys.

One of the things Kramer does well is show how Pauline Kael could be the person who promoted the career of a Great American Director, and also be the person who was later denigrated by that same GAD, and also be the kind of person who did right by a 16-year-old, and continued to do right by him until she died. It’s also noteworthy that a short essay about a critic who has been dead for more than a decade, who in fact quit reviewing movies all the way back in 1991, is just as interesting now as it would have been when she was still alive.

And finally, it’s noteworthy that Kramer’s piece is written as a memoir. There is something about Kael that inspires a personal response. Of course, she was famously personal in her critical work. Yet it was a constructed “personal”. Brian Kellow’s fine, loving, warts-and-all biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, told even obsessives a lot of things about the critic that we had never known before. We felt we knew her, but what we knew was “Pauline Kael”, not necessarily Pauline Kael. For this reason, a short, anecdotal look at the “real” Pauline from someone like Kramer, who knew her, is welcomed.

Kramer also helps us understand how Kael’s influence went beyond movies (which is perhaps why her influence still seems relevant). He writes, “I see that what I got from her was less a way of looking at movies (although her way has never left me) than a way of looking at life.”

Ultimately, Kael’s influence on this blog has been made clear over the years, most importantly in the tagline: “I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have.” Those of us who spend a lot of time (I guess 11+ years of blogging counts as “a lot of time”) following that idea know what it means to reveal “Steven Rubio” while keeping Steven Rubio slightly more private.