September 6, 2026

A Great Day

Yesterday, I got to see Pitbull in the company of 15,000 other fans. It was wonderful.

On March 14, 2025, we were driving home from a visit to the the Royal Botanical Gardens, and a song played on our Spotify playlist that I’d somehow never heard before, performed by an artist I knew nothing about, including his area code (unbelievably). A new release, I’d assumed, because it had come on after Charli XCX, but it turned out the song was 12 years old and everybody in my family—in the world, even?—knew it, except for me.

“Why did nobody tell me about this?” is what I kept thinking in the days to follow when I wouldn’t stop playing it over and over.

That song was “Timber.” (Full credit to Kesha, without whom….)

Now, an essential detail of this story and of my whole “Come to Pitbull” moment was that by March 14, 2025, I was six weeks into a difficult bout of anxiety, my first experience of such a thing since the major episode on 2022 that almost broke me and made me realize that I had an dysfunctional relationship with anxiety in the first place. Watching the US government wreak havoc on the post-WW2 world order had once again sent me down a road of terror and existential dread that made ordinary functioning difficult and left me sad and scared all the time in a way whose disproportions I did not comprehend. It was awful.

But “Timber” made me happy, it really did, and everybody in my family was pleased about this development because during my previous bout with anxiety, I’d listened to Phil Collins over and over, and they all determined that Pitbull was a vast improvement.

And then Leon Musk put on a cheese hat and a Democrat won the Wisconsin senate race, I realized that the forces of evil were not necessarily omnipotent, and my anxiety lifted.

But Pitbull remained.

And I’ve loved Pitbull ever since, Mr. 305, Mr. Worldwide, a product of Dade County always. Not in such a way that I’m sure you’ll love him too, if you don’t already. My love for Pitbull makes no sense, and doesn’t map neatly onto anything, weird and incongruous. But Pitbull himself is weird and incongruous, and I think that’s part of the appeal for me. After having my mind broken by its insistence on absolutes, Pitbull showed me how to relax a bit, to hold multitudes. He has taught me that some things are simpler than they seem, and that there’s power in rejecting cynicism. That I *could* consider myself too smart and worldly for a platitude like “Every day above ground is a great day,” and yet there is truth in it, so why would I?

He’s author of the line, “This biggity boy’s a diggity dog.” He does not take himself too seriously, and yet he also comically takes himself way too seriously. His lyrics are super-sexualized, his dancers practically naked, and his female fans show up at his concerts in drag, dressed like him in bald caps. He’s spoken of spending his childhood driving around with his mother listening to Tony Robbins’ cassette tapes and used his private jet to fly cancer patients from Puerto Rico to the US for treatment after Hurricane Maria. He’s a caricature, but there’s something more there that’s oddly compelling. You should read Jennine Capó Crucet’s novel SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND, which tried to skewer the Pitbull persona, but could not bring itself to do so entirely at the end.

I love him so much, and I love the world better because he’s in it.