Fletcher found out about the World Cup block parties the way Fletcher finds out about everything: a Reddit thread, eleven days after everyone else, presented to me as breaking news.
"Okay so this is huge," he said, rotating his phone toward my face while I was actively eating cereal. The screen showed the Hoboken girl post. He had annotated it with two screenshots and what appeared to be a rough hand-drawn map on a Post-it. "Twelve days. Twelve. They're doing it right on the waterfront. I already have a feeling about which day is the best day."
I asked him which day.
"All of them, but especially the one with the most people."
This is the thing about Fletcher. He does not experience crowds as a deterrent. He experiences them as confirmation that he has chosen correctly.
By Thursday morning — fifty-six degrees, the sky doing that noncommittal gray thing where it hasn't decided yet — he had a spreadsheet. Not a normal spreadsheet. A spreadsheet with a tab called "Vibe Forecasting" where he had cross-referenced the World Cup match schedule with a weather app, the PATH train weekend service advisory, and, I am not joking, a note about the new Papaya Dog opening on Newark Street, which he had included as a "food anchor" for one of the days. "We go to the match block party, then we finish at the hot dog place," he explained, fully serious. "It's called a through-line."
I said I didn't know if Papaya Dog was even open yet.
He said that was what made it exciting.
I asked what we were doing if it wasn't open.
He looked at the spreadsheet for a long time. "Duo Donuts might be operational by then," he said, with the gravity of a man announcing a backup generator.
The issue — and there is always an issue — is that Fletcher has now told six people about the block parties as though he personally curated them. He texted his friend Miles about "the one with the Brazil game" before verifying Brazil was in that group stage slot. He told his coworker Priya the vibe would be "intimate, kind of low-key" and then showed me the attendance projections he'd looked up, which were not low-key. When I pointed this out, he said the projections were probably conservative.
"You're going to tell people it's a hidden gem," I said.
"It's not hidden," he said. "It's just not talked about enough."
It is being talked about by every single person in this city.
He has also become extremely opinionated about which PATH train to take. There is a correct train, apparently, and a train that looks correct but will be "a nightmare" — this distinction lives entirely in Fletcher's head and has no basis in any published schedule. He has thoughts about where to stand on the platform. He has thoughts about exit strategy. He pulled up a satellite view of the waterfront yesterday and said "see, if we come from this angle—" and traced a route with his finger that appeared to involve walking through a building.
Saturday is supposed to rain, which I was going to mention as a potential complication for one of the outdoor days, but I already know what will happen. Fletcher will check three weather apps, find the one with the most optimistic hourly breakdown, and screenshot it. He will say something like "it could clear by noon." He will have already told someone we're going.
I'm not even opposed to any of it, genuinely. The block parties sound fun. The through-line is actually fine. I'm even cautiously interested in Papaya Dog as a food anchor.
It's just that Fletcher has described twelve days of public street festivals as something that, and I'm quoting directly, "we kind of stumbled onto."
We did not stumble onto it. He has a spreadsheet with five tabs. One of them is labeled "Contingencies."
Last night he showed me the Spring Arts and Music Festival announcement — May 17th, three hundred artists, the whole thing — and said we should do "a lap or two, nothing crazy." His eyes were already doing the thing they do. I could see him opening a new tab.
"Don't," I said.
"I'm just going to see if there's a map," he said.
There is a map. There is now a second spreadsheet.