Syllabus #88

I'm hopeful for the changes this coming week might bring.  I want to be optimistic that Biden and Harris will be able to accomplish their plans and help us move forward.  The past four years aren't going to just disappear from our collective memory on January 20th, and they weren't just a brief aberration of history.  The animosity and violence we've seen come to a head over the past couple weeks is just one pustule of deep, cystic acne.  It's been brewing beneath the surface for a long time, and it's going to leave an ugly scar.  Trust me, I know the difference between a low-key pimple and the kind of zit that emerges from the depths and takes over your life.  You gotta make some serious life changes to overcome the latter.  Cut out processed sugar, stop consuming white supremacist conspiracy theories, you know, all of it.

What are we really talking about here?  Why do I always make it about me?  Is it because only my mom will read this, so why not indulge in the navel gazing?  Probably.  But like, send some good vibes out into the universe to keep Uncle Joe and Aunt Kamala safe on Tuesday, and every day thereafter.  It's a sick, sad world out there.

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But wait, there's more!  

Long but important

Ew.  Not the overall concept of sperm donation.  But the underground jizz network is a little seedy.  Pun most certainly intended. 

Oh my GOD.  I almost couldn't read this, it was too stressful.  Guy seems pretty chill about it, though. 

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should (This covid lockdown jewel heist movie and the freakin' space one, I mean good on you for making a movie that doesn't have a comic book character in it for a change, but did you have to?)

Florida man finally goes way to goddamn far 

Glad we can finally flush these turds away in a couple days 

Analog Reading:

Finished Cleanness by Garth Greenwell.  I probably shouldn't admit this publicly, but I read the whole damn thing believing, mistakenly, that it was a memoir.  I mean, I discovered it on a list of books that were mostly memoirs, and it was written in the first person using only first initials for other characters instead of their names, so it wasn't an off-base assumption.  However, as the book went on I became increasingly uncomfortable with the guy's radical transparency.  First I was like, good for you for presenting life and the vast spectrum of human sexual desire as it is (whips, gag balls, and all) but by the end I was like are you suuuuuure disclosing this doesn't stand to blow up your life and possibly make you sound pedophile-adjacent?  Boy was I relieved to check and see that, nope, it was fiction all along.

Still savoring David Sedaris's The Best of Me

Finished Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh.  What a strange journey that was.  An isolated old widow so caught up in a story of her own invention that her reality starts to mirror it in horrifying ways.

Utterly enjoying Deacon King Kong by James McBride.  Vastly different from but sharing threads with Death in Her Hands - a guy succumbing to the voices in his head, carrying on full conversations, arguments even, with his dead wife.