Syllabus #124

How was your week?  We spent two nights with an injured feral cat in our downstairs shower.  He's all fixed now (wound-wise and testicle-wise, must to his chagrin I'm sure).  He used to come around our porch looking for food whenever we would feed *our* feral cats, but we haven't seen him since his ball-less release.  He's probably determined to take his chances licking Flaming Hot Cheeto crumbs and Checkers french fry dregs out of the various construction dumpsters dotting the neighborhood before he'll ever ask us for another nugget of Kroger's finest store brand cat food.  Sorry, Nermal, it was for your own good.

*Our* porch cats

Why can't every city do this?  Death to cars.  Yes to walking, biking, and public transit.

Speaking of public transit.  And they say Nashville doesn't have any...

Rick Steves, national treasure.

Well isn't this some great good fun.  Peanut butter and pickle is my strange food indulgence, but that far predates this wretched pan-demi-moore we are still trudging through.  I also used to really get off on putting a shitload of chocolate syrup in Sprite, or making chocolate milk and then drowning some E.L. Fudge cookies in the bottom of the milk, drinking the milk, then using a spoon to mash up the soggy cookies into a pudding-like consistency.  I don't know how I made it to age 18 with teeth and without diabetes.

Autotune my liver

File under: NO SHIT SHERLOCK 

I am shook

Analog Reading:

Finished Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.  Ultimately loved it, but it took a while for me to get into it.

Sped through Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney.  I know a lot of people love to hate her, and her characters are wildly frustrating, often in very small, petty, navel-gazing ways, but that's what brings them to life and makes the books so satisfying, for me anyway.  You can read a work of fiction where the characters are experiencing something vastly different from anything you'll ever go through, and you can be frustrated by their choices and want to scream at them to do things differently, but with Rooney's characters, you can see yourself having the exact same fights and insecurities and root for them to behave otherwise while at the same time knowing fully damn well you'd buy the same ticket on the hot mess express.  It's at once validating and depressing.

Syllabus #123

Not a lot today.  Yesterday I walked Charlie during a break in the rain, and there were four Lime scooters parked on the sidewalk in front of the AirBnb house where the shooting/broken-bottle-face-slashing happened a couple months ago.  Instead of walking in the street or stepping over them (which Charlie refused to do because of all the glowing green lights and humming noises, like, can you blame him, that shit's weird) I shoved them over in the grass.  I'm not proud of it, but I have no regrets.  Scooters are great if they cut down on urban traffic and pollution, but if you aren't supposed to ride them on the sidewalk why the hell would you park them on the sidewalk in a residential neighborhood where people actually use the sidewalks for, you know, walking?  GFY all the way back to Ohio or Mississippi or Indiana or wherever you sat around with your besties coming up with the quippy name for the Bach Bash Venmo Account you wrote on all your back windshields in order to beg strangers to send you money for drinks.  No, you buy me a drink for the rage I feel every time I have to witness your entitlement.  Thank you for coming to my NedTalk.  It's like a TedTalk but disjointed and not remotely uplifting.

 

A new Colson Whitehead novel!  I've only read his two most recent, heavy novels. Nickel Boys and Underground Railroad were phenomenal, but his range is impressively broad and I can't wait to see him working a more playful angle in Harlem Shuffle.  Even though every time I think about the title I think of this:

Gee this plot of intrigue is really doing the most.  So many twists and turns, so much good old boy network, so many bodies.  It's like if The Righteous Gemstones and The Sopranos had a real life love child.   

Analog Reading:

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.  At first, it seemed like it had the potential to be too much like Little Eyes  by Samanta Schweblin in terms of focusing on the creepy aspects of technology designed to provide artificial companionship, but despite that common thread it's completely unique.  

Syllabus #122

It doesn't look like much, but what we have here is a collard melt taco from Redheaded Stranger, and a wish fulfillment three years in the making.  The tacos are a riff on the collard melt sandwich made famous by New Orleans sandwich dive Turkey and the Wolf, and proceeds from the tacos go to Hurricane Ida relief efforts.  When we went to New Orleans for Thanksgiving in 2018, we had lunch at Turkey and the Wolf and I'm just a different, better human after eating that collard melt sandwich.  I think about it often, and as I reminisce about the perfect blend of collards, coleslaw, Russian dressing, and cheese, grilled to perfection on rye bread, juices dripping down my wrists, I understand the phrase, "Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

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Bra-VO, Mr. Sedaris.  Take a bow.  We got to see him kick off his rescheduled speaking tour last night at TPAC.  He was dressed like a Colonial Williamsburg figurine if its clothing was designed by Laura Ashley on LSD.  He read a lot of new essays, including one about his father that revealed even further than this New Yorker essay that Lou Sedaris was not, in fact, doing his best:

"...While the specifics blur together, there will remain one constant, which is you, having to hear things like “Well, I know that your father did his best.”

People love saying this when a parent dies. It’s the first thing they reach for. A man can beat his wife with car antennas, can trade his children for drugs or motorcycles, but still, when he finally, mercifully dies, his survivors will have to hear from some know-nothing at the post-funeral dinner that he did his best. This, I’m guessing, is based on the premise that we all give a hundred and ten per cent all the time, in regard to everything: our careers, our relationships, the attention we pay to our appearance, etc.

“Look around,” I want to say. “Very few people are actually doing the best that they can. That’s why they get fired from their jobs. That’s why they get arrested and divorced. It’s why their teeth fall out..."

Margaret Renkl also hitting it out of the park with this scathing opinion column about how the only things in the South that are rising again are despair, destruction, and death rates from Covid.  

M.F.K. Fisher on cravings - but has she ever gotten drunk and eaten a whole family sized bag of crab chips?

Well that really says it all, doesn't it?  

Listening:

The Maintenance Phase podcast by Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes (of You're Wrong About fame).  I'm late to this soiree but that just means there's all the more content to binge.  The episodes explore the history and misconceptions about various (usually harmful or misused) diet and fitness phenomena.  The episode about the Presidential Physical Fitness Test was entirely too real.  I remember the humiliation of the public weigh-ins, the shame of being able to do exactly zero of any of the exercises except the sit-and-reach (and then getting yelled at for 'showing off' when we did toe-touches to warm up at the start of gym class, but sorry I'm flexible let me just have this literal one thing in the entire world that I'm good at, you sad whore).

Analog Reading:

Finished Better to Have Gone:  Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville by Akash Kapur.  It was a book.  I kept waiting for the good parts, but it felt like reading the minutes from an HOA meeting.  I wanted more human drama and more understanding of the why of this whole community, but the book was so withholding about it.

Now reading Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl.  It's a collection of writings about the natural world and also a family and personal history, woven together in brief snippets.  It's pleasant, and her writing is admirable.  

Syllabus #121

It's funny, or no, it's not funny, but it's something, that I start collecting articles at the beginning of each week and by the end of the week, they are either irrelevant or utterly tone-deaf.  And yet I let them all stand.  Like maybe there was a brief punctuation of time when the week to come had the potential to be normal.  When Hurricane Ida hadn't yet caused chaos and destruction to New Orleans and surrounding areas.  When the storm hadn't yet continued northward to dump rain on us here in Middle Tennessee before somehow gaining destructive powers and unleashing devastating flooding on Philadelphia and many other parts of the Northeast, while leveling half my hometown with freak tornadoes.  When Texas hadn't unleashed a bevy of legislation that is so abhorrent I can't even fully articulate how offensive it all is.  

So like, here's a picture of a cute cat that won't let me pet him but comes running when I get home from work because he knows I'll feed him, and here are some links to some shit I read on the internet this past week:

Can you blame him, though?  I'm not immune-compromised but whenever I catch a kid free-nosing I feel a blood pressure spike.  The other day I gently reminded a kid to cover his nose and he was like 'but I can't my glasses will get all foggy" and I was like DO YOU SEE WHAT IS ON MY LITERAL FACE RIGHT NOW, OF COURSE YOUR GLASSES WILL GET FOGGY BUT YOU KNOW WHAT WON'T HAPPEN?  YOU WON'T END UP IN THE HOSPITAL ON A VENTILATOR AND WE WON'T HAVE TO SHUT DOWN THE SCHOOL BECAUSE ALL YOUR TEACHERS ARE DEAD.

Where was this milk crate challenge during my youth?  I was down to clown AND good at stealing milk crates from behind convenience stores.  Also I only broke bones on playground equipment so there's a 97% chance I would have been totally unscathed.

I wish I could see this street art in person. 

This too shall pass.  I feel like we've been waiting for a whole lot of shit to pass for the past 18 months.  So far everything after 2019 has been one giant spiky kidney stone.   

Texas - all of it.  Abortion bans, the gun carrying, the voting or lack thereof.  Who is it for?  I honestly don't understand.

Interesting take.  Also what baffles me the most about this new law is that anyone even tangentially involved in a woman's abortion procedure can be sued, but not the woman herself.  Some might say that's a silver lining but it actually incredibly pernicious and telling - it says that the woman is completely besides the point in this whole equation because she doesn't have the slightest bit of agency. 

Devastating.

And in case you've been curious about the why the actual fuck of the horse dewormer of it all.  I mean, why are people going to farm supply stores and taking veterinary medicine formulated for animals that are orders of magnitude larger than a human?  Don't y'all morons know your dog probably takes ivermectin for heartworm prevention?  If you're so fucking stupid you think taking animal medicine for an untested purpose is a good idea, at least the math is a little easier when you're scaling up.  Go pop a handful of Heartgard blocks and wash 'em down with a big ol' slug of toilet water just like Fido. 

Analog Reading:

Finished The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson.  It was slippery.  I didn't hate it.

Now reading Better to Have Gone:  Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville by Akash Kapur.  Right about now the urge to GTFO and try something different doesn't sound so strange.