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."

---

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.