Syllabus #126

I got carded in Disney World by a waitress from a former Soviet bloc country.  In fairness, someone who is my chronological age in her homeland would probably be covered in hairy warts, stooped over a cane, babbling senselessly through toothless flapping lips.  But I was THRILLED because she wasn't carding everyone as a matter of policy.  Just me and the faint whiff of youth that still occasionally emanates from my tired pores.

Best Shirt

This is all I got this week.  I didn't spend a lot of time living on the internet.  We walked 8.5 miles yesterday bopping all over Nashville, having a moveable feast (for my liver) just because the weather was nice.

Investors:  Hey lets invite millennials with discretionary income to drink beer in the crumbling ruins of an industrial building down by the river
Me:  I'd like to start a tab

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Yes, every town can be a scooter town, even here in Nashville, where a woman just died by crashing into the back of a semi truck, and yesterday the same guy on a scooter almost took me out twice, coming and going, on the same stretch of sidewalk, where scooters do not belong.  

C'mon Dave.  You are an incredibly talented, insightful comedian.  It's not that you can't make the points you want to make without belittling trans people, you just choose not to.  You could be equally, if not more, hilarious without punching down at one of the most vulnerable groups in our society, and nobody would reach the end of your new special and say 'wow, that would have been so much more entertainin if he had taken a beat to shit on the trans community just a little.'  

Analog Reading:

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead.  He has such range.  Really looking forward to his new book.

Don't Sit On My Bed in Your Outside Clothes by Phoebe Robinson.  I feel like Pheebs and I should be friends IRL.  We're very much alike in the sense that we like unnecessary abbreviations of words, and have chosen not to have kids and have devoted a great deal of time and energy to grappling with that decision.  Actually I guess the similarity kinda ends there.  Where she is hilarious, accomplished, hardworking, and fabulous, I am...not those things.  But opposites attract, right?  Phoebe, call me.

Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas - short and weird, didn't hate it.

Just started Sally Rooney's Conversations With Friends, which everyone says is her worst book, but to 'everyone' I posit this question - Did you ever write a book in your 20s and have it published to great critical acclaim and did Zadie Smith blurb it for you?  No?  Didn't think so.  Shut that mess down.  The worst Sally Rooney book is probably exponentially better than the best effort of a whole lot of published writers.