Syllabus #160

Thus begins my last week of summer vacaysh from my Real Job.  It started off with a literal bang, when an inattentive driver plowed into me and totaled my poor old Honda.  RIP old girl.  You had a good 14 years criss-crossing the continent and wearing plates from 5 different states.  Hot Girl Summer got even hotter and moister when I contracted an ill-timed case of Corona Extra (I would have preferred Tecate but nobody bothered to ask, it's fine, whatever) that wiped out most of our vacation plans.  It's been a wild ride.  Or more like wild walk, because that's pretty much all I did besides work, and I have excellent tan lines to show for it.  From shoulders down to butt cheeks, it's a blinding 17 shades whiter than my arms and legs.  

 

Weed is in the air...every time I sniff around...  I've joked before that kids who grow up in East Nashville are going to think all the flowering trees smell like weed, and they'll get to college (this imaginary kid is also very sheltered somehow despite the nightly gunshots, etc.) and smell weed on their hall and remark, "Ahh, why does it smell dogwoods in bloom indoors in September?"  It's like as soon as winter ends and the weather turns halfway decent, everyone in the land carries their bongs out to the front porch to get baked en plein air.  I don't even need a weed guy in springtime, I just go for a walk and snag a contact high for free.

Maybe I should aim higher, but getting at least one entry published in the annual You Are So Nashville If contest feels like some kind of accomplishment, even if I'm really just chasing the dragon of my winning entry in 2019.

This article is oooooold, but it holds up.  The Oregon Trail Generation is a great descriptor for people who feel like they aren't old enough to be Gen Z but are a little too old school to resonate with most Millennials.  I didn't have the sosh meeds until after high school, we didn't have a computer in the house until 6th grade, and I most definitely dined out on those AOL free trial CDs so I could get up in those creepy chat rooms.  My proudest use of AOL chat rooms was in doing research for a group project in 7th or 8th grade where we had to research a given city and make a proposal to host the Olympics there - we were assigned Dublin and I was the only functioning human in my group of wastoids so I did ALL the work, including the research on public infrastructure.  I popped in an Irish chat room and asked what the sewage and plumbing sitch was like over there, and some very helpful chap said he didn't know much about the pipes but he could assume they were robust because "the Irish lay massive bricks."   

Heat waves been faking me out.  It's wild that our regular-Tuesday-in-Nashville weather caused such havoc in Europe.  I get it, they don't have infrastructure designed to withstand these temperatures, anymore than we are equipped to deal with prolonged bouts of below-freezing temps.  Two winters ago, during the same cold snap when the electrical grid in Texas went to hell, a pipe burst in the abandoned house next door to us and there was a frozen waterfall cascading down the outside of the house from the upstairs bathroom.  

Analog Reading:

Memphis by Tara Stringfellow was fantastic.  I breezed right through it in about a day and a half, which sort of makes me feel bad for the author, like when you spend two whole days making Thanksgiving dinner and then everybody fills up on cheese and crackers and booze before the meal, eats a fraction of what you anticipated, and leaves you to do the dishes 30 minutes after you carve the bird.  That said, I can guarantee I enjoyed this book way more than most people enjoy their annual plate heaped with various piles of beige slop and overrated, dry poultry.  It was also a neat coincidence that the three generations of women in the family almost exactly mirrored my own in terms of our ages and birth years.

The rest of this week I've been rambling along The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles.  The prose is fluid and the adventures (and comedy of errors) never cease.  At over 500 pages there sure better be plenty of movement, and unlike Stephen King's gratuitously unedited The Stand, there's no discernible fluff!  The story is a bit saccharine, though.  It reads like a PG-13 Larry McMurtry novel.  It's reminiscent of The Last Picture Show without all the banging of the coach's wife and the best friend's girlfriend's mom.  Nevertheless, it's a very sweet story that actually makes me smile while I'm reading it (truly, I'm as shocked as you are), which is kind of a welcome break after the extreme violence of Young Mungo and the heartbreak of Memphis.