I could talk about how psychologically scarred I am from running a buy-one-get-one-free book fair last week. But I don't want to relive the trauma just yet. Instead, let me opine about something completely irrelevant.
I subscribe to "The Morning," the daily email newsletter from The New York Times. The subject in my inbox this morning read, "How humans failed racehorses." I assume this is a timely thinkpiece about animal welfare related to this weekend's Kentucky Derby, but here's my hot take:
You know how we've failed racehorses? By giving them the stupidest names imaginable. If I was a kajillionaire with a thoroughbred racehorse, you know what I'd name him? Greg. Or Bill. Or Ken. Even if it's a female horse. Just one syllable, something that connotes a late-middle aged man who works in a white collar profession, who dressed in norm-core before it was cool. None of this "Fire of My Loins" or "Onomatopoeia" horseshit.
And while we're at it, let's fix show dog names. If anything can rival the inanity of racehorse names, it's AKC show dog names. Whatever happened to Fido or Bingo? It's bad enough that you groom your dog to hell and back and then jog it around the convention center floor while you're dressed in your bank-teller-best polyester pantsuit. You gotta add insult to injury by registering the poor dog as "Mercedes of the Myst Under Full Moons on Venus"?
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I thought about quitting for probably all of the 30ish hours I spent operating the book fair this week. Gotta admit, it sounds niiiiice. Generally I appreciate my job and plan to keep it for as long as possible, but book fairs are a special blend of hell.
This is a real catch-22 for me. I love salmon AND I love herring. Scandinavia, y'all gotta figure your business out.
I want to preface by saying that I have not peed my pants at any time in the last 32 years (starting the clock at my deliberate bed-wetting incident at age 6) but for various reasons, a google search for something piss-pants adjacent led me to this WikiHow article about how to hide that you've peed your pants. There are SO MANY steps involved, and some of the suggestions are wild, and yet it comes across as completely serious. The part about waving your hips back and forth in front of the hand dryer destroyed me. You might want to read this article ON the crapper so you don't find yourself in need of its advice.
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Analog Reading:
Finished Kristin Hannah's The Women. I am always fascinated by books and movies set in the Vietnam era, but this takes on a perspective that is often overlooked, that of female nurses who spent time in country, and the brutality and peril they witnessed and experienced. I couldn't put this book down, but man, it was rough. It was just one unrelenting horror after another, moreso after the protagonist returned and was basically gaslit by her family and the entire country. Damn.
Speaking of feel-good stories set in the 1970s, now I'm reading The Shining by none other than my dude Steve King. I realized I've mostly been reading his newer fiction, with the exception of The Stand, so I'm starting to go back in time and read some of his earlier work. I'm about 1/3 through this one already, and so far (no n-words! good!) I'm digging it. It's interesting that the book focuses a lot more on the little boy, Danny's, perspective, whereas I don't remember getting much of a sense of his interiority in the movie.
