“The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service plans to stop delivering mail on Saturdays starting August 1, the agency is set to announce Wednesday. This means that for the first time Americans will receive mail only five days a week, a significant shift for the storied mail agency, which has suffered tens of billions of dollars in losses in recent years with the advent of the Internet and e-commerce. Post offices would remain open on Saturdays so that customers can drop off mail or packages, buy postage stamps, or access their post office boxes, officials said. Hours likely would be reduced at thousands of smaller locations, they said.”
 — Now you’ll have no reason to go downstairs during the daylight hours on Saturdays. Unless you’ve somehow run out of liquor, in which case, Jesus, haven’t I taught you anything about emergency planning over the years?

Haven’t seen the Post go in on someone this hard in years. But the Bungalow 8 farewell party for Tabber Benedict, who’s off to state prison for drunkenly running down a bicyclist, really gave them an opening: “’I feel terrible for Tabber because I know there’s no table service where he’s headed,’ sniffed fellow socialite Justin Ross Lee. ‘He’s the most pretentious person I’ve ever met.’”

Will Oldham chats with Sasha Frere-Jones at Book Court; Swans play; Andris Nelsons conducts; the David Foster Wallace Appreciation Society meets. Things, things, things.

by Teddy Wayne

The novel The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, which is out today, is narrated by the 11-year-old pop star known for such bubblegum hits as “Guys vs. Girls” and “U R Kewt.” The novel tracks Jonny, who speaks and thinks in a mash-up of tween grammar and music-industry lingo, on his “Valentine Days” tour across America. As he chafes under the control of his manager-mother, Jane, he attempts to reconnect clandestinely over the Internet with someone claiming to be his long-lost father. (In a review last week in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani had nice things to say about it.)

In this scene, Jonny has escaped his Memphis hotel room at night to hang out at his nightclub with his opening band, the Latchkeys — twenty-something indie rockers testing the major-label waters — and their charismatic front man, Zack. Along with them are four of the Latchkeys’ female fans.

We were in a roped-off section that had a bouncer guarding it, with thirty or forty people in our area and a lot more in the rest of the room, either talking or dancing to the DJ, who was playing some bad hip-hop song, I forget the rapper’s name, but it was one of those where the guy tries to sing and he doesn’t have the range. I want to be like, Stay in your element. You don’t see me trying to rap. I’ve tried it on my own, and I know it’s out of my talent reach.

Irena brought us to a free area with two couches and two chairs around a chipped and beat-up coffee table. It was sort of like what they had in the hotel room, only we were paying to be here and have other people around us that we weren’t talking to. Zack grabbed one of the chairs and I sat on a couch right near him. Irena took everyone’s order, which was still whiskey or beer, and when she got to me, she looked at Zack to see what she should do. “Jonny, what soda do you like?” he asked.

“Ginger ale,” I told him. All soda is crap for the vocal cords, but ginger ale has a little less sugar and doesn’t cause as much mucus production. I couldn’t ask for diet in front of everyone, though.

“Ginger ale on the rocks,” Zack ordered, which is what I was going to say from now on. He whispered something else to Irena before she went off. When she came back with our drinks and was handing out the last one to Zack, the DJ kicked into the Latchkeys song “Frog-Legs Franny.” I caught Irena smiling at Zack, and I figured he’d requested it, to impress the girls, but they were already impressed, so maybe he just wanted it anyway. “Well, that’s embarrassing,” Zack said after Irena left. By now a bunch of people in our section were looking over at us, mostly at me and Zack.

The Latchkeys talked about books and movies and musicians I hadn’t heard of. They all had opinions on everything and used words like aesthetic and ideology and polemic. Maybe I knew more about slave autobiographies than them, but that was it. I thought about asking if they’d read The Confessions of Nat Turner, which was the best one I’d read so far, because it was short but also it has the most action and Nat Turner kills a bunch of white people just with a small sword, like he’s in Zenon, except he says he wants to slay his enemies with their own weapons, which in Zenon would mean stealing someone’s weapon and using it against them, and I don’t think the game actually lets you do that since you can’t inspect an enemy’s inventory until he’s dead. They wouldn’t know about Zenon, though, so I stayed quiet. The girls didn’t say as much except for Vanessa, who used those kinds of words and argued with them all, especially Zack. Making smart music got you smart groupies who understood what you were doing with your sound, even if it meant a smaller overall base. I had fans who’d never even heard of MJ.

They were discussing the one movie I had seen, Back to the Future, and Zack was like, “It represents not merely a nostalgic desire to regress to the safety of adolescence, but to the conservative fifties, the notion that we only have to roll back the biological and temporal clocks and we’ll be happier. It’s a total by‑product of the anxieties of the cold war . . .”

The song that was playing switched into something familiar, and after a few bars I picked up that it was “Summa Fling,” but a remixed club version I’d never heard before. It sounded decent, but it cut down my lyrics to the words “Summa fling, two-month thing, I wanna sing to my summa fling,” and overlaid a lot of other beats not in the original song. My producer for that album, Charles, had the philosophy that the music had to hook the listener but the vocals were what kept them there, and when you had someone with my vocal strength, you didn’t mess around with overproduced songs. We probably got a good royalty rate for the sampling. Jane watches that stuff like a hawk.

“This one of yours?” Zack asked me, and he gave me a little wink no one else could see so I knew he’d requested it from Irena. I said it was, and he said it was cool and told the other Latchkeys they should do their own remix about briefly dating the valedictorian of summer school called “Summa Cum Laude Fling,” and took Vanessa’s hand and danced with her. A ton of people in the crowd were dancing, too, and even if it was only like a quarter of my original, it somehow felt cooler to watch people here dancing to it while I drank ginger ale than it did when they danced at my concerts. Part of it was because the crowd was older and where we were, but the biggest reason was that Zack had requested the song, which meant he knew about the club remix already, and he was dancing to it.

The one thing I didn’t like about the remix was the original has a long fadeout, where I’m singing the chorus over and over for about thirty seconds, and what I like about fadeouts is how, after the song is over, it feels like it’s still playing somewhere, only you can’t hear it. It’s a nice idea, that just because you’re not listening to a song in front of you doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist somewhere else. It works even better for “Summa Fling,” since it’s like, Even this two-month relationship is going on in some way, that’s why I’m singing about it forever. The remix had a hard stop. You know a song is over then.

They ordered a second round of drinks from a new waitress, and Zack asked for a double rye. When it came, he said, “Jonny, let me get some of your ginger ale?” I handed it to him, and he brought it down below the coffee table with his rye and poured half his drink into mine. He passed it back to me without looking.

The drink smelled mostly like ginger ale, but also like Jane’s breath when she drank. I took a sip. It was sweet, but it stung my tongue like an arrow piercing your armor in Zenon and slid down my throat like a mage’s fireball that caused some damage. But it got easier with each sip, until when I was halfway through Zack reached for my glass again and dumped in the rest of his drink. The fireball fell inside my stomach, but it was a relaxing fireball, and it spread out like a smoke cloak in Zenon for hiding yourself, and then it was like the damage was healing. What doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger. Now I got why Jane does this. You don’t worry about anything anymore. I could say something dumb that everyone knew about Back to the Future and not care how the Latchkeys reacted, like that I thought the coolest part was how different everyone’s lives became in the future after one little thing changed in the past.

By the time I was almost done with my drink, Vanessa was sitting on Zack’s lap on his chair and making out with him like in a music video. My vision was getting blurry, and I didn’t have the energy to keep it straight, so I only saw their outline, and then I had this picture in my head of Zack sitting in an armchair like the one he was in, but it was in a home, in a real living room, and there was a fireplace behind him and he was reading the newspaper, and I went up to him as he patted his lap and I crawled onto it and sat there while he read the paper.

And the weirdest part was, I was getting hard. Probably it was because my eyes were sort of on Vanessa’s legs where her skirt was riding up on her thighs and I could almost see her underwear, so I focused my eyes on her there and got harder and shut my eyes totally and put my drink on the table and thought about what Vanessa looked like naked and humping her.

Next thing I knew, someone was shaking me awake. It was Vanessa. “Wake up, sleepy boy,” she said, almost like Jane singing, “Go to sleepy, little baby.”

I don’t know how long I was out for, but it was way worse than waking up early from zolpidem. The Latchkeys and the girls were all getting their stuff together and leaving. The nightclub was still pretty packed, though not as much as before. I swung my feet onto the ground and wobbled back to a sitting position on the couch before Vanessa broke my fall backward with her arms. “Easy there, fella,” she said. “Zack, help?”

Zack bent down right in front of me. His eyebrows looked concerned. A long lock of his hair touched my forehead. “You okay, little man?”

I made sure I wasn’t going to fall again before I stood up. “I’m solid.”

Zack gave me a fake punch on my cheek, lightly touching it with his knuckles, and said, “Cool. Walk out with me.” He put his jacket and hat on me and his hand on my back again, but this time I think it was to make sure I didn’t collapse or depart the realm.

We left through the secret passage from before and there was a long line for cabs, but Irena let us cut in front and told us to come back anytime. I went with Zack and Vanessa again. The cab ride seemed longer than the way there, since we were quieter and time always goes slower after you’ve left something than before you’ve arrived. Zack sat in the middle, and after a few minutes Vanessa leaned on his shoulder and fell asleep, and I got tired, too, and my head found its way onto his other shoulder, but I wasn’t falling asleep and I didn’t really want to be asleep, I just wanted to stay like that forever, smelling the cigarettes in his jacket I was wearing and his cologne me and him were both wearing and resting on his shoulder as we drove silently in the dark of a strange city.

We arrived at the hotel after the two other cabs. Zack and Vanessa took me up to my floor in the elevator. I was hoping we’d pretend to sneak around again, but I think they were too tired. They escorted me inside my room and took Zack’s jacket and hat off me. “Change into pajamas,” Zack said. “You don’t want your mom asking why you’re still in your clothes.”

While I changed in the bathroom, I was hoping Zack and Vanessa would say they were so tired, could they just crash on my couch? And I’d be like, “Yeah, I don’t really like my bed and I kind of want to sleep on the couch, too,” so I’d go on one of the couches and they’d take the other two, and we’d have a sleepover like I used to have with Michael and maybe even make a cushion fort. I changed my clothes super-fast so I could tell them they could crash there if they wanted, in case they were afraid to ask.

But when I came out, they weren’t in the living room. “Zack?” I called.

They weren’t in the bedroom, either. I guess they wanted a real bed. I got under the covers. It had that feeling of being too big, like it was an ocean and I was a stone someone skipped in it, where you watch it carefully at first to count how many times it skips, and then it sinks, and you pick up the next stone and forget about the last one.

Related: Talking To Teddy Wayne About The Difference Between Fiction And Humor Writing and My Three-Month Facebook Dialogue With A Scammer From Malaysia Pretending To Be A Beautiful Woman

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels The Love Song of Jonny Valentine and Kapitoil, for which he won a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award. On Twitter, follow either him or Jonny Valentine.

★★ Litter cast monumental shadows in the low, strong morning sun, and in the hardly less strong reflected sun. A little bulge of shade lay on the downslope of a piece of flattened chewing gum; chunks of salt and broken bits of ice were interchangeably, translucently aglow. The schoolyard puddles were broken slush. The glare dampened social interactions, the faceless greeting the squinting. People hurried past people hurrying past other people, a constant overtaking. They came down to the subway platform flushed and ruffled, patting down mussed hair, agitated by the cold.

“To overdose on caffeine, you’d probably have to drink around 75 8oz cups of brewed coffee over the course of just a few hours…. A review of 200 studies suggests that a safe dose for an adult is only about 3 8oz cups.”

“Keenan is known for his handling of heartbreak and sadness.”
 — That has got to be one Miss Lonelyhearts-level job right there. This must be the happiest he’s been in years.

You kill the bear, eat the bear meat, and then put on the bearskin. The power of the bear shirt — or ber serkr in Old Norse — gives you the strength and fury of the great animal. This is what berserk means, “bear shirt.” Do you actually turn into a bear-human hybrid? Maybe. Nobody liked to go to war against the berserkers, that much is known from the stories of the Roman Empire’s long border conflict with the barbarians, which means not “bear brains” but “foreigners.”

The human-bear combination exists in North American and Siberian tribal religions, too. These stories go back to the Bear Sons, born to an animal-god father and human mother. When the mother dies, the Bear Sons leave the human tribe and return to the Bear People. Beorn, the werebear friend of Gandalf in The Hobbit, is of this lineage, too. The same basic mythology is in the tale of Callisto and Arcas, the bear mother and son of Ancient Greece. Much later, American forestry managers accurately predicted most people didn’t know that wildfires are generally caused by lightning. Perhaps Americans could be trained to be extra careful with matches and motors while out of doors, in range of public land full of trees that could be sold to make Dixie Cups and Bounty paper towels. And so a thousand billboards were put up, featuring a humanized bear, its tight Levis straining over its bulging bear crotch, telling Americans a huge lie about fire.

Something is happening, has been happening, and it’s about when one person and one bear love each other very much. Sex + magic animal-person hybrid = Why isn’t anybody making a supernatural teen franchise out of this? What is more romantic than a thousand-pound bear with fangs full of salmon intestines, all humping upon a nubile sophomore who really isn’t so different than any other high-school girl who has utterly turned her back on God and decency?

Is the werebear real? Of course it’s real. The second you or I imagine something, it is real. This is how Magic works. This is also how the Internet works, because the Internet is a collection of human thought expressed as energy — the Internet is magic. And much of that human thought is idiotic and disturbing. So of course there’s already not only werebear erotic fiction but parodies of werebear erotic fiction. Still, there’s plenty of room in the culture for a very successful mainstream werebear franchise. You have to dial back the bestiality aspect, make it more implied. (A good way to achieve this, in art, is to either be Mormon or pretend you are 13 and your dad is going to find your LiveJournal about this deep desire to copulate with Ursus arctos horribilis.)

People wear costumes at Halloween because they get magic power from wearing costumes and then become these other identities, if only for the night. If the California Grizzly had not been hunted to extinction a hundred years ago, you could go into the Sierra Nevada mountains or even the wetlands of Santa Monica and try to kill one of these majestic giants, wear its skin, and maybe become a werebear. The grizzly is the preferred bear for this kind of work. But you cannot do this; the grizzlies are all dead throughout the continental United States except for a northern range between the Cascades and the Rockies. Lewis and Clark claimed there were once 50,000 grizzlies between Hudson Bay and the West Coast.

Still, a common suburban New Jersey bear eating pizza crusts out of the garbage remains more impressive than most humans. You could become a black bear werebear. It might be better for cities, anyway, the way that coyotes do better in cities than wolves. Oh sure, everyone is excited about a werewolf, but coyotes have not only survived all barbaric human attempts to eradicate them, coyotes have also thrived. The coyote might be more compelling than the wolf. And more realistic in an urban or suburban setting, too. The Dire Wolf vanished thousands of years ago, the regular wolf was nearly hunted to extinction in the past century, and coyotes are everywhere. They’re in Chicago, they’re in Central Park. A werewolf has two things going against it: it’s a lycanthropic monster, and also it’s a big scary wolf. A were-coyote could pass almost unnoticed on the streets of any American or Canadian town. Nobody would run out for silver bullets — it’s just a coyote! You can get more cats at the shelter.

The best human night of your life wouldn’t be half as exciting as a few hours of pack hunting Golden Gate Park with your coyote friends. But this is not about the were-coyote, not today. Today is about the werebear.

It’s a pity that so few fantasy authors have found the werebear inspiring.
 — From a web page about werebears

There are weaknesses to being a were-bear, social and inherent. Some of the social weaknesses are the distrusting nature of those around you, your different, and you’re going to have to show them who you really are. There are also certain personality traits that come along with this species. They are generally somewhat irrational when it comes to goals, they will do what it takes, whether or not death is required. Were-bears are also somewhat impulsive ….
 — From the “*OFFICIAL* blogs of Ruben YoungBear Pandy, the world’s most talented new entertainer of all time.”

The werebear has few constraints, other than the already depleted wild habitat of large brown bears. A full moon means nothing to this creature. Besides, the moon is always full. A werebear is smart enough to know this. Silver bullets? Meaningless. Religious symbols? The werebear honestly doesn’t care. It’s not against your religion, it’s just not going to fall over dead because you have some holy water or crosses or a bracelet from the Kabbalah Centre.

The werebear’s great weakness is its love of salmon and honey. A nickname for the bear in Old English was “bee wolf,” because of its insatiable love of honey. So Beowulf means the same thing: bear. (In Russian, as well as many Slavic tongues, the word for bear is “honey eater,” or medved.)

Fresh wild salmon requires wild bear habitat: free-flowing rivers, forests, oceans, clean water, no dams or clear-cutting or outlet malls. But the werebear can adapt, too. Like Barack Obama on the Midwestern campaign trail, the werebear soon learns he can always order salmon and vegetables (“with a side of honey”) at Applebee’s or Coco’s. The werebear can survive, in this bland modern world.

Arctic werebears, for example, could use their rage against humanity for screwing up the climate and making the North Pole melt. Imagine a dozen white osos bursting through the (revolving?) doors of Exxon Mobil’s stately headquarters, taking the executive elevator to the top, and using their monstrous claws and teeth to remove the heads of the CEO and CTO and president of the board, then throwing the heads down through the atrium, 50 stories straight down, and then all the workers in the lobby cheer “hooray for the werebears,” and the bears walk down whatever New York street we use for this. (Exxon Mobil is actually headquartered in “Irving, Texas,” but that’s okay because we’ll call it something slightly different, like “MobEx OilCorp.”)

The receptionist sees it all. She actually buzzed the bears inside. Her name is Bernadetta, which also means “bearlike,” and she is not just in like but in love with the main bear, “Arktos.” (The word arctic means “near the bear,” because the North Pole is “near” the constellation Ursa Major and Ursa Minor with its North Star. Young readers will appreciate this, if they ever learn anything in high school or college. All of these “Art” names, including Arthur of King Arthur fame, come from the word for bear. “Orson,” “Ursula,” “Bjorn,” “Osbourne,” these names also mean bear.) Arktos is waiting for her, waiting with some frozen salmon he liberated from the dumpster behind Guy Fieri’s restaurant in Times Square.

Arktos and Bernadetta eat salmon over a campfire on Roosevelt Island. He swam across, his beautiful (yet ordinary) lover riding on his bear back across the icy river full of bacteria. There are werebears everywhere, now, and they are coming out. They are coming out of hiding. They will have their revenge, they will have love, and they will have salmon.

Ken Layne has already registered the trademarks and copyrights and URLs and Twitter accounts and even the parody Twitter accounts for this lucrative franchise.

“Researchers say that unfriending someone on Facebook can have serious real life consequences.”

Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Google, Chevron, Disney, Wells Fargo, Cisco, Oracle, KB Home, Yahoo, Qualcomm, Hilton, Oracle, eBay, Charles Schwab, Clorox, Adobe, Oracle … it seems like a lot of the world’s top companies are based in California, including more than half of the NASDAQ technology index. But Texas Governor Rick Perry is the kind of man who knows things in his heart, and he won’t let any fancy coastal-elite numbers and facts get in the way of what God tells Rick Perry in the dead of night.

That’s why Rick Perry’s comically dumb voice is featured on new radio ads aimed at getting Californians to move their businesses to the libertarian paradise of Texas — there are no laws of any kind in the entire state, except for those laws aimed at forcing women to have children and against gay people in general. (Even though the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the law a decade ago, it is still illegal for gay people to even have sex in Texas. And discriminating against gay people continues to be perfectly legal in Texas, according to state law.)

“Building a business is tough, but I hear building a business in California is next to impossible,” Perry reads clumsily from his script. Maybe he “hears” this from his DirecTV or DISH, both based in California. Wherever he heard this, it was enough for the Texas government to waste Texas taxpayer money to do this minor marketing campaign aimed at West Coast people who are tired of all this crushing regulation, good food, natural beauty, year-round delightful weather, vineyards, beaches, environmental fanaticism, sexy people, and the center of the world’s technology and entertainment industries. “Everybody with half a brain is coming to California,” Governor Jerry Brown said in response to the ad. “So Texas, come on over!”

There is a nice part of Texas where many book-learned people, artists and tech companies have assembled, but it is within the heavily regulated communist/eco-fascist mini-state of Austin.