Depends on how well equipped your log cabin is

“I am thinking of getting rid of my cell phone, signing off of all social media and moving to a log cabin out in the woods. Is there any reason you can think of that I should reconsider?” — Log Cabin Larry

I understand the impulse to try to escape from everything. And I am truly an enthusiastic advocate of running away from one’s problems. New Jersey is a particularly good place to run away from one’s problems to. No one will chase you. Your problems will be like, “I grew up in New Jersey, no way I’m going back there.” And you’ll be free from those problems for a while and will accumulate new problems and then they will all eventually, slowly chase you down like zombies on “The Walking Dead.” But buying time is really all we can do for ourselves in this life. And we have considerably less time than we might suspect.

Also it’s nice to have something to blame for the things that go wrong in your life. “If only I didn’t spend so much time on Twitter I could have painted a masterpiece by now.” If you sign off of Twitter you will somehow use time more wisely than you ever have before, you think to yourself. By starting a little project. If you’re like me, you start projects with excitement and flair.

I went to yoga a bunch of times. I would go on Mondays after work. I would walk home from work, get some sweats on, and wander over there. I was terrible at it. But I kept going for four or five weeks. Then the yoga teacher went on vacation for a few weeks. And I never went back. I got into some different habit of spending my Monday nights watching “NYPD Blue” re-runs. I am now as large as that little girl in the Willie Wonka movie that turned into the giant blueberry.

That’s not to say that changes in life can’t be made. And that spending less time on phones wouldn’t be a good thing to shoot for. I have no life and few people love me, so I really only use my phone when I’m in elevators or trying to ignore other people. When people go to the bathroom at bars, I can screw around with my phone for a while. You’re missing so much being on your phones all the time. Like being bored, disillusioned and feeling alone all the time. This was the foundation I have built my life upon. I had like twenty-five great years of feeling lonely and disconnected from everything. I wrote poems. Now I let my phone write my poems for me.

As Netflix’s “Stranger Things’ demonstrated, the times before computers were better. But we didn’t have instant access to porn, so that sucked. My friends and I used to go to a local store in our neighborhood, stick a Playboy magazine inside a Boston Globe, pay for the Boston Globe and steal the Playboy. We did this until it was my turn to do it, which I didn’t want to do and I was terrible at and I blew it and we got caught and then it was the end of that. Free access to porn through computers is better. Or, I guess, playing for Playboy magazine instead of trying to steal it.

If you do unplug you will miss out on a lot of cool things. Some memes are funny. Some cat videos are great. Some people you meet online can become very good friends of yours. The kind of friends that will help you defeat a terrifying monster. But you can probably survive without a phone and all the social media. I was going to switch over to just sending people faxes. But no one else had a fax machine and the whole thing became pretty upsetting pretty fast. I really only stay online because I haven’t met my soulmate yet and I’m pretty sure they will be reaching out to me very very soon. And so I have a LinkedIn account and a Google Wave account and Friendster and all that. Just in case. How else will they get in touch with me?

So I cannot come up with any reasons why you might reconsider, other than the easy access to pornography. Which the Republicans are trying to get rid of anyway. So enjoy it while you can. A log cabin seems like a pretty comfy place to hang out all the time while you’re not using a phone and Facebook. If you like chopping wood. Your life will consist of chopping wood. I used to split wood with a spike and a hammer. That was pretty fun. You could write a manifesto like the Unabomber, because you’ll have a lot of time on your hands in the log cabin without having to read tweets.

I only got email when I was a senior in college. And the internet has been a gas and all, but it’s been a real bummer sometimes, too. The most satisfying relationship I think I ever had on the internet was with a Starbucks employee in West Hollywood. We never met. We would like, AOL chat each other. I think we met on Nerve and so we would have like virtual sex. Her name was Debby, but that could have been a pseudonym. She was very sexy and it was easy to chat back and forth with her. There were phone calls, too, if I remember. If I had to live in a log cabin, maybe she could come there and live with me. She always had great stories about the famous people she’d meet who were regular Starbucks customers. And I bet she smelled like delicious coffee, which would be very arousing for me.

You’re going to need some pals to live in the log cabin with. Or people who live in adjacent log cabins. Because you may want to run away from your problems. And you may think people are your problems. And some people are your problems. But not having any people is an even bigger problem. We feel so lonely even in crowded places with just our phones. Imagine nothing but the baleful cries of a wild duck to keep you company as you split logs all day. You’ll want a hot cup of Starbucks coffee. Which will soon be delivered by drones but only if you order from your phone.

Jim Behrle works at a bookstore and lives in Jersey City, NJ.

Just as good and a lot less money

If you’re like me, your mattress is fine. You bought something smack dab in the middle of your price range, and now that you’re a few years into your life together, you’re thinking, “Damn, maybe I could have gotten something more luxe for myself.” Or at least spent a little more time Googling ‘good mattresses that last a long time’ and ‘average mattresses good reviews.’ You’re by no means dealing with something so shitty you need to replace it, but you know your bed’s not as comfortable as it could be. Great news.

This past Summer, I discovered a product on Amazon called the Ultra Premium Visco Elastic Memory Foam Mattress Pad Bed Topper (lol), and a company called Red Nomad is selling them for a reasonable $79.99. I have a Queen sized bed and have been sleeping on the 2-inch pad for four months now, and guys, it’s pretty nice.

Here is the link to the pad. It’s going to look like an ad when I drop it, but that’s just how Medium’s formatting works. It is actually a link that I have chosen to put into this post. Isn’t that tense? Here it comes:

Queen Size 2 Inch Thick, Ultra Premium Visco Elastic Memory Foam Mattress Pad Bed Topper. Made in the USA

That was it. Up there. Didn’t it look like an ad? I know. It’s not though. Me talking about it this much sounds like I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. Let’s move on.

The pad comes compactly wrapped in a small, travel-friendly form, but quickly unfurls and puffs up once you get it out of the packaging. You know how jeans smell wild when you first buy them, and then after a wear or two they smell like your laundry detergent and gross body just like everything else you own? That is the journey you’ll go on with your mattress pad. I’d say mine smelled like “house air” within an hour or two, but your timing will depend on how powerful your own house air is.

Now that we’ve gotten the number one Weird Deterring Element from the Reviews* out of the way, I can focus on the good things: this pad makes your bed super cushiony, but doesn’t rob you of the firmness you crave. This assessment is obviously anchored in my own personal preferences, but 2 inches seems like the perfect amount of foam padding. If you disagree, the company also offers 3-inch and 4-inch options—live your truth—but with the 2-inch, my gently-aging mattress suddenly feels luxurious again. I do not sink into my bed, I would not call it a deep bed, but I would call it a noticeably comfortable bed. You know how sometimes you go to a hotel and it’s nice to just peel back fresh sheets and interact with puffy bedding? Your bed can feel like that if you want! Even if you don’t make it in the morning!

Let me describe my rig: I already had a fitted sheet-style mattress topper (like this one), so I opted to position my foam pad under that and then use the fitted elastics to hold it in place. Then, I put my sheets and blankets on the bed as usual. The fitted sheet definitely goes on a little more snugly than it used to with all this new crap underneath, but the extra inches don’t cause long-term sheet problems. All the corners stay where I want ’em. And that’s it! I go to sleep every night like someone with a nicer mattress than she has.

The company claims to have something called CoolFlow Ventilation technology in the pads if you’re a particularly sweaty sleeper, and also boasts “no formaldehyde, flame retardants, heavy metals, phthalates or ozone depleters.” Idk. I can’t definitively say whether a mattress topper is a product you need, but if you feel so inclined, I’ve found a good one and I’d like to pass the savings on to you.

_______

*This phenomenon is called “off-gassing” and is just some science that happens briefly once your pad gets unboxed. Extremely cool, incredibly non-poisonous.

Why you didn’t want to get out of bed this morning

Did you have a hard time getting up today? Did you feel out of sorts? Confused? Drained? Did you cover your head with the pillow and try to think of anything else but facing the day, or the week? Are you just exhausted and depressed and hardly able to lift your head? There is a reason for your sadness and torpor! Let’s pretend that reason is the end of Daylight Saving Time. It is better than admitting to the actual truth.

Here is some blippy music that will offer five minutes or so of everything that is not the rest of your horrible life. You can play it as many times as you need it. Please enjoy. And remember, by the end of this week we will be used to whatever happened. We might not be happy about it, but we’ll be used to it. That’s just how we are.

What the show gets right and wrong about divorce in New York

by Marcy Katz and Tom Kretchmar

The first thing we learn from the fourth episode of “Divorce” is that Robert and Frances have decided to proceed through mediation rather than through lawyers. The episode opens at the end of their first session. We don’t learn much about the mediator other than that she disdains lawyers; she claims mediation avoids “a bunch of lawyers stirring up trouble and burning through all your money.” (Divorce mediators tend to be therapists or lawyers.) She also gives Robert and Frances two homework assignments: to prepare financial disclosure statements, and to tell their children that they’re getting divorced.

Written, sworn financial disclosures (“statements of net worth,” in divorce lingo) are a required part of the divorce process in New York. Each spouse fills out an official form, and must disclose their income, assets, and liabilities, as well as a detailed budget analysis. These documents play a major role throughout the process, from early efforts to get temporary child support and spousal support all the way through to trial, should one become necessary. Generally speaking, they’re the most important document in any divorce.

There can be serious consequences for not producing a statement of net worth. In the notable 2006 child support case Brim v. Combs, the appellate court that governs Westchester County held that the child’s expenses alleged in Ms. Brim’s statement of net worth would automatically be treated as accurate and true due to the fact that the father of her child, Mr. Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, had failed to make his own financial disclosures.

Completing a statement of net worth can be frightening and paralyzing. Spouses are suddenly confronted with serious questions that they may have spent months, years or a lifetime avoiding: how much money do they really have, owe, earn, and — often the most shocking of all — spend? The requisite review of bank records, credit card statements and bills to arrive at these answers can be a rude awakening. In episode four, it sends Robert into a tailspin.

Robert has a street-side meeting with his accountant (who works out of his car) and learns, to his chagrined disbelief, that he’s “hemorrhaging” money. When Robert can’t make sense of his accountant’s written analysis of his finances, the accountant dumbs it down for him: “You bought way too many houses, and you’ve spent way too much fixing them up, and now nobody’s buying them, so, you know, simple math.” He offers Robert some parting advice: “Stop spending money like you actually have money — because you don’t.”

Robert’s takeaway is that he’s flat broke, and he goes into an absolute panic because he believes that, as the husband, he will, as a rule, automatically owe Frances at least “half of everything” he has. He springs into action with a harebrained get-rich-kinda-quick scheme to convert a 200,000-square foot warehouse into multi-activity children’s “fun space.” He also starts pinching pennies everywhere he can: at the restaurant where he and Frances first try to tell the children about the divorce, he ends up more focused on convincing everyone to have dessert at home in order to spare the expense of the restaurant’s $12 ice cream sundaes (“We’ll just get some cream out of the refrigerator, whip it up, put it in the freezer, it becomes ice cream; throw in some chocolate chips, it’s the same thing, but it’s like, 50 cents”). (They eventually manage to break the news at home, where Robert discloses it to their not-at-all-surprised children with an impressive maturity and grace that was so cooperative and constructive it seemed, perhaps, to foreshadow success on the mediation front.)

By the end of the episode, Robert’s humming a different tune about his financial outlook, thanks to his new friend, the broker for the warehouse space. Over drinks, the broker corrects Robert’s mistaken belief that the husband in a divorce is automatically financially devastated by the process, and explains — as we have indicated previously — that Frances’s higher income may in fact result in an outcome for Robert that’s not just survivable, but altogether lucrative. (In this scene, we finally get confirmation of something we’ve speculated about for a while now: according to Robert, Frances has made “a hell of a lot more money” than he has over the last couple of years. Earlier in the episode we catch further insight into Frances’s headhunting job, spying her running a meeting in some sort of management role.) At first, Robert rebuffs the broker’s suggestion that he reach out to a divorce lawyer, claiming he’s committed to the mediation process. But by the end of the episode, Robert skips the second session so he can meet with a divorce attorney, giving us a pretty clear idea he’s decided the broker was right.

Mediation doesn’t work for everyone: when there are no children and minimal money is at issue, it can be successful. In other scenarios, mediation becomes much more complicated, especially if the spouses are not on equal financial footing, and/or have mismatched negotiating talents. It’s helpful, in that situation, for each spouse to also have an attorney to cross-check things with during the mediation process. This allows each party to understand the law and the reasonableness of their position along the way while trying to work cooperatively towards an amicable resolution.

Unfortunately, an all-too-common result of the mediation process is that spouses reach a tentative deal and think they feel great about it until, prior to signing the paperwork, they run the deal by a lawyer (or a divorce-savvy friend), find out they’ve gotten an unfair deal, and then walk away from mediation to start the whole process over in an adversarial process, through lawyers. A significant amount of time (months, sometimes years) and money has already been invested at that point, only to go back to square one. (Unless and until a mediation agreement has actually been signed, nothing that comes from the mediation process is binding on either spouse.)

Alternatively, two competent and reasonable attorneys can, without a mediator ever being involved, guide divorcing spouses to a fair and efficient result, often without any fireworks along the way. Whether Robert and Frances manage to avoid fireworks remains to be seen, but, as we said after episode one, it seems unlikely that they would be gifted a drama-free divorce as characters on a primetime television show.

Marcy Katz and Tom Kretchmar are New York divorce lawyers. They work at Chemtob, Moss & Forman, LLP, a matrimonial law firm based in midtown Manhattan.

★★★★ The gold of the damp morning haze blended into the semi-gold of the treetops. The five-year-old had chosen a matching set of shorts and hoodie, doing jumps off an imaginary skateboard in the long light. As the morning went on, the gold leached out, leaving the color of stainless steel. A glimmer but only a glimmer of brightness attended the half-day school dismissal, then was gone before the short walk home was done. The afternoon, though, brought on a breeze and with it blue in the sky. The still-humid air steamed against the ice pack where the five-year-old had bumped his knee. In the west, the formless clouds resolved into sold grays and silvers and whites, jumbled together on the blue, ready to catch colors of the sunset.

The Adventures of Liana Finck

Liana Finck’s work appears regularly in The New Yorker. Her graphic novel is called A Bintel Brief. She is on Instagram at @lianafinck.

The Nevada City Wine Diaries, Abroad

Last week I went to a restaurant in Tokyo called eatrip. I should add that I ate my dinner there in a fog of misery and grief because the day before a childhood friend of mine, still a part of my life, had been brutally murdered.

eatrip is a great restaurant. It is as good a place to be as any if you do not want to exist anymore but still do.

eatrip is in Harajuku, the neighborhood in Tokyo that’s famous for people dressing like cartoon characters and wearing furry shoes. It’s tucked away from the crazy heart of it all though, up a sweet little street and then a stone pathway. If it weren’t for two gay dudes from Houston who walked me to the front door I would still be wandering around looking for it. I went there because two separate friends who are both “into food” told me to. They have a set menu, 5000 yen if you want one main dish, 8000 yen if you want two. I have no idea what would possess someone to eat more than the 5000 yen option but it does exist. Also I might be totally wrong about how the options work, basically I just spent ten days never having any idea what is really happening.

There were four courses, each served with wine, 3000 yen extra. I ate the meal in a bewildered trance, sitting alone by myself in a dark corner. I had a view of the cooks, a young man and young woman. I never watched what they were doing. They registered mostly as benign human presences. I alternated between sobbing quietly into my napkin and eating the delicious food. I didn’t take any pictures. Eating felt stupid enough.

The first dish was tiny, one sliced fig with fromage blanc and honey and olive oil. There were also salt crystals — the “you again?” of ingredients. Does that about wrap it up? Everything was at the height of ripeness and quality, one could not overstate how pink the fig looked next to the white cheese, etc. The olive oil drizzle felt like a hug.

My waitress was young and pretty, with a face by Glossier or some other subtle brand. She brought me a small glass of Jean Louis Denois sparkling wine, and when I held it on the back of my tongue my whole mouth watered. It smelled of pears. Anyone would like this wine whether they had good taste or not. It is made from chardonnay and comes from the Languedoc region of France, which used to make totally average wine and is now getting more fancy — in other words, the story of pretty much everywhere rural that’s not in the middle of America.

For some reason, I felt like my waitress knew I was a mess, but that’s probably ridiculous. I had a notebook and stayed bent over it the whole time I was there. I thought about how my friend and I used to lie in her attic bedroom and read. She read Cujo 100 times and always told me to read it. But I read the The Catcher in the Rye over and over, or the Austin family series by Madeleine L’Engle. I would never read anything scary.

The second dish was a whole bunch of things all on one plate. It was so good that I kind of forgot how miserable I was. There were just so many things on it, and they were all different: a white scoop of soybean hummus, several slices of yellowtail, a palm-sized slab of homemade ham, and a little bit of Tête De Moine cheese, which is sharp and rich and a great thing to serve alongside the softer, mellower homemade mozzarella. It was a little buffet, all for me. I was already stoked, but when the waitress set down a thick piece of homemade white bread I was like, okay, now we are cooking with gas.

The wine was Le Vendangeur Masqué Esquisse 2015, a clean, light chardonnay from near Chablis. I have talked about this before and it can’t be overstated: When snotty wine people are bummed out with not snotty wine people one of the things that annoys them the most is how much shitty Chardonnay they drink when France has such good Chardonnay. I don’t know if you can find this particular wine, but it was $11 a glass which means it’s probably less than $20 a bottle. Go to a wine store and tell someone that you want to try something like it. It’s just good stuff, just a little bit lush and fruity, but not over the top, not gross, not the least bit gomi. Gomi means trash in Japanese. It is the only word I learned while I was there, and it was all I needed.

The Beatles were playing. I don’t know if it was Spotify. It wasn’t a record because the songs skipped around. “In My Life” came on. The last place I remembered hearing this song was a funeral. But I was okay. At the beginning of grief, two small drinks is a sweet spot.

I remembered being with my friend on a dock in Maine when were eleven or so. It was summer and it was cold and foggy and raining as usual. Everyone on the dock was straining for a glimpse of something, a dolphin or a seal or a boat. A tourist wearing a lobster t-shirt and a big canvas hat was very interested in seeing whatever it was and kept trying to get in front of people and looking out at the horizon and getting very agitated, and finally, he turned around and growled in a southern accent at no one in particular “I can’t see SHIT, can you?” We fucking died laughing. We clutched at each other and repeated “I can’t see SHIT, can you?” for the whole day and then for the whole summer and then once every two years or so, when we saw each other.

I actually kind of laughed my way through the next course, big silky sheets of black pasta and squid bolognese served with the 2009 Cala Cala Bianca grillo, which is just some Italian wine that is fine, not super exciting but good, dryer, sharper, less fruity than the chardonnay, I think. I don’t know that squid needs to be minced into tiny pieces and served in a tomato sauce but maybe I am wrong. I’m not complaining.

The last dish was the lamb. It was perfect, perfectly cooked, perfect sauce, and I have nothing to say about it other than I know that eating lamb is terrible and sad but I can’t stop. The wine, a 2014 La Souteronne, a red made from gamay, was very light and acidic and a beautiful color. Gamay is always a little sharp to me and this was no different. I drank it like I was reading a report, sip by sip, trying to figure out why I didn’t like it that much, and as I tried to figure it out liking it more and more and wondering when my mind would work right again.

I thought about this American guy I met in Japan who is an expert at this very specific sector of the food and beverage industry. After I’d talked to him for a while, I said something like, “Everyone thinks you’re so serious, but you don’t give a shit about your discipline per se. You just know life sucks so you’ve thrown yourself wholeheartedly into this incredibly exacting rare and kind of ridiculous thing so that you can engage in this lifelong performance of absurdity.”

I was a little worried he’d get mad but instead he said, “Wow. You totally get me.”

The night my friend was murdered I was in Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan, walking in the rain with a large group of people next to an older Japanese man who spoke good English and had lived in California for a while. We talked about books. He told me Cujo was one of his favorites. He was embarrassed, but I said he shouldn’t be because Stephen King was good at telling stories and that was the only thing that really mattered. “Any asshole can write a sentence,” I said.

I told him Stephen King was from Maine, and that probably was good for his writing. “Why?” he asked. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just a weird place.”

Is that cool and normal or weird and bad?

The year: 2016.
The home-renter: me.
The issue: I think I might want to purchase a Big Mouth Billy Bass.

If you were breathing and sentient at the dawn of the new millennium, you probably encountered the iconic singing fish known as Big Mouth Billy Bass. For years, he was available at pharmacies and Bed Bath and Beyonds the world over, waiting for you to push his red button (or walk past his motion sensor) so he could sing you upbeat hits like “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” or “Take Me to the River.” His head would pivot and his mouth would move while he sang to you, like a live action, photorealistic Little Mermaid fish.

He spent years as the perfect “I don’t know what to buy, but I mean well” gift. Office secret Santa? Give em a bass. Uncle at Christmas? Hand ’em old Billy. The fish knew how to please a crowd, and was just subtle enough visually that he wasn’t an obvious gag gift. He briefly and perfectly filled a specific need that all of us have: to be stupid and fun at a fair price.

I’m not sure why, but it recently occurred to me that now, sixteen years later, I might be pleased and comforted to have one of these guys in my own home. At the same time, though, do I really need to impulse buy a product designed to be impulse bought close to two decades after its release? Am I having a crisis? A lot of late-90s/early aughts culture is cycling back around right now: platform sandals, halter tops, eyeshadow. If it’s chic to look like post-makeover She’s All That Rachel Leigh Cook again, it’s probably also chic to hang this bass in my house.

Anyway, obviously this is a complex emotion for me and I’m unsure of how to proceed. I’ve broken down a list of pros and cons for purchasing one of these fish for myself, and I’d love for you to tell me how you think I should proceed. I can’t guarantee I’ll take your opinion to heart, but I’ll definitely add it to my pile of vague, borderline inscrutable sentiments.

Pros:

1. I love “The Sopranos,” and on that television program there’s an episode where someone gets a Big Mouth Billy Bass and it pisses everyone off. Later, Tony (the main boy) has a nightmare about one of his deceased friends coming back to haunt him as a talking fish. Every time I looked at this decoration, I’d be reminded of “The Sopranos,” a good show.
2. They’re cheap as hell. People are selling used Big Mouth Billy Bass on eBay for as little as $1. I’d probably shoot for something in the $10 range for quality’s sake, but that’s still an appealingly low barrier to entry.
3. He cute.
4. He outdoorsy.
5. He sings.

Cons:

1. Every new person who entered my home would probably want to engage with my cultural touchstone decor. I know this because I currently have books and DVDs stored in my home, and people love to engage with those titles as soon as they walk in. It’s not their fault, we need something to talk about, but after the first three, “Omg yeah! I just decided I wanted one!” conversations, I’d probably wish he were… less noticeable.
2. He runs on 4 C-sized batteries. What?
3. He sings.

See what I mean? It’s a pretty even split. Is the bass… good? Or is he bad? I can’t tell. Please let me know in the comments what you think, and thank you for your time.

Illustration: Forsyth Harmon

Two a.m. in New York on the Saturday night before Halloween is its own kind of witching hour. Or rather, an un-witching hour — the time when the spells begin to get loose and wonky and broken. The moment of the night when, drunk and tired, we fall asleep on the subway and lose our Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde berets, or ditch our hot and itching wigs, or shed our cardboard scissorhands, and our one-night-only alter-egos begin to fall away. The streets were strewn with little pieces of costume. I, Courtney Love, was walking home holding my high-heeled boots — feet too sore now for them now — when Kurt Cobain beside me, wig in hand, so not so Kurt any more really — spotted you and went, what the… A night of subways full of strangers in their conjured, conscious, home-made strangeness, but you were the last and strangest of all.

Earlier, Catherine Linton from Wuthering Heights (specific!) had asked me whether I had a tampon. I’d only just met her and her friend Kate Bush and I was flattered; it seemed like one of those quietly radical acts of everyday sisterhood, to ask this of a woman you’d just met. I patted my pockets and lamented I didn’t, and began to look in my bag too, but Catherine Linton, in her red velvet, looked confused and stopped me. No, she said. She meant as Courtney. (I’d forgotten I was Courtney.) Catherine Linton reminded me of the legend of a used tampon flung into the crowd. I did not have a fake used tampon and Kurt did not have a fake gunshot wound. We were bloodless, in every sense. I mean, how far should you go? In your case, though, you’d gone all the way.

“Shall we go have a look?” kind-of-Kurt said and we ventured towards you, hand in hand like children, to have a little gawp. As we approached, it didn’t even occur to me that you might be able to communicate with us, that’s how odd the sight of you was. I had to remind myself that there was a human being inside you. I thought of of tiny, pigtailed Drew Barrymore, talking to the big-eyed alien in the closet between takes, Spielberg maintaining his reality for her. What I mean is, you made me feel like child-Drew, only too awed to even talk. You weren’t a football-headed alien and honestly, I don’t know what you were. But I can say this: that you were seven and a half feet tall and shaggier than Chewbacca and had orifices — sorry, there is no other word — down your front. You looked primitive and primordial, like something an exceptionally powerful shaman might summon. You were a wild thing, but in an ancient, rather than Sendakian way. But here you were, just standing there, vast and hairy and unmoving, on the street with your mates outside a bar.

Your mates: I don’t know what they were either, but I suspected I hadn’t watched the relevant TV shows and superhero blockbusters. I knew there was a show called “Stranger Things,” that people cared about, and that it produced Halloween costumes that didn’t look strange at all. Maybe you were surrounded by “Stranger Things.” But how did you, yeti-thing, strange beast, strangest thing of all, end up among this lot? We lingered for a moment; I wasn’t even sure if you could see us, because, where were your eyes? I didn’t say anything and then we wandered on. Because even at three a.m. on the Saturday night before Halloween, the one question — what are you? — seemed too blunt.

From Everything Changes, the Awl’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Last week, I asked readers of Everything Changes to respond to a one-word prompt with a story, an image, a video, a link—pretty much anything they wanted.

The prompt was “Fall.”

Here’s just some of what everyone sent in (with the full doc here):

A woodman notches a felled tree’s trunk for sectioning in Western Australia, 1962. — SMS

I’ve been married 2 months and fell in love with my wife 2 years ago. When I was younger I would ask people how they knew they found the one and I often rolled my eyes when they told me “you just know.” I thought it was absolutely the dumbest answer until I met my wife.

I went to pick up my friend for our mutual friend’s engagement party when I was told that we needed to wait on her roommate. I hate being late and we were running wildly behind so I was a bit anxious to get going. When her roommate walked in the door it was like time stopped. It was weird. It just felt right. — TMD

Greetings from Japan, a country that worships seasonal change. Chrysanthemums come into bloom in late October/early November. Here they are! — Naomi

Giphy search for “Dog leaves.” — KS

My mom wasn’t always an alcoholic. I think the sickness was always there, but it didn’t manifest until I was a teenager. I still have a hard time saying that word: “alcoholic.” Late summer/early fall always makes me think of her. It’s her favorite time of year, when the air is both warm and cool, with the occasional cold gust of foreshadowing. When I was a kid we used to stand outside and try to catch all the falling leaves. She has a lot of trees in her yard and when the wind blows just right they fill the sky. It’s a strange feeling: grasping at so much excess, and coming away with only a leaf or two. Going from abundance to loss before you have time to blink. Watching the trees let go so effortlessly while trying, in vain, to hold on to as much as you can. — SBH

—MFL

I live in Australia so ‘Fall’ only conveys the act of falling to me and that has suddenly become my constant preoccupation. I have a severely eroded hip joint which makes alot of my movements painful and renders me legless — like a one legged person — so falling can happen anytime. We are fostering a greyhound at the moment which sounds worthy and is but she moves like a container ship in our little house and lists towards me. Fall hasn’t happened yet but lunge, trip, cry, wobble an obscene words have.

There’s a Wendell Berry quote –
“The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.”
We’ve had more rain in October in Missoula County than we do most years in all of autumn.
I like to think it’s because the City is in the process of buying the water system.
And Kettlehouse is building a larger (much larger) brewing facility in Bonner, where there used to be a lumber mill. So we should have plenty of Cold Smoke.

I fell in love and then out of love so many times my heart is now just this little deep fried chicken nugget. — Doug

i had to pay $130 to fix my phone because i got drunk at a fantastic halloween party and dropped it so hard the screen cracked, but on the way back from the apple store i walked next to a brown dog carrying a stick in its mouth on a walk in the cold sunlight. halfway down the block she dropped the stick to smell some pee on a lamp post, then continued on her joyful way without the stick now, owning stuff is fun but smelling pee is better.

It is actually spring in Sydney but this iconic tree had a fall. RIP.

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