The Nevada City Wine Diaries

Oakland used to be a black city. Then white people decided it was nice. It is nice. It’s amazing. San Francisco feels like South Coast Plaza compared to Oakland. A lot of places in the United States have been gentrified and I have been to them and lived in some, but Oakland is a place where you feel you’re watching a robbery as it’s taking place that no one, certainly not you, will stop. I won’t go to Lake Tahoe and can’t even understand why people like it. I am not even a spiritual person and I swear to God that place is packed with about fifty furious Native American ghosts per square foot. Is Oakland somehow easier for me to take because it’s not over yet?

White people used to just gentrify places by moving there and telling black people to get out. Now they just move there, and they take up space, but they say they don’t want to take up all the space, because they love diversity, except, by that they mean “we will join you in the nice place that used to be yours and keep some of you around because you make the place nice, as long as there is room for us which means obviously someone will have to go, but let’s not talk about them!” And then with all their money they got by more or less being lucky, just being themselves, they dust that place off and shine it up and it looks nice and well…

After making fun of natural wine last week, or not really making fun of it but making fun of people who like it to the exclusion of all other wine — I went to a natural wine bar in the Uptown neighborhood of Oakland that I go to a lot called The Punchdown. This place has been written about a lot, it’s a nice, spare pretty bar with high ceilings. The owners, a couple named D.C. and Lisa, are sweet, generous, and knowledgeable. Their demeanor when talking about wine brings to mind an elementary school kid showing you their experiment for the science fair. That’s not entirely accurate, but it’s that sort of perfectly charming and guileless enthusiasm.

What I like most about The Punchdown and its ever-changing list is that they have this blind-tasting choice — for $16, they bring you several ounces of 3 different wines and you have the menu and descriptions in front of you and you guess what they are. I am not good at it but I find it extremely entertaining. The first time I did I got two correct, and since then, I have done it four or five times and gotten none.

Lisa, who has a smile that suggests she’s about to unwrap a present, brought me one white and two reds. I began, as one does, with white. It smelled like a very cold swimming pool that didn’t have a lot of chlorine in it, “like the swimming pool at the Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island might smell” I wrote down, even though, as it turns out, The Breakers has no swimming pool.

What else? It kind of tasted like chardonnay, but like a no oak, not super ripe chardonnay. It smelled like apples. I think we have already established that I am not one of those people who smells or tastes eight billion things in wine. I had eight choices:

I ruled out #6 and #7 because they both said “funky.” There was nothing funky about this wine. I was pretty sure I wanted to rule out #8 because wines from the Jura are weird. (Some Warby Parker robot in a wine store in Park Slope once sold me a wine from the Jura even though I told him I liked “interesting but not too interesting” — luckily the friend I was having dinner with was a complete alc, and after pronouncing it disgusting chugged it anyway, because it was expensive af.) This wine was not weird. What do I mean by weird? Principally sour, principally tasting of an anus dipped in ashes. I can take a little of this but not too much. Some people love it. (For more clues about why different people like different things please read Carl Wilson’s 2007 book about Celine Dion, Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste.)

Just to be sure #8 wasn’t a contender I asked Lisa what sous voile meant. Her face alight with an infectious wonder, as if she were describing Narnia, she explained how in the Jura and the Jura only and not even everywhere in the Jura the wild yeasts produce this veil that grows over the wine and as the wine ferments beneath it, it takes on a very unique flavor. It seemed very unlikely that this clean, crisp wine had ever been under a veil of wild yeast.

As for #1, I didn’t get bruised apple and also this wine wasn’t that “round” — meaning, soft, or low in acid. By the way, acid isn’t a bad thing, it just means sharper rather than fruitier. Very, very roughly, like the difference between tomato soup (less round) and cream of tomato soup (more round). Finally, I knew it was not #3, because this wine wasn’t sweet enough to be a Chenin blanc.

I was down to #2, the aligoté from Burgundy, and #5, the chardonnay from Mount Shasta. And I definitely thought this wine smelled and tasted like apples and I didn’t know what an Aligoté was. That said, I feel like a lot of white wines smell and taste like apples. Aren’t apples just kind of like giant white grapes? I said it was #5 but it was #2. Lisa told me a bunch of stuff about aligoté and I nodded, fascinated, and then forgot all of it. If you see one, buy it.

The next wine, red as I mentioned, was medium, not terribly rich or extracted, but not light. It didn’t have big tannins. It smelled like…well, like a red wine that was made in Europe, or, of course, by a Europe-fixated American, which in this establishment was probably every winemaker represented.

I had eleven choices. Right away I eliminated #2 because it wasn’t chilled. (I know—genius.) I also eliminated #2 because it wasn’t funky, or light for that matter. I was also pretty sure that it was too dark to be #1 and too light to be #11. I eliminated #3 because I always think carignans have a licorice flavor and this did not. Do I actually know shit about carignan? I do not; I have had like five of them. But this did not seem like one.

Then I eliminated #4 because vibrant and alive means weird and weird means butthole and this wine wasn’t butthole, #8 because I didn’t taste or smell cocoa, #9 because I didn’t taste or smell orange peel and #10 because quite frankly it didn’t taste that cheap and I also come here a lot and they never give me The Tank. This left me with #6 and #7. I guessed #6, because I thought it seemed more French than Italian. It was #7. I said I had had her wines before — Elisabetta Foradori is a very famous winemaker — and Lisa said either “Yes, this wine is much less rustic than her other ones” or “This wine is much more rustic.” Pretty sure it was less but can’t be sure.

I am not going to take you all the way through the third wine except to tell you that it was #8, the 2014 Domaine L’ Anglore “Eyrolle” — a grenache — and that I got it right because I am amazing at this. Lisa showed pride and enthusiasm appropriate to the grand occasion.

I took a free shuttle back to my friend’s apartment in Jack London Square and read a horrible article about Yemen on my phone. I felt pretentious for even reading it, because there are people who know what’s going on and there are people who don’t and don’t we all live in pretty much the same way, consuming ridiculously, reaping enormous benefits we don’t see as such, working, spending, wanting, working, spending, wanting, bragging, crying, tweeting from airports. Some of us are more polite than others. We can talk about what we’re doing and why, but we’re all pretty much the same. We all live on stolen land, some of it was just stolen long enough ago that not only does no one care, literally no one cares.

The important thing to remember is that we all need to cultivate healthy self esteem.

‘Certain Women’ was a bad movie, but I got something out of it

All my life, I have seen people cut their hamburgers in half and thought they were nerds. It always seemed like an affectation more than an improvement—some little behavior that’s become part of the ritual even though it doesn’t accomplish very much, like opening your mouth while applying mascara or tapping a wet toothbrush on the edge of your sink. Eating a hamburger, I thought, is not that hard. If there are too many toppings for the sandwich to be structurally sound, take some out. Problem solved.

But then last Friday I saw Certain Women, a meandering drama about three Montana residents trying to make it happen despite having a lot to learn. Sometimes, the women are manipulating their neighbors into selling them bricks from the old schoolhouse. Other times, they are remaining calm in an office hostage situation. The scene that impacted me the most, though, took place in a diner. One of Kristen Stewart’s students brings her there after class, and not long afterward, a hamburger gets cut in half.

Stewart cuts it mid-conversation, without losing her place in the story she’s telling, and then eats it while she describes the women in her family. She is unhappy and has a long drive ahead of her. Her grip on the sandwich is mindless. The fact that she’s holding an all-American grilled beef patty pressed dourly between two very flat-looking buns is almost circumstantial, and something about the visual of that compact hamburger-half really spoke to me. She was so nonchalant! Gesturing with it! Like she was holding a fork, or a Pop Tart.

There’s maybe an hour left in the very boring movie after that scene, so I had a lot of time for the idea to marinate. Tonight, I thought as Michelle Williams wordlessly stared out at a chilly vista, I am going to cut a hamburger in half. On the walk home, I threw the idea out to my friend. We passed a neighborhood bar/restaurant whose food I would describe as “exactly fine,” and I pitched my idea.

“I am going to order a hamburger.”

“Is this because of the diner scene?”

“Yes.”

It is nice to be known.

I ordered my burger medium well. I did not want cheese, I did not want grilled onions for $1.50 (lol) extra. When the sandwich came, I opened the bun and spread ketchup across the patty and the top bun with a knife. I laid the leaf of Bibb lettuce and pickles from the side of my plate across the top, closed everything back up, and sliced into it in one straight shot. The cutting process wasn’t a hassle the way I’d always assumed it’d be with burgers from Applebee’s or the airport—there were no blue cheese crumbles to trip me up, no quarter pound of leaky beef. For authenticity’s sake, I pressed the bun down with my palm to flatten it the way that Stewart’s had been in the movie. I took a bite. It was good.

The first upside you notice is flavor. You’re biting into the middle of the burger instead of the edge, so you get all of your taste elements right there from the jump. I’m talking pickle flavors, condiment flavors, beef flavors. You’re also biting into the densest part of the sandwich content-wise, meaning more of your food is going into your mouth than being squeezed out the back end of the bun. I felt like a goddamn sommelier sitting there in the booth seat of my casual American dining establishment.

“This tastes…so good,” was my review.

I’ve never been so pleased to be wrong about something. And honestly, this opens a lot of doors for me—not just in terms of other things I can cut in half (of which there are many), but other things I’ve written off as the folly of people addicted to creating traits for themselves. If this is good, what else is? Sulfate-free shampoo? Hand sanitizer*? There’s a whole planet for me to explore with this expanded state of mind. Plus, there’s a nice moral here about movies that are bad. Even if the pacing is glacial and the connections between plot lines are tenuous, you might just figure out how you prefer to eat your hamburger. The things you don’t like are just as valuable to you as the things you do. They’re married to each other, actually.

It’s only been a few days, so I haven’t had the opportunity to eat another burger yet, but I know that I will soon. And when I do, fam? It‘s gonna be so good.

_________

*Just kidding, we all know that’s a scam.

By all means, talk about the weather.

Even though I take time every Labor Day to tell you that summer is not over here in New York until November at the earliest, that the last few Christmases have routinely been near 60 degrees, you and everyone you know will spend the next few days complaining about how hot it is. And you know what? Great! Prattle on! I did not ever foresee a moment where meaningless chatter about the temperature would be preferable to any other kind of conversation but that is precisely where we are at this point in the history of the species. Let’s just talk about the weather and nothing else from now on. Can you imagine how much happier we’ll be?

Or maybe just listen to this: It has no words at all, which is the exact right number of words for the present moment. Enjoy.

★★★ The light out the windows was unlovely, with off-colored clouds closing off diffident sunshine, but the air was cool and fresh-seeming. Ill will grew inside as the light improved outside, till the more aggrieved of the children agreed to take a walk to the sporting-goods store. Thick contrails stretched overhead on the blue, and the boy’s shadow bounced along in front of him. The end of the line outside the much-admired bakery was lost to view from the other side of the avenue. By the time a pair of shinguards had been acquired, the whole sky had clouded over again. Before long, just as quickly, it was clear again.

A chat about making your Sims bone

If we were to break my life into two parts, the part labeled “Sims player” would be longer than “non Sims player.” In middle school, friends would ask to come over so they could create versions of themselves and their crushes. In high school, I’d quietly play on weeknights instead of doing my homework. Now, as an adult, I have it passively installed on my computer the way you might still have Angry Birds somewhere on your phone—it might not get opened this year, but it’s nice to have it just in case.

One thing that’s been true the entire time I’ve been playing is that, within the Sims canon, sex is never visible. Sims only needed to kiss three times in a row to make a baby in early versions of the game, but that’s evolved over the years. Now Sims can “woohoo” or “do it” in a couple standard locations (bed, hot tub, end of list), but it’s all under the cover of pixelated bodies and twisted bedsheets. Because of the lack of detail, the only real function of Sim sex is still babymaking. However, thanks to a bunch of horny Simheads, all of that can change if you want it to.

The other week, my Sims-loving buddy Bobby showed me a fan-created mod (modification) called WickedWhims (or WickedWoohoo), where players can get their Sims full-nude and have them engage in sexual activities all over their houses and in public. The creator, Turbodriver, has made all of the graphics free to download (with a suggestion that your donate to their Patreon), which means there’s a very low barrier to entry, but it also makes me wonder—is this a product people actually want? Could it be… fun to use? There was only one way to find out.

Bobby and I both installed the mod on our respective home computers, played as sex-having Sims, and then reconvened to compare our experiences. Here is our review.

Christine Friar: hello bob

Bobby Finger: Hi.

Christine: i feel like i heard about wicked woohoo through you—how did YOU hear about it?

Bobby: I first heard of it after seeing a headline on Kotaku, but kinda just thought, “Huh. Right. The Sims.” It wasn’t until our friend Lindsey sent SCREENGRABS from it that I realized exactly what the hell we were dealing with.

Christine: the screengrabs were wild!
seeing them was like
“i……should download this”

Two Years Later, The Sims 4 Sex Mods Have Gotten Intense

Bobby: Yes. I had coincidentally begun replaying the game only month or so prior, after learning of an upcoming expansion pack (City Living) that sounded cool.
(I hate talking about this btw, as loving The Sims is so incredibly lame.)
You can leave that in btw.
Just want to acknowledge the fact that I sound like a dweeb.

Christine: hahaah
i had the sims 3, but had been putting off upgrading to 4. wicked woohoo is what pushed me over the edge.
i was like “wow”
“gotta upgrade i guess”

Bobby: Yes. Important to note that when The Sims 4 came out, you came to my home and we hooked the comp up to the TV to play it together.
In 2014
Just to convince readers of our fandom.

Christine: oh yeah wow
so i’ve waited 2 years and this is what finally tipped the scale
cool
ANYWAY, let’s talk about the mods themselves.
the initial package of actions you download is pretty sparse
it’s like: handjob, missionary

Bobby: Yes! You have to download SO MANY actions to make the experience truly entertaining.

Christine: the good news is so many fans have made… so much supplemental material for individual sex acts
that you can download in little bundles
i just arbitrarily clicked on 4 and was like “these are the ones i’m getting!”

Bobby: Oh I downloaded all the ones recommended in the initial Wicked Woohoo post.
I think there were 6 packs or so?
That take into account practically every position (and location) possible.
Like, have a threesome in a bathtub. Get a handjob on a couch.

Christine: here are the places i know my sims can fuck: bed, shower, TOILET, kitchen counter

Bobby: Chairs. Couches. Hot tubs. Benches. The floor (aka anywhere).
When I first watched the animations, I couldn’t stop laughing and immediately sent you video of my Sims fucking somewhere. Weren’t they on a bed?
And one woman walked into the room mid-threesome and began doing PUSH UPS by the bed.

Christine: hahaha yeah that’s such a good element of gameplay
because it takes them SO LONG to fuck when you have all these options
and everyone else in the house just like….keeps living
my people’s daughter keeps walking into the room and being like “UGH”

Bobby: One of the most interesting things about the extension is that they don’t stop?
They will literally fuck forever.
You have to make them stop.

Christine: and when you let them finish, they’re not THAT happy!!!
they get like +2 mood

Bobby: Yeah, the Wicked Woohoo doesn’t really help or hurt their mood. +2 is…nothing.

Christine: by the time it’s over they like
are hungry
have to pee
smell bad
and are late to work

Bobby: And, honestly, the novelty wears off quiiiite quickly.
How long did you explore the different moves?

Christine: i feel like i tried to generate every possible scenario once,
and then when i’d figured out all my options the game was over.
it’s definitely not…..a sexy experience.

Bobby: No, not at all.

Christine: there’s a lot of mental math involved when you have to make every mechanical decision for both of them

Bobby: Honestly, I found it annoying after a short while.
It’s wild to me that people are paying him for this
How does it not get boring for them?
Like, good for him for creating this thing and giving it away for free, but his Patreon makes like 900 bucks a month!

Christine: that’s a lot of bucks
i had the same kind of dropoff with my interest level
AND now my people are always horny
not actively, but like, they always have the potential to be fucking
every time i click on anything in the house it asks, “DO YOU WANNA DO THAT THE REGULAR WAY OR THE SEX WAY??”

Bobby: Haha.

Christine: and sometimes i want to sit in the chair the regular way.

Bobby: “Regular please.”

Christine: i will say it is cool that, depending on whose kits you’ve downloaded, anatomy doesn’t necessarily play a part in the positioning.
you can have a guy riding his lady reverse cowgirl no questions asked.

Bobby: True.

Christine: SO! i don’t think i downloaded whatever group sex capabilities there are.
wanna tell me a little about that?

Bobby: OH
ok
Group Sex: I did it once or twice just to see how it looks? And, well, it looks weird and is annoying to do.
It takes a LOT of clicks and correct ordering to do the group sex.

Christine: right like how do you manage all your holes as one sim?

Bobby: It’s not fun.

Christine: what are your sims like?

Bobby: My sims are boring. I usually just make one that looks like a version of me with better skin and who goes to the gym.
I enjoyed the Get To Work expansion because I made my Sim a cop? So that new gameplay was sort of fun for a while, but then my save file fucked up and I lost my career progression.

Christine: RUDE
that is in the top 5 angriest feelings for me i think
when the sims would crash and i’d lose like

Bobby: HOURS of life.
YES.

Christine: me at 14 in a computer room like, “HAH! OKAY! HAHA! GREAT!”
baby’s first rage

Bobby: HOW does it not auto-save in 2016?!?!?!

Christine: that is a great question tbh
and the people at EA owe us an answer

Bobby: Haha.

Christine: i’m going to pivot
ready?
if you had to rate wicked woohoo on a scale of 1–5
5 being “definitely worth downloading”

Bobby: Hmm.
I’d say 5?
Because it is SO easy to install and SO funny for 10 minutes.
And worth it just to show someone else.
But it’s a 1 for replayability.
As I lost interest in no time.

Christine: i agree on the initial 5
but would maybe give it a 2 for replayability

Bobby: lol

Christine: if you can get horny off of this, it’d be fun to revisit!
it gets a point for that

Bobby: I think it would be worth it if the sex actually had repercussions?
But since it doesn’t, it’s not really adding any value to the gameplay

Christine: right, the sex is very meaningless to your sims mood-wise
so it’s not fun within the world of the game itself.
wow
i think i just realized the sims is an empathy-building game
it encourages caretaking and need meeting! AHHH!!
so we’re mad at a plugin for like, not being valuable within their pleasure economy.
damn
thanks ea
for making me emotionally ethical
kind of

Bobby: lol

Christine: okay
i feel like we’ve explored a lot here today
thank u

Bobby: No problem.

Christine: we can stop now

When Hell is TSA, other people, and chain bars

Easy. Once you zip through security, just walk past all the chain bars and don’t stop till you reach the multiplex where a $20 ticket buys you all-day access to a bunch of first-run movies. You can watch just one, or wander from theater to theater (quietly, please!) catching bits and pieces of each. Or just plant yourself in the Trailer Room for a while and watch previews.

Once you’ve left the multiplex, you can swing by the Puppy Zone, or curl up in a big armchair, or — for fearful flyers — have a drop-in hypnotherapy session. By then, it should be time to pop onto your plane, stretch out, and relax, blissfully sober.

Oh, wait. I lost touch with reality for a second there, didn’t I? Sorry.

Let’s see. You could get your shoes shined? That should keep you busy for a few minutes. Maybe bring lots of shoes, get them all shined. Also…magazines?

Look, I get it. I’m at the airport right now — which is to say, I’m in a state of maniacal hostility. I hate the people who held up the check-in line while they rejiggered the contents of three suitcases to avoid paying a bag fee. I hate the TSA agent who called my sleeveless cardigan “outerwear” and made me take it off. I hate the the guy sitting across from me, who just called three different people and laboriously explained to each one the route he drove to get here. I hate that the boarding area smells like onions. An adorable baby girl just stumbled past me in flowered leggings, beaming, and you know what, I don’t much care for her either.

Why does the airport turn me into such a horrible person, ungrateful for the miracle of flight and the privilege of air travel? (Because right now I hate both of those things too.) Well, maybe it’s because I’m an introvert and airports are a lot for us. They’re loud. Your plans can be upended in an instant with no real explanation. There’s no privacy. Total strangers can tell you to take your clothes off, even though sleeveless is not outerwear. I never got very drunk in airport bars, because spending a whole flight waiting in line to pee again and again is not how I roll. But I was still drawn to them because they offered a place to be, a space of my own to claim for an hour outside of the over-stimulation of the terminal. There was conversation if I wanted it, eavesdropping if I didn’t — and usually enough of what I called “real” drinkers, red-faced and stolid, to reassure me my own habit was totally normal behavior.

So my trick now is to claim that space somewhere else, and this is why when I have extra time to kill, you will find me in the desolate corner of an empty gate, possibly quite far from my own. With my coffee and laptop and nine pounds of magazines and no one else around, I can almost believe I’m hanging out at home on a hard, ugly 1960s couch that perhaps I inherited from a beloved aunt and haven’t had the heart to get rid of yet, because I once lied and told her I loved it and now that she’s gone — too soon — I’m trying to learn to love it for real. For the sake of Aunt Beth or whatever she’s called, who died too young from some sort of disease or condition.

You could do this too, if it’s the stimulation and uncertainty of the airport that rattles your nerves. (I’ve never traveled through an airport with those little pod hotel rooms you can rent by the hour, but that’s an option too.)

But what if you don’t just need the illusion of aloneness, like me? What if your aloneness is the problem, and the lights of the SportsBall Grille or Malarkey O’Flannery’s are calling to you? Well, try this. Find a paging station, and ask them to say these words: “Paging Bill W. to gate B17.” (Only please use your actual location or it won’t work.) This page acts as a bat signal to people in recovery — A.A. specifically, though I doubt you’ll be asked to prove your bona fides — that you need to talk to someone, and soon. With any luck, one of those people will be near enough to come and find you and help you to not walk into that bar.

I have never paged Bill W. in an airport, but I know people who have, and it’s an astoundingly beautiful concept. You say “I need help,” and a stranger comes and helps you. With your feelings. Really, the idea should be extended so you could pick up the phone and say, “I am scared to fly at Gate B17,” or “I’m on my way to visit my mother who drives me crazy at Gate B17,” and another traveler would snap their fingers and say “Oh, I got this one” and head your way. You could try it. Who knows? But I do know the alcoholics have got your back. Call them.

Previously: How to Not Drink At a Wedding, How to Not Drink at a Show

What Was Life Like Before Smartphones?

The ancients tell of a time when we weren’t all connected.

One of the reasons creative people in the public eye are paid so well is the number of mind-numbing media events they have to endure where they are asked the same questions over and over and attempt to answer as if it is the first time the thought has ever occurred to them. If you have seen any of the voluminous press coverage creator Charlie Brooker has participated in for the new season of his show “Black Mirror” you will note the commonalities; you can’t blame Charlie Brooker for that, there are only so many ways you can respond to “the future looks grim, huh?” That said, here is something that stood out to me:

In 30 years’ time there will be a drama series set in 2016. Characters will be on their phones and the viewers will look at it like we do with Mad Men and smoking: “Look at them! They’re all on their phones in meetings! Well, of course, they didn’t know about the thumb cancer those things give you…” Having said that, I remember life before smartphones, and it was fucking boring. The most exciting thing you could do was get a cover for your phone, or play Snake. I don’t think we’ll replace them until we get in-eye contact lenses that do the same thing; so we can stare at people while we’re ignoring them. We should try and make people more interesting than phones.

Fine, yes, sure, let’s make people more interesting. (I mean, good luck: Talking to other people is agony and each time you do it you die a little inside.) But back up a second there:

I remember life before smartphones, and it was fucking boring.

Do you remember life before smartphones? Of course you do. Even if you accept the idea that time has slowed down to such an extent that what we used to measure as days now count as years there is no one who is reading this sentence who does not recall life before smartphones. Even if you were one of the people who bought the very first iPhone — and whatever your feelings about Apple, when we talk about the smartphone era what we really mean is the moment when every early-adopting asshole was so smug and intolerable about their iPhone that the rest of us decided either to conform by buying one ourselves or show how we weren’t susceptible to advertising and peer pressure by buying a different consumer product that did something similar — you did it less than a decade ago.

So cast your memory back to that time before smartphones. (You probably had a flip phone, like Adele in that video.) What do you mostly remember? Were you anxious? Did you dread looking at your phone to see what was on it? Did you dread not being able to look at your phone to see what was on it? Were you jittery and irritated if for some reason you couldn’t use your phone and were forced to be alone with your own thoughts? Did you find it difficult sustaining focus on a single thing for more than a minute?

I think if you reflect honestly on that era you will have to answer that not only were any of those things not a prominent part of your personality, but also their absence offered a degree of equanimity which you would today perceive as impossible to deal with. Back before smartphones you were considerably less apprehensive than you are in the present. What we are now being sold subconsciously is the idea that the lack of constant agitation was somehow mundane.

Life before smartphones was boring because you didn’t feel crazy all the time. It was boring because you could still believe that what happened next might be okay. It was boring because you could look beyond what was in your hand and what you saw there was ambiguous enough that you needed to determine its shape on your own, rather than passively accepting whatever was presented to you. Life before smartphones was boring to the extent that your brain had to do actual work back then, and there is nothing your brain hates more than doing actual work. Your lazy brain is trying to trick you into thinking things were worse when you forced it to exercise all the time. Don’t believe your brain! Life now is boring, your brain is just confusing you with fear so that you won’t make a big deal about it.

Listen: At any second your brain is going to tell you that you should click away, that I am just some Luddite who hates the future because he is afraid of progress, but that is your brain trying to keep you from putting it back on the treadmill. Do not listen to your brain. Write this down before you forget, before your brain convinces you that you should go check out something else, before oh why bother you left right around the time I brought up iPhones, didn’t you? I’m all alone here with my stupid, head-hurting brain. How can I punish it for all the pain it’s causing me? I know, I’ll go look at Twitter!

I Knew I Was a Real Poet When I Tried to Pay for a Taco with a Sonnet

And other answers to unsolicited questions.

“I’ve decided to become a poet. How should I begin?” — Versified Val

Awesome. Most of my best friends are poets. You are joining a fellowship of people who look at the world in a unique way: from the point of view of being poor, underappreciated and unread. But there’s just something about turning words over and over, seeing what they can do, like flipping pancakes with a buttery spatula, that makes it all somehow worth it. Don’t worry about it. Like everything else, poetry is more fun at the very beginning.

You can start in any way you want. Writing haikus about your favorite TV shows. Everybody loves TV now. Some poets like to think of work in projects. The idea behind the project or concept of the project might be alluring enough to get yourself some readers. You can write one poem at a time. That’s a harder way to go about it. You have to wander around your daily life accumulating experiences, small wisdom and collections of words until you have enough to fill like a page.

You do not have to write in forms. We’ve gotten to the point in poems in which no one has to rhyme or know anything about prosody to be a poet. Awesome. Rhyming and prosody are a pain in the ass. Rap does most of the rhyming now. And those guys get really rich.

Attending poetry readings can be very helpful to most poets starting off. Mostly so you can see the kinds of things you probably don’t want to do. Some poets put on this very serious “poetry voice.” The best poetry voice I can think of off the top of my head is like Robert Pinsky, who is the Barry White of American Poetry. He could read the phone book and the phone book would win a National Book Award. But my personal favorite is Eileen Myles, whose Boston/Cambridge accent comes back strong during poetry readings.

Other poets like to tell long, involved prose story/jokes to set up their poems. “This piece is about how I’d feel during a zombie invasion when I’ve run out of Pop Tarts. It’s called ‘Running Out of Pop Tarts During the Zombie Invasion.’” You’d be better off putting all that stuff in your poems. Whether you charm an audience or not, you will still be judged by how good your poems are. Not how snappy your banter is. Many poets should just become professional banterers and leave the poems behind entirely.

Send poems to every place that accepts poems. I am still waiting to hear back from The New Yorker on the poems I sent six months ago. I will never get into The New Yorker. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop sending them poetry. It’s been four months, New Yorker. Get to work. Prairie Schooner rejected my poems earlier this year. I should send them more just to spite them. But I don’t even know if they pay. Poetry magazine has like $200 million, so send them work whenever you can. You deserve some of that Ruth Lilly money. Poetry never even published Ruth Lilly’s poems! And she still gave them $200 million! It would be better off in your pocket, don’t you think? It’s important to get paid for your poetry once in awhile or everyone around you will think it’s just some kind of silly hobby. When, in fact, it is the moment your soul feels most at ease in the universe.

It helps to have poetry pals who like your work and are generally supportive of your efforts. But poetry is really every person for themselves. Lots of people will tell you to go to school if you want to be a real poet but all you have to do is go to the library and read lots of poetry and have lots of affairs with other poets. You can steal their best lines while they are sleeping. For free! Poets who get onto the merry-go-round of academia usually get seasick with politics and disappointment. And never quit writing poems! The older you get the more awards they’ll give you just for not dying yet! Good luck!

“I went to the mall the other day and the Holiday stuff was already up. I hate the Holidays. What can I do to avoid it?” — Gus the Grinch

Stop watching live TV and fast forward through all the ads. If you turn the heat up in your apartment to like 80ºF you can pretend it’s still June! Time is essentially meaningless, just our trip around a sun that allegedly keeps us alive if you believe we’re not all already dead and this is Hell. You could always make up other holidays. Not Buying Stuff Day. And Smoking Weed Week. If you have to go to the mall, just pretend it’s August or April. And that all the holiday stuff is just some new style everyone is wacky about.

I did succumb to some of the Pumpkin Spice nonsense this year. And I will very likely enjoy some of the Nog when Nog Season begins. It’s cheerful to break up the year into drinking pink wines one week and dark beers another. Don’t let it all get to you, Gus. Retail stores just don’t make much money outside of the Holidays so they start in September and end in February. Holiday movies are fun, but I don’t start getting into them until November. By December, I’m done with the whole thing and ready for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.

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

The Adventures of Liana Finck

Liana Finck’s cartoons appear regularly in The New Yorker. Her book is A Bintel Brief. This cartoon strip is a spin-off of her Instagram feed, @lianafinck.

You know what’s going to be worse than this week? Every week after.

I have had the bad cold that’s going around for what seems like a month now and this weekend my body was finally all, “Fuck this, we’re shutting down until we get it figured out.” I spent most of my weekend asleep. This was depressing, because from my window it looked amazing out there and I was heartbroken to miss it, but being on the Internet this morning made me realize something: Sleep is the only sensible solution to dealing with how horrible everything is now. It is not even 9 A.M. as I write this and already everything makes me want to die or set fires; I can’t even imagine how awful it will be by the time you read it.

Everyone out there is telling themselves that once the election is over things will be better. They will not. As much as you wish it would all go away, at present the election is the only thing giving you hope: the hope that as soon as the election happens life will return to normal. First of all, whatever you remember as “normal” is a lie, because “normal” was all the bits and pieces that added up to where we are now. More importantly, once this sideshow is over and we have to face how actually fucked we are going forward you are going to wish we were back in an era where sexual assault and incitement to riot were the issues of the day.

I know it seems hard to conceive of in this moment, but come Thanksgiving you will look back at the election as some kind of dream where, no matter how terrible it seemed at the time, at least the sheer horror of what was about to come could be kicked down the road in your imagination. You think things are intolerable right now? Get ready to live in a world where there’s no avoiding the sheer nightmare of reality. It’s the same world we’re living in, except without the delusion that everything will be better after one thing or another happens. I will say it again so you can remember when you need it, and dear God, will you need it: Sleep is the only sensible solution to dealing with how horrible everything is.

Anyway, good morning. Happy Monday. Here, via Stereogum, is Devonté Hynes performing Philip Glass’ “Metamorphosis: III.” If you are in need this morning of something to distract you from the awfulness to come — and dear God, you are in need — this will certainly help for about six minutes. Enjoy.