A Listicle Without Commentary

25. “’To be and not to be. That is the answer.’”

24. “now you deserve to get fucked in the ass”

23. “Jacob and Julia had batted about the notion of having the bar mitzvah in Israel — the Jewish coming-of-age version of eloping.”

22. “If it flushed, he fucked it.”

21. “’Well, you know about heaven, right?’ Jacob said, causing a nonexistent angel to lose its wings.”

20. “give me your cum, then you can have my cock”

19. “In the car, Tamir pressd the sole of his right foot against the windshield, parachuting his scrotum for any infra-red traffic cameras they might pass.”

18. “i don’t care if you cum, but i’ll make you cum anyway”

17. “They could go to couples therapy, but Jacob had implied a bizarre loyalty to Dr. Silvers, which would have made seeing someone else a transgression (a greater transgression, apparently, than requesting a shot of fecal cum from a woman who was not his wife)…”

16.”He tied rubber bands around his wrist — rubber bands being to masturbation what flour is to baking — to make his fingers go numb so he would no longer recognize them as his own.”

15. “He tried to fuck his own asshole, but that required pushing his boner in the direction it most didn’t want to go, like a drawbridge being forced to touch the water.”

14. “Tamir lifted Irv from the ground, pushing a small fart out of him — an anal Heimlich.”

13. “you’re begging me to fuck your tight pussy, but you don’t deserve it yet”

12. “It would have helped to have had a bona fide experience with a bona fide vagina, but his inability not to hear ‘boner fide’ made the chances of that as nugatory as did his use of the word nugatory.”

11. “i want to see you dripping onto your asshole”

10. “He was able to rub his scrotum around his asshole, but that only made him melancholy.”

9. “Vegans live longer, and are healthier, and have better skin, and she could do that; it would be easy, if someone shopped, cooked, and cleaned for her.”

8. “Blessing are just curses other people envy.”

7. “Of course, he had unlimited access to more free porn than could be watched over the course of the lifetimes of every citizen in China, but even an anus-crazed twelve-year-old appreciates the correlation between the mental work required and the magnitude of the nut, hence his ultimate fantasy of intercepting some Arab virgin on her way to get fucked by an actual martyr, tucking his head under her burka, and, in that deep-space, sensory-deprived blackness, licking orbits around Heranus.”

6. “By the third day, his pubes were pipe cleaners and his shaft was leprous.”

7. “The rabbi asked, ‘What would it sound like to cry in Jewish?’”

6. “cum on my mouth”

5. “Irv’s knee-jerk response triggered a reflex in Jacob’s brain’s knee, and within a few exchanges they were rhetorical Russian wedding dancers — arms crossed, kicking at everything but anything.”

4. “He fucked the soles of his feet like some kind of horndog maharishi.”

3. “Life is precious, and I live in the world.”

2. “Sometimes, in less proud moments, he would even talk to his sperm as his semen congealed in his belly button.”

1. “‘It’s a lose-lose.’ They both laughed. ‘It’s a love-love.’”

Carmen Petaccio received his MFA in fiction from Columbia University. He lives in Austin, Texas.

If weekends are going to suck too, why even bother having them?

Wow, everything being terrible isn’t even taking weekends off anymore, huh? It used to be you’d wake up to a Monday knowing how horrible things were about to get with at least a little bit left in the tank from two days of relatively minimal exposure to unpleasantness, but now not only do are you still hurting from the hits you took last week, you’ve also spent the only days off that you get being consistently pummeled until you can no longer make the distinction. Which is to say if you are feeling more dreadful than usual this Monday morning it will hopefully help you to know that it’s not just you, it’s awful for everyone, we all want to die the same amount and it seems as if it’s not ever going to get better again. Does that help? I hope so, because that’s about as positive as I can be right now.

How about we listen to some music? Here is Last Japan, seeing what he can put together in ten minutes. Check out the video of the performance, if you enjoy it. And do try to enjoy it, because it’s all downhill from here.

★ A fine, cold drizzle was blowing. The boy who never wanted to wear his rain jacket accepted his rain jacket without complaint; the boy who was always willing to wear his rain jacket didn’t have it, but promised to look for it in the lost and found when he got to school. The drizzle paused, but the gray and the cold held through the morning and on into the afternoon. The chill was into the office building. At the evening pickup from the afterschool program, the rain was starting again. The missing rain jacket had never appeared.

New trim size, more dad jokes, all pumpkin everything

Did you know that it’s officially pumpkin? That time of year when the weather has turned all pumpkin-y and the frost is on the pumpkin and they hay has a pumpkin hue to it. The coffees are being spiced with pumpkins and five out of every six skus at Trader Joe’s is pumpkin or pumpkin spice(d) (more on that later).

We just got our Fearless Flyer in the mail this week (thank you Postmaster for delivering between Tuesday, September 27 –Thursday, September 29) and boy do we have a lot to say. Sorry I’m writing in the first-person plural but it rubs off after twenty-four pages. Yeah, that’s right—TJ’s went BIG this month. The trim size has increased by about two inches (in width; same height), and they sprung for eight more pages. They did not have any spare change for improving the printing method, so we are still stuck with the hazards of bad glueform binding:

Whatever, it’s fine. It would be weird if the product were too slick, right? This is Trader Joe’s home of everything in the world under three dollars! Anyway I read through the whole thing and now I never want to see a pumpkin ever again. The first page starts off fine, only one out of three items is pumpkin related, but there are a lot of problems. First of all, they call potato chips ‘crisps,’ which makes no sense because we are not in England, and then they take a lot of space to tell us how Trader Joe’s Ghosts & Bats are made:

They’re very crispy chips shaped like little ghosts and little bats. They’re made with potato flour that’s rolled out, into sheets like pasta. Cut into shakes like cookies, they’re oven dried, then fried in expeller pressed oil. They have just the right amount of salt added to complement the potato flavor.

Okay a lot of problems here. First of all, there are no hyphens anywhere in this booklet except in the phrase “fall-favorite,” where it absolutely does not need to be. They are sorely needed, especially in the oft-used phrase “X ounce bag.” Second, these are not potato chips, and so I guess that’s why they called them crisps? They’re like, those vegetable chips that are made out of dehydrated reconstituted vegetable matter and starch that are dyed sickly pale yellow orange and green? You know the ones. Was it necessary to tell us that potato chips—sorry, crisps—put on salt just as they’re about to leave the house, that final magical touch that really complements their natural flavor that’s definitely been fried out of them? I guess so.

That “complement,” by the way, it appears a lot. Here’s another:

One of our favorite things about our pumpkin bread is the way the subtle flavor of the pumpkin is perfectly complemented by the jaunty additions of cinnamon and nutmeg.

JAUNTY! There is so much writing here that is unnecessary because they added eight pages and like twenty column inches so they’re literally just filling space with extraneous word phrases being like “hmmm, what else to say about these pumpkin cranberry crackers? Definitely something about how the dough was made and cradled lightly before baking and how the pumpkin feels about the cranberry’s zest.” There’s also a lot of this:

Just when you think the flavor has fully revealed itself, you discover a subtle hint of citrus at the finish that really pleases the palate.

Wow the flavor really has a lot of agency here. I don’t know if I like that!

Last time, your mom wrote this wonderful newsletter. This month, your dad did. You know how I know? Under Julienned Root Vegetables, he writes:

Their shape might evoke French fries, but that’s really where the F² comparison stops

EFF-SQUARED. Hi dad. Under Herbes de Provence:

Not buying our herbaceous story? Okay. But please do buy our herbaceous Herbes de Provence.

Dad, this is embarrassing.

What we call ravioli dates back to sometimes in the 14th century, in the region now defined as Italy. Deeper culinary exploration reveals that every food culture has its own variation on the dumpling, and some are traceable as far back as the 10th century. Cut to the 21st century, and the continued evolution of the dumpling continues with Trader Joe’s Honey Roasted Pumpkin Ravioli.

Dad, please don’t make us do the play this year at Thanksgiving?

Fucking everything is pumpkin, by the way. There’s Organic Pumpkin Toaster Pastries, Organic Pumpkin Spice Granola Bark, Pumpkin Biscotti, Pumpkin Spiced Pumpkin Seeds, Dark Chocolate Pumpkin Spice Salted Caramels, Belgian Chocolate Pumpkins, Pumpkin Joe Joe’s, Pumpkin Ice Cream (A Pumpkin Season Tradition), Mini Pumpkin Pies, Pumpkin Macarons, Pumpkin Bread Pudding, Pumpkin Cheesecake, Sticky Pumpkin Cake, and Pumpkin Pie Mochi Ice Cream.

“Fine,” you might say. “That seems like literally every pumpkin dessert ever made. Seems fine to me except for the part about putting chocolate together with pumpkin.” Yes, but there’s more. There’s Pumpkin Spice Granola, Pumpkin Waffles, Pecan Pumpkin Instant Oatmeal, Joe’s Pumpkin O’s, Pumpkin Flavored Dog Treats, Pumpkin Body Butter, Cold Pressed Pumpkin Harvest Juice, Pumpkin Spice Caramel Corn, and Pumpkin Tortilla Chips (“positioned to be the preeminent permutation of our perennially preferred plant, pumpkin”). First of all, no way to all of that. Second of all, fucking pumpkin cereal?

On the following spread, there are listings for Pumpkin Cranberry Crisps AS WELL AS Pita Crisps with Cranberries & Pumpkin Seeds. Wait hold on. Go back two paragraphs and please read where it says pumpkin spice pumpkin seeds????????????? I don’t even know how to spell pumpkmkimpinm any more. I get that it’s Pumpkin Pie seasoning as the “Spice” but this flyer is inconsistent about whether something is “spice” or “spiced” and it maddeningly includes Pumpkin Chai Spice Loaf and Pumpkin Spice Chai.

We’re on the last spread and I’m losing my goddamn mind. I’m not going to say “I’m out of my gourd,” because this flyer does it at least three times for me. There’s Pumpkin Vinaigrette, which cannot be any good. After that it gets really fucked up: This Pumpkin Walks Into A Bar (cereal bars), Orange is the New Pumpkin. (just actual pumpkins), Haunted House. Boo! (a haunted house kit), and this thing that I can’t even talk about:

On the back cover slash last page, there is a listing for Pumpkin Spice Coffee Two Ways:

Because the flavors come from real spices and seasonings, the overall profile is much more subtle than if we’d tossed in a bunch of artificial “junk,” We like it better this way. Brewed and black, its flavor is smooth and subtly spiced. If you add milk and sugar, those flavors are amplified.

WHAT ARE FAKE SPICES? IS ARTIFICIAL “JUNK” DIFFERENT FROM ARTIFICIAL JUNK? WHO CARES HOW YOU LIKE IT? THE FLAVOR IS BREWED AND BLACK? I JUST REALIZED THIS COFFEE TASTES LIKE SPICES, NOT PUMPKIN, WHICH I THINK YOU SHOULD REALLY CLARIFY?? IF YOU ADD MILK AND SUGAR THE MILK AND SUGAR FLAVORS ARE AMPLIFIED?

I’ll leave you with this cartoon about shaved Brussels sprouts. My commentary consists of the ballpoint pen rectangle I drew around it. Thank you and have a good pumpkin.

Some thoughts about the new Netflix documentary

It’s been a big year for pop murder documentaries. There were several major television events for the O.J. Simpson and JonBenét Ramsey cases in 2016, and I happily tuned into all of them. Even though the quality… varied (“American Crime Story” was the best, iD’s JonBenét coverage was not). There was so much that flew over my head the first time around: Race! Class! Privilege! Mid-nineties media coverage was incredibly unwoke, so it was cool to peer back from twenty years in the future and go, “Whoa.”

Something that makes a little less sense to me is that today, Netflix released Amanda Knox, a documentary about the woman who was initially convicted and later acquitted for the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher. Italy’s supreme court only laid the case to rest in March of 2015, a little more than a year ago—is there really any new perspective that can be offered on the evidence from this short of a distance? Apparently yes.

Here is what I know about Amanda Knox: I have clicked on articles and wiki’d her no less than ten times over the years, saying to myself, “This is the time I am going to understand what everyone’s freaking out about!” But it has yet to happen. Invariably, I get one sentence in, scroll down to get the gist from the photo captions, and then click over to another tab. It’s like trying to pay attention to the royal family—the nouns are way too boring.

Here is what I know about the case:

• a white, American Amanda studied abroad in Italy
• someone was murdered
• Amanda says she did not do the murder
• other people, however, seem to think she did
• ???
• she went to Italian jail

So that’s been my impression of the case until this point. A murder happened and Amanda was held in jail, maybe wrongfully. I could never quite grasp what had tabloid-buyers so captivated. These are the details of one pretty run-of-the-mill-seeming homicide, not a years-long international news story. Did she murder a viceroy? Why do we as a pop culture care about these people specifically? What are the stakes?

I realize that part of it, too, is that face-wise I can absolutely believe that this person could do a murder. In courtroom footage, she always looked saucer-pupiled and shook, like that old viral video dog who loves cupcakes or Jax from Vanderpump Rules:

Though the trauma of being wrongfully jailed and held against your will in a foreign land when you’d planned on spending twelve weeks ordering absinthe cocktails and experimenting with pashminas might easily do that to your eyes.

All I can say for sure is that, as far as legal thriller tabloid journalism went, this story fell short for me, and I am surprised to see it get a dedicated documentary. So I am going to watch Amanda Knox and report back with my findings. Here we go.

“Either I am a psychopath in sheep’s clothing, or I am you,” she says to me with unwavering eye contact in a light peach tissue tee against a gray backdrop. Damn Amanda.

Oh my god is this a case about how hot people get away with things because they’re hot? Is that the central tension? Everyone wants to make sure she’s not getting away with something because she’s hot, and so everyone paid attention to this case for years? The media should check out movies and TV. They’re wild.

Nick Pisa, who covered the case for The Daily Mail, just said, “A murder always gets people going. Bit of intrigue. Bit of mystery. A whodunit. And we have here this beautiful, picturesque hilltop town in the middle of Italy. It was a particularly gruesome murder. Throat slit, semi-naked, blood everywhere. I mean… what more do you want in a story? I mean, all you’re missing is maybe, I don’t know, the Royal Family and the Pope or something like that as well,” which is funny because I cannot imagine two more sterile or boring content examples. I literally made fun of the royal family in the intro. “All this story needs to get spicier is some outmoded British governmental figures or a 79-year-old Catholic male!!!!”

Oh okay he also reported that this girl could have been murdered at an orgy. We’re a nation of Puritans and if a hot girl did a murder at an orgy it means we can continue being terrified of both women’s sexuality and sex in general. Got it. Fun case!

Amanda Knox keeps referring to sex as “making love” and I want 2 die

I wonder if that is a courtroom training thing to make her seem more innocent. Murderers do sex, Amandas make love.

WAIT HER ITALIAN BOYFRIEND SIGNED A STATEMENT CONTRADICTING HER ALIBI (THAT SHE COULDN’T HAVE DONE THE MURDER BC THEY WERE AT HIS PLACE BONING AND WATCHING AMÉLIE*). RUFF STUFF, AMANDA.

AND THEN WHEN THEY QUESTIONED HER SHE BLAMED THE MURDER ON HER BOSS? WHY DID EVERYONE HAVE A PSYCHOLOGICAL BREAK AT POINT 1A IN THE INTERVIEW?

Googling whether you can be gaslit that quickly.

I guess if you’re in shock?

“It had that sexual intrigue. Girl-on-girl crime, if you like.” But someone died!!!!

Wait when they took her to jail they gave her a blood test and SHE FOUND OUT SHE HAD HIV?!? That’s her punishment for being a sex-haver! That guy was right, all this anti-fuck fable needs is the Pope!

Somehow the press got ahold of her prison diary and found out that, 1) the Italian police had administered a blood test and, 2) had presented her with FALSE RESULTS telling her that she HAD HIV just to FUCK WITH HER and SEE IF SHE’D CHANGE HER STORY. 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 :)))))))

At this juncture it is very clear who this documentary would like me to sympathize with, but no matter what it seems like this is an exploitation story. The most traditional of feminine crime narratives. They made her a sex witch.

Hey I’m not one of the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies, but this Rudy Guede guy seems……….suspicious DNA-wise.

… you get the gist.

By the end of the documentary you get a pretty clear picture of what Amanda Knox thinks happened: the local Italian law enforcement did a bad job investigating, decided who they thought was guilty, and then bent the evidence to meet their ruling. So there’s definitely something to get fired up about in 2016, it’s just not the verdict like it was for O.J.’s or JonBenét’s cases.

Amanda Knox is here to critique the tabloidcore media coverage that launched her case into the spotlight and, according to her, contributed to her imprisonment. She wanted to be a regular girl getting a regular trial based on regular analysis of the evidence they dug out of her regular life—what she got was a twenty-four-hour circus, one of the first of its kind as far as the internet goes. In her case, it might have gotten in the way of justice.

At some point toward the end she literally points to her face and says, “These are my eyes, they’re not objective evidence,” so, let me take this moment to say both “Whoops!” and “Sorry Amanda!”

I liked your movie.

______

*this is the most study abroad alibi of all time and I am inclined to believe it is true

From Everything Changes, the Awl’s newsletter.

Julia McWilliams was born in 1912 in California to conservative parents who didn’t entirely know how to relate to a headstrong girl who’d grow to be 6 foot 2 inches.

Her father, she said, hoped she would “settle in Pasadena to live a conventional life.”

After graduating from Smith College and moving back to Pasadena for a few years to take care of her ailing mother, World War II broke out.

Julia learned she was too tall to enlist in the Army or Navy corps for women, so instead she joined the Office of Strategic Services. She was a typist, then a researcher in the Secret Intelligence division.

One of her projects involved cooking, in a way: She helped develop a repellant to keep sharks from approaching (and setting off) underwater explosives. It’s still in use today.

She was posted to Sri Lanka and later China, where she met Paul Cushing Child. She was 31 and he was 41.

Paul’s first impression of her, written to his twin brother Charlie: “A classy dame, brave about being an old maid!” He told Charlie he was reluctant to pursue her because she was a virgin when they met.

She won him over.

Julia and Paul got into a minor car accident the day before their wedding in Lumberville, Pennsylvania in 1946. They smiled through the ceremony with stitches and bandages.

Paul could “do just about anything,” Julia said. “Carpenter, cabinet-builder, intellectual, wine-bibber, wrestler. A most interesting man and a lovely husband.”

A diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service, Paul was posted to Paris in 1948. Over the next six years, Julia and Paul would move to Marseilles, Germany, and Norway.

Paul, an enthusiastic gourmand, is the one to introduce Julia to fine food.

On her own, Julia “made do” with frozen food and didn’t really know how to cook anything.

It wasn’t what women of her class did, she explained. “Middle-class women did not have careers,” Julia said. “You were to marry and have children and be a nice mother. You didn’t go out and do anything.”

Her first meal in France was a life-changing experience: oysters, sole meuniere, and wine at a little restaurant in Rouen. She said years later that it was “the most exciting meal of my life.”

Julia decided to enroll in Le Cordon Bleu, the famous Parisian cooking school, in 1949. She was 37.

She ended up being the only woman in a year-long course with eleven former GIs.

She threw herself into school and called Paul a “Cordon Bleu widower,” but they did make time for each other. “I would go to school in the morning,” she once said, “then for lunch time, I would go home and make love to my husband.”

Of these years, she said, “I felt myself opening like a flower.”

After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu, Julia met two French women who asked her to help write a cookbook they were putting together. It’s intended to teach Americans about French cooking.

Finding the original recipes too confusing and prone to error, Julia ended up entirely rewriting the book, meticulously testing and re-testing recipes to make sure everything is foolproof.

She was thrilled to have something she loved to work on. “I have finally found a real and satisfying profession which will keep me busy well into the year 2,000,” she said in 1952.

The goal for the book was “a collection of good French dishes of the simpler sort, directed quite frankly to those who enjoy cooking and have a feeling for food.”

After seven years of work, the women turned in an 850-page manuscript to their publisher, Houghton Mifflin.

Houghton rejected the manuscript as too long and encyclopedia-like.

“Hell and damnation,” Julia wrote to one of her co-authors.

They revised the manuscript down to 684 pages. Houghton Mifflin rejected it again.

Meanwhile, Paul retired from the diplomatic service and the Childs bought a house in Cambridge, MA.

In order to save money, Paul designed Julia’s kitchen himself. He makes the counters extra tall to accommodate for her height.

Because she loves to have everything in its place, Paul outlines every pot and pan on a pegboard so it’s clear what goes where.

Julia and her co-authors’ manuscript finally gets passed to Judith Jones, a young editor at Knopf who believes in it and convinces the publisher to take a chance on it. They call it Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

From there, Julia got famous. Then Julia got a cooking show, and even more famous.

Paul was her partner throughout, working on photographs and illustrations for books and helping to manage her career.

“How fortunate we are at this moment in our lives!” He wrote Charlie. “Each doing what he most wants, in a marvelously adapted place, close to each other, superbly fed and housed, with excellent health, and few interruptions.”

During the late ’60s, Julia had a full mastectomy. “Left breast off,” she wrote in her diary for February 18, 1968.

She threw herself into her work. “Doing television,” she said, “you want amusing things, something fun and unusual. I think also on the television you want to do things loud. People love the whamming noises.”

She used a huge sabre to carve chicken, wore a helmet and fired a popgun to bring down small birds to roast.

She was credited for helping to change the American culture of food from frozen dinners and pre-packaged mixes to something to be savored and enjoyed.

She was immortalized in many ways. She loved a 1970s SNL skit in which Dan Aykroyd portrayed her as proceeding with a taping of her show despite cutting off her own finger and suffering massive blood loss. She kept a videotape of it under the television in her kitchen.

Julia worked through her sixties and seventies, traveling the world. When Paul got too frail to come with her on trips, she’d set an alarm so that no matter where she was in the world, he’d get a call from her at the same time of day.

Paul Child died in 1994 at the age of 92. Julia died 10 years later, two days from her own 92nd birthday. Her last meal was French onion soup.

Previously: Dolly Parton Facts.

Subscribe to Everything Changes, the Awl newsletter.

I’d been out of the city for weeks, hunger building, so ​that first evening back, I reached Union Square in a state of voraciousness so intense that it felt shameful,​ a bit rabid. I could feel the whites of my eyes straining, shrieking hit me, bring it, I’m home. I was outright looking for you, to be honest. Or at least, someone like you — a punctum of freak in the sober crowd.

In the subway, I put my body in the shy, resenting press of all the other silent bodies shifting up the stairs and clocked a teenage girl giving someone heavy side-eye. There you were, an ambling, ascending lightning rod of New York City voltages, and I screamed silent allegiance to you.

I lost you of course. But then, after coming up out in the undying daily din of the Hare Krishnas, you were ahead of me again, walking south on University Place. People slowed and stared; I ​dawdled after you like some dumb rabbit. You wore a cheap synthetic wig in a nasty shade of auburn, styled in a bob and topknot and you dragged a pair of suede thigh high boots in one hand like they were a thing you’d casually slain. Any trashy chic these elements conjured was warped by the stuffed plastic bags you gripped which​ appeared to be filled with actual trash. Your pale male body was cosseted in what I suppose is called a playsuit, a short, pink thing gathered and trussed into rosettes. Not the modish peach-pink of Acne ads in Williamsburg though​, but an auntlier, more suburban shade. Something redolent of gelatinous desserts, smeared lipstick and support stockings. It was backless, and I stared and was a little revolted by and in love with your scapula points, which looked like amputated wings.

You asked a blonde woman directions in a deep drawling voice and I dawdled, hanging back, feeling a silly little spike of regret that you’d asked her and not me. I would have been nicer. But maybe you wanted the balking stranger more than you needed the smiling one. Maybe that’s what you were seeking — the drag of “horrified blonde tourist” to tell you where you were, in the same way I was eating up your drag of “freaky weirdo” to tell me I was back where I wanted to be.

I watched you disappear west down East 13th Street and wondered how the roundedness of your butt seemed to communicate a vulnerability, even as you sashayed. You hadn’t seen me, you’d said nothing, but I’d heard your butt sashay say what I wanted to hear​: honey you’re home.

Based on actual events

The sweetest words I’ve ever seen another person write
are, “Listen, something just came up, let’s pick another night.”
(And if you’re extra lucky you are able to respond,
“I’m all booked up the whole next month, and several weeks beyond.”
The fates are in your favor if the answer back is such:
“I’ve got a lot to get through too, but please let’s stay in touch.”)
It seems as if it’s Christmas or you cheated on a test
And somehow got away with it. You never feel more blessed
Then coming home when day is done and locking up the door,
Aware that there’s no reason you need go back out there for.
Having plans is nice, but there’s no greater pleasure known
Than suddenly discovering that you’ll spend your night alone.

What did this week do to you?

I found a picture of you this morning and held it up to the light. Your eyes were smiling and your face was full of what could only be described as joy. There was something in the way you had your lips pursed together that looked like you were about to break out into a great big laugh. All I could think was how happy you seemed, how full of youth and hope you were. I wondered what changed to make you the way you are now and then I realized the picture was taken last Sunday, almost ten years ago. God, we’ve all gotten so old since then.

Hey, there is a new Radiohead B-side coming out with the vinyl release of their latest album. I am not the kind of person who falls all over himself at every new Radiohead release — you know who those people are, and if you are one of them I guess I’m glad that you still have something to be enthusiastic about but also it’s close to 25 years that they have been doing this now, maybe relax a little bit — but this song is rather good and I think you will appreciate it. If that’s not your speed there’s a Gucci Mane/Lil Wayne collaboration here. Either way, enjoy. Good luck on the long slog to the weekend. I keep telling myself we’ll get there someday.

Vocaroo | Voice message

★★ Low unshaped clouds were racing by, crossing a quarter of the sky in half a minute. A worker was hosing down the sidewalk, and the wind threw the spray onto oncoming pedestrians yards away. Heavy gray cut with brightness was dragging across the eastern sky. By irregular stages, the gray took and held the middle of the day. A flight of napkins raced across the subway mouth from the vicinity of the waffle cart, entered the crosswalk, and began making a wide circle in the middle of Broadway. The newsstand keeper complained that every time he stepped outside, the wind would blow the door shut and he would have to unlock it to get back in. A few cold drops came down from the still grayer late sky.