“New video shows ‘Pedals’ the injured upright bear making its way through a yard in New Jersey this week.” The video of this bear walking upright is amazing — particularly if you can keep your mind off the fact that the only reason he is doing it is because of horrific damage to his front paws, two disfiguring wounds which make his lighthearted nickname equally difficult to enjoy if you really think about it. Anyway, he’s walking around like we do! [Via]

All the major national referenda of my lifetime have operated along these lines: a sense of confidence at the opening from analysts that voters will choose the safer economic option; an increasing level of unease at the midway point; a moment where the less conservative option takes a small lead in the polls, leading to panic; a restoration of equilibrium between the two options as voters go to choose; a decision by voters to choose the safer economic option. Will today’s vote on Brexit on Knifecrime Island play out any differently? If your answer is “What the fuck is Brexit,” oh my God, I wish I were you, I wish I weren’t paying attention to any of this. You’re so lucky. If you still want to know Google “noel gallagher brexit,” that should get you up to speed. Speaking of music, Thundercat’s terrific The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam EP came out last summer, but there’s a new video now, which is as good an excuse as any for us all to remember Thundercat’s terrific The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam EP. Enjoy.

★★★★ If any of the overnight rain that was supposed to have fallen had fallen, it had failed to cleanse or even to wet anything. The sky was pleasantly divided, for a moment, between clear pale blue in the west and sun-blocking clouds in the east. That protection was swiftly withdrawn, and the freed sun made the eyes hurt. The blinds on the near side of the Starbucks on the way to Columbus Circle were all the way down, so that it looked as if it had gone out of business. The 1 train had been impossibly late, and the attempt to work around the 1 led to an empty and suffocating downtown N/Q/R platform at Herald Square, hotter than anywhere else would be all day. Back uptown, in the late afternoon, candy corn had been flattened into the sidewalk, each piece losing its pointed shape but keeping its color bands through its coating of dirt. The river was thick with blue haze. The famous minimalist played one of his piano etudes under a white canopy on the pier, and a little child lurched off the low concrete barrier, slopping water all around. A near-baby in a pink polo shirt wailed. A helicopter droned along under a temporary gathering of clouds. The four-year-old waited till the end of the piece, then went sprinting down to the empty far end of the pier, where the sound was of the intermittently plashing Hudson, interrupted by the blast of a cruise ship, glimmering in a localized patch of sun, leaving its berth downriver. Back at the landward end of the pier, in the cafe, pigeons sent gusts of air over feet as they fought under the chairs for a scrap of a chicken tender. The cloud cover broke and the sun came in hot and clear under the table umbrella. The day stretched on and on; down at Pier 62, skateboarders lounged by their waterless swimming pools. Through a gap in the weedy plantings was the carousel, its carved indigenous animals glossy in the shade. Now the haze on the river was gold, and golden light shone through the sails on it. The clouds were in sharp whites and grays, with subtle blues underneath. A gull flew over, flamingo-colored in the light. The carousel spun through site-specific brass music. Now and again a drop or two of rain landed, though what was overhead was a mild shred of gold and then nothing at all. The music ended and the sun came straight across the water, throwing shadows the full length of the path back out. A big screen awaited outdoor moviegoers but it was hard to imagine how long it might take be dark enough. Sunset was ordinarily pretty in the west, but in the east and overhead, pink cumulus bloomed to preposterous shades and dimensions till the city below felt puny and flat.

Offnet week: No news, no blogs, no opinions.

Most civilized enterprises take breaks, often with everyone going away at the same time: schools observe summer vacations, sports franchises have off-seasons, the stock market closes, and France observes August. In the modern corporate world, it is generally understood that summer (unless of course you live in the Southern Hemisphere in which case it’s technically winter but I don’t feel sorry for you because you get a different night sky) is a time when it’s pleasant to spend more time than usual out of doors—whether it’s by a body of water, halfway up a mountain, or deep in some catacombs.

Therefore, during the summer season, it is expected and sometimes even encouraged for you to take off for a week (maybe two if you’re very senior!) at a time to get sunburned and read a trashy novel while everyone else stays at their air-conditioned desk job and just works around your absence. We all take turns having an “off” week, and everyone is given a grace period where they don’t have to do any work, respond to any emails, or pay attention to the meme of the week. (It’s only really fair in the aggregate, so please, do your part: TAKE VACATION!)

The Internet knows no such reprieve. No matter where you live, no matter what time it is, there’s always content churning and opinions spewing forth from every corner of the globe. It’s not even a cycle, because it doesn’t really ebb and flow it just gets more and worse and bad all the time. I would like to put forward a suggestion or perhaps a plea: let’s all agree to put down our keyboards and take a week off. No tweets, no Facebook posts, no hot takes, no Bloomberg Terminals. Call it: Offnet week. Total blackout.

I know what you’re thinking. You can’t just stop reading the news. Sure you can! It doesn’t mean stuff won’t happen. Spoiler alert: the tree still makes a noise. Also I suppose you could buy a paper paper, but good luck with The Hunger Games: Gray Lady Edition. It would be like a juice cleanse, but for the internet—we can admit that it’s mostly pointless and we would just return to our old bad habits, but for one glorious week we would feel like we’re floating, buzzing, almost light-headed. You wouldn’t be made artificially angry all the time, so your cortisone levels would totally plummet. You might even be pleasant to be around.

What would you do with your offnet week? Where would you go and who would you see? Remember, we’re offnet, so there’s no Instagramming or sharing of any kind. Would you still go see The Bean if you couldn’t take a picture of your reflection in it? Would you still order the ramen burger if you couldn’t geotag it? Would you even still have a pet cat anymore? WOULD ANYONE GO SEE HAMILTON?

No one would comment horrible things on celebrity’s Instagrams, because celebrities wouldn’t Instagram anything. We’d all be living like Tina Fey, who doesn’t even use Twitter or participate in internet inanity (a feat that becomes increasingly as improbable as it is impressive). Best of all, since we’d all done it together, no one would have missed anything. Do you really think you’re capable of knowing everything? Force yourself to let the fuck go.

A morning with the highbrow hip-hop ambassador

People Hear What They See, proclaimed the 2012 album by Amir Mohamed el Khalifa, the rapper and composer known as Oddisee. Before a performance at June’s Northside Festival I met the wiry, sleepy-eyed Sudanese-American from Maryland, one of hip-hop’s most highbrow stars, at his Brooklyn apartment. An espresso bar and an upscale infant clothier had just opened on Malcolm X Boulevard, Bed-Stuy’s Orthodox Jews scuttled en masse to sabbath services, and a trio of Airedales roamed within the rusted fencing of Fulton Park footsteps from the blocks made infamous by Jay-Z, Fabolous, and the Notorious B.I.G.

In the last three months, Oddisee released a surprise rap EP, Alwasta, an instrumental record titled The Odd Tape, and embarked upon a thirty-date international tour with his band, Good Compny. Conceived and recorded in the span of one week, Alwasta voices the leeriness of immigrants and Muslim-Americans in an election year. The Odd Tape reached #12 on iTunes’ hip hop chart, rare for an independent release, and even rarer for one without vocals. “My father taught me never to put all my eggs in one basket,” he said. “So I did my best to chart a career that allowed me to make instrumental records, solo records that were expressive and jazz-oriented, and to tour with a band playing acoustic material.”

Oddisee ascended as one-third of D.C.-area supergroup Diamond District, whose 2009 debut In the Ruff was heralded as a hearkening to the no-frills underground rap of the mid-1990s. Featuring articulate, streetwise raps over sturdy percussion, it was an Avengers-style team-up and rallying cry from a metropolis that still lacked a national hip hop star (in the pre-Wale days).

In creating the group, he said they wanted to “carve out an identity for the District of Columbia and its surrounding areas, to create the record that we didn’t have in the mid-90s. New York, Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles had so many odes to their neighborhoods, streets, corners, establishments. We never had that record to immortalize our area. I wanted to do that.”

Oddisee was the first act signed and remains the flagship artist on Mello Music Group, an Arizona label founded by ESL teacher Michael Tolle in 2007. Drawing inspiration from the Blue Note Records catalog, Mello features an eclectic roster of rappers almost exclusively from outside rap’s traditional coastal meccas as well as visual artists showcased on the label’s considerable physical output. Releases are pressed on CDs, cassettes, and specialty vinyl as well as delivered through Bandcamp, Soundcloud, YouTube, and premium streaming services.

“The goal was to create a middle-class American label,” Tolle said. Most of Mello’s acts are highly educated and wear glasses; some are acquired tastes and a few are middle-aged. If Mello’s extended success — predicated on humble, self-deprecating rappers — has indicated anything, it’s that even in rap outsiders need not be unmarketable. With little airplay save for the haven of college radio, promotion is contingent upon a lo-fi online presence and tour dates.

Raised in Prince George County, Maryland, just across the D.C. border, Oddisee spent summers in his father’s native Sudan before moving into Washington for high school. He drew musical inspiration from D.C.’s go-go funk subgenre, embracing faster tempos, softer bass lines, and more sprightly percussion than usually found in East Coast hip-hop, and he also explored rhythms and time signatures of traditional North African music. His instrumental work carries an undeniable sense of place: 2010’s Traveling Man was assembled on tour, with twenty-five short tracks capturing the sounds and feels of their eponymous cities, whereas the lush Rock Creek Park from 2011 was inspired by the leafy national park spanning D.C.’s Northwest quadrant.

A nimble and meticulous vocalist, his unmodified mid-Atlantic delivery is natural but hardly effortless. His hooks often have strategically placed syllables drawn out for emphasis, a tactic similarly employed by younger likeminded D.C. rappers Toine and Quartermaine. On Alwasta’s “Strength & Weakness,” the half-sung, half-rapped chorus embodies the narrative’s hopeful conflictedness, whereas the less emphatic hook of “Asked About You” injects the song’s grappling uncertainty with a playful vivacity. The rhyme schemes — over strata of synths, horns, bells, and live drums — are dense, but seldom difficult. Sociopolitical lyrics strive to be observant rather than preachy, as on “Lifting Shadows” which drips with the paranoia of a conspiracy thriller:

I’m just an artist, you’re not a target, no use in arguing we all look the same
With that knowledge I stay calm, when they search for bombs all they find is grain
All in the name, I got a name that’ll scare all the brave in the land of the free
All in the name of protecting a country that’s shooting its citizens dead in the streets
I used to live in Northeast D.C., not too far from Capitol Hill
White House here, trap house there, they were so near you could go by feet
Never mind that ’cause that’s not news, let’s stay glued to war on peace
Who gets blamed, whoever can sway that election toward what the order seeks

“One of my favorite shows growing up was The Simpsons,” he recalled. “As an adult, I’d watch reruns and say, ‘Oh my gosh, that was such an adult joke I didn’t get.’ I realized it was written in layers, and that I needed to do that with my music — to write such that people who are academically advanced will appreciate it on one level, and that people who don’t have the privilege of higher education won’t feel alienated by some high-vocabulary existentialist lyrics that aren’t relatable.”

Examining human behavior and relationships, Oddisee expresses revelry in a nearly universal set of pleasures: love, freedom, hard work, and travel. A serious coffee connoisseur, he tellingly titled The Odd Tape’s early-morning soundscape “No Sugar, No Cream.” He’s afforded a virtually unprecedented degree of experimentation because he’s such an accomplished musician first, but also because he maintains almost unanimous respect among rap’s more conservative gatekeepers with a foot grounded in the precocious, sometimes flippant battle rap of his early work.

“There’s always going to be that one quintessential hip hop track,” he said. “Even on The Odd Tape the interludes are very boom bap, old school, whereas the instrumentals for the full tracks are a bit more aggressive. I’m conscious of my multiple audiences, but I never feel the need to compromise myself because I love all those sounds.”

Oddisee outwardly embraced the avant-garde that was always at the heart of his music. His braids were a casualty of the same purgative epoch that Ludacris and Carmelo Anthony’s were. After years of critical praise on their website, NPR — “Hometown guys,” he laughed — invited him to be one of the first rappers featured on their Tiny Desk concert series. In anticipation of his 2015 album The Good Fight, promotional coffee sleeves were printed and distributed at independent coffeehouses in eight cities. He is currently endorsed by the eyewear brand Etnia Barcelona, and models a line of glasses inspired by the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“A few years back, a friend informed me that NPR’s Marketplace was playing one of my instrumentals in the background,” he remembered. “Then extreme sports companies like Quiksilver and D.C. Shoes started approaching me — surfers and skateboarders were asking to use my music in their videos because it gelled with their concepts. ESPN licensed a song I produced for the NBA Finals. It’s that diversity that allows me to survive as an independent artist.”

The timing of his prominence parallels the Obama presidency, and he has emerged as an authority with an international coalition of progressives, intellectuals, vinyl collectors, internet DJs, jazz and afrobeat heads, classic hip-hop fans, Muslims, politically engaged millennials, and concertgoers who’ve found his music through a breadth of channels. Where the cautious exuberance expressed upon Obama’s election by rap diplomats such as Nas and Jeezy grew garbled and dubious over the recession of his first administration, Oddisee found his voice when theirs went hoarse as a function of limited perspectives. “The lack of critical thinking in the world, especially in America, scares me more than anything Trump could say,” Oddisee said.

Oddisee’s next full-length solo Iceberg is halfway finished and slated for release close to election season. “The theme is taking stories of everyday life — fear, money, achievement, failure — and applying almost a Gladwell perspective, analyzing why things are the way they are,” he said. “Whether it be fear of Muslim and Arab migrants into Europe, Islamophobia in America, or fear of migrant workers taking American jobs, no one thinks critically about the difference between how we see things and how things really are.”

Back in his apartment, Oddisee reflected on his youth. “Going back to Sudan every summer as a kid from America, I’d make a connection stop in this strange land called Europe to go to this place called Africa. It made me realize how small and interconnected everything was, and how much we all belong to everything. My family comes through a diaspora on both sides, one through slavery and the other through war and crisis. I have cousins with British accents, Canadian accents, cousins who don’t speak English. We’re all from the same family, so how important are these nationalities?”

The next night, Good Compny took the stage just after sunset, allowing Oddisee time for a quick bite to break his daylong Ramadan fast. He paused mid-set to address a packed Brooklyn Bowl. “What you’re seeing in the news,” he said, referring to that morning’s tragedy in Orlando, “That’s not Islam.” The sextet proceeded into a rousing rendition of “That’s Love,” the uplifting opening track from The Good Fight. If people hear what they see, perhaps soon they’ll see, in Oddisee’s words, how much we all belong to everything.

Pete Tosiello is a New York-based writer.

Back-catalog sales numbers of note from Nielsen SoundScan.

The definition of “back catalog” is: “at least 18 months old, have fallen below No. 100 on the Billboard 200 and do not have an active single on our radio.”

Every week when I get The Charts, one of the first things I look at is the column titled “% CHG,” which gives the percentage change in sales relative to last week’s numbers. I specifically scan for any listings with the number 999, which usually means it’s an album’s first week on the back catalog and thus the ratio of however many thousands of records were sold to zero is enormous, OR something big happened in the news that spiked sales of a particular record. (Ed note: I never know how and whether to use “record” and “album” interchangeably or not, and even if you popsplain the difference or lack thereof to me, I can assure you it won’t stick, so please don’t try.)

This week, Van Morrison, Phil Collins, The Beach Boys, and Hunter Hayes were all in the first category. Christina Grimmie was tragically in the second. Grimmie, a YouTube star-turned-‘The Voice’ contestant was shot and killed after her concert in Orlando on June 10. Finally, Simon & Garfunkel had a crazy week; not quite a 999% week, but a 657% week, which is still pretty good—they jumped from spot 150 to number 4. The Simon & Garfunkel Story, a musical revue about their origin story, is now on tour in the UK after a huge success in London’s West End.

4. SIMON & GARFUNKEL BEST OF SIMON & GARFUNKEL 9,533 copies

37. VAN MORRISON IT’S TOO LATE TO STOP NOW (LIVE) 2,519 copies

45. GRIMMIE*CHRISTINA WITH LOVE 2,310 copies

49. BEACH BOYS*THE PET SOUNDS ­50TH ANNIVERSARY 2,244 copies

66. COLLINS*PHIL …BUT SERIOUSLY 1,956 copies

69. GRIMMIE*CHRISTINA COMPLETE SEASON 6 COLLECTION 1,940 copies

89. GRIMMIE*CHRISTINA FIND ME 1,699 copies

131. BEACH BOYS*THE PET SOUNDS­ 50TH ANNIVERSARY (4CD) 1,372 copies

163. HAYES*HUNTER STORYLINE 1,227 copies

(Previously.)

You know, as terrible as everything is maybe it will be slightly more tolerable if we have a steady stream of new Avalanches tracks to listen to while it’s all crumbling around us. In a strange way, Wildflower could be the perfect soundtrack for the end of the world that we seem to be careening toward. Enjoy, I guess.

★★★ In the damp shade, on the walk to preschool, the breeze could hold off the heat for the moment, if only for the moment. Soon enough after, a hot blue haze filled Broadway. A taxi backed up and bumped into a man, and he walked away without looking back. People on the train were disheveled. Heat rose up off the asphalt in the crosswalk as the pedestrian signal took unbearably long to turn. The notion of ducking out for an iced coffee decayed from a plan to an aspiration to a missed opportunity. Each flare of light in the cross street drew the eye up to find another ugly flat-windowed building. Enough clouds arrived at the late sundown to make it richly and routinely gorgeous.

Maybe the world would be better served by Read A Book Live.

“The potential power of Facebook’s platform has been evident in early experiments. In April, two BuzzFeed employees streamed a Facebook Live video showing them placing rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded. It was Facebook’s most-watched live video, until it was beaten out by Facebook user Candace Payne, who in May filmed herself in her car, laughing uproariously over a noise-making Chewbacca mask. As of June 21, the nearly 45-minute watermelon video was viewed 10.8 million times; Ms. Payne’s four-minute video has been viewed 157.6 million times.”

— You know how whenever you bring up the incontestable fact that the Internet is making us stupider some suck-up to technology is all, “Well, Socrates said the written word would turn everyone dumb”? First off, fuck that guy, but second: LOOK AT THAT PARAGRAPH ABOVE — a paragraph that exists in a piece that begins with the news that BuzzFeed and the New York Times are going to spend the next year putting on little skits for less money than Mark Zuckerberg keeps zippered up in his KangaROOS just in case he gets mugged — and tell me that we are actually entering a world where our smart levels are somehow going up. You can’t do it with a straight face, right? (Also why is the Socrates guy always the same jackass who comes back with “Newspapers have horoscopes!” They sure do, you disingenuous fuckwad. Enjoy watching your exploding Chewbacca mask videos, because that’s what the future holds for you.)

And other answers to unsolicited questions.

“I can never figure out what to have be the subject of my emails. Why do they have to have subjects? Can’t it just be an email from me?” — Subjectless Sue

Naming things is hard. For a long time, I thought the names of my unborn children would be Hero and Champ. How could you feel bad if your name was Hero or Champ? Every day you’d be like, I’m a Hero! And now I think maybe that kind of name for a kid is just too much pressure to live up to. When I named my fish, I went with Sam and Dave. Classic, non-Shakespearean names. Instead of Pyramus and Thisbe. I didn’t want them to feel the pressure of having to be star-crossed lovers, that just seems like a bad gig. There is no King Dave tragedy. When Sam died, I named the next fish Peggy.

I have one good title for my kind-of-unwritten novel: The Coldest Night of the Year. (In high school, we wrote a play about homelessness and called it that.) But I want my novel to be a bestseller, so it’s not about panhandlers near the Boston Public Library. I usually steal the names of my poems from Blues songs. I don’t think a thriller called “It Serves Me Right to Suffer” would be a bestseller. Even though one of my favorite books is “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me” by Richard Fariña. It’s not a great title, but it is a great book.

It used to be so exciting to get emails. I mean, not as exciting as it was to get letters or mix tapes in the mail. But pretty exciting. Especially when the internet was new, and we had no idea how to connect with each other or what it all might mean to be connected to each other. I used to love to write letters. Now, I guess I just can’t think of anyone to write a letter to. All of my emails are like a sentence long. Crafted in mere seconds. Utilitarian, lacking any zeal or poetry. “OK, sounds cool.” That is fifty percent of the emails I have ever sent. “OK, no problem.” That one is the other fifty.

Do emails need subjects? I guess business emails do. Like “Oh No, Our Company is Going Down the Toilet!” I haven’t gotten that email at my job yet, thankfully. At the bookstore, most of the emails I get are “Books” or “Book Order.” I don’t ever even look at the subject of an email, just usually who sent it. Most of the personal emails I send are usually titled “Hey.” I thought this was a perfectly fine subject until someone told me that emails with the subject “Hey” usually came from ex-boyfriends looking to pick up underwear from their apartment after a break-up. Then for a while I tried subjects like “Bubbles” or “Cotton Candy.” I was dissatisfied. I may just start using “I Want My Underwear Back.” What I really want is to get fewer emails and more letters.

You can always leave the subject fields blank! That would make so mysterious! What is this email about they would wonder for like 3 seconds! Will they open Pandora’s e-mail? I am so lazy I often split the first line of an email into half subject, half message “I am sorry that / I put the non-stick pan in the dishwasher and now it’s all pale and faded.” These are not the grand messages I expected to be sharing with others through the power of the epistolary. Most poets have long correspondences with other poets about all the secrets of the universe. I am not that kind of poet. Today a Skittle fell into my navel and I couldn’t get it out. For a while. I mean, way too long a while. It was really jammed up in there. That is the kind of poet I am.

“I was at the grocery store today and I put my items down on the conveyor belt and the guy in front of me went nuts. His stuff was all the way at the front. There’s no way they were going to mix up his stuff and my stuff. There was at least ten feet of conveyor belt between us. Who is right, me or Crazy Grocery Store guy?” — Shopping Bob

I have to go with Crazy Grocery Store Guy here, Bob. Sorry. There are fewer and fewer rules that govern the behavior of humans in American society anymore. And we’ve got to stick with the ones that work. And the grocery store conveyor belt rules are built for us. For us to feel like we have earned the right to have a little space. That our oranges should not have to get mixed up with your Pop Tarts or whatever.

I was walking home from the grocery store the other day and two very small kids were playing badminton in their gated-in yard. (I live in New Jersey. Want some green space? Go to the graveyard.) So the shuttlecock comes out into the sidewalk and I stop, bend over and pick it up. One of these very small kids says “That’s ours.” Yeah, I know kid. I remember what happened five seconds ago. I am not that old. It was like the kid thought I was going to run away with this shuttlecock. Of course, I am just going in circles walking with grocery bags waiting for kids to let loose their toys in front of me so I can snatch them up, go home and make Crazy Kid Toy Soup with it. Now, in the kid’s defense I do look kind of like a guy who might make Crazy Kid Toy Soup. I am trying to grow a pointy beard out, again. Of course I gently tossed the shuttlecock back. And went on with my delightful day, affirmed. It’s a great feeling when a ball comes bounding your way and you get to throw it back to a bunch of kids, it’s always a thrill.

Anyway, the grocery store. When you are in line: first, your stuff goes up on the metallic lip of the conveyor belt. If you do not have an approved grocery store official plastic separator, you wait. I have seen people use separator-shaped items to separate their grocery purchases, Spaghetti in a box, or an eggplant. It doesn’t work. You are messing everything up. Just wait for the plastic separator. If the separator is in sight, you can carefully reach for it. If there is only one separator and it is being used, you must wait. When the separator gets removed by the customer and placed at the back of their stuff, it’s your turn, Bob. Your stuff goes up. As soon as you get the chance, the separator goes at the back of your stuff. Do not ever deviate from this simple pattern. We’ve already given away too much! Everyone is listening to my calls to my mom and dad, everyone’s reading my emails about wanting my underwear back. Can’t we allow order to beat chaos in this one case, the case of the line at the grocery store, Bob? We are not all shuttlecock-stealing monsters.

Don’t fence me in! But give me that little plastic grocery store separating thing, please!

“I’m not racist. But it kind of drives me crazy when I hear people on the subway speaking in different languages. I always think they are talking about me. Like, look at that dude with the weird pants over there. Am I being crazy?” — Ned Not a Racist

Why don’t people admit that they are a little racist? It’s always, I’m not a racist, but, etc. No one who is not a racist ever starts a sentence with “I’m not a racist.” It would be better if they said “I’m not a huge racist or anything, but….” “I’m kind of a racist, but not as big a racist as most people.” That kind of thing. This is America. You have a right to say racist things, clearly. People might elect you president for it. And if everyone just gave voice to whatever stupid, racist things they had in their brains, maybe things would be better off. We could have Racist Day, like that movie The Purge. Everyone would be able to tweet whatever crazy racist stuff they could think of and then we’d be able to see just what we were dealing with in America. I’m not sure we definitely want to peel that onion, but it could be revealing.

I love when people speak in other languages around me. Because they are almost certainly not talking to me. And I don’t have to do anything about it. I’ve failed English, Spanish, French, German. I can barely communicate with anyone at all. Overhearing conversations on the subway is usually pretty horrible if I do understand what people are saying. Because their conversations are usually so boring. I kind of hope people speaking in different languages on the subway were talking about me. That would be interesting! It’s really best to believe that everyone is always talking about you.

One time on the subway I heard a guy continually refer to Marcel Proust as Prowst. Those are the people we should be stealing shuttlecocks from. Build a wall around that guy.

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