#44: Vroom vroom beep beep!

Actual updates

I guess the biggest piece of news around here is that I’ve had a few driving lessons, and I’m going to have a few more, and it’s going okay so far. I’ve done a bunch of 3-point turns! I’ve gone through nearly every rotary on the West Roxbury Parkway!1 I’ve parallel parked, mediocrely, in a really easy spot with nothing behind me! I’m not terrible, particularly for a n00b, although I’m not fantastic yet. I haven’t got an instinctive sense of how big the car is or how fast I’m going (beyond “too fast” or “too slow” - like, I don’t have a sense of the speed per hour), but I suppose that comes with time. I do go too slowly a lot, though. And I’m worried that my lane changes aren’t precise enough.

Actually, there’s a lot to worry about and a lot to keep in your mind at any one time; how do you all do it without being the most stressed and flustered people on planet earth? I haven’t behaved that way out loud yet but after I get out of the car my brain revisits every choice I made, with a red pen in hand. I have to keep from doing that while I drive, since that would render me incapable of doing anything at all, but not to the point that I am not paying attention or don’t care. And people learn how to walk this balance when they’re 16? Whose brain is that calm at 16??

Anyway. I’ve got 7 more lessons to go in the package that I bought, and presumably then I’ll take my test. I’ll let you know how it goes.

To make a big tonal shift, every time I talk about body stuff, I get replies and have conversations. Since I did last time, it’s happened again. I relish this; it feels good to know we’re all climbing out of that pit together, and we can help one another. But man, the culture (such as it was) really did a number on so many of us. It breaks my heart; all these friends who are so gorgeous thinking they were cave trolls because someone told them so, because they didn’t meet some incredibly strict standard. If you need someone to tell you you’re a fox, come see me!

But ok, to be more serious2, I feel like I’m stepping into a role that befits my increasingly crone status. I’ve been fucking through it with my body, I’ve (not to be dramatic) suffered, I’ve been a variety of sizes and seen what changes with that, both in terms of my own outlook and the way others view me, I’ve made good choices and bad choices and indifferent choices, and I’m increasingly at peace. It’s weird. I’m not really there. I know that. I think about my physical form too much for that to be true. I still weigh myself every few days, for goodness’ sake, and have opinions on the direction of the trend line. But the way in which I consider myself is more often descriptive than prescriptive: the dimensions of my body aren’t connected to a value judgment, the same way my height or my hair color or my shoe size aren’t. If you call me fat, I cannot be offended by that anymore; it’s just a description of me (and not an inaccurate one!).

And so with this comes the ability to … what? Help, maybe? Or, maybe that’s too strong a word; help isn’t something someone can give you externally. But I can be steady for you. I can be with you while you do this, and show you that it can be done, even by someone as fucked up emotionally as me. Someone who looks like me can think they look basically ok, even after family, friends, schoolmates, teachers, and total strangers on the street gave me every message to the contrary. Someone like me can act like they think they’re cute. I have fought and worked through too many miserable years for the right to say these things, and my experience gives me conviction. I think maybe people are taken aback that I’m out here acting like I have a right to look the way I look, because obviously that’s the opposite of what I’m supposed to think, societally, and maybe that’s why people want to talk - I must have discovered the secret.

I don’t know if I have. But even if I’m not perfect myself, even if I backslide sometimes about myself, I’ll never leave a friend out to dry with this. It’s the kind of feeling you would jump into a volcano to keep your friends from experiencing, even when you know they already have, and I am always here to talk about it, or listen about it, if you want to talk about it. I won’t buckle under it; I’m sturdy, after all.

What else, what else. We went on vacation at the start of the month, but that’s the kind of thing that’s only interesting to the people doing it, while they do it. We went in some caves, we bought some souvenirs. What more can I tell you3.

What am I reading

Another day, another book of Hap & Leonard short stories by Joe R. Lansdale. This time, it’s Born for Trouble; we’re not treading a lot of new ground here with the fellas, they’re still bickering like brothers and getting into scrapes while trying to solve mysteries and keep their heads above water. It’s fine! Not everything has to be the most innovative literature I’ve read all year.

But one thing that this one addresses is that the guys are aging, but not at the rate of one year per real-world year. If they were the age they “should” be according to the regular passage of time vs the age they were at the time of the first book, they’d be senior citizens. They’re not, but they are in the modern era - they’ve got smartphones, people drive cars that exist today, there’s passing reference to some political events - and finally we have definitive word that this is because time only passes for them when Lansdale wants it to. Which, authorially, makes sense.

One other thing is that there’s a story whose impetus is that Hap (Collins! not my kid!) might be feeling the weight of having had all these dramatic misadventures, come close to death, hurt and killed people, been unable to save people, and so on. The story soon moves into other directions, but the idea that this weighs on him and that it isn’t always easy to carry is something worth mentioning when you’ve got a series of stories and books about these characters, spanning years and years, where they’re nonstop getting into Situations.

Anyway, it’s fine! I’m having a good time!4

Some links

This is an excerpt from a book; it’s about the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, and how it was the home and headquarters of the western press during World War Two, and I’ve got to read more. Also, if you’ve read A Gentleman in Moscow, this is also where it is set (although not at the same time). The Secret History of a Moscow Hotel’s Double Life

I kind of wanted this article to be a bit more - it sets you up, and it gives you a few examples, but I was hoping for a deeper dive - but what you get is still neat, and I can only imagine how bizarre our current beauty norms will look to someone in 400 years. Tinder for Tudors: The Power of Portraiture in 15th-Century Matchmaking

Oh, my god, now this is the science that we need. Who among us has never taken public transit and seen a drip - or, god forbid, had one land on you - and wondered with some dread and disgust just what that drip was comprised of? I remember a time that there was an ongoing leak in one of the tunnels between the orange and red lines at Downtown Crossing, and a drip hit my hand, and I thought, well, farewell to that hand. Also, are we not all assuming that any unidentified subway liquid is pee? Anyway, this has the facts. What’s in the Subway Water that Drips on your Head?

A great essay about working in the sexy-massage industry, and about moving from that line of work into another, more mainstream one. We Are All Animals at Night

Mail-order scams! Kind of a relic of a bygone era, not so much because the world has run out of gullible people, but because now we’re getting scammed in other ways. Another feather in Canada’s cap!!! The Greatest Scam Ever Written

I guess, thanks to … TikTok? travel-themed IG influencers? … this is well-known to many people, but my social media doesn’t trend that way or whatever, so this was the first I learned of Up Helly Aa, an annual festival in the Shetland Islands, and how it’s been going through some changes lately. It’s incredibly interesting, although I guess if you’ve been following the right kind of travel influencer for a while, you probably already know! Mythology and Misogyny at the Edge of the World

If you haven’t already read this, please treat yourself. It concerns a man named Domenic Broccoli, who is an IHOP franchise magnate, and what happened when he found a dead body during a restaurant expansion. You would not expect the Revolutionary War to get involved, but it does!! The Battle of Fishkill

Different authors reflect on “The Lottery”! It’s great! Man, Shirley Jackson was a genius. 75 Years After “The Lottery” Was Published, the Chills Linger

I had no idea you could simply lose train cars, but someone managed it - and train cars as iconic as these! The tale of searching them up is pretty amazing, too. The Hunt for the Missing Orient Express Trains

I don’t know why I always have at least one art theft article, but it’s a Thing now apparently. Anyway, read about how this guy stole some art! Inside a Heist with the World’s Greatest Art Thief

This article was tailor-made for me, an old fart who thinks current pop music is singularly unmemorable and samey, just as every old fart has in their turn, and not due to any inherent quality in the music. But this purports to validate me: they ARE all the same song! Because the same person built them this way! Or people who want to emulate his work did! You’re not just an elderly crank, you’re actually right (unlike the elderly cranks who said this about the music you listened to in high school, who were simply calcified old fossils with no taste). Is it correct? I don’t know. But it feels vindicating. Dream of Antonoffication

You know, if you’re going to have this wedding, it’s ok not to invite me! I won’t feel spurned! How I Survived a Wedding in a Jungle that Tried to Eat Me Alive

I bet you never thought this much about condom testing, manufacture, and marketing! But also, like… not to get too personal, but the whole thing of people being unwilling to have sex with them on, and how it feels so impersonal and bad… grow up, honestly. “People Are Like, ‘Wow!’”: The Man Trying to Make Condoms Sexy

Oh, man, this was compelling. The Salton Sea is weird and fascinating in a historical way and a scientific way; a band I enjoy has made it part of their personality; and it’s a massive and tragic ecological disaster. Scientists Warned of a Salton Sea Disaster. No One Listened

Space psychology! Fake Mars! The effect of not being able to see Earth (bad)! Super Buck Moon 2023 

Tern Island is falling apart. It’s an island that got built out into a runway for fighter planes back during the war, and then abandoned, and it is crumbling in a way that’s incredibly dangerous to the birds and sea life that stop there. That would be an interesting enough read on its own, but this story takes a SHARP TURN in the second half. The Lonely Battle to Save Species on a Tiny Speck in the Pacific

From one Pacific island fucked up under the auspices of the US military to another: Guam is the kind of place that’s vitally important to the system when geopolitics require, and absolutely written off the rest of the time, and that’s appalling. The America that Americans Forget

Oooh, the year I lived out here as a kid (1993-94, when I was in grade 7), Starter jackets were the thing, and I remember standing in a department store in need of a new coat and feeling their weird crinkly fabric between my fingers, trying to decide which team I would get. I couldn’t get the team I wanted, because they didn’t have them in stock - which I figured was because I was on the other side of the continent from them, but this article makes clear was a calculated scarcity strategy - and I wound up getting a boring regular coat anyway. But I remember how certain teams’ jackets were trendy, which seemed strange to me - wouldn’t you just want the team you were a fan of? Not just one whose colours were in style? The Rise and Fall of Starter, the Coolest Company on Earth

In Nigeria, genetic testing for sickle cell disease can make or break relationships. It’s fraught - you want to do well by your possible future kids in terms of their health, but you also have to be true to your own heart. This story will break it a little, I think. Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease

You won’t be surprised that a woman invented the dishwasher, but you might be surprised about how long ago it was. The Forgotten Housewife Who Invented Your Dishwasher

Another invention: the history of the pop-top for cans! Who knew this was actually interesting! I still call a bottle opener a “church key” because fundamentally I am an old man5. How Popping Open a Can Became the Sound of Summer

I’m sorry, I have to spoil the most nuts thing in this article, but: this is the Depths of Wikipedia lady, and she’s roommates with the guy who started Birds Aren’t Real! Also she’s out there making perpetual stew in a park with her community, which is nice, but: birds!!! Our Lady of Perpetual Stew

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

Saw this guy play a show a few years back (I say things like “a few years back” and it turns out to be like, fully a decade) that someone I was actually trying to see was opening. This is a man who looks and sounds like 100 years ago, walking the streets today. I recently decided to listen through his discography; here’s a taste.

I can’t remember how this artist came to my attention! Either in a playlist that someone I don’t personally know made, or on a Spotify Blend I’m in6, and I heard one song (this one, actually) and was in. I listened to their discography, I’ll probably buy an album, I’m all the way on board.

This album has been on a lot lately, I don’t know. It’s good! What can I tell you!

This month’s top 5: Vacation souvenirs throughout my life

I was thinking about how we stop at the gift shop now. Growing up, that was not something we really did - unnecessary, expensive but simultaneously cheap (derogatory), can’t you just remember it with your brain and/or photos? - but now we do it every time we go somewhere, and honestly, it’s nice. Unfortunately, here is this list.

1. A nice mug from the Jameson Distillery in Dublin, when we were in Ireland for our honeymoon and we were deposited in the gift shop at the end of the boozy tour. Everyone gets a sample, but a lucky few get selected to do a comparison test between Jameson, an American whiskey which I believe was Jack Daniels, and a scotch. And these lucky few also get to have the regular sample. Matt was one of these. The guy next to him was apparently too good for the Jack Daniels, and offered his to Matt. So he was pretty loaded by the time we got to the gift shop7. Honestly, the mug is pretty good on its own, but the memory it unlocks is even better.

2. The memory of changing the bandage on my finger, from the cut that gave me my best and most interesting scar, in a hotel room in Thailand when I was 5. I got the cut at my friend’s house back in Jakarta8, where we lived at the time, but no way was my having 3 stitches in my finger going to prevent us from going on our little vacation.

3. The number 385, from an inside joke that got out of hand9, on a trip to the Gulf Islands with some high school pals.

4. I dunno, I’ve got some ok magnets and stuff

5. A persistent and recurring stomach bug in East Java as a teenager that we initially thought was just a momentary bout of food poisoning but stuck around, on and off, for years, and ultimately led to my Big Digestive Thing that consumed me10 for several months in my senior year of college

Honorable mention for the souvenir I didn’t get: scabies, when a bunch of the kids in my class did, on our grade 9/10 class trip to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival. I thought I had talked about this here, but maybe not. Anyway, we camped, there was a hillside nearby covered in long grass, and everyone who went there for any reason came home with scabies. Not me, though, I was in a nearby apple orchard possibly stealing apples. What! It was unclear whether we were allowed to be there or not, but nobody ever told us to stop! Oh, like you weren’t a little shit at 14.

Well, that’s all I’ve got this month! I hope you got to go somewhere and get a souvenir, too, and that it was a good one and not, like, a disease. Don’t forget to throw a couple bucks at the Entertainment Community Fund to support striking writers and actors if you’ve got it, we all gotta stick together!