inspo/funny
Miranda July,
Ingmar Bergman,
Thomas Pynchon,
Jonathan Franzen,
Lucia Berlin
otherwise uncaptured moments of humor
[...] His wife fed me a treasured Czech recipe which was so garlicky that the next day Marie-Claude wordlessly gave me chlorophyll gum and at the movies the couple in the row in front of us got up and took different seats when she and I sat down behind them.
The house was easy to find again, because it was on a dead-end street by the cheerful name of Felix and its street-side mailbox bore a weathered NIXON AGNEW bumper sticker, possibly humor, possibly a red herring for the township police, or possibly, who could say, a heartfelt statement. As Perry came up the street named Felix toward the rail embankment, he saw the white Dodge in the driveway, buried in whiter snow. Light showed around the edges of sagging shades in the house’s living-room windows. The front walk was unshoveled, altogether untrodden.
the drug dealer lol
Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining—wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. . . . Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets. . . .
oh my god
502 was the clue for 1-Across in this morning’s Times. Easy. That’s the police code for Driving While Intoxicated, so I wrote in DWI. Wrong. I guess all those Connecticut commuters knew you were supposed to put in Roman numerals. I had a few moments of panic, as I always do when memories of my drinking days come up. But since I moved to Boulder I have learned to do deep breathing and meditation, which never fail to calm me.
I’m glad I got sober before I moved to Boulder. This is the first place I ever lived that didn’t have a liquor store on every corner. They don’t even sell alcohol in Safeway here and of course never on Sundays. They just have a few liquor stores mostly on the outskirts of town, so if you’re some poor wino with the shakes and it’s snowing, Lord have mercy. The liquor stores are gigantic Target-size nightmares. You could die from DTs just trying to find the Jim Beam aisle.
god this is funny
I stood holding the note with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. I could have cried, but why? It’s not like I need to dish with my husband about every little thing; that’s what friends are for. Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.
Saturday. I got out of bed and looked at the calendar on my computer. (This is the kind of thing you can do easily if you don’t share a bed with your husband. He snores, I’m a light sleeper.) On Saturday at three o’clock Harris had driven Sam to a playdate, so at four I had been alone. That’s right—I had dutifully called my parents, but they weren’t home so I began texting friends in New York about my upcoming visit; I had just turned forty-five and this trip was my gift to myself. I was going to see plays and art and stay in a nice hotel instead of with friends, which normally would feel like a waste of money, but I’d gotten a surprise check—a whiskey company had licensed a sentence I’d written years ago for a new global print campaign. It was a sentence about hand jobs, but out of context it could also apply to whiskey. Twenty grand.
lol
He wasn’t as young as he looked, but he was younger than he thought he was. Thirty-one is young, I said. He winced like I was just being polite. He felt like a fuckup, like he should have done more by now. He’d wasted time on stupid shit. He was working overtime these days; he needed to save up twenty thousand dollars, a “nest egg,” and that would take years and years. I nodded, getting it. There was nothing on my person that revealed I’d just been paid twenty thousand dollars for one sentence about hand jobs.
“You recognized me,” I said tightly.
“Well, sure. I saw you talking to that guy at the gas station and thought I was going to have a heart attack. Then we had the thing when I cleaned your windshield.”
“But you couldn’t see me, the glare—”
“What are you talking about? We were looking right at each other.”
I felt like I was moving in slow motion, underwater.
“So when you came into that restaurant, Fontana’s—”
“I knew you’d be there. Because you’d asked the gas station guy where to eat.”
Not just a fan, a stalker.
“You really seemed like you didn’t remember seeing me,” I said evenly. “That was a good performance.”
“But I thought we both knew. We had had the crazy moment through the windshield, and now we were playing a kind of game. You asked me so many questions. And I kind of spilled the beans when I said I worked at Hertz.”
I didn’t see how that was spilling the beans.
“Oh my god,” he said, covering his mouth, “you’re so . . . You think everyone’s job is to clean your windshield.”
I shook my head. “No—you were cleaning another car, too.”
“A Hertz car. You do understand that I don’t work at a gas station?”
I turned red. There was a little vagueness around car-related jobs.
ahahaha
Meanwhile, the administration was understaffed and over-worked. The theatre director’s secretary was also the press officer. The costume studios were disintegrating and the permanent stage designers were ill or alcoholics. Communication was an unknown concept.
lmao
I high-handedly moved to the Savoy Hotel and swore I was prepared to pay whatever it cost. Lord Olivier offered me his pied-a-terre at the top of a high-rise in one of the more genteel areas of the city. He assured me I would not be disturbed. He and his wife, Joan Plowright, lived in Brighton, and he might spend the odd night in London occasionally, but we would not embarrass one another. I thanked him for his thoughtfulness and moved in, to be welcomed by a Dickensian character who was his housekeeper. She was Irish, four feet tall and moved crabwise. In the evenings she read her prayers so loudly, I first thought it was a service being broadcast through a loudspeaker in her room.
im sorry but this is hilarious