FUCKING SPRING MY FELLOW HUMANS! I hate to be such a damn season ninny but when spring hits right it really is just the best damn thing. The afternoon sunlight has a quality that allows me to bask in it even if I’ve made a poor transit choice and I’m standing on an elevated platform watching the express trains roll by my local stop. Also being a non-allergies person allows me to opt out of that spring downer conversation, I GUESS I’M JUST BUILT DIFFERENT. UNFORTUNATELY, the things that are happening that are not SPRING HITTING are quite quite bad! Really dark stuff that throws a damper on my happy-go-lucky look at all the trees in bloom let’s go ahead and take that 45-minute night walk that you want my dog joyousness.
ROSES AND THORNS
When I got to college I heard about kids who would sit down to dinner with their parents and name three good things and three bad things that they saw or experienced that day, they’d call them Roses and Thorns. This sounded like a nice way of communicating as opposed to my childhood of spending dinner hoping that we’d sit late enough to miss the boring syndicated episode of MASH and be dining just as the awesome syndicated episode of Night Court was coming on. So now I’m stealing this idea for what may or may not be a running feature!
ROSES:
The supermarket near my studio is not great, the selection is hit or miss and they recently redesigned their produce section so that the leafy greens sit pretty much in direct sunlight all afternoon. They do however have some pretty amazing PAPER BAGS. I know it doesn’t seem like much but after living through years of terrible plastic bags and now the annoying era of reusable bags (on balance a positive but they are all ugly and not enjoyable to hold), these sturdy unbranded (on the side of the bag, the bottom reveals that they are made by The AJM Packing Corporation, this model I believe) handle-less paper bags are a damn delight! They crinkle up real nice and I get to feel like I’m taking lunch to a jobsite in the 80s or something! It reminds me of a paper bag in a movie but I cannot place which one, I thought it was the bag that Emilio Estevez has his lunch in from The Breakfast Club but that one has a big logo on it. I GUESS WE’LL NEVER KNOW.
The book I’m reading is gooooooooood! It took me a minute to get into it but now I’m rolling right through, really enjoying the ride. It’s Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead who almost always delivers (the one book about elevator inspectors was a little too Pynchon-ey for me but I still liked it).
While we’re still on Whitehead the first essay in Colossus of New York, City Limits, is still something I think about years after reading it, and it is one of the finest things I’ve ever read about New York City. Here it is.
THORNS:
Not being able to say it’s bad to murder someone on the subway.
Cops (If you don’t subscribe to Hell Gate, you really should!)
SOUND OF THE WEEK
This could be a song or just like a sound I heard or something. MY SUBSTACK MY RULES!
I was going to write about the new Sweeping Promises single but then I was reading an interview that was kind of boring to me and the subject mentioned this piece of music from Donkey Kong Country 2. OH BOY, this is some good shit! Like if someone sent me a bandcamp link to this song it would be an immediate purchase. The various Donkey Kong sagas never really fit into my limited gaming life but hearing this song, and now the rest of the soundtrack by David Wise, makes me want to reconsider. I meant I won’t, I’m not really playing video games right now and will probably wait till it gets cold again to play the new Zelda game but I WILL listen to this soundtrack repeatedly!
CELEBRITY SIGHTING OF THE WEEK
I had a couple this week but I’ll save one for the next dry stretch. Besides the first one was a TRUE DELIGHT! Henry Winkler came into my workplace and melted our hardened service worker hearts by being incredibly nice! This was in spite of the fact that he violated some sacrosanct restaurant rules by showing up 5 minutes before we opened without a reservation but with a large party that included multiple children. As he left, he acknowledged my somewhat rote “have a good night” by saying “I already have”! WHAT A CHARMER!