Tag / writing

by Alexander Sorondo

April 26

Karaoke. You didn’t know.

A middle-aged guy in blue jeans with red suspenders and his shirt tucked in takes the stage with a melancholic rendition of “Love on the Rocks”. You see him at Barnes & Noble sometimes. He goes there with a backpack and a baseball cap and stays for hours. Reads a lot.

His voice is deep and he talks with a cadence that sounds aloof, and every step he takes looks a little too deliberate. You see him sometimes with a friend who’s shorter, slimmer, has more hair. They talk and talk and sound like close friends. This other guy sits while the big guy reads, never cracks a book himself. Just looks around, plays on his phone. Now and then he’ll interject with a remark. Big guy responds as though he weren’t preoccupied.

Next guy on stage is tall and white and bald, wears a sleeveless t-shirt, and he raps and even though the on-screen read-along has substituted the n- and f-word for something else he supplies them anyway. The room is uneasy, and he descends the stage with a smile. A shitty dude, powerless, takes what joy he can from making people uncomfortable.

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by Alexander Sorondo

April 23

Every now and then you’ll have a busy morning where you get more things done than you expected but most days you go to bed feeling like you haven’t done enough. Wouldn’t be able to sleep if you’d done nothing, though. You abide pretty strictly by the No Zero Days doctrine and, big or small, there’s something to show for your day.

But mostly you’ll find yourself sitting at the bar when Happy Hour comes around and you feel like a criminal, a burnout, a loser. Tethered to this place where you’ll slump and sulk forever about how unproductive you are.

Like today: you woke up, recorded a podcast at the house. Then you came to the coffee shop and edited the podcast from 18 minutes down to twelve. A good edit. Then you posted it. After that you fixed your resume and sent it out to somebody who’d asked to see it. Then you did about fifty pages of reading, edited the evening’s blog post, typed up a hand-written essay. It’s not nothing. But you spent a lot of the afternoon socializing. Wondering what you could be doing to be productive.

So you get here and have your drink and crack the notebook so you can add this to the list of shit you did today and now you’re mapping all the shit you ought to do with the rest of your night. You’ll probably do one of the four things you’re planning. if that.

So here’s a question to drink about: how much is enough?

It occurs to the narrator that there might at last be a feeling of success, or something like it, when he posts the last entry for 

Thousand Movie Project.

by Alexander Sorondo

April 22. Never looks the way you thought.

At work your colleague shows you this book he just bought. A friend of his wrote it. Published by a small house. The author photo is a candid shot, kinda blurry, taken at an event where he’s wearing a suit and holding a microphone.

Start thinking about how the author probably poured his heart into this book and a few hundred hours of eager earnest work and how he probably pitched it to a hundred agents who all broke his heart before he came across this little press, a local outfit, that took his book and dressed it up and shelved it in stores and got him some speaking engagements around town where he sits on a panel or reads to a small audience so that he can feel some vestige of what he figured — while writing — it would feel like to be an author

Eventually you realize you’re being negative for no reason and hush yourself.

That night at the Brewhouse you get a text from your brother that rustles your feathers and you’re writing some long-ass text in response, “and this thing and that thing and how dare you” — pointless. Negative for no reason.

Just agree with him. And then turn your phone off. Have a drink and stop thinking.

by Alexander Sorondo

April 20

Use the garage today because it’s pouring rain. You know it’s a bad idea because they charge a weekend surplus but for some reason you go along with it.

At a bar upstairs the notebook comes out and you do a good amount of work in the sapce of two beers. The bill is $6, plus tip. It’s been about two hours. This is fine.

Leaving the garage a twentysomething in the cashiers’ booth tells you the price of your stay was $7. Frustrating. Guilt-inducing. Embarrassing, too, that you can’t go out to do some work over just two cheap beers without then incurring some peripheral expense that throws your supper into question and sets you on this nervous-angry thought track (made worse by the booze) about when you’ll next be paid and how embarrassingly meager a life you’ll have to lead until then.

The machine isn’t working.

Dude in the booth asks if you’d mind backing up 20 feet, changing lanes, and going and paying in another automated register.

Bafflingly, you say, “Yeah, I mind.”

Of course you don’t mind.

This dude with the glasses sighs and then apologizes but says that this is the only way for you to get out.

Of course he’s not sorry.

Two twentysomethings at an agitated standstill not wanting (not being able) to say what’s really got you both here, in this mood.

  1. He’s just doing his job, and embarrassed to be working here.
  2. You’re just broke, and embarrassed to be so.
by Alexander Sorondo

April 13

Only other guy at the bar is thirtysomething and says to the bartender, tall woman all frecklespeckled with red hair, he’s surprised by how relaxed it is in here. He says this is his first visit.

“Place looks so fancy,” he says, “everytime I get near it I feel like I gotta book.”

She shrugs, wiping the counter in fast circles, “We’re not so fancy.”

He asks where she’s from.

“Virginia. What about you, you’re Cuban?”

“Yeah but I was born in New York.”

“I lived there for a while.”

He grins and does some clicking thing with his mouth. “It’s the best, I miss it.”

Bar tender puts a tender hand on the small of her back while straightening, and tossing the rag into the liquor well, exhaling. Strain of work written in her posture, her breathing, sweaty face. “Ahdunno.” She shakes her head slowly and looks either tired or defeated. “Wish it wasn’t so expensive.”

by Alexander Sorondo

April 4. Keep it to Yourself.

Lunch with dad at an Argentine restaurant that the family hasn’t been to in years but that once upon a time was maybe a monthly staple. Early on a Friday evening we’d come here as a family and complain about the bread being stale and as a kid I’d get the cherry off my mom’s tres leches. One night when the manager noticed the trend he started bringing me a plate of cherries for dessert. You were little then but not very. All through the meal you’d be checking your watch because you didn’t wanna miss ABC’s Friday-night kid-centric programming. Boy Meets World, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, a show about a genie that you can’t remember the name of.

Dad asked a few minutes ago if you were upset about something but you’re not and you tell him you’re not but he doesn’t believe you. Drink a beer and now you seem fine. Have another beer and you’re finer still.

He follows you to the house afterward to pick up some stuff. He hasn’t been here in weeks and asks lots of questions about it. In the driveway he seems sad for a minute and then starts saying indiscreet things to make that sadness clear. Hugs you too long, says he misses having someone to drink wine with.

Leaves.

by Alexander Sorondo

Today You Are 25

If there’s a defining sentiment to your 24th year it’s probably shame — although not necessarily in a bad way, if that makes sense, just that you got drunk and did this, did that. You misunderstood a million things. Most of what you remember from this year, as you approach the end of it, makes you cringe.

Realizing this, you buy a book about shame and learn that porn stars, after retiring from film, often pursue work in hospice care, or nursing, given their comfort with the body.

They’re hard to embarrass, and they laugh a lot.

#

Your first novel is finally done after three years (congrats!) and it gets rejected by 36 agents. Excerpts that you try to pass off as short stories get rejected by a dozen magazines but then one short story does get published. Which is nice.

#

You go out on what you think is a date (in a bar that will soon be shut down for having cockroaches in the ice machine), but it turns out not to be a date, and after sharing a basket of chili fries with this very pleasant woman, after she’s had one shot of Fireball and you’ve had four, she reveals that she’s always wanted a vibrator but (to your surprise) has always been too shy to actually go into a sex shop and buy one — at which point, in a gesture of gregariousness by which you hope to cover up your mistake about this being a date, you pay the tab and slap the bartop and tell her that you’re gonna be her wingman right now in buying a vibrator.

At the sex shop, a few minutes later, your accomplice stands behind you and hugs her elbows while looking around like she’s in a cathedral, some holyplace with secrets, and a salesperson adorned with pigtails, two noserings, and blue lipstick tells you that if you’re looking for something with simultaneous g-spot and clitoral stimulation it’s gonna cost no less than $60. Eventually your friend joins in on the conversation and before long the two of them are talking amongst themselves.

You wander off.

An elderly man is drinking a Fanta in the DVD room, entranced by the poolside orgy that plays out on a cornermounted TV. He looks at you, eye contact happens, and he nods in a grievous way.

You go find your friend.

She buys a $75 vibrator and you feel a little guilty about the extent of her buyer’s remorse. Several hours later you drive for 90 minutes to a birthday party in another city (where you get lost in a shady area and eventually have to pull over and charge your cell phone in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant in whose parking lot you find bullet casings) and when she texts you at around eleven to say that she just had her fourth consecutive spin with the vibrator, and that she loves it, you raise your glass to her, a hundred miles away.

#

A lot of people cry in front of you when you’re 24. It happens at a bar in South Miami, a patio restaurant downtown, the doorway of a utility closet in Kendall. It happens at your dining room table. At one point you are the lone audience to a woman crying at a podium in a small room.

It starts to seem like everybody has something going on in their life that they’ll start crying about if you ask them an open-ended question and listen attentively.

A server who leans on the bar and talks with you sometimes, when the restaurant’s quiet, says one night, while you’re fretting about the future, “It’s a blessin to be stressin. Means you’re on the right side of the grass.

#

The Ages at Which Some of the Writers You Admire

Published Their First Book

 

Jonathan Franzen: 29

Stephen King: 27

David Foster Wallace: 25

Jeffrey Eugenides: 33

Philip Roth: 26

Norman Mailer: 25

Martin Amis: 24

Cormac McCarthy: 32

Kurt Vonnegut: 30

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon: 26

#

You’re having a beer with a friend one morning in October on the first floor of a five story building. The friend is telling you about relationship trouble, you’re talking about the frustrations of trying to get published, and eventually someone jumps off the roof and hits the pavement outside.

It happens around the corner, so you don’t see anything until you set out to walk her to her car. The body’s been removed and there’s a light rain falling. The janitors are sweeping big rain-swirled gouts of blood into a storm drain.

Your friend drives off but you hang around South Miami for the rest of the day. You spend $50 on beer and later that evening, after receiving a terrible email, you go to see Goosebumps by yourself in a theater packed with families.

One kid shrieks at the yeti onscreen.

#

Creed comes out in theaters and you think, at the time, that this is gonna be the last on-screen appearance of a character with whom you’ve always felt a strangely heartwarming kinship. You have a couple of shots beforehand and you cry from pretty much the first frame to the last.

#

It feels pretty laborious to go on and on about the submission process, the rejections, and so you dodge the subject pretty well among friends and family but it’s really the only thing that crosses your mind. You’ve got no girlfriend, you’re on autopilot at work, your routines are set in stone. If your thoughts aren’t hushed in total meditative suspension then they’re coiled like a frigid hermit at this little flame of hope in the center of your brain where no light comes in and the only motivation is the same as what fuels the hypothetical prisoner who chisels at a wall whose thickness he can only guess at, may indeed be endless, and that thing that fuels him and fuels you is the near-religious conviction, the faith, that there must be a way out.

Or in.

So yes there are themes of ambition and failure and shame and regret, of hope, that characterize your 24th year but really this is the (first) year of SUBMISSION (in more ways than one) and it’s hard to conceive of a life taking shape around this pursuit of yours, this struggle to be published, and but if, in your 25th or 26th or 38th year, you’ve allowed this goal to be eclipsed by the taste or pursuit of something else, something more sensible or fiscally responsible, know that I’m standing here in the past with my arms folded, looking ahead at you, and I am so fucking pissed because if I endured all of this only for you to bail because you’re too tired or embarrassed or whatever…

Like I can’t even imagine how much that would suck but I know you’re an asshole and that you love money and you can be guilted into anything, so I worry.

#

You’ve always seen osso buco on menus at fancy restaurants but this is the year you finally have it. Twice.

                                                                                                  Sweet Jesus.

#

Two of your closest friends marry each other outside on a day where rain is forecasted but never falls, the sky actually clearing up to allow a good bit of sun for the ceremony, and — as will happen — you drink too much, end up sleeping in your car, but this is one of the better nights you’ll experience. Everybody so friendly, the booze as constant as the hugging and dancing and laughing. Before the meal and throughout it you sit talking with an aspiring veterinarian at her education’s endpoint who, for all of her knowhow and passion and promise, is pretty worried about the future too. This is the person you click glasses with during the toast.

#

Somebody lights a fire at your dining room table one Sunday in January. The firestarter takes you for a series of lunches in the ensuing months with hopes of explaining.

Someday, in the future, somebody will say, “Alex, what’s the angriest you’ve ever been?”

So you’re gonna have to learn how to talk about this.

#

Another regular at this particular bar is a little drunker than usual and even though you’re not writing at the moment, just sitting and watching TV, she usually sees you with a notebook or a novel and so when she comes up to you now, for the first time, she leans an elbow on the bartop, gives you this head-to-toe look of appraisal, and in a caustic tone that’s also probably supposed to be flirtatious she says, “You realize how much of a stereotype you are, right?”

And later that night when you’re home, getting into bed, your dog comes up and coils himself at your hip, this fourteen-year-old toy poodle with a beard that was once black but has now gone sage’s gray, and he slings his head over your stomach to look at you for some reason and he says, “I know you’re not so keen on taking advice about how to conduct yourself in public, especially when it comes to bars and books and whatever, but if you’ve found a routine that works for you, that helps you get shit done, then fuck it. Do you.”

Your dog is right.

#

An Englishman at the bar of a BBQ joint alerts the bar tender, with honest angst, to the ease with which he gets drunk. He then orders a Sam Adams with his sandwich. The bar tender takes a pint glass out of the cooler and goes over toward the tap.

“Woah!” He lurches forward. “Can I have it in a smaller glass?”

Bar tender eyes the glass, then the Brit. She says, “This is the only size we have.”

“Well you see I get drunk very easily…”

She stares at him.

He relents. “OK, then.”

She pours.

“Nothing is small in the United States, is it?”

#

The therapist you’ve been seeing for eleven years says, “I’ve got some bad news.”

“OK.”

Cringing: “I’m moving away.”

A few months before this he told you, wincing, “Don’t judge me, OK?, but my politics lean toward socialism.” He’s a fan of Hamlet, of Freud and film noir, and he seemed a little bummed that you wouldn’t read those geography books he recommended.

You’ll have occasion, once your dining room table’s on fire, to think of him a lot.

#

Toward the end of your 24th year there’s a day where, as in the past, one frustration piles upon another and you say fuck it, and you bail on your responsibilities. You take a notebook to a bar in S. Miami and three hours somehow evaporate, which is nice, but your problems are waiting for you, unresolved, the moment you step outside.

Later that day you’re watching this video online about a guy who’s allergic to bees. One day, while fucking around in a neighbor’s yard, he splits an entire hive open by accident. The bees come out in a swarm, they’re fucking pissed, and they chase him. Panicking, the guy runs for a bit and ends up jumping into his swimming pool to escape them. But it’s no escape. The bees just wait for him, hovering in this noisy static cloud over the water’s surface, probably just getting angrier.

The metaphor is hard to avoid.

#

A stranger sends you an email and invites you, for some reason, to a private event on South Beach where Bret Easton Ellis will be doing an informal Q&A. One of your heroes from when you were growing up. You’re psyched. Get there and find that there’s an open bar: eight or ten bottles of Bombay and a spectrum of mixers. You get a drink and talk with Ellis on the balcony for a while about horror movies, about Eli Roth and Tarantino, and then he gets swept into the crowd.

It’s a weird experience to have at the end of this particular year and when you’re finally seeing, in person, just how lauded this writer is, how respected and appreciated, you find yourself standing hermetically in the most shadowy corner of this lavish penthouse, sipping your long sequence of complimentary gin & tonics, and you study the whole scene (this parade of dapper sophisticates all smiling and hugging each other and drinking responsibly) and you feel this thing inside yourself like violence, like those science videos where a windstorm is created in a mason jar, and it takes a few hours for you to cool off but eventually, when you do, you realize that this thing that had consumed you in your drunken idling was the rapacious, remorseless, decidedly unfriendly core of your ambition suddenly coming up to the forefront of consciousness. Like when the svelte and dapper Bond villain steps aside to unleash his monstrous right-hand man. You want to take all of this. The fame, the respect, the money. The gin.

You spent an hour and a half trying to park your car for this event, had to walk two miles along Collins Avenue in dress shoes under a soft rain in order to get here, received an $18 parking ticket for your troubles and a lot of indignant stares from the other attendees on account of being

  1. Sweaty
  2. Under-dressed
  3. The youngest person in attendance.

And so you’ve confronted the strangely huge portion of your ambition that runs on spite and aggression.

You feel like Clubber Lang.

#

And now it’s done. On to the 25th. There’s stuff to complain about, reasons abounding for discontent and grudges and whatever, but you’re here. I know, in retrospect, that the cumulative disappointment of those rejection slips did nothing to dim the joy of seeing your friends get married, or of talking to and toasting that veterinarian, or of Creed or of waltzing those two lesbians through a patio bar at last call. Certainly stole no flavor from those two osso bucos. You watched Dressed to Kill and fell in love with it. Talked horror movies with a childhood hero. Got to taste Blue Label.

All these little in-the-moment pleasures that echo in your chest and warm you for days. Think of these. Accumulate and remember them.

by Alexander Sorondo

Summary of 2015

Probably the most unsettling part of this informal retrospective of 2015, as you jot it on a notepad at Starbucks, is that you find yourself writing these exhaustively detailed notes about a departmental merge that took place at work in the middle of the year — this ostensibly temporary job that you’ve now inhabited for two years. It isn’t even interesting. Why are you writing so much about it?

So OK, here’s one last realization for 2015: it’s time to quit your job.

#

You go on a date with somebody you met on Tinder. Drink three whiskeys while she eats a salad (extra croutons) and recounts for you a controversy that unfolded on The Bachelor and why, on moral grounds, she refuses to watch it as even just a guilty pleasure anymore.

Later that week you delete Tinder.

#

On New Year’s Eve you’re at a bar as one of only seven customers. Everybody gets free champagne at midnight. You climb on the bar and then fall off, shattering a flute, and the sad-looking man three stools down smiles when you hit the floor and says, “Please do that again.”

#

As the year starts out you’re finishing up a book you’ve been working on for several years and you’re involved, in a complicated way, with a spindly brunette who quotes Macbeth when she’s drunk and fans her face with big saucerlike hands whenever she gets excited. The two of you drink a lot together, and fight, but it’s a good time.

Then you finish your book, and the girl moves to another city, and your drinking slows down and you quit the worse of your two jobs and go back to the gym. Life seems to reset.

#

After revising the book twice you start sending it out to agents; excerpting little sections that might pass for short stories and sending those bits out to magazines.

Twenty agents say no.

One says maybe. She asks for more pages, so you send her some more pages, and then two weeks later she says no.

You hold out hope for the excerpts, at least. The stories. But the magazines say no, too. They say, like the agents before them, to not take this rejection personally. “Please don’t,” etc. Because, they say, there’re a million factors and the majority of stories they turn away are rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the writing. So really. Don’t feel bad.

One of these rejections begins, “Dear Aaron.”

#

You do get discouraged, though. How could you not?

One day over lunch your dad prompts you to explain why you’re so discouraged. And so you go on. Talk about the poor quality of the prose and the overall shoddiness of this thing you’ve written and “the fiction market” this, “the fiction market” that, fears about something you read online and so on, so on.

He listens. Tells you to lighten up. Points at your drink: “And you shouldn’t get into the habit of drinking a beer with lunch.”

#

For a couple weeks you can hear your own heartbeat whenever you get too idle. You start feeling it in your ears — which are constantly hot. After going to the Miami International Book Fair on its opening morning, and actually seeing the reverberation of your heartbeat in the flesh of your stomach, you freak out. Go to Urgent Care. Then Urgent Care sends you to the hospital. Electrodes are glued to you, and you panic. Blood is drawn, and you faint. An x-ray is taken and various tests are run and when finally you see a doctor she scans the results and shrugs and says you should probably just calm down.

An hour later, over Thai food, your dad nods. “Really, though,” he says, “you gotta lighten up.”

#

You become active on Twitter. In the wake of your book’s completion, rich with rejection, you start a new project on (and find solace in) YouTube. After a month of work on this project you feel good, busy, but find that even just reading a few lines of your book can sour your mood for a whole day.

Start writing other things. One of those things gets published, and you dedicate it to the spindly Shakespearean with the wide hands.  You start work on a new book.

#

At an Italian restaurant in the Gables you’re sharing a booth with a girl who doesn’t live here and she sighs a lot, looks around, and when finally she gets her menu she flips it open and tells you in a near-whisper, without looking up, “Since I know you’re not gonna kiss me I’m gonna go ahead and get something with garlic.”

#

Next year there’s a new Cormac McCarthy book coming out, which is exciting, and you should have a new job and should be well into the next book and you suspect, in optimistic moments, that you’ll’ve gotten a better angle on the agent thing. On publishing. Either way: you should probably lighten up.

Here’s to the best.

Cheers.

by Alexander Sorondo

Summary of August, 2015

Last call and the bar tender’s telling you about this older married couple who keep coming by on weeknights and chatting her up, inviting her out, boasting of their money and of the luxuries they’ll bestow, of their yacht and two sports cars and lavish meals each night.

Manager pulls her away for a moment. Some problem with the register. While she’s over there trying to fix it the manager comes back to where you’re sitting and, after a quick and heavy pour, hands you an egregious amount of whisky and with arms folded he leans back against the liquor display. Tells you with a smirk and a hard stare to “Go on, drink it all, one gulp. Come on. Something to put on your blog.”

A girl who’s stood you up three times before gets in touch to say she’s back from out of town. She asks if you’d like to go for a drink on Saturday and, since you’ve never passed a stove you didn’t touch, plans are made.

To your surprise and delight, she shows up. The two of you meet at a bookstore and then cross the street for a drink, small talk along the way, and meanwhile, like a match dropped into oil, your anxiety ignites to something apocalyptic and vast so that, once seated, you pull down two beers in quick succession to quell it.

Conversation at that point is going pretty well, fluent as it was when the two of you first went out six months earlier. So it appears that the booze has worked, which is great, except that it’s kind of a double-edged success in that, having been soothed by the second beer, you feel emboldened to have a third. Elixir of good conversation. Have a fourth! What could go wrong?

It isn’t until you stand up for the check and the room starts doing Inception things that you realize how drunk you are. Sit back down and, keeper of necessary information, tell this to your date. “I’m a lot drunker than I thought I was.”

“Yeah,” she says, “you had seven.” Her tone is kinda dry and maybe it isn’t so judgmental as you’re thinking but you go ahead and project things on it.

Two days later you and the date exchange pleasantries through text, pledge a mutual interest to get together again later in the week, but old habits resume, the girl goes dark, and you go on to sit thinking and talking and cringing about your fuckup at various bars over the next few days, friends lending their ears. Sleep is sparse and guilt abundant and meanwhile the Earth persists undaunted in its orbit and your dog each night is here with this look to his eyes like, “Hey. Come on.”

Your brother stops over between appointments. Sits at the kitchen counter playing with shrinkwrap and doesn’t make eye contact when he says, “Hey so have you ever tried using online dating?”

This is his way of saying that he knows you’re using online dating.

You have finished the second draft of your book and now get to be that 20-something with a part time job and an unpublished book. Laying up at night and contemplating your credit score in the same bed where you once sat contemplating your first pube.

Your dog in the middle of the night starts roaming the bed. Rising and stepping and then laying and groaning. Repeating the cycle. It’s 2 a.m.

You take him outside, thinking he’s gotta pee. There on the grass with his tail pulled tight between his legs under so much moonlight, the sky strangely purple, you see his hindquarters pitch to the right and then the rest of him goes over. He’s never collapsed before.

Get down in the grass and try bribing him to his feet with promises of every sort of enticement he knows a word for. He blinks, squinting.

Pull on your jeans and shoes and head toward the all-night animal hospital a few blocks away. All through the drive you’re talking to your dog in a perky voice as if to sooth him in his final moments but really probably just so you can feel like you’re doing something, anything, that you’re not quite so helpless while this dog you’ve had for half your life dies in your lap.

Peel into the parking lot at the strip mall where the animal hospital is, throw open the car door, unsnap your seatbelt — and this fucking dog jumps out of the car like it’s his birthday. Frolics among the pavement and grass. Latenight piss fiend, raising a leg to everything.

Take him to the vet and the vet says he’s fine. Probably arthritic. It’s 2:30 in the morning.

So you head back home and take this fucking asshole dog back to bed with you and there in the dark you squeeze him to your chest until dawn and are grateful that certain things can at least be postponed if not avoided.

Your mom, not making eye contact, digs around for something in the top shelves of her closet and calls back to you, “Hey so have you ever tried using online dating?”

This is her way of saying everyone in the family knows you’re using online dating.

Two envelopes in the mailbox amid the catalogs and flyers. Both addressed to you.

Open the first. A collection agency wants $63 for a parking ticket you got almost six months ago and have neglected to pay.

You don’t have $63. Fold the bill, put it in your back pocket.

Open the second letter: A different collection agency wants $63 for a parking ticket dated from the same week as the first one.

Take the dog back inside and keep typing.

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“You have those fucking glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling.”

Something you’ve been telling just about everybody this month is of a guy on reddit who, after several years in prison, still can’t shake the habit, when he sits on a toilet, of taking one leg completely out of his pants. Why? If somebody attacks you in the bathroom, and you’ve got your pants accordioned down at your ankles, you’re bound. Can’t run.

That even in prison you’ve got people worried about their constraints.