Election? What Election? Never Heard of Her!
I Am Dissociating My Way Through the Midterms, And So Can You!
Quick question does anyone in here know how to write a book? Cuz listen, I’m over here fighting for my life! I’ve been working on an excerpt to share here because in my brain I have this very grand notion that if I share a bit of what I’m working on you will all be so wildly impressed that you’ll all join together to picket outside of Simon & Schuster headquarters with torches and pitchforks until they give me a multi-million-dollar book deal, which, as a person who worked in publishing for six months before quitting because his boss was on some Miranda Priestley shit, I can tell you is exactly how publishing works. It’s a direct-action business, like union organizing or storming the Capitol.
Anyway, today was supposed to be my big writing work day where I finally crack this thing and send it to your eyeballs, but since there is a big event which I refuse to name happening in these United States tomorrow, I cannot concentrate on anything. It’s as if I’m trying to describe, I don’t know, the Elgin Marbles or something except I’ve had a stroke and none of my words work. Which is a problem! Generally! For writers!
And this is despite having sworn off social media, the thing that usually scrambles my brain like this, for the next 48-72 hours, because truly what is more embarrassing than engaging in ~*discourse*~ during what is essentially a referendum on whether to officially turn this country into a post-Soviet–style dictatorship because people think Joe Biden is an evil warlock who astral projects to the Ghawar Oil Field to personally dictate gas prices from a spreadsheet he keeps on Hunter Biden’s laptop. The answer is nothing! Nothing is more embarrassing!
I mean god bless and enjoy your TikToks or whatever, I’m not here to kink shame, but for me something feels very off about hearting tweets and watching Instagram Stories while we vote on whether women should be sent to Guantanamo Bay if they can’t incontrovertibly prove their menses isn’t actually a fully gestated caucasian infant they strangled in a bathroom stall with their tampon string. You want me to read your Taylor Swift hot takes and watch another white person fuck up that “Cuff It” dance in an Instagram Reel while all THAT is going on?! Truly no thank you! I will be screaming into a pillow at the back of a walk-in closet for the next 48 hours instead, see you Wednesday!
Suffice to say, I am not going to be making any progress on ~*my work*~ today, and so I thought instead I would write down some of the things I have been dissociating to in case they might help you do the same until Wednesday or Christmas or the day the new dictatorship finally falls in 2049 or whatever the case may be. Hit it!
Global Warming
It is presently 83 Farenheit degrees in this Southern city in which I am living, which I refuse to name because Elon Musk’s fascist takeover of Twitter has me convinced far-right extremists are going to see all my dumb online shrieking about Madonna and Real Housewives and start forensically combing the internet for clues to where I live so they can come kill me in my sleep with a bazooka. Yes, I’m aware that’s absurd since roughly four (4) persons follow me on the internet, maybe seven (7) if you count the group of terrorized BFFs who courtesy-follow this Substack so that I won’t call them up and be like “I thought I would shriek my thoughts on the latest episode of Ryan Murphy’s 9-1-1 at you over the phone SINCE YOU REFUSE TO SUPPORT MY SUBSTACK.” I’m not exactly a high-profile public figure known to be part of ~*The Resistance*~ you know what I mean? But still, you can’t be too careful these days so you won’t catch me divulging my location on Al Gore’s internet! No ma’am, Pam, as that one queen on Drag Race used to say!
Anyway, it is 83 degrees in this unnamed Southern city (it’s Raleigh, North Carolina) and so my plan for today was to really lean into the whole staying-off-the-internet thing by going to this one bakery down here, Boulted Bread, that has the best croissants I’ve had outside of France. They’re so authentic that every time I go I expect to be greeted by some foul-tempered man named Didier with ropy arms and a Gauloise dangling from his lips (daddy?) and am shocked to once again find only garden-variety American hipsters who went to baking school. Truly such a serve.
After purchasing no fewer than 37 croissants I was going go eat them at the park around the corner that has a series of hammocks hung from a copse of oak trees. (Doesn’t “copse” sound like a dirty word? Like something you’d read in a romance novel–“He thrust his manhood against her copse”--or hear in gay porn–“Yeah daddy blow that copse all over me”--but in reality it just means a group of trees. I bet the Germans have a word for this sort of word. Anyway, I could’ve just used “thicket” but I once read a book with a sex scene in which the author described this lady’s bush as a “thicket of hair” and I haven’t stopped vomiting since). There I planned to recline like a Roman king and pendulum back and forth in the delicious whatever-we-call-Indian-Summer-now while emotionally eating French viennoiserie until I inevitably inhaled fallen flakes of laminated dough into the deepest recesses of my lungs and accidentally suffocated to death, but it turns out said bakery is only open Wednesday through Sunday, so instead I made frozen chicken fingers and ate them in the backyard while basking in the delectably out-of-place November heat and chuckling about how the Earth is melting and we are all going to die. All in all, not a bad afternoon!
Mountain Lions
Were you aware of how many mountain lions there are, and how utterly incapable we are of defending ourselves against them, and how basically any time you are in the woods you are being stalked by one, and how any time you see one it’s because the mountain lion was hunting you but decided you aren’t worth the effort and dispensed with the task of hiding itself?
Were you aware of this brazen affront to our status as an apex predator??? Because I was not! Until I read about it on Twitter the other day, and now I cannot stop thinking about it.
That thread is full of all kinds of grizzled outdoorsy types who grew up on Mount Pinatubo or whatever who are like, “Yep, if you ever feel like you’re being watched in the woods it’s because you’re being hunted by a mountain lion and your instincts know it and you are definitely going to die and nobody will even know because you’ll be dead before you have a chance to scream.” Oh! Ok! This is very interesting to me, a person who has never been in so much as a fistfight and regularly goes to the woods to hike by himself. Very cool! Nature is my passion!
Or at least it was, until someone decided to underline the point with this charming little exercise.
Are you FUCKING kidding me?
As you know if you read this newsletter regularly, I spent all of last summer and part of this past summer wandering the wilderness of the West, and I cannot stress enough how many times I felt intensely as if I was being watched while hiking alone. It was not unlike that feeling you get in the middle of the night where you have to run back to bed from the bathroom because the hobgoblins who live in the toilet will chew out your rectum if you don’t, except in this case the monsters are real and you’re all alone in the fucking wilderness where nobody will have any idea you died until a month goes by and one of your friends is like, “That messy bitch hasn’t tweeted a single off-putting manifestation of mental illness in at least a fortnight, what gives?”
I spent the final third of 2020 house-sitting for my bestie in Los Angeles, and on Black Friday I went for this amazing hike way up in the San Gabriels in the Angeles National Forest—truly rugged, remote country that took almost two hours to get to and was gloriously far from absolutely any form of civilization. Midway through the hike was a huge boulder field—a winding, multi-level pile of enormous rock slabs balanced against and atop each other with pine trees and all manner of plants growing out of the cracks, all of it looking out over the whole mountain range and, way, way off in the distance, a thin ribbon of Pacific that glittered against the sky. It was breathtaking, and I spent an eternity admiring the view, staring slack-jawed into the distance and climbing up on the rocks for different vantage points.
And then, suddenly, for no reason, I began to panic. I was certain—in my bones, in that place in your lower intestine where you just fucking know things—that I was not alone. I started mentally going through the items in my backpack that might constitute weapons and came up with two bottles of Jennifer Aniston water and a Kind bar, because I am a dumb, dumb bitch. So instead, I did what they tell you to do to differentiate yourself from tasty animals and began singing Spice Girls songs out loud while booking it the fuck out of there and mentally telling myself I was being irrational.
Just as I’d finally calmed down and returned to something approaching equipoise the trail spit me out into an isolated campground that was completely empty and silent except for the wind whistling through the pines and fluttering the fabric of a single abandoned tent that was indisputably haunted. The whole thing looked like some post-apocalyptic The Walking Dead shit, the kind of place horror movie characters stumble upon and murmur “What happened here…?” despite the answer being obvious, which is that whatever was watching me at those rocks came and ate whoever was in that tent and their disembodied spectre now helps it hunt hikers from another dimension. I lost my shit all over again.
Thankfully before long I crossed paths with an adorable pair of olds who’d decided to do the trail in the other direction, and normally on trails I’m more of a “Uh huh, nice to see you too now keep it pushin’” kind of bitch, but I was fucking terrified, so instead I hiked back to the parking lot with them and listened to them jabber about how they couldn’t wait for the snow up there to melt so they could get back to hiking barefoot. I mean honestly how much horror must one man endure in a single hike, is my question.
Anyway, once I was back in my car I had a good laugh about how ridiculous I had been. Lol, what a dope, having panic attacks on hiking trails! People hike alone for months and I couldn’t even handle it for an afternoon! What a maroon! Oh what mirth! Oh the follies of life’s rich tapestry! Except now I know I was probably panicking because I was being fucking hunted by a fucking mountain lion.
And if it were just that incident I’d let it go, but in hindsight it’s happened more times than I frankly care to come to terms with. Last summer I was up in the Rockies, eating my lunch on a felled tree by a goddamn glacier, when something starts a-rustlin’ in the brush. Every time I looked over there was nothing there, so I shrugged and kept mashing Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos into my gob because it was probably just a squirrel, right?
Bitch you thought!!!
Mind you, I already had a fear of mountain lions on account of this dude who went viral a couple years ago after accidentally hiking past a mountain lion’s litter of cubs, and the extent to which this bitch was not having any of the fuckshit? Unprecedented!
Did you see that shit at the 2:50 mark?! The fuck kind of chupacabra shit is that?! That dude is lucky to be alive and he didn’t even do anything except WALK on a part of the EARTH. It’s unjust!
At the time this happened, all these wilderness experts were like “He did the right thing by not bending down to get a rock to throw because she would have pounced and he’d be dead.” Exfuckingscuse me?! It was that close a call?! All it takes for them to murder you is for you to trip over your goddamn shoelace?!
Listen how long does it take to learn Magic The Gathering or some other dumb nerd shit because I need an indoor hobby yesterday. Fuck nature!
Mincemeat Pies
I spent last Christmastide in Her Majesty’s United Kingdom and listen to me have you ever had mince pies??? Americans assume they’re disgusting because they think they have meat in them but they haven’t since the 18th century, it’s just dried fruits and baking spices and whatever the fuck treacle is in a delicious pastry crust, and fuck me running they are delicious bruv!
Meg, my friend over there whose guest room I commandeered, decided we needed to taste test each grocery store chain’s in-house mince pies, so for weeks we had a nightly tradition of eating 46 mince pies each while forcing Meg’s erudite British cinephile boyfriend to watch Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies on some British cable channel called like Wow! TV or Hey! TV or Telly Innit! or something, and when I tell you it was the most enjoyable Yuletide since the year I got a big wheel and my stoned older brother taught me how to jump it off my great Aunt Blanche’s wheelchair ramps while my incensed mom screamed “I WILL CALL SANTA AND HAVE THAT BIG WHEEL REPOSSESSED”? I mean it sincerely.
So now I have this wild hair up my ass that I’m going to bake a bunch of mince pies from scratch, and have spent an inordinate amount of time in recent days Googling recipes and trying to figure out what the fuck “Gas 5” is in farenheit and where to buy fucking currants, which fun fact are illegal to grow in the US because they put off some fungus that kills pine trees or some shit.
Obviously this is a fiasco waiting to happen, as not only am I reliably informed that even British people don’t make their own mincemeat, but also my brain is broken in a specific way that I am always terrified anything I cook will not live up to the way I have hyped it, even when it’s something basic, let alone something foreign.
I mean, I made my family’s cornbread dressing for Meg’s London Thanksgiving party last year and the extent to which it was an unmitigated disaster cannot be overstated, because it turns out polenta, which the UK has, and cornmeal, which it does not, are not essentially the same thing, nor are homemade croutons a suitable substitute for those rock-hard pre-seasoned bread cubes from the good people at Pepperidge Farm, and so the entire shit disintegrated in the oven into something akin to sawdust.
To ensure I was kicked squarely in both testicles and not just one, I also offered to make the gravy with a roux like my good hillbilly ancestors, and it turns out the flour over there is also completely different and the butter much higher in fat, and so the gravy simply turned into a coagulated gunge with roughly the consistency and texture of a melted-down dildo. Turns out they make gravy with “corn flour” (corn starch) over there for a reason.
Naturally, Meg’s wonderful best friend Natalie, a renowned cook and a great fan of foreign foods, was eager to taste this uniquely American bread dish and gravy method, and despite me literally begging and beseeching everyone to simply throw both items into the garbage and bludgeon me to death with their serving vessels, she gave me a “Cor go on then it cah’n’t be as bad as all ‘at mate!” and insisted on eating them anyway. The quiet strength with which she swallowed the first bite as it dawned on her she should have heeded my warnings was a profile in courage, and I would find it inspiring if it didn’t make me want to climb head-first into a pre-heated oven even as I type this nearly a year later.
Given this trauma, I have decided to abandon the notion of making my own mincemeat and have now transitioned to combing the internet for services which will ship mincemeat pre-prepared by the UK’s finest grocers directly to these godforsaken colonies. Yes, you can buy mincemeat from that fancy British marmalade company for $5 at fucking Walmart for Chrissakes—I checked—but what is the overwrought, hyperfixated, dissociative fun in that?! So far I am quite keen on an extremely posh version from Marks & Spencer that includes preserved clementines and fine French brandy and which can be imported to this North Carolinian home for the bargain price of $77.32.
This absurd sum pleases me, because while that most sacred of American rites, the franchise, seems ever more out of our hands, there is one American article of faith that they can never take from us, that will burn in our breasts and be borne anew each day for as long as this nation exists: The purchasing of something deeply stupid and totally needless for a sum unforgivably profligate.
Give me mincemeat or give me death!
If you enjoyed this, why not:
And you could even send it to someone you like who might like it or someone you hate who might hate it!
And I will send you one of the undoubtedly vile mince pies I make if you:
Okay bye bye!