Best Shit List: February
That’s me at Target in 1992, when photo prints came back in three days’ time, and even with doubles the cost was just $6.99. This was the best memory presented to me in February, sent via text by a friend after he found it in an old photo album. I can feel the leather laces of the shoes. I must have worn those cut-off shorts for 90 days straight that summer. I do not recall the haircut, though it looks cooler than I ever felt for sure.
My buddy also sent old pics of my first serious girlfriend, to whom I lost my virginity. She dumped me for a dude at another school, and later I learned of a journal entry in which she wrote that she lost hers to him. It was dated many months after we first fucked. We must have done it 20 times. Apparently those didn’t count. Bad start to sex for AV.
More of my favorite stuff from February below.
🖤 Adam
🎶 “Blue Skies” by Finnoguns Wake
Tim "Shogun" Wall, the voice of Australia’s well-missed Royal Headache, has a new band! One minor disappointment with Finnoguns Wake, though: half the songs on their debut EP are sung by some other guy. Oh well, I’ll take what I can get. This tune “Blue Skies” with Wall on lead vocals rips.
📚 “Girl on a Motorcycle” from The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner
What we talk about when we talk about dope essays. I haven’t finished the full book, but the opening shot is worth the price of admission. I’m seeing galley brags going around with a new Kushner coming soon, and readers seem hyped.
🎬 Anatomy of A Fall
It’s a long wait before you see the argument which might’ve been the last straw before murder. The scene is uncomfortably realistic—the acting is supreme—but doesn’t provide answers. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether “she did it” or not, but I’m convinced the story the father tells his son in the car, prepping him for the eventual death of the family dog, was fabricated by the kid.
✍🏻 “Eating Bacon with the Cocaine Cowboys of Manchvegas” by Damien Rucci
I am not like this dude, but I like this dude. From what I can gather, Damien is the king of open mic nights. He’s primarily a poet, but as you’ll find in this essay, he’s also propulsive with prose. Damien has recently acquired a bus and is bumping around the country seeking adventure, performing poems, probably doing hard drugs, and other out-of-fashion things.
💬 “Publishing as a Social Practice”
This tweet from Rachelle Toarmino had me thinkinggggggg. “Publishing as a social practice” is a killer collection of words, and I’ll fall back on them when second guessing why I do what I do with Little Engines.
📺 The Tourist, Season 1
I’ve heard zero chatter about this show, a Memento-esque thriller set in the Australian outback, but I dig it and can recommend.
🛝 Walker on the Slides
We took the Walker to the park and she was newly confident with the little slide. She climbed the five steps without help, slid down alone, the static raising her hair, and repeated many times. To our further surprise, she set her sights higher. “Blue one,” she said. “Blue one!” The blue one is the big-kid slide. She couldn’t do the ladder alone, but zipped down the steep incline without fear, which is more than I can say for mom and me watching.
Not sure about this playground frog, though.
📚 Septology by Jon Fosse
A strong entry in My Year of Reading Thiccly™️ at nearly 700 pages written with a single sentence in a tiny-ass font. Don’t be intimidated; it’s an exceptionally comfy book. Fosse’s beautiful, slow, repetitive meditation on loss, loneliness, art, and aging is a reading experience like I’ve never had, and I’m certain there won't be another quite like it again.
🎬 The Zone of Interest + 📚 Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
I finished the Roth book in the morning and saw the Glazer film in the afternoon. Really indulging in some Nazi shit that day. The Zone of Interest is a perfect, awful film. Mal and I both left and remain unsettled. When the Roth novel arrived in 2004, The New York Times called it “sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible.” If the review were today, I suspect the word preposterous would not appear.
☑️ I’ve been tracking habits so I can be even harder on myself for falling down, I guess. Wanna see my February stats?
Write (novel): 16/29
Write (not novel): 6/29
Exercise: 17/29
Yoga: 4/29
Weed abstention: 29/29
Tell us more about My Year of Reading Thiccly