Paul said afterwards, “I don’t think it’s the possibility of evil. I think she’s evil!” This got a good laugh.

I put Bell, Book and Candle on the movie schedule for Saturday night, but while I was driving residents downtown to the Black Panther Party Museum I passed an old revue house that’s playing the ‘31 Frankenstein and could have kicked myself for not putting Young Frankenstein on the list for this week.

I’ll probably put it on the calendar in November anyhow, even if it is a little late.

I went to Target to pick up some last-minute supplies for the residents’ Halloween party and ended up getting suckered into buying some impulse toys for our son Rocco. He likes fire trucks, mostly because we read a lot of Richard Scarry to him, and Richard Scarry puts fire trucks in everything. I like him so much, our son Rocco.

I got a haircut. Every time I get my hair cut I seem to attract hairstylists who are going through some sort of personal or professional crisis. I like that a lot. This time I got my hair cut at Supercuts. Right away I know it was going to be a weird experience, which made me very happy.

The Supercuts near me has only two employees who don’t like each other very much. As soon as I walked in the door, the one who wasn’t cutting hair at the time told me, “Don’t check in on the machine. Just write down your name.” So I did. A few minutes later the other employee finished cutting someone else’s hair and made ready to cut mine.

As soon as I sat down, the two employees started arguing with each other over the previous haircut. The previous haircut had just departed the salon without paying because she was (I think) upset about the temperature of the hair dryer. They started arguing about it using my head as a sort of template. They kept touching my head to describe how the previous haircut had looked.

“Do you think this hair dryer is hot enough?” one of them asked me. She turned the hair dryer on me. It felt pretty hot.

“Yeah, it feels pretty hot,” I said.

“Then why would she say it wasn’t hot enough to dry her hair?”

She blow dried me again. It was still pretty hot.

“That’s really strange,” I said. “I don’t know. It definitely feels hot to me.” I love being asked to confirm someone else’s oddities. You and I are normal, and you and I are together.

The argument between the two of them continued, and started veering on the personal. The employee cutting my hair nicked my ear once or twice with the clippers while they were fighting over which of them should take her lunch first. I jumped a little when she nicked me.

“Now he’s nervous,” she said to her colleague. “Don’t talk to me anymore. You’re making him nervous. Look at him, he’s nervous.”

I wanted to tell her that their conversation wasn’t making me nervous, she had just nicked my ear a little, but I felt she’d been criticized enough for one day already, and besides she had finished with the part of my hair near my ears.

“I’m taking my lunch,” said the other one. She started slicing up an avocado and microwaving a bowl.

“No, I’m taking it! As soon as I’m done with him, I’m taking my lunch! Don’t you take your lunch now!”

But the other one had an obvious head start, and she took it. My employee lost, and started telling me about how she’s worried the owner is maybe going to sell the building, because he doesn’t want to hire more than two employees and you can’t really run a hair salon that way. She pointed out the window to the guy who owns the barbershop down the street. I never go to him. He’s got one of those old-fashioned pictures in the window of various haircuts: the normal, the Ivy League, et cetera, and sometimes will ask guys walking down the street if they want their hair cut. I hate being put on the spot like that.

The haircut turned out great. I really liked the way she cut my hair.

I drove Martha to the doctor. She told me that she’s outlived all her family back in Mississippi, but that she and her two sisters used to take all kinds of trips together. She used to pay for her own cruises by teaching bridge onboard. I guess that pays pretty well.

I told her my sister and I once took a trip to Iceland. Rented a car and drove all around the island. Our first night there we saw the Northern Lights. Just a little, but we did see them. It was very faint, green, hard to make out, pulsing like a jellyfish. Martha said she and her sisters used to talk on the phone once a week.

I mostly have my phone switched off at work these days. So I don’t listen to music or podcasts or look at the internet or anything. After I dropped Martha off, I cried to think of my sister, and how much we used to like to go places together, and how we never will go places together again. I liked her; she was my good friend once. I knew her before I knew anybody else, practically. She has sons, and I have a son, and it would have been nice to go places together with them, too.

When we were both small she cut most of my hair off in order to give to birds to make nests with. My mother saved a huge chunk of it and taped it into a photo album. I wish I’d known in advance what was coming; I would have taken a photo album or two with me so I could look at them sometimes. The craziest things happen to me when I get my hair cut.

Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock with his brothers. And the lad was with the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives; and Joseph brought a bad report of them to his father.

Now Jacob loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age. Also he made him a tunic of many colors. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him.

Now Joseph had a dream, and he told it to his brothers; and they hated him even more. So he said to them, “Please hear this dream which I have dreamed: There we were, binding sheaves in the field. Then behold, my sheaf arose and also stood upright; and indeed your sheaves stood all around and bowed down to my sheaf.”

-Genesis 37:5-7

Now taken between them the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah amount to four of the thirteen, which is no small proportion of the family. You may not have known this, not being a shepherd yourself, but when you have four men watching a single flock, it is permissible, even customary, for one or more of them to slacken their vigilance. This is not a cause for concern. You have four shepherds; you don’t need them all on the highest alert imaginable. For one thing, that makes the sheep nervous.

At any rate, if you have concerns about your fellow shepherds on your very first day of shepherding, perhaps the more appropriate first step is to ask your fellow shepherds why it is they do something in a particular way, before you inform on them. By all means, if the answer you receive is unsatisfactory, inform away, but why not try to get the most accurate on-the-ground information from the parties concerned first?

We had been herding sheep for quite a few years with no complaints, at any rate, Dan, Gad, Asher, and myself. The sons of Rachel and Leah did not do too badly either, I might add. The sheep were all present and accounted for, ate during the day, slept at night, gambolled while hoggets, grazed placidly as ewes, charged about as rams, submitted to shearing in autumn, lambed in spring, et cetera.

I don’t mean to suggest it was impossible for anyone to object to the way we herded our sheep. There is always room for improvement. Never let it be said that the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah were not open to receiving useful suggestions from men who knew what they were about, i.e. men who had herded a sheep or two in their day, and not callow youths of scarcely seventeen, who hardly ever left their mother’s tent unless they thought there was something in it for them.

Now it is a known fact among pastoralists that, unique among all the men of the earth, we take great pains with our appearance. A hunter must needs blend in with his surroundings. A farmer has no time to dress; he must see to his crops before the sun has time to shine on him. But shepherds are unique among pastoralists, having such greater access to wool than the average, for the splendor of our fancy dress. We pride ourselves in the keeping of ourselves, and the sons of Jacob, whether by Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, or Zilpah were no exception.

We are careful, too, not to send too many compliments in any particular direction. We are judicious with our praise. A man may throw his back out putting together a remarkable garment and count himself lucky if he hears “New hat?” from his neighbor a month or two later.

“That’s a very fine coat Joseph is wearing,” my brother Asher said carefully the next morning.

“Well,” Gad said, taking a long drink from his wineskin and looking briefly in Joseph’s direction, “so it is a fine coat. What of it?”

“It’s a coat, certainly,” I said blandly, hoping to discourage talk of this sort. “I don’t know where he might have gotten the wool for it, though, unless I’m very much mistaken in the size of his flock.” It was brightly-colored, certainly, although very few of the colors did much for his coloring. He clearly thought a great deal of it, but what Joseph knew about dressing with style was about as much as what he knew about herding sheep properly. We didn’t want to puncture his self-conception, you know, but I worry now that we erred too far in the other direction, and let him think he’d gotten one over on everybody else.

“I heard Father had it made for him,” Asher said, removing an imaginary speck of dirt from the faultless Mechlin lace on his Ascot tie.

It should perhaps go without saying that a shepherd who does not make his own coats does not count for much, among other shepherds. For the most part I believe the garments that were to come were all handmade. At least I have no reason to believe that any of my brothers pursued shortcuts, although I do know that between the twelve of us we were able to work on his sense of fairness sufficiently to come out the richer a few pairs of jeweled sandals, a steeplehat, an artichoke-colored doublet, a beribboned pair of Spanish breeches. His sense of fairness or his sense of guilt — who’s to say? But it is shameful, among shepherds you know, to let one son go around looking conspicuously finer in attire than the rest.

Next day Asher appeared at our usual gathering-place in a ridiculous peacock blue ensemble complete with a peaked cap. None of us said anything about it, we were so embarrassed for him. We were on slightly higher alert than usual that week, watching the flock for any signs of grain overload, as we had recently moved to a pasturage richer in barley than they were used to, but all of them adjusted beautifully.

As best I can recall, Joseph may have talked about a dream, and it may even have included binding sheaves in the field. But I don’t remember any further specifics. Certainly I think I would have remembered it if he had told us he dreamed we were all bowing to him. If anything, I remember thinking it a little sad, that in his dreams he was still no better than a popular farmer.

Later that week Gad turned up in a red swallowtail coat, jet-black topboots, and a turkey-feather gloves. Dan countered with traditional Carpathian national dress, which is heavily pleated and covered in highly detailed embroidery.

I myself had been working for some time on a robe à la polonaise — well before Joseph debuted his new wardrobe, mind you — and thought it would be silly not to wear it now, just because it would look as though I were doing it as a response to him, when really it had been in the works for months. It was very simply and very tastefully done, with a cutaway gown, fitted panels, and draped overcoat, with chinchilla fur trim all up the left side. The trick is to make sure the center and two far-back side seams all end in inverted pleats, the front being all of a piece held together with an underarm dart. It was a little daring, for our crowd, being so tastefully understated, and I don’t mind telling you I was a little nervous. Would this maximalist crowd really “get it”?

“It’s a bathrobe?” said Issachar, suited as a muscadin (bicorne hat, green jacket, huge necktie, drop earrings, thick monocle, hair dressed in the coiffure à la victime).

“Oh, don’t be tiresome,” said Zebulun, chapeau-bras balanced just so atop his white powdered wig, his wrists and throat absolutely foaming with lace. “I think it’s refreshing.”

Well, you know what brothers are like. In the end I really think Joseph did us all a favor, behaving the way he did; none of us have ever dressed more splendidly, either before or since.

[Images via]

Prometheus and Zeus.

PROMETHEUS. [Stapled to a rock face, liver half-out, the whole nine.]

Release me, God, or let me die. I have suffered every hour of every day for ten thousand thousand years. It is enough.

ZEUS.

If I had any idea how to make metal heavier, I would make your life worse in a heartbeat. You know, that’s not a bad idea right there. I’m going to ask the boy if he knows how to make metal heavier.

PROMETHEUS.

What boy?

ZEUS.

Oh, Lord, I’m hopeless with names. One of mine. Hunchback or something. Extra foot, or not enough feet, he’s got. Always messing about in the dirt. He always seems to have tongs with him. Clackety-clack. Fingernails like a trainyard, that boy, but he’s very good at whatever it is that he does. He’s always making things. Made a shoulder for dark-faced Pelops once. My wife threw him off the top of the world when he was born. Can’t remember why, but she must have had her reasons. Wrought, I think, is what they call it when you make things the way he does. I’m going to see if he can wrought some worse metal for you. Cast you down further, or smite particularly your impudence.

PROMETHEUS. [Groaning thinly.]

ZEUS.

And I’m getting more birds for you. This eagle can only eat so much in a day. More birds, and worse. If only for the trick at Mecone, I think every bird there is should take a crack at you at least once. All anyone ever gives me now is bones. You deserve everything.

PROMETHEUS.

I’m not asking something for nothing. I can offer you prophetic information.

ZEUS.

Titan chicanery! [Still dwelling on Mecone.] Anyone with eyes would have chosen the bones wrapped in fat. They were glistening with delicious fat!

PROMETHEUS.

If I speak in error, you lose nothing. You can always find a mountain and shackles again, if I mislead you and you decide you want to chain me up again.

ZEUS.

I like the part where I stand to lose nothing…You may speak.

PROMETHEUS.

Am I right in thinking you’re off to visit the nymph Thetis?

ZEUS.

Warlock and sibyl! …Is Sibyls ours now, or is that later? I mean, are Sibyls with me when I’m Zeus, or are Sibyls afterwards, when I’m Jove? Oracle, anyhow. Forget everything I said before. You knew I was going to try to sleep with a nymph…Oraculous. [Tearing up a little] You are my most trusted advisor. I want to know everything you’ve ever thought.

PROMETHEUS.

You must not sleep with her. Any child of yours by Thetis will treat you as you treated your own father.

ZEUS.

I enjoyed it at the time, of course…but on reflection, I don’t think I’d like to be treated that way myself at all. Thetis: Farewell. Thank you kindly, young man. I didn’t catch your name. I’ll send the boy round to unchain you later. The eagle I’m afraid I can’t do anything about. He just does that.

PROMETHEUS. [Groans thinly.]

ZEUS.

Hephaestus. That’s the name. I knew it would come to me.

Zeus and Hermes.

ZEUS.

Hermes! You remember that beautiful girl — Inachus’ daughter, the one I was so fond of?

HERMES.

Io? The priestess of Hera in Argos?

ZEUS.

I don’t know about that. Not sure she was priestess of any goddess in particular, just a priestess of goddesses generally. They’re very general on Argus. At any rate, she’s been made into a cow now. Oh, that’s awful. That doesn’t make it sound serious at all, the way that rhymes. She is presently a cow, through no fault of her own.

HERMES.

Remarkable. How did it happen?

ZEUS.

Oh, how does anyone get turned into cows these days? My wife did it. I told her not to bother, that it certainly wouldn’t slow me down any, but that just made her madder.

HERMES.

[Diplomatically] I see.

ZEUS.

So she sat around trying to think of ways to make a cow’s life worse, which as you might imagine is pretty difficult, but she managed to find a shepherd — whatever you’d call a shepherd for cows —

HERMES.

A cowherd?

ZEUS.

That doesn’t sound right at all. You don’t call a fellow who raises horses a horseherd.

HERMES.

There’s goatherds.

ZEUS.

Yes, but that’s different.

HERMES.

How’s that?

ZEUS.

Geese have wings.

HERMES.

I don’t follow.

ZEUS.

It’s just different, qualitatively. She’s found — Hera’s found, I mean — a fellow to look at Io all day, so she can’t slip out and have any fun for even a minute, who’s eyes entirely. He’s eyes throughout. Utterly eyes, this man.

HERMES.

And how can I help you resolve this situation?

ZEUS.

Oh, Lord, I don’t know. Find the pasture, kill Argus, take her to Egypt, and transform her into the goddess Isis, making her responsible for flooding the Nile annually and regulating the winds?

HERMES.

This would help, you think?

ZEUS.

I don’t see how it could hurt. Give her something to look forward to. I’m sure she would prefer being the Egyptian goddess Isis and managing the Nile to being a cow that’s not allowed to have sex with me anymore.

See to it that she floods it annually, now. In summer, I think is when they expect it. After Shemu but before Peret. And if the flooding of the Nile’s already got a god associated with it, give him my fulsomest apologies and a helm that grants invisibility to its wearer, or a boar that can run faster than a horse or something. You ever made it with a cow, Hermes? The trick is to [Exit Hermes]

[Images via]

Last week I reduced the annual cost of a paid subscription to this newsletter from $65.00 to $30.00. I’ve been writing The Chatner for about a decade now, and there are a lot more paid newsletters out there than there were ten years ago, so it naturally follows that the average person has less to spend on newsletters than they used to.

But if the annual cost of a newsletter is $30, it doesn’t make much sense to keep charging $6 a month, as I have been doing for the last few years. So I’m making a paid subscription $5 a month instead from now on. I tried to make it $4 a month, but Substack’s CMS won’t let me set it below $5. A little error message pops up: “Subscription cannot be less than $5 monthly.” So $5 it is.

The annual subscription is still the best deal for your money, in that case, if you decide to spend any of your money on my work.1 But this will narrow the gap somewhat between the monthly and annual subscription. It will of course apply to those of you who already have a paid subscription, so you’ll save a little money, too.

I’ll confess to some slight trepidation; it may be that this will not encourage a flush of new subscribers, but simply in a little less money for me each month. Well, faint heart never won fair lady, and I do think it’s worth doing anyhow. But I do hope it’s the kind of thing that wins me a great deal of social and ethical credit, and people say things like, “How shrewd and yet how humble he is, how well he unites shrewdness and humility in the same elegant mind, cunning as a serpent and harmless as a dove, he’s like a 21st-century Don Marquis who can’t draw. If only he could draw…!”

Last month while staying at a monastery in Berkeley I came across a Little Free Library on one of my afternoon walks. Usually the books in Little Free Libraries are quite bad, especially in Berkeley. They are either highly out-of-date diet books written by hysterics and neurotics, or else E-Z summations of Eastern mystical traditions.

This is often the best type of book one can expect from a Little Free Library, but the cover is funnier than the book. If you’ve read the cover and laughed a little, you’ve gotten your money’s worth from it.

But I did manage to come away with A Clinical Approach to Children’s Rorschachs, by Florence Halpern, published 1953. (If you’d like to see the Rorschach inkblots you can do so here.)

“The test is best introduced to the very young child (two and a half to four years) with the following remarks: Did you ever see ink spill on a piece of paper? It makes a big spot on the paper, and sometimes when you look at the spot it makes you think of something; it looks like something. Now you look at these inkblots that I have here and tell me what you find in them, what they make you think of, what they might be…In his examination of the card the child should never be hurried, and the whole procedure should have the quality of an interesting experience without tension.”

The children are Well-Adjusted, Neurotic, Behavior Disorder, Reading Disability, Family Problems, Anxiety Reaction with Somatization, Stutterer, Boy with Tics, Enuretic, Severe Eczema, Girl with Convulsions, Postencephalitis, Degenerative Disease of Central Nervous System, Congenital Syphilis, Disturbances in Eating, Aggressive, Maladjusted, or Schizophrenic. In no cases are the children diagnosed via Rorschach; the Rorschach test is administered as part of an ongoing attempt at interpreting each child’s progress in solving problems, making sense of their environment, and managing their various symptoms.

I like the idea of Rorschach tests; I like the idea of being presented with the same spill over and over again and being asked to present a narrative justification for it. I find poignant, and distressing, the idea of children being diagnosed with schizophrenia and congenital syphillis; I find their assessments of the inkblots to be creative, winsome, appealing, distressing, and often heroic.

“The subject is an only child who is somewhat oversheltered. He tends to be rather passive and quiet, but is essentially happy. He is easily contacted. The parents report no special problems.”

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That’s about the cost of a new hardcover book a year, which seems like a pretty good deal to me. I do hope this encourages more of you to become paid subscribers, as I enjoy both the making and spending of money, but even if it doesn’t, I think it’s a good outcome for pre-existing subscribers, too.

Subscribe now

Well, that’s all the housekeeping from me.

I wonder if you’re familiar with the livery companies of London? There are 114 of them. Many of them originated as medieval guilds and trade associations, although quite a few of them only exist as charities nowadays, and they have special powers like being able to vote for the Lord Mayor of London (Dick Whittington for 610 years running). Historically they were also granted the Freedom of the City of London, which gave the right to drive sheep over Southwark Bridge, although for obvious reasons that right is less important now than it used to be.

The livery companies are all styled as the “Worshipful Company of ____” and governed by either a Prime Warden, an Upper Bailiff, or a Master. All but two of them have a formal motto, and most of the mottos are quite good. A few are even what I would call terrific.

I’ve ranked them here, for your convenience.

I believe that the Top Ten explain themselves. “Wool Is Our Hope” is as good as any slogan ever coined, I think, although I’m sure my preference there is at least partly explained by 30 Rock’s excellent Wool Song.

I’m fond of rhyming (“By Hammer and Hand…”), of winsome little claims to universal good (“Marketing benefits everyone!”) and Biblical references. I’m enchanted by the Spectacle Makers. I don’t understand the Painter-Stainers’ motto in the least, nor what love and obedience have to do with painting, but it compelled me nevertheless.

1. Worshipful Company of Woolmen

   Motto: “Wool Is Our Hope”

2. Worshipful Company of Pattenmakers

   Motto: “Women Receive Support From Us”

3. Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers

   Motto: “A Blessing to the Aged”

4. Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers

   Motto: “Love Can Compel Obedience”

5. Worshipful Company of Needlemakers

   Motto: “They Sewed Fig Leaves Together And Made Themselves Aprons”

6. Worshipful Company of Marketors

   Motto: “Marketing Benefits Everyone”

7. Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths

   Motto: “By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand”

8. Worshipful Company of Launderers

   Motto: “Cleanliness is next to Godliness”

9. Worshipful Company of Butchers

   Motto: “Thou Hast Put All Things Under Man’s Feet, All Sheep and Oxen”

10. Worshipful Company of Paviors

    Motto: “God Can Raise To Abraham Children of Stone”

    ---

    The Top Twenty are very nearly as good. The Glovers! I don’t understand the Cooks, unless it’s a nod to the fact that people who work in kitchens seem always to be cutting and burning themselves. Any joking or subversive reference to one’s own work will always charm: The Founders claiming God as the only Founder, or the Clockmakers referencing time. I don’t understand the Poulterers’ but am once again compelled! What oath?

11. Worshipful Company of Glovers

    Motto: “True Hands and Warm Hearts”

12. Worshipful Company of Distillers

    Motto: “Drop as Rain, Distil as Dew”

13. Worshipful Company of Cooks

    Motto: “Wounded Not Conquered”

14. Worshipful Company of Coachmakers and Coach Harness Makers

    Motto: “The Sun Rises After The Clouds”

15. Worshipful Company of Clockmakers

    Motto: “Time is the Commander of All Things”

16. Worshipful Company of Fuellers

    Motto: “Our Strength is in coal”

17. Worshipful Company of Founders

    Motto: “God, The Only Founder”

18. Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers

    Motto: “The Word of the Lord Endures Forever”

19. Worshipful Company of Gunmakers

    Motto: “May guns be proved for honest citizens”

20. Worshipful Company of Poulterers

    Motto: “Remember Your Oath”

    ---

    In the Top Thirty we begin to see some merely “good, not great” entries. But I am heartened by the Surveyors, cheered by the Basketmakers. I’m delighted that the Bowyers (bowmakers) just list a series of battles from the Hundred Years’ War like a resume, and that the Saddlers tell me to sit.

21. Worshipful Company of Actuaries

    Motto: “Experience Foretells”

22. Worshipful Company of Bowyers

    Motto: “Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt”

23. Worshipful Company of Chartered Surveyors

    Motto: “Method from the Very Beginning”

24. Worshipful Company of Solicitors

    Motto: ““Freedom’s foundation is the Law”

25. Worshipful Company of Weavers

    Motto: “Weave Truth With Trust”

26. Worshipful Company of Salters

    Motto: “Salt seasons everything”

27. Worshipful Company of Saddlers

    Motto: “Hold Fast, Sit Sure; Our Trust Is In God”

28. Worshipful Company of Water Conservators

    Motto: “No life without water”

29. Worshipful Company of Basketmakers

    Motto: “Let Us Love One Another”

30. Worshipful Company of Vintners

    Motto: “Wine Cheers the Mind”

    ---

    As we approach the middle of the pack they remain quite good. I really have no criticisms, except for the fact that there’s nothing as good as “Our Hope Is In Wool”.

31. Worshipful Company of Tobacco Pipe Makers and Tobacco Blenders

    Motto: “May the Earth bring forth”

32. Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers

    Motto: “Behold the Lamb of God, Who Takes Away the Sins of the World”

33. Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers

    Motto: “Science Languishes Without Us”

34. Worshipful Company of Tin Plate Workers

    Motto: “May You Be United In Love”

35. Worshipful Company of Scriveners

    Motto: “Write, Ye Learned Ones”

36. Worshipful Company of Shipwrights

    Motto: “Within the Ark Safe forever”

37. Worshipful Company of Hackney Carriage Drivers

    Motto: “With Knowledge We Serve”

38. Worshipful Company of Tax Advisors

    Motto: “Truth, Charity, Fellowship”

39. Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers

    Motto: “Straight and strong”

40. Worshipful Company of Firefighters

    Motto: ““Fighting Fire, We Trust in God”

    ---

    I’d give higher marks to the Farmers, for example, if their motto was “We Give You Your Daily Bread.” It’s reasonable, too, because they’ve only been established since the 1950s, so it’s not like they’ve been carrying this slogan around since the Middle Ages. And I do think “Upholders…Uphold the Good” is very solid! But no better than solid.

41. Worshipful Company of Upholders

    Motto: “Uphold the Good”

42. Worshipful Company of Builders’ Merchants

    Motto: “The Fortune of the House Continues”

43. Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects

    Motto: “Firmness, Commodity, Delight”

44. Worshipful Company of Environmental Cleaners

    Motto: “To Clean Is To Preserve”

45. Worshipful Company of Engineers

    Motto: “Use Skills to the Best of One’s Abilities”

46. Worshipful Company of Cordwainers

    Motto: “Leather and Art”

47. Worshipful Company of Gardeners

    Motto: “In The Sweat Of Thy Brows Shalt Thou Eate Thy Bread”

48. Worshipful Company of Farmers

    Motto: “Give Us Our Daily Bread”

49. Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters

    Motto: “Speed, Strength and Truth United”

50. Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers

    Motto: “Discord Weakens”

    ---

    Here we begin to see a lot of phoned-in mottos, that simply list a virtue and call it a day. Truth is good. Art is here. Fairness, don’t forget about it. All right!

51. Worshipful Company of Wax Chandlers

    Motto: “Truth is the Light”

52. Worshipful Company of Chartered Accountants

    Motto: “True and Fair”

53. Worshipful Company of Arts Scholars

    Motto: “We foster Arts (with)in the city”

54. Worshipful Company of Musicians

    Motto: “Preserve Harmony”

55. Worshipful Company of Joiners and Ceilers

    Motto: “Join Loyalty With Liberty”

56. Worshipful Company of Information Technologists

    Motto: “Swiftly”

57. Worshipful Company of Security Professionals

    Motto: “In Harmony Small Things Grow”

58. Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers

    Motto: “We Are One”

59. Worshipful Company of Air Pilots

    Motto: “Our Way Is By The Heavens”

60. Worshipful Company of Fletchers

    Motto: “True and Sure”

    ---

    None of these are bad, but we really do begin to drop into virtue-listing in a way that feels unmemorable. “Protectors of All” for Insurers is cute, though. In retrospect that should be higher on the list.

61. Worshipful Company of Feltmakers

    Motto: “An Ornament and a Safeguard”

62. Worshipful Company of Arbitrators

    Motto: “Law and Custom”

63. Worshipful Company of Master Mariners

    Motto: “Loyalty and Service”

64. Worshipful Company of Broderers

    Motto: “All From Above”

65. Worshipful Company of Carmen

    Motto: “Skilfully, Swiftly, Surely”

66. Worshipful Company of Constructors

    Motto: “Build with Honour”

67. Worshipful Company of Coopers

    Motto: “Love as Brethren”

68. Worshipful Company of Chartered Secretaries

    Motto: “Service with Integrity”

69. Worshipful Company of Educators

    Motto: “Through Learning to Light”

70. Worshipful Company of Fan Makers

    Motto: “Arts and Trade United”

71. Worshipful Company of Farriers

    Motto: “By Strength and by Virtue”

72. Worshipful Company of Fruiterers

    Motto: “God Gives the Increase”

73. Worshipful Company of World Traders

    Motto: “Commerce and honest friendship with all”

74. Worshipful Company of Apothecaries

    Motto: “I Am Called a Bringer of Help Throughout the World”

75. Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards

    Motto: “With an Upright Heart All Are Exalted”

76. Worshipful Company of International Bankers

    Motto: “Nation to Nation”

77. Worshipful Company of Insurers

    Motto: “Protector of All”

78. Worshipful Company of Innholders

    Motto: “Hence Hope Shines Forth”

79. Worshipful Company of Haberdashers

    Motto: “Serve and Obey”

80. Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths

    Motto: “Justice is Queen of Virtues”

81. Worshipful Company of Gold and Silver Wyre Drawers

    Motto: “Love Draws Friendship”

82. Worshipful Company of Cutlers

    Motto: “To Succeed Through Good Faith”

    

    ---

    From here on out it’s just God stuff. Fine, I guess!

83. Worshipful Company of Glaziers

    Motto: “O God, Give Us Your Light”

84. Worshipful Company of Plaisterers

    Motto: “Let Brotherly Love Continue”

85. Worshipful Company of Plumbers

    Motto: “Justice and Peace”

86. Worshipful Company of Lightmongers

    Motto: “The Lord is my light and my help”

87. Worshipful Company of Grocers

    Motto: “God Grant Grace”

88. Worshipful Company of Ironmongers

    Motto: “God Is Our Strength”

89. Worshipful Company of Leathersellers

    Motto: “Honour and Glory to God Alone”

90. Worshipful Company of Masons

    Motto: “God is our Guide”

91. Worshipful Company of Mercers

    Motto: “Honour to God”

92. Worshipful Company of Pewterers

    Motto: “In God is all my Trust”

93. Worshipful Company of Turners

    Motto: “By Faith I Obtain”

94. Worshipful Company of Tylers and Bricklayers

    Motto: “In God Is All Our Trust”

95. Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights

    Motto: “God Grant Unity”

96. Worshipful Company of Girdlers

    Motto: “Give Thanks To God”

97. Worshipful Company of Fishmongers

    Motto: “All Worship Be To God Only”

98. Worshipful Company of Skinners

    Motto: “To God Only Be All Glory”

99. Worshipful Company of Drapers

    Motto: “Unto God Only Be Honour and Glory”

100. Worshipful Company of Curriers

     Motto: “Our Hope is in God”

101. Worshipful Company of Dyers

     Motto: “Give Glory to God”

102. Worshipful Company of Clothworkers

     Motto: “My Trust Is in God Alone”

103. Worshipful Company of Brewers

     Motto: “In God Is All Our Trust”

104. Worshipful Company of Carpenters

     Motto: “Honour God”

105. Worshipful Company of Bakers

     Motto: “Praise God For All”

106. Worshipful Company of Barbers

     Motto: “From the Foreknowledge of God”

     ---

     The bottom of the barrel. Management consultants, you have no business being here. No motto?? And listing “Property, People and Liberty” in that order is contemptible. Get rid of these four!

107. Worshipful Company of Management Consultants

     Motto: “Change through Wisdom”

108. Worshipful Company of Horners

     Motto: No motto

109. Worshipful Company of Loriners

     Motto: No motto

110. Worshipful Company of Security Professionals

     Motto: “Property, People and Liberty”

[Images via]

I like to travel alone as often as I can. I prefer to stay at monasteries when I do so. I have been making occasional visits to Camaldolese guesthouses since about 2015, and will likely continue doing so as long as there are Camaldolese to be found in the world. I am skeptical of hotels with an ethical mission statement, tied as they must be to the profit motive, even though I am also the target audience for hotels with an ethical mission statement. I am not myself a religious man, but when I arrive at a Camaldolese guesthouse and am greeted in quiet earnest by an elderly man whose life is ordered by bells, I know that when he says Sit in your cell as in paradise he knows what he is saying to me. The monk is not altogether divorced from a profit motive, I realize, inasmuch as he also has to live in the world, but I know exactly what he’s selling: a room for the night, some pointillist artwork of a nearby landscape, and maybe some fruitcake the brothers sell during the Christmas season.

Monst monasteries that offer lodging have a designated monk who also serves as the guestmaster, usually the most sociable monk in the community. If monks could be said to have a homecoming king, the guestmaster is it. He might speak as many as three sentences to you during your stay, rather than none – but what real affection is present in those few words! You could warm yourself by them for days.

As I say, I am not a religious man, but I do enjoy periodically drafting behind the religion of others, like a goose flying in the very back of a formation so as not to have to flap his wings very hard. The concept of “spirituality” does very little for me. I like my monks to have decided religious commitments, although I do not share them and I decline to participate in their communal prayer life whenever I make my stay among them. Monks make no constraints upon the poverty, chastity, or obedience of their guests; you are not inclined to follow their religion or share their values. (Nor need you be a man; some people mistakenly assume that monasteries will only accept male guests, but this is untrue.) They will ask you to conserve water, because California is always in a drought, and to leave your linens in a pillowcase by your bedroom door upon your departure, but otherwise the rule for guests is very light. You will likely need to make your reservation in advance, since monks do not accept walk-ins, and you will probably have to do so either by calling them directly or emailing the guestmaster. It is not always possible to book online. But what a pleasure to email a monk about a room! One feels transported both forwards and backwards in time at once.

The Camaldolese are a type of Benedictine monk. Their founder, Romuald of Ravenna, established a hermitage in Camaldoli, Italy around the year 1000. The Rule of St. Romuald is brief. It begins, Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him.

After some time, a few of the Camaldolese made it out to the West Coast of the United States. There are three Camaldoli houses in California, the state where I have passed most of my life. Two monasteries, one in the Berkeley hills and one in San Luis Obispo, as well as a hermitage in the Santa Lucia mountains, overlooking Highway 1 in the Big Sur region.

Staying in a monastery has several advantages: it is often significantly cheaper than a hotel in the same area, and more often than not, monasteries are located in areas of distinct natural beauty, with an eye towards peaceful solitude. A night at Incarnation Monastery in Berkeley will run you about $90, and will get you a plain whitewashed room with a closet, a twin bed, a desk, a recliner, a dresser, a view of some bay laurel trees, and access to a shared bathroom at the end of a hall. A night at the Hermitage will run you around $145, which is an excellent deal for Big Sur, and will get you a square-on view of the last sunset on the continent, where the sun falls directly into the Pacific Ocean through a net of fog, and is worth three times the price. The Hermitage also provides meals for all its guests. You can eat what the monks eat – good, straightforward, mostly-vegetarian food – although not at the same table, and not at the same time. At the monastery you have the right to your own shelf in the shared fridge and pantry. It is best to really enter into the spirit of things, in my opinion; whenever I stay at the monastery I bring a loaf of good bread, some peanut butter, a quart of minestrone soup, some fruit and cheese, and eat the same meal for the duration of my stay in quiet, deranged happiness.

Here is the difference between a monastery and a hermitage: in a monastery the monks live communally, under a single roof, whereas in a hermitage they live slightly apart, in separate cottages. One roof per monastery; one roof per monk in a hermitage.

I prefer the Hermitage in Big Sur to all other places on earth, but it has grown almost impossible to visit in the last five years. A hermitage is of course meant to be isolated, but God has seen fit to grant them inaccessibility beyond even their scope of ambition. Every winter the rains wash out huge section of Highway 1, which is the only point of access. Whenever the damage from the mudslides are repaired, the road gets washed out again. When the road is not being washed away, it is being threatened by wildfires; the monks can taste nothing and eat nothing but what the State of California brings them.

This year I began staying at their satellite monastery on La Linda Drive just above the campus of UC Berkeley, about a ten-minute drive from my own home in Oakland. Guests have very few restrictions on their time, but they are asked to observe the Greater Silence between 9:00 in the evening until the end of Lauds the following morning. After this guests must observe the Simple Silence for the rest of the day, until 9:00 when the Greater Silence kicks up again. Each cell has a little hand-stitched guidebook to orient guests that includes a primer on what I can only describe as harm reduction techniques for speech as one adjusts to talking very little. They give, by way of example, the possible problem of encountering another guest in the common kitchen during the Greater Silence, where the desire to be polite must be weighed against the shared quiet: “A nod of the head can be extended by way of greeting, rather than a verbalization.”

I come to the monastery when I most badly need to reorient my relationship to speech. I say speech rather than my phone, because I am sometimes uneasy about how people discuss our phones nowadays. Everyone seems to agree that they are shameful and unpleasant objects, that their ongoing use only further degrades our integrity, that we ought to put them away, that they can only produce a simulacrum of pleasure, never the real thing, and that they are hatefully necessary rather than useful or interesting. I do not want to give up my phone. Generally speaking, I like it, and I like the things I can do with it. But there are times when I want to check nothing, say nothing, ask and answer no questions, coordinate with no one, and a monastery is a good place to accomplish this.

My ideal relationship to my phone would be this: When I am looking at it, I want to be delighted by it; I want to take pleasure in its use, and to use it without recrimination. And when I am not looking at it, I want to feel ease and equanimity, secure in the knowledge that it’s not going anywhere and can survive a few minutes or hours out of my hand.

And I can certainly remember the various methods I used for wasting or otherwise blunting my experience of the passage of time before I had a cell phone at my disposal. So the phone isn’t the primary problem, the problem is something else. I come to the monastery when I don’t know what the problem is, because the monastery removes almost everything from me but the problem of when to eat and when to go to sleep, and I can work my way backwards from there to establish a diagnosis. I know perfectly well how to look at a bird or turn off my phone at home; there is never new information to be found at the monastery. But sometimes I have to sit in a room where it is impossible for me to either watch a movie or decide it’s time to start doing chores. I come here to read and sleep and look out the window and fall outside of time. I go to the monastery whenever I feel unfit to live around other people, and as soon as I get there I think, Finally, at last, I’ve found a way to be alone, at which point the monks remind me to relentlessly consider my own dependence, Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him, and that gives me more than enough to do for three or four days at least.

How to put this? I’ve seen my girl’s face and your man’s.

I’d sooner watch the turn of her steps

or the side of her face than your whole boyfriend,

who on his best day looks like Kashi cereal.

The Roman poet Tibullus lived from roughly 55 to 19 BCE. He wrote two books that people who ought to know are pretty sure about. He might have written more than the two, but then again he mightn’t’ve. In the work we do know him to have written, he never once mentioned Augustus, which may or may not mean anything. We also know that at one point he lost his farm, or part of his farm. Ovid calls him “polished” in the Amores.

His first book contains a number of elegies directed at a woman he calls Delia but whom Apuleius tells us everybody else knew as Plania. He — Tibullus — seemed to have a lot of trouble with her. The same book has a few elegies about a boy named Marathus, who also seemed to give him (Tibullus) a lot of trouble.

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Elegy the First: The Simple Life

[Theodore Williams translation | A.S. Cline translation]

Other men can gild all the lilies they like!

Till, plow, rotate, boil: whatever it is you do to soil to make it rich,

I say have at it. And have it!

Get yours and fight to keep it; stab your neighbor,

Quit trusting windows,

And never again sleep a’nights for trumpets and war.

All I need is the endless cheerful humble flame in my simple modest unpretentious little hearthstone, which I built myself. A quiet life!

Life, but quiet, that’s the idea.

No wanderlust, no addiction to glamour.

When it’s hot, I find a tree, or a stream. Simple as. I see a problem, I solve it. It’s summer? Get your feet wet, sez I.

The hay-stalk might not be literally braced between my teeth —

but then again, as they say, Hell,

I’m not too good for it, either. Hell! Pass the chewing-hay, brother, and let’s lean against a post.

Overalls without a shirt, boot with a flapping sole, frog in the pocket, slingshot for good measure, you get the idea. A noble yokel. Not ashamed to pick up a shovel, if something needs shoveling.

Or pick up a lamblet, in the way shepherds do, braced around the neck, and if it happens to emphasize the trapezius muscles, so be it. I don’t pay attention to that sort of thing. I’m too busy conscientiously tidying rural altars in lonely fields.

And I don’t forget the tutelary deities while I’m at it, you know. I distribute votives and whatnots to the gods chthonic, rustic, Olympian, civic, di manes, et cetera, you name it.

My simple cot! You wouldn’t believe how well I sleep in my simple cot. If someone tried to offer me a luxurious bed bestrewn with violets and honeydew, I’d scorn it; unless that someone were a god in disguise, in which case, I’d humbly accept, since one should never scorn the gifts of the gods in disguise. What I mean is —

am I talking about my humble cot too much? You must tell me if I’m making too fine a point of it. The moths sing me a lullaby, you know, and I prefer the music of daffodils to the twanging of golden harps. I’m a very simple man!!!

If you were to even mention a jewel to me I would get violently ill. I can only look at streams. Or Delia.

Delia, that’s the ticket. You can keep your silks and your imported Scythian pride and your footstools. Let’s go live outside, barefoot all the time, knitting wheatstalks by the hearth…assuming one does knit wheat. I’m not quite up-to-date on the latest farming techniques. We’re pure of heart, we’ll figure it out. But if anyone so much as mentions a market commodity to me, I’ll scream.

Elegy the Second: Pleading Time

The hour does not call for less wine, I think.

Let’s pit pain against the grape and see which puts paid to which.

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The materials the Society pulled for our group (“the Society” being old pal and Archive Director Isaac Fellman) were a few bundles of private letters, a photo album pasted into a wallpaper sample book, a collection of matchbooks, and ads countering the 1978 anti-gay Briggs Initiative.

I was immediately distracted from the Briggs materials by an unrelated advertisement in the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin for hot borscht at the Soviet Consulate. It’s just a few weeks and forty years ago from now!

I was also, regrettably, enchanted by this caricature of State Senator Briggs and the accompanying quote about coming from “the bowels of the middle class.” Seeking to excavating those bowels has been the delightful task of my working life, and it has stayed with me as I revisit the world of the Biedermeier Hotel.

The matchbooks in particular interested me. What a life graphic designers must have had, once upon a time! What a world has been lost! “The Corner Grocery Bar” offers drop-in opera and kosher-style delicatessen?

“The City Dump” bar only existed during 1973, at 506 Castro Street; both before and afterwards it was known as Midnight Sun. For the last ten years it’s been vacant; most recently it was a Body Works shop.

“Where dinner is a pleasure and parking is a blessing.” Some people go their whole lives without writing a sentence that good, you know.

Smoking, and fire, have certainly been on my mind as I work on WH3. There are a few little fires in the book so far, although I haven’t decided yet whether there will ever be a big one. I’m inclined to think not; the Biedermeier is not a place where big things happen.

It was less than two weeks after Mrs. Mossler had resigned her post as hotel director before the Biedermeier caught fire. There had been a little smoke and a great deal of excitement, and in the end proved disastrous for only one of the building’s inhabitants, which counted for something. The fire was not in itself unusual. In 1941 all residents had been issued Anholt safety ashtrays with the understanding that small domestic fires were an indulgence that ought to be curtailed during wartime, and that any former habits of using saucers, jewelry dishes, and empty coffee cans to stub out one’s cigarettes had better be broken at once.

This unfortunately did no good for Ramona Sylvaro in 703, who did not smoke but who did once, during a particularly alarming telephone call with her cousin Hazel about recent uncharacteristic behavior of their mutual cousin Arlen, set down her steam-iron on the seat of a parlor chair and promptly forgot about it, causing no loss of life or limb but forcing an evacuation on the seventh and eighth floors, after which she was roundly snubbed in a fit of patriotic unity. The chill did not lift until she enlisted in the SPARs as a chauffeur in the spring of 1942.

Ramona received six weeks’ of recruit training at Hunter College in the Bronx and a Mainbocher uniform, and considered herself to have gotten the better of the U.S. government for it. There would have been no question of Ramona’s being able to afford any garment of Mainbocher’s otherwise. Some of the girls who had led the snubbing – in particular Francine Gumbrell – lived to regret their decision. They had enlisted in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, whose uniforms were made from the same materials as the men’s: olive-drab wool skirts, ankle-high Lil Abner field shoes, a khaki cotton summer-service suit, a horizon-tan wool crepe off-duty dress, and worse yet, an Army-issue girdle. The Navy did not trouble itself with the undergarments of its servicewomen, but provided them with made-to-measure navy suits in soft, heavy fabrics, the sort that stiffened the spine and brought a delightful fire to the eyes when worn. There was not a single Friday or Saturday between 1942 and V-E Day that did not see Ramona provided with an escort, but many a weekend evening saw Francine Gumbrell staying in to wash her hair.

Let go of some of the trips that restrict you! Coolness, butchness, “he’s not my type.”

My new thing is infinite resignation. I’m extremely reserved now, and just, I hold everything loosely, because anyone who has lost as much as I have (my girlfriend but also just, like,
the very concept of personal fulfillment, which is fine, because
I can accept it)
Was I once happy and dwelt among the sunlit lands? Okay, yes,
And was my girlfriend loved as no one ever loved a girlfriend, like, ever?
Also a yes there, Chief,
but sometimes people get tired of happiness, I guess,
and if she doesn’t want to dwell in the highest form of bliss
available to mortals, then who am I to defy Fate?
my new thing is being a beacon of stoicism and endurance,
and closing myself off to all love and forms of consolation,
and people say things like, “Oh wow, is Catullus completely closed off to sweetheartism now? Who hurt him? and why? We should have appreciated him when we had the chance.”

Catullus 9

[Recently broken up with] Veranius!!! My friend!

My better than friend, my better than three hundred thousand friends,

Recently I’ve been made aware that friendship is the only thing that matters.

Are you really home for good? Did your mother cry when you came in? Your wonderful mother, old as kitchens, full of bread and fire, weeping brothers just to see you —

this is the only newspaper I’ve ever read. I want to hear everything. Spare no details. The trip to Iberia, arriving at Iberia, everyone you met in Iberia, how they write and send letters in Iberia,

I just want to sit on the floor in your kitchen, eating muffins with your brothers, listening to you talk about your vacation. Because friendship is the only thing that matters. Please, may I kiss your neck and eyes? I’ve never been happier than I am right now. From now on I am 100% laser-focused and dedicated only to friendship. No distractions. Can you bring your neck a little closer? Thanks!

Also can I please stay over tonight

I already asked your mother and she says it’s fine

She says she doesn’t think there’s any reason for me to ever go home.

Catullus 10

I never said your girl was either charming or attractive, Varus,

I said that, as far as your lovers go (which is plenty far enough, ha ha),

she was not really uncharming. Not unattractive. There’s a world of difference (not that I’d expect you to know it) between a charming, attractive girl who happens to do it for money, and the sort you go out with. What I mean is I wouldn’t bother to change my seat at table to get away from her, but please don’t mistake that for a compliment to your taste or hers.

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Lot of people are worried about what AI is going to do to their industry, to their jobs. That’s a big part of why I went into senior living. I don’t have a lot to say about AI other than I don’t much care for it, and I don’t see much need for it in my own life. I find most discussions of it tedious and I’d like not to think about it very much. If you work in senior living, you really do have to be a person in the same room as another person. You’ve got to give that person a shower, dose out their medication, present them with dinner, drive them to the doctor, read aloud, play chair volleyball with them yourself. That’s the kind of work I like to do.

Every once in a while a resident will ask if we’re ever getting a robot server in the dining room. They don’t ask about it often — not like they ask about acoustic tiles, which comes up just about every day, or when we’re getting a new coffee machine — but whenever a regular server goes on FMLA or vacation, it comes up. “We getting any robots soon?”

Then it trickles up into the morning manager’s meeting: “Residents want to know if we’re getting any robots in the dining room.”

“I don’t know about that. All those walkers, all those wheelchairs…what if the robot gets in somebody’s way, and they fall?”

“They don’t do that. They use light radar. They stop.”

“We had one when I was at Barksdale.”

“Can we get back to the question of when Angelo1 is coming back?”

“Angelo’s not coming back.”

General consternation. What are we going to do without him?

Every once in a while I see a delivery robot in Berkeley and I feel vicious. I want to knife it, kick it into the street, hear its robotic little squeal of distress. I don’t feel that way about seeing new point-of-sale systems. Just delivery robots. I don’t know why. I like tap-to-pay fine; I like it when my phone autofills in a confirmation code that’s just been texted to me.

I’ve got a buddy who’s a radiologist who says AI helps him a lot. I don’t remember how. I believe him, and I’m happy for him. I want radiologists to have an easier time of things.

We’ve got like fifteen touchscreen computers down in storage from pilot program a few years back called something like “Apptown.” Apptown has since been rebranded as something like “Monoguest.” I don’t know what they used them for. They were discontinued a few months before I got hired. We also have a ton of yarn down there, but people actually use that. We’ve got a pretty good-sized knitting and crochet group that meets on Sunday in the living room.

The nice thing about an anecdote like this is it makes both the writer and the reader (that’s you and me!) feel pleasantly smug. Yarn, that’s eternal. AI, that’s gonna end up like Touchbot 3000, moldering away down in the basement, gathering dust. We know not to lose our heads whenever they come out with a shiny new model. Doesn’t it feel good to know you’re not the sort to lose your head?

Residents answer their phones at work like you wouldn’t believe. In the middle of the dining room, in the middle of my workout class, in the middle of reading Anton Chekhov’s short story “Misery.” They’ll answer them on speakerphone!

This is one of the few areas where my sense of decorum differs from theirs. Usually we’re on the same page about punctuality, handshake pressure, eye contact, that sort of thing. I have to call people to arrange medical transportation, and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had this exact conversation:

RESIDENT: Hello?

ME: Hi, I’m just calling about your ride for tomorrow —

RESIDENT: I’m in the dining room/ceramics class/a lecture/meditation.

ME: Oh, my God.

RESIDENT: So we’ll have to keep this short.

ME: No, I’ll call you back later.

One of the residents I’m closest with, she told me the other day, “I ask ChatGPT for information five times a day. Then I double-check it with Claude.” I didn’t really know what to say to that.

Later that same day, I’m configuring our trip back from San Francisco on Maps, and she says, “Check it on ChatGPT!” Listen, I’m already on the computer. I don’t need to be on the computer any more than I already am.

It’s not that I mind being on the computer. I like the computer plenty. I just don’t think I need anything more from it than what it already gives me.

I’ve got other residents who tell me, “Don’t bother calling me. I have a phone, I don’t use it. You can come find me if you have something to say to me.”

Some people — this includes staff as well as residents — will watch those godawful AI Youtube narrative videos, the ones where this incredibly monotonous robot voice tells you AND THE WOMAN SAW HER MOTHER IN THE COURT ROOM while a series of unrelated images flash past. They’ll do it in the dining room, the break room. No headphones, of course. I feel like I’m having a heart attack every time I see it. Like I’m being knifed.

One of my coworkers played me some music, then told me she got AI to generate it for her.

Other day, I was talking to someone else and I could see they had a conversation saved with a chatbot about why they should get a raise during the next merit increase. “You haven’t just created value…”

All right. I don’t know. I hope it helps, I guess.

Relatives are always hopeful that those AI-enhanced iPads will generate more useful reminders. “I got her this new iPad that will remind her when exercise starts.” I hope it does too, but in the meantime I’ll just run upstairs and knock on the door.

We’ve got this internal calendar-building and message-sending system we have to use at work. Call it ActiviDay. It generates, among other things, a daily trivia-and-puzzle handout I use during the coffee hour.

It’s mostly pretty useful, but then it’ll do something like generate an AI photo of Mae West wearing a sexy fedora, which drives me crazy, because we know what Mae West looked like. We already have photos of her. She wore cloches and I think a few times she wore a Gainsborough hat when she did those Gay ‘90s pictures, but she didn’t wear fedoras.

[PBS]

Or there will be a little factoid about the person of the day, and you never get any real details about their life, just that they “taught people” or “showed the world” how to lead with grace, or create with confidence, shit like that.

Once, last year, at the last minute I was asked to fill in for a speaker to give a presentation on Martin Luther King Day and I couldn’t figure out why the presentation didn’t include anything like dates or names or locations or real, concrete information, and about halfway through I realized it was all AI-generated. Just vague sentiment. Martin Luther King taught the world how to lead with grace. And he changed the world. And he was always there.

I don’t like that sort of thing. I like to pick the movies we play every night myself. I think about it careful, I take other people’s tastes into consideration, and I like movies. I want to do a good job of it. And if I’ve got to give a last-minute presentation about somebody, I’d like to be able to tell you where he lived.

I’ve got a regular group of about thirty-five residents now who meet with me on Monday afternoons to read a short story together. I’ll print out the story, and I’ll read it aloud, and I’ll print a glossary of any technical terms, historical context, a little bit about the author, maybe a passage or two from some complementary texts.

Here’s what we’ve read so far. Lots of middlebrow, middle-century New Yorker stuff, which I think is terrific, but we sometimes cast a wider net:

Shirley Jackson, “Charles”

Donald Barthelme, “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby”

Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”

Edna Ferber, “Old Man Minick”

Daniel Orozco, “Orientation”

Lydia Davis, “Five Stories”

Alice Walker, “Everyday Use”

Grace Paley, “Friends”

James Joyce, “The Sisters”

Grace Paley, “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age”

Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Wait”

Kathryn Scanlan, “Kick the Latch”

John Cheever, “The Swimmer”

Anton Chekhov, “Misery”

Lorrie Moore, “How to Talk to Your Mother”

And of course I want to throw in some charming, humane little details that will make us all think, “I’d like to see AI recreate the glint in Paul’s eyes as he describes the Santa Anita Racetrack….I’d like to see AI showing up whenever a cop’s beating up a guy! I’d like to see AI bein’ all aroun’ in the dark, wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper is ready!” So I suppose I’d better not.

The upside to all this is that I get to feel embattled, misunderstood, and superior, which of course I always enjoy. The last of the Romans, me.

[Friar Bacon’s Brazen Head]

Rafe Meager writes the “Rotten and Good” newsletter and very graciously agreed to chat with me about Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes. Their “You’re not getting Boy with Apple you goddamn little fruit!” essay is terrific.

You can watch the whole movie on Youtube here, if you like, or just the trailer below:

RAFE:

The summary of this movie on SBS (our beloved Aussie community channel) is "While on her way to continental Europe, a rich young Englishwoman attempts to prove that an elderly governess was actually present on a train." Why does this slap so hard?

I think it's because it gives us absolutely no reason why she's trying to do this, and presumably if this is meant to be a thriller the reason that she would need to do this should be salacious or violent or something intriguing, but instead of telling us about that the film summary is like "the important thing is just to determine if an elderly woman was on a train". And you know what, hell yes.

DANNY:

It’s a fantastic set of stakes to give a thriller. She doesn’t have to save her own life or prove her own innocence to the federal government. It’s like the dramatic equivalent of Kidney Now! Prove that one governess was on the train. No more, no less.

RAFE:

I guess the first thing to say is that it’s a mystery to me why the gaslighting revival has skipped over this film. It would seem to be a pretty classic entry into the genre, but I never hear people talk about it. Maybe it’s eclipsed by his other films, and I just have the benefit of not having seen them. This is only the second Hitchcock I’ve ever seen, and the first was Rope. They’re at pretty opposite ends of the spectrum. I prefer this one, it’s got so much raw emotion in it. It’s also a much warmer film than Rope and than Hitchcock seems to be known for. Was that your experience with it?

Something has to have happened to Alfred Hitchcock to make a film about being gaslit by a bunch of people who actually know they’re doing the wrong thing but are too selfish and venal to behave properly, so I went to look at Hitchcock/Truffaut:

FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT. Mr. Hitchcock, you were born in London on August 13, 1899. The only thing I know about your childhood is the incident at the police station. Is that a true story?

ALFRED HITCHCOCK. Yes, it is. I must have been about four or five years old. My father sent me to the police station with a note. The chief of police read it and locked me in a cell for five or ten minutes, saying, “This is what we do to naughty boys.”

F.T. Why were you being punished?

A.H. I haven’t the faintest idea. As a matter of fact, my father used to call me his “little lamb without a spot.” I truly cannot imagine what it was I did.

F.T. I’ve heard that your father was very strict.

A.H. Let’s just say he was a rather nervous man.

DANNY:

The Lady Vanishes is in a strange sort of position, I think. Just like how everyone remembers Rebecca and no one really talks about his other early Du Maurier adaptation the year before (Jamaica Inn, not a great book, not a great movie and quite rightfully overlooked), I think The Lady Vanishes tends to get a little eclipsed by Sabotage and The 39 Steps, both of which came out a year or two before it.

Since it’s such an explicitly political film, too, it’s also a victim of its own time. People nowadays remember World War II much more strongly than they remember the appeasement era or the Phoney War, so it’s easier to overlook. Lifeboat and Suspicion and Notorious and Saboteur all have much longer afterlives than The Lady Vanishes for that reason, I think.

Are you familiar with the old Vanishing Hotel Room urban legend? It’s the basic source material for the book The Lady Vanishes was based on (ditto Flightplan!) and somehow I’d been familiar with the former without ever having seen the latter. I often have a really difficult time watching movies where a big part of the plot involves following a protagonist who no one else believes – I remember being physically agonized as a kid when The Fugitive movie came out.

Read more

“I’m here to see my mom”

There are three or four different receptionists staffing the front desk at work every day from seven am to seven pm. Often they can cover each other’s lunch breaks, but sometimes there’s only one on the desk. In that case someone from Marketing or Activities will cover it. If none of us are around, the Business Director or the head of Care will do it. Front desk helps my department out all the time, so I like to help them out too when I get the chance.

Front desk has to answer two kinds of phones and manage two separate alert systems. If the phone on the left rings, you answer with the name of your community, “Front Desk, _____ speaking, who are you here to visit?”

Sometimes people will answer “My mom,” especially if they’re from out of town or don’t visit often enough to know the policy. We can’t confirm if anybody lives here, and we can’t give out resident’s names. So they really do have to say who they’re here to visit, or we can’t let them in. It’s sort of funny, because it makes you sound jaded or world-weary about the idea of people visiting their mothers. Listen, buddy, I see a hundred of you guys a day. We’ve got a lot of mothers in the building, after all.

Since I only cover front desk once in a while, I don’t know as many relatives by sight as the regular front desk staff. Mostly people understand, but there are a few who get really upset about not being recognized.

I feel bad about that. You’ve got a lot going on, managing your parents’ lives, and now you’ve got to wait in front of a building you enter maybe three, four times a week until someone new can click you in.

Worst part is if you’re in a standoff like that and then someone else with a key fob walks in the door. Door’s open anyway, now. They don’t need you. Well, come on in anyhow, I guess.

Never happen again

Covering front desk, you get to run little errands more often. Once a month we have a foot doctor who sets up shop in the computer annex for the day. Residents will make appointments with him and come downstairs instead of having to travel all the way to his office.

Sometimes people forget they made an appointment, so he’ll stop by front desk and ask for one of us to go upstairs and get them. Last month it was Constance.1 Constance was a nun for over forty years.

“Oh, I’m glad you reminded me,” she said. “At least now I’ll have beautiful feet.”

“That’s worth having,” I said, “especially if you’re discalced.”

She turned her head to look at me, slow, and then she smiled, with real, mild but real, mild but definite, surprise and pleasure. Surprised and pleased she was, surprised and pleased to be surprised, pleased and surprised to be pleased.

Well, I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself, either. How often in life do you get a setup like that? A nun, on her way to a podiatry appointment — never happen again. Never get a setup for a joke like that again in my life, not if I live to be ninety-five, which she happens to be now.

I overheard Constance and Marisol in the elevator on Mother’s Day last year. Marisol asked if Constance had any plans for the rest of the day.

“No,” Constance said. “I don’t have a mother…I’m not a mother…Some of my nieces are pretty nice, though.”

Tip Jar

How can I help you?

Like I said, if the phone on the left rings, you’ve got to buzz people in through the front door.

If the phone on the right rings, you just answer it regular: Name of the building, Front Desk, Name speaking, How can I help you?

I hope the phone doesn’t ring too much when I’m covering front desk, because unless they’re asking a question about medical transport or upcoming outings, I can’t do much besides write a message down on a Post-It for when the real front desk gets back. I don’t know most of the systems they use and I don’t know how to put in a work order, which is how most things in the building get seen to.

You’ve got ants? That’s too bad…I’ll leave a note for Maintenance.

You want to know who’s on duty tonight? I’ll leave a note for Care to call you back.

You want to order room service? I’ll fill out the kitchen request form, but I have to wait for front desk to get back before I can deliver it.

Your TV isn’t turning on? Are you Xfinity or Comcast? I’ll leave a note for Maintenance.

You’ve got to be careful about TV stuff. Anything with phones or computers or devices of any kind. They’ll ask “Are you any good with technology?” and you’ve got to just say “No” right away. If people think you can help them with their phones, you’ll never get anything else done again.

No, I’m no good with computers. Never seen a phone before in my life. It’s a little shameful, pretending like that, but I don’t care. I’ve got a lot of other things I need to get done.

Someone called once because I dropped my work key on a mountain trail on my bike ride to work without realizing it. She saw the name of our building on the side of the key fob and called to give me her home address so I could go pick it up that evening.

Last month Malcolm R.2 called while I was covering front desk for lunch.

He said, “Danny…I’m calling about the birthday luncheon…in regards to the RVSP….the answer…is…‘No.’”

Michael3 called once just to say, “Danny, everything you’ve heard about me is true.” I’d never heard anything about him, though.

Pendant alarm for Room ___

If a resident’s pendant alarm goes off, you’ve got to radio Care over the walkie-talkie system and make sure they copy. The system will beep this flat little beep sound every four seconds until someone gets to that resident’s room, solves their problem, and then matches their half of the Care pendant to the pendant the resident’s wearing. The first beep is half a tone higher-pitched than the second beep.

“Beep beep…beep beep…beep beep.” It’s always going off.

Which is as it should be; the noise ought to irritate you into paying attention, in case someone’s in real trouble. It only gets really rough when the wall unit starts beeping too, because it’s not supposed to beep, and that sound is twenty times worse than the everyday beeping. Then you have to call the number listed on the wall and talk to someone from the fire department.

Fire department comes out a few times a month at least. They’re just as friendly as you think they’re going to be. The paramedics, too. They crack a lot of jokes but the jokes never seem stale, which is no easy thing to pull off.

The good stuff

Working front desk is a lot of fun, though, for the most part. You get a rolling chair and you have a lot of systems to manage, so you get to roll back and forth answering phones and sounding efficient.

Also a lot of the front desk staff will keep mints and gum and sometimes individual bags of Cheez-Its in the side drawers. You have to ask, of course, but a lot of the time they’re happy to share.

Plus everyone walks by, signs in, says hello. The machines to sign in give everybody a lot of trouble. They like you more because you’re a person, and the machine’s no good, and if it’s really bad you can always say “Don’t worry, I’ll sign you back in.”

When people die, they leave by the front door, too. The General Manager says that if you welcome people through the front door when they get here, you ought to see them out the front door when they go. She said that at the last town hall meeting and everyone seemed to appreciate it.

I think I have a good job because at the end of every week I’m real happy to go home, and at the end of every weekend I’m real happy to be back.

[Image via]

I don’t like getting spam emails as a general rule, but they’re usually pretty easy to filter and don’t cause more than a momentary spasm of irritation:

• Zodiac Signs That Were Born To Be Billionaires

• You earned this: $5 restaurant credit

• Follow up: Rib Remodeling Craze: How Patients Are Losing 4 Inches - Not Ribs

• Beauty Marks or Cancer Clues?

• You’re so close to 60% off…

• Risk-Taking Is Biblical - New Book where leadership, business and spirituality connect

• Meet the Mom who Turned her Child’s School Anxiety into a Nationwide Movement

Usually when I have a book coming out, I’ll see a slight uptick in PR-related spam for a few weeks following the release date. Nothing too serious, much of it doesn’t make it past my spam filter, and historically they’ve been easy to spot and block from the subject line alone.

This year has been different. Everything takes about five seconds longer to sniff out and they’re using irritatingly relevant target words that make me think I’m hearing from a human being who likes my work:

• Invitation to Showcase Your Book at Our November Literary Awards Event

• Christmas at the Women’s Hotel feels like a return to form in the most Lavery way possible

• I recently revisited Women’s Hotel and found myself utterly charmed

• Invitation to Feature Your Book in Our November Program

Once I see the email is signed “Curator Miracle,” sent from “elitebookagency@gmail.com,” or contains a sentence like “It’s both a celebration and a diagnosis of community” I know where I’m at, of course, but those five seconds make all the difference in the world.”

I did get used to this new style shortly after publishing the piece, and they no longer troubles me in the way they once did.

But last night I got an email with the subject line “Ruthlessly Eliminate Hurry.” I couldn’t help but click on it; I knew the expression well. My father said it often.

I still have auto-forwarding setup for the email address I used back when my name was Mallory Ortberg, almost a decade ago, and this message had been sent to that address from a “Gail Hernandez”:

"You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life." That's the answer Dallas Willard gave you, years ago, when you called him mid ministry crisis asking how to stay spiritually healthy. Soul Keeping grew out of that decades long relationship, and you wrote it the year after Willard died, which is part of why people describe it as a kind of Tuesdays with Willard. This six session study guide isn't teaching a concept you picked up secondhand, it's translating a mentorship into something a small group can actually work through together, what the soul needs, how grace and gratitude restore it, what growth actually looks like when hurry stops running the show.

A study built on that kind of source material speaks directly to a few specific reader groups.

Small groups already using the video study who need the guide to structure their weekly sessions.

Readers introduced to Dallas Willard through your writing who want to go deeper into his ideas without starting with denser academic texts.

Christians feeling depleted by a hurried, overscheduled life who are looking for language to name what’s actually missing.

A 4.6 rating across 425 reviews is a strong, established base for a study guide this specific in format, and it tells me groups are actually finishing all six sessions together rather than losing momentum partway through.

Given how established this guide already is, the clearest opportunity is Goodreads Momentum Builder, since a study this well reviewed should be showing up on more spiritual formation and small group lists than it currently is. Reader List Building could also make sense if you want a way to reach group leaders directly about future studies, rather than relying on Amazon alone.

Just reply and let me know if either is worth exploring, and I’ll send the full breakdown.

But of course that is not the answer Dallas Willard gave me when I called him during a ministry crisis; that is the answer Dallas Willard gave my father, John Ortberg Jr., quite a few years ago now.

I could not help but reply. I do not speak to my father, and he does not speak to me; we do not send one another messages through intermediaries and I do not look him up, but I wanted to talk to Gail about him. I sent her this in reply, although I know perfectly well that no such person as Gail exists, and all I have done now is mark myself as “likely to respond” on a list somewhere.

Hi Gail,

What’s remarkable about this AI-generated spam is that you sent this to a very old email address, associated with a very old name, which still auto-forwards to my current email address. I’ve changed my name twice since that one.

What’s even more remarkable is the book you’re trying to sell me a promotional package for is not one I ever wrote, but by my estranged father, John Ortberg. I’ve never called Dallas Willard in the middle of a ministry crisis. My father did that, many years ago.

Once Dallas Willard came over to my family home and I spent all afternoon cooking for him, because I felt guilty that I was no longer religious, and I knew this deeply grieved my parents, and I wanted to behave hospitably towards him. I know macaroni and cheese was on the menu; I don’t remember what else I made. Several side dishes, certainly. This was maybe ten or twelve years ago, maybe fifteen.

I just looked it up, and Dallas Willard died back in 2013, so it must have been at least fourteen years ago.

As it happens my father is no longer directly in the ministry at all. He resigned in disgrace back in 2020, after abusing his ministerial position to enable my pedophile brother to spend unsupervised and unrestricted time with children. I don’t speak to him now, but I understand that he makes somewhere in the neighborhood of $400,000 a year hosting a religious podcast. I find this personally distasteful, but as this sort of work does not enable him to exploit children, I see no reason to oppose his earning an astonishingly good living for what cannot be very hard work.

I’m not sure I can put you in touch with him. The only email address I remember him having was “Calboy@mppc.org.” (In retrospect, also distasteful.) He’s no longer associated with that church, and that church is no longer known as Menlo Park Presbyterian, so there you are. I don’t think I can remember his phone number off the top of my head anymore, either. I used to know it by heart.

The book you’re thinking of is probably The Life You’ve Always Wanted, which was released in 2002. It currently has 1,099 reviews on Amazon with an average of 4.76 stars. It has over 10,000 reviews on Goodreads and a 4.1 average rating there.

I don’t check my own books on Amazon, but I believe that this book has received substantially more, and better, reviews than any of mine have ever received. It was also on the syllabus for the Foundations of Ministry course I was required to take before graduating from evangelical Christian college in 2009.1

He’s got a good twenty years on me, of course, having started to publish in the early 90s, but I believe in giving credit where credit is due: He is more successful, and more liked, and more respected, than I am. I don’t mind saying that. He used to tell a fun story in a few of his early books about a naked little dance I used to do around the house as a toddler after bathtime. I called it the “Dee Dah Day” dance. Sometimes as a joke, during college, people would ask me to “do the dance again,” but I did not especially mind it. It was in pretty harmless fun.

I had to look up the title of the book to be sure that’s where the “ruthlessly eliminate hurry” quote came from. I don’t think I’ve looked my father up online since we stopped speaking in 2019.

There’s a terrific picture of him on the Amazon landing page. He used to use it for all his books. It’s probably 20 years old now, but this is still how I picture him. Gail, I can’t tell you how much I used to like to see his face. I found it winsome, charming, endearing, reliable, friendly, and inviting. Looking at that picture now, I think, that’s a face you can trust. And terrific teeth. Not so perfect they look like veneers. He never had veneers, not as long as I knew him; until 2019 at least I can tell you that he never had so much as a cavity. I don’t know about now.

I’ve never had a cavity, either. I believe in giving credit where credit is due.

The About the Author section on his Amazon page is a little out of date, though.

John Ortberg is the senior pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church (MPPC) in the San Francisco Bay Area. His bestselling books include Soul Keeping, Who Is This Man?, and If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat. John teaches around the world at conferences and churches, writes articles for Christianity Today and Leadership Journal, and is on the board of the Dallas Willard Center and Fuller Seminary. He has preached sermons on Abraham Lincoln, The LEGO Movie, and The Gospel According to Les Miserables. John and his wife Nancy enjoy spending time with their three adult children, dog Baxter, and surfing the Pacific. You can follow John on twitter @johnortberg or check out the latest news/blogs on his website at www.johnortberg.com.

He’s no longer the senior pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, as I said above. I believe that now he lives in Santa Barbara with my mother and her mother, my grandmother. I haven’t spoken to either of them since 2019 either, but I do occasionally google my maternal grandmother to see if she’s still alive, and I learned that she now lives at their Santa Barbara address.2

I’m glad she’s living with them; she always worried about having to go to a nursing home. I don’t work in a nursing home now, I work in assisted living, but to plenty of people that’s a difference without a distinction, or a distinction without a difference. I can never remember which.

I think he was allowed to resign from the board at Fuller Seminary, too. I don’t know about the Dallas Willard Center.

I can tell you that John and his wife Nancy do not enjoy spending time with their three adult children. They likely spend time with two of their adult children; I don’t know to what degree they enjoy it. My sister was always sentimental about our brother but did not especially enjoy spending time with him. I don’t know if they’re good friends now, or what.

I know that she sometimes claimed our brother was not allowed to spend time alone with her children, and she sometimes claimed that he was. I found her difficult to pin down on that question. I worry about that.

John is also no longer on Twitter. The dog Baxter is almost certainly dead by now.

All of this is to say, I don’t think my father needs much help in publicizing his books. He’s a very successful man. I wish you all the best in selling your promotional scheme to other authors,

Daniel Lavery (formerly Daniel Ortberg, formerly Mallory Ortberg)

Best thing is a no-brainer. When I was six, my mother took me on an Amtrak from Chicago to Los Angeles to visit my aunt and take me to Disneyland, which was all I wanted as a child. I barely remember Disneyland, funnily enough, but I remember that train trip: three or four nights without a sleeper compartment. We ate snacks and read to each other from Peter Pan and slept in our upright seats covered in a giant old fur coat that my mother called her “mystery mink.” Everything about it was magical. I think it was the one time she was the mom she thought she was, or wanted to be. After she died I inherited a massive photo album just from that trip. I’m so glad both of us had that.

[The Ungrateful Son, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1777]

But I think turnabout is fair play, and one must from time to time examine the thankless child with that same critical eye! We can’t all be blameless, and all our mothers terrible. The odds are against that numerically. Surely we’ve flung a disagreeable remark their way from time to time.

So this week I asked the same group about the worst thing they’d ever said to their mothers, and the nicest thing they’d ever done for them.

AUDREY

Once, to break the silence of the only time I ever refused to speak to her (I held out for like five weeks?) I told her in a letter that all I had ever wanted was to make up for every bad thing that happened to her, so there’s that. Maybe 18 months later, for my last birthday with her, which I did not know would be the last, I went to this very expensive chocolate shop in the Ferry Building and picked out a few for her. She was really happy that I picked ones with notes of tobacco and coffee, because she loved smoking and drinking coffee.

Whatever the worst thing I ever said to her was is obscure to me. I was really too afraid to talk back to her — she once cornered me by my bedroom door and tried to sound very casual as she asked me why we didn’t fight more; weren’t teenage girls supposed to fight with their mothers? I did not tell her the truth, which was that she was terrifying. Said I didn’t know why.

The precipitating event of us not speaking to each other was an absurd fight that she picked with me after I had driven a great distance to pick my brother up from a hurricane shelter in another state.

Read more

The last person I posed this question to was Jordy Rosenberg:

DANNY: What’s the worst thing your mother has ever said to you?

JORDY: Too many to list. But the funniest worst thing she ever said was: “No one likes sex with men. Marry one and divorce him for the alimony.”

DANNY: Yes, but Jordy, at least your mother is dead. That’s got to help a little. Mine is still generating a chain of events that turns into a single catastrophe in front of my feet, piling wreckage upon wreckage! And a storm is blowing in from Paradise!

Whenever any of us kids moved into a new apartment, she’d always come over and make sure our cutlery drawers were lined. Said she couldn’t feel comfortable until she’d seen our new places and knew where everything was and that our cutlery drawers had a nice lining in them. She did a lot of other nice things, too.

A few weeks after I had started testosterone without telling her, she looked critically at my neck and said, “You’ve been breaking out a lot lately. Did you start testosterone without telling me?” She said some worse things, too, but I can’t remember any other things as vividly as this one.

AUDREY

The worst thing my mother ever said to me is “you and your brother are living marginal lives.” I think about it literally every day and am afraid I will never outrun it.

The nicest thing is serial, and it’s that she always sent me a housewarming card in the mail every time i moved.

SIOBHAN

My mother taught me about the beauty of adventuring outdoors. We didn’t have much money growing up, and our home life was very difficult. Because of this we spent a lot of time camping, backpacking, and riding horses in the wilderness. She planned incredible adventures for me that shaped who I am today.

She put the burden of deciding what to do about her abusive marriage on me, age 11: “I’ll leave him if you want me to.”

LOREN

Made me a mixtape of songs that reminded her of me. Once she rush shipped a care package overseas with a belt, pants, and a grip of protein bars, because I’d lost so much weight traveling that I was keeping my pants up with a piece of rope.

“You know how I feel about that,” when I finally told her I had a girlfriend in my twenties. Later, “I don’t want to meet her.”

NATALIE

She gave me an insane amount of self-esteem. Always made me feel like I merit love and care and attention. Specific examples include: bought me a plane ticket home from college at 3am my junior year after I got in a scary fight with my then-boyfriend. She came to all my plays in high school, let me sleep in her room for months when I got my heart broken for the first time at seventeen, and always makes me feel like she loves being my mother.

Also, she did one overnight a week with my very sleep-uninterested baby for the first ten weeks after she was born.

The worst thing: I vividly remember my mother telling me “you are such a fuck-up” in high school. I remember where we were (in my room, she was standing in the doorway). I don’t remember what it was about, but I don’t think it was anything huge — maybe time management. Because she usually held me in high regard and because I really value her opinion I was especially hurt.

RACHEL

Best thing is a no-brainer. When I was six, my mother took me on an Amtrak from Chicago to Los Angeles to visit my aunt and take me to Disneyland, which was all I wanted as a child. I barely remember Disneyland, funnily enough, but I remember that train trip: three or four nights without a sleeper compartment. We ate snacks and read to each other from Peter Pan and slept in our upright seats covered in a giant old fur coat that my mother called her “mystery mink.” Everything about it was magical. I think it was the one time she was the mom she thought she was, or wanted to be. After she died I inherited a massive photo album just from that trip. I’m so glad both of us had that.

Worst thing she ever said, there’s lots to choose from. Right before I started high school: “You can be anything you want, Rachel. Why not be popular?”

And right before I started college, when I told her I wanted to major in English and theater, “You’ll need to lose a lot of weight if you’re planning to be a trophy wife.”

LIEM

My mom has taken me all around the world, instilling in me a love of good food and broader horizons.

Probably the worst thing is, “If we can’t find your sister, I will kill you.” But honestly that was fair. I lost my three-year-old sister on my eighth birthday at our apartment complex. We found her. I’m alive.

CATRINA

“The nicest thing a mother can do is literally everything else while father writes his clever little books. Mine doesn’t come out of her room much these days, though.”

ANN

She paid off my credit card when I finished grad school. I still had to pay off my student loan, but back in those days student debt was less life-hobbling. She also stopped my high school from holding me back after I got seriously depressed.

But also: She was not a well woman. In addition to the mental and emotional instabilities, and the chronic pain, some of her behavior was probably exacerbated by what we later found out were mini-strokes that ate away at her brain and caused wild mood swings. She’d say horrible things and then forget them.

She once wrote a long letter to me about what a failure I was as a daughter because I didn’t help out around the house enough when she was in pain, even though it had apparently escaped her notice that I took up cooking duties for our family and fed us all until I left for college.

When I was very young, and my father and sister were away, I saw my mother crying, and it scared me so much I left the room. Later she told me I was uncaring and selfish for not asking her what was wrong.

I was able to put it aside at the end. She died of Covid in a nursing home in August 2020. A nurse brought in an iPad and for over two hours, I monologued to her unconscious face, filling her head with every happy memory I could muster and letting her know that I loved her, and I knew she loved me, and that she was going to be pain-free and with her beloved older brother again, who she loved very much. She died a few hours later.

I recently got a tattoo of one of the last things she said to me a few years prior. As Parkinson’s took over, she didn’t always remember my name or who I was. I had flown to see her. She rallied, and I was sitting by her bed spoon-feeding her Jell-O. She looked at me, rallied what seemed to be all of her consciousness, and rasped out, “I want you to know that I think you have turned into a fine young lady.” There is a version of that on my inner upper arm now.

[Images via Wikimedia Commons]

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There are two rooms whose cleanliness I’m responsible for at work. I’m also responsible for the cleanliness of the car and the bus, and I share responsibility for the cleanliness of the bistro with the kitchen staff.

Plus I have some storage units downstairs and up on the third floor. I share responsibility for the neatness of the storage units with Maintenance. The storage units don’t really have to be clean, just neat.

Usually that means once a week I vacuum the Activity Center and the Wellness Center. Then I Swiffer them. Used to be someone from Housekeeping swept and mopped the Activity Center, but I think that was pretty short-lived. Maybe somebody from Housekeeping still does it on the days I’m not there; I don’t know. I guess anything might happen on the days I’m not there. It’s nobody else’s job in the world but mine to keep the floors of those two rooms in the building clean.

Anyhow, between the bead jewelry class, happy hour, and the twice-a-month ceramics class, the Activity Center needs to get vacuumed and mopped at least once a week, and since I don’t have a mop, I use a Swiffer WetJet. It’s not very good. I don’t recommend it as a product, although it is easy to use and less messy than a mop. It gets the floor just clean enough that you think, “I guess that looks better,” and move on with your day.

There are two bagless vacuum cleaners that usually get left to charge in the silverware-rolling room off the main dining room. They’re okay. Not great, but okay. Better than the Swiffer, but not as a good as the big bagged upright vacuum cleaner they keep back in Memory Care.

I like to borrow Memory Care’s vacuum whenever I can. My key fob works on the Memory Care door, so I let myself in a few times a week to say hi and visit my Memory Care counterpart and borrow her vacuum cleaner. She’s nice. She always lets me use it. I trained her on the big bus over the last few months, so she can drive it now, too. She was nervous about the bus at first but she’s done real well. She’s better than I was, my first few months, getting the bus through the front turnaround. The clearance bar is at 9’ and the bus is about 9’1 so you always bump it going through, no matter what. Lucky the clearance bar is soft, so it doesn’t matter.

People like to see a young white man1 using a vacuum cleaner. They don’t necessarily mean anything pointed or political by it. They just like to see it. It makes them feel cheerful. I think people feel that it looks lucky, like the building has a lot of luck to it. It makes them feel good and buoyant in their hearts.

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I don’t especially like vacuuming, but I don’t dislike it, either, and I certainly like a clean floor. I even more certainly like receiving positive attention when I’m vacuuming, so I guess taken holistically I do like vacuuming, as long as it’s at work and I have a big audience and I only have to vacuum one bare floor, without any heavy furniture or carpets to move out of the way.

Always make sure someone sees you working hard before ten in the morning. That’s one of my work rules. I didn’t used to have work rules, because I didn’t work for a long time, about twelve years. I didn’t used to like the jobs I had, so I didn’t need rules. I like the job I have. I have a lot of rules now.

Always make sure someone sees you working hard early. That way it cements their mental image of you for the day as hard-working, so if you want to take it easy in the afternoon no one will remember it.

Always say yes if someone from another department needs your help because they’ll remember that you said yes and they’ll help you out next time you’re slammed or short-handed. Also if you don’t you’ll get discussed as a not-a-team-player, which is no good. Always double-check when someone says they’re wearing their seatbelt in the company car, because people will lie happily to your face about it but the insurance will blame you just the same if you get in a crash. Always keep a lot of good snacks in your office but keep them in tubs so you don’t get ants. Never rush. It’s fine to hustle, but you shouldn’t rush. Don’t just remember people’s orders during coffee hour, say “No sugar, two stirrers, right?” so they can have the pleasure of saying “Yes, that’s right.”

If somebody falls down and they have to wait on the floor for a caregiver just sit on the floor with them, unless they tell you to go away. You can’t help pick somebody up off the ground unless you’ve been specially trained, but people feel embarrassed sitting on the floor, and a lot of the time it’s less embarrassing when someone else is sitting there with you. Also then you get a pretty good sense of whether the floor needs vacuuming.

If somebody has bad memory problems, they’ll still notice if you’re impatient with them. Even if you’re still being polite while you’re being impatient so you think you can technically get away with it. Everybody notices when you’re impatient with them, so if you do feel impatient, take a break and find a way to keep it to yourself. They might miss a lot of other social cues but being able to tell when someone else is irritated with you is about one of the last things to go. Anyhow what do you have to do that’s so goddamn important? What’s the rush? It’s senior living, there’s no need to rush. You’re not a doctor or a fireman; you can wait a minute.

If someone walks past when you’re vacuuming and they say “They make you vacuum the floors, too?” you don’t have to make a joke about it, but you can always say it saves you from going to the gym. Even if you go to the gym more than ever now, because you’re worried about sarcopenia, you can still say it saves you from having to go to the gym, because that’s the sort of thing people say to each other to pass the time and express non-hostility. But let other people make corny jokes to you more often than you make them in return. You start making a lot of corny jokes, you’ll never stop.

They’re your floors. It’s good to keep your floors clean; you can take a good kind of pride in it. People go through a lot by the time they get here. It’s important to be of good cheer. Not cheery, always, and not with a forced smile, but good cheer and a clean floor, that’s important. That’s a good rule.

A lot of people, they move into a place like ours as a married couple, only one of them outlives the other. A lot of people will leave the nameplate on the door the same, so you have to find out by word of mouth how many couples live in the building, and how many people are keeping the name up as a sort of memorial.

Sometimes a couple will move in and one of them will die almost right away. That’s a hard thing. Sometimes it’s a relief, too; that’s another hard thing.

There are plenty of people who live here I barely ever see, because they don’t really participate in the building’s social calendar. This is perfectly fine. Some people just want a small apartment, place to sleep, the knowledge that a care team is downstairs in case of emergency, and to be left alone to manage their own social life as they please. I don’t think everyone in the building needs me, is what I mean; I don’t think they all need to see me vacuuming in order to feel good.

It can be easy, working in senior living, to think you’re special when really you’re just forty.2 Give it time; you’ll have the same problems.

In the final count I really do think bagless vacuum cleaners can’t stand up to bagged. I don’t want that to be true; I keep buying bagless vacuum cleaners, thinking this one’s going to be different, but you really can’t beat the bag. The filters on the bagless vacuum cleaners just can’t handle the fine dust. You’re always having to break the whole damn thing apart to clean it. But you got the vacuum to clean things, not to have another thing to clean.

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Yesterday a friend asked if I’d ever read The Phantom Tollbooth – I think it had something to do with their work as an academic, but it might have been pursuant to that day’s Twitter conversation about that brief period in the 70s and 80s where junior high class schedules were a serious heroic asset in children’s fantasy:

“…Anyhow, he ends up in Digitopolis, and some related kingdom but for language, and he has to contend with – a lot of expressions keep coming true to horrifying effect, I guess, so the sunrise shatters the idea of sound at some point, and there’s a family who dangle in the air and grow down towards the ground, and he has to eat the concept of division, and rescue these princesses, Rhyme and Reason, who looked a little bit like those old caricatures of William F. Buckley…”

It was at this point that I realized five things:

1. Most of the illustrated characters in The Phantom Tollbooth looked a little bit like William F. Buckley

2. I had an absolutely inexplicable but profoundly stirring crush on William F. Buckley when I was a little kid, despite having no idea who William F. Buckley was (I saw him on old covers of Time magazine and had a vague sense that he was an old actor like Dick Cavett, who I also had a crush on as a kid, although I at least knew what he was famous for).

3. It’s perfectly explicable, come to think of it: Dick Cavett is 5’7, one of the most pulsingly attractive heights for a man to be (other attractive heights include 5’8, 5’9, 5’5, 5’10, 6’5, 5’11, 5’6, 6’1), fine-boned and carefully-assembled, like if God had to make a jockey out of a Precious Moments figurine, with a John Cazale hairline and the wryest eyebrows ever to wriggle across a forehead. The caricatures I’d seen of Buckley played up similar qualities: sneering little rabbit mouth, a sense of languor to the point of illness, heavy eyelids (I learned his less attractive qualities later, when I found out who he was, at the time I rather think I believed him to be a cartoonist himself).

4. I had understood on an intuitive and pre-verbal level that almost every character in the Phantom Tollbooth was my beau ideal, a mishmash of Cavett and Buckley and Little Boy Lost, in various disguises, and fallen in love with them all.

5. Love, or at least pre-verbal attraction, was directed at a vision of stymying, of intelligent bewilderment; the idea of someone brilliant and pensive and adept and a little bored set adrift on a sea of confusion, growing increasingly baffled, overwhelmed, sleepy and receptive, to the point of hypnosis and hallucination, placidity and pliability, horror and frozenness, inaction and fulfillment, helplessness and the sensation of being gradually and from all corners overcome. Not for nothing was one of my first crushes the sharp-eyed little boy delirious with fever in The Velveteen Rabbit.

You can see what I mean here, I think (of course, perhaps you can’t!). Milo first, from the Jules Feiffer illustrations: Alert, slight, wide-eyed, guarded, precise, small enough for a jockey but perhaps too delicate a constitution to ever mount a horse, in a word, Cavettesque. (It should not surprise you to learn that I loathed Tock the dog, that clock-mounted beacon of vigilance, always reminding Milo of time and urgency and clear-headedness, always recollecting him back to himself.)

Next, the Princesses of Rhyme and Reason, who seemed to me to have longer, dreamier versions of Milo’s face:

Milo again, this time trying desperately to conduct the sunrise – “He tried very hard to do everything just the way Chroma had done, but nothing worked. The musicians played on, faster and faster, and the purple sun raced quickly across the sky. In less than a minute it had set once more in the west and then, without any pause, risen again in the east. The sky was now quite yellow and the grass a charming shade of lavender. Seven times the sun rose and almost as quickly disappeared as the colors kept changing. In just a few minutes a whole week had gone by.

At last the exhausted Milo, afraid to call for help and on the verge of tears, dropped his hands to his sides.”

“He tried very hard…but nothing worked” – there is no more thrilling sentence to a dreamy, beleaguered young future trans boy; or at least there wasn’t for this one.

The real Buckley now, from Time Magazine, for comparison:

Now the Phantom Tollbooth’s King of Wisdom – Buckley in every sense of the word, from the ridiculous epaulets, absurd hairstyle, and grasping, cruel hands:

Finally Dick himself, from the Al Hirschfeld Foundation:

Yes, that’s Tim Curry from Rocky Horror cropped out; I know what I am and I know what moves me, and little Dickie Cavett beats out the glorious Tim Curry every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Almost exactly halfway through Tollbooth Milo and his twice-hateful dog Tock stop at the house of the tallest man in the world, the shortest, the fattest, and the thinnest, and are continually directed to “try the next door,” where the same unremarkable-looking man answers them every time. “Just as they suspected, the other side of the house looked the same as the front, the back, and the side, and the door was again answered by a man who looked precisely like the other three.” But it’s not just that house – it’s every house, and every face, over and over again, Cavett and Buckley and a series of unremarkable pointy white faces growing more and more perplexed, until eventually you have to stop reading and fall asleep yourself, and I can’t think of a pleasanter dissolving sort of feeling than that.

-New shoes

-Big cigar

-Dice

-Lowdown

-Specific make and model of car (Lincoln Continental, El Dorado, drop-top Cadillac, ‘57 Chevrolet)

-Alabama

-Cigarettes

-Big women

-Slide trombone

-Riverboats

-May-pop tires

-Nickels

“Car Wash Blues” is a perfect example: this is a song that is literally about depression (specifically of the low-down mind-messing variety) but is in fact the most joyful and rambling celebrations of a healthy ego.

Things Jim Croce sings about when he is feeling despondent

-Matchbooks

-Phone booths

-Dusty shoes

-Dusty old shoes

-Georgia

-Cars, generally

-Women of unspecified size

-Railroads

-New York

-Quarters, dimes

This is unrelated, but a few years ago I tweeted about a dream I had, where I was out dancing and heard a song that dropped the beat after the line RICHARD SCARRY’S BUSYTOWN IS NOW IN EFFECT. Last month a DJ made that dream a reality:

Previously: Every Pete Hornberger subplot on 30 Rock’s Season Two.

It’s in season two that we see the beginning of Pete’s desperate hope of total personal transformation via hat, in fact. In “Rosemary’s Baby” he accompanies Liz to a book signing by her comedy icon Rosemary Howard, and is perfectly content to play the straight man until Liz agrees to get lunch with Rosemary. At this point he gasps in genuine distress: “But you’re supposed to take me hat shopping!”²

We see what happens in the next episode where Pete’s unaided taste has guided him: he wears what Jenna calls “a sexy Justin Timberlake hat” and what Liz recoils from in horror. The less time Liz spends with Pete in favor of Jack, the more unmoored Pete comes from reality, taste, reason, and good judgment and the more squarely he drifts over the loser line.

Every Pete Hornberger subplot on 30 Rock’s Season One.

But the seeds of greatness are there, I think. Scott Adsit has the winning, poignant smile of an urchin who doesn’t realize he’s dying, and the shamelessness of Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums. He’s always losing, but he’s always looking for way to game the system, too, and you can’t keep a downed man down for long.

Season Three of 30 Rock is a tough one for old Pete Hornberger.1 There are no highs like “MILF Island” or “College.” I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel just to reach ten episodes to rank.2 The only real subplot he gets is in “Larry King,” which is terrific, but he spends most of the season either offscreen or just getting a line or two in. The tenth entry in today’s ranking barely qualifies as a subplot. It’s bad!

We do learn a few more details about Pete’s backstory, though. In addition to being a former Olympian archer, we find out he used to teach high school math, that he has experience breeding cows, that his father was a congressman.

The really interesting element of season three is that just as we learn that Tracy Jordan is secretly wholesome in episode 15 (“Don Geiss, America and Hope”) Pete becomes increasingly venal and degraded. He’s always been a little crude, but it’s hard to imagine the guy who cheerfully decides to go home to his wife in “Black Tie” saying, as he does in cutbacks, that his former students “pretend they’re not women, but they are.” It’s a line delivered with as much fear as licentiousness, and he tosses it off perfectly. 30 Rock never quite seems to know what it wants from Pete vis-a-vis infidelity.3 No one wants to see him cheat successfully, but they never want to see him stop trying, either.

He still plays the voice of reason with some regularity, especially with Tracy and Jenna, but now with an additional layer of self-loathing (“We told him he had to be blindfolded before launch to prevent space madness…As a child, I dreamed of being a congressman like my father. Now I do this”) that will eventually lead to the unhinged, nothing-to-lose Pete of later seasons, who feverishly, frequently plans to fake his own death. In season three (notably “Jackie Jormp-Jomp”) that’s still a strictly-Jenna plotline.

#10.

Episode: “Do-Over”
Subplot: Helps Liz temporarily transform the studio into a baby-friendly workplace to trick an adoption agency; receives a chinchilla coat from the proceeds of Tracy’s pornographic video game
Best line(s):

Liz [Impressed at the speed with which he’s turned the green room into a nursery]:Nice work, Hornberger. Are these dolls?

Pete [tossing one to Liz]: Are they?

Doll: Mommy!

Pete: They’re called ‘Little Creepers.’

#9.

Episode: “Jackie Jormp-Jomp”
Subplot: Creates an on-air tribute to Jenna after she fakes her own death
Best line(s):

Jack: Pete. A word. Jenna’s dead.

Pete: I don’t feel anything. What’s wrong with me?

#8.

Episode: “Cutbacks”
Subplot: Gets fired
Best line(s):

Pete: Liz, it’s a massacre!

Liz: What is going on?

Pete: Brad came in this morning and started making cuts. I can’t go back to teaching high school math. Those girls pretend they’re not women yet, but they are.

#7.

Episode: “Mamma Mia”
Subplot:
Best line(s):

Pete: Liz...hey. This is your job. This is what you signed up for.

Liz: I know. I like it when you use your calm, reasonable dad voice…That’s the voice you should use when you tell Jenna that I’m gonna be in that magazine with her.

#6.

Episode: “Goodbye, My Friend”
Subplot: Tries to dissuade Liz from grooming a pregnant teen into giving her her baby
Best line(s):

Liz: No, I’m just gonna go to the 24-hour donut place and go home.

Pete: Donuts and then bed. What are you depressed about? Or celebrating?

#5.

Episode: “Kidney Now!”
Subplot: Fights with Liz after she advises his wife to force him to come on a family vacation to her relatives on the strength of the success of her Dealbreaker series
Best line(s):

Pete: Liz Lemon, you dumb bitch.

Liz: What?

Pete: Here’s the reason I don’t want to go on that family vacation: It’s a working farm. And I’m the only one whose hands are big enough to guide the bull during mating.

#4.

Episode: “The Natural Order”
Subplot: Resets all of Tracy’s watches and clocks in order to trick him to getting to rehearsal on time
Best line(s):

Liz: I had Grizz call him at 8:00 this morning and pretend it was 11:00.

Pete: I printed up that fake rehearsal schedule for him, saying we were starting at 9:00 instead of noon. Oh, and I set all his watches and clocks to say P.M. when it’s really A.M.

Liz: Oh, boy. We may have overdone it.

Tracy: What the hell time is it? I took my son to his cello recital this morning at what turned out to be midnight yesterday.

#3.

Episode: “The Ones”
Subplot: Helps Jenna realize she’s a sociopath while trying to reunite with a paramedic she likes
Best line(s):

Jenna: I called 911. They wouldn’t even connect me to their celebrity service. I don’t know what to do.

Pete: Huh…you know, your dilemma reminds me of a book I read once.

Jenna: Ugh. See you later, Pete.

Pete: No, no, no. Listen, listen, listen. There’s this question psychiatrists use to identify sociopaths. A woman goes to her mother’s funeral, where she meets the perfect man. It’s love at first sight. But he leaves before she finds out who he is. So what does she do to see him again?

Jenna: She kills her father, hoping that the guy will come to that funeral too!

Pete: That’s correct — Oh, boy.

Jenna: Thanks for the advice.

Pete: No, no no — that wasn’t advice.

#2.

Episode: “Apollo, Apollo”
Subplot: Creates a fake space launch to convince Tracy he’s fulfilled his childhood dream of going into space without interfering with the show’s shooting schedule
Best line(s):

Pete: Oh, hey. I just wanted to get you to approve the other astronauts we hired.

Liz: Looks good. Where’s Tracy?

Pete: In Cape Canaveral. By which I mean through that door. We told him he had to be blindfolded before launch to prevent space madness.

Liz: Sure.

Pete: And then we put him on the Channel Four traffic copter for a couple hours. And now he’s landed here in sunny Florida.

Liz: Well done, Hornberger.

Pete: Yeah. As a child, I dreamed of being a congressman like my father. Now I do this. One DUI in high school.

#1.

Episode: “Larry King”
Subplot: Calls in to Larry King Live to ask Tracy questions that will reveal the location of buried treasure at 30 Rockefeller Plaza
Best line(s):

Larry King: Our next caller is Pete from Manhattan. Pete, what’s your question?

Pete: Hey, Larry. First-time caller. Adore the show.

Tracy: Hey, I’d recognize that voice anywhere, Larry. That’s my friend Peter Frampton on the phone.

Pete: Uh, sure. Listen, Tracy, I love the idea of hiding cash at work. Can you be more specific about where you hid your money?

Tracy: Of course, Pete. I hid my money in the safest place at 30 Rock. Without giving it away, the place I picked is very dry and warm. Its top is hard, but its bottom is soft. And although the location changes all the time, the money stays in the same place.

Larry King: If you are just joining us, we’re with Tracy Jordan, who is giving guitar icon Peter Frampton enigmatic clues about a secret treasure. Stay with us.

Anyhow I’ve been giving the matter a lot of thought, and I’d like an award for only the first page of the book, which I think is more than fair. You are aware, I am sure, of the very common practice of putting two epigraphs at the beginning of one’s novel.1 The first one is serious and high-culture, the second one is joking and ideally low-culture, even better if it undercuts the effect of the first.

I didn’t do that. I did two epigraphs for Meeting New People, of course, because I’m only human and epigraphs are a lot of fun, but they’re both straight across-the-board the same level of sincere. They communicate similar ideas and sit in similar emotional registers. One isn’t funnier than the other, and neither complicates its fellow. The first one is just about friendship, and the second one is about friendship and food.

I wonder if you realize how rare this is, and how much I ought to be fussed over for not having done one serious epigraph and one funny epigraph. Sometimes people will even do two serious epigraphs and one very short funny epigraph. Sometimes the funny epigraph is just the tagline to an old commercial or something. You know the formula I mean:

1. Quote from Freud/Nietzsche/Virgil/Wittgenstein

2. Something from a zoologist about animal behavior in deadly scenarios

3. “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” Or if the book came out fifteen years ago, a Kanye West lyric, but now that sort of thing doesn’t win you points with the type of people it used to, so it’s likelier to be part of a jingle, or a children’s rhyme, or something like that.

It’s the same thing all the time, and I didn’t do it, and even though the book came out two months ago, no one has pointed it out to praise me for it yet, so I’m going to have to do it myself. I don’t mind, I’m perfectly happy to do it.