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.

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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.

[Image via]

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.

Relevant to this exchange: Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and a mild defense of Edmund Bertram.

MRS. PRICE: Too many children

Too many children Portsmouth help

Mail son away

Send son away via mail

A. Natasha Joukovsky’s new novel, Medium Rare, a modern retelling of the myth of Icarus about prophesy, fame, and basketball, was published earlier this year by Melville House. She is also the author of The Portrait of a Mirror, a short story in Thirty Cabins, sundry nonfiction, and a “quite useless” newsletter.

I admire Natasha’s work exceedingly. I sent her a message on Instagram a week or two ago because I thought she would have interesting things to say about Elizabeth Inchbald, one of my favorite eighteenth-century authors (and, if you require further justification, a significant influence on Austen), and asked if she would consider reading A Simple Story so we could chat about it. A Simple Story follows the successful, then unsuccessful, love story between Dorriforth (a Catholic!) and his ward Miss Milner, then the unsuccessful, then successful, parental relationship between Dorriforth (now Lord Elmwood) and his daughter by the disgraced Miss M., Matilda.

Our correspondence follows:

Dear Sir,

It was good of you to solicit my thoughts on Elizabeth Inchbald for—if memory serves—“one million dollars” via Instagram. While I endeavor to insulate my literary efforts from overt pecuniary manipulation, flattering hyperbole fortunately bears no such personal constraint, and I am pleased to comply. I have read the novels of Mrs. Inchbald with relish. Her debut, A Simple Story, I found not so simple; Nature and Art, a philosophical feast. But let me not presume to understand the precise nature of your inquiries when—

I have the honor to be,

Sir,

with regard to this conversation,

your most humble, and

most obedient servant,

ANJ

I won’t try to maintain Inchbald’s style, mostly because I have only recently recovered from a familywide bout of Covid and because I fear I have a tin ear for that sort of thing. But I would gladly give a million dollars, if I had it, for your thoughts on Inchbald’s style, if only because I first came to enjoy your writing through your Austen Math series:

The four primary dimensions predict total status via uneven weight distribution, in alignment with the hierarchy of Austen’s values as I have long understood them:

1. MORALS - 40%

2. FORTUNE - 30%

3. MANNERS - 20%

4. FUCKABILITY - 10%

for a total of 100%.

The formula to calculate total estimated Austenian status is a basic SUMPRODUCT: D1*W1 + D2*W2 + D3*W3 + D4*W4, where D=dimensional raw score and W=Austenian weight.

III. Secondary dimension calculations

Each pair of congruous primary dimensions yields insights into asecondary dimension. At the intersection

of FORTUNE and MORALS is WORTH,

of MORALS and MANNERS is CHARACTER,

of MANNERS and FUCKABILITY is AFFECT,

and of FUCKABILITY and FORTUNE is ELIGIBILITY.

I ought to point out here that Elizabeth Inchbald was someone Jane Austen certainly read and admired, and whose play Lovers’ Vows features so prominently in Mansfield Park. But it’s her funny little Catholic version of Wuthering Heights, A Simple Story, that I wanted to talk about with you.

I was thinking of Inchbald in this context in particular, since A Simple Story strikes me as a purely mathematical one. (I graduated without honors from an evangelical Christian college with a degree in English literature and a minor in biblical studies, you will forgive me if I misrepresent pure mathematics here.) It’s just hearts and numbers talking to one another, is what I mean.

Strachey wrote the introduction of my edition of A Simple Story:

“Compared with A Simple Story even the narrow canvases of Jane Austen seem spacious pictures of diversified life. Mrs. Inchbald’s novel is not concerned with the world at large, or with any section of society, hardly even with the family; its subject is a group of two or three individuals whose interaction forms the whole business of the book. There is no local colour in it, no complexity of detail nor violence of contrast; the atmosphere is vague and neutral, the action passes among ill-defined sitting-rooms, and the most poignant scene in the story takes place upon a staircase which has never been described. Thus the reader of modern novels is inevitably struck, in A Simple Story, by a sense of emptiness and thinness, which may well blind him to high intrinsic merits.”

I did not think you would be blind to its merits! Would you tell me what you thought some of its merits were?

Sincerely,

Danny

Okay, Danny—but the idea that you have a tin ear for faux eighteenth-century formality is ridiculous. I have been reading your books, and the author of Texts from Jane Eyre does not have a tin ear. I’m just as happy to switch, though; contemporary style may prove more appropriate for handing Lytton Strachey his ass.

I went and read his introduction to A Simple Story to understand the quotation above in context, and it’s like an ur-text for how to create a literary environment systematically hostile to its merits as I see them. He kicks things off by comparatively bashing Frances Burney’s magnificent debut, Evelina. Great to know it was “still widely read” in 1908—Burney cannot be read enough—but the entire posture feels animated by the same vicious presumption of period quotas on canonical female novelists that Rebecca Romney’s recent book, Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, so persuasively resists.

Even in praising Inchbald and Austen, Strachey manages to undercut them. The “narrow canvases” of Austen’s tableaux are a feature, not a bug—and I wouldn’t say Inchbald’s are actually narrower. Characters banished from and even fully outside the gentry—adulterers, musicians, prostitutes—can take center stage. Unlike, say, Maria Bertram, whose fall ushers her swiftly off, Miss Milner is not only permitted to remain, but to remain a figure of more pathos than derision. This, more than twenty years earlier. Oh, and he gives credit for “part of the plot of A Simple Story“ to William Godwin because “it is said” (by ??) that he suggested it.

I think Austen is the GOAT (of any sex), but she did not write in a vacuum. As in the case of Burney, Austen’s comparison to Inchbald should be celebrated to their mutual standalone benefit. If the high-ironic style so often attributed to Austen is frequently indistinguishable from Burney’s prose, the idea that Austen invented imperfect heroines must, with A Simple Story, fall similarly by the wayside. Inchbald’s greatest merits exist not, as Strachey suggests, “in spite of” her “artificialities,” but in the depth of character her so-called artificialities allow—in the novelistic truths of her insights; in the psychological and philosophical dramas of her pointed parallelisms.

Inchbald’s style is also very good. She can be quite epigrammatic (”But alas! in the exercise of the arts, industry scarce bears the name of merit.”) and her dialogue in particular often zings—but I wouldn’t say it’s as groundbreaking as her depictions of women as full-blown human beings. Miss Milner in particular: vain, alluring, so inescapably subject to taboo desires. Falling in love with a Catholic priest! In 1791! Delicious.

I realize I probably haven’t adequately addressed the mathematical side of things—could you say more about what you mean by “hearts and numbers talking to one another,” please?

Very best,

Natasha

Let us say that I know enough to realize that I do not know enough to write in such a style that would satisfy me. I will not, however, throw back the compliments I have fished from you; they are more than big enough, and will keep.

Read more

Next week I’ll be at the San Diego Book Festival on Saturday, August 22nd. I’m on a panel with a few other authors at 1:30 on the USD campus, you can find more details about the event here. The topic up for discussion is “Complicated characters” but I pledge not to use any of the following terms:

• likeable

• unlikeable

• “difficult women”

• relatable

• redeeming qualities

• audience sympathy

If I do, please throw something at me and I’ll try to take the line again.

I also have a review out today of Maddie’s Secret, John Early’s debut movie, in the New York Review of Books. There was a great deal to like about it, but on the whole I think it compares unfavorably to The Brady Bunch Movie:

I like the way Early displays his influences openly, like an auctioneer at an estate sale: here is a shot from Douglas Sirk, here is a scene from Showgirls, here is Fly by Jing chili crisp. In Maddie’s Secret, Allan, Hennessey, and McCollister play a trio of bad girls with eating disorders opposite his good girl with an eating disorder. At the plot level the film follows its source material, the 1986 bulimia melodrama Kate’s Secret, quite faithfully, and its stagey quality is recognizable to anyone familiar with Seventies- and Eighties-era after-school specials. It does not, however, precisely parody the style of Very Special TV episodes, unlike, say, The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), which might otherwise be Maddie’s Secret’s closest spiritual relative. The Brady Bunch Movie uses the exact visual grammar of the original sitcom, as well as its hokey, aw-shucks tone and earnest plotting to get its satire across. It’s both a sarcastic rendition of the corny, flat style of the old show anda loving mockery of its foursquare values. But Early seems to be making a very personal film with a certainly lovely, distinctly Sirk- inflected aesthetic that is nevertheless somewhat at odds with the story being told.

Maddie Ralph is an ingenue dishwasher turned online influencer who is given the opportunity—spoken with the same whispered, urgent excitement as a member of Heaven’s Gate scanning the skies for the arrival of Comet Hale-Bopp—to become a food stylist for a TV show called The Boar. Like all ingenues, she is blonde and has precisely two enemies, a work rival and, of course, her mother, but is otherwise beloved by all. She is particularly beloved by her lesbian best friend, Deena (played by Kate Berlant as a sort of comic shark—Deena’s jaws snap ceaselessly, as though she is always chewing gum; whenever her eyes have the opportunity to roll, they do), and her dim, adoring husband, Jake. Jake is played by Eric Rahill as a sort of simple child; motivated by affection and hunger, easily outmaneuvered, he always seems to be on the verge of saying, “Look at what I can do!” before attempting a somersault…

Jake might be described in modern online parlance as “an eater,” someone who readily telegraphs a mighty appetite for pussy and food. He openly lusts after Maddie (although he stops just short of offensive perversion), eats whatever she cooks with obvious relish, and instinctively shuts down her self-deprecating comments, seeing no faults in either her body or her cooking. He is beautifully paradigmatic of the oblivious partner of someone with an eating disorder: he can be easily dismissed and lied to without guilt, since he’s too unobservant or stupid to realize he ought to hate her, as she hates herself.

And Maddie’s secret, or at least one of them, is that she does hate her husband (although she will never relinquish her compulsive affect of warmth toward him), not least for refusing to treat her with the sort of operatic cruelty that her mother does. On multiple occasions, when backed into a corner, she tells him that she is pregnant rather than disclose her bulimia relapse(s); the more excited he gets about the idea, the more disgusted and dispirited she becomes with it, and with him.

You can read the rest of it here (and I hope you do).1

Something my two-year-old son has started doing recently is putting his arms around my neck and saying “This is my friend Papa.” Little hands the size and heft of ravioli. He’ll say it ten or twelve times in a row, sometimes. It gets to be a little tough to hear, it sounds so good.

Whenever I want to wash his hands, I call them his paws. I never call them paws any other time. He usually objects when I try to wipe him down after dinner. “You don’t want to wash your paws.” / “Sorry, gotta wash your paws.”

Sometimes I’ll say “this is my friend Rocco,” just because I feel like I ought to say something to him in return after he says “This is my friend Papa.” But it doesn’t feel especially important to say anything. Not that that ever stops me. I’m a man who likes to talk, as the fat man says in The Maltese Falcon. I like a man who likes to talk; you’re the man for me, sir. Now, sir, we’ll talk if you like. I’ll tell you right out - I’m a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk..

Of the three of us parents, I’m the only one who ever refers to himself in the third person when talking to Rocco. I like talking about myself in the third person in the right circumstances. Child of a certain age, they’re not so clear yet on the difference between I and you and me and your, so it makes more sense to say “Papa and Rocco” sometimes, instead of “Me and you.” It’s an affectation, and not the kind of affectation I’ll take out of the house, but I like an affectation once in a while. I like it in old movies when old married couples refer to one another as Ma and Pa, too.

The other day Lily asked if I knew that I did it — talked about myself in the third person with Rocco — and I said sure I did. That seemed to put her mind at ease about it.

I asked if she minded the habit, or merely noticed it. She gave it some thought. Mostly noticed it, rather than minded, especially if I knew I was doing it.

That’s fine, I said. You let me know if you start to mind it more than notice it, and I’ll see what I can do.

After I got the new job, I picked up a few new pairs of dress pants, a few nicer shirts for work. I wanted to look sharp. I run a lot of errands for work, you know, talk to a lot of people. Get in and out. Post office sometimes, grocery store often, gas station, copy shop. Got a lot of places to be. I like it that way. People seem to like talking to me when I’m out running errands, especially when I’m dressed a little sharper than I used to.

Other day, picking up the big monthly calendar in the copy shop, older man stepped aside to me: “Young man,” he said, “you are looking sharp.” You couldn’t have told me a thing for a month. Not one thing. I was running as high as a man can possibly run without peeling clean off the Earth. I said thank you, but he was already laughing, pleased with himself and with me.

This morning buying Creamsicles for work. Eight boxes of Creamsicles. Once I had to buy a twenty-four case of beer for work, last-minute, for Saint Patrick’s Day, and I’m a red-headed man, I know it’s mostly auburn, sometimes more brown now than auburn but I’ve been red-headed all my life and will be until it’s all silver, crossing the street, a crowded street, carrying a twenty-four case of beer on Saint Patrick’s Day, and I felt like the mayor. Cars stopped me every five seconds. Every three seconds. “You’re coming with me!” I don’t ever want people to stop talking to me when I’m out running errands.

Woman behind me putting her groceries on the belt, asked her if she could use a hand, mostly she didn’t but she did want to talk. Two grandbabies, youngest in day care, only one years old, a little early for daycare, children are a blessing. (I’ve got one myself.) Then you know. You know they are a blessing. (I do know, yes ma’am.)

Now there is nothing hokier folksier treacly more false-sounding than this sort of exchange written down, yes ma’am no ma’am blessings, but I tell you standing in the grocery store line saying these things to each other, it sounded fine. It sounded fine and real and true and good to say these things to each other; she gets up every day at five to take her grandbaby to daycare for her daughter (Then you know you are a blessing too), then she laughed. When someone says blessing like that, and I know they are religious, it feels good, like sharing soup with someone who really needs it. I don’t mind repeating the word blessing, the way they say it to me, not in the least.

Grace and Lily aren’t like that. They’re the same no matter who they talk to. They sound the same, they say the same things. I’m not like that. Sometimes I think that’s a good or at least an interesting quality in me, and sometimes of course I think it’s because I’m a double-dealing slippery no-self changeable sort of everything-to-everybody type. But buying those Creamsicles and talking to my neighbor in line, I really was religious. I really was blessed. I really did mean every word.

For a long time I was sorry to have to get a job. I didn’t want one. I used to date a man, long time ago, who didn’t like having a job, who quit his to write full-time. I can understand that, to a certain extent. Only to a certain extent, you understand.

It had been a good job, his job, and he wasn’t making much money from writing at first. You might guess what happened next. I started giving him money, never in any sort of regimented way, just whenever he couldn’t pay a bill and got very upset about it. Then afterwards I’d have to try to console him for giving him money. I didn’t mind giving him the money, at least not at first, but I did mind having to make him feel better about it. And after a while I did mind about the money, too.

This went on for a while. Not very well. Once his car broke down, and he couldn’t pay for it to get fixed, so I went over to pay for it with him. I had been thinking for a while how to ask him about it. I said, Have you given any thought to how long you’ll go before you’d consider getting a day job again, if you’re not making enough money to pay for your bills? And he said, very fast, that he would kill himself.

Well, I thought, that’s what I get for asking. I don’t mean that I can’t relate to quitting a good job, or trying something new, or even floundering for a while, because I’ve done all of those things. I considered his position a perfectly human one. What bugged me was that he didn’t even want to think with me about how he was going to get out of it.

I don’t think about that relationship very often — we broke up shortly thereafter — but I thought of it when I was last looking for a job. I thought, Better do anything besides that.

I felt that served me very well. It felt good to think, I’m not going to wake up anybody crying about my car if I can help it. It felt good to think, My God, I’m going to take care of myself and my people if it’s the last thing I do, even though it wasn’t anywhere near the last thing I was going to do. Sometimes you’ve got to be a little dramatic, I find, in order to work up the nerve to get out of bed and do anything.

Sometimes, in the months I was looking for a job but before I found one, I’d just go around muttering A man’s got to have a job, like I was John Garfield or something. But it really worked. I don’t mean saying that got me a job, I mean that saying it kept me moving until I found one. It’s a true thing, and I wanted to make it true, and it felt good to know that no matter what, I’d go get a job if I had to, and find a way to like it if I could, and if I wanted to — just to show off — just to show that lousy sonofabitch — find a way to love it, while I was at it.

It’s good, what I mean to say, not going around loving everybody. It’s good to go around liking everybody you can, and loving quite a few, and hating the everloving guts out of five or six or seven. But not more than seven, if you can manage it. More than that and your own self starts to get a little unwieldy.

HBO’s Succession As Prophesied by the Season-Two 30 Rock Episode “Succession”

Every Pete Hornburger Subplot on 30 Rock, Ranked: Season One

Tracking The Finances of 30 Rock and Sex and the City

Every Time Liz Lemon Is Almost Gay Or Something (”Or Something”) On 30 Rock

In Pete Hornberger, 30 Rock can show us Liz Lemon’s shadow. They are more alike than otherwise: Practical, hardworking, (usually) competent at work and nowhere else, sarcastic, critical, the most successful iteration of a theater tech graduate. By the end of season one he has begun literally wearing her clothes, and there is not even a period-typical crossdressing joke in the plotline; Pete and Liz can wear the same clothes without raising gender anxiety, which is all the more remarkable for 30 Rock’s tendency to find gender anxiety in almost anything.

He “has it all” in terms of career and family, and has been destroyed by everything she wants. By season two, Liz has already begun to fret that she has waited too long to have children, while Pete met his wife in college (“Paula and I got married our sophomore year. She got pregnant twenty minutes into our first date”) and he’s been completely defeated by his own family. He’s alternately frightened of and weirded out by his own children (Kyle is too strong, there’s an unnamed “creepy little one” who’s “always rubbing himself against the carpet,” and no one seems entirely sure on how many children he has until later seasons), and his wife only likes him when he’s staying at Liz’ apartment and wearing her sweaters. We’ve seen in season one what happens to a relaxed version of Liz, who lets her guard and her standards down for just a minute: she ends up with Dennis.

Whatever version of Liz stuck with Dennis the first time around, and really did end up having kids with him (“I know what that phone call means. All of my sisters got that phone call junior year of high school…Pre, before. Natal, ruined”), would be Pete Hornberger. Totally subsumed by chaos, hating her life, looking to fake her own death; she’s saved by her own criticizing, carping worst habits, and is much better off kidnapping babies and faking adoption interviews.

Liz and Pete are both caught midpoint between being a boss and being a loser, defaulting to whichever category would be funnier in any given moment, which is why Pete gets storylines in season two that vary from sensible, irritated buzzkill (“Transfers? Demerits?” he asks derisively when he busts up Kenneth and Donnie’s “page-off” in “Rosemary’s Baby.” “This is a billion-dollar company!1 Get back to work!”) to “fly getting squashed” (as when he gets his arm trapped in a vending machine over a Soy Joy in “MILF Island” and manages to dial his own number while calling for help. But by season two, even as Pete’s storylines become more seriously crowded out in favor of Jack, the writers realize they can do a lot more with Pete’s loserdom than they can with Liz. They’re able to degrade him to much greater depths.

Like Liz, Pete knows that positive change is impossible. Jack clocks Liz’ intermittent attempts at self-improvement in the pilot (“You buy any magazine that says “healthy body image on the cover, and every two years you take up knitting for…a week”) and by season four she has “lost faith [even] in decorganizing.” In season five she, very. much like Pete, pins all her hopes on becoming someone new and wonderful by wearing a hat at conspicuous odds with her usual style (a hat that “a KISS FM DJ once called ‘a sweet lid’”).

It’s in season two that we see the beginning of Pete’s desperate hope of total personal transformation via hat, in fact.

Read more

Season One Pete Hornberger is a little tricky to figure out. He gets more screen time than he’ll get later on in the series, when it really becomes the Liz-and-Jack and Tracy-and-Jenna show rather than a true ensemble1, but he’s the straight man much more often than he’ll ever in the later seasons of the series, once they decided to really lean into his vicious, lecherous loser-ness. Season One Pete is often competent and even, occasionally forceful.

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.

#12.

Episode: “Pilot”

Subplot: Is fired, then rehired, by Jack.
Best line(s): “Hey, I thought we cut the cat-lady sketch.”

#11.

Episode: “Up All Night”

Subplot: Forgets Valentine’s Day; loses balloons
Best line(s):

Pete: “Sorry, I got to duck out. I just found a Hallmark store open 70 blocks from here.”

#10.

Episode: “The C Word”

Subplot: Tells Liz not to fire Lutz, carries Liz when she gets sleepy after yelling at everybody
Best line(s):

Pete: “You think Jack Donaghy sits up there and worries if people are saying bad things about him?”

Liz: “It’s different for women.”

Pete: “I don’t think it is. Sometimes people hate their bosses. Big deal. You got to stick up for yourself. Because if you don’t, they’ll take advantage of you. Oh, hey, could I borrow 60 bucks? I’m going to meet Frank and Lutz at Scores.”

#9.

Episode: “The Rural Juror”

Subplot: Guesses name of Rural Juror
Best line(s):

Pete: “Oh! So you must finally know the title.”

Liz: “Yes! Yes. The Rural Juror.”

Pete: “The Ru…”

Liz: “Rural.”

Pete: “The R…”

Liz: “Rural.”

#8.

Episode: “Blind Date”

Subplot: Loses wedding ring in poker game; encourages Liz to try lesbianism.
Best line(s):

Pete: “Oh, Jack, we usually just play for quarters.”

Jack: “Well, then, you best go home and put on your daddy’s shoes, boy. This is a man’s game.”

*****

Liz: “I can’t believe you bet your wedding ring.”

Pete: “I know! The weird thing is, I had money left.”

#7.

Episode: “Jack the Writer”

Subplot: Tries to convince Liz not to ask Cerie to dress more appropriately at work
Best line(s):

Liz: “Me trying to tell Jack what to do would be like you trying to boss around…which one of your kids is it that you’re afraid of?”

Pete: “Kyle. Kyle. He’s so strong.”

*****

[Cerie takes off what appeared to be a very short dress]

Pete: “That was a jacket?”

Liz: “That’s it. I’ve got to talk to her about her clothes. She can’t dress like that.”

Pete: “Yes, she can. People like the way she dresses.”

Liz: “Oh, come on. It’s distracting. It’s inappropriate.”

Pete: “You’re inapropriate, you jerk, with your…big, stupid face. No, Liz. Listen. Listen. Listen. Look at me. Look at how bald I am. Look at my life. Please, just give me this one thing.”

*****

Liz: “Did we just go in a circle?”

Pete: “Yeah. I was following you.”

Liz: “No, I’m going to wardrobe.”

Pete: “Okay. Good walk and talk.”

#6.

Episode: “Jack-Tor”

Subplot: Argues with Jenna about how explicitly she can moan during “Muffin Top;” cuts “Muffin Top” for time
Best line(s):

Liz: “Look at the educational system in this country. We spend all this money in Iraq, but meanwhile, our inner-city graduation rates are lower than they are in the Sudan.”

Pete: “That doesn’t sound right.”

Liz: “Maybe it was Sweden. And maybe it was teen pregnancy. I gotta read more.”

*****

Jenna: “Pete, the Standards lady is saying my moaning in “Muffin Top” is too graphic. Which of these is less offensive? Aah! Aah! Aah! Or...Ohh! Ohh! Ohh!

Pete: [Visibly unhappy] “Uh, I guess, uh, ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’”

#5.

Episode: “The Baby Show”

Subplot: Buys off makeup artist whose baby Liz briefly kidnaps; admits he’s faked his vasectomy when offering to impregnate Liz
Best line(s):

Pete: “What? What’s wrong?”

Liz: “Jenna told the writers that I am looking for a guy to get me pregnant.”

Pete: “Oh.”

Liz: “Can you believe her?

Pete “I know. It’s so uncool. I mean, why would she go to them? Who do you know better than me?”

Liz: “Aw, come on. Didn’t you have a vasectomy?”

Pete: “No, I just told my wife I did.”

Liz: “And she doesn’t get pregnant how?”

Pete: “I fake it.”

*****

Pete: “Oh, God! It’s true that you had the baby.”

Liz: “I don’t know what happened. One minute, I was holding the baby in makeup. And then, suddenly — it was like highway hypnosis — You know, when you pull into your driveway, but you don’t remember driving home?”

Pete: “Oh, right! And you have someone else’s baby in your car.”

#4.

Episode: “Black Tie”

Subplot: Impersonates Elmo over the phone to help toilet train his son; decides not to cheat on his wife with a member of Tracy’s entourage
Best line(s):

Pete: “No, not at Mommy. At the potty — Well, how is that Elmo’s fault?”

*****

Pete: “Wow. You are so smooth.”

#3.

Episode: “The Fighting Irish”

Subplot: Compares Liz to Lisa Nowak, asks to move in with her after his wife realizes he’s lied about getting a vasectomy.
Best line(s):

Pete: “You can’t fire the other Liz unless she’s in the bottom ten percent…You can’t just do this.”

Liz: “I’m not gonna just do anything. I have a plan. Step one: befriend the enemy and gather information. Then, use the information to drive her into the bottom ten percent.”

Pete: “Good Lord! Your eyes — you look like that lady astronaut who tried to kidnap that other woman.”

Liz: “Hey, that was a lady with a plan. Diapers, mace, Houston to Orlando in nine hours — blammo.”

*****

Pete: [Running into the elevator, interrupting Liz with her newly-single crush]: “Liz! You forgot to give me the key to your place, and I need it. My wife knows about our little secret. I don't know how she found out. Oh, God. I should have just gotten a vasectomy!”

#2.

Episode: “Fireworks”

Subplot: Keeps wearing Liz’ sweaters
Best line(s):

Liz: “Okay, dude, how can we be wearing the same outfit? You saw me leave the apartment this morning.”

Pete: “I saw you put it on. I thought it looked nice.”

Liz: “How long are you staying with me?”

Pete: “Indefinitely!”

#1.

Episode: “Tracy Does Conan”

Subplot: Is pressured into wearing a joke wig full-time by Jack
Best line(s):

Jack: “Pete, where’s your charisma?”

Pete: “What?”

Jack: “The wig. I prefer that you wear it.”

Pete: “Well, I thought you were joking.”

Jack: “Well, let me clarify. I’m not joking. Pete, did you know that men with full heads of hair, on average, earn 17% more than their bald counterparts?””

Pete: “I did not know that.”

Jack: “Perhaps that’s because bald men are generally less informed than men with full heads of hair. But here’s what I want you to do. Wear the wig for a week and experience your full potential.”

Pete: “Well, I — I think this is my full potential.”

Jack: “I know you’re skeptical, Pete. I know. Here, I want you to do something. Pull my hair. Right now, go ahead, pull my hair. [Flinches] I’m just kidding. It’s... It’s real. I’m not like you.”

DANNY: And I like Boo and Baa, because I love those little routines or escapades, especially ones that don’t have a moral, or the moral is no stronger than “Well, you had an interesting day.” The only moralizing book of his I like is Strega Nona, unsurprisingly, because the moralizing involves punishment. I don’t like anything along the lines of “It’s okay to have big feelings” or “Here are three things you can do to calm down when you’re mad.”

GRACE: “It was better in the olden days.”

DANNY: Look, I don’t object to the idea of helping a toddler learn how to calm down, I just dont like the idea of locating all that moral messaging while we read. I find it cloying in a book.

LILY: The thing that’s agreeable about Strega Nona is it’s not just Big Anthony who doesn’t listen, but the townspeople also seem to be foolish. Even though they’re the ones who are mad at Big Anthony, they don’t have the moral advantage, they’re too quick to jump to conclusions and point blame.

DANNY: And the punishment still includes reincorporation. He has to eat all the pasta in town, but at the end of the day he keeps his job and gets to sleep next to the goats. It’s not only punishment.

The Pages of Goodnight Moon, As Ranked By Our Ten-Month-Old Son

The cover of “Goodnight Moon” is perhaps the most characteristic element of “Goodnight Moon.” You don’t get any “Goodnight Moon”ier than this. He goes nuts for it. Show him the cover and say “It’s time for ‘Goodnight Moon’” and you’ve made a friend for life. Ten stars.

The Problem With The Boxcar Children Is They Never Got To Spend Enough Time In The Boxcar

They should have stayed in the boxcar forever. They ought to have spent the rest of their lives roaming from town to town across America and helping other desperate children reclaim old rolling stock on spur tracks in former logging camps. There are plenty of books about children who live in houses with their families; there are precious few books about children who live in abandoned freight cars, and Gertrude Chandler Warner, who I’m sure was otherwise a decent and upstanding person in her private life, did her readers a real disservice by hustling the children out of the woods and into their grandfather’s house prematurely.

DANNY: The Story of Babar is a wonderful book, and one that I’ve very much enjoyed reading to our son lately. It’s about how even a king is drawn to bourgeois comfort as the best possible way of living.

Babar’s happy youth is brief. He is born, he plays with a shell, and childhood is concluded. On the third page of the book, the elephant Babar experiences grief when his mother is shot from underneath him.

He runs away “for several days,” arriving at an unnamed city, and finally speaks. What does he have to say?

(Babar would have no way of knowing this, of course, being but recently arrived to human society, but he has not noticed two gentlemen on the street. He has noticed one gentlemen, who is addressing either a gendarme or a bus driver. But his instincts are quite correct; he patterns his own dress after the gentleman.)

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Word has gotten around lately that I successfully parallel parked the big bus at work this week. In the interest of saving time and man-hours I thought I would compile a list of the most frequently-asked questions I’ve been receiving here, that future inquirers might be able to acess all the relevant information more conveniently.

QUESTION #1: How long was this decision in the works? Was there a planning committee, and if so, who served on it, did you follow Robert’s Rules of Order, Erskine May’s Parliamentary Procedure, or an alternative decision-making process, etc?

ANSWER: It was entirely unplanned.

QUESTION #2: You mean this was a spur-of-the-moment action — a course was decided upon, committed to, successfully carried out, solely by yourself, all while you were already behind the wheel of what can only be called a very big bus?

ANSWER: The bus is, in fact, so big that it beeps whenever you put it in reverse.

QUESTION #3: That big?

ANSWER: So big that sometimes, when I have pulled up alongside a city bus at a stop light, the city bus driver has glanced out his window at me and offered me the courtesy head nod customary between bus drivers.

QUESTION #4: Surely not.

ANSWER: It has happened on more than one occasion! A deliberate, willful head nod, with conspicuous friendly eye contact. There could have been no mistaking it.

QUESTION #5: An accordion bus?

ANSWER: No, not yet an accordion bus. But a real city bus nevertheless.

QUESTION #6: Remarkable!

ANSWER: Thank you.

QUESTION #7: This was a nose-forward parallel parking job, I assume? With plenty of room — say, a half block or so — between the cars in front and behind?

ANSWER: I parallel parked it in reverse.

QUESTION #8: On a side street?

ANSWER: A busy thoroughfare.

QUESTION #9: And no one honked at you for taking up more than your share of the lane…?

ANSWER: I did not take up more than my share of the lane. I parked it in a single go, with no redundant returns into the flow of traffic to correct my positioning.

QUESTION #10: Successfully parked, in reverse, a 10-passenger van on the spur of the moment, in the middle of heavy traffic?

ANSWER: Let us say moderate traffic. No more than moderate

QUESTION #11: Thank you for your commitment to honesty, even at the moment of your greatest triumph.

ANSWER: Thank you.

QUESTION #12: Close to the curb, and everything?

ANSWER: Less than six inches from the curb. It was textbook. I tell you, it was a textbook parking job on a 10-passenger bus with a nine-foot clearance. And this time a year ago I could not have taken such a bus out of the alley without scraping the dumpster, or the retaining wall!

QUESTION #13: Did anyone see you do it?

ANSWER: Not anyone I know.

QUESTION #14: I’m so sorry.

ANSWER: Please, don’t be. It was nothing. It was nothing.

QUESTION #15: What did you do afterwards?

ANSWER: I called one of the residents on my private cell phone to tell her what I had done. And I knocked on my general manager’s door, interrupting a meeting, to tell her.

QUESTION #16: Only human!

ANSWER: I very nearly called my mother, who I hate, such was my ebullience.

QUESTION #17 [alarmed]: But you didn’t —?

ANSWER: No, I remembered in time why I hate her. But it was a very near thing, I can tell you. And no one is going to be able to say a word of criticism to me for a month at least.

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By all means, ignore my advice — if you are satisfied with the number and quality of favor-rings your king has already bestowed upon you. But if you would be bedecked as I am, if you wish to carry a fly-whisk of carnelian and fine horse-hair, or to wear a cap of maintenance, and costly gold arm-bands, you will not bow too often, nor say “How right you are,” when your liege happens to sneeze.

It just goes to show, you know, that there are two sides to every coin. Perhaps I had better explain what I mean. You might think, as an emperor, that the worst fate that could befall you would be to inherit a scheming vizier (Or viceroy, steward, head chancellor, senior minister, satrap, pasha, administrator, et cet).

You know the type, I think: silver-tongued, or worse honeytongued, and much given to intrigue. If he is not precisely oily, then certainly well-lubricated. The sort of fellow who oozes helpfulness, and surprises you when you come around corners. He may not precisely skulk, but he seems to come together all of a sudden and quite in your way, like a precipice. Thin, top-heavy fellows, whose signet rings are always a vivid and hateful sort of crimson, you know. Not much flesh on them, as a general rule. They must produce them all out of the same assembly-line, or something.

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Danny: I enjoyed your recent book report, Some Thoughts About Twilight, very much:

Two Sundays ago, San Francisco being much befogged, and my brain, somewhat, likewise, I thought I would read the copy of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight that my woke PhD student friend had lent me the day before, having never done this at any other point in my life. Interesting read! The first thing that stuck out to me was that after a perfunctory flash forward, in which nothing much interesting is revealed about our narrator (Bella) except that one day she will be in a Situation, we get to the good stuff: this freak LOVES Phoenix, Arizona, as well as . . . canonical literature? From whatever afterlife they put literary scholars in, Wayne C. Booth is surely sobbing tears of joy at this masterclass in unreliable narrator establishment — surgical, ruthless.

Well, after that, we get to high school, where there’s a guy, Edward, who is lowkey kind of different, not like the other boys at the high school, or even very much like the Edward from the movie Twilight, which I have seen, some years ago: I remember thinking at the time that any admiration for this guy at the high school who is not like the other boys at the high school suggested some deep spiritual rot at the heart of American empire, as he is creepy, and I didn’t like him, but in the book things are different: for one, we’re in Bella’s head, and she thinks a lot (this is not so much a feature of the movie); for another, while my main memory of the movie is that Edward is staring at Bella in class and deathgripping the desk as if it is the only thing standing between him and a rapacious, one might even say a well-nigh murderous, lust, in the book he is a little more British, and they understate — interesting, I thought, as I’ve just been introduced to Jacob, the also charming, but this time indigenous boy who is into cars and dopey smiles and so forth, and while I never read Twilight, I was somewhat aware that each of these boys had Teams, and that Bella would soon find herself in another Situation . . . tea, I thought, familiarly, but I was nevertheless experiencing this text as if it had never been read — no one told me it would be allegorical!

Yes, what else is one to think here except that Bella is meant to be a prototypical American novelist, caught between the canonical, Anglophone tradition — charming, sometimes, but also anachronistic, and more than anything, perpetually undead — and the indigenous culture of the land upon which she lives, a crossroads she sees reflected anytime she looks in the mirror of the postcolonial writer, who faces this very same set of paths, only, you know, reflected.

This kicked off a goofy conversation about humidity in the Twilight series:

There’s a conversation Bella has with her father after he picks her up from the airport towards the beginning of the book that I really love, right before she goes into a description of the characteristic greenness of the Pacific Northwest landscape:

“We exchanged a few more comments on the weather, which was wet, and that was pretty much it for conversation. We stared out the windows. It was probably beautiful or something.”

I think of Bella as a character who is incredibly humid, spiritually speaking, because she’s so ready to be saturated and slowed down. She seems born to be waterlogged and subject to microscopic influence.

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Well now, I will say I am pleased. I haven’t had very many day jobs, so I haven’t had very many opportunities to receive a promotion, and I must say I like the feeling very much. No one ever put up a flier in my honor on an elevator before.

And everybody takes the elevators at work. I mean it’s a great way to get the word out about something. It gratifies one, knowing he is the subject of appreciative elevator fliers, is what I mean.

I’ll still get to drive the big bus from time to time — in fact I’ll be driving it tomorrow — in fact I’ll be driving certain residents to a literal pizza party — in fact my life feels rather full, at the moment.

I’ll be off the rest of the week attending my best friend’s wedding. Expect a return to regular Chatner programming next week. Lunch at work today was a veggie burger and a Caesar salad, consumed before I saw all the news about produce and now regretted in the extreme. The movie at work tonight is His Girl Friday.

Last night I watched Young Mr. Lincoln for the first time, and the night before that Midnight, which stars a young Don Ameche and a middle-aged John Barrymore and I can’t recommend highly enough.

Today I showed the baby The Music Man for the first time. He went kicking about the house for hours afterwards.

If you happen to live in the Bay Area and have any interest in performing for senior citizens, won’t you consider emailing me? I have to arrange the calendar now, and one doesn’t want to let the side down.

You might offer me your congratulations in the comments, or request a future topic for the newsletter, if you felt so moved. You don’t have to, of course. Nothing is compulsory, everything is permitted.

DANNY: Hello, Jordy. We are both transsexual men who published novels about difficult older women named Barbara whose sons do not like them this year. To the best of my knowledge this was done without prior coordination on either of our parts.

Your book is called Night Night Fawn and came out in March. My book is called Meeting New People and came out in June. Your Barbara is a Rosenberg; mine is a Foerster. Give us a line or two from your book that you think is representative of your Barbara, won’t you?

JORDY: “Some people, aka “liberals” (which is not a word we ever used until my so-called daughter started uttering it like a slur, and I realized Stephen was one and I was actually just a bigot, but according to students at Wesleyan University both were equally bad!), think relationships in the world can be the embodiment of abstract ideals. Liberals think that living in accordance with these abstract ideals makes them good people, and Marxists think that’s bullshit, and actually this is one thing I really agree with Marxists about.”

DANNY: Mine (from a moderate crisis Barbara undergoes after seeing a woman ten years her senior wearing cap sleeves) is: “The present common sense is something like this: Never wear makeup or dress well when you’re young and attractive, because it’s a pernicious drain of your time and resources, designed to distract you from pursuing your fullest potential. This is supposed to hold until you reach menopause, at which point it becomes a virtue to wear the loudest possible clothes and the most outrageous colors of lipstick in order to prove that you’re fun and don’t care what anybody else thinks. Associating dignity, reserve, or decorum with increasing age is restrictive and demeaning. Noticing what anybody else wears or how they comport themselves in public, unless it’s complimentary, is the equivalent of being a Peeping Tom. Not only are you supposed to only say nice things, you’re only supposed to think them, too.”

Do you think it would enhance our book sales if one of us were to accuse the other of plagiarism? If so, would you like to accuse me, or would you rather I accuse you?

JORDY: It’s worse than that! Both of our Barbaras are also going through an epic friend breakup. And the ex-friends’ names sound suspiciously similar: Susan in yours, Sugar in mine. I think we can skip the plagiarism accusations and go straight to the hypothesis that all trans men are the same man. Either that or one of us hypnotized the other and made some subliminal suggestions. Do you have a more capacious account of how on earth this could have happened?

DANNY: I take it I can safely assume that we both wrote these books at our mothers but didn’t want to use our mothers’ real first names lest we be accused of autofiction or something, so we went with something very nearby on the Social Security Administration list of commonest baby names the years our mothers were born. Nancy and Barbara are only two names apart on the 1955 list.

We’re roughly contemporaries, yes? Late thirties, early forties? So Barb(a)ras loom large in our mothers’ generation; Streisand, Walters, Bush, Stanwyck if you want to push it. The powerful televisual mother who must be killed before we can run free with the wolves, or something.

And my mother had a best friend named Susan, whom she often affectionately called Suzy Q, although I don’t think they ever fell out. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever knew my mother to fall out with anyone. I’m sure she must have. She certainly fell out with me! But it suddenly strikes me that my mother might be an easier person to get along with than I myself am, which isn’t at all a pleasing thought to have.

What are your earliest memories of/associations with the following:

Male transsexuality?

JORDY: I guess it’s me? Identifying very emphatically as “a wolf” in a 3rd grade class assignment.

DANNY: The short-lived Dawson’s Creek summer replacement Young Americans, around 1999/2000. Then I guess things were pretty quiet until Chaz Bono.

Me?

JORDY: Your viral rant about possums from 2016. I had two reactions: total delight but also anxiety. I shaven’t be having these young whippersnappers being this funny and smart.

DANNY: If it helps, having a phrase like “viral rant about possums” associated with my work fills me with dread and anxiety that I’ve never really stylistically exited the long 2014, that I’m hopelessly tied to all the worst and most dated millennial tics, and that I’ll never achieve blogspeak escape velocity, so let that comfort you retroactively.

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Meeting New People, my latest novel, features a woman named Barbara caught off-guard by an unexpected breakup with her best friend Susan, which Barbara handles rather badly. One of her greatest missteps comes in the immediate aftermath of getting dumped, when she fails to employ proper gamesmanship1 while speaking to some of the friends she and Susan had held in common.2

On the subject of retaining non-mutual friends after a friendship breakup we have very little to say. Do your best not to complain too often about the breakup, for if you develop a reputation as a grumbler, a grudge-holder, or a score-settler, you may see some of them begin to drift off, but this holds true the rest of the time, anyhow. Remember, however, the unfortunate social truth that nothing breeds failure like failure. Once you begin to give off the stink of someone who is unlucky in friendship, who does not have the happiness of retaining loyalty in others, you will find it does not wash off easily or quickly. Others may begin to look for a reason to cut you loose. If you do not provide them with one, they may invent one anyways.

The act of retaining more mutual friends than one’s former friend requires a very careful touch. One must behave shrewdly at every moment, while all the time appearing to behave naturally, as one moved solely by instinct. The lack of self-consciousness3 must be both perfect and complete. You will be beset by danger on every side. To fail to behave convincingly even once may spell the ruin of the entire project; as Christ says to his disciples in Matthew 10:16, be ye cunning as serpents, and yet harmless as doves.

The Chatner has most recently covered gamesmanship in respect to transitioning by family committee, addressing popular games such as Did Everyone Sign the Card?, All Of A Sudden You’re Mother’s Darling, But I Was Going To Run Errands Today, When Were You Going To Tell Us?, and Old As The Hills:

Barbara is in an especially tricky position because she cannot claim the moral high ground in her breakup with Susan. Susan established a strong lead over Barbara from the very beginning of their final fight:

1. She initiated the breakup

2. She got her claims in writing

3. She established her side of the story with mutual friends first

A better gameswoman in Barbara’s case might have chosen to

1. Brazen it out — Kay might have respected Barbara more had she chosen never to broach the subject at all.

2. Approach Kay in person, and more directly (this would have required extraordinary levels of cunning, however, as engineering a plausibly accidental in-person meeting after a known dumping is extremely unlikely)

3. Split the difference: made an attractive offer like, “I’m not going to discuss this with you, and I’ll never ask you to discuss it with me,” which goes over well with a certain type of person who dislikes conflict to such a degree that they will prioritize whichever member of the friendship breakup promises a smoother ride in the aftermath, regardless of how they might have otherwise apportioned blame)

It is not necessary (indeed it can sometimes be a hindrance) to have the moral high ground in a friendship breakup. People will feel obligated to assure you of your rightness, but this very obligation may set the groundwork enabling them to decamp for the other side; when it comes to social ties, “who seems more fun/less work for me” often wins out over “who seems right.”

Above all else you must never say “Of course I don’t expect you to choose sides.” You must give off the impression that you believe this (even though of course you are angling for everyone to choose sides, and for your side to win), but you must never say it. (Because if you said it, it would only imply that part of you did feel as though other people ought to choose sides, and that you had the right to release them from such an expectation. The “look who thinks he’s nothing” problem.)

You can see for yourself where Barbara begins to go wrong in her approach:

Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember the last time Kay and I had gone on a walk together…Kay and Susan had been friends for years before I came into the picture, too.

It would be no use calling Kay now, not so freshly and transparently in the aftermath of a breakup. Sounding innocent would be impossible, to say nothing of sounding casual, and I started to worry I was going to have to leave a message (has anyone ever left a message where they didn’t sound guilty of something?). I had just resigned myself to it, in fact, when she suddenly answered after the fifth ring:

“Hello?”

“Hello—Kay?—I was just about to leave you a voice message—”

“Oh?”

“I had just been thinking to myself how nice it’s been lately, how uncharacteristically nice really, and that we really are overdue for a good brisk walk. I know I am.”

“I’m not in town.”

“Oh! You’re out of town? Somewhere nice, I hope.”

This was bad, and getting worse. Short, clipped answers, plus she was going on trips without telling me, or worse, lying to avoid seeing me. Did this call for a change in tactics, or was it safer to continue to pretend ignorance?

“Anywhere nice? I mean, are you anywhere nice?”

“So I won’t be able to go walking with you.”

Damn! Might as well go for broke.

“Kay, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but it sounds like you may have talked to Susan recently—”

“I talk to Susan often. We talk all the time.”

“Then I’m sure she’s already told you about our fight the other day. And I don’t want you to feel like this puts you in the middle of anything. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think this has to affect our friendship.”

“Don’t you? I can see why it would.”

Then there was an awful silence for a while. I thought she was going to say more on the subject, since it sounded like a prelude to something, but apparently she thought it was more than enough, because all I could hear was the occasional faint sound of breathing on the other line.

“Well, I don’t expect you to take sides, is all I meant,” I said.

“I’m perfectly happy to take Susan’s side,” she said. “I think you’ve acted really disgracefully.”

As in all acts of gamesmanship, the only rule is to break the flow of your opponent’s play. If your opponent behaves messily, you must appear respectful, forbearing, possibly even as though you are harboring a profound secret that would change the opinion of all who knew you both, but that you will never share due to deeply-held principles, etc. If, on the other hand, your opponent appears to take the high road, you go ahead and share confidances, make digs, and generally go racketing in the direction of pleasure.

If your opponent attempts to analyze your character with others to your discredit, and this information makes it back to you, do not attempt to do the same: a well-timed, slightly world-weary, “Ah. I’m sorry to hear he ended up doing that after all. I wish he might have spared you that at least,” will do nicely. Appearing to have anticipated their every move will always serve you well.

Or if she continues to complain about your bad behavior (even if your behavior has been very bad indeed, you need not despair) to others, and these complaints make it back to you, never complain about her complaints, or attempt to counter with complaints of your own: Say instead that “I do think it’s hard for people, when two of their friends break up, and they feel roped into hearing all of the messy details, or in getting involved. I won’t ask you to do that.”

People may bristle when they hear the expression “choosing sides,” because it sounds presumptuous, but they delight in being told you don’t want them to have to “get involved,” particularly if you are dealing with the conflict-avoidant. You may have killed someone, but promise that you’ll never require them to “get involved” and they’ll still end up taking your part nine times out of ten.

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Managing intrusive anxious thoughts can be challenging for anyone, but it’s doubly difficult for the arsonist, who often has to flee the scene of his or her latest attempts at fire-starting before being sure of its successful ignition. “Hang on — did I forget to leave the stove on before I left the house?” has tormented many an arsonist halfway through the morning commute.

Insated of trying to suppress these thoughts1 most experts recommend acknowledging, detaching, and refocusing.

Begin with acknowledgement

The thought is simply that — a thought. Remind yourself it is unconscious, involuntary, and cannot predict the future of whatever fires you have started or may start later today.

Ground yourself

Interrupt anxious thought patterns by focusing on the here and now. A common technique is the 3-3-3 rule: Name three things you can set on fire in the room with you, look for three fire sources close at hand (no matches? no problem! a 9-volt battery and fine-grade steel wool will work just fine), and improvise three stacks of kindling, such as sawdust or dry dead leaves.

Disengage

Observe the thought without judgment or action. Watch it drift past you, like you would a small brush fire.

Refocus your energy

Calmly return your attention to whatever fire you were starting before the intrusive thought occurred.

If the unwelcome thought should later again return, repeat the cycle as many times as necessary. The key is to interrupt the negative loop of automatic secondary thoughts that follow the intial intrusive thought (“This deadwood is too soft and unseasoned. All I’ll be getting out of this is a lot of smoke,” “That looks like chipwood. I’ll never find anything untreated here”), getting stuck or dwelling over fires we have failed to sustain in the past.

Remember, the only fire that matters is the fire you’re starting right now.

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