A Moderate Amount of Yankees
Let's talk about this for a second
Oh hello there!
Well, as you may or may not know, because I kind of buried it at the very bottom of the last one, I have started a weekly paid version of this newsletter. I started this because I wanted to tell stories about the business I am starting — right in the here and now as I am starting the business. So far, and I don’t want to be hyperbolic about it or anything, but the weekly newsletter about my new business is one of my favorite things I’ve ever attempted to do.
The most recent entry tells, for some reason, the story of the time I auditioned at the Coyote Ugly Saloon. It’s ignominious! And as you know, I don’t say that lightly. So check it out, if you’re called to.
But not to worry: the monthly free version isn’t going anywhere, if you feel like receiving ignominious stories from me in your inbox on a more casual cadence.
Casual ignominy is, after all, my whole brand.
LET’S GET THIS TAGLINE
Do y’all remember the “let’s get this bread” meme from a couple of years ago? I love it a lot: the original daily-grind hip-hop-song meaning, the Twitter reversal where people started to claim that “Let’s Get This Bread” is what LGBT (?) (TB?) stands for, and of course, the endless recurrence of visual puns involving ducks.
In the very best of what the internet can be, that inspired the below Venn diagram (and if you know who to credit for this please oh please tell me because I want to send them an Edible Arrangements):
My brain saw that Venn diagram and hung onto it as an obvious pinnacle of the form.
A few weeks ago, I was trying to come up with taglines for my new business (“storytelling for entrepreneurs!”) (clearly stated, but lacks panache), and my brain reached way back into some dusty synapse to come up with:
MY BRAIN
Hold on, what about “Let’s Get This Read.”
ME
Hee hee.
MY BRAIN
See, it’s perfect, because it has both a writer meaning AND an entrepreneur meaning.
ME
You know, it ruins it when you explain it.
MY BRAIN
I know, but I am YOUR brain.
ME
Good point.
MY BRAIN
That’s kind of my whole deal, ruining things by explaining them.
ME
You’re doing it again.
MY BRAIN
I know! 🙌
ME
Anyway, I love “Let’s Get This Read,” but will everyone understand it? Will even 50% of people understand it?
MY BRAIN
That’s the beauty of it: WHO CARES! Wheeee!
ME
We’re sort of supposed to care. About clear communication. Right?
MY BRAIN
Tsk, fine. Go ahead and communicate clearly like some kind of wack nerd.
ME
Oooh, I know: Should we explain it with a Venn diagram like in the meme?
MY BRAIN
OMG! the only thing better than not caring is creating intricate explainer graphics that are inexpertly thrown together in Powerpoint. Yeah, I wanna do your thing.
Looking forward to either using this and never explaining it, or not using it but telling everyone I ever meet about it.
MY DAD ALWAYS DID LOVE FISHING
A few weeks ago, I discovered a site called e-yearbook.com (all right, this already sounds like I am doing an infomercial, but I’m not, I’m just still in my grieving process and as it turns out they sound the same, I’m as surprised as you are) where you can look up every old yearbook from around the country. I mean, I only looked up yearbooks in Virginia, but I assume the rest of the country is well-represented, too.
Anyway, of course I was looking for pictures of my dad, mom, and grandparents, and I found this one of my dad that I’d never seen before:
Are you wondering which one my father is? Oh, he’s the one second from left in the flowered shirt and fedora holding what looks to be a massive shotgun while all the other kids benignly wield fake fishing poles. I’m certain this was a prop from some show and not an actual gun (my father actually hated guns after accidentally shooting a seagull and killing it as a little boy) but it is still a very delightful image and he looks like SUCH A LIL’ TROUBLEMAKER and I love it so so much.
“NO YANKEES in my house!” might as well be the rallying cry of the entire Sunbelt, am I right?
If you decide to go on e-yearbook.com (for the low, low price of $11.99 if you act now! death is the only constant!) and you uncover any gems from your own personal family tree, I would be delighted if you sent them my way, because it turns out that yearbook captions of yore have a distinct wacky no-rules flavor that I am very enamored of.
NO YANKEES IN MY HOUSE.
AND YOU KNOW WHAT THEY BETTER KEEP OUT THE DAMN FRONT YARD TOO, WE JUST MOWED.
AND DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT TOUCHING THE YORKTOWN ONIONS.
Anyway.
DON’T WORRY, I’M STILL EXTREMELY INTO SPIDERS
There is a spider who hangs out right next to the window of my study at home, and when I take mini-breaks from typing things, sometimes I look out and see the spider hanging out in her web. It’s so cute. This spider builds her web in the corner of the window and then hides out in the upper reaches and waits for bugs to fly in the web. Whenever this happens, the spider materializes, as if by magic, in the very center of the web to paralyze the hapless stuck flying thing and carry it off.
Sometimes, the flying thing is the teeny-tiniest little gnat, and it’s not immediately obvious to the spider where lunch is.
It seems to me that I learned in school that spiders are blind, but this has been brought home to me in a new way now by constantly watching this spider — because if the lunch-bug is small enough, the spider has to drum on her web looking all confused for a pretty long time before she finds the bug.
Just now it happened, and the spider had to thrum on its web ten or twelve times, spinning all around as it went, nudging ever closer to the super tiny bug. At first I was like “what is this wacko spider doing” but then eventually I figured it out.
Anyway, I don’t have a joke for you here or anything, it just was quite a miraculous moment to witness and I wanted to relay it, David Attenborough-style, with an equal or surpassing amount of wonder but an utter dearth of expertise. My newsletter is basically going to turn into an earth-science paper and I hope you’re all here for it.
TIMELINE OF A SATURDAY MORNING IN MARCH
6:17 a.m.: [sleeping]
6:18 a.m.: [wide awake] I wonder if "yallforall.com" is available
6:21 a.m.:
I don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet — I bought it without any kind of plan in mind, if you can imagine such a thing — but the important thing is that I have rectified the problem of not owning this domain that so clearly needed to be mine.
BANANER? NEVER HEARD OF HER
I recently learned that bananas are technically, botanically, a berry, which objectively rules, and which is even more irritating than the fact that tomatoes are technically, botanically, a fruit (and also a berry).
I’m planning to use this information for the highest possible purpose: to annoy friends with by offering some “mixed berries,” and if they say yes just handing them a whole banana and tomato and then becoming incredibly pedantic in explaining my reasoning. Really can’t wait to introduce this new character to you all post-lockdown.
THE APRIL FOOL IS ME
I have good news about something that happened to me back on April Fool’s Day and which I have finally emotionally processed enough to share with the world at large.
In case you are wondering what happens when you are standing in the elevator and carrying two heavy shoulder bags and wearing a face mask and also hurriedly zipping up your jacket so you can pick up your dog's leash before the elevator doors open, and then you reach down for the leash at the EXACT MOMENT the elevator stops? In case you’ve ever wondered what that would all look like? Well, GOOD NEWS, I have the answer.
What happens is that you fall over backwards verrrrrrrry slowly and comically, like a roly-poly, and even though you feel it starting to happen, and then happening, and then having finished happening, there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop yourself at any point.
This happened! I April-Foolsed myself! I have never been a part of a funnier moment that absolutely no one else but me witnessed or could react to. The face mask did not help or hinder with the situation, I only mention it because it adds to the comic imagery.
Woodrow, for his part, got very startled and then darted out of the elevator with a real [mariah-carey-i-don't-know-her.gif] look on his face, leaving me to scramble to my feet alone. unbelievable.
LINKS FOR YOUR LIFE
How CL Polk creates a book. (You really oughta read their book, by the way. It’s a marvel.)
Shout out to everyone who got new serious-actor headshots back in 2001 and gave themselves a zigzag part for the big day 🙋♀️🙋♀️
You may have forgotten that Ronald Reagan was a damn idiot, but Ronald Reagan was a damn idiot:
Here’s the full story that comes from, should you be intrigued enough by the teaser. (The entire story, from one year ago, is excellent, and bonus, mostly not about Reagan.)
A compendium of history’s most famous ghost photos are available for your perusal and there is literally no way that all of these are fake I am not saying I am JUST SAYING.
Had y’all heard of the world’s last lost tourist? Get ready to get your heart warmed.
You absolutely must check out this amazing story about my friend Dean’s work on the lost Black spaces of Richmond.
My pal Nat is right, if I know anything about Generation X, it’s that they love to pledge fealty to various authorities' doctrines and ideologies:
This episode of Under the Influence is great, and you should listen to it first before you look at any other stories.
Read Dick Cavett’s blog about that time a guy died on his show.
A small (and hilarious) taste of how the vaccine rollout is going so far in BC.
And most crucially, how to survive a killer asteroid.
I’m taking a social-media hiatus for the month of May. So far I don’t miss the algorithms but I do miss the people, which is predictable, and here’s my idea. Won’t someone GOOD and RIGHT-ACTING please set up an EQUITABLE and UN-FRAUDULENT social network where we can pay to be on there and be allowed to choose what we want to see instead of allowing The Corporations to choose for us? Some tech bro out there has to be looking for the next big thing. I’m telling you, I’ll pay. We’ll all pay. I love my community and hate the algorithms. There’s gotta be a better way. Also, and this is just my thing I know, but I sort of sense Mark Zuckerberg ought to be in jail. I know they haven’t accused him of anything. I just got a feeling, like The Black Eyed Peas say.
Care for a palate cleanser? Please enjoy five minutes of H.R.H. Scarlet Johansson witheringly shutting down sexist questions from reporters:
Enjoy your month, pals! And if you liked today’s offering, I’d be so grateful if you’d tell your friends! (And did you know you can leave comments, too?)
I DISTINCTLY remember getting yelled at for picking the Yorktown onions!