#76

Read China Men, by Maxine Hong Kingston, which was so good I feel like purchasing a case wholesale and hawking them on the corner, breathlessly enumerating the qualities of the text and the brilliance of its author as mothers drag their children to the opposite side of the street. I've bought five copies of James Baldwin's No Name in the Street just to press it on people; this is a similar feeling. Now I am reading Against Interpretation, a collection of critical essays by Susan Sontag, and rereading A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle, at the same time. 

With some collections of short stuff like essays or short fiction I like to read one of the collected works, switch to another book for a while, usually something familiar, then read the next one, and so on back and forth for a bit.

There! That should satisfy those of you who come here mainly to find out what I'm reading and what I've been reading. You're my kind of strange, you underground hip-hop classics. You funkadelic cogitators. You and me, we groove to sympathetic currents, hooking crossed thought pinkies to keep a little anchored in this byzantine swirl of a world.

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Yesterday, as part of a tone joke, I wrote out that I agreed to work an extra shift this week. I hadn't done that really. This morning, on my second day off in a row--a weekend I had claimed not to need but which, after a six-day work week, I had warmed to--I was asked if it would be at all possible to please come in and cover a shift. Naturally I agreed. I almost always say yes. Arguably I am too open to the universe. Anyway, bonus punchline and buttress to yesterday's post. That's like, twelve percent of your packet of pre-sliced cheese for free! Yeah, think of it that way.

It's not really an extra shift, though. I get a different day off instead.  

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No more today! 

Wait. It is long past time that I came out as absolutely loathing to death the galling lampoonery about "ancient aliens" on the History channel. Watching Action Bronson watching it with guests as everybody gets super high is something else altogether, but the base metal is just so reactive to me that it's still not great for my blood pressure or tooth enamel. 

Wait!

Action Bronson seems like a wonderful man. That link is a trash bucket; turn on all your blockers and privacy shrouds before you click it. Perhaps worth it? Maybe you don't give a fuck. That's healthy. I like strange people, strange things, and strange occurrences, all for strange reasons.

Aw, here's the first thing. God, 2016 feels like another lifetime. I think the show itself is available on Hulu. 

To people from the future: Hulu is an inappropriately and insipidly titled internet video content streaming service, one of many. Because there was a red one, there had to be a green one. 

That's a real thing companies bank on. Just as with Autozone and O'Reilly's. Some people switch back and forth or play one against the other, but there are permared customers and permagreen customers. A matter of bedrock reliance. Same with CVS and Walgreens, except of course there it is red vs. blue, just as with Coke ands Pepsi; though in both these cases, the blue team keeps a little red for their logo, red being activating and attractive to the human eye in general. All the most popular logos have red. Red and white is the broadest hitter. 

I hope some future person has to annotate that whole paragraph, but that's ridiculous optimism. The hyperintelligent cockroaches that discover hard evidence of real, factual human beings in the archaeological record will celebrate their monumental achievement by cracking a bunch of cold coca-colas back at base camp. 

THIS BLOG RESPECTS TRADEMARKS AND SHIT OK NO MORE TODAY FOR REAL for real

--JL