Sally loved telling people about Donald Turnupseed. Get a couple drinks in her at a party and she'd be off. It was at one of these parties, one we hosted at our place a couple months after she moved in, that she got to telling Craig Sommerson about Donald Turnupseed in the kitchen of our apartment.
When I hiked a segment of the Pacific Crest Trail,
a little ways outside Seattle,
it was blazingly beautiful the whole way.
Looked as good with my bare eyes
as it would in a frame.
The pizza delivery arrives with no way to get it inside. Can you see where we’re headed? Jez has the carrier slide the slices through the letterbox, which is now laced with Jez's pee. This doesn't bother Jez but certainly disgusts Mark, for obvious reasons. It continues downhill from there, as one might expect.
Why, oh why did you sing that heartbreak solo through the empty halls during lunch period? Probably wasn’t the best move for someone trying to keep it low-key, but you couldn’t help it. Blame the hormones. Blame the trendy outfit and kitten heels begging to be paraded around. Blame the boy making you feel these things that can only be expressed in a slow female ballad.
While more decent and responsible audiences should connect the dots between the skinheads’ deeds and their bloody fates, several others have missed the point. But it takes an overwhelming amount of cognitive dissonance to pretend that Russell Crowe as Hando, leaning against a fridge with a skeleton-bone arm tattoo and holding a glass of milk against his head like James Dean in “Rebel Without A Cause,” wasn’t supposed to look sexy and cool.
Cameramen watched and filmed as contestants cheated on their boyfriends while perhaps too drunk to realize it, were nearly pressured into having sex with discomforting foreign men at parties, and sobbed after being given no other option than forfeiting, to kiss an openly racist male model while filming a commercial.
The teams are sorted, and the sentiments on the fourth graders’ faces range from this is the best thing ever in the world to I’d rather be sitting in front of my Atari playing Combat. Nina is right smack in the middle of that neon spectrum—she’s way more athletic than most of the girls in her class, but she’s wearing strapped sandals and her too-tight pair of culottes, so it will slow her down for sure.
The lack of Black women’s vantage point on the issue is curious. After all, Timberlake’s apology was addressed in part to a Black woman and referenced racism and misogyny. (I am guessing neither Timberlake nor his publicist know the term misogynoir.) And, Timberlake fell out of public favor partly because of his actions towards a Black woman.
Those eyes, those eyes. We get drunk
and conform to views
of how a pep rally
should be. It should be
cherished, like a skeleton.
She spent hours sitting on park benches listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers with her legs crossed. She watched people with tote bags wander aimlessly, falling in love with trees and birds. Billy Collins was right about so many things.
Meadow can’t breathe but chalks it up to the alcohol
and dancing. Hallucinations, trick of the mind.
Outside, the cool air pin-pricks her skin and the episode
is nearly forgotten.
The most perfect touch of this episode comes at the end. The wedding that an entire nation has been waiting for isn’t shown. Instead, we get Diana’s back, and that impossibly long train, and for all of us who know the long, sad history, it almost feels like an ending.
“Look,” I say to him, without raising my voice, which is no easy feat. “I didn’t do it. I would never harm my wife. I’m telling you the truth.” That’s partly true, if I’m completely honest with you. Sometimes I feel like killing her. Like when she doesn’t fill the car up with gas, and we’re leaving in the morning to go camping. That can really be annoying. Set a person off. You know what I mean? I think you do.
The funny thing is, when I needed him the most, he left me. He went evil, which is the problem with vampires, I guess: lifetimes of emotional baggage, centuries of bingeing on patriarchy and abuse. I got him back but the blood had coagulated in the vein, so to speak.
Twice I have employed the one-week follow-up, the first time when my tenderfoot, Rebecca, struggled to continue flossing after giving birth. Outside a café, a new baby in her arms, she confessed to me to breaking her newly acquired habit of flossing.
There is no bartender.
I decide this is now a nightmare.
I scan the room to confirm my suspicion,
but I can’t get anything out of the faceless couple
next to me.
“I have deduced from the signage that you’re quite concerned about shoplifting and yet, all things considered, do you really think anyone would be capable of lifting a shop as heavy as this one? To me, such a feat seems merely impossible.”