hos long to die in cold

This right now today does not feel like a time to be sending you an email about myself, but I am going to do it anyway so as to experience the short-lived and artificial satisfaction of having written and hit send. That is maladaptive behavior which does not serve me in the long run and certainly does not serve anyone who is looking to this newsletter for thoughtful or interesting content — misguided, that — but it’s a fucked-up world and I have to be at a computer for nine hours anyway so here are a few things floating near the top of my mind stew which I can scoop out with a slotted spoon and serve to you still warm and wet.

1. I felt that I enjoyed Materialists well-enough in the theater because it was eleven AM on a Friday and I’d taken the bus there with my girlfriend and even in the air-conditioned dark I knew that outside it was sunny and warm. Whenever I have thought of it since then, basically, it has been to adjust my opinion for the worse. There is very little in the film which feels human or real and as such not much to hold onto once the (good!!) Japanese Breakfast credits song has floated away. History will show that I like the alien coolness of Dakota Johnson’s almost-bad-but-actually-maybe-quite-good acting and that stands even though she does a laughable job here of being “poor”. Her character is meant to make 80k— more than I make, truth be told, yet a ridiculous lie of a sum given her clothes, apartment, workplace, peers. In an actually fun and openly silly movie, or, like, Sex and the City, I do not give a fuck about characters having a lifestyle which dramatically outpaces their alleged income and actually hold a certain amount of disdain for those who would grouse over it, but in a film that is explicitly about the relationship between income and romantic prospects, about the mathematics of love, about how your On Paper-self determines the options available to the real flesh and blood you, well, then SOME modest effort should be put into making the numbers at least maybe sort of add up. Celine Song — who I, Past Lives skeptic, am starting to think is just sort of annoying, which… fine! I’ll still see the next film. — here does no such thing. Or anything at all? What is the point of this movie? Not particularly funny, never sexy, not poignant. At first, I felt a certain generosity, even, toward the weird decision to introduce the rape of tertiary character as a springboard from which our heroine could vault into personal evolution because, well, women, people, but especially women, do get raped on dates. But ultimately that too was just the germ of an idea never rendered forth into something approaching real. I liked the one scene with Meryl Streep’s gay daughter and intend to forget the rest.

2. Want to see a movie that rips ass instead? Try Final Destination Bloodlines. Reset your nervous system via the tranquilizing force of stupid, gleeful bloodshed. Hear a man who looks 35 and possibly is playing 16 say the phrase “gammy’s death book” in full earnest. Watch an adult emo get pulled into a supercharged MRI machine by his dick ring. Bounce around giddily inside your own body the way the specter of death bounces about across endless Rube Goldberg machines of potential gore and annihilation. See a human adult get dumped into a trash compacter because some neighborhood kids kicked a soccer ball. Feel peace for once in your miserable life.

3. Megan and I just watched the most recent season of The Amazing Race, and I cannot recommend it enough. The casting is excellent — hordes of adorable angel teams and one pathetic villain — the challenges are fun; the competition is tight and exciting. It is astounding that this show was produced and aired concurrently with one of the worst Survivor seasons ever made. Survivor is over. Jeff Probst needs to be Old Yeller’d. Free yourself from the doldrums of modern life. Escape your own moldering hell! Watch this hot new show that I have just discovered!!!!! Watch gays (one set of best friend nerd gays, one set of married Vegas performer gays— both perfect. There’s also a pair of lesbian nurses who do not really thrive in this environment but wishing them all the best anyway.) learn dances in Bulgaria and drive hours the wrong way on the freeway in France. Cheer on the most incredibly joyful straight man in the world, a darling, darling person who talks about his jock wife like he’s posting on stan twitter and cried tears of relief and pride — which made me cry to — when she sky-dived and didn’t die!! Meet a weirdly likable pair of 1. Mormons with eight sons 2. twenty-something brothers from Brooklyn. See host Phil Keoghan just be a pleasant and normal presence. Hiss and boo and will karmic justice upon the man who immediately after the race ended announced that the reason he harassed and degraded his wife all day for weeks on end is because he’s autistic!! lmao!!!!! I love television. If I ever suffer a memory-munching brain injury the upside will be that I can watch The Amazing Race over again fresh.

4. Okay. I am just going to say a couple things about the Karen Read boondoggle. My mother and I spent untold hours watching Dateline during my childhood. Like, I was five years old staying up late to see if the husband did it again. This exposure whet my appetite for true crime stories and I’d read all the classics by the time I hit high school. Then the podcast boom came and I passively consumed many thousands of hours of people talking about the grisly murders of mostly young women. I am only human; when the first season of Serial broke big I was twenty-two and hanging on every weirdly horny word. This is not heading in Friend Who’s Too Woke direction. True crime brain, as it were, has clearly addled the threat-detectors and general mental competence of many of its most passionate consumers, but I don’t think that the content in and of itself is some uniquely horrible thing. That there are people in the world who would maim and rape and kill another person is to me and presumably the vast majority of people, a disturbing, baffling, intriguing thing. Nobody wants to be murdered, and most people are never going to murder anyone. These truths adjoin to create a large population who have a natural curiosity about this thing we fear and hope to never experience firsthand but also are desperate to make sense of, to grab hold of and conquer and know. The telling of these stories, I think, is not the problem but rather the manner in which they are told i.e. probably best if not over wine and with crude jokes. I still will listen to a well-done piece of audio-journalism, and I love a true crime longread. I haven’t turned from the genre as a whole out of any high-mindedness, but my tastes have evolved and because much of what is available no longer meets those tastes, I find I am consuming significantly less true crime on the whole in, I don’t know, the last five or so years. For that reason, when the Karen Read case first came to my attention, I brushed it off as something beneath my attention. And perhaps, were I better, smarter person, it really would be. But, alas, I am just a girl from hole in the wall Massachusetts, proud land of drunk driving and police corruption, and eventually the spectacle became too much to look away from. Still, it wasn’t until the jury rendered their not guilty verdict in Karen Read’s second trial on Wednesday that I finally surrendered to my fate, which is to say I watched the HBO documentary. And what a pleasurable experience that was. To see exactly the type of incestuous, ruddy-faced Massachusetts-lifer creatures I’d long left to the hall of mirrors in my memory squealing now for anyone at all to see on streaming television was a shock and then a bizarre delight. If you’re interested in this case, you already know more than I could say here and if you’re not then good for you. But, in short, Karen Read either did or did not drunkenly run over her cop boyfriend and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts did such a bad, expensive job of trying to prosecute her for it that, whatever the truth really is, she is walking free. Read’s defense team of delightful evil lawyers alleged an elaborate police coverup and had an abundance of — at best! — obscene police incompetence and malfeasance with which to prove it. I knew I would find the documentary compelling purely for the spookily familiar small town Massachusetts freaks of it all, but I was shocked to find myself so immediately charmed by Read herself. At one point in the case, it is revealed that another involved party Googled “hos long to die in cold” at two in the morning (or not?) on the night of the incident, and Karen reads this search aloud for camera, grinning and pronouncing the typo phonetically for comic effect. Her huge eyes dart every which way while she says to camera things I would hesitate to admit in my most sacred group chat and her ombre highlights always looked perfect as she smirked and scoffed in court. There is a sort of classic scrawny woman ballsiness about her that endears me and because of my upbringing I was nodding along vigorously as she explained, ludicrously, of course, that just because people bought her three drinks in an hour at the bar didn’t mean she actually drank them all and, in fact, she’d even brought one along in the car when she left! This is not a good person. I mean. What’s a good person? Yeah, there are some problems here. There’s some mortifying text messages here. But she would not allow herself to be cowed into deference by a tsunami of oppressive, saccharine copaganda and I have to admire that. She’s insane and also categorically one of the most normal people involved in this entire debacle by far. I don’t see why she should go to prison for having an attitude and a jury of her peers has determined the same. The fact is that even if you do run some guy over because you were mad at him and nine vodka sodas deep, well, you’ve got the legal right to try and get away with it. Karen Read’s worst crime is having been a business professor (odious, fake area of study which has and continues to destroy the world) and I hope that she’s added to the next cast of Traitors immediately.

5. We went to the Dodgers pride game last week and it sucked. The bats went deader than dead, and the Giants ate up Yamamoto. The vibes were not remotely homosexual enough to meet the stated theme of the event by which I mainly mean the energy was low and the “drone show” they put on after the game in lieu of fireworks was incredibly stupid. We did get to stand in the sun before the game and watch famous mid-life-lesbian Chrishell Stause, of Selling Sunset and becoming gay in her forties fame, judge a “vogue-off” or some approximation thereof and while I can’t claim I was blown away by the performances she is very pretty and seems to be a truly lovely person who is so happy to have fallen in gay love and I adore her. After that, Chrishell’s partner, G-Flip, non-binary Australian drummer and singer-songwriter, performed two of their songs and one Taylor Swift cover. They are actually a lot better than the name “G-Flip” would leave one to imagine and because my beloved girlfriend is maybe their most dedicated American fan who isn’t a long-pony-and-snapback suburban butch I’ve really come around. Stream “Worst Person Alive”. It rips. All this to say, G and Chrishell marked safe from the Dodgers sucking ass. I don’t need the Dodger organization to affirm the legitimacy of my lifestyle or my love. I like baseball and the views at the park are pretty, so I go and eat a hotdog and that’s about as intimate as I want my relationship with that billion-dollar corporation to be. Still, it’s hard not to have a sour taste in your mouth right now as ICE tears apart LA families and the Dodgers (when I say the Dodgers here I am referring obviously to the ownership group and front office etc and no the guys who hit balls for a living) not only fail to voice any support for their fans who are directly suffering this brutality but collaborate or maybe don’t or kind of do but then stop because their pussies with them in that work. Would it really matter if they did release some well-polished statement proclaiming the right to dignity and safety of all Angelenos regardless of documentation status? No. I mean, materially, probably no. It would just be PR fluff, just like having the Pride night is PR fluff. But when these corporations don’t even feel like they have to bother hand-waving at caring about the people whose money keeps them rich, well. It’s bad. The cowardly non-stance of a baseball team is not the real problem here, clearly, but it’s bad. I feel quite bad. I don’t know what else to say about it. There was an ICE raid at the Home Depot near our home. People snatched off the streets and taken into custody while eating breakfast at a local stand. Everything is so horrible all the time right now that I rarely know here to land my eyes. Military drones circle the city. LAPD gases citizens for holding signs that say, “families belong together” and meanwhile every day on the sidewalks there is pain and fear and death for the people this world wants us to forget. What should I be looking at now? What can I do? I have no answers, but I have a little extra money, very little, but some, and I try to share it where I can and walk outside and smile at my neighbors and dream of more. As always you can Venmo Catherine-Schetina to help provide food and supplies to people who are trying to live through this hell without any of the creature comforts I use to dull my own aches. You can also see Final Destination Bloodlines. It really did help.

   

   mental health lap around the block to see the sweet scraggly neighborhood garden. have a good weekend!!