Teach me to care and not to care.
Kroger: Would you like to scan and bag your own groceries?
Customer: Bag my own groceries? Are you going to pay me to do your work?
Kroger: No. As a matter of fact, we’re going to start charging you for the bags that you’re filling yourself.
Customer: Is the bag fee going toward higher quality bags?
Kroger: No. The new bags break ten times quicker than the old ones.
Customer: Win win win. Sounds good to me.
It’s far easier to deal with people who always think they’re right than with people who always think their intentions are pure.
People who always think they’re right have a high incentive to actually be right, because they know everyone can tell when they’ve been proven wrong. On the other hand, you cannot prove to someone that their intentions were impure.
Just arrived in the mail today.
“I had a lot of LEGO as a child, as did my friends, and we all knew there were two kinds of blocks: “regulars” and “specials.”
Regulars were the kind of blocks you used to build a wall, a floor, a hull, a wing, a fuselage, or a roof. Most were solid, symmetrical, and they tended to look like cinderblocks, bricks, beams, studs, cast metal, or sheetrock. In any unsorted box of LEGO, most are regulars. That is because you need a lot of them to build a plane, a castle, or a ship.
Specials were few in number, though, and tended to be small. They weren’t practical, but they were highly desirable. I remember hundreds of different kinds of specials: small transparent cones and rods (which tended to represent light or laser beams), dials, levers, switches, flags, feathers, rockets, treasure chests, shields, swords, and so forth. While you couldn’t build a fort with specials, you couldn’t build a cool fort without them.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
The latest episode of Proverbial is devoted to the saying, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” which I think one of the most misunderstood aphorisms that pretty much everybody’s heard. Download the latest show here.
We need to get that “The rent is too damn high” fellow back and send him after Starbucks.
After a two month hiatus, Proverbial is back. Episode 123: Letting The Water Hold Me Down is available now.
“The film’s greatest contradictions concern motherhood. Barbie wants motherhood to be noble, but not more noble than a swinging single life, which is to say that it doesn’t matter what women choose as long as they choose it for shallow reasons.”
I will be at Goldberry Books in Concord, NC on the evening of August 10 to do a little reading, a little Q&A, and to sign copies of Love What Lasts (or any other objects upon which you prefer my signature). If you’re in the area, or care to drive, fly, or sail to the area, I would love to see you there.
You can register for the event here.
When I think of the summer of 2022, I think of oysters, Seinfeld, Thomas Kosmala No. 4, and Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator. When I think of the summer of 2023, I’m pretty sure I’m going to think of George Jones.
I never figured I was the sort of person to get into country music, but George Jones is the one who did it for me. At this point in my month long road trip out West, it’s George Jones’s late 70s/early 80s work that has soundtracked much of the barren places and national parks.
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.