[Seth Says] All Out Of Poems
"Roses are red
I'm so lost without blue..."
With April now over, so is National Poetry Month and also my usual poem-a-day practice which I maintain for the month. (More successfully, I might add, than the blog-a-month practice I fail to maintain on my website)(which I also fail to maintain, friends)(which I also fail to maintain...sorry.) I may not be out of rhymes (and indeed, just had a dream last night about rapping with a poet friend of mine) but my mind has now drifted away from the poetic and towards the pathetic.
Certainly no shortage of pathos and the pathological these days! And one of the frustrating things is that it can be difficult to find refuge, even in a sewer with your turtle pals.
GIMME A BREAK
This really hit me this week as I started to notice that every show I was watching or game I was playing to try to distract myself from The Everything (and here we 80s kids watched Atreyu fight so hard against The Nothing; almost seems ironic)(We could totally do a modern Neverending Story remake with The Everything)("How did you feel about what happened to ArTax?" "Sad and Tariffied!")(these parentheticals have distracted me from talking about distracting myself) just ended up reminding me of The Everything. I ended up writing my column about it:
You might appreciate this column for three reasons:
1) It has my favorite opening sentence I've put in a column for quite some time, since I got to cram a few satirical headlines into it.
2) I suspect this is a relatable problem -- in at least one case I know it is, since a friend of mine was recently posting about looking at awful news and then going back to watching Andor and Handmaid's Tale, and I want you to know I am there with you and also that this column was already in the works before I saw your post. (and although I have no plans to watch Handmaid's Tale, subsequent to writing this column yet more examples appeared in my relaxation media.)
3) On the non-relatable side, I find that sometimes my jokes are aimed at a specific audience, which means I suspect that audience will appreciate things more and others might appreciate them less. This is the nature of in-group jokes and niche references. I do generally try to write my column for a more general audience and save my unhinged obscurities for this newsletter, but occasionally I include a joke in my column that not everyone will get. In this case, the joke was sufficiently niche that my editor felt the need to include an explanatory link because otherwise I guess they presumed the vast majority of their audience would have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. But I think at least half of my audience will get it and it's a joke that made me laugh so I kept it in.
HOPE IN A TAKEOUT CONTAINER
I do have a brief story to share:
I like food.
Okay, not quite that brief. Specifically, I like certain delicious foods like pad see you which we used to get at the local pan-Asian ("cooked with Asian pans!") restaurant. It was one of our go-to restaurants for at least a decade, conveniently located just downtown (literally down the hill from our house)(a "down-town" definition which makes so much logical sense that I think my father believed it as a child when he was raised with a downtown downhill), the perfect place to not only get weekly takeout but also to grab a container of wonton or eggdrop soup when someone was sick and needed comfort soup. (arguably all soup is comfort soup)(but I'll argue against that because there's nothing comforting about Gazpacho)(obviously the secret police of the Soup Nazi)
Anyway, I had loved this restaurant through multiple incarnations all on the same block, until last year when the restaurant was taken over by new ownership and quality began to plummet. First the formerly great food was mediocre. Then a dish didn't taste right. We gave it one more try and I ordered a pad see you that was so bad I simply threw it out (and for those of you who have seen me try to save leftovers from being thrown out, or desperately dump random ingredients into a bad food I've made to try to make it more palatable, you know that I hate to throw out food, so the level of bad that one of my favorite dishes has to reach for me to want to throw it out is pretty damn bad).
The restaurant, which had been a wonderful local institution for many years, was ruined. And that wasn't just my opinion; everyone local pretty much agreed. The food was no good, nobody went there, and it ended up closing down.
But this year the original owners came back and took over the restaurant again and reopened it last month under a new name (since the old one had been ruined). They opened just last week, and last night we finally got takeout and I got to try their pad see you and it tasted good and right and for a brief shining moment the world felt like a better place to be. (often the case when eating pad see you, but you get what I'm saying.)
And I want to believe that means something. That maybe even if new management comes in and starts destroying everything of value that a beloved institution provides to the community, that there is a path back to redemption, where people who actually know what they're doing and care about providing something good for the community and filling a need take charge once again and the world shifts back slightly to being a better place.
And if not, at least I'll have better food to drown my sorrows (and Artax) in.
THE NEVERENDING EEEEEEEMAAAAAAAIL
That about wraps up this nostlgia-filled newsletter. ("Yeah, I'm nostalgic for when your newsletters didn't have so many dumb 80s references!") As always, I thank you for reading, will be back in two weeks with another column, and assure you that no horses were harmed in the production of this newsletter (don't be filly).
Increasingly Un-Stable,
Seth