Here’s what you’re going to do the next time you can find a good sale on pork belly, maybe when Aldi puts it on sale for $2.99 a pound. You’re going to go buy it, maybe two slabs, then go find a pack of brioche buns. Aldi would probably have them for two or three bucks. If you don’t have mayonnaise, you’ll need that. The final thing is kimchi. You need to have kimchi. There are a variety of other wonderful canned vegetable slaws one could use in a pinch, I suppose. By now, you’ve spent about twenty or twenty-five bucks. Go home. It’s ideal you do this in the afternoon. Throw one slab of the belly in the freezer. Cover the other one with salt and pepper and let it sit for a couple hours. Take a nap or whatever. Wake up. Turn on your bluetooth speaker, connect it. Pull up one of any of your streaming apps (preferably not Spotify), find the first Neu! album. Put on the third track: it’s called “Weissensee”. Put it on repeat. Begin frying the pork belly on medium high. Make sure you hit this with more salt and pepper. It is important to know that as long as you don’t forget about the pork belly, it is impossible to over cook as long as you apply good common sense. What you ideally want, though, is a crust and a thick vein of fat. I recommend rotating your slices in your cast iron, so as to make sure you get some good burn on however many slices of pork belly you chose to cook. When you’re ready: mayo on each side of the bun, layer the pork belly, and then ladle kimchi. Cover this in a paper towel. The next step is very important. Turn off every light in your house. Sit either cross legged in your living room and cradle the sandwich in your hand. Take a bite. The acidity and brightness of the kimchi is going to ping pong off of the pork belly, and the mayo will add a sort of creaminess to it all, but most important: the fat will burst in your mouth. The sandwich will require all of your attention because the fat of the pork belly makes pork belly chewy. You will begin biting it and eating the sandwich will become such a physical experience you will consider taking off your clothes. Some mystics of the method have been known to eat their sandwich in the tub, but it is important you do not get horny while eating the sandwich. The sandwich requires care to eat and everything else besides the sandwich is a distraction. For once in your life you can afford to do one thing at once. At the end of the sandwich, change to the final song of the Neu! Album and turn on all of the lights in your house. I don’t know what else you have going on that day but I guarantee it will be worse. You will also be free of one thing: the urge to ever weigh in on social media Doordash discourse ever again, especially when it’s posted by a noted opinions pervert.

SCENE HERD RED

• Fat City: they are who we thought they were. It feels fitting mine was devoured at the corners by a mouse left in a storage unit too long. Fat City, they tell you, is the great boxing novel. Very well, and I’d agree. Boxing is based on an agreement: if you can dish out and dole out more punishment than another man can handle, you only have to take care of your body and we’ll pay for the rest. Everything else is where it gets complicated. Fat City shows that even the idea of taking care of your body loses its appeal through the story of Billy Tully, one of those down on their luck drunks that populate worse novels. It’s because here, they’re not a character you use to fill a space, but a psychology to enter, the awkward and broken and self-pitying thoughts of a man who will never have what he thought he should. It’s also the best novel about physical labor I’ve ever read. More than any boxing match, it’s Billy’s battle with a tomato farm that leaves its mark. 

• How the Irish Became White: I expected something that read more as speculative inferrals. Turns out Irish community leaders basically gave up the game early the minute they hit America, and they were pretty blatant about it. A figure like Mike Walsh would denounce the horrors of factory work, but work against the “free soilers” when they go to Congress. It’s important to remember: Noel Ignatiev was pretty skeptical of the turn “critical race theory” would take, in his own irascible way, while remaining a neo-abolitionist until his death in the early 2020s. The evidence abounds: Irish-Americans were a pillar that kept slavery alive. They became “white” when they arrived, not because somebody schemed for them to become white after the Civil War. 

• Saying this here: I'm not sold on the Knicks and if they were in any city besides New York, everyone would be pointing out they beat a retooled Hawks, an Embiidless 76ers, and a Cavs team relying on James Harden in the playoffs. I'm sure I've made my opinions on Brunson available elsewhere (I'm more pro KAT than you'd expect and like Anouby). Insanely pissed the Pistons laid an egg against those Cavs. 

• When I was on tumblr, I was on the cross hairs of Odd Future/menswear Tumblr, fighting off Joey Bada$$ and Childish Gambino stans. I never liked the overarching culture of the site, threatening to kill somebody because they drew your favorite cartoon character wrong or arguing if Steven Universe says enough about biopolitics in fascism. As far as I'm concerned, it's a shame the site became synonymous with fandom nonsense. This is why I'm surprised as you are I generally like The Amazing Digital Circus. Let me say: the first fifteen minutes were rough sledding for me until I realized all the things that annoyed me about the show were a purposeful evocation of everything I don't like about what I’d broadly call “Media for Babies”, a multi disciplinary genre that takes most of its story telling cues from TV Tropes (that sort of over telegraphed, overwrought joke writing). Pomni, the main character, is trapped inside a piece of Media for Babies, forced to do silly adventures and exhibit eternal positivity. The other captives force their personalities into easily tropeable categories. This doesn't mean that it's free of ALL the sins, but it is attempting to discuss those sins, and because almost damn near every piece of media now is for Babies, I think that deserves some commendation. I just wish every character would quit turning into a therapist when convenient, but that's an issue with a lot of media now.

NEW WORK

Over at Kittysneezes, I reflected on a year of writing Apophany, a column I started right as my life started falling apart, which means it’s been a year since my life started falling apart. I don’t have much else to say right now, but one day I will.

See everybody in two weeks.