can't stop won't stop
(Two yard signs that caught my eye this week.)
About last week
It is late afternoon, on a Wednesday. A middle-aged woman, alone, hunches over a large midcentury dinette table, muttering to herself. Covering the table: A 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, about 80 percent done, of a landscape in Red Rocks, Colorado. It is the most difficult puzzle she has ever tried to complete. The pieces have bizarre and inconsistent shapes, and are so thin that, without long fingernails, it takes three or four tries to pick one up. She can’t decide if she should thank or curse the person who gave her the puzzle.
“A-ha, fucker,” she says triumphantly as she drops a piece into place. Once the piece has settled, she pats it several times with the fingertips of her left hand. She’s aware of this strange behavior but can’t articulate why she’s compelled to do it.
The windows face west, and the curtains are drawn, to prevent the sun from creating any glare on the remaining 200 or so puzzle pieces. She alternates between standing up and kneeling/sitting on a green IKEA ottoman. Her stomach and bladder are insisting on being filled and emptied, respectively, but she ignores them both. This is Day Five with this puzzle. She needs to finish it so she can get on with her life.*
She sees an opening for a really fucked-up looking piece. Her eyes start scanning the table before she remembers that most of the pieces are really fucked-up looking. She wonders if it would be easier if she knew technical puzzle terms. Maybe the round lumps are heads, the pronged parts legs? She could make a case for the long, skinny curved ones as arching backs.
“Vee-like shape, prongs on both ends, no holes,” she chants to herself while looking back and forth between the remaining loose pieces and the outline inside the frame. There are at least 20 possibilities. She tries them each, one by one, and fails.
Her phone, at the end of the table, lights up with a text message. Whoever it is will have to wait. She can't decide if her utter absorption in this task counts as obsession, compulsion, or both. She wonders if there’s a special chapter of the DSM that addresses jigsaw puzzle addiction.
She’s down to the last 50 pieces. "This should go fast now," she thinks to herself. She is wrong. Several hours later, she drops the last piece into place and caresses the entire surface of the completed puzzle with both hands. She stands up, heaves a sigh of relief, realizes it's almost midnight, and staggers off to bed, hoping she won’t dream about missing puzzle pieces.
* The getting-on-with-her-life will include a literal double whammy at her weekly group tennis lesson. First she will hit a ball entirely too hard at a beginner player with slow reflexes, nailing the poor woman in the crotch. The woman will double over in pain and then have to go sit down. Five minutes later our heroine will swing violently, miss the ball, and nail herself in the face with her own racket. After class, she will ask the instructor about the average injury rate, to which he will reply, "Not this many!"
Links
#The100DayProject starts on February 22 this year. I should dig out old family photo albums and do 100 stories for my niece. That might hold her for approximately 3.5 days. (The100DayProject)
The house I grew up in was previously owned by a man who had been shot and paralyzed when someone tried to assassinate Marion Barry. At least, that was the story as I understood it. Thanks to American Caliph, which I plowed through in less than 48 hours, I now know that on that day in 1977, no one was specifically targeting Marion Barry, who wasn't even mayor yet. A group of American Hanafi Muslims (whose HQ was and still is half a mile down the street from my brother's house, and was paid for by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) had taken hostages at three DC locations. The victim paralyzed by the gunshot wound was Robert Pierce, "a fifty-two-year-old retired State Department official" who "was aiming to start a second career, pursuing a degree in the poverty law program at Antioch School of Law. As part of his law program, he was interning with the city government, and he had been taken hostage when he had wandered into the office." But that's just one tiny piece of a much, much larger story, one I will be thinking about for weeks. (Macmillan)
Another, totally different book I also blew through in two days: Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason. If you like dark humor and stories about mental illness and failed marriages — I mean, who doesn't, right? — you will love it. (Harper Academic)
Are you there Margaret? It’s me, God. (New Yorker)
This tweet. I remember in like 2002 when my boss at CNET asked an engineer to explain to me how and why I should always strip out the ? and everything after it in the URL, and I have been religious about it ever since. (Twitter)
The word enshittification is kind of dumb. The article, though, thoroughly explains why all the websites we used to love suck now. (Pluralistic)
Drone video of a moose shedding its antlers. It looks rather violent. I wonder if it hurts. Or if things had just started to itch. (The Kid Should See This)
Absolute sorcery with paper and scissors. Watch until the end. (Instagram)
Best name ever? (Twitter)
Amazon has shuttered its "Smile" donation program. The company never cared about charity, it just didn't want to have to pay Google for search results. (Hachyderm)
My friend and trainer made a video showing you how to use a foam roller. Including this as a reminder to myself to keep doing it, in the hopes that one day it won't hurt like hell. Also if you want a trainer who will kick your ass over Zoom, LMK and I'll put you in touch with her. She's the best. (YouTube)
An entire account devoted to DC area Brutalist architecture. (Instagram)
Gen Z-er keeps collection of concert ticket PDFs on old phone in shoe box. (Hard Times)
Minor obsessions/addictions
The puzzle addiction thing is sort of funny to me. I'm wondering what you obsess over or are addicted to, in a non-lethal way. Like, what sucks you in and won't let go, but doesn't actually do any harm other than eat up hours of your time and make you a little embarrassed afterwards? TikTok is an obvious one, but I'm sure there are others. No judgments here. If anything, I'm looking for puzzle alternatives! As always, you can reply to this email and anything I share will be anonymous.