failed recipe
[Alt text: A large black sculpture of a mythical creature, possibly a wolf head, with big fangs, four eyes, a skull emerging from the top of its head, and serpents for ears. Its top is covered with real or fake flowers, and its open mouth is filled with real dollar bills. It is hanging above a table in a restaurant. According to the bartender, its name is Gary.]
Reality Check Stew
Total time: 29 months.
Serves: No one.
Ingredients
1 global pandemic
3-4 virus variants
18 months near-total isolation
1 bedridden, post-stroke, blind and deaf step-grandmother
4 cups rage and resentment
5 cups guilt
50 gallons self-pity
1 Midwest funeral
1 Peloton
1 rotting gall bladder
2 or more social media feeds of happy people in their pods/with their families, living their best lives
Everything you own
1 moving truck
Instructions
In a large bowl, whisk together the pandemic, the variants, and the isolation. Carefully pour in the grandmother and funeral at the same time to achieve a good balance of "has lived way too fucking long" and "should have lived at least another 30 years." Finally, add the rage, resentment, guilt, and self-pity. Beat until you don't know who you hate the most — the president, the CDC, your family, the Supreme Court, the universe, yourself.
Cover and set aside. While all that ferments, unfollow all the shiny happy people on the internet because, truly, fuck them.
Order a Peloton and use it 8 times or until your gall bladder explodes, whichever comes first. To save time, omit the Peloton and flush $1500 directly down the toilet.
Transfer the contents of the Fermenting Bowl From Hell to a large stock pot. Turn heat to high. Once it starts to boil (approximately 6 hours after surgery), pack up everything you own and put it on a moving truck. Including the pot.
Let mixture reduce for 8 months.
Slowly uncover the pot. Look closely. While you've been AWOL/licking your wounds, almost everyone you know has been adding their own ingredients, including but not limited to: Covid, broken bones, insomnia, dead pets, serious mental health crises, dead parents, cancer and chemotherapy, dead friends.
Garnish with shame and vows to do better.
founder of costco: [drunk as hell] it’s gonna have hot dogs and optometrists
— soul nate (@MNateShyamalan) August 11, 2022
Links
There have been a number of articles in the last two weeks "debunking" the "serotonin myth." Tomorrow I will make time to read this one in The New Republic and this one in I-D.
A very well done oral history of the snowstorm that shut I-95 down in January for more than 24 hours. (Washingtonian)
I found a copy of Susan Orlean's Saturday Night (publisher's site) in one of those little free libraries. Each little vignette reads like an ethnography in story form, and had I known that kind of work was even an option, maybe I would have pursued that as a career. Anyway, the Wellesley story was especially funny.
Behold the echidna, the weirdest animal I've ever read about. "The evolutionary marvel mates in love trains, can swim in the ocean, and even uses jazz hands as a defensive tactic." (Atlas Obscura)
Happy to see RIP Medical Debt getting some coverage. (NPR)
Perfect parody of The Bear. (Twitter)
Thank you, CDC, for explaining what "anus" means. (Twitter)
Related: Any excuse to re-up my favorite song. (Twitter)
If the Sopranos were botanists. (YouTube)
Roy Wood's version of the Alex Jones trial. (Digg)
Man realizes parents only pushed him hard to make him insecure for rest of life. (Onion)
I've probably linked to this before but death metal rooster brings me so much joy. (YouTube)