he’s like a saltwater taffy store where the girls are all named kimberly
Tricia Lockwood posting on Bluesky
Sometimes I think about what kind of world we lived in if only poets were allowed to post. Also, this sentence is about reading Don DeLillo.
Nests were like bruises: things I couldn't help but touch, even though I didn't want them to be there.
Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald
One thing leads to another, one thing cancels another thing out, they are all interconnected, and none of them interest me.
Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, Mary Ruefle
I have been meaning to read this book for maybe four years. It is sort of slow going because I am a little depressed and burned out right now. My ten-year-old dog is recovering from a very worrying injury which makes me all too cognizant of the fact she will, someday, die; at the same time my financial and work situation is currently very uncertain and probably won't be resolved until late summer. This sentence is not actually about being depressed but it spoke to me as a person in a medium-spicy depressive episode trying to keep up with the horrors of the world and keep doing my silly little tasks while also low key eyeing my dog's Trazadone prescription.
Knock it off, moon!
"Raisin the Stakes: A Rock Opera in Three Acts", Clone High
Any sentence that issues a command to the moon but refers to it as "moon" as though that is the moon's name is by default perfect. "Knock it off" is an especially incredible command to give the moon. Contextually, this moment is very funny because it's said by clone JFK, a character with a comically overblown Kennedy Boston accent. I'm making my boyfriend watch the original Clone High with me because the reboot recently came out. For better or worse it is a truly astonishing time capsule of 2002 comedy (having Tom Green and a member of the Making the Band boy band O-Town as special guest voices, in the same episode with the O-Town member having a character say "Say hello to the next Bubba Sparxxx!").
A similarly perfect sentence construction was used in the fifth episode of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale:
The moon’s weird though, right? It’s there, and there, and then suddenly it’s not. And it seems to be pretty far up. Is it watching us? If not, what is it watching instead? Is there something more interesting than us? Hey, watch us moon! We may not always be the best show in the universe, but we try.
I'm from Waterloo—where the vampires hang out!
Despite basically knowing where everything was headed this movie felt very stressful! And sad! In the way capitalism and masculinity are both stressful and sad. (This might also be shaped by my belief that one of the film's leads, Jay Baruchel, just as an actor and a guy has resting sad face. Like the Harry Dean Stanton of Ottowa, which sounds like an insult but I mean as high praise.)
It is not an especially accurate depiction of the company's history, but it does articulate the atmosphere of the pre-iPhone tech landscape pretty well—while still feeling extremely Canadian, which was a refreshing reminder of how that era didn't feel so quite so physically and intellectually bound to Silicon Valley and other loci of US elite power.
Anyway, the moment when this sentence is uttered is incredible, and it's maybe important to know the actor Glenn Howerton is the one who says it. I saw this at a matinee at a movie theater in what I was told is the fake Waystar Royco headquarters on Succession, which felt a little on the nose.