"Forget it, Jughead... it's quarantine"
Have you read my favorite post about Riverdale? Here it is. You should read it too, if you don’t mind spoilers. It’s a perfectly straightforward list of plot points. Dylan and I caught up on Riverdale last Thursday, around the same time we opened a bottle of a liquid whose first ingredient was listed as “grape wine,” which was a necessary clarification. We also watched Tiger King on Netflix. When I Googled it just now to make sure I had the correct title, the first article that came up was this.
I showed the headline to Dylan.
“That tracks,” he said.
“I mean, why not, right?” I said. “He’s got a pretty good shot, all things considered.”
That was the kind of day we were having, which is probably the same kind of day you were having, given that we’re all here in 2020 together. Thursday, for us, was when things started getting weird: not the kind of weird they were before, which was unsettling, but a new kind of weird, the result of too much time inside and much less structure than usual. We had been self-isolating, at that point, for 10 days. We watched all of Tiger King, and enjoyed most of it. (The show fails to use a trans subject’s correct name or pronouns.) We drank the grape wine. I thought about this comic.
When I went to find it just now, I found out that the story behind the webcomic this is from — Pictures for Sad Children — is the same genre of weird as Tiger King and Riverdale. In case you, like me, are just finding out about this now, in 2014, the comic’s original creator, Simone Veil, raised $51,615 on Kickstarter to compile it in a print edition. [Hello! I’m here in 2021, editing this post to reflect new information. If you want to read the old version, sorry: you can’t! I had the wrong name for the creator and a bunch of links speculating about stuff that she discusses in the interview I’ve linked here instead.]
Life is so, so strange. All of the people on Tiger King, many of whom I saw named in headlines that typically ran “hates their portrayal in Netflix series,” are quite strange. Dylan and I are fairly strange, as people go, though perhaps not quite as strange as the kind of person whose financial problems could be mitigated, if not entirely solved, by following the advice “Spend less on tigers.” The best way to sum us up, I think, is that we talk pretty much the same way we write. If we’ve ever had a conversation, you can probably imagine me saying this sentence to you.
Ohio, as it happens, is an incredibly strange place to live, as evidenced by Mr. Pound-of-Weed-Pound-of-Magic-Mushrooms-and-a-Thousand-Bullets. Earlier this year, I found out about the Cleveland Torso Murderer, thus named for exactly the reasons you’d expect. We have our very own Angel of Death Victorious, the Haserot Angel.
Last year, Dylan had the pleasure of being the first person to tell me about the Zanesville Zoo Massacre. That was in Ohio, too.
Her son remained trapped in the barn. From there, looking through a north-facing window, he watched the menagerie grow. Along came a wolf. And a second bear, this one much larger than the first. And there was the lion he had seen before, now pacing back and forth. And also a lioness, anxiously scuttering around. “And then,” he says, “I saw a tiger. I’m telling you, the lion is bad enough, and the lioness is bad enough, and the wolf is bad, and the bear, but…don’t be around the tiger. The tigers are actually bigger than the lions if they’re fully grown. He started snarling, and went after the horses.”
“Gotta ask why I have never heard of Ohio Culture Being Like This before I had like four friends living there,” my friend JD (not like Scrubs; more on that later) asked me a few days ago, referring to the former Marine with the psychedelic stash. “Why is it LIKE THAT? Wait, Glee was set in Ohio too, right?”
It was. Ohio, if we’re being totally honest, is just like this. You just don’t hear about it most of the time, as Dylan put it, “because most of the people who are Like This live totally within their own bubble, and everyone else lives in and talks about Pretty Regular Ohio and pretends not to know about Oh God What’s Happening Over There Ohio.”
Not, to be clear, to unfairly impugn Ohio here. Before I moved to Cleveland, I had spent my entire life in New York City, which as we all know is an absolutely bizarre place to live. It is, at the same time, absolutely not a real place and the most real place there is. The way I think about it is that New York is so densely populated, so full of human life and stories and all the strangeness that inevitably crops up wherever people make their homes, that it’s a little bit like the singularity of a black hole according to the theory that suggests black holes come into existence when all the matter that is packed into a singularity punches its way through the space-time continuum. New York is a singularity of strangeness. In Cleveland, where there is so much more space — backyards and treelawns and distances only traversable by car — all that weirdness has more space to spread out, like warm honey, like the way Terry Pratchett describes how time zones work on the Discworld in The Last Continent.
Light travels slowly on the Disc and is slightly heavy, with a tendency to pile up against high mountain ranges.
Human eccentricity has the same viscosity, I think, as the kind of rich afternoon sunlight that spills across your floor and holds dust motes aloft. It flows and pools according to a topography of Ohio that has nothing to do with actual elevation. You can track the places where oddity collects by the way people act in them. In one of these places, you can tell a cashier, for example, just about anything — that your future in-laws are insisting on having a full polka band at your wedding, or that you missed an appointment because the whole bottom fell out of your car, or that you spent your weekend being hunted through the woods like the most dangerous game — and they will respond, “Oh sure,” or “Yeah, why not,” in a tone that suggests your story isn’t even one of the top ten strangest they’ve heard that day.
Ohio is absolutely full of cryptids. People have the space and time to really cultivate their weirdness, and they forget that everyone else is doing the same thing, and then when they remember they get angry about it. Being low-level furious all the time is one of the top Midwestern hobbies, as far as I can tell, except you can’t manage it the way you would in New York, which is by screaming “Fuck you!” at the third cab that day to nearly murder you. Instead you just have to take it home and do the dishes about it, or park your neighbor in, or find another way to hand on misery to man that doesn’t actually involve doing anything about it. This is why people in Ohio like to riot so much, according to Dylan. Two of the other major Midwestern hobbies, to the best of my knowledge, are drinking and sex, which both have more to do with geography than anything else: In any region where people endure long, bitter winters, they develop indoors hobbies. The drinking, of course, also helps with the passive-aggression. I really like it here, in case that wasn’t clear.
Last night, I said, “I think I’m at the point in quarantine where I might fuck around and read a 90-page PDF about Scrubs.”
The PDF in question is “Where Do You Think We Are?” by Shea Serrano, which should be all the sales pitch you need. In case it isn’t, here is how I would describe the experience of reading 90 pages of illustrated essays about Scrubs: Imagine you’re at a party, and you put your drink down somewhere, and you eventually realize that it’s on a table nearby, but two people are having a conversation leaning up against that table between you and your drink. In the process of trying to edge past them to get your drink, you realize that in fact what is happening is that one of those people is having a conversation, and the other one simply happens to be there. And you get your drink, but the conversation (that only one of those people is having) is so compelling that you don’t walk away or intervene; you just stand there, sipping your drink and listening, as one of the people has a great time, and you have a great time, and the other person’s soul slowly dies behind their eyes. And the conversation is about Scrubs.
I’ve been thinking about Scrubs lately in any case, because it contains one of the most memorable illustrations of contagion that I’ve ever seen.
Reading “Where Do You Think We Are?” made me want to rewatch Scrubs, but it also made me think about one of the work holiday parties I attended when I was a full-time political journalist. I got there earlier than was wise, which was my first mistake, and then I decided to strike up a conversation with somebody I didn’t recognize who had also gotten there earlier than was wise, which was my second mistake, and my third mistake was continuing to stand there for almost an hour as this very nice person proceeded to explain that you could perfectly map every member of the Trump administration onto a character from the Sopranos, even after I told them that I’d never watched the Sopranos. The difference between “Where Do You Think We Are?” and that conversation is that I have watched Scrubs.
“All right,” Dylan said, “I’ll read a 90-page PDF about Scrubs.”
Then he sat in silence for an hour and a half, reading a 90-page PDF about Scrubs. Every so often, he said something like, “Wow, this thing about how he suspects his dog is racist,” or “This is so weirdly compelling.” I could tell, when he started reading, that he didn’t intend to read the whole thing in one sitting, if at all. Then he stopped saying things, and I knew he was hooked.
The last few letters here have been on the heavier side in terms of subject matter, and I’ve definitely been feeling that, so it was nice to take a little bit of a break and let myself be distracted for a day or two. Thank you for the excuse. I always find it a little too easy to lean a little too far into grief, like holding my hand a foot above a lit candle to see how long it takes to do real damage. The inclination to test my own resilience comes more naturally to me than the inclination to remove myself from harm’s way. I’m glad we had an episode of Riverdale, and all of Tiger King, and “Where Do You Think We Are?” and the Good Eats reboot, all saved up for this kind of rainy day. There is nothing I find quite as compelling, it turns out, as watching somebody who is very invested in a subject I don’t care about quite so much. It’s entertaining to sidle up to that table and eavesdrop for a while. People are so strange, and care so much. It’s my favorite thing about them.
—R.