Oh, I Think So

Bla.  Woke up feeling awful.  Under the weather.  Mysteriously icky.  Still feel meh but managed to go downtown and do errands that needed attention. Then I watched "The Favourite."  It did not improve my general health nor did it make me feel like people have ever been anything other than just ghastly.  But what great acting!  They all must have had the best time playing whack jobs and self-serving, power-mad beyotches.  No one was nice or pleasant or even possible to identify with. Dancing in those days was weird.  Lady Marlborough stood in for the queen for a dance and as part of this dance -- dances were very complicated in those days -- her partner picks her up behind his back and she is straight and still and he spins her around like she is lumber among other weird moves. Not the thing to watch to feel better and about 3/4 of the way through, I got up and took my vitamins and then used the restroom and then installed toilet roll a...

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/lesley-nneka-arimah The story above, "Skinned," by Lesley Nneka Arimah is one of the most frightening, brilliant, skeevy tales I've read in a long time.  It's a tale of a nonexistant place where any woman's life is a chore, a test, an almost-daily humiliation. This story won Lesley Nneka Arimah Africa's leading literary award, the 2019 Caine Prize for African writing.  It scared the living stuff about of me.  It made my skin crawl.  Not reading it is your loss.

This sale is so insane, so popular, so desired that by the time the Anniversary Sale is open to public, there is no sale merchandise left.  I went to Nordstrom after work on Friday.  It was 6pm.  There were already no shoes in my size.  I bought a very nice and very economical pair of attractive booties but had to jam my foot into a size too small and limp about in order to determine they might work in the actual size. I happened to need to visit the burbs today and went to a suburban Nordstrom where there were no shoes in my size, "but we can order them."  I said the official Early Sale had been going on just since Friday at 11:30am Central time and there was already no merchandise.  The salesman just nodded. Such is the bloodlust.

Today's free concert was Gabriel Kahane who plays the piano, sings, plays an electric guitar, is his own sound person with a machine at his feet, plays the strings inside the piano, is a composer and songwriter, and so smart and funny that I wanted to shake his hand and these days, I pretty much don't want to shake the hand of anyone famous, semi-famous, or 15-minutes-one-and-done famous. He played material from "Book of Travellers," about meeting people as he travelled 9,000 miles around the country after the election of Trumpy.  I went to work and cried at my computer for two days and he got on a train and travelled around the country to get a different point of view from his own.  His job is way better than mine. There were songs from other collections but one went into my head and stayed there.  Should you ever see him around, go see him because the guy's a fucking delight. God’s Perfect Killing Machines pic.twitter.com/QsmV64j0i4 — Gabriel Kahane (@g...