Est. Read Time: 4 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections.
UPCOMING SHOWS:
Set Swap! Weds, 3/2 8PM. Just bought 60 clown noses for this one.
Sunday Funday 3/27 8PM. Last night, a father and daughter from Pennsylvania saw me at the bar after the show and asked for a picture with me. If some version of that doesn’t happen at every show from now on, I will be so disappointed.
Greetings, Sternal Journalists!
Next week, we’ve got another big, long entry in the Sternal Journal Interview Series. So this week, here’s just a rough, short, short story I wrote kind of about writing:
The Smile on Cantankerous Jackson
Cantankerous Jackson Smallville—or just Cantankerous Jackson as he was known to the the neighborhood kids, the bravest of whom would ride their Mongoose BMX bikes (with the pegs, of course) all the way down his dirt path to try to get just a glimpse of his feverish, sweaty, pipe-smoke-billowing face in the window—needed to write today.
He needed to write everyday too, but he also needed to write today. It was the first thing he thought when he woke up on his California King concrete slab, and the tatami mat he found on CraigsList and took really good care of because he knew it would be unlikely he’d find two such tatami mats on CraigsList.
He ripped open his sleep-gunked eyes and thought, “God fucking shit, I need to write.” He crackled out of bed, and he eased down the sturdy pine staircase his grandfather had built with such precision and care that it just needed some irregular oiling and a twice-yearly checkup to maintain its ascential and decential fortitudes.
A lone brillo pad on the table was for scrubbing the stink from his pits and his neck, and last night’s dinner from his now-breakfast plate. He fried two eggs and a piece of toast, devoured them over the sink, and sat down to a woodbound notebook and a needle dipped in a bowl of ink (also CraigsList finds).
His pipe was already packed with stale tobacco from yesterday. He lit the pipe, scrawled three lines, and dropped dead from some sort of medical failure induced by years of all the above.
The neighborhood kids—the bravest of them—watched it all, and wanted desperately to know what the three lines were. But even though Cantankerous Jackson had been extinguished, his pipe was still lit. So that wood journal and that pine staircase and that whole house went up in flames.
As those bravest kids watched it all burn to a pile of soot and a concrete block,
they argued over whether he was smiling.
I don’t mind what you think of it in any direction; I just hope it wasn’t spooky because I didn’t want it to be . There’s enough spookiness in the world right now, let’s be honest. Anyway, here’s a mug my dad made that I believe Cantankerous Jackson would have exclusively drank out of:
Recommendations
Spider-Man Homecoming. Movie. Has anyone not seen this but me? If so, it’s worth it!
Euphoria. Television. No spoilers for the finale, but I just want to make sure nobody overlooks the sleeper most hilarious line of the season, “It’s not her fault! She’s a writer! She’s a writer!” (Counterpoint: there’s a lot of Sam Levinson hatred going around the internet that I don’t fully have a grasp on, but if you’re trying to familiarize yourself with it, Vulture did a little write-up here.
Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde. Podcast. I was hankering for some audio after Trojan Horse Affair, and voice-messaged a friend exactly that. He suggested this episode of This American Life, which was a really great listen, and for a story heavily involving patricide, it had a lot of warmth. Also, it’s a Sarah Koenig piece, so Serialites will love.
Baba Is You. Video/Mobile Game. Very fun logic/puzzle game I heard about on an Ezra Klein show (what a nerdiness turducken, a nerducken if you will). It’s $15 on Switch, $7 on iOS.
Okay, that’s all! Sending love always, but a little bit more during this turducken of a spooky time.
Julian
The Smile on Cantankerous Jackson
Good call on recommending Baba Is You! I was at the Independent Games Festival/Game Developer's Conference in 2018 when this won some awards including Best Student Game (it beat a game developed by my students, IO Interloper.) Everyone knew this game was legit.