Jane Levy and Other Unresolved Business
Red wine for all three meals. That’s my starting position. Organic if available, from whatever bottle the kebab shop keeps under the register if not—source is irrelevant; commitment is everything.
Misfits came back around this time and I should have been more grateful. Instead I spent the first episode missing Nathan so completely it colored everything else. He was the chaotic center around which that show orbited, the one genuinely dangerous element. Second-best asset, technically. Alisha made a compelling argument for first place that I’m still not prepared to fully dismiss.
The global financial collapse was running hot that autumn and the papers were full of stories about City bankers doing cocaine before morning trading sessions, which struck me not as scandalous but as eminently practical. We were all watching money evaporate in real time. You find your coping mechanism where you can, and mine happened to be cheaper than theirs.
Someone put me onto a gore Tumblr and I spent a Friday afternoon going very far down that hole before surfacing into a paranoid evening where every passerby looked like they had specific medieval plans for me. Ate several bananas in the dark. Something about potassium and existential dread. It helped, marginally.
Halloween was still three weeks out and I’d already started. There’s no rule that says you have to wait. The government hadn’t made it a public holiday but I remained optimistic that sustained street-level chaos might eventually move the needle—throwing candy at a cop while wearing a Spider-Man mask seemed like a reasonable first step in that campaign.
A question I’d been meaning to have answered: do girls actually stick a finger into their vagina to dislodge a piece of stuck shit? Reddit had sources suggesting yes. I found this information neither disturbing nor unwelcome, just useful.
Jane Levy was out there somewhere, looking the way she looked, and I’d developed what I can only describe as a situation regarding that. I remain unresolved. And Arnold Schwarzenegger’s vacation photos were, by any objective measure, better than anything I’d ever produced—better composition, better light, a more confident relationship with the frame. Humbling thing to admit about a former bodybuilder and governor of California. I’ve sat with it.