Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison; as part of a detour that didn’t really pay off, Rockford; as a bachelor party destination, Miami. That’s where I spent the week, driving a mid-tier crossover SUV that was so new and pleasant (heated seats, the dream of the Midwest striver) that I was stopped checking out to make sure that I was allowed to take it.
This really happened. I’m a Hertz loyalist, because of my deeply felt support for O.J. Simpson and his work. (Not all of it.) You rent enough from Hertz and they promote you from Five Star to President’s Circle, which makes sense, because when Dwight Eisenhower became president people considered it a promotion. You rent at that level, and typically, instead of being assigned the Impala in G7 or whatever, your name appears in bright lights on a board next to the cars; in my case WEIGEL DAVID and PRESIDENTS CIRCLE. This is the morphine drip that keeps capitalism going, at least the business traveler part.
Anyway: Jumped into a Nissan Rogue, cranked the seat-heater to medium, and started to drive out when I was stopped. The attendee, doing her job — keep your disrespect for service workers off this blog — called up to see if “you realize that we’re letting a Manager’s Special get upgraded to President’s Circle.” The boss either knew this already and didn’t care, riding high in what suddenly seemed like a much more valuable car. Don’t think the inverted meaning of “manager’s special” as “ideally the worst beater we have.”
My car, definitely not a beater, did the job – Chicago City Club, plumbers union hall, library polling place, Wisconsin supper club, strip mall polling place, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin-Madison, etc. Still living by Penn Jillette’s advice to consider some rich meals the last ones, I didn’t repeat the worst habit of my college years: Ordering a deep dish pizza, eating a single slice, then advancing on it meal by meal until it was either gone or calcified beyond edibility; no longer softened with some water on the crust and microwave radiation.
Downtime, sparse. I used one slow afternoon, after testing some peoples’ limits of how long they could talk to a reporter in the cold, to head back to Myopic Books, then another slow hour to visit The Book TK in Rockford. “Didn’t you just write, last week, about needing to give away books?” What are you, a cop? Sure I did, but the point of my book purge is getting rid of stuff I’ll never read again and freeing up space for stuff I will.
Books purchased: “The Confessions of Nat Turner” (William Styron), “The Science Fiction Encyclopedia” (ed: TK), “Beowolf” (the Seamus Heaney translation), “Something Happened” (Joseph Heller). One I’d have time to read, the others were for later. All, I hoped, were keepers; the encyclopedia was a first edition, fire-sold for $4. Can you find the gist about science fiction on Wikipedia, or on a million stan wikis? Sure. But you can only get what was written by contemporary people by a contemporary audience. The best sci-fi stuff I’ve read recently, like Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” and John Brunner’s “The Sheep Look Up,” had zero cultural imprint, denied the revivifying power of film adaption. I found it by falling into a rabbit hole. This book made the hole a little shallower.
I didn’t have much time to read, though, and took people up on offers to meet after we’d filed. There are not many face masks left out there, but you see them when work takes you to a college town or liberal city. For the first time in a couple months, I had to mask up to enter a store that had flyers up for the Trans Day of Visibility and a band called EXILED that needed “a drummer who is advance enough to play songs.” Good luck to both. Not far away, I met up with colleagues at a bar where no one was masked and I was offered a Bushmills shot because I was accidentally next to someone else being offered one. Hardest liquor I’d had all week. Runner-up was the “bitters and soda” I ordered, so full of bitters that it turned whiskey-colored. What I’m saying is that there are varieties of human experience.
I had a little more to drink in Miami Beach, where we stayed; I drank almost nothing in Miami proper, where the bachelor party I was part of kept traveling for its excitement. Not my tempo, if it ever was. But I did get two and a half hours to lie flat on a blanket and irritate in the heat while finishing books.
The Best Thing I Ate: A red hot with everything from Jimmy’s Red Hots, after the Bernie Sanders/Brandon Johnson rally, when I knew I had 12 hours to file a newsletter and sleep. Nine hours of the former, three hours of the later. The hot dog with a green chili pepper draped on top was perfect for this.
The Best Thing I Read: Kerry Howley’s “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” which is being marketed strangely, but which I’d describe to a skeptic as the story of the modern surveillance state through the story of Reality Winner. Kerry is the best writer of sentences I know, and I kept marking lines that said things better than I’d remembered hearing them said. On revealing a spiraling search history to the reader, as a way of demonstrating why we reveal so much to the online audience and conceal it from our family: “I’m only telling you now because I don’t know you.” Her competition was the King James version of the Bible, which I’m trying to read through before summer. So, high standard for sentences that impress me.
The Best Thing I Saw: Half of this week’s “Succession,” I guess, because I wasn’t paying attention to anything else. The repetition of the same near-deals with the same prestige TV actors finally got tedious for me, but I’m sure Jesse Armstrong knows what he’s doing.
The Best Thing I Heard: Matt Lieb’s final round of song parodies on “Pod Yourself a Gun,” the Sopranos recap podcast that kept me hooked because of the real effort put into the production, especially the parodies. (The theme song, if you’re unfamiliar with this podcast, is “Woke Up This Morning” with Lieb’s flat voice saying “pod” over key words.)
As someone who has heard and told a lot of OJ jokes I thought you hit the perfect tone with yours; matter-of-fact and sarcastic is the best route.
The open was good, you brought a lot of life to a story that's just checking out a rental car. I felt there might have been a missed opportunity at a line about being in a book purge and buying a Joseph heller book, but it wasn't catch 22 so it would've been a stretch. I do have to say deep dish pizza as a regional delicacy at college ranks higher than my universities regional delicacy which was the on campus sbarros. So breaking from a diet could be worse and more expensive!
I'd like to think I could rise to the tempo of Miami but like you I doubt myself ever could. Michael Mann might be as close as I get.
The breakdown of howley's sentence style was really great I got a lot from that. Definitely gonna read more of her stuff. As someone who has read the kjv quite a bit there is some good stuff there and there's also lots of moments interspersed where old English is basically unintelligible.
The hot dog sounded delicious and I never had HBO so I can't speak to prestige tv but for a week where you said you didn't have a lot of downtime, there was a ton here!