Category: Everywhereist

A few weeks ago, Rand and I went out to dinner at a restaurant we hadn’t tried before. The menu was mostly Pacific Northwestern – so, lots of fish and expensive – with a few Italian dishes thrown in. We settled on a couple of things, one being arancini – tiny little fried balls of risotto. It’s a Southern Italian dish, but not one my family ever made at home. Risotto was rarely consumed in my house growing up. My grandfather refused to eat it, out of what I now suspect was a long-standing and entirely justified grudge against Mussolini. (Because the wheat for flour had to be imported, the fascist dictator tried to get Italians to abandon pasta for rice, which grew well in Northern Italy. This plan did not go over well.)

The word arancini means oranges – the singular being arancio. (Which is sort of how the

I have to warn you, this post is about Dane Cook.

This is exceptionally depressing. Honestly, most days, I don’t think about Dane Cook – not even enough to hate him. Any knowledge I have of him has been gained through some sort of pop culture osmosis. I think he made a weird creepy movie about being a stalker a few years ago. I think he’s a comedian, maybe? I don’t know of any specials he’s done, or jokes he’s told, or TV shows been on, or anyone who genuinely likes his work. But let’s accept this strange truism: Dane Cook is, apparently, rich and famous and successful for (insert reason here).

But the reason that I have decided to give a flying fuck about Dane Cook for the first time in my life, is that six years ago, he started dating a teenager. Cook was 45, and his girlfriend

Several years ago, I crossed paths with the rusty, hateful jalopy that is Lauren Boebert’s internet presence. The Representative had recently shoved a few firearms onto her bookshelf with the care of someone trying to shove dirty laundry into their suitcase at the end of a trip. I decided to display menstrual products on my shelves with the same abandon, just to see how conservatives might react. And as you can imagine, the responses were completely measured and logical.

HA HA HA HA HA HA. Just kidding. I got called a stupid cunt. The replies were so vitriolic and unoriginal that I actually wrote a blog post rounding them all up, because I’d heard them all before. The representative herself decided to get involved, with this comment, which is transphobic and also incoherent?

Like, I don’t know that anyone is claiming that there are 57 genders, but if

Congratulations! You just finished your book, and while we always knew you could do it, the odds in Vegas suggested that this was extremely unlikely, and some of us are out a lot of money this morning. But never mind! That’s irrelevant! Lifelong dreams have been accomplished, so does it really matter who gets thrown into the back of whose car and gets their fingers systematically broken?

Ahem. Where were we? THE BOOK. It is done. Go ahead and throw out that copy of The Artist’s Way that you bought and never actually opened. You don’t need it.  You are cured from whatever creative malaise that book was attempting to solve and if it strikes again, you can, I don’t know, start drinking absinthe or something. That book is for losers and failures, something that you are not, because you took a bunch of words and spat them out into

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Last week, Twitter … did something. I don’t actually know the machinations of it, to be honest, and I’m at the point where I’m a little too fatigued to care. I heard whispers of something amiss. That Google could no longer crawl the site; that people were getting notifications that they’d exceeded their daily recommended allocation of tweets, a limit which never existed before. This time, I didn’t even bother logging in to check what the problem was. In recent months, it’s felt like a problematic teen that I’ve struggled to coparent with several million other people; I, finally, had had enough. Let it do what it wants. It’s going to end up dead in a ditch if it keeps up like this.

I’ve announced the end before, time and again, when he took over, when I lost my verified status, when my mentions started to once again fill with

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October, 1953. New York City.

Record Exec: So Eartha, we just heard the preliminary recordings for “Santa Baby.”

Eartha: Lucky you.

Exec: Uh, yes. Thank you.

Eartha: You’re welcome. I assume we’re done here.

Exec: Uh, no. There’s more that we need to discuss.

Eartha: Well, lets make it snappy. I promised Orson Welles we’d eat canapes off of Marlon Brando at 3 and I can’t be late.

Exec: …

Eartha: The canapes get soggy.

Exec: …

Eartha: Orson hates soggy canapes.

Exec: So, uh, … the vocals are great.

Eartha: Of course they are.

Exec: The issue is that … well, the mood of song.

Eartha: The mood is perfect. It’s Christmassy, or whatever. It’ll make people feel (she flutters her hands dismissively).

Exec: Yes, but … some of the lyrics. You tell Santa to, uh, ‘hurry down the chimney.’

Eartha: (Lights a cigarette, takes a long drag.) Yes. He’d

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I need to tell you something. Something very important.

Are you sitting down? It’s not strictly necessary. You can stand if you want. Do you need a pen? I guess you don’t need one of those, either. This isn’t a particularly long message. Are you ready? Okay.

You don’t need to make a pumpkin pie from scratch this Thanksgiving.

Actually, you don’t need to make a pumpkin pie, ever.

*waits for a moment while the weight of this information sinks deeply in*

Do you understand what I’m saying? Every year, the Pumpkin Lobby (note to self: maybe see if this is actually a thing) gets together and convinces the world that every single novelty food item made between September 21st and November 30th must contain pumpkin. And that’s … fine? I sort of like pumpkin! It’s sweet and spicy and tastes like you’re eating the candle section of TJ Maxx,

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Explaining why I embarked on a quest to consume as many different flavors of Mountain Dew as possible is not an easy task. Why am I voluntarily drinking a beverage whose ad campaigns seem to vaguely suggest sexual violence? Why am I forcing my kidneys to undergo the aging technique used in that Benjamin Button movie to make Brad Pitt look like a testicle? Why am I doing this twenty-one times?

I’ve tried to find the logic in my actions, and as best I can tell, it’s this: sometimes, the world becomes a dark place, and you desperately need a distraction from all of it. Sometimes, you need to be reminded that your body is still yours, and that you can do with it what you want, no matter what anyone else says. Am I actually blaming my Mountain Dew escapades on the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe

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As my online persona has grown over the last decade and a half, so has the volume of hate I have received. I have received letters at my home, had politicians come for me, and received every threat you can imagine, including one individual who told me that I was “too ugly to rape.” (Please, tell me, what is the corollary to this statement?)

After the Batali piece came out, my Twitter account was hacked, and I decided I needed to approach the issue from the distance of academic detachment, lest it overwhelm me entirely. I started researching the nature of online hate. I poured through academic journals. I tried talking to some of the people who sent me hateful comments (something I don’t recommend). I cried in my car a few times at the sheer terror of engaging with people who said they wanted me dead. I asked one

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I’ve recently finished watched all ten seasons of Letterkenny – the Canadian cult comedy now available in its entirety on Hulu – a feat which is less impressive than it sounds, as each is a mere seven episodes long. Still, this required a measure of commitment from an American West Coaster, to sit through those early episodes, occasionally with the captions turned on. The humor of the show – which follows the travails of various stratified groups within the town (the hicks, the hockey players, the Mennonites, and the “skids” – the meth-head social misfits who dance outside the local convenience store) is not just Canadian, but highly specific to the eastern provinces and to the Ottawa Valley. According to my highly scientific Twitter research, the show is laser-accurate in its depiction of the region and the archetypes within. A friend who went to university in the area told me

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