REID #148

Aug 01, 2023

jess realizing that, despite finally sneaking onto the roof, they can’t access the inside of the screen to remove the stickers/papers that have been driving them crazy for weeks

SHORT:

On Sundays, I lie in bed and scroll on TikTok as members of the church next door belt out prayers to the lord… Every now and then I’ll join them to pray for the grown adults gyrating across my screen…

MEDIUM:

I haven’t done much this week, but I’m catching up on my favorite show (LGBTQIAnd Just Like That), and… I will say… honey? Cynthia Nixon loves being Cynthia Nixon!!! May we all be so lucky!!! That woman is tits out onscreen screaming about being a 50-something-year-old sexually active lesbian in a gorgeous purple dress while executive producing and just LOVING life! The world’s ending, it’s 300 degrees everywhere you look/go, but Cynthia? Is onscreen in Books Are Magic swooning over the woman who played Yitzhak in Hedwig And The Angry Inch! In the words of Jess, “say what you want about the show, but no one else is doing anything… quite like this”. Can’t argue with that! May they have 10+ seasons.

LONG:

As most readers know, I wish I was weirder than I actually am. I’m constantly obsessing over some comedian who crawls around on their hands and knees screaming “I’m the last lobster on earth!” and talking about how it’s a never-before-seen model of human solitude and really makes you think about how we’re all rich, full creatures stuffed into fucked-up shells.

I’m humiliated by the lack of complexity in the things I say and do (both onstage and off), but also still feel rather unpalatable. My new thing I’ve been saying is,

Hope it works! lol

I haven’t been writing a lot of jokes as of late, but I’ve been reading a lot ABOUT jokes. I’m particularly obsessed with a quote I read from Lauren Berlant about how, when it works, a joke induces feelings of self-suffusion and self-forgetting (simultaneously): “If you’re the recipient, it’s the … perfect meeting of being you and not-you, of being both delighted and untraumatized by a surprise that displaces you from your self-continuity without shattering your confidence”.

I think it’s so rare that you get to experience this kind of co-presence/coalescence. It’s escapism and collectivism and just like… joyful somatic resonance… all at once. Non-sovereign relationality is what Berlant calls it. I think.

I would like lots of “surprise[s] that displace [me] from [my] self-continuity without shattering [my] confidence” this month. I hope you get them too.

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for… SNACK OF THE WEEK:

This week’s SOTW… is… the Mac N Cheese I just had from the Jacob’s Pickles kiosk inside Moynihan Train Hall (which, by the way, is named after a guy named Daniel Patrick Moynihan and I just tried to look up if he’s at all related to Bobby Moynihan of SNL-fame, and Google responded: “on the Bruno Mars episode in October 2012, it's revealed that Ass Dan has an identical twin brother named Butt Dave also played by Bobby Moynihan”… not exactly the answer I sought, but 100 percent the answer I needed).

The Mac N Cheese from Jacob’s Pickles is divine. And tonight wasn’t my first rendezvous with the stuff… In 2018, I dined at the Upper West Side JP location with my uncle Patrick. We ordered a vat of the mac and both were like, “woah”. Now, I can’t speak for Uncle Pat, but my “woah” was catalyzed by 1. the cheesiness (of course) but 2. the shape of the pasta: PENNE.

I love when Mac N Cheese is made with penne pasta (and have spent years trying to figure out if it’s 1. because I’m gay and like non-traditional takes on classic dishes, or 2. because I’m so basic that I can’t handle the wild curvature of the traditional macaroni noodle). Regardless of the reasoning? I’m hustlin’ to the counter to order it!

I also love eating penne-based Mac N Cheese because it reminds me of when I would go to Outback Steakhouse with childhood best friend Kayla and she would get Mac N Cheese with penne.

Kayla and I recently returned to Outback as adults and got really drunk on Long Island Ice Teas and somehow ended up under the display camping tents next door at Sports Basement with her parents. We eventually got kicked out because the store was closing and we asked the guy if we could stay a second longer to make fake s’mores on the portable fire pit in front of us. He said no.

I will say (with love), by the way, that Outback’s Mac N Cheese was soupy-watery-disgusting, which just goes to show, it’s not just the penne that makes the Mac.

Okay. I waited too long to do this, and now I’m falling asleep.

I will end by saying, I got to do monologues at Raaaatscraps yesterday, and it was so much fun. Go to their shows and follow them on socials and such. When improv is good… it’s so good.

Also, if you subscribed to this newsletter after seeing me on the show? God bless u.