REID #151

Aug 22, 2023

I’ve been drawing again… this one’s called “beautiful bald men dancing”

SHORT:

I’m eating pesto pasta right now (Snack Of The Week! Never thought you’d see SOTW in the Short section, did you!?). Sometimes pesto makes me feel so good and sometimes it makes me feel so bad. Does anyone know the clinical term for this? (And don’t say Jew!)

MEDIUM:

Speaking of Jews (cuz I know you said it! even tho I said not to!), have we all seen the Bradley fiasco? According to the Anti-Defamation League, Cooper’s fake schnoz is “not anti-semitic”, but I wanted to check-in with Mr. Bernstein himself, so I walked over to Green-Wood cemetery and sat down with the maestro.

Our chat was brief:

Reid: U see this prosthetic on this goy?

Bernstein: [no comment]

the inventor of the hot dog is also buried in this cemetery, should i visit his grave next week?

LONG:

I’m still unemployed as evidenced by this, this, and all the visual “art” I’ve been churning out. Everyone keeps telling me “the job search is hard because the market is bad right now”… and ya totally but also I’ve never in my life heard anyone be like: “The market is good!”. Except for my mom when she discovered Trader Joes: “Free samples all day every day! Now THATS a good market!”* (*she’d like me to let you know that they actually stopped doing free samples during covid, which was devastating but “had to be done for the safety of the nation”).

The cool part about being unemployed is I can do things like stand stock-still in my kitchen and think about how the titular message of the song “Let It Go” from Frozen is actually really powerful. Yes, it’s 2023 and the film came out in 2013, but some things take a decade to cohere. Same timeline (and payoff) as becoming a doctor!

Relatedly, I’ve been attending physical therapy at a place called Hands Of Hope (personal slogan of every boy at my middle school trying to f*nger a girl for the first time).

Hands Of Hope is for people with Medicaid or Medicare, so it’s basically me and a dozen ancient-but-mighty Brooklynites doing exercises to a radio that exclusively play songs that go: “I’ve been drinking all night I’ve been drinking all night I’ve been drinking all night HEY!” and “feeling drunk and HIGH! So HIGH! SO HIGH!”.

I think it’s safe to say that none of us, at 9am, are inebriated in the way the songs so powerfully describe, but we sure LOOK IT. The exercises they make us do SUCK and KILL so our faces are contorted and you’re instructed to do them SLOWLY so everyone appears sluggish.

Also, for some reason, I’m the only one ever given a chair, despite being the youngest whippersnapper, and I’m prescribed exercises where I’m waving my arm in the air while The Oldies are prescribed loads of slo-mo-marching-in-place, so it looks like I’m leading the world’s saddest platoon into battle (as the speakers bump our call to arms: “Party Rock Is In The House 2nite!”).

To top it all off, today, a beautiful old woman named Gloria kept falling asleep during her exercises, her head dropping down at random intervals, which resembled someone continually sniping her in the middle of our parade to nowhere.

At the end of each session, all The Oldies get picked up by their designated drivers, and I’m left to walk home alone from my big morning at the battlefield/9am nightclub.

There’s definitely something in here^ about how aging is both a hellish battle and a powerful dance. War and a disco. But I wouldn’t know. I’m just the whippersnapper waving my arm in the air.

C U Next Tuesday