Maybe just don't

Cracks
Oh boy. Yeah. So, everybody okay? Drinking enough water? Watching enough videos of cats meowing for food (my favorite genre of cat video)?

What the heck is there to say that hasn’t been said more eloquently? It is extremely stressful right now, a little bit scary (for a variety of reasons), and it’s just been a deluge of bad hot takes and misinformation on a level I haven’t experienced since my peer in first grade said they were making a Jurassic Park sequel set on the moon.

The advice I am giving myself right now is…MAYBE JUST DON’T. Maybe don’t post on social media right now if you have nothing to add. Maybe just don’t be mean to people right now. Maybe just don’t. Maybe just, take a couple days for all of us to gather ourselves? Be kind to each other, be thoughtful?
Don’t worry, soon we can all go back to being terrible

Theme music for this newsletter
Re-listening to a perf song from a perf album, Wire’s “Outdoor Miner”.

Pigeon report

My first day out in two weeks I decided to take a leisurely bike ride to pick up cat food, thinking I could avoid humanity and anxiety. I was promptly greeted in the bike path with a freshly massacred pigeon, wings akimbo, blood-splattered and Christ can’t they even keep it together during a time like this!!!

Also, I forgot to include my pigeon illustration from last week so am plugging it in at the end as a fun BONUS.

Grade: F, because seriously, fuck those guys
Photo: (Me)

Are you okay? Checking in on my favorite d-listers
HOW DARE. How DARE Chet Haze, the worst person in the world, I mean really bad (watch this), noted bad rapper, and son of beloved grandpa-dad Tom Hanks, have…such a measured and calming response to his parents contracting COVID-19?? I suppose wearing a shirt might have been nice, but I really can’t expect more of yung Chet.

Truly nothing makes sense.

Answer: He, unsurprisingly is okay, and I, for once, am okay with that.

The weirdest shit I saw on Craigslist recently

I really shouldn’t judge, because I am not a snail expert (who…is?) but how many snails do you have to have to not be able to take care of them all? And that last line feels like a threat. What do these snails plan on doing to me? What does he know that I don’t????

Photo: Screenshot

Hints from Hellouise
I love many different cuisines (not 2 brag u kno), but I feel like when left to my own devices I have the instincts of a Greek fisherman isolated on a tiny island. Left to my druthers, I would probably just straight up eat bread and cheese with some sort of pickled vegetable and olives every day for my whole life and be pretty okay.

Obviously though, Greek food is a lot more nuanced than that, and I think it gets a bad rap as a kind of boring cuisine. I don’t think it’s boring but Greek food does skew far on the “peasant” scale for sure, which just means the ingredients are cheap. I would encourage you to learn more about Greek dishes besides Gyros (which are delicious but are literally just a sandwich?) and Spanakopita (also delicious, also basically a sandwich). I made this Greek tomato-potato stew yesterday and it was unbelievably easy, really nuanced flavor-wise and cost very little to make. My only rec would be to double up on the ingredients and eat this for a leisurely quarantine lunch throughout the week. Oh also I used Bulgarian sirene, not feta because even Greek people agree it’s better than their cheese.

Shit you really ought to read
Here are some engrossing, but slightly less stressful things to dip into. Why are Mountain lions so mysterious? In slightly less mysterious news, Bernie Sanders loves to relax to the films of Lars von Trier. Satire, but way too real for anyone naïve enough to interact with men in a creative writing class. What does sustainable beauty REALLY mean?

BONUS PIGEON