I have continued to use Little Red Book a.k.a. Xiaohongshu a.k.a. Rednote. It’s the Chinese version of TikTok that got popular in the USA when it seemed like TikTok was going to shut down. I never liked TikTok, but I enjoy Rednote, because I can’t understand what anyone is saying and I can’t determine how nauseatingly bad all of the jokes are.
I am pleased to report that a comment I left on a video on Rednote has gotten more than 200 likes. The number is climbing all of the time. Soon they’re going to call me Mr. Worldwide because of my universally celebrated fame, all because of the comment I left on this one video.
This is the story of how I left the comment on the video.
I was watching footage of a man breaking up logs of wood, using a kind of whirling drill thing. It looks like the drill bit that’s on the front of the vehicle Shredder uses to travel from underground to the surface in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Sometimes he would bring Krang with him.
On the video, in English, I commented, “please put my head on this.”
Now, every time I open the app, I find that a dozen people have liked that comment. Sometimes it’s more than that.
It’s an extremely popular comment. But I don’t really want anyone to split my head open with an electric thing, I was pretending.
I have also found a man who does livestreams at night, which is daytime here in the USA, of cats and dogs he has taken in. Someone posted in English during a livestream that he rescued them, that they’re all strays. They gather in this outdoor space, and there’s always a pot of something simmering in the foreground, while further back he slices raw meat and fish and feeds them to the cats and dogs.
He wears nose plugs. It must smell like a nightmare, all the dirty animals and dead flesh pulsating in the hot Chinese night.
I want to travel to China and meet this man. I want to help him feed the dogs and cats. But it’s possible I should stay at home instead and write something about the leafy greens that are in the simmering pot. I wonder what sort of inner life I can extrapolate for those vegetables. Who are their parents? What did they want for their own lives, before they ended up in that pot?
Using Rednote reminds me of what it used to be like to use the Internet. I heard Chris Hayes, of all people, talking on a podcast about how in the early Internet days going online could sometimes feel like the moments after you check into a hotel in a new city, when you hit the street to go and get a cup of coffee and see what kind of people you see, whereas now using the Internet always seems to feel more like getting stuck in traffic. And I wouldn’t necessarily put it the same way—going online for me has never quite matched the excitement of being in a new place like that. But using an app that’s based in another country, which has very few American users, does remind me of what the Internet was supposed to be, before it turned into what it is.
I wrote an essay that was published on Friday at The Culture We Deserve. You can read it now. It’s about the novel Wieland, by Charles Brockden Brown, which was the subject of my master’s thesis, which I wrote twenty years ago.
You know what I can’t believe? I can’t believe the nurse at my doctor’s office laughed at me when I said I wanted to be the healthiest person she’s ever seen. I said I wanted to feel like a man who has something to live for. I told her someone in this world had to lay it all on the line, and that it might as well be me. She laughed for at least the third time that visit. I said nothing could happen anymore unless something took place that was real, that you could feel with your hands. She laughed even harder.
The nurse did laugh in real life, though, when I said I aspire to be someone who smokes cannabis all day long and floats through his life without a care in the world. I confessed that I have too much work to do, to be like that. My kids would be against it, I’d probably feel nauseous a lot, and I just wouldn’t act like myself. Also I need to drive places, and I don’t want to do that under the influence.
No one would be happy with me if I were like that, but still I kind of wish I could be that kind of person, who’s like the physical embodiment of calm and feeling good. The nurse walked out of the room laughing and said something to the doctor, I think that she thought I was funny. I couldn’t really hear her. She may have recommended that the doctor inject me with Lethal Injection Fluid and get this mess over with once and for all.
Although I am rarely calm, and if I am the physical embodiment of anything it’s the sound of Jell-O being fired out of a machinegun, at least I am not a coffeehouse that’s owned by a church. The Kansas City subreddit had a thread going the other day about coffeehouses in the city’s northland, where I live, being owned by churches and Christian groups. One of them advertises that they donate money to one of those pregnancy crisis centers, where they make it look like they’ll help you terminate a pregnancy but instead do everything they can to prevent you from doing that. There’s another one I’ve gone to a few times recently, because the atmosphere is nice and the coffee isn’t bad, and I like leaving my house sometimes, and I like coffee. I got a Christian vibe from it, when I was there, but it wasn’t overpowering. They sell books, and there’s a religion shelf, and most of the books on it pertain to Christianity. And every time I’m there someone is having a loud conversation about Christ—but that’s true of most coffeehouses, I have found. There’s always someone reading the Bible or talking about the Bible. Anyway, on the reddit thread someone said their friend went to this particular establishment with her transgender son, and the staff asked them to leave, because of the transgender son. I realize it’s not out of the question that the owner of a competing coffeehouse posted that—but I don’t care. I have heard enough. Anyone who discriminates against trans people is no friend of mine, and I would sooner throw a Molotov cocktail through their front door than walk through it myself.
That said, I would never throw a Molotov cocktail at anything. I am not an arsonist. If someone does commit that crime, I assure you it was not me.
But I have been having new dreams. Most of the dreams I have at night repeat themselves, and in recent years they have mostly involved my going to a classroom where I have to take a test I’m not prepared for. I’m going to fail, which means I’ll fail the class I’m taking, which means I’ll have to stay in college for an extra semester to retake the class and possibly fail again. Instead of that, last night I dreamed my wife, kids, and I went to a national park. We took a long train ride and were supposed to get on a bus to reach a remote campsite where we would spend the night. But it snowed, and the snow was a foot deep, so it seemed unlikely we would make it. We tried to take a helicopter, but by then our younger daughter was saying she didn’t want to camp anymore. We talked about going home.
It’s a great time to be a television viewer. The new season of White Lotus is on, and I have problems with that show, but this season has Carrie Coon on it, and she is one of the best. It’s also got Parker Posey, who is another one of the best.
This season also has on it Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son, who might be the most unfortunate man of all time. His father is Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he wants to be a movie star, but he failed to inherit the three things that make his dad a movie star: 1. his physique; 2. his charm; 3. his accent. He has the Schwarzenegger name, but he’s really a Kennedy, maybe even just a Shriver.
What a horrible fate. I would get upset that yet another nepo-baby is getting smeared across my TV screen, but you know what? I don’t care. Nothing matters. Or, no: something matters, just not this.
My prediction is that Schwarzenegger’s younger brother on the show will get killed, because they seem to be suggesting that his brother is gay, and all gay men on White Lotus die at the end of whatever season they’re introduced in. I could be wrong, and if I am I don’t care, but I still think it’s weird that I can feel reasonably confident in making that prediction, because all gay men on White Lotus so far have been murdered somehow. They get stabbed or they get shot because they’re up to no good.
My daughter was watching Cowboy Bebop. I started watching it, and now I can’t stop. It’s really good.
I don’t know what everyone has against the concept of me having a great time.
The thing is, I have so much confidence I am almost losing my mind.
A Thousand Blows is a good new TV show. We’re halfway through, and have only seen a few hundred of the blows so far. And I have finally watched the first season of Squid Game, which is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with bloodier human sacrifices.
Severance has been on my mind, because Incrediwife and I have been watching the new season of Severance. To try to explain the show, briefly, to anyone who doesn’t know: it’s about a handful of office workers who have volunteered to have implants put in their brains that split their personalities in half. When they are at work, their “innies” take over their bodies and have their own lives throughout the day and their own personalities, etc. When they leave work, they revert to being their original selves, their “outies,” the ones who get to live free of labor because their innies handle all of that.
The company that’s done this awful thing to their workers has ways of keeping the innies in line. When they perform well at work, they are rewarded by being given information about their outies, the people they become when they leave the workplace. The innie sits across from someone in a small room, who tells them stuff that’s probably not true about what good, virtuous people their outies are.
I read this essay over at The Culture We Deserve, about how people are given literary characters they are meant to aspire to, that we are expected to want to read novels about the kinds of people we want to be. And it made me think of those parts of Severance where the innies hear about how wonderful their outies are. The innies are given sustenance in the form of assurance that the people who are their other halves are good, that they are capable.
It dawned on me that this must be how a lot of people experience books. Or it’s how some people expect us all to experience books. Or it’s the relationship we are supposed to have with politicians as well as people in books. We want to hear about folks with hearts of gold doing the right thing, because it sustains us somehow, because on some level we perceive them as reflections of ourselves. When we read about people who aren’t like that, we want to close our eyes. And that’s bad news for me, because I wrote a novel about a roving band of cannibals. Nobody wants to identify with a band of cannibals. Oh well.
I have one more thing to say about Severance, which is that when I was watching it I thought it looked like the paintings of Amy Bennett. I got her permission to post images of her paintings, because I wanted to show everyone what I’m talking about. Here they are, juxtaposed with screenshots from Severance:
I’m not saying there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the images from Severance and the paintings. I just wouldn’t be surprised to learn that someone on the production team had seen what she has done and taken notes. You know?
I watch too much television. But then so does everyone else.
And it’s okay to send a newsletter to loads of people even though you have nothing to say. It’s okay to spend weeks on a job application because someone encouraged you to apply for the job, and then not even get a phone interview, because apparently they didn’t mean what they said about applying for the job being a good idea. It’s not okay to discourage me from traveling to China so I can meet the man with all those dogs and cats and find out where all that raw meat and fish come from that smells so bad. It’s okay to come to my birthday party. It’s okay to read the essay I published at New Delta Review recently, about what it was like to see a great live performance in a small room with a handful of other people when the pandemic was winding down. It’s okay that I feel funny about that essay because it was written out of a kind of joy and near-ecstasy that I don’t feel anymore, and which looks a little embarrassing to me now. It’s okay to feel uncertain that you know for sure what the word “plenary” means. Sometimes things just happen a certain way. I really hope you know just what I mean.
In the audio version, I’ll end by reading some of my novel Weird Pig, which came out in 2020 and so didn’t get to go on tour. But in the non-audio version, I will show you a song you’ll want to hear:
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