Tuesday 8/2/22
M: Hey.
C: What's up?
M: What are you doing?
C: Working on that story "Caves and Waterfalls" and writing an op-ed.
M: What's the op-ed?
C: Why the demise of the starting pitcher is the worst thing to ever happen to baseball.
[Proceeds to read parts of said op-ed and story.]
M: Everything you do is always at such a different level than everyone else. Everyone I know needs to read these. It would help them. Even the baseball piece is about so much more than baseball. My widowed sister-in-law should read it. My dad would love it.
C: Yes, well, here we are.
M: Anyway, I was at the beach yesterday, and I went to this stand to get food for the girls.
C: You're a born provider.
M: There were these meatheads, and they had gotten pizza. This one meathead was bright pink, but not because of the sun. I think it was like his blood pressure. He starts eating the pizza and he gives it a ranking, and then all of the other meatheads said, "Just one bite, you know the rules," because of Portnoy. A slob who represents the lowest common denominator in society.
C: Who looks like he shaved his pubic hair and glued it to his face.
M: Right. He is exactly the kind of person who would spit in a girl's mouth. But they all knew the rules. That's his influence. I thought, here I am, out in the world, and I see this guy's influence. These guys could have been fifty. You can't even tell sometimes.
C: No, you can't.
M: But you could totally sell Meatheads to these guys. They might not see it as the genius work of humanistic satire it is, and instead like a handbook, but they'd love it. You could have people writing a dissertations on it as the modern Swift or whatever but better, and you could have these idiots quoting it and doing their meathead laugh with each other. I'm telling you, I could have sold copies to them right then and there. There'd be pizza sauce all over the pages from all of the years going forward of reading and bad eating until they have their heart attacks, but you really do hit every single kind of demographic, and for totally different reasons with each work.
C: Hmmm. Can you become a certain shade because of your blood pressure?
M: His coloration was not good. They also started drinking at 11 AM.
