Taylor Lorenz and Vidal Sassoon, master classes, prank call from a sly boots, another evening with Julien Sorel

Monday 8/31/26

Maybe if you said "master class" a thousand more times?

People are now sufficiently lacking in language skills--and they have so few words at their disposal--that they've taken to putting extra letters in words in an attempt to convey different meanings. Sometimes a brighter person does this in a playful way, but that's not usually why it happens.

Vidal Sassoon remarked that the only place success comes before work is in the dictionary, an incredibly naive thing to say when it comes to how the world really works. Nothing does a better job obliterating that would-be truth (which is really just a lazy attempt to author what's hoped to be a famous aphorism) than the publishing industry.

Look at Taylor Lorenz who was in the news--well, what constitutes a kind of news these days--over the weekend. Do you think she's ever worked hard for so much as an hour in her life?

And no, I don't count conniving as something you can work hard at any more than I count Lorin Stein-ing people on your desk as a form of working hard.

There's someone who sends me a text every few days asking how I'm doing. This takes different forms. Sometimes, like yesterday, it's "How has your weekend been?" I responded yesterday by saying I wish I had a better answer to give them. Normally I skirt it somewhat, because it's probably hard to read the truth repeatedly. And it's always the same here. Each second of my existence is an agony. It's agony without any hope of relief. It is a life without hope. And in that absence of hope it's not like there's this void or pocket of mystery. I see things for what they are.

I feel bad about skirting, though. Like I'm being dishonest. But I also don't think this person is asking me how I'm doing without any awareness of anything else and the situation, though I don't know how much she knows. She replied to what I said about wishing to have a better answer by saying she just wanted me to know she cares and is thinking about me and I suggested maybe what I should do by way of answering is saying what I had been doing. Anyway, I thought that was kind of her. The checking in and what she said. I have so little kindness in my life. So little warmth. So little evidence that I am cared about in the slightest.

But I received a voicemail from someone the other day from someone pretending to be someone else who cares. On Tuesday, my buddy/six-year-old niece Amelia was over my mom's when she decided to prank call me and pretend to be my mom. She hasn't phoned in quite a while so I don't know what brought this on.

I only got this voicemail yesterday morning, but it was pretty funny. She did this whole voice and everything. She's funny. Then I sent the voicemail to the woman mentioned above and also my sister. I had never done that before--it's rare for anyone to call me, let alone for me to have a reason to share a voicemail of all things--but it was quite easy. I told my sister to tell Amelia that she tricked me and also made me laugh.

I watched the Red Sox take a savage 16-1 beating by the Yankees yesterday. I was at the cafe reading for the 0-0 part of the game, a book called Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell, returning to see it become 5-0 in a flash. And from there, it just kept getting uglier and uglier, culminating with the Red Sox using a position player to pitch and the Yankees launching homers off him.

There's a kind of morbid fascination with to this kind of thing. You sort of just have to roll with it. 10-1, 14-1, 16-1, 30-1, what's it matter at that point? This was one of the biggest games of the year for the Sox, seeing as it was for the season tiebreaker with the Yankees and was the difference between trailing them by 2 games or 4 and needing to finish a game in front of them for the first Wild Card spot, and it concludes with a position player on the mound. Definitely not how you wanted that to go.

I posted the following:

10-1 Yankees right now. This hasn’t been an encouraging weekend for the Red Sox. Seems like something may be up with Sonny Gray, too. Anyway, that’s probably it so far as the first Wild Card goes.

This was a response:

Forget not only the first wildcard (sic) but also the second and third.

That would be quite the collapse, failing to make the postseason with 25 games to go and having a 6-game lead over the team trailing the third Wild Card squad. That guy will respond to everything I say Red Sox-related that expresses something less than positive, which can be tantamount to a statement of facts, and he does so in the most extreme, miserable fashion.

And no, it's not that "Ah, what a crusty old New Englander" thing or "That's the nature of being a fan!" which is one of the stupid things people love to say like "Art is subjective" and "Let people like what they like" which is always a case of an idiot making excuses for other idiots, and idiots in general, and thus themselves, in order to remain complacent as idiots and never look to better themselves.

You'd suggest to someone who only eats bologna sandwiches and has never tried anything else to maybe do just that, right? So maybe you don't need to fill your mind solely with shit. And maybe doing so impacts the lives of the people around you, as well as adversely affects yours, and then the world as well.

Having said this, if I post something about a Red Sox success, he hits the like button. Like he's happy now. He doesn't follow me. He just comes to my page to do these things without fail. I think he both likes when they lose and when they win.

But they could be up 10 games with 9 to play and if I posted something about a Red Sox loss, he'd say they're never going to make the playoffs again in a hundred years. Middle-aged man. The other thing he's really into are the novels of Stendhal. Big Red and the Black guy.

And if you don't know that's a joke, well, I guess I don't know what you're doing here unless you're looking to improve at reading. Sign up for my master class!