Next year all our troubles will be miles away..

"We’re moving pretty fast now. When you slide by it all, so fast, you think you won’t ever have to get bogged down in it again — the traffic, the neighborhoods, the stores, waiting in lines. We’re really speeding now. The ride is smooth. Pretty quiet. Just a little squeaking from some metal part in the car that’s jiggling. We’re all jiggling a little."

I can't think of a better way to celebrate this annually strangely bitter sweet morning than with a story by Lydia Davis, the contemporary of the strangely bitter sweet.

But no one will dance with us in this zaney town

Cut up

They being prescription THC pills

Merry Christmas, you beautiful old Building & Loan!

"Welcome to the Real America, my name's Ted Nugent."

Two days back in the Land of the Free and I'm already flirting with possible redneck status.




What you can't see are the super cool duck boots down below. I think this may be my new uniform.

"When I was a kid, we used to suck on pennies, and it was a delight."

So there's like, four feet of snow out there. It's been coming down since around this time last night, and it got so bad today that my mother and I actually had to stop our car in the middle of route 50 and wait for the road to reemerge from the thick white out by which we suddenly found ourselves enveloped. I think this is all so wonderful.

In any case, I spent my evening eating chicken pot pie and sipping bourbon in front of a roaring fire. I also watched the SNL Christmas special (thanks to my mother's, who, as it turns out, is surprisingly savvy with the DVR), and was delighted to find myself reacquainted with this gem of a skit:


Also, did you know that Fred Armisen and Peggy from Mad Men are engaged? Because I did not, until today.

Fits of ecstasy

"Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me--as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands--particularly in the late afternoons of spring and summer, when the sunlight on sunny days achieved moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold and was itself (the light, as if it were taste) so delicious that it was almost too much to stand, and I would lie on the pile of large pillows in our living room and roll back and forth in an agony of delight and tell my mother, who always read on the couch, that I felt so good and full and ecstatic that I could hardly bear it, and I remember her pursing her lips, trying not to laugh, and saying in the driest possible voice that she found it hard to feel too much sympathy or concern for this problem and was confident that I could survive this level of ecstasy, and that I probably didn't need to be rushed to the emergency room, and at such moments my love and affection for my mother's dry humor and love became, stacked atop the original ecstasy, so intense that I almost had to stifle a scream of pleasure as I rolled ecstatically between the pillows and the books on the floor."

There are few writers that can keep a sentence going, keep your eyes on the page, like David Foster Wallace. (From his story "All That" in the Dec. 14th Yawka)

It’s sad and it’s cold at the bottom of the sea, but at least I got my blueberries with me

Have a lot to update, but a flight back home to catch in five hours. My limbs feel all rubbery and I'm consumed by the most subtle feeling of dread. Strange things happen in America.

What am I saying! I was born for America, I am an American! I want to, as Hemingway put it, "go west with this face and grow up with the country." I bleed America. I sweat fucking nationalism. Haha. I am so tired, and my suitcase, so heavy. This will have to do.

I hope they play Last Chance Harvey on the plane.

Take anotha drinka wine!

It was Christmas last night on South Clerk Street!
Imagine this in a refined British accent

Ridhima and DB, thinking about how hungry they are.

Meanwhile, Shaun lends a hand in the kitchen.

Delicious, delicious roast

The chef



Giant Yorkshire puddin'







Pretty drunk and skeptical of the self-timer and really really really full


(photos courtesy of Lucy Stew)