While rummaging around Amazon Prime looking for something to watch, I ran across the TV series Loudermilk, and it turned out to be pretty good. Not great, but a good watch with some excellent writing.

The titular character – played with slacker energy (low) by Office Space’s Ron Livingston – is a recovering alcoholic who leads a substance abuse group. He’s also somewhat of an asshole.

The group – primarily men – are all recovering/lapsed addicts of some sort, so it’s pretty much a circle of losers. Which, of course, can lead to some chaotic situations (and lots of profanity – stay away if at all put off by profanity or sexual talk).

It leans a little too heavily – for me – on “you have to understand that your sobriety is tied to everything you do so keep doing the work!” Reminds me a people who obsess over church or therapy; it often seems forced, as it is what you think you should do instead of what you want to do. But that’s the backbone of the show, and it’s not too preachy.

It ran for three seasons (2017-2020; 30 episodes) on some network that got gobbled up when HBO became HBO Max. A season 4 had been planned (and there were plotlines that could have been mined) but never happened due to the merger.

It’s a good watch – no car chase, few rom-com plot points, just a lot of dialogue and weird little twists that are done well. Not great like Fleabag, but I’d watch it again sometime, skipping this or that episode/scene. Low key and watchable – and very human.

A documentary of a previously little known, self-described “queer Negro woman” whose life is getting more and more traction as the years go by, and – especially – as Supreme Court Justice Breyer has announced his imminent retirement (Jan. 2022) and President Biden has reaffirmed his commitment to putting a Black woman on the court.

Murray was a lawyer, activist, priest and poet who influenced both Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who was interviewed on-camera for the documentary) and Thurgood Marshall, among many others.

Murray – born in 1910 – was remarkably ahead of the times: She denounced segregation, embraced LGBT+ rights, decried gender inequality (“Jane Crow,” in her words) and, in 1977, became the first African-American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest.

Her entire bio is a list of “firsts”;: Sole female at Howard Law School (first in her class), first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School; co-founder of NOW (National Organization for Women). She’s one of the most famous women you’ve never heard of – but that seems to be changing.

The documentary (2021) is well done, with most of the narration either by Murray or in her own words. It reminded me of a Ken Burns documentary, with a remarkable amount of archival material – photos, film and audio clips.

Well worth checking out. One of the things that stuck with me were the old pictures – probably from just before or after I was born (1959) with “Whites only” signs on buses, white/black entrance signs.
What was/is wrong with us?

Well here’s a federal program (free Covid tests) that actually worked.

Ordered 1/18, day before the site went officially live. Got email confirmation.

Tuesday 1/25 got email saying would have free tests by the end of the week.

Later same day got email saying tests out for delivery and would arrive by 8:15pm.

Arrived at 7:15pm.

You can argue about why this didn’t happen under Trump or why it took a year for Biden to pick up the dropped baton, but it’s here now and working well.

Update: March 2022 – Another round of free tests were announced; I signed up for same on a Tuesday, and by Thursday night they had been delivered.

Sometime over the past few weeks, I was noodling around on the internet and I stumbled upon – from what site I can’t recall – a link to an article with an intriguing yet click-baitish title: “Reminder: the most famous short story in American literature was written in one day.” (Took some google, biut here’s the article link.)

For most people, I guess the article would be interesting in seeing how “they pounded it out so quickly?” Short stories are a difficult genre and each word matters. One can get sloppy in a novel – witness William Faulkner’s pages-long paragraphs. Can’t do that in short story – just don’t have the pages to burn.

But for me the question was: What is the most famous short story in American literature?

Before I clicked through, I made a few guesses:

• “Hills Like White Elephants” – Ernest Hemingway
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” – Edgar Allan Poe
• “To Build a Fire” – Jack London
• “A Rose for Emily” – William Faulkner

And so on.

The winner – according to the article’s author: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

OK, I know the story and it is a classic, but I would have never thought of it. As good a story as any I came up with before clicking through, and better than some (but not all) that I have considered since.

But not the “most famous American short story.”

I don’t think you can select a most famous American short story, any more than you can pick a most famous American novel. (And let’s not even get into the issue of the “best” short story or novel!)

Other American short stories to consider:

• “Big Blonde” – Dorothy Parker (though I prefer “The Waltz” – delightful).
• “A Good Man is Hard to Find” – Flannery O’Connor. Southern neo-gothic
• “A & P” – John Updike. The last line echoes – but in a far different way – the last line of Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation.”
• “The Country Husband” – John Cheever
• “Why I Live at the P.O.” – Eudora Welty
• “A Lovely Day for Bananafish” – J.D. Salinger
• “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” – Stephen Crane. Worth reading just so you can occasionally pick up the story and re-read the last few paragraphs.
• “Bartleby the Scrivener” – Herman Melville
• “A River Runs Though It” – Norman Maclean. Again, read so you can more fully appreciate the final three paragraphs. Poetry even if you didn’t read the story; magic if you did.
• “Battle Royal” – Ralph Ellison. A brutal story which became the first chapter of Ellison’s seismic Invisible Man.

One final note: It’ll never be on a list of most famous short stories (American or otherwise) – but Tillie Olson’s “Tell Me a Riddle” is as well-written and devastating as anything I’ve read. Forty or so pages; I read it in one swallow in college knowing nothing about it.

My first – and possibly final – 2022 prediction:

There is about a zero percent chance I’ll make it ’til midnight.

You have been warned…

Update 1/1/2022 – I was quite right…

Well, it was yesterday – December 28 – that we got our first measurable snowfall (must be at least 0.1 inches).

We had a couple of snow flurries earlier in the fall/winter, but not even enough to collect on cold cars.

Yesterday, we got about an inch of wet, heavy snow.

Forecasters said the snow wouldn’t stick to roads or sidewalks (it did – it’s how I know the snow was heavy: I shoveled).

Forecasters said rain overnight would get rid if the snow. No rain; still snowy.

Today we had temps just above freezing and a little sun (very little), so pavement is clear, but the grass is half clear, half snow.

Weird to get our first snow this late – a few years ago, we had snow on Halloween!

From CDC.gov

It’s a long story, but it took me until this past Friday (11/10) to get a COVID booster shot (Pfizer, like the first two).

First jab, no side effects at all. Not even a sore injection point.

The second, however, knocked me on my ass. Night sweats, fever, aches. Cleared up after a day or so, but kind of a surprise given the absence of effects from the first.

The booster was somewhere in between: aches, fever, very brief night sweat (singular). Today, I’m pretty much back to normal.

The weather didn’t help, either – we had a couple of extreme fronts come through, and the change in pressure made my sinuses feel like my head was going to explode.

But booster – well worth it.

Get it.

I mention this because I ran across a strange ecommerce issue not once, but twice in the past week.

Basically, I was not really able to get a price for what I ordered/wanted to see price for.

1: Network Solutions

I had a domain that needed renewal (it has been at Network Solutions for its entire lifetime, pre-2000).

I extended the registration via my NS account and it was $40/year for five years. Yikes! But whatever. I paid and am now good until 2026.

But I wondered what kind of discount – if any – I got for extending five years instead of one or three.

So, I went to Network Solutions to check it out.

There’s no pricing information, anywhere.

Finally, I “searched” for a domain (adfadfdafdfadfa.com or whatever); it was available. But no pricing. I needed to set up an account (or log into an existing account) to, I’d guess, see the pricing options.

So, before I even decide to buy, I have to create an account, surrender an email etc.

That’s bullshit.

I still don’t know the cost for a dot-com for one year.

Shady.

2: Checks Unlimited (dot com)

Remember checks? Those paper thingees that you sorta use as money??

I ordered my last set of checks from Checks Unlimited decades ago and am currently down to a book of checks. One more reorder, probably my last check order ever (I write very few checks, 1-3 per month).

The site had prices, but no volume. Sure, one box $18.99, two boxes for $29.99 (discount!), but how many checks in a box? Ten? 100? Not specified.

I had to google it, and each box of checks is 100 checks.

So I ordered, but that’s kind of lame.

And I ordered a register book, because they promoted it, so it seemed like the checks didn’t come with a register book. Odd…but it is what it is.

Checks came, and one “box” is 100 checks: two 50-check pads. And no box. And the “box” of checks did come with a (flimsy) register book.

I put these new checks in an old box I had from my years-ago Checks Unlimited order, and the “two boxes” of checks (4 pads x 50 checks) fit into one box of years ago.

Now I realize the price of things – domains, checks – are going to keep going up, but the frustrating part is really not knowing what you’re getting until 1) You have to pony up for it (domain name) or 2) It arrives in the mail (checks).

I hope this is just a blip and I hit two outliers in one week, but it’s concerning.

I shop online a lot, and usually the experience is much clearer and cleaner than this.

Back in the day when I had time for reading (grade/high school, parts of college) I would binge-read authors – literary fiction – much like I’ll today binge-watch a TV show on DVD/streaming.

Hemingway, Vonnegut, Steinbeck, Joyce (no, not Finnegan’s Wake), Faulkner and so on. Not all writings, but the bulk of the biggies, novels and (often) short story collections.

In the last decade or two, it’s rare that I read more than one book – very rarely two – by a contemporary author (in the last 50 years or so). I no longer appear to have favorite authors, I now have favorite books.

Not that that’s a bad thing.

Two exceptions to this rule are William Styron and, more recently, Jane Hamilton.

I just finished a fourth Hamilton novel: Disobedience. It happens to be the most recently published of her books I’ve read, but I’ve read them out of order. I’m not waiting patiently for her latest to come out and devouring it, I just read as I find this or that book interesting. Disobedience came out in 2000, and the previous Hamilton book I read, her first, came out in 1988: The Book of Ruth (brilliant, shocking and unexpected).

Compared to The Book or Ruth (a PEN/Hemingway Award winner) and my personal favorite, A Map of the World, Disobedience was a disappointment.

It starts off strong – the first graphs of Disobedience and A Map of the World are so strong, so encompassing that you just need to read the rest of the book.

Sadly, Disobedience doesn’t hold up.

It’s a story about the Shaw family, transplanted from Vermont to Chicago, and is narrated by the family’s 17-year-old son, Henry/Hank. The gist of the story is that Henry finds, by accidentally(?) accessing his mom’s email account (“Liza38” – it has to be an AOL account, as it does take place sometime around or before 2000), that his mom is having an affair. The book, narrated in past tense, describes the year or so that follows the initial discovery.

That’s the main arc of the story – him snooping around the letters sent and received by his mom and her partner in disobedience, as well as his mother’s emails to a female friend, where she more straight-forwardly outlines details of the affair: the good, the bad, the confusing. The guilt and the amour.

But there is an inordinate amount of time devoted to Henry’s younger sister, Elvira, a high school-aged goth who is a Civil War Reenactor, and obsessed with all things post- and ante-bellum, as well. But mainly the War. Their father, a history teacher, is slowly (weirdly, why the delay?) revealed to be just as big a Civil War buff as his daughter. I was expecting some sort of issue between the two to suddenly emerge, but it never did.

The ending of the book really rotates around the daughter, which is odd given that the book is narrated by the son and mainly focuses on his reactions to his mother’s choices.

At bottom, the book is about how each character in the book finds their own place in the world. It’s about missteps, adjustments and acceptance.

It’s well written and full of quirky details. For example, the narrator (the son, Henry) almost never writes about his “father” – he’s just “Kevin” or “Kevin Shaw.”

For his mom, she’s “Liza98,” “Elizabeth,” “Liz” and so on.

There are some other interesting characters, notably a school friend (Karen) who is described in dress and conversation like she’s an artsy thirty-some year old, but she’s just a high-school senior. And there is a beautiful woman Henry meets at a summer camp whom he, of course, lusts after.

All in all, the book just didn’t click, and the ending just did not resonate on any level. The narrator’s tone was problematic, as well: He was writing in past tense, and it seems like he had already graduated college and film school, and Henry sounds like Holden Caufield, but with a solid grasp of literature and nuances of language. That’s an odd mix.

Will I read another Hamilton book? Absolutely. She’s a good writer and, as a bonus, sets her tales in or around Chicago (I’m from the burbs). So when a character thinks about getting a job as a lifeguard….at Fullerton Beach, it adds a little something.

And while she didn’t quite pull it off here as well as she did in A Short History of a Prince, it’s a gutsy move for a woman to write the novel from the first-person point of view of a male, and – in this case – a horny 17-year-old male.

So maybe one of her more recent books has something to say to me.

I have many mixed thoughts about our leaving Afghanistan, but this former vet’s tweets (made into a Medium post) is a fast, visceral take on the whole affair as it was unfolding.

Wow, this seems to be really resonating with folks. I'm kind of blown away

I made this post into an article, if that's a thing that people want:https://t.co/PJsvy2EOmf

— Laura Jedeed (@LauraJedeed) August 15, 2021