Summer of Our Discontent
I think I realized I was hopelessly fucked when I couldn’t master the high-fives that the summer kids seemed preternaturally accustomed to. Even pretty simple high-fives stumped me. I guess I wasn’t used to touching people. And talking! Man, I was bad at that. Slang was like an evangelist bleating out nonsense syllables, half High Aramaic and half dog bark. I was allergic to ice cream, threw a football like a girl, had no friends, and feared sunlight. All these disparate threads would come to a head every year for about a hundred days of wasted time in a brutal stretch known as the summer. BY ALEX SIQUIG
Monday, August 19, 2013A Conversation Between Marguerite Imbert And Herself
En route from Venice to Verona, an implicit dialogue made explicit: What did your mother teach you? What do you believe? Have you ever been in abject terror? BY MARGUERITE IMBERT
Notes From An IHOP
The hostess is petite with a cute dimpled chin. She has pink hair, but the blonde is growing back in underneath and it flashes when she turns her head, and she’s complaining that she smells like cigarettes after an unknown ‘he’ has left. The atmosphere is very friendly and conversational. The other hostess, tall, skinny, black, wearing glasses, is bantering back when Pink Hair sees Peter and me and assumes her official posture to welcome us and ask how many. BY ANDREW ZOLOT
Amongst The Bogans
Asleep in the passenger seat of my car, crammed in with the entirety of my worldly possessions, I was awoken by a rapping on my window. I blearily peered out of the window, only to be peered back at by an extraordinarily skinny young man in camouflage trousers and an undershirt. I recognized him as Michael, who for some reason had asked to be called Biggles. BY JAMES SCHRECK
The Worst Pub in Edinburgh
I suppose it all started the first day I arrived, a cold and wet September morning. Getting off the overnight plane I thought it would be profitable to adjust to the time difference by warding off my droopy eyelids and attempting to make it to nightfall before retiring. Of course I hadn't the slightest idea what one could do in Auld Reekie. Actually, let me retract that. I had a slight idea. And it involved a pub. For all the stories one hears about the number of pubs in Edinburgh, it's a bit hard to fathom their abundance until you see them for yourself. In a strange way, Edinburgh's wealth of pubs is a bit like the Grand Canyon. BY BENJAMIN RILEY