The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.
🍻The Old Men Need a Place to Drink
SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE is a newsletter by Meaghan Garvey that is required reading. This week was number 87 and toward the end we meet a man who is joking and ball-busting with the other regulars at the bar. Then he starts sobbing; he put down his 15-year-old terrier earlier that day. Garvey drifts in and out of these scenes like a ghost everyone can see. They are truly wonderful.
I don’t have a local dive bar. Back when I was in my 20s, I never went in for the nightclub and college-to-post-college bar scene. I hated the music, I was too shy a dancer, and I wasn’t about to pay $10 for a drink I hated while trying to save money to move out of my childhood room. It’s amusing I developed a reputation as a beer snob despite frequenting a place that had dollar drafts of Rolling Rock (placing a bet on the ponies). But that bar was in Allston, and I was “Iced” there on more than one occasion.
There were local bars, mostly attached to mid-class family restaurants, where I could run into people I went to grade school with and they could marvel over how I either hadn’t cured cancer yet or was still alive somehow. And the boys from youth hockey that either got fat or roided up or both. Most of them probably conceal-carried and only some of them because they became cops.
See the young man sittin' in the old man's bar
Waitin' for his turn to die
— Goo Goo Dolls, “Broadway”
I don’t need to summarize Bowling Alone or beat the dead “cure for male loneliness” horse; the old men need a place to drink. Preferably somewhere you can go while the sun is still up, and time travel to when it is not. This would normally be the point where I bemoan the evils of capitalism and gentrification, but I don’t want to sully this little elegy for those dried-up watering holes.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, my glass is empty.
📚Book Bits
Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto
This was pretty good. I wouldn’t go out of my way to get it, but it’s an entertaining, if boilerplate crime noir. You can see a lot of Pizzolatto’s theme from True Detective in this, but the protagonist doesn’t rise to the level of a Marty Hart, let alone a Rustin Cohle. There’s no supernatural aspects or deep philosophy either. Still a good meat-and-potatoes story which some stylistic flair.
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
I’m likely going to finish this one today. It’s a good yarn and a bit of offbeat 70s humor. An apropos read in this time of civil disobedience and environmental plundering.
How Cormac Works by Bill Hardwig
A deep-dive into the sentences, structure, and style of Cormac McCarthy and his use of language. This deals less with the metaphysics and philosophy of McCarthy and more with how his art works at the sentence level.
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
This is gonna be a co-read with Mrs. Reads. My buddy Timmy is also reading this. I’m either gonna love or date this, I can already tell.
Speaking of my buddy Timmy, I recently recommended him Christopher Buehlman’s Between Two Fires. I read this one years ago, but it recently caught traction on BookTok. If you like angels, demons and Medieval France, you’ll love this one. Also check out Buehlman’s Blacktongue Thief series. The Daughters’ War might be the best fantasy novel I’ve ever read.
Love, Kurt by Kurt Vonnegut
A collection of love letters from Kurt Vonnegut to his wife, as compiled by his daughter. I’ve read through 1941-42 and our boy Kurt is DOWN BAD.
Recent Book Haul:
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti
I mentioned on Notes that I rewatched season one of True Detective. Apparently, this was a big influence on Nic Pizzolatto so I’m looking forward to it.
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. by Robert Coover
The New York Review of Books monthly selection. Baseball novel; paging Dr. Vince Wetzel.
Supergod by Warren Ellis
On loan from a buddy of mine after I sent him JLG Noga’s article on Grant Morrison and Batman.
💡Substack Spotlight:
M.P. Fitzgerald’s A Happy Bureaucracy Live Read!
MA Knight’s FEVERCHAIN Live Read!
Day of the ___ Writer is a collaborative community collection put on my Trevor Cohen. You can read mine here and check out all the entries, collected here:
📰Substack Headlines
This is cool as hell. Shout-out Anthony Marigold:
If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.
🖋️Writing
I partook in the Day of the ___ Writer community project. You can find my piece, Day of the Broken Writer here. This was cathartic to dump my various challenges and excuses out into the world and try to coalesce them into a coherent piece.
I am working on a story (presumable a short story), tentatively titled Final Rounds. I wrote an opening 500ish words that functioned as spec sheet for the story. I’ve been breaking down all the exposition I crafted in a first-person monologue and I’m teasing that into a rough outline.
❄️Fleeting Thoughts
I picked the right week to take off last week. Deepfakes and hate manifestos and trolls. There was other wild shit, too, but that all got lost in the whirlwind. I realize I am no troll’s primary target (white, male, straight, stunningly handsome, endlessly charming, unfathomably brilliant, etc.), so I have the ability to tune all that out and fuck off for a week. I realize not everyone has that luxury, and unfortunately there’s not a lot that can be said or done at the individual level about it.
That’s, ya know, kinda where we are in the world right now. I don’t know anyone who is psyched that Iranian schoolchildren are getting bombed. No decent people are co-signing genocide or fascist street thugs. And it sucks to come to a place where you feel you have community and face more of the same shit that makes you feel depressed and powerless.
I can ramble on for hours about any number of topics, but if you come to me with transparent vulnerability about the things that are getting to you, I turn into an inarticulate frump. “Shit sucks, man.” It’s a different kind of helplessness to recognize pain and be unable to soothe it. What can you say in the face or nonconsensual pornography or the bloodied backpack of a formerly living child or the partially redacted photos of sex crimes?
Feels gauche to promote your short story about a guy who blows his fucking brains out because he’s doing a sad.
Things will get better, or they’ll get worse, but they won’t stay the same. Whether you’re with or against the current, the key thing is not to drown.
Float on,
— V
If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.
“Vinny muthafuckin writes!” The exact words that popped into my head after your mic drop of a piece. Thanks for the shoutout. Appreciate you.
whatd ur friend think of the article