One way of thinking about today to help yourself get through it is that no matter how horrible it is you will wish you were back here tomorrow. Yeah, I know it’s not much. What do you want from me? If I knew how to make the days more bearable I’d be a billionaire. Anyway, here’s music, enjoy.

★★ Big, soft-edged clouds bounced golden light into the living room. Two elevators were out, and the exertion of walking two dozen flights down led out into air too heavy to afford any relief. The downed leaves were mostly green but scarred in spots with color. The light lost its warmth and the clouds went gray for a while. Then full shining sun came back, but with incongruous darker cumulus lurking in the west. The clouds took over again, not quite completely, followed by a likewise incomplete spell of sun. Nothing would be stable or reliable. The air through the windows was too damp to be fresh.

megancreynolds [12:57]
do i need to know what david s pumpkins is
i missed that last year

silvia [12:57 PM]
no
it was last year
missed it once, shame on you
missed it twice, congrats

megancreynolds [12:57 PM]
omg yessss
i was at a wedding the weekend of david pump
and i never researched
but i just saw vulture published an “oral history

nicole [12:59 PM]
“we drafted a sketch. then we revised it.”
[1:00]
“we told Tom Hanks to slap their butts.”
“I don’t know why this got so popular.”

Image: Erin Pettigrew via Flickr

JARED, his DAUGHTER, and GARY COHN are in New Haven for the Harvard-Yale football game, where they run into many other powerful people. JARED graduated from Harvard in 2003, and his DAUGHTER, assuming she takes a gap year, will graduate from the school thirty years after her father, in 2033. By that time, all jobs will be automated and most self-actualization will be automated as well. Life will pretty much be a never-ending gap year of coffees with robot CEOs and wine tastings with robot chefs and singing lessons with robot casts of Hamilton. GARY COHN did not graduate from Harvard, but because of his access to both political and financial power, he is able to enter whatever space he chooses. EVERYONE is wearing barn coats and networking and politely ignoring the opioid crisis ravaging much of New England. IVANKA is at home because she attended Penn.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [marveling at the size of her barn coat’s pockets and wondering why anyone, even barn people, would need pockets this deep]: Why couldn’t mom come to this?

JARED [happily, for once]: Your mother didn’t get into Harvard or Yale.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [fantasizing about all the candy she could fit into those pockets of hers]: Why didn’t the good grandpa get her into Harvard too?

GARY COHN [to KUSHNER DAUGHTER and then to JARED]: It doesn’t matter where you go to school. It matters which schools name buildings after you.

Puce is a color that’s been around for as long as we’ve been spilling blood and watching it dry, but it didn’t get a name until the summer of 1775 when French dressmaker Rose Bertin made Marie-Antoinette a gown in a color that blurred the lines between brown and maroon with only a hint of pinkish-gray. According to a biography of Bertin, the Louis XVI strode into a room where his wife was hanging out, wearing her brand new silk dress, and exclaimed, “That is puce!” He had observed, and rightfully so, that her dress was the same color as a flea (or, in French, “une puce”).

Considering what happens next, I imagine he meant this as praise. While that’s bug-colored doesn’t sound like a fantastic compliment to receive from a significant other, the French court went wild for this King-approved and Queen-endorsed red. “As the new colour did not soil easily, and was therefore less expensive than lighter tints, the fashion of puce gowns was adopted by the bourgeoisie, and dyers were unable to meet the pressing requirements of their customers,” explains The History of Fashion in France. Soon, both men and women were wearing trendy puce-colored taffetas and satins (or sending their old rags out to be dyed anew). “But the color was not always exactly the same shade, so they made a difference between old and young flea, and then made subdivisions, and you could see clothes the color of the flea’s ‘back’, ‘head,’ or ‘thigh’,” adds historian Augustin Challamel. But the muddy, bloody red went out of fashion as quickly as it blew in. Legend has it that, on another occasion just months following his puce ejaculation, Louis XVI saw his wife in a fab new gray gown and said something along the lines of, “That dress is the color of your hair!”

Everything is terrible and hope is an illusion which none of us can sustain let alone afford anymore. Anyway, here’s music. Enjoy.

★★★★★ Gaudy rows of candy on the newsstand floated in reverse on the glass of a kitchen design store like misplaced merchandise in the dim and tasteful interior. There was just enough coolness to burnish the warmth. The walk uptown to the movie theater was more appealing than the trains, and it was a partial penance for spending three hours shut in the dark. A ukulele twunged by Verdi Square. A woman stooped to snap pictures of pigeons bathing in a grimy puddle in scaffold shade, as if compelled to find the bleakest thing in the landscape of bright-lit marvels. A big butterfly flapped high above Broadway. Every glance up at the sky turned up at least two separate and incredible things happening there at once. The high thin clouds after the matinee were gently separated into ripples, and the ripples were smeared together in places like smudged white color pencil, and then the whole surface of it had been slit by the passage of an airplane. A bit later, across the west, there ran a contrail that had been chopped into a neatly dotted line. Somewhere out of sight a brass band was playing, with a sound like movie music.

I sensed I was barking up the wrong tree by telling my 62-year-old Mormon eye doctor that my mom’s brother had just died and that he was a jerk whose breathing problems had prevented him from having sex. He stepped back, holding the drops like he might hold a cocktail, if he drank. His wedding ring was stainless steel and enormous, like his wife had their sub-zero refrigerator melted down to make it. He cleared his throat. “Do you want to call your mother back?”

Always read Sarah Miller.

Image: slgckgc via Flickr

“Halloween is coming up! I still don’t have a costume! What kind of candy should I get?” —Trick or Tracy

We have forgotten over the decades that holidays are for giving stuff to kids. Candy at Halloween. Presents at Christmas and Kwanzaa and Hanukkah. Candy at Easter and Purim. Trees on Arbor Day. “Hey, kid, we killed your world. Go stick this Oak Tree in a vacant lot.” Instead we’ve somehow made holidays about adults. By showing ad after ad of people giving their spouses new cars at Christmas with big red bows on them. No one does this. These ads will start 2 seconds after Halloween is over and last until Valentine’s Day. If your spouse does give you a new car for Christmas, they may be a criminal hiding cash from the authorities. You might want to call the FBI on them.

Holidays are for kids because their lives suck. They are forced to go to school for like 20 years. At first they learn that they should share and be nice to each other. That, sadly, quickly goes away once playtime is over. Then they’re taught to achieve, win, succeed at all costs. Why not have a class for kids in “Dealing With Failure and Disappointment.” That would have come in handy when it was time for the prom.

There’s no limit to the waves of embarrassment that old metal dudes will rain down on their beleaguered, black-clad fans. Every time a hesher bangs his head, some fogey from the first or second gen kills the buzz: here’s Phil Anselmo doing a white power sign like a dickwad, or how about Gene Simmons’s failed bid to trademark the horns? Or, Ted Nugent, still sucking air? It certainly does suck. More recently, Dee Snider, the one-time frontman of the ’80s glam band Twisted Sister, who made an entire career out of appropriating crossdressing, is pissed about the “new” trend of non-metal fans wearing metal tees.

On October 17, Snider tweeted, “Gotta say, this new trend of non-metal fans wearing vintage metal T’s if [sic] pretty sickening. Metal is not ironic! Dicks.” Where the hell do I even begin? Old Man Snider is so completely out of touch with the culture he was once a part of, that he thinks a) the trend of wearing heavy metal shirts ironically is new, and b) that heavy metal itself is not ironic.