The morning after, as I filled a 10-gallon bucket with water, trying to keep my favorite work dress and fancy Swedish clogs from getting splashed with the hose, I finally got it. Killing a wild animal is very hard. And I don’t mean emotionally wrenching or internally conflicting. My ethical dilemmas about the work in front of me had been totally erased by months of insomnia, back-breaking labor and near-insane, illegal behavior. What I realized is this: it’s very difficult to whack, burn, stab, or shoot the life out of a wild creature.

Like many people in Oakland, California I raise chickens. People here don’t raise chickens because they don’t earn enough money at their real jobs to buy eggs. Or because the eggs for sale aren’t the most bougie, sought after eggs anywhere in the United States. Every grocery store in the Bay Area is stocked with about 25 different brands of free-range, locally sourced, fertile eggs. The yolks are deep mustard orange—evidence of the greens and bugs that the chickens laying these magic orbs are eating. On any, and I mean any of the 7 days in a goddamn week, there’s a farmer’s market within a 5–20 minute bike ride where foodies like me can purchase eggs straight from a local farm, still warm from being nestled in the deep, downy folds of poultry pussy.

Heirloom hens, raised on organic greens and oyster shells from the Pacific, give birth to the most beautifully hued eggs—blue, brown, pale green, saffron, speckled. I know other chicken hobbyists who raise hens because they love the satisfaction of working for their food, of plucking the eggs straight from the coop with their own bare hands. Something in them yearns for a back-to-the-land experience they never had as a child. But not me. No, I’ve come to realize that I raise chickens because I am crazy. Because I must love to work my ass off, to lose sleep, friends, and hundreds of dollars every year.

Image: Brian Turner via Flickr

JARED is trying to use the office microwave to pop popcorn. He has never used a microwave before, so he is examining the buttons carefully. JARED’s DAUGHTER is having fun with NANCY PELOSI and CHUCK SCHUMER, who are visiting the White House again. They’re laughing and having a bull session, like they’re college sophomores who take a lot of classes in comparative politics and art history. GENERAL KELLY is deciding when to tell JARED it’s only a fucking microwave as GENERAL MATTIS enters, carrying an Amazon Prime box.

NANCY PELOSI [pragmatically]: Special delivery!

[NANCY PELOSI opens up the Amazon Prime box with one of the box cutters STEVE BANNON left everywhere and starts tossing soccer jerseys to her former enemies. They all read “Trump” on the back.]

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [pandering to voters her grandfather will never win]: Football!!

NANCY PELOSI [excitedly]: Wait. That’s not all. [She tosses out reusable grocery bags with Che Guevara iconography.]

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [happily]: Viva!! I’ve always wanted to go to a grocery store.

[CHUCK SCHUMER asks KUSHNER DAUGHTER if she’s ever been to a Wegmans, a grocery store chain headquartered in his district.]

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [proudly]: I’d never go to Buffalo.

CHUCK SCHUMER: Soon Brooklyn will have one!

[NANCY PELOSI and KUSHNER DAUGHTER roll their eyes at each other.]

Image: Jeff Warren via Flickr

Hello! If you would, tell me about something you learned recently, and how you learned it.

It can be a skill, a fact, a truth (emotional or existential or otherwise).

You can leave your response right here. I’ll send around responses on Monday. 

Lot 1: Fox & Friend

Nothing says I’m sorry I accidentally killed your dog like presenting its owner with a sizeable diorama featuring the pooch’s stuffed remains. That’s the legend behind this circa 1900 case containing a fox terrier and its prey set against a woodland watercolor and faux ferns. The terrier had belonged to Henry Allison, a tenant farmer on the Skelton Castle Estate in northeast England. One day his boss, Squire William Wharton, was out hunting when his horse somehow trampled the dog. According to the Yorkshire auction house offering this melancholy item, “Such was the Squire’s remorse, that he had the case commissioned for Allison, as a gift to remember his terrier by.” How kind.

An auction estimate of $2,500-4,000 reflects the fact that this diorama was made by one of the “great British taxidermists,” Peter Spicer, known for his realistic backdrops and artistic styling. The entire sale on September 20 is heavy on taxidermy, including heads of wildebeests and warthogs, trays of mounted butterflies, and this pickled pike, crammed into a glass coffin and staring us down.

The Clientele’s Music for the Age of Miracles is out next Friday, and it is one of two great albums for fall coming soon. (Here’s the other.) Will we make it to next Friday? Will autumn be a thing then? These are questions beyond my ken. The only thing I can tell you about next Friday is that it is so many more days away than it seems. In the meantime, you should probably listen to this, and the previous tracks from Music for the Age of Miracles, so that when next Friday finally comes you are ready. Enjoy.

★★ The early western clouds were silver-edged. It seemed the right time to lace up the new canvas sneakers. Overhead was white reticulated with deep blue. At midday, though, the air had acquired an indoor-swimming-pool humidity. The sky abruptly went fully gray. Light, scattered drops got bigger and more frequent, till it was time to get the new shoes inside. For a while a full rain was falling. After the radar said it was over, a fine drizzle was still keeping the cars and the pavement wet. Little precociously fallen leaves were turning to goo. The evening air got more and more suffocating, till the air conditioners had to be turned back on.

Octopuses are reclusive animals, and the gloomy octopus (Octopus tetricus) is no exception. During the day, it retreats into its den in the rocky reefs of Australia, which it often blocks with rocks. It comes out most often at night, to catch lobsters, crabs, and other creatures with its meter-long arms. But in 2012, researchers reported that the species is surprisingly social. Diving in Jervis Bay, Australia, the scientists documented as many as 16 gloomy octopuses all living in a large pile of discarded shells—dubbed Octopolis—mating and fighting, even during the daytime. 

Scientists have discovered an “underwater city full of gloomy octopuses” off the coast of Australia. Whenever I expire, please incinerate me and throw my ashes into Jervis Bay, where the octopuses are so busy being gloomily social that they barely notice the wobbegong sharks!

At dawn, Henry Williams Camel, Jr., left the Flathead Reservation in Montana and headed west on I-90, weaving through the Rockies as the sun began to rise in his rearview. In the late ‘90s, when Camel, who goes by JR,  starred as one of the earliest Native Americans to play Division 1 basketball, the interstate had a speed limit of “reasonable and prudent.” Today, the limit is 80 miles per hour, and Camel had to be in Spokane, Washington (209 miles from the reservation) by 8:00 a.m. to register for the world’s biggest outdoor 3-on-3 basketball tournament: the Spokane Hoopfest.

Camel, who is 43 years old, is his team’s best player, and one of the top players at Hoopfest every year. His team, Desert Horse Elite, had won the championship for the 6-Foot-and-Under Elite Division three years in a row, and if they won again this year, they’d become just the third team in the Hoopfest’s 28-year history to win four straight. I was less interested in if Desert Horse was going to win this year than I was in why Camel would keep playing basketball at the highest level against players half his age, long after he seemingly had anything left to play for, on unforgiving asphalt in 90-degree heat, when the stakes were only what you made them and the reward was a T-shirt, some Nike gear and a blurb in the local newspaper.

Image: Dave Parker via Flickr

THU 9/14 8:25 ET At Cincinnati -5 Houston

J.J. Watt’s finger
Bone busted through his skin and
He just taped it up

PICK: TEXANS

SUN 9/17 1:00 ET Tennessee -1.5 At Jacksonville

Blake Bortles is to
Quarterbacks what Ted Cruz is
To internet porn

PICK: TITANS

9/17 1:00 ET At Baltimore -7.5 Cleveland

When the world does end
And only cockroaches live
the Browns will still lose

PICK: BROWNS