Plus, who named this thing?

I’m unhappy to learn that the pink fairy armadillo may be threatened. You just need to look at one to know that it’s not going to threaten you back. It looks like a chipmunk on Halloween or a crappy cosplay gerbil at a rodent sci-fi convention. It has pink armor about two sizes too small just draped over its shoulders like those European guys do with their sweater. It’s got disproportionately large pink turtle feet, like a toddler wearing her dad’s sneakers. If hamsters ever decided to make a low-budget horror movie this is what the monster would look like.

Sit. Stay. Speak.

What’s so great about passive longevity, like “third generation farmer” or “family-owned in the same location for 75 years?” When you brag on how long you’ve stayed put, it seems to me you’re kind of saying, “My grandparents were driven by some blend of determination, desperation, grit, gumption, necessity and just plain stupidity to uproot themselves and start from scratch in a place where everything from the food to the language to the smell of the dirt itself was strange and new. But not me. I’m nothing like that.” Meanwhile, we got folks exactly like that waiting at the border.

Or must I knock up my solicitor?

Association football is the most popular team sport in the world. It is known in the United States as soccer to distinguish it from other games called football like Gaelic football, Australian football, Rugby football (League and Union), American football, and also Canadian football which features mayonnaise instead of ketchup. You know what it is when an American starts calling soccer football? It’s pretentious, that’s what it is, like a philosophy major at a Midwestern land-grant college smoking Gauloises. What are you going to do next? Start calling trucks lorries, cookies biscuits, fries chips, chips crisps? Stop it. Talk normal.

The coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty

Want to understand what Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil?” Look at Jeff Sessions’ face, listen to his voice, as he declares war on children. It would be nice to think, “We’re better than this,” but the bare fact of it proves we are not. We build camps to hold undesirables. We huddle in craven acquiescence. This is what we are. This how we treat people. It’s pure-D meanness. If this is how we protect the land of the free and the home of the brave, why even bother? The free and the brave have all gone away.

Also, I stubbed my toe.

Friends, we got packs of coyotes roaming Chicago while the wild hogs are closing in on downtown Tulsa. We’re separating mothers from their children and shipping them off across an archipelago of detention centers. We got rivers of molten rock gradually paving over the 50th state. Somehow we got the Canadians pissed off – the Canadians! – and it’s probably only a matter of time before the French are asking for their statue back. Not to go all Jeremiah on you, but just because we’re not roasting rats over garbage fires yet doesn’t mean this isn’t the end of the world.

Cosmology

Here’s what we know: After an unknowable interval during which everything that ever was or will be was contained in a single inconceivably compact package, it fell apart and since then everything has been getting further and further from everything else. The tiniest things tend to clump together; the biggest things to break up. Basically, it’s all trying to turn into cold iron and then remain absolutely still, maybe forever. That’s it. We used to think that maybe there would come a time when everything would fall back together again. But the more we learn the less likely that seems.

Absurder than fiction

The toilet tank was refilling periodically so I shut off the stop and sure enough the tank drained to the very bottom, past the neck of the flush valve. So I took the tank off and went to True Value on my bike for a matching shank washer and I installed it but when I reassembled the whole deal it was leaking worse than before. By then it was time to clean up and go the Columns Hotel to play a set of Dusty Springfield hits. That was yesterday. If you’re thinking, “This isn’t very funny,” well, no, it isn’t.