I have said this so many times that even I am bored with it, so feel free to ignore this post as you see fit: my inability to “relax” amazes me, and the surest way to guarantee that I’m going to be in a shitty mood is to put me in a situation where I’m not “getting anything done.” I did basically nothing over the last couple of days other than marinate in front of Twitter and fall into bleak fucking despair at the fact that literally everything gets worse every single day.
Today, I have done the following:
Successfully sold the 3D printer
Deposited a bunch of change at the bank
Contested the $100 bill I got from a lab for a Covid test; those motherfuckers had better go talk to my fucking insurance because there’s no universe where they’re getting $100 from me for a test that I had no choice in taking
Paid my car registration and remembered to put the receipt in my car, and did it early enough that I probably won’t even get pulled over and need the receipt
Mowed the fucking lawn
Murdered weeds
Went swimming (this counts!)
Went to the comic shop and engaged in capitalism
Bought my wife a present
Some light cleaning and organization
And I am in a much better mood than I have been for several days now, simply by virtue of having kept busy today. I mean, if I get stupid and start paying attention to the news again I’m sure I’ll go right back to being fucked, but at least I feel like I did something today. And my wife is about to leave town for a week, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be busy for the next several days. Maybe I’ll even write a compelling blog post sometime between now and then! The possibilities are endless.
Slept in a little bit, cleaned up the kitchen while my wife went and got groceries, had baked potatoes for lunch for some reason, went to the art fair, came home with a couple of really cool photo prints (pictures to come, six months from now, when we’ve hung them), had burgers and brats and blueberry pie for dinner. Tried to play video games, failed, and now I’m going to go clean up the basement for a little while– speaking of projects that you need pictures from.
Not a bad day, so long as I look no further than the tip of my nose and ignore the entire rest of the world. Happy Father’s Day to those celebrating.
As I have become sadly accustomed to when attempting to sell things, we did not make a ton of money at our garage sale. We made enough to cover the tables we had to rent and probably the gas to get to and from the place we had to rent them from, and the rest will maybe get a delicious McDonald’s meal for two of the three of us. During the last hour, we switched to “get this stuff the fuck off my driveway” mode, however, and my wife posted on a couple of come-get-free-shit groups on Facebook, and indeed, people came and got free shit, to the point where there was very little left by the time we closed up shop, and nothing that we’d have to make any phone calls to get hauled away. Which is good! We did this to clear space, not to make a ton of money, and the space is cleared, and some folks got some stuff they need. I’m good with it.
Tomorrow is Father’s Day. My wife and I just had a brief conversations about my expectations re: said holiday, and really, all I need/want/care about is to be acknowledged. And, like, even that doesn’t require much, but I’ll admit that last year I was a little upset, as my father, my brother, and three former students all said “Happy Father’s Day!” to me before my son or my wife did. I don’t need presents or a special meal or anything like that; we’re going to a local art fair for an hour and a half or so in the afternoon, assuming either of us can make our legs work, but that’s something we both want to do. I’d just like it if my ten-year-old manages to remember.
(“But what about Mother’s Day?” I can hear you asking. And the answer is: for reasons that are hers and therefore I’m not going to get into here, my wife loathes Mother’s Day, so beyond the perfunctory Acknowledgment of Holiday Status it is generally best ignored. And she’d probably be just fine without even the acknowledgment. I want that much, but not more.)
Let’s see, what else? I’ve now seen two episodes of Ms. Marvel and it continues to be the best thing Marvel has ever done. Yeah, I said it. It’s maybe not up to the emotional level that the first Iron Man and the first Avengers got me to, but it’s coming close. I fucking love this show.
Okay. I’m tired. Books and chairs for the rest of the night.
I am so tired that it is actually offensive, after being wrenched awake by a headache at 1:30 AM last night and losing several hours of what had been pleasant sleep to throbbing temples. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment in a couple of weeks– just my regular checkup– and I’m going to bring this up, because I keep getting these exact same headaches every couple of weeks, always in the middle of the night, and I don’t know what the hell the deal with them is and I want them to go away.
Anyway.
It’s Wednesday, which means it’s the day that new comics come out, and a new episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi comes out, and– most importantly– the second episode of Ms. Marvel comes out. I was surprised to note that I don’t appear to have mentioned the premiere in this space last week; needless to say it was absolutely perfect and I would literally die for Iman Vellani, whose name is not Man Villain no matter what Autocorrect wants. The premiere was wonderful and made me insanely happy; I will watch the second episode either tonight or tomorrow and am hoping for a similarly positive reaction.
And then, after that, please God let me sleep through the night. This has been a rough week.
My internet has melted, and has been at best intermittent throughout the day, so lemme just throw up a quick proof-of-life before it goes down again: it was brutally hot outdoors today; I think the heat index reached somewhere in the 105-110 range, with tomorrow expected to be just as bad. Amazingly, though, it wasn’t nearly as humid as I was expecting, meaning that outside was unpleasant but not the immediate death I was planning for. We spent the evening in the pool. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.
I say this a lot, but it’s as true now as it’s ever been: I don’t need to review this book, because you already know if you want to read it or not, so really, my job here is just to make sure that you know it exists. And did you know that Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs existed? Yes? Then you have it already. No? Go buy it. I was about to say “It’s about dinosaurs!,” which actually isn’t quite true, because the book begins on what Black quite reasonably refers to as the worst day in the history of the entire world: the day that a 6-mile-wide object, possibly an asteroid, possibly a fragment of a much larger asteroid, and possibly even a comet, slammed into the Chicxulub region of what is now the Yucatán and basically killed every living thing on Earth. Including all the dinosaurs, except for the ones lucky enough to be living underground or underwater when the object hit. She goes into some pretty intense detail about what happened in the immediate aftermath and then skips ahead a bit in each subsequent chapter– the next day, the next year, 100 years later, and so on. “That sounds fascinating!,” you think, if you’re the type of person who would be reading this blog in the first place.
Yup.
I like the description on the cover, there, that refers to the book as “narrative prehistorical nonfiction.” This is definitely a work of pop science; there are notes, but they’re confined to the back; Black is not citing sources or arguing with specific paleontologists during the text, because it’s not that type of book, but neither is she engaging in wanton speculation. Where things are fuzzy, she says so, but she talks about the different changes on Earth after the explosion through narrative, fictionalized stories about the various creatures that would have been alive (or could have been alive, at least) during whatever time period she’s discussing. In other words, we might not have uncovered the fossils of the specific Triceratops with bone cancer in the Hell Creek formation in what is now Montana that she discusses in the first chapter, but there were definitely Triceratops there and we’ve uncovered evidence of some that appear to have had cancer. Do we know for sure that this particular turtle might have been in this river at that time, staying alive partially by breathing through its cloaca? Nope! But they can do it now, so it’s reasonable to project that ability backwards given other trends in the evolution of prehistoric turtles.
You get the idea. This book tells stories; the stories are not specifically true, necessarily, but they are carefully fictionalized, and there’s forty pages of extra “stuff” in the back past the official end of the book if you want to read in more detail. Which I do, of course. What you need to be able to pull off a book like this is a fine grasp of the detail, a good journalist’s instinct for getting your story straight, and a novelist’s flair for storytelling, which is a rare combination, but one Black (an amateur paleontologist but not, I believe, a Ph.D) has in spades. This is a great read for anyone who thinks deep history and dinosaurs are cool, and if you’re not one of those people, you’re not here anyway, so everybody else go buy it.
(Oh, and also: I found out about it on Twitter, and bought it on the spot, so those of you who don’t think Twitter can sell books are doo-doo heads.)
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