I was out of town all day today visiting my wife’s family, and along the way we played a stupid little game based on something I saw on TikTok yesterday. It was a live stream of, of all things, a man trying to remember as many cities in the United States as he could. The first question was how many do you think you can name, and then my wife and I would occasionally throw states at each other as I was driving. And I was doing well! I figured I could name at least one city in every state– I mean, surely I know the capitals— and at least two in most, with a handful where I could name a hell of a lot more than that, especially since we didn’t bother putting a limit on population. I figure most people can name a ton of cities near where they live so that’s going to even out, and once they get outside of a one-state radius or so it’s gonna get a lot trickier.

I figured I could do 150 pretty easily, ultimately, and if I sat and thought about it for a while I was thinking I could get to 200. Well, I just gave myself half an hour, after prepping for it all day, and I named 107. This includes a couple of states I went completely blank on, including some that are genuinely embarrassing– Virginia, for fuck’s sake. I’ll come up with four of them the second …

(Adds fucking Winston-Salem, NC to the list, because I was blanking on it and put “wherever the fuck Wake Forest is” in the margins.)

… I hit submit on this. Also not on the list: New Haven, CT. Also not on the list: the entirety of Connecticut, despite the fact that I was looking at a map. Also, Princeton, NJ, which you would think I might have thought of since it’s where fucking Princeton is. God.

So anyway, my brain went completely batshit dry as soon as I started doing this, which … okay, I drove for like six hours today and spent most of the rest of it outside and being friendly to relative strangers, no pun intended, so my brain is a trifle underpowered at the moment.

(One city from Kentucky, dude? One? That’s shameful.)

I’ll try it again tomorrow.