A Christmas Story (1983)

Its a primitive holiday!

And yes my typos are all the product of epigenetics so…sorry?

The two different wilpapa bay oyster-based dishes we bring most years have a pretty polarizing, cult-classic type brand which I’ve really worked to cultivate

@femmeintheory.bsky.social ’s mention of autoethnography made me think of the great Studs Terkel and how, if midwesternness enables this climate crisis, it is also the author’s regional aw-schucks enthusiasm (not to mention his comfort with silences) that so empowers his primary-source journalism

"No that's fine...you're mag is a little too middle-brow for my work anyways...middle-brow means like "Netflix" by the way...which is bad...I submitted to you guys as a joke..."

The humor and spookiness are both so great but also, by the end, both feel like a red herring that Birnie uses to distract you from how deeply and insightfully he's written a portrait of a very specific place and people.

Hell yeah, got to savor every little mystery we get these days

(also this is my experience with Donald Barthelme about every five years or so)

This is such a generative experience for me! Does it make you create stuff? My friend and I used to have a 4-track game where we'd pick evocative descriptions of songs we hadn't heard yet and try write and record them ourselves. So productive and fun, especially when we listened to the real song

I'll be honest that I always feel like I'm mis-deploying gnostic readings of stuff (if reality is indeed a text), but yeah, this Yaldaboath guy...this is not my kind of guy.

You know who else likes to build worlds, right?

I’m so glad we found each other again, Michael, here on Bluesky