Your favorite singular post on SJ

For me it’s “No collision!”

 

Flabby, flaccid, soggy, saggy splitting tubes of rotting rancid animal flesh, floating languidly in a fetid bath of malodorous swill.

 

I don’t know the Bautista post. Got a link?

 

Not the best by far, but I was always amused by Boom’s “It’s a fluid situation. Call your local airports for more information” schtick.

Whenever I hear of fluid situations, I always think of that line.

 

If someone can find it...

Publisher longing for the days of grinding out a story and the reporter longing to be a publisher.

Did DD write that?

 

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From wicked: "Said she'll make me an omelet if I come back in 90 minutes and "start off my day right".

 

Not quite that, but it’s on page 1.

 

I don't get it.

 

This one, from jgmacg, still rings true:

"I'll ditto what IE has said this morning. The old institutions are crumbling as the ground falls away beneath us. But destruction means creation, and as many businesses and futures as the internet revolution might foreclose, it will create an equal - or greater - number of opportunities for those strong and determined enough to survive the transition. It's worth remembering that while the act of storytelling has been a constant in our species, writing for a living has always been a tough racket.
That said, this is indeed a challenging age, and there's a palpable sadness in a lot of the posts here. These I take to be the regrets of younger writers who feel they've missed something.

So here's a quick story about dreams and disappointments and the inexorable grinding motherfucker of time and change.

It took me too many years to get to Paris. I was 50 before I walked through it. But that city and everything it stood for has been vivid in my heart and in my mind from the time I was a little kid. As it is for many of us, Paris was almost entirely a creation of my own imagination, a fantasy capital for the writers I most admired and the poets and artists of every generation.

A few nights before my wife and I went there at last, we had dinner with some very old friends. One of whom is a writer now in his late 60s.

Coming off his Stegner fellowship at Stanford forty-five years ago this friend and mentor, now a great gray-bearded American novelist, had moved to Paris. He and his wife, young and penniless, had lived in a single coldwater room above the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore on the Rue de la Bucherie while he wrestled his first novel. George Whitman, the owner, had invited them to stay there free as a gesture of literary generosity and good heartedness. Thus my friends slept and worked in a simple whitewashed room bounded by dark medieval beams on the third floor. Out their window was a view of Notre Dame and the Seine beyond the treetops. They scraped by on a few francs a week, enough to buy wine and bread and foul Turkish cigarettes. All of which seemed to me impossibly romantic and beautiful.

At dinner that night, my friend asked us please to revisit that place when we got to Paris, to see how it had changed. We did so. It had changed not at all. But as I stood in that tiny room, I was overwhelmed by a wave of heartbreaking regret. I looked out the same window my friend had looked out of nearly half a century before and was reminded that I would never be a young novelist working and starving in a soft-focus, technicolor Paris. I had missed it. Overtaken by such powerful disappointment, I could have cried.

When we came home, I told my friend as much.

To my surprise, he told me he'd spent his year there feeling much the same way. That whenever he turned a corner, or took a sidewalk table at the Deux Magots, he was overcome by sick regret at having missed the Paris of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Stein. The Paris of nearly a half century before, of 1920, of the Lost Generation. Of his imagination. He had missed it.

"You can never have the Paris you imagined for yourself," he said to me. "You can only mourn it. You have to learn to love the Paris under your feet."

Seems to me this is true of our careers as well, that we can never have things as we imagine them to have been for those who came before us. We can only ever have our own work in our own moment, however flawed and hard and colorless that present moment seems to be.

To regret too much an age long gone, to miss simpler times that never were, to pine for the days of Rice or Heinz or Liebling, of Sherrod and Laguerre, of the Saturday Evening Post or the New York Herald-Tribune, is to disregard the Paris beneath our feet."

That's a great post, one I think about from time to time.

But, man, Vin Scully. Juxtaposing Jose and Dodger cap night, fucking brilliant.

 

That’s well beyond a great post. You should have to pay money to read something that good.

 

I'm surprised Fart hasn't mentioned my post about breaking up with a girlfriend, scrubbing my anus with her toothbrush, then placing said brush back on the rack as I left.

FWIW, she didn't have much of rack.

 

Double Down's screed on writers and the feelings of inadequacy many of us deal with on a daily basis.