I recently took an HR leadership training, where I learned the three key rules of leadership:
How would that translate to the presidency? I asked Enrique to explore, back before Hillary’s crushing defeat. Here’s what he wrote…
Why are writers and stoners my favorite people? Writers are very much in their own heads. Or the process of writing is about being inside your own head. How do you want to say something? How do you tell a particular story? To write is to think about an idea, over and over, to make it meaningful in some way, to parse out the significance. “Now that I understand the significance of everything that happened.”
For stoners—or at least for this particular stoner—I think weed is about very much the same thing. Moments just making sense. Unique insights and perspective.
Women want to be princesses, from Carrie Bradshaw to Cinderella. We want to be beautiful, dress the part, find The One, live happily ever after.
I said that the other night, back when we were going out on our shitty date. You looked so handsome—you always do—and in my stoner reverie, I called you my Prince Charming, though perhaps the better analogy would have been to call you the Jordan Catalano to my Angela Chase (minus the Rayanne Graff mess).
Remember that night about a year back when we went for a 12L ride with our Weed Husband? So much fun. So many laughs and good tunes, but my favorite memory was a single moment on the drive home. You looked so hot in your navy blue shirt, and I wanted to be in your arms, and at that very moment, you played my song, leaned over to kiss me (you have a great lean, even better than Jordan Catalano’s), and quoting Little A, you said, “You’re my favorite best friend.”
“I am America,” Muhammad Ali once said. “I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me.”
He passed away as I was putting together my last magazine, and his quote so poetically addressed the question that graced our cover: Who is America?
It seemed only fitting that it was answered by The Greatest, that it withstands the years, that it reflects and confronts our nation’s history in an honest, even uncomfortable way. Because it is not an easy question.
Scene: Bedtime, Little A snoring softly in the bed beside us.
Me: Are you excited about the election tomorrow? We’re going to have a new president!
Big A: I’m excited to not have school!
“I’m excited to not have work! I’m excited for a new president, too. But I’m also a little nervous. I really hope Hillary wins.”
“Do you H Donald Trump?”
“No, I don’t hate him. I’m just a little scared of him because he says things that angry people like to hear.”
Peach people, as Big A calls them. Lots of angry peach people who love their firearms a little too much and don’t necessarily believe that women’s rights are human rights or acknowledge that Black Lives Matter. People who want to go back in time to when America was great for their peach parents and grandparents, who didn’t have to compete for jobs against the wider world or the technology of the future. People whose love for the Second Amendment trumps their belief in the First, the very founding principles of America, the freedoms of speech, religion, press and peaceful assembly.
Yes, I am a bit scared. But hopeful, too.
That’s not, like, some self-help mantra. Or maybe it is.
I felt like I had some breakthrough on Monday. I was reading an interview with my favorite writer, Cheryl Strayed, whose advice to aspiring writers—“write like a motherfucker”—adorns an empty coffee mug I keep on my office desk. (Empty because I have a naturally over-caffeinated brain).
In the piece—a Q&A on how to write like a mofo—the interviewer mentions Neil Casey, an improv comedian I actually interviewed recently. (Irrelevant to my larger point, but isn’t it cool how sometimes it feels like we’re all connected?). Anyway, there’s a point in the article where the interviewer mentions an improv class she’s taking and says,
Someone recently asked [Will Hines, who runs Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York]: “Is improv a road to nowhere?” The question focused on Neil Casey, an improviser who was hired at Saturday Night Live after more than a decade of improvising. Hines responded: “When [Casey] was 20, . . . SNL was not on his mind. . .. If he never got a job, and now I can speak from experience, then he’d only have a life spent being happy behind him. . . . Spend your days in love with what you’re doing as much as fucking possible, and thank the stars for your chances to do that. Be nice and honest and brave and hopeful, and then let it go.” Don’t you love that?
Strayed responded, “I do. That’s exactly it.”
Spend your days in love with what you’re doing as much as fucking possible, and thank the stars for your chances to do that. Be nice and honest and brave and hopeful, and then let it go.
Damn, that spoke to me!
There’s only one endorsement that would hold any weight this election season, and it would come from a man who knows more about ruthless ambition, moral ambiguity, corruption, greed and leadership than most in Washington. He is George RR Martin, supreme ruler of Westeros.
“When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die,” Martin wrote in the series’ first book. “There is no middle ground.” The words bear eerie forbearance to November 8, when a new ruler will ascend the Iron Throne of America.
On the one side, we have the real-life equivalent of Ramsey Bolton, the petulant bastard son whose power from a “very small” multi-million loan from his dad helped finance a campaign rooted in resentment and loathing; whose appeal resonates a little too closely with the pale-skinned masses, ready to build walls, defend guns and “knock the hell out ISIS.” Perhaps even flay some skin.
Then there’s Tyrion, the smartest person in the room, underestimated throughout her entire career, despised for her ambition, vilified for her networks, resented for her acumen. She is not the Daenerys Targaryen of the Sanders campaign. She would not liberate Meereen without a plan. She is slower, more methodical. Her secrecy serves as evidence of her low cunning, and she sleeps with the enemy in a way that repulses even her most ardent supporters. She may not be likable, but she gets the job done.
Meanwhile, the American Meereenese grow restless.
I want a husband who wants me.
On a cerebral level, I know Mr. D does. But emotionally, physically… that’s where I’m starved. Potheads don’t have passion.
They’re kind and warm and funny, and make life a comfortable ride—you can be happy going nowhere, doing nothing, finding the joy in the monotony—and then all of a sudden feel broken and bereft.
Mimi and Sarge are probably the couple I most admire, possibly even more than my own parents, and my parents make a 35-year marriage look effortless. Mimi and Sarge have something special, too. They found forever in their second marriage, a blended Brady Bunch family of the 90s whose kids all turned out perfect (doctor, teacher, accountant, soldier), and who still, decades later, seem to have the fire.
Mr. D and I saw them earlier this month at a wedding, and I asked them the secret to a long and happy marriage. “Compromise—and good sex,” Mimi said. Sarge said alcohol.
I love weed, and I doubt Mr. D and I would be together if I didn’t. I’ve come to believe drug compatibility is essential for any adult relationship (and I define drugs in the broadest of senses–starting with Marx’s “religion is opium of the masses” quote).
But Mr. D loves weed more than me. He’s always loved drugs more than me. I don’t know why he doesn’t understand how much that fucking hurts.
BJ Novak and I share the same favorite story from his debut novel, One More Thing. (Actually, we don’t; he apparently tells everyone that their favorite is his, too.)
But when I met BJ Novak at a book signing last fall, I asked him to sign my favorite story from the collection, and he said “I never want to walk on the moon” might just be his favorite one, too.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I replied, pointing to the very subtle reference from the very last story of the book, in which J.C. Audetat, translator of Don Quixote, helps his neighbor compose an unsolicited editorial on moon travel.
“I don’t think anyone has ever noticed that,” Novak said.
I’ve replayed our entire exchange many, many times since then, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I would only do two things differently were I able to travel back in time: I would have forked up the money for another Book with No Pictures for him to sign for my kids (I was miserly at the event, where copies were double the rate of Amazon; and my dog, in the late stages of bone cancer, had vomited all over our original copy). Second, I would have asked him to sign our favorite story as JC and not BJ.
Mr. D knows I love BJ Novak. He even said, “I hope you get an interview” when I went to see his show. (I didn’t, though we did have that brief moment in the book sign line). I like to think of myself as the Mindy Kaling to Mr. D’s BJ Novak, the effervescent Indian counterpart to a supremely brilliant and hilarious White guy, but that may be where the similarities end. As much as I would love to see them get back together (they’d have the sweetest, funniest daughters!), I don’t know if BJ Novak feels like I do about love.
I’m judging this solely from his short story collection, of course, and more specifically, from the narrator’s second fantasy in “Sophia,” in which a woman’s head rests on a man’s shoulder as they look out into the world and see the same thing. I loaned my copy of One More Thing to my Weed Husband a few months back, so this is a tough theory to fact check at this very moment, but I’m pretty sure most of Novak’s love stories are connected by an underlying thread of shared experiences and, more so, shared outlooks: the couple who outraced the rain, the man with “a good problem to have,” the family who attended the world’s biggest rip-off. Even the most beautiful girl in the bookstore. Especially the most beautiful girl in the bookstore.
It’s a two-page story about a girl who loves a bookstore that sells books and and also sells things. Her boyfriend doesn’t quite understand her love for it, and they disagree on whether the books should be organized by color (they should not), or whether the store would be better with a photo booth (it absolutely would), and in the end, they break up because she could never shake the feeling that she was always his favorite thing in the bookstore.
The hopeless romantic in me hates this story. Like, what the hell, BJ Novak? Why did they have to break up? In the wise words of Carrie Bradshaw, “If you find someone to love the you that you love, well, that’s just fabulous.” Who cares if he didn’t love the bookstore? He loved her.
Or maybe that’s just what I’m telling myself now, at 12:46am, on the night of the Hunter’s Moon.
A few weeks back, I blogged about my Sunday with Pickle and Spiderman, and how Spiderman had sent me home with some very thoughtful presents: homemade herbal ointments and a nice bud of weed.
“It was the sweetest gift of all time,” I wrote. “Until two days later.”
That’s when I received his email.
Spiderman had read my blog in its entirety. Something nobody has really done. Not my close friends. Not my parents. Mr. D reads each post, but even his expertise in IT business analysis hasn’t translated to Google Analytics for my site. And as a pothead with killer business acumen, he hasn’t looked into cultivating potential ad revenue. (But I’m not mad. I am anxiously looking forward to fasting for your health and well-being this Wednesday, Oct. 19, on the fourth day of the waning moon. You are the great love of my life, and I hope our love may be forever blessed by the heavens above. By the sun, the stars, and the moon.)
The moon is crucial. Spiderman knows. In an email entitled, “Here goes haha,” this is what he wrote: