#46: Vacation mode: on
Death by Consumption
3/18/25 - 3/24/25
Hello from San Diego, where I’m spending the week visiting family, having one of those things called a “beach vacation,” where things like writing and thinking and having opinions go to die. So who knows what’s going to be in this email? Honestly, you can probably just skip this one. Delete it! Free yourself!
On the flight over here I sat next to an absolutely chaotic gay with a thick mullet, who huffed and puffed when he saw a baby was sitting behind us, before demanding of me, “IS THIS ROW 24??” as if I were some sort of Row Expert. “IS THAT SEAT 24F???” he yelled at me, pointing at the empty seat next to me, while he stood in the aisle, where they famously have little signs that tell you exactly which seat is 24F. Once he plopped into his seat, he angrily started pecking out texts, so I peeked at his phone, where I saw him texting someone whose name was saved as “Mother.” To Mother, he sent messages like: “Do NOT fuck with my equilibrium,” and, “I am warning you!” The only response he got from Mother to his endless tirade was a simple: “Ok.” Unflappable queen! After we took off, he put his phone away and rawdogged the entire 6-hour flight, angrily staring at the flight map the whole way. There are so many interesting ways to be a human on this planet!
This week, what with being on Vacation Mode, I watched a couple very suitable plane movies, read a few books, and got drunk at a San Diego swinger bar.
My Old Ass (2024) — on Delta
You know, this one snuck up on me. This is a perfect plane movie. Quick, cute, well-acted, great music, a delightful time. Watching it after Aubrey Plaza’s recent horrific personal tragedy added an extra level of emotion to it, so that plus the altitude had me, suddenly, crying at the end, thinking about how youth is so fleeting, how life is so painful but also beautiful, etc. etc. etc. I probably would be too cynical for a film like this down on the ground, but everything is different at altitude. It got me good!
Juror #2 (2024) — on Delta
On the other hand, there is no altitude that would make me feel anything watching this film. It’s not a bad film — it’s very potboiler, very 90s, totally serviceable — but the characters… woof. Whoever wrote this has not met a real person. You’ve got the innocent pregnant wife, who spends most of the film knitting on the couch or waving goodbye to her husband from the porch. There’s a feisty old lady who literally says, “Kids today…” There is, of course, a Black woman bailiff. Every character is AI-generated. Still, though, this killed a good 2 hours of my flight, and it did keep me wondering how it would end, which is really all you need from a movie on a plane. And that last shot was 👌.
Severance, season 2 finale — on Apple TV+
Look, I did have fun with this finale, okay? Lots of stuff happened! It was a very good finale of a TV season. The best scene by far was the scene where the two Marks negotiated with each other. Second best was when Mr. Milchick danced. (This show must be so confusing to try to pick up on if you’ve never watched it.) Now, do my feelings about the finale counteract everything I said last week? No! I will never admit to being wrong about anything!! And, ultimately, I still left this season feeling vaguely empty about the whole endeavor. Like, what even is there to discuss, really? “Will Innie or Outie Mark be in control after they reintegrate?” What? Who cares? I have come to accept that this is a show I will never think about when it’s not directly in front of my eyeballs, and that’s fine! There’s a whole beautiful world out there to enjoy when Severance is not on TV, which is, actually, most of the time. I’ll watch it when it comes back next season, but I still won’t really care about it. You’d think that would make me reevaluate what I’m spending my one precious life doing, but I’ve definitely spent my time on many more worthless things.
Orbital, by Samantha Harvey (2023) — paperback
A beautiful, slim book that got a lot of praise last year, and rightfully so. Orbital is a book mostly without plot, as we simply spend 24 hours with 6 astronauts in the ISS, orbiting the Earth, which Samantha Harvey uses as an excuse to take a good, long look at our little planet from afar. “They’re humans with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse,” she writes. There are lots of little moments in here, thoughts on climate change or political divides, none of which are necessarily the deepest insights you’ve ever read, but it’s very beautifully written so it all still hits.
This was a great book to read on an airplane, imagining that I was looking down on the planet from much higher up, connected but disconnected from humanity, while an angry mullet gay sulked next to me. If the billionaires went into space and felt all the feelings in this book, maybe they’d come back and stop being such dicks! Ha ha, just kidding, you know they’d come back somehow worse.
Headshot, by Rita Bullwinkel (2024) — library ebook
Like Orbital, this book mostly encompasses a single day, in which girls compete in a boxing tournament. Maybe I’m just more naturally inclined towards astronauts than boxers, but I found this a duller read. There were moments of beauty, but it felt overly written. Very MFA, which I am using here as a slur. After these two slim, repetitive books, I was begging for a book with some real plot. It’s unfortunate, then, that my next book was…
Colored Television, by Danzy Senna (2024) — library ebook
The actual full title of this ebook was “Colored Television (A GMA Book Club Pick),” as if Good Morning America is now part of the novel’s title, a marketing move that I understand the reasons for, but one I found deeply embarrassing. In some ways, however, I’m pleasantly surprised that a book that uses the word “mulatto” this regularly was a GMA Book Club pick. The suburbs must have been scandalized! But beyond that, I found the book so safe and toothless that I understood why GMA felt comfortable recommending this to their early morning, probably majority-white audience.
The book, written by Danzy Senna, who is married to Percival Everett — not to reduce an accomplished author to her marriage but it must be said, I’m sorry — follows a mixed-race female author who, frustrated at her lack of success and tempted by the luxury of her screenwriter friend’s life, tries to leave the novelist life behind and become a Hollywood writer. We follow her as she lies to her family, her friends, to agents and producers, and to herself, all in pursuit of Making It Big. The book has been described as a comedy, which is always a double-edged sword, because that leads to people like me reading it while wondering the whole time where the laughs are.
For a book that, on the surface, was an exploration of what it’s like to be mixed-race in America, it turned out to mostly be about a specific woman who just wants to be wealthier than she is. And, though I tried, I couldn’t ever make myself feel that concerned with whether this character became a different type of writer than the type of writer she already was. Whenever a book focuses so much on whether a character will get tenure it’s like… I’m sorry about your tenure drama, but please leave me out of it. I found the whole Colored Television experience mostly boring, somewhat grating, and overall disappointing. I don’t think I’ll be joining the GMA Book Club!
Maker’s Mark on the rocks — at Jimmy O’s in Del Mar, CA
We’ve been coming to San Diego to visit family for nearly 40 years — more specifically, we’ve been coming to Del Mar and Solana Beach, two beach towns in outer San Diego. It’s absolutely beautiful and peaceful, but if you want to go out at night you have 3-4 options, at most. Eventually, as the night approaches 10pm, all the options close except for one: Jimmy O’s, a classic dive bar that, we’ve been told, is also a bit of a swinger’s bar. Because what else is there to do when you’re a retiree in a beach town but swing?
Every time we go to Jimmy O’s, we encounter some deeply fucked up, deeply hilarious people. Last year the star of the show was a woman who, mid-conversation, dropped to the nasty floor of the bar and did the electric worm across the entire length of the bar. Once she finished, she stood up and we watched shame completely envelop her in a matter of seconds, as she immediately pulled out her phone, ordered an Uber, and ran out the door.
This time, we started the night at a bar called Monarch (if Jimmy O’s is the swingers’ bar, Monarch is the singles’ bar — they are also, essentially, the only two bars), where we had a couple very strong drinks. I clocked a few notable characters — two women becoming friends across the bar, a single man being hit on by various women — before we decided to take the party to Jimmy O’s.
On the way, we realized the two women we had seen becoming friends at the bar had also left, so we invited them to Jimmy O’s with us. We quickly realized these women were not only drunk but on the prowl, as they tried to hit on any and all of the men in our group, who were all either married or gay. The younger woman was 38 years old, and quickly informed us, for some reason, that she had once dated Brendon Urie, lead singer of Panic! At The Disco. (“Does the eye makeup stay on during sex?” I asked. “I fixed his makeup during sex,” she replied.)
The other woman, a 59-year-old with an Australian accent who insisted she was British, discovered Justin and I were gay and immediately asked, “Which one is the girl?” before deciding it was Justin because he’s “pretty.” She then mused on the concept of gays that are attractive, declaring them “such a waste!” Perhaps the 38-year-old sensed our discomfort, as she quickly jumped in to let us know she’s an ally: “My brother is gay and he’s my favorite person,” she said.
“Are you going to marry him?” the 59-year-old asked.
“Marry... my brother?” the 38-year-old said, confused, before falling off her barstool and landing on the floor.
Since we had last visited Jimmy O’s the year before, they had updated their seating, replacing their old barstools with new, faux-midcentury bar stools that were designed by some sort of psychological torturer. The stools rested on a narrow central pillar but the seats were double-wide, which meant if you weren’t balanced perfectly on the center of the stool, the entire thing would tip right over. The design is perfect if you want to give people a head injury, and every 15 minutes, someone in the bar would fall hard on their ass. It’s genuinely a miracle someone hasn‘t cracked their head open yet; if you’re in need of some quick cash, go to Jimmy O’s, fall off your stool, and call a lawyer.
I’ve always found beach towns fascinating, with the mixture of bored locals and psychotic tourists, and nothing better guarantees a strange time than being at a beach town bar right at closing time. The younger woman had told us that a man had been stalking her all night, which alarmed us at first, until I remembered that I had seen him at the previous bar, being hit on by a slew of women, and realized that he had actually come to Jimmy O’s before she did. He did seem to be checking her out a lot, and had a vague serial killer energy about him, but if anyone could be accused of stalking in this situation, it would have been her, not him.
In fact, not only did he arrive at this bar before her, but he left before she did, which poked quite the hole in her stalking narrative. “Your stalker’s gone!” I said when he walked out, and she looked genuinely disappointed to have lost him and the attention he had been giving her. “Yeah, fuck him I guess, right?” she muttered, depressed. We said goodbye and got the hell out of there, happy to be on our way back home, but already by the next night some of us were asking each other: “Jimmy O’s tonight?”