the merits

overheard in the uzbek restaurant…

wayward talk of chile and ecuador, the prime stops on the silk road, techniques of the boustrophedon, raging poppy fields + too much hash…

the one-upmanship: sharp…

how we’ve lived through seven of the top twelve historic snowstorms in boston over the last 22 years…

a peripatetic call and response about the tang + other merits of uzbeki beer + uruguayan women, the obscurity of radiohead + the future is m(h)aol + have u listened to attachment styles?…

the timbre maudlin, the umka a perfect puff…

declamations of wanderlust in the south, remaking the ruins of venezuela in the image of argentina, death by clear cutting rainforest, petrodollars are the ruination…

somehow the talk turns to czars…

the plov congeals in its oil…

meandering laments of the rarity of this ritual, forecasts + promises to do this more often, something in their voices belies that certainty…

the crash of a kazan clanging a death roll in the kitchen…

peregrinations of assiduous maths—parsing a $109 bill 3 ways to the tenth of a cent, then a drunken 3 card pile up on a plastic credit card rectangle…

yes, let’s, more often…

a terminal point chicken is beheaded in the alley…

What I’m Reading:

In the 1960s, it was possible to attend a four-year college debt-free but impossible to purchase a flat-screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was close to the reverse. 

— Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson / Abundance