NEW SH*T

Jokes:

- I like that rapper Earl Sweatshirt.

I'm confused about his name though.

Is his first name Earl or is he the Earl of Sweatshirt?...

the position above Duke, in the esteemed land of Sweatshirt, ya know?

Probably the second.

- I never thought I'd be able to say

that my family's small refrigerator is held together by scotch tape

and

we have a large, flat screen, high-definition television.

Being lower-middle class is wild like that.

A couple very short stories:

- In my high school gym class we were forced to take ice skating at the rink neighboring the school...

which was not my cup of tea...

but the gym teacher said if we wanted during our ice skating class we could bring a CD to play on the place's speakers.

I-- unlike the other students-- took the offer before that sentence was finished.

Imagine hearing your favorite song pounding out of speakers that go on for the length of an ice skating rink...

You're fucking welcome.

I don't even like ice-skating but ice-skating in these conditions... was the neatest.

- I lived in San Diego until I turned seven and moved to Connecticut.

There's just palm trees, guacamole, and Hispanophones as far as the eye can see in California.

There were mad Hispanophones... and I have a vague recollection of something involving grand theft auto and my family's car going missing when I was really young.

I'm not saying those things are related... but I'm not saying they're unrelated.

I spent hours weekly in La Jolla, a rich Californian suburb that had a lot of good guacamole.

My favorite thing about San Diego was the guacamole.

My least favorite was the traffic but the guacamole made up for it.

My brother and I shared a room and that room had a walk-in closet with too much stuff in it, as my families closets often do.

Often my taco was stuffed with too much guacamole in it so that the shell was overflowing. But shit; still, I managed.

I liked bouncing off the walls of that walk-in closet. I did that a lot. I spent a lot of time in that walk-in closet. I liked eating those tacos with too much guacamole.

- I've done a lot of Eli Whitney museum summer camps.

The Eli Whitney museum has an original cotton gin on their premises which makes you go “Wow,” when you see it.

I very secretly played with a lot of fire at those summer camps.

At the Eli Whitney aeromodeling summer camp we had a chemical compound nicknamed “dope,” that was spread on model airplane wings so they would become sturdier.

Dope was highly flammable.

In the back of this red, old-school barn the camp worked out of my friend Riley and I (this was the best part of our brief friendship) found an empty Folger's tin for coffee grounds in the back and filled it with “dope." Then we took a lighter to the inside of the tin so that we were holding a coffee tin filled with fire.

We then set the fire-filled tin into a nearby stream and for quite a while watched it bob up and down.

Talk about neat.

Talk about a summer well spent.