Hey HBO: you okay, little buddy?

We get it, you're smarter than us.

Sep 8

Thank you to the kind souls who wasted a sliver of their precious time on Earth debating if they could rip off their own index fingers or how much physical pain they’d put a loved one through for 10 million dollars.

But that’s all in the past. And I’m all about the future.

And speaking of the future, I have a quick announcement to make: for the next few months I’m going to go from every-other-week posts to once-per-month posts. I doubt a single person reading this cares, or even knows what my posting schedule is, but in case you do—it’s now monthly. I just have a lot going on at the moment. I have a lot of HBO content to catch up on, I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in… 12 years, and my irrational fear of stonefruits has been running unabashed in my consciousness for far too long.

HBO in particular has been a massive thorn in my side for a while now. It’s just really frustrating how HBO is so complicated. Who decided that T.V. shows needed to be confusing? My wife and I just wrapped up the fourth season of Westworld but we had to watch an hours’ worth of YouTube recaps just to get back up to speed on which marble balls were inside which robot.

Shows are just so needlessly convoluted. We just started House of the Dragon and everyone is trying to get us to watch that Netflix show, Dark.

T.V. producers are all about having 20 different actors that all look alike, their names are only a half-syllable different (is it Mikkel or Michael?), stories have to be told over multiple timelines, and you need to remember like 70 different characters. Who’s that character? Oh that’s just third Dolores.

Real quick sidebar, if there’s any T.V. execs reading this newsletter—here’s my pitch: it’s basically Supermarket Sweep but if you want the money you have to eat all the food in your cart.

T.V. episodes are now like four and a half hours long. Can it at least be in English? Nope. And we’re going to make up an entirely new language. Sometimes it’ll just be, like, electronic beeps and stuff.

I’m constantly sweating. The action scenes are always too loud and too dark, the dialogue is too quiet. I’m physically repulsed by my wife every time she asks me for clarification.

“I DON’T KNOW WHY MAEVE NOW HAS WEIRD, JEDI POWERS I’M WATCHING THE SAME FUCKING SHOW YOU ARE, EMMA” —me

I’m scared all the time now. I can’t make it through an entire episode without getting up, throwing my glass of seltzer at the T.V., telling my wife I want a divorce and storming into my office to watch home videos of the Blue Angels performing at the 1995 Columbus Air Show.

I am a nervous, frail, little man. I somehow always have pasta sauce on my shirt. It doesn’t make any sense. Buy a new shirt—no pasta sauce. Put the shirt on, pasta sauce. Every night I walk circles around my cul-de-sac, muttering about Rehoboam, drenched in sweat, gripping a handful of micro-USB cords.

Anyway. So once-per-month for a bit here. I appreciate the support. 2022 is gonna be my year.

I just know it.