TNY weekend reader: hearts of darkness
(image: carolita johnson)
There are things, ugly desires, dark, simmering rages, festering hatreds, repulsive beliefs, and just plain embarrasing mediocrities jostling alongside all the good and boring things one values within even the most docile of parents. Sometimes they come out in a humiliating (for you, but perhaps beautiful for the involved parties) affair with someone younger than your sister/brother or daughter/son, sometimes they come out in a public toilet (Hertzberg on Craig), and sometimes they come out in the form of “Mr. Bones”, which I read mostly on my cell phone going downtown and then back uptown to finally find my copy of TNY in my letterbox. Paul Theroux’s Mr. Bones is part Minotaur, part Mr. Magoo.
Aptly, Crawford’s cartoon is my pick of the week: Is this your first time…?
Larry Doyle’s “Portrait in Evil,” makes evil, and Karl Rove, funny again.
But “Crybabies,” by Jerome Groopman made me shake my own hand in congratulations for not having any babies, thereby neatly preventing the evil which is the colicky baby. There is nothing you can do about a screaming, colicky baby. NOTHING. Read my lips: NOTHING. It is nothing more than a test of your own capacity for evil. So, good luck. And the article isn’t online, either. But if you want to know what you’re missing, click here.
