Hi. About a week or so ago I decided to release a new album of music I had recorded in over the summer of 2023. They’re lo-fi songs, written during FAWM’s 50/90 challenge, and after I recorded them I set them aside and was unsure if I would touch them again. But then I listened to them recently and you know what? They’re pretty good.
Then I took a walk a couple days later and recorded it, and made a simple lil music video for one of the tracks, which is called “It Ends All Lonesome.” Here it is. I hope you enjoy it.
The album is called Somehow the Mongoose Got Outside Again, fourteen songs about love, loneliness, gangsters, edgelord kids, the annoyance of cows, a singer’s life on the road, and, of course, a mongoose who got outside again, somehow. It is set to be released on my Bandcamp site on Valentine’s Day, 2025.
(I’m also in the process of remastering and fixing up my album discography, which is why there aren’t a lot of my older albums currently on my Bandcamp. They’ll be there soon!)
If you like the song, please do all the things that every influencer tells you to do with videos so that it can get seen by more people. I’d love to get enough views that I start to get hate comments. Nothing drives engagement more than hate.
Been trying to think of stuff to write about for ye olde newsletter. It all feels lackluster, so here’s a blog about my teeth.
So I was at the dentist. The dentist is one of those few places where the “Find Out” portion of “Fuck Around and Find Out” reveals itself in a slow, permanent sort of way. Oh, you mean I shouldn’t have drank liters of soda for years as a child and teenager and young adult? At least if you drive drunk without a seat belt and get into a wreck, waking up without a leg the next morning feels earned. The slow, inevitable decay of one’s teeth is a visual representation of the slow, inevitable decay of your own body into eventual wormfeed. Welcome to my newsletter!
My teeth have been bad forever, and as a child I was terrified of the dentist. There was a dentist a couple blocks from my childhood home and I remember three things about it:
They had a sit down Pac-Man arcade system that I enjoyed playing,
The children’s play area entrance was an archway very low to the ground–the height for a kid to crawl into, basically. The top of the archway had padding so kids wouldn’t bonk their heads. I always thought that was crazy. What if a kid was choking in there? Would a parent have to army crawl into the room?, and
The last(?) time I went there I was so terrified of whatever they were going to do that I had to rush to the bathroom to dry heave and ended up not getting any dentist work done that day.
Fun fact: the place still exists and is still a dentist!
My parents took me to this place when they could afford to; when they couldn’t, they took me to Terry Reilly Health Services, which is where poor people got their teeth fixed. You could tell the difference, even as a kid, between the “rich people doctor” and the “poor people doctor.” It’s all in the waiting area: the latter is louder, more chaotic, more children climbing over seats. More ethnic diversity at the poor clinic; lots of poor Latinos in southwest Idaho. Growing up, I always felt a kind of kinship with the Latino community, not because of music or culture or food (though the food is very good), but because we were both broke and just trying to get by, and I guess I saw that more with the Latinos than I did with my white friends and classmates. (Also it was Idaho, there were no Black kids to commiserate with about being poor.)
As an adult, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been to the dentist. The breakdown of why I didn’t go very often is simple: I was poor, and mandatory health insurance didn’t exist when I was young. There’s more to it than that–a bit of bad dental genetics mixed with a much worse hygiene regimen–but the simple fact is that I couldn’t go get cleanings and whatnot because I couldn’t afford it. If I could have, I would have, even if I hated it. I distinctly remember a day in college where, over the course of a few hours, an abscess grew in my lower jaw, enough that my girlfriend at the time warned me about it. The type of rock hard fluid trapped in a space it’s not supposed to be in. I think I got it taken care of, likely at Terry Reilly, though I can’t remember, because I’ve also had abscesses that I “took care of” myself because I A) didn’t like the dentist and B) couldn’t afford the dentist. I didn’t poke my gums with a needle, if that’s what you’re wondering about. But if you press against a pressured space enough, it will pop, and you will spend the next few minutes swishing water in your mouth constantly to avoid the taste. I won’t say any more than that, but I will say that if you get an abscessed tooth, please go to the dentist. That shit can get into your bloodstream and seriously harm or even kill you. I do not endorse anything I’ve done, tooth-wise, or also probably just anything in general about my life.
Then, in my 20s, my wisdom teeth came in. They didn’t hurt so I let them be, until they crowded my mouth so hard that they cracked molars further ahead in my mouth. I remember a very loud cracking sound when one of the molars broke. I didn’t even know that sort of thing was possible, until it happened. I had teeth shards sticking out of my gums until grad school, when I finally attended the dentistry school attached to Portland State University. I went there only because one day I was at the Cheerful Tortoise (PSU’s nearby shitty dive bar) and I took a bite into a cheeseburger and one of my teeth broke. I went to the dentist and told her that and she said, “Yeah, sometimes eating meat can cause a tooth to break.” In hindsight, I think she was being sarcastic. They pulled my teeth shards as well as one of my back wisdom teeth and the tooth in front of it; the wisdom tooth grew in at an angle and basically grew into the tooth ahead of it, ruining it. Lots of fillings in my back teeth, lots of ruin that could’ve been prevented.
Speaking of hygiene regiment … the 2010s were quiet but also likely the worst for my oral hygiene simply because there were times–weeks, months, years?–where I just didn’t care. I remember Patrick Rothfuss saying once that he has had friends who lost teeth due to depression and I get it. It’s hard to explain, that lack of desire that prevents you from accomplishing even the simplest tasks. Empty the dishwasher. Take a shower. Brush your teeth. And then the cycle of depression and anxiety, where you know you’re supposed to shower but you don’t care, but you know you should and because you’re not it’s making you anxious, which perpetuates the cycle. It’s not that I didn’t brush every day for years, it’s that I brushed more often than not, which was usually once in the morning. Once in the morning, sometimes + Portland’s lack of fluoride in the water = the gradual and continual decay of my mouth.
Then, the pandemic came, and you can just throw all the rules out the window. Whatever depression sat heavy on my chest starting around 2014 melted into my bloodstream by late 2020. I don’t think I need to go on.
A couple months ago, I was eating popcorn and one of my teeth broke. I knew it would happen; I knew that popcorn would betray me one day. It wasn’t the microwave kind either, it was the bagged pre-popped stuff. I don’t know why, but pre-popped popcorn always has the most egregiously dangerous kernels. The bottom scraps of the bag are like playing Minesweeper with your teeth, and I eat popcorn like someone in a trance.
A week after the Popcorn Incident, I was eating almonds and another tooth cracked, this one a fillinged molar. I knew popcorn would betray me, but almonds?! Now where would I get my easy source of protein and magnesium?
At that point the die had been cast. I had to go to the dentist. My work doesn’t offer a dental plan1, so I bought my own, because you have to have insurance, right? Why else would you get work done without insurance? Well, long story short is that my dental plan is one where you don’t get all the stuff right away. An “incentive” plan which has incentivized me to drive off a cliff. It makes the entire point of getting a dental plan for the purpose of dental repair absolutely fucking worthless. It did pay for my cleaning though, so there’s that. I basically have to have it for a year before it really kicks in, and the big stuff I need to do (crowns, root canals, etc) aren’t covered for at least six months, and then when they are covered they only cover 15% for the first year. Wow! Such luxury!
Insurance is the capitalist mafia, by the way. The only difference is that while the actual mafia breaks your actual knees if you don’t pay them, the capitalist mafia breaks your financial knees if you don’t pay them.
So anyway, I’m sitting here now, writing this with a root canal done and likely another one on the way. TV shows and movies really made me nervous about getting a root canal. They always presented it as if it is the worst thing ever, but mine didn’t hurt at all, even after the lidocaine wore off. I’m going to get a couple of crowns placed, but after the root canal my gums were too inflamed so they had to wait to seat the crown. The doc then drilled out the filling from the tooth behind my root canal tooth because of a cavity, which is where he discovered that there was a crack in the tooth and that it needed a crown as well. So currently I have some temporary sealant stuff on my teeth and will be back in a couple of weeks to get it fixed.
I dunno why I’m writing this. I find the entire experience incredibly embarrassing; it feels like stuff I should’ve dealt with decades ago, but I couldn’t because I was poor, which is also embarrassing. For some reason, writing about embarrassing things is cathartic for me. I guess. Or maybe you’re embarrassed about your teeth and me writing about it allows a bit of kinship in that. Teeth are absurd. We only get two sets and the second set we get until we die, and then we discovered how to basically inject sugar into our gums via the sticky tack that is Swedish Fish. Teeth have been bad since the Egyptians, for fuck’s sake, and probably before that too. We should be commiserating about our fucked up teeth!
That’s my life right now. Teeth time and car repairs. My car has been repaired, by the way, and I took it in to get some anti-theft thing installed on it the same day I went to the dentist.2 This is how it works for me: I have a whole lot of nothing most days, and then everything suddenly happens on the same day for no reason.
Hi former Substack besties. I posted on my blog today and then I got an email of my post, which makes me concerned that the rest of you also got an email of my post. It is NOT my intention to send every single post on my blog as an email! I even toggled a toggle to make it a “post only” and not send an email, but apparently that didn’t work. So I’m not sure what’s going on there. It’s supposed to only send an email for a specific category of posts, the “newsletter” category, so I’m not sure why it’s just not doing that.
Anyway, I don’t know how to fix this, or if it’s even fixable, so if it keeps sending out all my blog posts as emails by default, I suggest you unsubscribe. If you scroll down to the end of the post, you’ll see a link to manage your email settings or unsubscribe. I would unsub all of you myself, but I’d rather leave the power in your hands, He-Man style.
Again, it’s not my intention to shove every single post of mine down your throats. If you’re into that (you kinky devil), then feel free to stay subscribed. But I will not be offended if you unsub, because honestly, if I were in your shoes, I totally would.
The turkeys have been slain. Their reign of terror ends for another year, and we feast upon their flesh to remind them never to return. And yet … they do. Like the Devil himself, the turkeys appear. No matter how many we kill. No matter how long we stay up, they are there, just beyond your periphery, waiting, watching …
gobbling.
News
I temporarily have moved my site to a blog.joshbelville.com/ site: https://joshwritesablog.wordpress.com/
There’s no drama about why this happened. I just didn’t want all the bells and whistles of having a full-blown website, but wanted to have a blog, and this felt like the best solution. At first I tried to find non-corporate owned blogging sites, but it’s impossible. Auttomatic, which owns WordPress and Tumblr, two of the best blogging sites out there, is just too much of a juggernaut to dismiss. Blah blah blah.
I do plan on buying a Plan so that I can have some bells and some whistles on the site. But right now I am broke because of teeth and car troubles. In your 40s, the Triangle of Troubles is Teeth, Car, and Bowel.
As you may have seen in my previous post, I am moving my newsletter stuff to my site rather than Substack. It’s really just for ease, but also because Substack lets Nazis talk about Nazi stuff on their platform, and I don’t like that either. So you’ll eventually see these posts from a wordpress site, rather than Substack. Don’t freak out.
Dreams
Merry Christmas: I have uploaded a new podcast episode as my present to you. This one is a few of the dreams I’ve recounted into my phone after waking up. Topics include Demi Adejuyigbe, peeing, beef jerky, and peeing again. That’s it. Does that appeal to you? If so, have a listen. It should appear in your email shortly after this one. If it doesn’t, just head on over to my Substack and listen to it there.
NaNoWriMo Debrief
Final stats: 95,186/50,000 words. I was on a real tear this November, writing the most I’ve ever written for a NaNoWriMo. I’ve technically written two books, although both need to be expanded upon greatly, and edited, and made a lot better overall. Let me give you a little elevator pitch of them.
Book 1 is called re:human. It has two plots. Plot A is about Six, the first human created by AI 10,000 years after humanity has gone extinct. They have a somewhat oppressive “mother,” a sub-sentient proto-AI called Zero, who keeps Six alive within a building called the Facility, which has everything Six needs, but little of what Six wants. The story is about Six leaving the Facility and taking a trip to the City, and what they find there.
Plot B is about Dr. Tamara Vandayar, a researcher in the 2070s who helped developed Zero. Her story is about how she inadvertently created the first fully-sentient AI, known as One.
Book 2 has no current title, and is about Tamara’s descendant, Adelphi Vandayar. The story splits between him in the 2300s, sneaking aboard a generation ship, Pioneer, which was hastily constructed to escape Earth and travel to Proxima Centauri (the nearest possibly habitable star system), as sentient AIs eradicate humanity, and then to Adelphi in Six’s time (many decades later than Book 1) as Pioneer returns from Proxima Centauri b for … reasons. Don’t want to give too much away. I don’t want to say it’s aliens, but…
Does that sound cool? Let me know because I have no idea. I just thought the philosophical concept of a robot creating and rearing a human was interesting and now it’s all spiraling out of control. In a good way.
Race Report: Holiday Half
Here’s the blog about it. In short: it kinda sucked! It was rainy and miserable and I am just not a very good runner, haha. Not for distance races at least. Oh well. Plus the paint peeled off the damn medals because of the rain. Wild stuff.
A Year of Running
26 races. Twenty 5ks, one 3 miler, one 4 miler, one quarter marathon, one 10k, and 2 half marathons. A total of 108.15 miles raced.
37 parkruns. 185 kilometers, or about 115 miles run.
4/5 Portland Parks & Rec ribbons. (Damn you stomach flu!)
Distance ran & walked total in 2022: 450.44 miles
Distance ran & walked total in 2023 (as of this newsletter): 1220.03.
I made up my mind this year and I’m glad I did. I’m glad I started this on my 40th year around the sun too. It feels a little “midlife crisis” but it’s also me acknowledging that the past three years were a bit of a downfall for me, mentally and physically, and now I feel better than I have in a long time.
No plans to run that many races in 2024 though. I honestly can’t afford it, plus they can take your toll on you, and I’d rather just run a lot of easy mileage with some speed and hill sessions thrown in the mix. A lot of this year was me trying to prove that I could do these things, but what I really proved is that I can do them my way, as in, I’m no elite athlete, I don’t think I’ll ever run a sub-20 5k race, or a sub-3 hour marathon, but I can get them done. And for the vast majority of people, that’s enough. It’s enough for me.
Resolutions Roundup
For 2023:
Run a half marathon (and/or a 5k every month). ✓ [WAY overachieved on this one]
Bench 225 for reps. [I don’t have a gym membership so this was impossible.]
For January, eat 100-150g carbs and no artificial or added sugars. [This was a bad concept to begin with and I’m glad I didn’t adhere to it at all.]
No social media except Instagram, BeReal, Strava, and D&D Reddit (for battle maps). [I added Mastodon, tried to get back into Facebook, and dabbled in the stupid ones (Threads, Bluesky).]
Meditate every day I am healthy. [Sometimes running is meditative!]
Complete a project. ✓[This is NaNoWriMo.]
Start a new hobby. ✓[This was my short-lived but fun jaunt into personal genealogy.]
Make a new friend. ✓[Lots of new parkrun friends!]
Workout 30 min every day I am healthy except Sunday. [This was also kind of a ridiculous desire, because I love rest days.]
Take a trip out of state to somewhere I’ve never been before. ✓[Long Beach, WA]
So, 50/50. But like I said, I’m glad I didn’t follow a couple of them.
2024! A tentative list:
Social media purge: no apps on phone, block all but Insta on desktop, only post on Instagram once at the end of the month.
Hidden NYR, very personal, hush hush.
Run a sub-25 minute 5k.
Run a marathon! [This is very tentative.]
Do something outside of my house once a week. See a movie, hang out with friends, go to a museum, see a band, etc.
Get laid in England. [Look. We all have our bucket lists, okay? I just want to have a bit of how’s your father with an English bird, awwright?]
Buy local in store whenever possible.
Finalize a first draft of my book.
Run 100 miles every month.
Take lots of photos with my goddamn camera that I bought!
The End (of the friggin year!)
The craziest thing about 2023 is that I have been fairly regular in posting newsletters. Honestly, my life is too boring for this level of competency. Thank you for reading. In honor of a year of writing and living, here is an AI image I generated that was going to be in the email I sent to my office about our White Elephant gift exchange next week:
Hi friends. Happy Christmas, as they say in Britain. The long and short of this little post is that I am planning on moving my Substack newsletter to WordPress, in an effort to consolidate my internet shenanigans. I’m also not a huge fan of Substack’s policies regarding who gets to use their service. But really, WordPress has a suitable newsletter option and I don’t see why I wouldn’t use it. This means I can just use my website as a blog and then have a “newsletter” category set up to send just those posts out to your email. No fuss, no muss.
Of course, if you want to read my blog in general, you can do that too. It’s currently at joshwritesablog.wordpress.com, but you can also go to joshbelville.com and it will forward to that site. Eventually, I will fix that as well. I don’t think that really means anything to you, but maybe you know enough about domain names and stuff to know that right now, jb.com is a forwarding address rather than the actual address. Even though all domain names are technically forwarding addresses to IP addresses … look, you don’t care about this, I know, I can see your eyes glazing over from this post. That’s how bored you are right now.
Anyway. I felt it important to let you know that I am moving your email addresses on file to WordPress. One of these days you’ll get an email from me from WordPress and you’ll be confused, and I’m trying to mitigate that, but to be honest we all have the memory span of half a hummingbird these days, so I won’t blame you if you’re like “WTF JOSH” in a few weeks.
That’s really it. I hope you’re having a good holiday season! I should have a new post coming soon, either here or on WordPress, we’ll see!
take my haaaand, we’re off to ending daylight saving time
Just me, sitting here, eating some discount candy corn, listening to my cat snore, thinking about how 2023 is almost over. This truly is what November is all about. Mostly the discount candy corn part.
Random Thoughts
https://youtu.be/wAS45XwU1Rg
Family reality TV (that is, reality TV that centers around a family) peaked with The Osbournes and will never regain that level of greatness. The reason behind this is that Ozzy Osbourne was a direct antithetical concept to reality TV, and thus, watching Ozzy be “family man Ozzy”—this man who bit the head off a live bat in 1982—was an amazing juxtaposition, especially because he was still very “Ozzy” even in the context of the show (and by that I mean his brain was addled after decades of heavy drug and alcohol use). Compare this with Keeping Up with the Kardashians, a reality show that is fundamentally fake and full of fundamentally fake people doing dumb fake things. Kim Kardashian will never be as funny or fun to watch as Ozzy Osbourne.
The amount of waste individuals generate pales in comparison to the amount of waste corporations generate, and yet I am still mad at myself for letting a bell pepper wither away in my fridge. It looks so sad! Just sitting there, deflating slowly, the green of its skin turning darker and darker. How do I tell it that I’ve already eaten the onion? That I ate the onion while it desiccated in the crisper drawer? O WOE TO THE GREEN BELL PEPPER
Random thing I learned the other day: the word “handiwork” is not a play on “handy work” but is rather two words, “hand” and “iwork,” the latter of which is the Old English past participle of “work,” made by adding the i- prefix. So “handiwork” more literally means “hand worked,” aka “hand made.” This is more or less what the current meaning is too, but it’s still neat. (Also the i- prefix still exists in Germanic languages as ge-. This all makes sense as Old English is Germanic in origin.)
I’m Going to England (in May)
I have booked my first ever international trip across Ye Olde Ponde to my ancestor’s stomping grounds: London, England. Yes, from what I understand King Charles himself will be at my airport gate waiting to tip a ladle of Heinz baked beans right down my goddamned gullet. (Queen Elizabeth didn’t perform this ceremony because it was thought “unbecoming of a woman.” That’s why you didn’t know about it before now.)
The trip is two weeks in London. The only thing I have planned is to run my 50th parkrun at the original spot, Bushy Park, on May 11th, which is the day before my birthday. Other than that I have NOTHING planned but I’m sure I’ll visit the museums and eat an English Breakfast and a Turkish Delight and a Jammy Dodger and then Greg Davies will see me walking down Trafalgar Square and shout, “You! Boy! You would be perfect for the next series of Taskmaster!” and then I’d do that and become famous and well-known as “The Best Taskmaster Contestant.”
Honestly though I think I’m just gonna bum around London for two weeks, maybe take a bus up to Scotland, maybe figure out how to get to Ireland and try to erase the “London” from the “Londonderry” signs. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know!
NaNoWriMo 2023
I am doing National Novel Writing Month once again. This is my 21st outing, which is impressive, but on the other hand, I’ve only “won” NaNoWriMo three times. So, whatever.
This year I’m expanding on an idea I’ve had for a few years now, about a human created by robots long after humanity has been extinct. The current title is re:human (see, cause it’s re(garding) humanity, and it’s also re(making) humans, you get it? eh? eh?). I thought it would be interesting to try and make the cover art using Dall-e 2:
The prompt is a person in a vat surrounded by machinery. I don’t know how people get such good AI art cause mine always looks like this shit.
If this ever becomes an actual book I won’t actually use AI for the cover, even though it would be kind of ironic because the book is about AI creating humans, and then I use AI to make the book cover … but AI is just thievery right now, so unless that gets better, forget about it, bub. I’d rather pay an artist.
I’m writing this newsletter on Nov 10th, and I’m already at 30,000 words, so … I must really like this idea. In fact, I’m at a point now where I know where the series goes, if it ever becomes a book series. Who knows right now, but it’s a fun thought.
If anyone’s interested, I may post a snippet of the novel in a future post. Just something to wet the ol’ whistle. If you’ve ever wondered how the sausage is made. Is that how the saying goes? Wetting whistles and sausages sounds like a pornographic combination.
Running
Ah, who cares. I’m doing it. Since last newsletter, I’ve run three races:
ORRC Dual Duel 10k – Running 25 laps on a track is hard. Run Like Hell 5k – Got 3rd place in my age group! Weird but cool. Mt. Tabor Tar n Trail 5k – Everyone missed a whole .30 of the 5k because of a poorly marked sign, and then the event organizers never followed up on that so I’m not gonna run that one again.
Oh, and we have a new parkrun in Oregon! It’s in West Linn; that Run Like Hell blog link above will talk about it too. It’s nice to have two options now, even if both are far away from where I live.
November’s only got two races, the Hood to Coast Turkey Trot 5k at Portland International Raceway, which is at night and lets you get to run around the raceway track and look at the Christmas lights before anyone else, and the very next morning is the ORRC Turkey Trot at the Zoo, which is a 4 miler. So that’ll be interesting.
After that is my LAST OFFICIAL race for 2023, the Foot Traffic Holiday Half. I am running the half marathon and it will be cold as balls, I’m sure.
I’ll have a more thorough analysis of my Year in Running next month, but suffice it to say: it was quite a year.
Reviews
Movie: Saw X
The Saw series is over …? X was honestly pretty good and had one of the only torture porn scenes that actually made me look away. Plus there was a lot of Tobin Bell and I love that guy. He’s genuinely talented and makes a great “gray area” villain (even if his philosophy isn’t very gray area). Here’s my slightly longer Letterboxd review.
TV: Shoresy Season 2
Very good. Somehow they’ve made a Letterkenny/sports movie hybrid and it’s quick and fun and quippy and all of the characters have their own quirks. Also, for Jared Keeso to make a joke character in Letterkenny and transition him into a full-fledged person that I care about in Shoresy is amazing.
Also, Keilani Rose (Miig in the show) was SHOT IN THE CHEST in LA prior to filming, and recovered and is in the show and I am glad she is okay! She only had a fractured rib and punctured lung. Not great, but could’ve been a LOT worse.
Book: Shift (#2 in Silo Series)
The first book, Wool, was uneven and kind of slow to start. It didn’t help that the first half of the book is the first season of Silo, the Apple TV show, and that the TV show is better than the book. Shift, thankfully, is a lot more interesting, acting as a prequel/sidequel? to Wool and delving into some of the machinations of the silo. Hugh Howey still refuses to write a scene between more than two people, but at least the scenes here are more interesting.
YouTube Share’ems
I don’t think “Now and Then” is the best of the Beatles “post-John” songs (that would be, IMO, “Real Love”), but the story of the two living Beatles making a song with the two dead Beatles using state of the art technology, creating a music video that is, if nothing else, a memorial for The Beatles, is pretty incredible. My only issue is that the song is clearly and painfully an unfinished demo, even from John’s standards. But he’s been dead for over 40 years so there’s not much you can do on that front.
Because this novel I’m working on is science fiction, I’ve found myself down a rabbit hole of science fictiony concepts. PBS Space Time is always interesting to me but I especially enjoyed them breaking down why building a foundation for thinking of time on an atomic level is important.
The End
Well that’s it, see you next month, when Santa Claus descends from the North Pole to terrorize us all with capitalism. Until then!
this is a byline, where one would put a witty comment if they could think of one
I feel like 2024 is going to have some big changes for me. “Josh you just ran a half marathon—” no but I mean, like, other changes. And I’m not a big change guy. Personal change, I mean; I love quarters and nickels and dimes. But getting my trajectory from ΔA to ΔB takes a lot of fuel.1 It’s always been this way; ask me to get a new hairstyle and I will, maybe, two years from now. But there’s just something about my current situation which feels untenable, bristly, at odds with some innate desire.
I think what I’m trying to say is: I’m gonna buy a boat.
Just kidding. You think I can afford a boat?
Portland (Half) Marathon Report
First of all, if you wanted a race report on the Portland (Half) Marathon, click ye olde link to ye olde blogge and have a read with your eyeballs. If you want a TL;DR: it went good, I made it, huzzah. There is a more philosophical treatise on the impact running long distances can have on your brain and your body, but I ain’t the type to write all that shit down. If anything, I need to not think about it so I can do it. You know how sometimes you’ll be having sex and suddenly you’ll think of George Washington’s wooden teeth, which weren’t actually wooden but were all sorts of teeth—holy shit, imagine having walrus teeth in your mouth—and then suddenly you look down and your partner isn’t even in the room anymore, they somehow just crawled out from under your frozen body as you ponder our first president’s dentures and now they’re on the couch eating Wheat Thins and watching an episode of Maury from 1994? Yeah it’s like that. No think, just sex running.
I’m running a 10k track race on Sunday the 15th with the Oregon Road Runners Club. My first track race and I can’t wait to look completely like I don’t belong there.
I’ve told this story a million times but when I was a kid, my class went to the local roller rink to skate. I had never skated before so I was hugging the walls and falling on my ass. At some point they declared that there was going to be a race around the rink with all of the boys. Despite me never skating before, I was put in the race. When they shouted “Go!” the boys all roared down the skating rink … and then there was me, at the end, shuffling like an old man. I guess my point is, sometimes you just gotta be shit at something, even if it’s embarrassing. Usually people are like “Nobody’s paying attention to you” but I guarantee you people were looking at me. Ah well. I was a kid!
Cleaning Up & Clearing Out, Digitally
I’ve been contemplating social media again. Wait, don’t go! I brought cookies. They’re just for me but you can smell one if you keep reading
My disgusting inky ichorous tendrils have been rooted within the World Wide Web practically my entire life. I made websites back in 1996, when I was 13. That was 27 years ago. And for a while, being present on the internet was great. Having a username and forums and AIM and early Facebook, it was all cool. Instagram filters that nobody uses anymore. If the internet of mid and late 90s was the wild west, then the internet of the early 2000s felt like the industrial age, and me and my online friends were the coal miners.
Now, the internet sucks ass. And by that I mean social media, which is a festering wound that could be cleaned out if capitalism wasn’t a drug-resistant flesh eating bacteria. Twitter, obviously, was demolished by the world’s dumbest richest man. Facebook has become a nightmare miasma of absolutely everything I don’t care about. Mastodon is good, but boring. Threads, stupid pandering. The only thing that continues to barely resemble its former self is Instagram, and that’s owned by the world’s fastest richest man! It’s all self imploding in the service of the All Ighty Ollar?
All this is to say, I’m pulling the tendrils out as much as I can. I’m trying to reduce my internet footprint. I want other Josh Belville’s to show up on google search results. I’m sick of posting a thing and then having to post that thing on multiple other things to ensure that the vast majority of people—my friends and family—can find it, even if they never read it or even think about it for one second. It’s absolutely absurd.
We have a device that fits in our pocket and can tell us where the nearest hot dog is in .0000005 milliseconds and yet in order for you to watch the YouTube video I made, I have to post it to Facebook and then also to Instagram oh and you better write a tweet about it too, have you thought about posting a thought-provoking post on LinkedIn about how nice it is to lick billionaire’s boots in order to buy groceries?—etc etc etc.
I hate it! It’s stupid and bad, and in the last few years it has even fractured relationships between family and friends because social media (or the Russians, or both) took our middling opinions and polarized them so much that I can’t look at my extended family online anymore without tagging them as Trump supporters in my head. In real life, this would never be a problem. I know they’re conservative and Republican, but if they asked me to their house for dinner, I would go and have a great time, because they are, at heart, good people. But online, everyone is a Something, and that Something is usually Bad.
In order to get the engagement they need to satisfy advertisers enough to pay them money, social media sites have to make you want to come back. I hate it. It’s basically addiction on a mass scale. It’s that fucking game from that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. It’s stupid that this TV show accurately predicted our addiction to smartphones back in 1991.
So, what does this really mean? It just means that I’m going to try to either delete, or stop using, as many social media apps as possible, and to delete accounts to things that I don’t really need. I thought for a long time about just using this newsletter to post things, but honestly the engagement here isn’t very good either. Maybe I just suck! That’s totally possible.
For 2024 I want to use social media as minimally as I can, with a few exceptions. Like, I want to post only on Instagram, and only at the end of the month with a photo dump of what I’ve been up to. And then maybe go outside more and actually meet people and shit. Who knows.
Just thought I’d bring it up in case you’re wondering why you haven’t seen me around in a while. I’m out there, in the Real World, picking up Chicks.
Stuff
Great TDC with Caroline Polachek that really showcases her voice, which is beautiful. She does have that ethereal air of a woman whose parents are rich.
Somebody reminded me of Square One the other day. Amazing show on PBS about math and they had great music videos, like this one.
Conan’s interview with Arnie is very good. I forget that he’s a Republican and loves Ronald Reagan, which I will forgive, I suppose.
The End
I’ve always been bad at wrapping things up. In that vein: bye.
This is an astronaut joke, and I don’t even know exactly what it means. ↩︎
sponsored by pepsi, pepi, bebsi, pesu, pepcid, pespi, pepis, joe piscopo, and pepsi
I’m writing this during a brief bit of non-rain on Portland’s first real rainy day of the season. The first day of Fall was on the 23rd and we had a bit of rain almost immediately, but this morning was the type of insistent-yet-polite deluge that Portland is famous for, the kind of rain Fred Armisen would make fun of, maybe for a minute longer than he needs to. We don’t often get the sudden torrent that ends as quickly as it started, like on the east coast. Instead, our rain shuffles in with the quiet expectation of being known and seen and heard and smelled. Much like the hipsters of this city.
It’s September 25th, is what day it is. Yes, I am going to talk about running again. Yes, colloquially when I say “talking” I mean writing, but the sentence, “Yes, I am going to write about running again,” feels disconnected between me the writer and you the reader. If I say that I’m talking to you, it hits different than if I said I was writing to you. “I am writing you this letter” is something you’d hear at the beginning of a voiceover in a Ken Burns documentary. “I am writing you this letter to inform you that your dear nephew Ansel has pneumonia and is currently stretching his hands up to Heaven for God’s embrace.” People back then were depressed.
There’s a little over five days until I run 13.1 miles for a shiny medal and a beer before 10am. Yes, I bought a sticker. No, it’s not going on the back of my car. I told you, running is for me, not for you, which is why I’m writing to you ab—which is why I’m talking to you about it now. The sticker goes somewhere that I see most of the time. That’s the plan at least.
One of the interesting things about this whole process is that it is eerily reminiscent of rehearsing for a play. Training regularly, doing repetitive things over and over. Getting sick of it all and then, on another day, having an epiphany that makes the whole thing better. Currently I’m in the, “We just gotta get this in front of an audience,” part of rehearsal, when you’ve run the entire play so many times to no one that it’s almost frustrating. The director keeps giving you passive-aggressive notes like “Stand over there” and “Be better at acting.”
Hell, you’re even doing it with other people. With plays, everyone knows their parts and when you rehearse you become a cohesive whole capable of telling a two-hour story. With running, for me at least, we runners still all know our individual parts, but we’re separate, rehearsing for a play where we all do our own thing for an hour or two.
The wearing down is what helps negate the nervous energy. People still get nervous when they do a show, of course, but if you’ve rehearsed enough, then your nervousness slowly gets replaced with irritation. “I just want to do the show already!” you think as you make the same cross from downstage left to upstage right, where you then look at the flower pot poignantly as you say your line about how much you hate doors. In this example you’re doing a farce.
With running, the nervousness is about failure, about injury, about diarrhea. That sounds like a joke but it’s true. Every runner out there is worried they’re going to poop their pants on the run. Such camaraderie in that. Every runner knows that every other runner has worried about pooping their pants. It’s humanizing! If only we lived in a world where we knew that everyone was worried they were going to poop their pants, nuclear war would never have been invented. Oppenheimer would have been distracted, watching his scientists as they watched each other, all terrified of the Fart That Wasn’t.
But if you run, and you have a good routine set up, and you work hard, and build mileage, and maybe get a fiber supplement in every day but not on race day because if you get too much fiber it’s like the political horseshoe concept except both ends of the horseshoe are diarrhea—if you put in the work, then by the time you get to half marathon morning, you won’t be thinking, “I hope I don’t poop myself during the run.” Instead, you’ll be thinking, “I’m so sick of training for a half marathon, who cares if I shit myself, in fact I’m going to shit myself deliberately because I’m sick of training, I’ll be the goddamned GG Allin of this half marathon.”
And then before you know it you’ve already run the damn thing.
Thank you for reading The Belville Baguette. This post is public so feel free to share it.
I suspect there are mats at every mile of the course, so it won’t be real time tracking; instead, it’ll just let you know when I’ve reached various mileposts and at what time. I could set up LiveTrack on my Garmin watch but I don’t know how it works and I don’t really want to. There will be photographers on the course as well but my track record for getting a good photo of me during a race is pretty bad, so we’ll see if I end up looking majestic of majornstic.
Runs
Just a couple of races since last post. Blog entries if you wish to read them.
Nothing too exciting on this front, other than the half on Sunday, but that’s not in the past, that’s in the future! I’m a-gettin’ faster, little by little.
Punkins
I went to the Pumpkin Patch’s corn maze with my longtime friend and occasional argument-participant Missy last weekend. I got a free pass when I ran the Foot Traffic Flat in July, which started at the Pumpkin Patch. We saw the following:
punkins
corn
small animals
some other stuff
If you’re wondering if we got through the maze: we did. We ate pumpkin pie and two alright burgers and an apple cider float and two pumpkin spice beers and elote1 and then wandered in a corn maze for an hour and then on the drive home I was a little concerned that I would poop my pants. See, I told you runners think about this all the time!
We tried to take creepy photos of ourselves in the corn:
I think Missy wins this one.
Glasses
In other news, I have decided, after six long years, that perhaps it is time to get a new pair of glasses. I am going through Warby Parker (#NotAnAd); the try-ons are in the mail. Here’s the thing, folks: I’m a big tall dude with a big tall head. I don’t dislike the idea of wandering through an eyeglass store trying on pairs, but the truth of the matter is, my head too big. My head too big and it’s just easier to get Big Head Stuff online. Even my current glasses, which I like a lot, were the biggest pair they had available at America’s Best back in 2017, and they still look slightly narrow on my face.
The problem with Warby Parker is that I hate the phrase Warby Parker. It’s the Lollapalooza of eyewear names. Warby? If I was a newborn infant and you said out loud, “Your name is Warby,” I would immediately grow several trillion brain neurons with which to articulate the word, “No.” Apparently the name is taken from two names from a Jack Kerouac journal, not even an actual novel. It’s a venture capitalist brand started by venture capitalists and I’ll let you guess if they were all rich white men or not. I’ll give you a hint: they all started the company with seed money from Wharton School of Business.
But what can you do. Nobody’s hand-crafting glasses out of reclaimed beachwood and coke bottles ground into lenses, you know what I mean? Or maybe they are. But it’s easier for my big head to shop online. That’s where it’s easiest to get tall sized shirts, for example. It’s impossible to do this at the store. Last time I went to the Target at Mall 205 the men’s section looked like a rabid wolverine went on a rampage in there. I couldn’t find anything. The only section that looked decent were the Hadrian’s Wall of jeans.
So anyway, expect a future post with possible pictures of future eyewear candidates.
50/90
The 50/90 challenge ends this week and I think I’m tapped out on songs. I got 25, 25 lo-fi demos for potential cultivation. Here’s another if you’d like to listen. It’s called “it ends all lonesome.”
it ends all lonesome
you think you should care
drop all your worries
cut off your hair
they tell you it's hard
the wine chilled in ice
it ends all lonesome
but it feels rather nice
you fight this feeling
all dark in your gut
the days escape you
you're stuck in a rut
but it's not all bad
walks through your neighborhood
you fight this feeling
but it feels pretty good
of course there's closure
a door's gotta close
peel out in the driveway
in those last little throes
you can cry all day
almost as if by design
of course there's closure
and it feels pretty fine
The End
When next we meet, I will have a shiny new Portland (Half) Marathon finisher’s medal. I may have also ground my two legs into bloody pulps. We’ll see!
I could’ve sworn elote was spelled élote, but I can’t find proof of this online. I did however see a recipe for elote (aka Mexican street corn) which said it uses a “creamy mayo and sour cream mixture,” unlike the chunky mayo and sour cream mixtures I’ve seen … nowhere. Ever. ↩︎
My life continues to be boring. As of this writing I am a little over two weeks away from the Portland (Half) Marathon, which is kind of exciting. Between it and now, however, pretty boring.
Been playing the Big Two video games of the past month or so: Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3. Both are good for different reasons. If I had to pick one over the other though, it would be BG3. Very detailed, lots of great story and combat moments. Starfield is fun but it’s just Fallout in space. A lot of it feels unmotivated; the base building is Fallout 4, the upgrading is Fallout 4, character models look like they’re from Fallout 4. But you can build ships like Legos, which I enjoy, and the combat is sufficient and the planets are neat. I did board a pirate-raided ship whose power was malfunctioning, meaning that every few seconds it would turn off, causing me to float in the air from the lack of gravity. But that pales in comparison to the amount of havoc wreaked in Baldur’s Gate 3. A lot of choices you make in that game have consequences. Not consequences. Consequences. Which I enjoy a lot.
Running is going very well. I finally ran a sub-30 minute 5k at the Beaverton 5k. I’ll just post some blog links if you want to read more:
The Portland (Half) Marathon is a little over two weeks away from this writing. I’m excited for that. Still don’t feel like a proper runner, and by that I mean I feel like my body is not a runner’s body, and by that I mean I think I’m too fat to be a runner. Typical body dysmorphia bullshit. If you run, you’re a runner. But it still nags at me in the back of my mind. Bought new proper running shorts; that little nagging part thought, numerous times, Why did you buy these? These are for runners, not you. Shut up, brain.
In the end, my body craves comfort because I was born with particular stars and planets in the night sky, or something like that, I don’t know how astrology works. So I bought the shorts because they are light and keep my cool when I run. Take that, self-confidence.
Been watching TV. Ahsoka is great. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is good and fun and a proper middle finger to Picard’s depressing nonsense. The only streaming service I pay for is AppleTV so I’ve been watching a lot of shows there. Foundation is good, but feels like one of those cheap sci-fi shows you’d watch in the 90s, like Stargate. Shows that have mediocre acting and terrible setpieces but decent storylines and interesting characters. Foundation is a bit above that, but still.
Physical is a show that I didn’t think I’d enjoy but I actually really love it. It’s very raw and difficult to watch at times, which is surprising for a show about a woman trying to create an aerobics workout empire in the 1980s. It deals a lot with eating disorders, but since the creator and a lot of the staff on the show are women, it really comes at it in a way that’s rough to watch sometimes. I feel like if a man made this show it A) wouldn’t be as good, but B) would probably tone down the eating disorder stuff a bit.
There’s probably an essay somewhere in the idea of women-created art and how much more emotionally raw it feels, especially art about women. Reminds me of menstrual performance art. It seemed like the late 90s or early 2000s had a lot of women making art about or even with their period blood. (I doubt that was the only time it happened, it’s just when I was aware of it.) The shocking “gross” aspect of it being the point, in a way; period blood is a natural body process for most women and the fact that society finds it gross is kind of weird, really.
Anyway, the idea being that women are ultimately better at shocking people than men because there are more “taboo” concepts for women than for men. Think of when women were dressed head to toe and then a woman would show her ankle and it was scandalous. Physical is a show in part about a woman overcoming the taboo of having an eating disorder and, in turn, owning it and her own body and mind. It’s good. I like it.
The other Rose Byrne show on Apple, Platonic, is meh.
Hijack is surprisingly good. It’s about a plane hijack. Don’t know what else I need to say there.
The Afterparty season 2 is fun. I appreciate that the first episode is an homage to sequels. A little meta joke there. I also like the conceit that Aniq and Zoe will just somehow arrive at a murder at the beginning of every season. I was thinking about this re: Hijack as well—it would be great if every season started with Idris Elba getting on some form of transport that ended up getting hijacked in the first episode. Season 1, plane. Season 2, bus. Season 3, boat. Season 4, elevator. Etc.
Invasion is … alright, though I can’t stop thinking about Naian Gonzalez, who is just super attractive in that show. I’ve only gotten through the first episode though, maybe it picks up.
I think that’s it on micro television reviews.
My FAWM 50/90 music output has slowed to a snail’s pace. I’m at 23 songs and will definitely not get to 50, but that’s alright. Some decent stuff to tinker around with in a couple of months.
So there’s my past couple of months. Running, watching TV, playing video games and D&D with friends, and making some l’il songs. Here’s one of those songs with lyrics if you’d like to listen. See you next month.
the cool waitress of the sabbath
got the midshift this time
how's about a few hours to sleep in?
there's drool on your pillow;
a dream of a beach lined with palm trees
two missed calls from your mother
voicemails wondering if you forgot jesus?
you drop off your cigarette butt
in the half-empty can of budweiser
displayed on your bedside table
your car's in the shop again
the bus smells like pot again
you wish you had pot again
apply makeup in the restroom
just like the ancients before you
the cook is a new cook
the old cook got fired for stealing
angeline hands you your apron
tells you her boyfriend is leaving her
a brief hug while she wipes her eyes
you don't have the heart to describe
how much you despise her
here's where the fun begins
the regular crowd shuffles in
how they greet you with smiles
and a neverending empty gut
so this is your sunday whiled away
for a pittance and free dinner
late on your rent and your money's all spent
on some vices to quell your own wrath
the days keep on pulling you under the sway
while your mother's convinced you're a sinner
but someday they'll know what your CV can't show
the cool waitress of the sabbath
I know basically nothing about Belgium surrealist painter Rene Magritte, other than he’s the guy who made two of the most famous paintings of the 20th century:
This is not a post about Rene Magritte; I just wanted to title it “Summer Marches On” and when I typed that into Google1, one of the first page results was Magritte’s painting, which is fascinating if you think about it in the context of its time. Late 30s Belgium, sitting neutral, watching Hitler’s rise to power. Two years later it would be occupied by Nazi forces, with King Leopold III surrendering without consulting his government at all, and would stay occupied until Allied forces liberated the country in October of 1944.
Magritte remained in Brussels during this occupation and his art style turned very different while the Nazis were around, adopting a more colorful, so-called “Renoir” style. For example, here is “The glass house” from 1939:
And here is “Forethought” from 1943:
Pretty different style, eh? The guy clearly didn’t want the Nazis asking him pointed questions about surrealism. I don’t blame him; they wouldn’t get it.
This isn’t a post about Rene Magritte, but god damn are his paintings amazing.
In case you think film reboots are a unique endeavor, might I suggest this:
Yes, Magritte painted a sequel. He actually painted several paintings over and over again in his lifetime. I won’t get into that though, because it’s kind of depressing.
Life
June was a good month. It started with two 5ks on the same day, which was new for me. Parkrun #15 in the morning and then the Starlight Run in the evening. I thought I was going to run slow for both of them but I didn’t, and it was fine. The Starlight Run was great because people were cheering us on even if they were mostly waiting for the parade later that night. Also there were a lot of children wanting high fives along the route. Like, too many. Sorry I didn’t high five all of you.
Then the next week I went on a date. A first date with someone I met on Hinge. I think it was Hinge. It wasn’t a great first date, we didn’t have a lot of compatibility and she seemed weirdly adversarial at times. And I drank too much, which these days is like two beers. Which meant I babbled on about nonsense. Eh. I learned from it; namely, that waiting for the Right One™ is the best idea, but also, you can’t find the Right One™ if you don’t go and look.
The week after that I ran the second of my Portland Parks & Rec 5ks, out in Lents Park. It was nice to actually run this one, when I had to walk the first one because of nagging injuries. And then that weekend I drove to Redmond, Oregon to run the Redmond Run. It was great! The drive to central Oregon was pretty and the cabin I stayed in was very cute and the run itself was a blast. Redmond is close to Bend, so it felt like a nice small race, like a little group of runners wanting to do something over the summer. I also got to walk around Smith Rock, which is beautiful.
Then! The final full week of June I drove to Grants Pass to have a little mini family reunion with my parents, my brother Russ, and his girlfriend Lori. Had a great time, despite what my friend Will thinks of his hometown. Drove to Crater Lake, saw a play at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and drove around Grants Pass so my mom could take pictures of the bears there.
It was a lovely little vacation and it was great to see my family again.
In July, I ran my first ever quarter marathon with the Foot Traffic Flat, up on Sauvie Island, in the northwest of Portland. My first proper “distance” race, it went pretty well! I was pleased with my result, even if I got confused at the end because I thought it was a 10k, and not 10.55k, which meant when my watch beeped, alerting me that I had completed my 10k, there was no finish line in sight, causing me to wonder, “Did I make a wrong turn and now I’m following the half marathon crowd?” It was fine though, I just needed to run a bit more.
A week later I got the stomach flu! Yeehaw.
My race schedule has tapered quite a bit since the Flat. I don’t have another 5k until August, the Garlic Festival 5k in North Plains, OR. Since then I’ve been running more and more and getting a lot of PRs in my 5k runs at parkrun. I think I might get a sub 30 minute time by the end of the summer. Fingers crossed.
Now, I’m trying to get a new passport so I can go on a trip next year. I don’t think I’ll get it in time for cheap flights though. For some reason I lost or threw away my old passport, I have no idea, but I wish I hadn’t because it would’ve been a lot easier to get it renewed if I had kept it.
The objective is England. I want to run my 50th parkrun at Bushy Park in London, where parkrun started. I want to have one of those Big Vacations. I got a credit card and everything.
50/90
I skipped FAWM (February Album Writing Month) this year, having absolutely no desire to write music then. But with FAWM comes this little side quest called the 50/90 challenge; 50 songs in 90 days, from July 4 to October 1. (Or something like that, don’t math me.)
This year 50/90 is on the FAWM site and it looks great! They really did a great job of integrating it. So I’m writing little songs there. No real production value (not that I had that to begin with), just a geetar and me coming up with shit quick so I can grease up the ol’ creativity wheels.
I’m going to share one with you here. It’s the one I like the most, so far. It’s called “the horizon” and I kind of aped Phoebe Bridgers a bit but whatever.
I’m up to 15 songs as of this writing so we’ll see how many of those are salvageable. I’ve only done 50/90 once before, back in 2009, and there are several songs from that session that are garbage, and some that I wish I had released. Oh well.
A Thing for You
Here are some songs!
I know little about Richard Thompson but for some reason I had this album back in the day and I really enjoyed it. And of course since sumer has, in fact, cumed in2, I thought it prudent to add this.
Art Brut was a band I enjoyed back in the 2000s. In one of my D&D games we joke about making a party of all bards (a “bardy”) and I suggested this be our theme song.
Jaboukie I only really know because he used to pretend to be other people on Twitter—most notably the FBI, which I believe got him banned for quite some time:
But anyway his song is very good if you like rap at least.
And finally, of course, it’s Carly Rae Jepsen. Her latest b-sides-esque album, The Loveliest Time, is out, and like with her previous b-side albums, some of the songs on here are better than the ones on her a-side album. Like this one!
The End
That’s it for now. Go look at some Rene Magritte paintings!
Also since you stuck around this long, here’s another song I wrote for the 50/90 challenge. It’s called “mod girl” and is about Gen Z girls who dress vintage. Enjoy. See you next time.
you dress like the 60s but you're only 16 you were born in 2008 you might be a poser but you still look good in bell bottoms
the weed's 10x stronger so pack up your bong or take a big hit from vape swathed in ambers and greens holy hues of the autumn
high school still lingers a prison that brings only terror like settling ash so spend all your nannying cash on a bright yellow sweater
hippie or beatnik mod, chic--you can't pick at least you can choose from them all but not at the local mall but the vintage store tucked in the corner their selection is better
one day when you're older these clothes all a-mouldering piles in a landfill somewhere you'll wonder what fashion was there when you were a teen
cause all you remember shift dresses and splendor and go go boots stuck in your mind a smile cause it felt so refined so perfect and clean
the time feels like cycles in 20 years, all this recycles for the next protegees but that feels like decades away and now is important
so pull on your bold colored tights, so old and jauntily knock your beret for this is your statement today a decision made with a purpose not just simply an accent
I had thought it was a lyric to a Decemberists song, “The Gymnast, High Above the Ground,” but the lyrics there is actually “April marches on.” Alas, it is not April at this very moment. ↩︎
