All: would anyone like a mix CD? I’d have to buy discs, cases, and mailers and postage would be my treat, so serious replies only. All my friends no longer have CD players in their cars and don’t have CD players in their stereo systems, so if you do and it hasn’t spun in a while lmk.

I gave myself mild frostbite eating orange sherbet straight from the carton with my index finger while stoned. Turns out ice retains its coldness real well. At first I lost fine sensation in the affected area, now it’s painful, discolored (pale, not necrotic), and inflamed. Even eating from the tin, a spoon is your friend.

BD: something in my Google News feed came up about Marysville. I don’t remember anything else about it. It’s always cool when your hick-ass town makes the headlines. Mine is Warsaw, Virginia, originally something else but renamed in solidarity with the Poles in some 19th-century uprising. One of the few ethnic town names in America unconnected to the ethnicity of the local population (Anglo-American and Black – my favorite town name is King of Prussia, SE Penn., in Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e. Deutsch, at that time, continental Germanic generally) country). Its lofty ambitions belie the local market town and county seat of rural Richmond County, located on a remote peninsula in the Tidewater, having nothing to do with the state capital city except being named after the same now-obscure 17th-century duke. The downtown and southern outskirts are getting thoroughly bougie, with shops and good locally-owned artisanal hamburger and pizza joints next to the old local Chinese buffet – a couple of decades ago the big excitement was showing off their new fire wagon in the July 4th parade and the opening of a new thrift shop and Family Dollar to anchor a revitalized main street. For better and for worse, it kept revitalizing, boosting local property values right when it came time to sell the family farm. If the hipsters move in I’m buying a rebel flag.

Its chief claim to fame is being the mother town of an early 20th-century congressman who’s a national hero in the Philippines and probably dismissed as a segregationist here. At least he was a decolonizer: in my hometown they changed the name of my dear almae materes Thomas Jefferson Elementary and George Mason Middle and High, the latter known as “the Father of the Bill of Rights”, because they were slaveholders. In conversation I have to say that the schools of my childhood no longer exist. Some 12-year-old immigrant do-gooder busybody girl started a petition and here we are. I love immigrants, but you don’t get to change our history. No offense. These are the kind of upper-middle-class remote-work professionals who inevitably follow the hipsters in places like poor Warsaw, Virginia. At the present moment it’s in right in the sweet spot of having the benefits of gentrification before becoming enshittified, a line my hometown of Falls Church, Va. has passed (like the “Mendoza Line” of a low .200 batting average in baseball, this line is called the Craft Beer Line).

Part of middle age must be seeing beloved places become unrecognizable.