N.B. I am perfectly aware that “Modern Love” articles are carefully calibrated to create outrage in people such as myself. Personally, I think I do an admirable job ignoring them, as a general rule. I am, however, MERELY A HUMAN WOMAN, and you can only ask so much restraint of me.
When I checked the home answering machine after my ferry commute across San Francisco Bay, there was a proposal of marriage from my old friend John Basso, who was now living in Florida.
I listened in awe to his rambling message: “You are the love of my life, and I want you to be with me while I take care of my mom in Gainesville. She is now bedridden. She’s got half a million in stocks and bonds, a pension, two properties in Crystal River, the house in Gainesville, a fur coat, two diamond rings, antique furniture, rugs from Panama and Wedgwood china. I’ll send you a plane ticket, and you can help me take care of her.”
He didn’t sound drunk. He must have thought this would win me over. I hadn’t seen him in 10 years, but a few months earlier he had started mailing me letters, poems and artwork…
John would phone me from time to time, but years went by without our paths crossing until one lunch hour when I hiked from the financial district to the Caffe Trieste, and as I rounded a corner there he was in front of the Condor Club, North Beach’s first topless bar, shouting at passers-by like a sideshow barker: “Step right up and get a glimpse of these lovely ladies inside.”
Good grief, whatever was he doing in this low-down job? I was polite and said hi, but rushed off to get back to the office on time.
Ten years, three jobs, one house and one condo later, I got a call from John, who was back in Gainesville, Fla. Being a technophobe, he located me using directory assistance. His familiar voice and flattery brought me back to our early days and the gratifying feeling of being worshiped…
Josephine lived for a year after I arrived. She left us her trust fund, her home and three wooden trunks filled with crocheted hats, plus the items John had listed in his voice mail proposal.
Now we live on Amelia Island, Fla., and I have a nest egg of stocks and bonds, diamond rings on three fingers, fur coat in the closet, china, rugs, antiques and a poet/artist who greets me with, “Hey, gorgeous” no matter how rumpled, mismatched or disheveled I am.
1.”Josephine lived for a year after I arrived.” This woman is responsible for more than one murder. Plans for her next murder are already carefully itemized away in the lockbox of her heart. I suspect her of killing her former boss, Josephine, at least one drifter who knocked on the door of her Marin condo looking for an honest day’s work, and quite possibly her nameless child who disappears halfway through the article.
2. This is not a real poem written by a real human being. “John’s poem began: ‘There is just a tincture of me until I strangle the fissioning cougar that stalks my jungle night in a neon city of flashing, clicking streetlights.’”
3. Here is a list of the “feeling words” this woman uses to describe the man she marries:
- lithe
eager
balding
flattery
revolted
onslaught
hyper
THAT’S LITERALLY IT
Here is a list of other words chosen at random:
- half a million in stocks and bonds
pension
two properties in Crystal River
a fur coat
two diamond rings
antique furniture
rugs from Panama
Wedgwood china
red MG
a Victorian gingerbread with an outside third-story deck
pristine condo
dream kitchen
chandeliers in every room
hot tub
terraced rock garden
expensive Japanese maples
savvy stock purchases
trust fund
nest egg
diamond rings on three fingers
This article was 100% written by a cynical detective in a John Fante novel, not a living human woman. This is a misogynist’s idea of a femme fatale whose veins run with ink and interest, not blood. Right? This woman cannot exist. She must not exist. She is the most banal and simultaneously the most monstrous person to ever move to Florida; her heart is a gun and her brain is a ledger.
4. For reasons that are completely foreign to me, there is a casual, blithe admission of drunk driving in the middle of all this…whatever this is. I don’t know why this particular bonkers tidbit in a well-seasoned bonkers stew leaps out at me so, but why is it here? She doesn’t appear to have any narrative about her drinking that she wants to share. What purpose does it serve?
We went walking in the park’s rose garden, ate tapas in a Haight-Ashbury cafe, walked to Coit Tower for the panoramic view and ended up getting drunk at a dive on Broadway. It’s a miracle I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and made it home to Marin after the bar closed.
5. Guys, she murdered her boss. She just did. Don’t ask me how I know. I can feel it.
My boss was a lawyer who relied on me to keep track of her vast collection of periodicals, articles and case notes that accumulated daily. She yearned to give up her practice and move to a small town to open an ice-cream parlor.
“Oh, Miriam? Why, you know it’s always been her dream to give up the law and move to a small town with no post office where she could run an ice cream parlor. I’ve told you about this many, many times, on her behalf.”
6. I met John when I was 17. He would pick me up from Miami Beach High School in his red MG and wait with an eager look for me to ask a favor.
“Take me to get a Whopper then let’s drive down Collins Avenue,” I might suggest, and he would happily comply.
John would phone me from time to time, but years went by without our paths crossing until one lunch hour when I hiked from the financial district to the Caffe Trieste, and as I rounded a corner there he was in front of the Condor Club, North Beach’s first topless bar, shouting at passers-by like a sideshow barker: “Step right up and get a glimpse of these lovely ladies inside.”
Good grief, whatever was he doing in this low-down job? I was polite and said hi, but rushed off to get back to the office on time.
Ten years, three jobs, one house and one condo later, I got a call from John, who was back in Gainesville, Fla. Being a technophobe, he located me using directory assistance. His familiar voice and flattery brought me back to our early days and the gratifying feeling of being worshiped.
Then the onslaught of mail began. Every day I would find at least one letter from him, sometimes two, waiting in my mailbox — rambling observations, snippets of poetry and references to my once-upon-a-time teenage beauty.
He also sent me collages and colored pencil drawings of dolphins, mountains and waterfalls, always 10 by 12 inches, sized for the mailbox.
[Old-timey gumshoe voice] It started with a cheeseburger. By the time she asked me to kill my mother for her, I was so used to running errands for her, it didn’t seem like much to ask.
Illustrator: Matt Lubchansky makes comics and occasionally leaves his apartment in New York. His work includes Please Listen to Me and New Amsterdam Mystery Company. He’s on Twitter, and doesn’t expect you to get his name right.
I’m still stuck on how the guy’s mother reportedly didn’t believe in throwing away unused napkins and this was some sort of quirk. Who does believe in throwing away unused napkins? What was going on with the napkins in that apartment?
Imagining the writer getting home from the grocery store with a 300-pack (or whatever) of napkins, using ONE to blow her nose, and throwing the rest away.
I have a large collection of miscellaneous napkins piled on my desk because they always hand me way too many of them when I get lunch. My coworkers definitely regard this as eccentric behavior.
You’ve reminded me that I used to do this at my first real job, where I went to a deli across the street for lunch every day. I kept the napkins in a drawer and dug through them to get at whatever else I kept in there. That’s a weirdly vivid memory I hadn’t thought about for years.
I do this currently. The napkins form a protective cover over all the post-its, push-pins and pens in my drawer.
I once polled my acquaintances on whether, if there were a few last napkins stuck in the bottom of a Scott napkin bag, they would peel them off and use them or throw them away. It was a startlingly divisive question, as it turns out.
I think some people set the table with napkins and then throw them away even if they haven’t been touched?
….was this written by Jenna Malroney?
No. Jacqueline Voorhees.
Naw, Jacqueline would be all “A half million in bonds? Wedgwood? Gainesville? Do I look like someone’s uglier second-tier mistress? That’s not even worth getting your anus lasered for.”
(Seriously a half million in bonds is chump change. Would not murder.)
Fair enough. In that case, Jacqueline Voorhees, age 50 and out of money.
Went back and re-read it in her voice; was not disappointed.
HER WHOLE LIFE IS THUNDER.
Is it possible that this column was some kind of coded cry for help? Her stalker successfully coerced her into matrimony and now she’s begging us to get her out of there? Because I’m otherwise at a loss for the total swerve into left field that this column took.
Like insanity and eccentricity, the difference between stalking and romance depends on how many zeroes come after it. Apparently.
I think I read this column three separate times last night trying to parse it out. Not once did I catch that SHE WAS A MOTHER. Holy cats.
YES THANK YOU I want to know what happened to the child, if not poisoned by arsenic.
yeah like did it waste away from consumption in an asylum??? was it trapped in the reflecting ball in the back garden? that’s all I got.
I read that yesterday and missed that too!
I cannot believe that this is real. It sounds like a cross between a Harlequin romance and, as Mallory said, a detective novel.
I am torn between utter scorn & grudging admiration because my veins will never be full of ice like that.
…but then I see how badly it’s written & hug my Nora Ephron comedies & feel superior.
“As an aside, did you know that if someone dies less than a full year after you buy an insurance policy, the company withholds payment? Any time after a year and they pay off without a second thought. Just a little thing I’ve picked up over the years.”
If anything calls for a “Congratulations, how wonderful”…..
I have never been so blissfully at peace with my spinster state. Thank you for this gift.
even in high school there is no excuse for that kind of poetry
I am so mad at that poetry for being such a waste of words.
I couldn’t tell if she was impressed by the poetry, or mocking it! And I read over it 3 times. Which is too many times.
You can almost pick up hints of T.S. Eliot, but then everything goes to shit, like a cheap knockoff perfume.
Wait but was he in high school? I got the sense he was older, making that… adult poetry. *shudder*
I couldn’t even make i through the quotation; I bailed after “fissioning” because I was worried I’d hurt myself with eye-rolling.
I also believe there was no reason for her to quote it….she was just trying to confirm it was the same John she knew, why didn’t she just say ask if he went to my high school and graduated in whatever year?
It was an heckuva power move. She got her current beau to read the guy’s own terrible love poetry to him before she’d deign to see him again. I’m kind of in awe.
What?
…
No. What?
Her local community paper was advertising that she was going to write for the New York Times and isn’t that fancy, so I take great joy in imagining how many people in her small community are side-eyeing her so hard right now.
Yep. Witches Of Eastwick-style.
http://fernandinaobserver.com/2015/03/28/local-re…
“Rules for submission require the story must be true and no changing of names.” PHEW! For a second I was really, really worried that it was really, really bad fiction.
“Oh yeah, Diana, she’s the one always walking around with two diamond rings on three fingers and muttering about chandeliers in every room. Can’t wait to see what a clusterfuck THAT column will be.”
YES there will be so much shade. And hiding of wealthy (“wealthy”) elderly relatives.
‘“You are the love of my life, and I want you to be with me while I take care of my mom in Gainesville. She is now bedridden. She’s got half a million in stocks and bonds, a pension, two properties in Crystal River, the house in Gainesville, a fur coat, two diamond rings, antique furniture, rugs from Panama and Wedgwood china. I’ll send you a plane ticket, and you can help me take care of her.”
He didn’t sound drunk. He must have thought this would win me over. ‘
And he was right!
THIS WAS THE MOST CONFUSING THING FOR ME. she’s implying at first that she’s not into it and then she totally goes for it? is this even supposed to be real?
I had to re-read this a few times because the lede is pointing toward him being just the creepiest weirdest dude, and SHE’S INTO IT?
Floridians be crazy? IDK. Why does the NYT want me to not read it? I mean, I’m pretty loyal. For crap’s sake, it’s one of the only newspapers left that’s pretty good. They’re just taunting me with their horribleness, so much of the time, that it’s hard. *sigh* I saw the title of the column, which I usually do avoid now, and decided not to read it. I don’t think I can, Mallory! It’s too much horribleness!
The paywall is only trying to help you save yourself.
But..she got a fur coat out of it. Murder was really a small price to pay.
FUR IS MURDER!
I MEAN, IN THIS CASE, FUR IS LITERALLY MURDER!
To wear in Florida. May she always live in interesting times.
“She is the most banal and simultaneously the most monstrous person to ever move to Florida”
and people wonder why i hate florida.
Does this mean we’ve found Florida Woman, she who sends Florida Man to do her bidding?
And always thought he was a free (crazy) spirit.
“I arbitrarily picked cobalt blue for the counters and tile floors, maple for the cabinets, and stainless steel appliances, never imagining I was creating a dream kitchen for myself until I learned I had Type 1 diabetes”
WHAT
Yes, this was also the most bizarre part to me. Like, she just casually infers ‘diabetes diagnosis = must quit job and move to Florida’, as though that is the only possible logical course of action and therefore no further explanation is necessary.
I am pretty sad actually because I just redid my kitchen and I have cobalt counters and hardwood cabinets (walnut, actually) and stainless appliances and it’s so pretty and perfect but apparently it looks like hers.
i hate to break it to you, but cobalt blue counter tops are the #1 indicator of adult onset diabetes
Look diabetes is one thing and I can cope with that but what if I start writing Modern Love columns? What then?
Instant recipe for Murder.
The thing is, Type 1 diabetes is the JUVENILE onset type. It is possible to get it in adulthood, but quite rare. I don’t understand this article’s timeline but she must have been in her 30s at least. I mean, nor does type 1 diabetes typically force one into medical retirement (?????), so what am I saying, that counter top looks great with that chandelier.
It is more common for type 1 diabetes to occur in children, but the medical community has been moving away from the juvenile/adult onset terminology to the type 1/type 2 terminology because both types can occur at any age. both my grandmothers got diabetes in their 60s. one got type 1 and the other got type 2. it happens.
I do think she made sure to specify type 1 because type 2 is thought of as the “fat person” diabetes, and she seems like exactly the kind of person who’d be horrified you might think she was fat.
I would totally go for cobalt counters and hardwood cabinets, clearly she was just imitating one of the many fine Toast Aesthetics.
Yeah, that really threw me off as well. Cobalt blue, maple, and stainless steel are ideal for people with Type 1 diabetes?
I screamed “WHAT” out loud at that sentence.
This whole sentence sounds like something I would mutter into my pillow while being forcibly woken from a dream.
A+ cougar gif from Matt Lubchansky, by the way
I wish you could put gifs on t-shirts, because I’d buy it ASAP.
“He also sent me collages and colored pencil drawings of dolphins, mountains and waterfalls, always 10 by 12 inches, sized for the mailbox. This artwork ended up creating a gallery at my law-office workstation. … [My boss] was impressed by my growing collection of original art and began treating me more like a girlfriend with a real life outside the office. She wished me well when I took my two-week vacation to visit the artist himself.”
That is not a gallery. That is a collection of my Lisa Frank-inspired doodles that, at the most, belong on the fridge.
I kinda want to see what the art looks like, though, because I suspect they are not worthy of the “growing collection of original art” descriptor. Her boss probably thought they were made by a young relative, if I had to guess. I mean…dolphins???
It just gets even more twisted if the boss was thinking “oh, that’s a fairly talented child” and she’s like “she appreciates my fine art collection!”
“I’m going to visit the artist himself! He lives with his mother in Florida.” See? She had no idea it was an adult.
Yes I was just thinking I would love it if my kids made me a collection of Lisa Frank-inspired doodles; I would *totally* hang them up at work if I had a job. 🙂
10×12 is kinda big for a mailbox. Nothing about this makes sense.
This whole thing is insane, makes no sense, and is 100% a confession to murder.
HER BLOOD IS RUNNING MONEY HER EAR IS A SMOKING TOMB
I read the ML column yesterday and kept asking myself is this even REAL? Can such a person exist? It had such a strange, self-congratulatory tone–but with all the plot twists, weird skeevy paper napkin details, coquettish errand-boy themes and the dead MIL, I fear Ms. Diana Frank has merely stolen a page from my 1988 Barbie doll playbook, in which I’d get rid of most meddling mothers-in-law with a push of the old convertible down the (carpeted) basement steps.
Sometimes I think they just skim the modern love submissions to find any “love story” that in any way relies on technology. Cause that makes it modern! This lunatic sent her a voicemail proposal, so that shows how the world is changing and it’s Modern!
I think you’re right. I just read a couple of the other Modern Love articles and they’re about as terrible and pointless as this one.
Wait. She has (had?) a CHILD?
There’s one sentence with “single mother”.
Uuuuggghhh. Jesus.
*scans list of property, assets and moveable goods*
*casually tests heft of pewter candlestick*
This is the kind of comment that only someone named Blanche de Shambles is allowed to write.
WHERE IS THE CHILD THOUGH
NO BUT SERIOUSLY
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN
WITH HER SENSE OF SHAME
I just don’t get Florida. I was born there and the only logic I’ve ever found in it is that green and orange are my favorite colors (go ‘Canes…?)
This is the kind of person who goes to Disney World…stays at one of the on-site hotels….and then hangs out on the lake beach and shit. NOT THE POINT.
This goes with the Ayelet Waldman and Sarvis pieces in the Modern Love Hall of WTF Fame.
Also, that Lubchansky gif is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.
Oh god I just googled “sarvis modern love” OH GOD
I KNOW! Let it never be forgotten.
AHHHHH I just read the Sarvis one, too, and I’m mentally screaming forever
Oh NO me too AHHHHH
And I knew that for now, anyway, and maybe for months or years, she wouldn’t really be able to compete with someone like me who had the power to feed Sarvis, drive him places and rent from Netflix.
“I’ll love you forever,
I’ll have you for always,
As long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.”
You guys, this article is completely horrifying and the mother obvs needs some serious therapy, but throughout my reading, I kept thinking to myself, What the heck did you expect from someone who named her kid ‘Sarvis’?!?.
I just did too, and oh god what the actual fuck. Like, lady, a 9-year old girl has a crush on your 9-year old son. You need to stop being terrifying and Freudian about it.
“and turning her 18-inch hips just so for the very first time, or taking a try at batting her lashes.” THEY’RE NINE YEAR OLDS!!!
I just read it, and it is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen.
Whoever Graffiti Girl was, she was impudent: a little child who obviously shouldn’t be allowed to say anything about love. She didn’t know Sarvis the way I knew Sarvis, no matter what the bathroom wall proclaimed.
I recognized it as an obvious sign of our love and eternal connection that when I went out into the hall, Sarvis happened to be walking by on his way to P.E.
I just did the same and it was worse than I could’ve imagined. Who thinks like this? And, what’s even worse, who then MAKES IT PUBLIC?
Wait I liked the Ayelet Waldman piece. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
I did too. But apparently women are expected to become their children’s slaves from the moment they’re born.
I think her position is pretty much as conventional as competitive mothers, though (her comments about how her son spent hundreds of dollars on an app, which is the fault of the ‘vile Kardashian pigs’ seems pretty standard my-child-can-do-no-wrong parenting), she’s just added in the classic ‘don’t ignore husband for cradle’.
“I unwrapped the baby from her blankets. She was average size, with long thin fingers and a random assortment of toes. Her eyes were close set, and she had her father’s hooked nose. It looked better on him. She looked like a newborn baby, red and scrawny, blotchy faced and mewling. I don’t remember what I said.”
Meh. It’s a thing. A human-ish toe-y thing I just expelled from my body with the help of percocet and vicodin. Wanna fuck? I can stop by the vibrator store on the way home.
Thank you? For directing me to these stories? Ummm, I feel better about myself as a failed person now?
“a random assortment of toes”? Is that how it works?
“There is just a tincture of me until I strangle the fissioning cougar that stalks my jungle night in a neon city of flashing, clicking streetlights.”
This is truly Literature.
The ‘fissioning cougar’ is his mother, right?
It’s giving me horrible flashbacks to the poetry readings an ex-boyfriend used to drag me to, which were put on by the first year poetry class at the local community college.
“She is the most banal and simultaneously the most monstrous person to ever move to Florida…”
That’s a pretty big claim, Florida being what it is.
(nb: I say this with nothing but love for Florida)
The romantic in me sometimes reads these columns and sighs, but this one made me shudder like no other.
I deciphered his poem!
“There is merely a distillation of me until I asphyxiate the schisming puma that prowls my rainforest darkness in a fluorescent conurbation of blinking, clunking lampposts.”
That makes more sense, right?
Or this?
“There is simply a tinge of me until I smother the dividing catamount that tracks my wilderness dusk in a incandescent municipality of twinkling, ticking streetlamps.”
Yep. He’s Eli Cash.
friscalating
+1 for “catamount.”
She’s on Facebook (search Diana Frank Florida). No sign whatsoever of loverboy John, but she has a grown-up goth son whose profile I definitely didn’t click on and who definitely doesn’t have a band named Starlit whose latest album is MACHINE GUNS AND ORAL SEX .
Definitely not, no way.
Starlit definitely doesn’t have a website which is mostly instructions for people who are confused by scroll bars, with info about both Machine Guns and Oral Sex and their previous album, She Was a Spicy She Wolf.
To be fair, she was.
I want to know more about them and their songs, but I just don’t understand how to get to the information that isn’t visible in front of my face?
At one point they refer to the album as just “She Was a Spicy Wolf”, which somehow sounds much worse.
NOT what I pictured.
Also, remember, John’s a technophobe!
…the album of which is related somehow to the Animal Liberation Front? Am I reading that correctly?
The poorly photoshopped amalgamation of neon and old movie stars hurt my eyes.
<3 <3 <3 to you forever
Bless you, child.
And she just listed herself as “in a relationship” a week ago?
“until I learned I had Type 1 diabetes and was experiencing such drastic sugar lows and highs that I no longer had the energy for the long hours and high stress of the law office.”
This seems backwards? I would expect that one would learn of the lack of energy first, through the experience of not having much energy, and then after that learn why. And then presumably learn about diabetes and take insulin and so on, and thus regain at least some energy.
Also – there are two lawyer in my office who were diagnosed with Type I diabetes as adults and both of them manage to still be lawyers, with energy for the long hours and high stress of the law office, so ???
I feel like the boss who wants to open an ice cream parlour must play into this somehow. Maybe she had to leave her job because her boss keeps trying to serve her ice cream in an attempt to live out her fantasies, and this is incompatible with the writer’s diabetes?
Utter crock of cougar crap. My dad has had super-brittle Type 1 diabetes since he was 19 and worked 60-hour weeks – some of them in an Illinois coal mine – without (much) incident. He broke his toe on a coal scuttle once. But otherwise, incident-less.
Lady, this is not 1867. We can manage diabetes with a thing called an insulin pump and another thing called a glucometer, so please don’t call your erstwhile husband a technophobe without taking a good look in a mirror. You just wanted an excuse to have half a million dollars in bonds and a fur coat.
Okay, so, here is my Modern Love story; it is about a Modern Love that never made it into print.
My oldest friend’s rich girlfriend cheated on him while he was looking after his dying father. She didn’t tell him she was cheating; she just told him that she thought he was immoral for feeling ambivalent about his father, and broke up with him. After his father died, she suggested that is he spent the money his father had left him to join her on her South American vacation, they might get back together. He (poor bastard) did, and she promptly broke up with him again. I was sitting in a bar with him when his phone rang. It was the girlfriend; she was terrified she’d contracted botfly. Botfly is a truly disgusting parasite, a worm which lays larvae on human skin; the larvae tunnel down and invest, growing into worms. She was sobbing; she needed his emotional support. Badly. He apologized to me, and left the bar to provide the emotional support.
Several months later, she sent him her Modern Love essay, in which she compared him to botfly. Did she mind that she didn’t plan to change his name, she wanted to know? He said he minded that she’d elided her behavior into a vague declaration that she had “hurt him,” which read in the context of the essay as if she had simply decided they weren’t right for one another, oh, and also the part where the essay hinged on comparing him to a nauseating parasite. He minded that, but he left name changes to her discretion. Oh, she said, well, if he was going to be like that about it, she wouldn’t publish it; they clearly had different approaches to the ethics of memoir. (Her ethics entailing, apparently, making herself look good.)
The non-publishing was probably for the best. He forwarded it to me; it was a purple matrix of cliches. Which I suppose is par for the course for Modern Love, but still.
The viral marketing for Gone Girl 2 is getting pretty sophisticated.
*Only problem was that we were right on University Avenue, three blocks from the University of Florida, and traffic whizzed by, making conversations tense.*
THAT’S why you think conversations were “tense”?
I still maintain that he lured her to Florida, convinced her to murder his mother for him, and then revealed that it was all a cunning ruse, intended to rid him of a stifling maternal presence without his having to actually do the deed. Then he murders her and dumps her in the Everglades.
This Modern Love is not an actual story. It is instead a coded message, as someone who lives near both the CIA and the NSA can tell you.
1. There is no way any actual human being would ever memorize that indecipherable line of awful poetry, especially when it comes from a person you have no real romantic interest in, and keep it memorized for DECADES. Just… there is no way. This cannot happen in the Reality in which we live. It cannot.
2. No actual human being has ever gone from Marin County, California to the fetid, college student and alligator-infested swamp that is GAINSEVILLE, FLORIDA and been like, “man this is so much better than that hellhole where I live, with its disgusting, stunning views of San Francisco and easy access to the disgusting, beautiful Wine Country.” No. No. No no no no no no no.
I will never stop thinking these things. Decades from now a blood vessel will burst in my brain thinking about that “ice cream parlor in a small town” line and I will die. This essay has killed me.
She looks the part though. Well, I haven’t lived there in a long time, but she looks a hell of a lot like a middle aged woman who just loves living in Florida in 1990. They probably haven’t changed much.
Who _remembers_ poems they wrote in high school? Like, if someone gave me a paper napkin with ostensibly the first lines of a poem I wrote in the past, I… I have not worked at retaining clarity in those memories.
I remember several of the poems I wrote in high school, as they were so embarrassingly terrible that they are forever burned into my memory.
Am I just delirious and bewitched by all things Diana Frank, or does she also work for “Coldwell Banker Jasinsky & Ass”?! http://www.agents-re.com/states/florida/diana-fra…
JASINSKY AND ASS.
That’s her.
Can’t wait for The Jinx people to turn this into a documentary and catch the very obvious killer. Modern forensics!
This is one of those moments when I feel like I am truly blessed to have an internet connection.
Aww man I googled it and came up with “Jasinky and Associates.” Dissapointing. But I admire whoever thought that “Ass” was the best way to abbreviate it.
I realized after the fact that was probably the case…I’m going to keep living the Ass fantasy, though…
Oh god straight up murder confessions! First on HBO, now in the Times… my only question (shocking I know) is did she kill her child before or after she moved to Florida?
“I met John when I was 17. He would pick me up from Miami Beach High School in his red MG and wait with an eager look for me to ask a favor.
“Take me to get a Whopper then let’s drive down Collins Avenue,” I might suggest, and he would happily comply.”
We would find an innocent, sheltered suburban classmate, offer her a ride and then drop her off in the most dangerous part of downtown. Then we would throw back a couple shots of human tears and go back to figuring out how to murder my identical twin sister in an elaborate plot involving a chairlift.
WHAT IS THIS A REFERENCE TO?!? I definitely read this as an impressionable teen but I can’t for the life of me remember what the book was called or how it resolved.
I just had to look it up, because I didn’t actually remember the title. It’s Twins, by Caroline B. Cooney of Face on the Milk Carton fame. Madrigal is the evil twin and Mary Lee is the good twin, and their parents have figured out that Madrigal is evil and have dealt with this by sending Mary Lee off to boarding school. Mary Lee doesn’t know her sister is evil, so she’s understandably jealous of her popular, confident sister who gets to stay home and go to a regular school. Madrigal tries to kill her in a rigged chairlift accident, but it goes wrong and it’s Madrigal who dies. So Mary Lee pretends to be her because she wants to be popular, but as soon as she gets home she finds that actually everyone is terrified of Madrigal and her equally evil tear-drinking boyfriend John. I actually don’t remember quite how it all got resolved.
I love that the writer casually drops the fact she commutes by FERRY across SAN FRANCISCO BAY.
Post-quake, that was the only way to commute for some time. The bridge was down, so everyone took the ferry.
What gets me, is that she saw the guy acting as a barker for the Condor Club. This must have been some time ago. (Or does the Club still exist but just not the neon sign?)
They are both still there! I work across the street at City Lights and they are both definitely alive and kicking.
IDK, that’s pretty common? My dad did that all his working career. So do lots of people.
I have a bone to pick with Diana about her writing. Everything — which definitely included her sentence construction — led me to believe that she was NOT going to marry him. Imagine my surprise when she was suddenly jaunting off to Florida, which she just loved loved loved, with no mention of her future stalker/husband.
Reader, I married him, and you too can find love — if he gives you his dead mother’s diamond rings, her Wedgewood china, and defers to your every whim like the despot you’ve always known yourself to be.
“But baby, baby, dig these counters!”
We don’t know if they’ve moved past the microwave though.
YES THIS EXACTLY
Now that I have enjoyed the comments I must read this.
OK I have now read it and I cannot even deal with all the WTF going on in my head.
My favorite toast threads are always the “DID YOU SEE THIS RIDICULOUS THING ON THE INTERNET??” ones. The consensual incest lady from NY Mag? The guy who spent his paternity leave getting drunk? Now this? Keep ’em coming.
It does not surprise me that this woman lives in FLORIDA, the state that is the center of all my nightmares.
You had me at “chandeliers in the bathroom.”
Apparently that is a thing. Pinterest tells me so.
Our renovated bathroom will not involve a chandelier, because we do not live in a decor blog.
Also, seeing “chandeliers in the bathroom” written out makes me immediately go “mirrors on the ceiling, pink champagne on ice…”
It makes me think of a line from Drunk In Love, “cigars on ice” which has always baffled me because… why the hell would anyone put cigars on ice, or is this something that I cannot hope to understand because I am not Beyonce?
Maybe they mean ice in the “diamond” context and Beyonce is balancing her cigar between her fingers, resting it upon diamond rings.
It could also be a rich person thing, but I really like the idea of Beyonce with a cigar.
which my spouse (who is bad at hearing lyrics) (or possibly wonderful at hearing lyrics) repeated to me as:
“minors on the ceiling, pink shampoo on mice”
Also, the last paragraph is really striking. Basically she wants a man with absolutely no agency of his own.
Dead men have no agency. John must me dead, too, and that “ask the boss!” reply is just her throwing her voice like a ventriloquist.
On her Facebook profile photo someone asked “how’s John B?”
NO ANSWER.
“Fine, good, definitely alive, yep! How are things with you?”
“Lovely talking with you! Have to go and consume a meal with John, who is totally alive and doing alive-person things like eating and breathing.”
I thought I was getting a migraine while reading this, not from the brain-piercing weirdness of the column but this bloop of animation that kept appearing, then disappearing at the bottom of the screen. When I finally scrolled down it resulted in that very specific Toast-induced brand of laughter. Thanks, Matt, that was awesome.
I’m fairly sure that John is an adult when he meets her at 17:
He picks her up at high school – so presumably he doesn’t go there with her. He’s also free whenever she gets out of school, so if he’s coming from another school across town, that doesn’t work.
She mentions what I assume is an expensive car, and Josephine doesn’t sound like a woman who buys a sports car for her teenaged son. Also doesn’t seem like a family with that kind of class markers doesn’t let a son end up hawking a topless bar. So he’s probably working, and has some income – not full time, not now, anyway, and living at home keeps down the costs to pay for the car.
He’s balding and stocky fairly early in this story. He could be balding at 28, but it hints that he’s older than she is there.
He’s living with a “former student” in SF at one point – suggesting a pattern.
He’s a technophobe.
In their early days, he give her a “gratifying feeling of being worshiped” – which doesn’t sound like something a teenage boy would be up to.
With the general creepiness, I think it’s a safe bet.
I was trying so, so hard not to notice those markers, damn your eyes.
You are correct.
I had to get up from the reference desk and run to the break room to laugh like a hyena for ten minutes before I was calm enough to return to working with the unsuspecting public.
Bless you, Toast and Toasties, for the best laugh I’ve had in ages.
Serendipitously, my then-boyfriend announced one day that he had to go to the city to see his friend John Basso. “I knew a John Basso,” I said. I wrote down the first few lines of the poem John had written back then. I had repeated it so many times when I was 17 that I still knew every word … “Take this to him and see if it’s the same guy,” I said.
YEP TOTALLY NORMAL WAY TO CHECK IF YOU HAVE A MUTUAL ACQUAINTANCE.
“Ahh….the tincture poem (chuckles)……yes, I know this goddess, TAKE ME TO HER.”
“THEN”-boyfriend.
Bodies everywhere.
“My then-boyfriend, who was then-alive …”
"What is WRONG with people?"
So, so many things…
This Modern Love, it breaks me
this set off my BS detector: “We went walking in the park’s rose garden, ate tapas in a Haight-Ashbury cafe, walked to Coit Tower for the panoramic view and ended up getting drunk at a dive on Broadway. It’s a miracle I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and made it home to Marin after the bar closed.”
You can not walk to Coit Tower from the Haight. That is literally crossing ALL of San Francisco. It reads like someone Googled tourist spots in San Francisco and just threw them all in there
I have never read Modern Love before, and this seems like possible a strange introduction to it. I am meant to be dazzled by the romance?
For some reason this annoyed me the most “John used the microwave only to fix his mother frozen dinners”… What else should he use the microwave for Diane?!
I am really loving the comments at the bottom of the Ferdinand Observer article as well.
(http://fernandinaobserver.com/2015/03/28/local-resident-diana-franks-writing-to-appear-in-new-york-times/)
“Mid week! Ugh!”
I can’t wait to see how they react once they actually read the piece.
I actually checked back!
So far, silence. Chilly, chilly silence.
I think this is the dude’s art. It’s about on a level with the poetry… http://www.artwanted.com/artist.cfm?ArtID=1899&am…
Hoooly shit is that bad. It’s just like his poetry.
That banana (it is a banana, right?) will haunt me.
That banana (it is a banana, right?) will haunt me.
I actually checked back!
So far, silence. Chilly, chilly silence.
This is exactly why I always say I’m from San Francisco. Marin people are the worst.
I just did the same and it was worse than I could've imagined. Who thinks like this? And, what's even worse, who then MAKES IT PUBLIC?