The New Year is a powerful time in our lives, and by that I mean in our practice. Through no effort of our own, we arrive at a point of culmination. A moment of reflection and renewal. In this span between what we think of as the old and the new, regret can stir. We may be more aware of our stubborn habits and shortcomings, our losses and the never-ending ache of unfulfillment. Another year gone, and all those things we were going to do! All those changes we were going to make!
This recognition is a rare and momentous blessing, and one to be used. Recognition is all any of us needs to make a change.
My teacher Nyogen Roshi is fond of quoting his teacher, Maezumi Roshi, who said something like, “It is impossible not to do your best. You just don’t think it’s your best.” Every moment arises pure and perfect from conditions as they are. From you, as you are. Our judgment alone, our ego mind, distinguishes best from less, gain from loss and new from old. Judgment alone separates us from the fulfillment we think lies just beyond the precipice of time.
And so I seize this moment to wish you all the best.
I wish you less of what you can live without and more of what you’ve always wanted. Less anger, and less quickness to anger. Less greed, and more open-mindedness. Less judgment, doubt and cynicism, and less of the pain and confusion they create. Less hurry.
Less fear. More of the compassionate love that can only arise in the absence of fear.
I would wish you more time, but you already have it. It only takes a moment to transform your life. A moment of undefiled, nonjudgmental awareness. A moment of practice, and everything everywhere is new again.
Only you can make it so, but I will wish it just the same: your best new year.
It’s frigid in Massachusetts this morning. When I woke up early to assess the damage from some trees downed by the brutal winds overnight, I saw my neighbor carrying a big box out to their car. She said hello and then immediately ate shit on the icy sidewalk lol. After checking to make sure they weren’t seriously hurt, a certain phrase popped into my mind, as it has many dozens of times over the years.
“Check this shit out motherfucker…”
After that I went inside and read that Mike Fossey had died a few days before Christmas and a couple weeks after his 35th birthday.
I cried for a minute or two and then started laughing. It’s such a strange feeling finding out someone is gone then spending the next couple of hours howling at their old posts.
There aren’t many people who that could apply to but Fossey was indeed one of them. You’ll find hundreds or thousands of others writing something to that effect on Twitter or Bluesky right now. Mike F – who grew up just down the street from me here in Concord, MA – was without hyperbole one of the funniest people I, or most of us, ever knew, whether it was in real life or simply through his iconic Superman-avatar online persona. He was one of the best to ever do it, many are saying.
“His posts brought me much joy over the years,” the journalist Mike Isaac wrote when I shared the news of his passing. "’its not clear what move i was trying to do’ has rattled in my head for a decade.”
“Mike was one of the guys laying the framework for what good jokes would look like in a novel format with a strict character limit,” John Darnielle said.
It’s hard to write about joke posts and the people who make them without coming off as overly serious or spoiling the whole point— as a lot of people learned writing about “Weird Twitter” back in its heyday—but Fossey was a luminary in the golden age of Twitter in the 2010s, up there alongside the likes of Dril and others, that we got to watch invent the form in real time.
The thing about a sense of humor is that it is learned and shared.
Sometimes part of the appeal is how many people remain unable to pick up on the joke. Probably his most famous post was this one about a hot dog. The kind of tweet that was shared widely all over, to the delight or anger of many.
This is a load-bearing feminist post, someone commented earlier.
This one, too.
Fossey was never as overtly political as a lot of his peers (and most of us everywhere) have become online. But a clear political sensibility was there, underneath the silliness.
But more than that, there was the poetic manipulation of language. The way someone like, say, Tim Robinson, speaks a phrase weird and it overwrites how you think about it forever. This is one of those for me:
Insanely surpassed. A phrase I don’t think anyone had ever uttered before but now it’s locked in our heads forever.
I don’t know that I’ve had an Arnold Palmer in many years either without thinking about this one:
Or seen a news story about a drug bust without remembering this:
“It feels kind of wrong, like to the point of feeling embarrassing, to talk about Posting as a writing form, but it really is a type of writing, and the shape and style of a joke-post is its own thing,” Flaming Hydra David Roth said.
“Mike Fossey's posts were so obviously on point in that regard. They're funny, of course, but the economy of how he wrote—creating a little scene, establishing characters in it, using a few details to shade it and make it funnier—was real writing. That wasn't the point, I sense, I think the point was to be funny, and he was funny. But he was also legitimately a master of this weird type of writing. You don't have any room to spare with the character count and all that, and he didn't waste anything. He was one of the greats at doing whatever this is.”
“After spending so much of my life ‘online’ it can be easy to ask ‘what’s the point?’” comedian Mike Ginn, a friend of Fossey’s, who called him “my windmill slam pick for the funniest poster of all-time,” told me.
“I think the point is you get to make friends like Mike F. To connect with people across the country or world who you resonate with on some deep personal frequency. He’s hilarious, wonderful, and I’ll miss him forever.”
You could call him a jokes craftsman, and that would be accurate, but he was also a regular craftsman as well. A woodworker and artisan and in recent years a signmaker around the Boston area for some big projects, not to mention a fine photographer, as you can see on his Instagram.
I just went to look and noticed this at the top, which punched me in the gut.
Rest in peace too to Kaleb Horton. Another great and funny writer and poster we lost way too young. I am so sick of writing eulogies this year.
Aside from the gags he would often share images of the cabinets and tables and such he was working on, both for his job and for his family and friends. As much as I might regularly read his jokes and think I wish I could be that funny, it was truly admirable that he also had this real world talent as well. Something tangible to go along with the ineffable.
I wasn’t super close with Mike. We were buddies online in the way that people are, although I got the chance to meet him a couple times. I remember the first, maybe eight or so years ago, meeting up at a concert in Harvard Square. He was sweet and funny in person, too, and we walked around the corner to smoke a joint. I remember being sincerely kind of nervous about it, worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up. That I wasn’t going to be funny enough. Like I was hanging out with a beloved famous comedian or something. Which is what he was, in fact.
Sadly, like many of the best, a number of Fossey’s original Twitter accounts were suspended over the years and have since been mostly lost to time. Luckily a lot of people have kept screenshots of some of their favorites saved elsewhere. Here are a few of the best.
christmas is kind of like if for 1/6 of the year everyone got really into ska and started wearing the fedoras and checkered clothing and they only played ska music in stores that the employees clearly weren’t enjoying and everything was just ska themed for a while and one day someone eagerly asks you what ska you’re listening to and when you tell them you’re not doing the whole ska thing for the tenth time in a row its like a 50/50 chance that their face suddenly falls deathly serious and they say “are you one of those people who thinks all orphans should be drowned in boiling shit?” or they chuckle and squint at you and say “oh yeah you must be one of those people that listens to pop punk! Its kinda like a weird, different ska I guess! I am going to a ska concert later today if you wanna come along and see how awesome ska is, as enforced by the ephemeral force of enjoying ska instilled in all moral beings!” and this has been going on for so long that all the ska music is just people saying “pick it up” over and over again and plastering everything in checker patterns and theres a whole wave of people who think everyone has forgotten how to really enjoy ska but they actually just want an older version of the artificially enforced ska mania everyone is having and they made a book and several movies called “the man who did not like ska” about a disgusting evil spinach creature that hated everything and ate broken glass every day who learns basic empathy after hearing an upstrummed guitar for the first time.
I’ve been meaning to write about this interesting essay by Michael Green, about how the poverty line could be pegged at $140,000 per year, if we’re talking about what he calls “the cost of participation” in contemporary American life.
Some of the claims in the essay are hyperbolic, and it was largely derided by the green eyeshade battalions of the dismal science, but it nevertheless struck a nerve for good reasons. For example:
Critics will immediately argue that I’m cherry-picking expensive cities. They will say $136,500 is a number for San Francisco or Manhattan, not “Real America.”
So let’s look at “Real America.”
The model above allocates $23,267 per year for housing. That breaks down to $1,938 per month. This is the number that serious economists use to tell you that you’re doing fine.
In my last piece, Are You An American?, I analyzed a modest “starter home” which turned out to be in Caldwell, New Jersey—the kind of place a Teamster could afford in 1955. I went to Zillow to see what it costs to live in that same town if you don’t have a down payment and are forced to rent.
There are exactly seven 2-bedroom+ units available in the entire town. The cheapest one rents for $2,715 per month.
That’s a $777 monthly gap between the model and reality. That’s $9,300 a year in post-tax money. To cover that gap, you need to earn an additional $12,000 to $13,000 in gross salary.
So when I say the real poverty line is $140,000, I’m being conservative. I’m using optimistic, national-average housing assumptions. If we plug in the actual cost of living in the zip codes where the jobs are—where rent is $2,700, not $1,900—the threshold pushes past $160,000.
The market isn’t just expensive; it’s broken. Seven units available in a town of thousands? That isn’t a market. That’s a shortage masquerading as an auction.
And that $2,715 rent check buys you zero equity. In the 1950s, the monthly housing cost was a forced savings account that built generational wealth. Today, it’s a subscription fee for a roof. You are paying a premium to stand still.
Green emphasizes that for couples with young children, childcare costs are a devastating addition to household budget. For many people in their 20s and 30s, this means “choosing” to be childless, because it feels fundamentally unaffordable. This of course helps explain why the birth rate has been cratering for decades — it’s now quite literally half of what it was when I was born at the peak of the baby boom. And the birth rate in the US is still a lot higher than in much of the developed world, The worst situation, not surprisingly, is in countries that still have strongly patriarchal traditional cultures, i.e., women are expected to do all childcare and other domestic labor, but where women also now have a certain degree of economic and social freedom. In places like South Korea, the consequence of that combination is a total fertility rate of less than one — a completely unprecedented situation in all of recorded history, and no doubt in the entire history of the species, or otherwise we wouldn’t be here to blog about it.
The Times had a piece today (gift link) that used Green’s essay as a jumping off point. The basic economic problems here are well known: the cost of housing, of childcare, of health care, and of higher education. These things are all central to any concept of a middle class lifestyle. Of course another big factor in all this are changing standards of what’s considered an acceptable version of such a lifestyle:
Mr. Thurston, from Philadelphia, said he wanted children. But right now, he and his partner must climb three floors to their rental apartment. Their car is a two-door “death trap.”
His salary, about $90,000, would need to cover student loans and child care. He also wants to live in a good school district and pay for extras, like music lessons and sports leagues.
“I know you don’t need those things,” he said, “but as a parent, my job is to set my child up for success.”
Even for those who own a home, the thought of children can be daunting. Stephen Vincent, 30, and his partner, Brittany Robenault, a lab technician, first went to community college to save money. Then, he said, they “ate beans and rice” for several years to save for a down payment.
Now an analyst for a chemical company with a household income of about $150,000, he likes his lifestyle in Hamburg, Pa., and wants to keep it.
“We live in the richest country in the history of human civilization, so why can’t I eat out twice a week and have kids?” he said.
To the skeptics who say these trade-offs are simply lifestyle choices, there was a rejoinder: Hey, you try it.
“It’s very easy from a place of wealth and privilege to say, ‘You should be happy with something more modest,’” Mr. Thurston said.
But, he said, “it would kind of suck to live that way.”
Alicia Wrigley is grappling with the trade-offs. Ms. Wrigley and her husband, Richard Gailey, both musicians and teachers, own a two-bedroom bungalow in Salt Lake City and feel lucky to have it — they say they could not afford it now. But juggling in-home music lessons with their 2-year-old’s needs can feel like a squeeze. They want another child, but wonder how it would all work.
“I know it’s possible,” she said, looking through the window at her next-door neighbor’s house, which is exactly the same size.
That neighbor raised six children there in the 1970s. One way mothers then would cope, Ms. Wrigley said, was to “turn their kids out all day, and they’d just run around the neighborhood.”
She said she would not do that today, not least because someone might report her.
“The world,” she said, “is fundamentally different now.”
This is reminds me obliquely of a passage in The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell’s study of life in a mining town in northern England in the mid-1930s. Orwell is interviewing a family of eight living in a four-room house (I would guess this would probably be in the neighborhood of 800 square feet or so), and he asks them when they became aware of the housing crisis. “When we were told of it,” is the reply.
. . . commenter Felix D’s question about this passage led me to look it up, and it’s somewhat different than I recalled, but the gist is the same:
Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortage first
became acute in his district; he answered, 'When we were told about it',
meaning that till recently people's standards were so low that they took
almost any degree of overcrowding for granted. He added that when he was
a child his family had slept eleven in a room and thought nothing of it,
and that later, when he was grown-up, he and his wife had lived in one
of the old-style back to back houses in which you not only had to walk a
couple of hundred yards to the lavatory but often had to wait in a queue
when you got there, the lavatory being shared by thirty-six people. And
when his wife was sick with the illness that killed her, she still had
to make that two hundred yards' journey to the lavatory. This, he said,
was the kind of thing people would put up with 'till they were told
about it'.
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