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by jayess 3523 days ago
"I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears. Grocery shopping is a multisensory living nightmare."

This kind of writing is insufferable.

4 comments

My favorite is when he talks about his enlightened post-kitchen lifestyle.

"I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it. My home is a place of peace. I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber."

Did this dude just leave the stove on all the time and keep the knives pointed up next to the fridge or something?

Yeah, so presumptuous of the architect to assume he'd want a kitchen. I'll bet this architect also dared to assume he'd want a toilet.
I think when we get intensely focused and emotionally invested, we tend to think our work is the answer to the world's problems and every other way of doing things is flawed.

For instance, Sergey Brin claiming Google Glass would prevent the "emasculating" effect of smart phones....[1]

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/28/tech/innovation/brin-google-gl...

Now included with Soylent: antimatter suppositories! Never use the toilet again!
Looks clear now however that opting for the toilet was a prescient move.
You just have to read it in the voice of a stage actor clearly overdoing it on a dramatic soliloquy. Not sure if you're into comedians, but Paul F. Tompkins does this pretty frequently and well.

That said, it's still insufferable, just mildly entertaining as well.

This reminds me of the "Rails is Omakase" video ripping on DHH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E99FnoYqoII
It doesn't even have decent scansion tho.
Not everyone wants to read through life like Nathan Lane.
Or Jon Lovitz.

"Acting!"

Good Lord. Anybody using the word "nevermore" outside of a discussion of Poe is 99% likely to be someone I won't get along with.
Hey, and when writers of newyorker.com do it, it is called "fantastic journalism"…
You seriously can't dustinguish between his writing and that of in the New Yorker?