Timothy McSweeney Patiently Waits for the CVS Clerk to Unlock the Deodorant Cabinet
Hello and welcome to the twenty-eighth edition of McSweeney’s Internet Substackency, the Substack of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a humor and satire website run by McSweeney’s Publishing.
Remember blogs? Suppose they’re still around in various shapes and forms (including this very form), but back in the early-to-mid-aughts, they were everywhere. That was the golden days of blogs. Everyone had one. With a simple press of the PUBLISH button, your words were put out onto the informational superhighway for all to see. No longer was your writing relegated to your journals or customer comment cards at Applebees. It was thrilling. Sometimes, you would get as many as six or seven readers a week.
One annoying thing about them, though, was that many bloggers overshared, particularly when it came to having a cold. Worse yet, the posts about their sickness were boring and bland. “I have a sore throat, it sucks," or “I’m full of phlegm; here are 2000 words about my expectorant.”
For some reason, many of the bloggers we read were oblivious to the fact that no one wanted to hear about their colds. Listen, it’s a bummer you’re sick, but please soldier on and write about something else. Like that time when you were 13, and the guy you had a crush on was caught shoplifting a Bon Jovi album at Sam Goody, and you couldn’t decide if you were more disappointed in him being a thief or a Bon Jovi fan. That’s why six or seven people flock to your blog every week, not to read about how lousy your nasal cavity feels or whatever, but to learn about your tragic youth.
This is all to say that we have had the flu since Sunday, but we are powering through and will spare you the details.
Alright, on with the links…
LADY MACBETH
Out, damned spot, out, I say! All the
Perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this
Carpet. T’was I cleaned up the last one. Methinks
I shall feign walking in my sleep—to bed,
To bed! Yet who would have thought Graymalkin
to have had so much puke in him?
Enter Macbeth
MACBETH
This is a sorry sight.
LADY MACBETH
Can’t hear you—sleepwalking.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…
We loved the location, the fourteen-foot ceilings, the exposed brick, the historic pre-labor-law building. But the more modern additions were intolerably bourgeois. This space was not meant to be a luxury condo; it was meant to be a vehicle for ruthlessly extracting wealth from the sweat of the proletariat. So, determined to bring a little authenticity back to the neighborhood, we rolled up our sleeves and paid someone else to get to work.
Read the rest of this beautiful story of real estate, renovation, and child labor.
A WORD OR TWO FROM OUR STORE…
DAVE EGGERS SILKSCREEN PRINTS TO BENEFIT THE NEW INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF YOUTH WRITING.
In November, we opened the International Library of Youth Writing. The library features books written by young people from all over the world, and collects all the publications created by 826 Valencia and its sixty sister centers across the globe.
The library started as a pop-up, but now will be expanding and will soon fill most of the space at 849 Valencia Street in San Francisco. To help cover the costs of that expansion, we’re offering a series of prints by Dave Eggers. All of these prints were hand-pulled by Eggers in the new printmaking studio in the basement of the same building—849 Valencia. All proceeds go to the library. We will be adding more over time, at irregular and seemingly random intervals.
To see all currently available prints, click here.
Customers only care about one thing: barely functioning AI crammed into every facet of their lives. We all know this. That’s why anybody who’s anybody has slapped AI onto their product. AI phone, AI refrigerator, AI stick. If it doesn’t have AI, what the fuck are we even doing?
And here’s this week’s BLAST FROM THE PAST, a classic Tendency piece from our archives…
Let us pray…
Our father, who art holed up in the bedroom for the past 36 hours with the infernal suffering of a “godforsaken infliction,” I am definitely cursing thy name.
Thy man-cold come, nothing will be done on any of the housework while he whimpers and whines and acts like he’s the only one in this family who’s ever had a cold. Mother of God.
Thanks for reading. Subscribe for free to get new posts. We promise this newsletter will be as non-invasive as possible. It will arrive in your electronic inbox gently and with very little fanfare, no more than once or twice a week.
If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.
And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.