On Monday I went out to dinner at my favorite bar, which is closing. I’ve been going to this bar for more than a decade, and it’s a widely beloved place, with what the kids would call a really baller patio, if you asked “kids” roughly twenty years ago when that slang was current. It’s weird to visit a place you know you can’t visit again, and weirder still when that place is one where you’ve spent a lot of time.

I’ve been trying to think of a way to encapsulate what made this place so wonderful. In part I think it was because it felt like a place where you could just abide for a while. The aesthetics of the interior weren’t that unusual—picture a bar, but a nice one, and you’re pretty much there. But that patio felt like an escape from the real world, like a secret, lush oasis that had magically sprung up steps away from a busy street. Flowers draped over planters hanging from the beams while a water element trickled along the brick walls, and I would go out there and sit at a picnic table with friends and order nachos and drink beer and bask in warm weather, and time would pause for a little while. Doing nothing is harder than it should be, somehow, and doing nothing with friends in pleasant surroundings is probably one of the best activities available to you on this earth.

Finding a place that makes you feel this much at ease is hard. And I was there with two people I’ve known since 2002, one of whom is moving away from Boston for the foreseeable future, and it was both a really nice time, and an experience that I felt all too conscious that I had done many times before and would never be able to do again. There are so many moments in your life where you have no idea that it’ll be the last time you see a person, or the final time you taste a favorite dish at a struggling restaurant. There’s a concurrent joy and sorrow to thinking about these things as you’re living them, because you’re reminded of how hard it is to hold onto things, people, or places, even as you’re thinking about how much you love them.

I’ll miss Atwood’s, and I’ll miss my friend who’s moving away. But I’m glad we were able to raise a nacho one last time together, even if we couldn’t sit on the beautiful patio because this is Massachusetts in March and a nor’easter was brewing.

Here’s what else I’ve been getting up to lately, including reading a very good and interesting interview with a Boston Man.

What I’m Reading in Print

This week I read Frontier, by Grace Curtis. The back cover blurb name drops the TV show Firefly, which is a pretty unavoidable comparison. Like the cult Joss Whedon show of the early oughts, this is also a Western that takes place in the future and involves space travel. It’s about a space traveler who crash lands on a post-climate-change-apocalypse Earth, separated from her traveling companions and desperate to find them again in a world that deeply distrusts anything to do with space travel. It took me a minute to realize this, but the book is doing something unusual with each chapter, which is that they all tell self-contained stories that play on archetypes of Westerns. So while the lost traveler is on this Odyssean quest to reconnect with her lover and traveling companions, she also keeps popping into creative takes on all these old-style Western tropes, like the group of bandits who all betray each other, or the flawed man of god, or the sinister lawman stalking the hero.

It started a little slow, and before I fully realized where the author was going, I had a little trouble getting into it. The episodic nature of the main character’s travels could be frustrating early on when I wanted more development of the overarching plot. But this is definitely one of those times where you should have faith that the writer knows where she’s going with it, and eventually the whole thing comes together, and I loved the reveal of what was really going on with the traveler. I think the mini-narratives also got more exciting as we neared the book’s climax, which helped.

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What I’m Watching

Like many enterprising literary young people, I spotted a copy of the D.H. Lawrence classic Lady Chatterley’s Lover at my parents’ house when I was young, knew it had a lot of sex in it, and immediately read it. Because I read it so long ago, I’m a bit foggier than I’m sure many viewers of the new movie adaptation will be on the plot, but I would describe it as gorgeous and well-acted, if not totally able to capture the novel’s sense of how transformative sex is for its two main characters. Nor does it fully engage with some of the class stuff that I remember being threaded throughout their romance. But regardless of its fidelity to the source material, sometimes what you want is to watch two very attractive people who have the hots for each other, and then do very dramatic things to keep their love story alive. Life is short, watch the love stories first. This one is on Netflix, and yes, I added a cheap paperback version to the Bookshop storefront, because everyone should read one of the world’s most famously saucy books at least once in their life.

What I Watched Previously and Am Now Mad About

I really liked the first season of the TV adaptation of A League of Their Own and I’m so annoyed that Amazon is burning it off with a four episode final season. They can print money to keep building more and more expensive versions of Middle Earth, but they can’t fund a full season of this show? To put on my TV critic’s hat for a moment, I think it hadn’t totally found its way by the end of the first season—some of the plotlines worked really well, but the central plotline built around the star was a bit blah. But what was there was really promising and compelling and unusual. I’m hardly the first person to express this, but I really wish all of these streaming giants could recognize the value in letting shows find their footing and develop a loyal fanbase. For one thing, if you create the sense that nothing gets more than a single season, you’re not giving anyone much reason to invest in your shows in the first place. But also, doesn’t a customer who cares a lot about your specific programming seem like the kind you want to develop? It makes me think about that old HBO slogan: “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” Except now it’s more like, “You’re bored, and you’ll watch whatever we give you.”

What I Searched for Online This Week

• Large translucent slug in plant

• Slug in plant bad?

• How to get rid of slugs

• Slugs solitary?

• Medal of bravery for disposing of slug by yourself instead of making your roommate do it?

• Slug able to climb out of trash and into bed?

For the record, I asked my mom if slugs traveled in packs, and she said, and I quote, “No. Slugs don’t have any friends.” Harsh, but hopefully true.

What I’m listening to

Both Tidal and Spotify have stuck “Rhododendron” by Hurray for the Riff Raff on playlists for me, and you know what, they’re right. It sounds like summer.

What I’m Reading Online

OK, here it is. I don’t want to oversell it, but this is just a phenomenal interview with Ben Affleck. The questions are good, but also he’s funny, and interesting, and has a lot of insight on what it’s been like for him to make movies for decades. He name drops, he gossips, he’s unexpectedly honest about which movies suck. Cannot recommend highly enough spending 15 minutes of your day catching up with the guy.

If you’re Of a Certain Age, you probably watched Ana Gasteyer on SNL. She’s now starring in a Peacock show, American Auto, about a woman who knows nothing about cars but becomes CEO of a traditional American car maker. It’s pretty good! It’s also extremely cringey in a way I find difficult to handle in large doses, because they’re all constantly making horrifying mistakes and you’re in a perpetual state of waiting for it to blow up in their faces. But also it’s funny? I haven’t seen a traditional sitcom about corporate life in forever, so there’s something oddly retro about the whole endeavor. Here’s a good interview about what Gasteyer has been up to since leaving SNL (did you remember that she was one of only three female cast members at the time? I bet you can name the other two), and why it took so long for her to lead her own show. What was auditioning like in the years in between? “There were a lot of wives. A lot of wives.”

I think it’ll actually clear up your skin and cure your insomnia to watch a video of the Oscar-nominated actor Paul Mescal sharing a video of Olivia Rodrigo saying happy birthday to his young co-star in Aftersun.

Somehow I watched this entire 47 second video of goats eating tomatoes out of a wheelbarrow and I bet you will too.

Two different people sent me this news clip about how the city of Newark formed a sister city partnership with a city that does not exist.

I didn’t watch the Oscars this year, or rather I watched bits of the Oscars silently on a TV in a bar during a concert, which is perhaps not the ideal way to appreciate the tearful speeches. I did, however, read some interesting things about it. This great piece by Isaac Butler explores the flaws of the gendered acting categories, such as the fact that they leave trans and non-binary actors without options. But also, the very types of performances that end up honored skew into a certain stereotypical performance of gender: “Men rant, women cry.”

If you’re someone who gets into the strategy of it all, I enjoyed this Vulture piece about how inevitable Everything Everywhere All At Once’s best picture win ultimately was. I liked the movie, but I also appreciated this measured critique of it.

And finally, having not watched the ceremony, I can’t say for sure if something funnier happened during the broadcast, but by far the funniest thing I saw associated with it was a hilariously and inexplicably horny tweet from the Associated Press, which saw fit to declare, as it shared its writeup of some after party, “Michelle Yeoh and Angela Bassett locked in a long embrace, their bare, muscle-bound arms wrapped around each other.” Unsurprisingly, this tweet did some numbers until the org swiftly deleted it and replaced it with the opaque excuse that it “contained awkward wording and lacked context.” For shame, AP. Let’s not criticize the writing of the tweet, which was evocative, if nothing else. And what additional context did we need? They did hug; they’re both impressively fit. Don’t be embarrassed by your (horny) description of their respective admirable physiques. To paraphrase the many people responding to the confusing explanation tweet: Bring it back, you cowards.

May you have a good week; may your muscle-bound arms find only success in their endeavors.