Monthly Archives: May 2025

What is this thing called lunch?

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I am in an abusive relationship with a food truck. Okay, that’s not completely true. It’s not fully abusive. I don’t want to cheapen that word, but what is it when you are in a relationship, and you have a good thing going, and the food truck simply will not text you back? What is going on with the food truck? Doesn’t the food truck recognize that you have something special? 

I am of course referring to the El Peyo food truck that exists sometimes at the entrance of a decommissioned car wash behind the Valero gas station, approximately two klicks from my office. At some point in T’s relentless campaign of doom he warned that if Biden got elected we would have food trucks on every corner. I am still awaiting that horrible, wonderful prediction. 

First, some service journalism: if you’re driving through the Land of Progress and need the specific intersection of said food truck, hit me up. 

Moving on, the food is wonderful. Obviously? Twelve dollars and the best burrito in town since that place next to the Mazda dealership closed. What makes this burrito special is that they fry it just a little bit after wrapping everything up in its little portable poncho, so that the exterior gets wonderfully crisp. This is combined with their sinus-clearing orange salsa and a little side of sliced cucumbers. So innocent! So refreshing! 

But they’re not always there. After becoming slightly infatuated (I am not obsessed), I have finally learned that they aren’t there on Mondays. Fine. My doctor says I need a burrito break anyway. But sometimes they aren’t there on Tuesdays. And then, one day they weren’t there on a Friday, and then last Wednesday evening when I drove by on a lark because the kids were gone and I needed a quick bite, so why not treat myself? Not there. The unpredictability is what makes it so psychologically damaging. Sometimes they are there and open, and it’s wonderful, but randomly they are not, and I am left to U-turn in the parking lot and come up with a Plan B, which is another word for disappointment. I suppose I could just ask them when they’re open and when they’re not, if there is any kind of schedule, but that seems pushy, and when they are open, we have such a lovely time. I pay in cash and they call me “boss.” One lesson of middle age is that I love it when strangers, out of a sense of politeness or joie de vivre, call me “boss.” I had a lady call me “sugar” last week for no reason at all. I mean, I was about to buy a pizza, but “sir” or “mister” or “jackass” or whatever would have been fine. But sugar? Good lord. I would have changed that lady’s tires.

This reminds me of the classic “hon,” which is how the waitresses at the Elite often addressed customers. The Elite was itself a classic Land of Progress restaurant downtown, now closed and boarded up, another victim of the progress. Back in the glory days men would line up on the street in their shirt sleeves to get at those rolls. Sometimes a change is not an improvement. 

Plus I think part of the problem is that the food truck isn’t simply closed. Shut. Whatever. It’s that the black-paneled trailer is completely gone. But you have to pull into the Valero gas station and wheel around the dispensers to discover that it’s not there. There’s only the pitiful remnants of the car wash and the reticulated tracks that lead your car inside, Pied Piper-like, rusted from disuse. 

They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day but lunch is the happiest. I live for lunch. I’ve already done a few hours of work. I have somewhat justified my existence. The kids are off at school. I am free briefly to pig out. And it comes without the theatrical complications of dinner. Dinner has to be made, or chosen, or you have to go to the restaurant and sit through the tiresome theater of it all. Dinner is work. Lunch is a holiday. Dinner is marriage. Lunch is a fling. I can have lunch with a friend, or I can go solo and try to catch up on all these goddamned Substacks. I can read my Henry James or listen to a podcast. Note: the burrito obsession does not comport well with Henry James. 

There are no drinks at lunch, no appetizers to decision tree, no dessert foolishness. If it’s quick, fine. Sometimes I have to get back to work. Sometimes my lunch buddy has other stuff to do. Sometimes it goes long, it’s a Friday, we’re playing hooky, we can lounge on the patio and make fun of the pick-up trucks. Dinner is getting everyone fed, but lunch is civilization. For a while whenever I proposed going to lunch with a friend I did it with the name of some jazz standard, but I would substitute the word “lunch” for “love.” So a friend would get texts such as: 

A lunch supreme? 
I can give you anything but lunch? 
There is no greater lunch? 
I fall in lunch too easily? 

This began as a way to be a smart ass over text. For some reason it pains me to communicate straight. But as time went on and I ran out of standards I realized I did find lunch to be a form of love, comradeship, communion, the mutual breaking of bread, pick your Platonic euphemism. But of course, we don’t acknowledge that. If we did, it would break the spell. It’s nothing special. It’s just lunch. The important exchanges are like turtles, startled into the creek if confronted head on. We must lunch with our gaze averted. 

Now I’m hungry. But it’s a Monday, and I know my lover isn’t there.

Does the short story live in disguise?

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The Republic of Letters published two pieces this week about the short story. In the first, Clancy Steadwell argues that Substack is the perfect environment for the short story to thrive and even grow in popularity. I appreciate his optimism but I found it naive. Writers have been arguing my whole life that “now” is the true moment for the short story because of shorter attention spans. This seems to be wishful thinking.

In the second, Naomi Kanakia argues that the short story is a dead form, and if you see any leftover zombie tales wandering around the internet or your bookshelf, you should promptly kill them. Her essay bothered me so much I spat out a little contradictory Substack note:

Everyone’s worried about AI, but this right here is actual artificial intelligence: trolling in place of argument, “vibes” instead of thinking. At least B.R. Myers, in his Atlantic screeds of yesteryear, had the decency to quote from the writing he was disparaging. The corrosive populist spite on display here is stunning. It seeps into the argumentative gears, and the whole engine of coherence breaks down.

It’s essentially arguing that the only art forms that should exist are the ones that are currently popular and can fund themselves. In effect, there should be no more ballet classes for the kiddos out there, because ballet isn’t a popular activity anymore and I don’t like it. And it shouldn’t be included in university education anymore either because that’s a waste of good old taxpayer money. God forbid the institutions that were built to study and preserve all the valuable stuff that the dead people made actually devote one little basement office somewhere to let the currently alive students make art themselves.

There’s an interesting idea in here — that the short story lives in disguise, that we are surrounded by short narratives but they are presented without the costuming of the traditional short story, whatever that actually is. But along the way Kanakia walks around the block to kick the shins of The Missouri Review. What? Yeah, Speer Morgan was just cackling to himself on his way to the bank for all those years. Fleecing the American people with short fiction! Those rubes, who thought they were supporting art. And those chump kids, who believed in it.

There’s more to say here, but in a calmer register. Kanakia recommends the advice letters in Slate as more rewarding literature than the “literary short story.” Her argument is that these letters are most likely actually fictional, and that we are surrounded by short narratives that are truly popular and are not shackled by the chains of tradition and obsolescent gesture.

I agree with her that we are surrounded by short narratives, but it’s much more complicated than she lets on. I take her point that many of them are likely fictional or at least highly embellished. I think there’s an important distinction between writing that is presented to be rigorously factual, writing that is presented to be completely fictional, and a sort of gray area, a demilitarized zone of Tall Tales, which all the adults can admit that there’s a perhaps a little bit of editorial fibbing occurring. I’m not totally naive. Also, it’s worth noting that Slate, as a going concern, seems to survive on this chum-like content, faux-confession exploitation. At some point it turned into a site that primarily consists of advice letters and sex tips.

I would argue that the reader approaches a non-fictional piece differently than a fictional piece. For instance, you watch a movie to empathize with the characters; you watch a reality show in order to judge the characters. Even if you understand that a reality show is highly edited and manipulated, there is something about the people presenting themselves as themselves that invites judgment rather than empathy. I don’t know why that is. Phoebe Maltz Bovy has written eloquently on this question.

So while the advice letters in Slate or the AITA posts on Reddit are shaped as first-person narratives, they are presented as real, not as fictional, even though their veracity is unprovable and highly suspect. Since they are presented as factual, readers don’t approach them as art as Kanakia claims to do. They approach them as entertainment. This is not a bad thing. It’s just a different mode. Perhaps, decades hence, Houghton Mifflin will publish a Best American collection of AITA posts. Perhaps their artistic merit will be discovered by the scholars of the future.

So if the short story lives in disguise, it’s disguised so well that it’s become something entirely different. And perhaps that’s the way it should be. Perhaps it’s impossible to know what will be worth preserving in the future, so writing to some old masterwork criteria is a lost cause. What we call literature is a library of exceptions, the texts that persisted.

Kanakia ends her post making a point about Chekhov and how he published some 300 humorous pieces before he wrote his famous short stories. It’s a useful reminder, but still, we don’t read those. We read his short stories.