Paul Gadzikowski's The Hero of Three Faces

For me, it's because, as a child, I was incredibly cranky, and as soon as caffeine-free Coke was introduced, Mom had me start drinking that, and, hey, I got a lot less crabby, so that made me want to avoid caffeine. I also never really cared for the smell of coffee, either, so had absolutely no interest in drinking even decaf.

I didn't drink much coffee during my years in the Coast Guard, despite being in the middle of the Bering Sea in the coldest months of the year, because:

US Military-issued coffee is swill.

I had undiagnosed acid reflux, and coffee kicked it into high gear.

If I weren't on GERD medication now, I would not be drinking coffee. Or fruit juice. Or eating fresh fruit. Or any number of other things.

At which point they will find an ovarian cyst, but they now get whatever fucked up satisfaction they derive out of proving you wrong, because you didn't believe it could a cyst at all, but guess what? They did find a cyst! It's such a good thing you didn't listen to your intuition and came to them to verify your lay diagnosis from that third party! Bonus? Doctor doesn't have to feel like they look stupid in front of a patient, which is really what all this is about. Not your health, why would you think your medical diagnosis is about your health? It's obviously about a doctor's potential ego.

And apparently this works. Apparently you just need to be able to always play 4D chess with your medical professionals in order to find an avenue of advocating for yourself and getting you medical needs met. Isn't that great?

And some years before that, King had gone to school with a couple of girls he pseudonymously calls Tina and Sandra, who were bullied and shunned by the other kids—Tina for wearing the same clothes every day, Sandra for her epilepsy and extremely religious mother, but both really for having some undefinable Other quality that kids pick up on like blood in the water. Both of them were dead by the time King began writing Carrie: Tina by suicide, Sandra from her epilepsy.

Carrie was what King imagined might have happened if that explanation of poltergeist activity were correct, and if Tina and Sandra had been able to tap into such an energy. He started writing the story a few years after getting married (his wife Tabitha is also a writer), but abandoned the idea a few pages in; the raw, merciless adolescent cruelty the story called for was too much to deal with, and what did he know about teenage girls, anyway? But Tabitha dug the pages out of the trash and read them, and convinced him it was a story that needed telling.

Carrie is a story which, perhaps like poltergeist activity, could only happen to a girl on the brink of womanhood, when every emotion and sensation is excruciatingly vivid and nothing makes sense anymore and every single occurrence in your life is the most important thing that will ever happen to you. It's about being horribly powerful and vulnerable at the same time, and alienated from your own body. It's about the visceral, starved animal fear and rage of being a teenage girl, and it goes to show what an arcane and powerful craft creative writing is that a man could manage to capture that without having experienced it firsthand.

Years later, I tried again with Bluesky and found it easy, which one might construe as a sign that I've become a better editor, but no – I've compared, and while I can reliably get my present Tumblr posts down to 300 characters (albeit often with pretty vicious cuts), I still can't do 280.

“A man once asked me – it is true that it was at the end of a very good dinner, and the compliment conveyed may have been due to that circumstance – how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘I shouldn’t have expected a woman [meaning me] to have been able to make it so convincing.’ I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.”

The FDA has upgraded an egg recall issued last month to “Class I,” its highest risk level, as it warns the public that consuming the products could cause “serious adverse health consequences or death.”

The recall of 1,589,577 dozen white-shell eggs and brown cage-free shell eggs was initially issued by Midwest Poultry Services in late July, which warned they might be contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis.

According to the company, the eggs were produced and distributed from farms in Texas between June 6 and July 3 and have sell-by or best-by dates between July 20 and August 17. The recalled egg cartons have either the code P-1950 or 0840962 and Julian Dates between 157-184.

source: X