Baginas of Dissatisfaction

Hello, friends. Welcome to Wut., a blog about sentences. Like you, I experience loads of sentences and sentence-like word-globs good, bad, and berserk every day: from my toddler, the group chat, spam texts (too many of them lately invite me over for either pinot noir or night swimming*), coworkers, competitive parents at daycare drop-off, Cigna customer service, AI-generated PR emails, world leaders, alpha male influencers, books, magazines, writers I edit, people on the streets and subways of New York City, aunts.

A few are memorable, for their beauty, economy, weirdness, wrongness, insanity. My favorite sentence of 2022 was nine words turned into five sentences. While I was pushing my daughter up Broadway in a stroller at 7:30 one Sunday morning last summer, an older gentleman passing by looked at my gym shorts and said:

Put some pants. On those. God. Damn. Chicken legs.

He was right. I’ve skipped leg day most days of my life. And of the trillions of possible ways he could have communicated that in nine words, he found the most perfect string. A memorable sentence is like a pool of water in a moon crater you can swim in for a while before floating back to Earth. A memorable sentence pulls you out of the sludge of whatever you were in the middle of and slaps you awake to the immeasurable gift of being alive.

So that’s what I’m going to try here, to share with you the sentences that make me go, Wut. Each week, I’ll collect them as I read, hear, or overhear them. To be clear, I’m making no judgment on their rightness or wisdom, nor am I advising that you recite them in polite company — I’m only documenting that they have a charge. On Friday mornings, I’ll scramble 10 or so into a kind of crowdsourced poem. Beyond saying a few words about one of them if the spirit moves me, I’ll leave them be on their own. (I’ll list the source for each at the bottom.)

This is part trying to make a wee bit of sense of the billion bits of information flittering by us each week, and mostly about sharing a little joy before the weekend. Thanks, and enjoy!

—Zak

Sept. 29, 2023: Baginas of Dissatisfaction

What is the only thing about buildings?
What if we understood that boys are born into a destiny, not a pathology?
What’s better than tears to make a girl ready to hear she can be beautiful?

Have I told you about my dopamine stacking day? Yeah, I only drink coffee on Mondays. I only eat pizza on Mondays. I do my long runs on Mondays. I don’t get the Sunday scaries any more, because now I get psyched about Mondays.

For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don’t like, babies who throw up on you again and again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they’re babies.

Don’t let the bagina drive the bus.
That’s YOUR problem, Stan. I can’t worry about THAT. I’m gonna die.

Technology imperiously commandeers our most important terminology. It redefines “freedom,” “truth,” “intelligence,” “fact,” “wisdom,” “memory,” “history”—all the words we live by. And it does not pause to tell us and we no not pause to ask.

The city is squirting ice cream trucks out of its tits tonight.
Am I to entertain your ballad of dissatisfaction, or is there actually something going on?
Bitch, you don’t tell me dick!

Sources

My toddler; Caitlin Flanagan, “In Praise of Heroic Masculinity,” The Atlantic; Don Draper, Mad Men, Season 2; a buff redheaded 30-something man inside the framing store; Hilton Als, White Girls; my toddler; a middle-aged woman in Central Park; Neil Postman, Technopoly; an unnamed person I live with; Lane Pryce, Mad Men, Season 3; a middle-aged man on the phone waiting outside Mama’s Too pizza.