Fall has entered the chat. It’s good! I have been looking forward to it since at least July. I’ve been fire-pitting, I’ve been making and eating cozy foods, and I’ve been wearing high-end sweatpants.
On my birthday – in a cleansing burst of synchronicity (bonus points if you get that deep cut) – I discovered that Shetland had returned to Amazon Prime via the Britbox channel. OH SHIT I yelled loud enough to startle my husband.
By all reasonable measures, Shetland should feel depressing and disturbing. You’ve got a town of about 7,000 people stuck on a subarctic archipelago and what seems like an AWFUL lot of murders for such a small and allegedly peaceful place. But every time I hear the mournful opening notes of the theme song and see a falling-down croft perched on what must be, most of the year, the coldest and windiest outcropping of inhospitable rock in the known world, I WANT TO GO TO THERE.
This season, the will-they, won’t-they of DI Jimmy Perez and his Irish nurse friend whose name I don’t remember or care about is a bit tedious, and the tertiary Billy and Sandy are more props than characters (we shall not even mention DS McIntosh getting blown out of a caravan by enough explosives to level a strip mall and escaping with nary a scratch), but nevertheless I cannot wait for each windswept episode to wrap me in DI Perez’ ever-present pea coat and deposit unintelligible Scottish utterances directly into my veins.
We also tried to watch a very terrible Amazon original called The Terminal List with Chris Pratt. Not only is The Worst Chris In Hollywood not very convincing in this role (or any role that is not whoever he plays in Guardians of the Galaxy, aka himself) the show is just very bad overall. If you have to watch a Hollywood Chris in this type of silly fare then please do yourself a favor and watch Chris Evans in Grey Man, which includes bonus Ryan Gosling. It’s not “good” either but it is entertaining, also please refer to the parts where I mention Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling.
There is not much else going on here. I have taken to lighting a fire on these brisk evenings and sitting down with two ounces of bourbon and a single big ice cube. I guess I’m a retired salesman now? But it seems to me as good a way as any to not engage with some of the world’s unpleasantness. In my backyard, when all the neighborhood dogs are not barking about their problems, it is all gentle breezes and crickets, and my own little dogs are snug in their beds just behind the kitchen door. I can’t really complain, and yet this is issue #193 of a complaints newsletter. We all contain multitudes.