Free The Postmortal by Drew Magary

go to this weekend. It’s just decision after decision after decision, from trivial crap to really important things. By the end of the day, I’m mush. I don’t even eat dinner because I don’t want to choose what to have. I have cereal and call it a day. And now there’s this. Big, huge decision alert. Every question I ask myself about it begets a dozen more. It’s giving me a migraine right now, and I haven’t even done anything.”
    “It has to be better than the alternative, though.”
    “Does it? I don’t know.”
    “Well, you say you’re already old. How does growing old feel so far?”
    She sighed. “It sucks .”
    “Well, now I feel somewhat better about my decision.”
    We changed the subject. Polly handed me a plate of cold roast beef and corn off the cob. We talked, and I ate, and for the first time, Katy’s death moved to the back of my consciousness, if only for a moment. This is bereavement: the slow, eventual reassertion of your own meaningless preoccupations. As I ate, the look in Polly’s eyes made it clear she was still thinking about the cure. She had tried for so long to stern the tide, to avoid being overwhelmed by it. But there I was: the tsunami at her doorstep.
    DATE MODIFIED:
7/17/2019, 5:09 P.M.

DC Apparently Stands for “Don’t Come”
    I have a friend in DC who e-mailed me this in response to reports about the expanded security perimeters to accommodate protesters in Midtown:
    Dude, the security bullshit you have to deal with up there is nothing compared to what’s going on down here. The entirety of Northwest DC below M Street has been cordoned off since that girl was beaten to death for her DieStrong bracelet and the riots in Germany started. You can’t drive anywhere downtown. I’m talking about miles the hell away from the White House. And when you come up out of the Metro, there are National Guard members with loaded rifles, and their fingers on the trigger, ready to pull you aside if you look like a threat. They increased the restricted airspace above town by nearly twentyfold. If you come down on a shuttle from Boston to National, you practically have to go through Ohio. It’s insane.
    Downtown DC around the Wizards’ arena is essentially a pedestrian thoroughfare now. I have no issue with this, since people in DC can’t drive for shit , except that Metro stops can be goddamn light years away from each other. That scene you described at Penn Station? That’s every Metro station, except here the station escalators never work, so you have to haul ass up four thousand stairs before you get to emerge above ground. And the buses aren’t running. All the protesters have been forced to demonstrate on the other side of the Potomac, along the bike trail in Arlington. I saw a bunch of them trying to swim across the Potomac to get to the Mall, only to have cops pick them up in a riverboat and haul their sorry asses out of the water. One of them almost drowned in the rip currents.
    I have a friend who works on the Hill who says the Supreme Court judges will be moved to an undisclosed location to argue the California case. Lots of bomb threats.
    Fucking crazy, man. Fucking crazy.
     
    —MK
    DATE MODIFIED:
7/18/2019, 11:07 A.M.

A Blonde Everywhere I Turn
    I was walking down Third Avenue today when I spotted a woman across the street with a remarkable body and blonde hair that broke just past her shoulder blades. I turned electric. I saw a gap in traffic and sprinted across the avenue. A cab rounding from Forty-third blithely took the corner and nearly plowed into me. I kept my focus on the blonde as the driver honked three hundred times in the space of four seconds. She didn’t turn her head and kept bouncing down Third, with me trailing behind her and trying to figure out a plan before quickening my pace to identify her. I kept thirty yards behind, dodging dog walkers, tourists, and meandering hordes of the unemployed. I took out my phone and queued up the number for the