#EGGY 4CHAN MOVIE#
#EGGY 4CHAN SERIES#
#EGGY 4CHAN TV#

I was an only child, a former fat kid, son of a dental nurse named Kimberly who ran an Etsy side hustle making customized wedding‑cake toppers out of modeling clay. When the blazered Oxford boys heard I was from Colorado, some enthusiastically mentioned their trips to Aspen or Vail, or the less informed would mention the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, and I’d smile vaguely and change the subject because I knew it would embarrass them to learn that I was poor enough that I’d never strapped my feet into skis and hadn’t even managed a road trip to Arizona. If I could offer you a defining image of my adolescence, it would look like this: I’m lying on my bed with the flat screen blaring downstairs and the little Morrissey who lives in my head is plaintively singing: “And when you want to live, how do you start?” In truth, my hometown was Broomfield, Colorado, a newish agglomeration of prefab‑looking housing developments squatting on flat, treeless land in a zone that was neither Denver nor Boulder and was distinguished by nothing but its in‑betweenness. With strangers, I usually went along with this, murmuring the lie “London” with a diffident smile when a cashier or barista asked where I was from. In my first months in Manhattan, then, I was frequently mistaken for an English expat. After Dartmouth, second‑least impressive of the Ivies, I’d been anxious enough to delay adulthood as to spend a final school year at Oxford, where my voice became inflected with the rounded vowels of moneyed English youth-the same youth who had ribbed me, paid attention to me, and even kind of fetishized me for being a bloody Yank. That November, though, I was newly arrived in the city, with few friends, or at least nobody with whom I wanted to eat either turkey or birthday cake. This is how it goes, I guess, that people who were once more real to you than life itself eventually come to feel like stock photo models in a collection of well‑framed shots imprinted on your once impressionable brain.

#EGGY 4CHAN MOVIE#

My pitiful twenty‑third birthday and the Technicolored year that followed-that color‑saturated, richly lit time of the two of them, Paula and Jason, my twin movie stars who for a moment were truly nothing less than my life-it all seems now to have happened on some discontinued film stock. By which I mean about a thousand, because back then I had of course zero idea that we were in the Before times. Names now, more than a decade later, half‑forgotten in a world too tyrannized by the present to have time for history. Later, Zara would say in her deadly deadpan that the good ones had all peaced out because they knew what was coming: Prince, Bowie, Muhammad Ali.

#EGGY 4CHAN SERIES#

The incoming president was the executive producer of The America Show, barreling faster toward the series finale, and the ratings would be great.

#EGGY 4CHAN TV#

Ahead lay the grotesquerie of the reality star who’d soon be eating McDonald’s and watching TV in the White House.

The sky had a passive‑aggressive quality, bruised clouds withholding their light while telling you they were fine, not to worry about them, they knew you didn’t really care anyway. It was the weekend before Thanksgiving, the end of the nothing month of November, and I remember raininess, a vague and unremitting overlay of pathetic fallacy. I’d hoped that being alone might feel sort of heroic, or at least dignified. I’d convinced myself that this stoically miserable total nonevent was preferable to drinks with a few people mustering faint cries of “Happy birthday!” or, God forbid, trying to sing the song-always too slow, always going on longer than anyone wanted, particularly when groaning toward that final protracted lift on the first syllable of the penultimate birthday. Toward the garish end of 2016, the year our idols died, I turned twenty‑three alone, failing to read a book in the dim eggy light of a deserted Chinatown bar. There’s something kind of gratifying about a really bad birthday.

Eggy 4chan