I tie linen serviettes around my neck, a streamer, all colors: the plummed point of an artichoke leaf, Cinderella pumpkin orange, gold and cream like an ear of corn.

It was just four years before he accidentally dispatched himself from planet Earth with a suicidally reckless cocktail of Valium and vodka that Thomas Kinkade celebrated the release of his Hallmark Channel-esque biopic, Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage.

Women suffer twice as hard here. In France it’s highly common, even acceptable, to loathe mature women. You certainly don’t want to hire them.

Don’t read this essay. Print it. Seal it. Bury it in the cold ground for a hundred years. Leave it for somebody else to read a hundred years from now.