Rutledge flew in from Dallas on a Sunday night to go out to breakfast with Bezos in Seattle on Monday morning. He had signed a contract to stay with Amazon for the next three years and thought the meeting was going to be about Bezos bringing him into his inner ranks.

Instead, the meeting ended up being awkward. Bezos didn’t seem to have any real agenda, even though Rutledge had traveled far to meet with him.

Bezos had ordered an exotic meal: Mediterranean octopus prepared with potatoes, bacon, green garlic yogurt, and a poached egg. When Rutledge asked Bezos why he had decided to buy Woot, Bezos paused for “several painful seconds” before answering.

“You’re the octopus that I’m having for breakfast,” Bezos said. “When I look at the menu, you’re the thing I don’t understand, the thing I’ve never had. I must have the breakfast octopus.”

is this not horrifying to anyone else

Express a slightly left-wing opinion to summon a dude with a touhou icon who greentexts in your inbox and calls you a cuck.

I’m attracted to very weird writers and artists a lot of the time. I don’t just mean writers and artists who work with unconventional or strange subject matter, or who use unconventional or strange techniques— although I do also mean that. Nor do I just mean writers and artists who have a couple prominent eccentricities, or whose personalities are sort of large and colorful. Although I do also mean that, too— although-although, I’m not sure there are that many people involved in creative professions like fiction authoring or comic book making or singer-songwriting who aren’t eccentric and/or larger than life to a certain extent. (It’s like engineers and pedantry, or being a middle school gym teacher and having a mildly sadistic streak. They go together.)

What I mean is people who are so weird that, reading interviews about them, reading about their lives or whatever, you quickly realize that there’s probably something really off-normal about their actual, physical brains. Like, they are literally crazy in some way— not “mentally ill” necessarily, although some are. Just crazy. It doesn’t need to be a craziness that makes it difficult or impossible for the person to function in everyday life, or that makes them miserable, or that prevents them from making meaningful connections with other people. As an example, David Lynch for sure has this quality to him, but he appears to be a perfectly (albeit unconventionally) functional, very successful human being who is likely much happier in general than the average man off the street. Then again, a lot of people who fall into this category are inarguably very troubled, depressed, dysfunctional, etc. Shirley Jackson was one of those.

(Probably more extremely troubled, depressed, dysfunctional, etc. artists fall into this category than do not, but just as the type of craziness I’m talking about doesn’t have to equate to anything debilitating, neither does every severely depressed, traumatized, drug addicted, etc. etc. etc. artist have the sort of craziness I mean. There may be a lot of correlation, but they are ultimately separate categories of person– you could be in either one without being in the other be default. I wouldn’t say Dorothy Parker had it, this type of craziness, for instance, or David Foster Wallace, even though both were suicidally depressed people with other mental health problems on top of that. But Franz Kafka did have it. Edward Gorey did, too, although he was another functional and balanced sort. Tommy Wiseau does, which I think is one reason his particular brand of bad acting, writing, and filmmaking is so memorable and watchable for so many people. I’m not a Harlan Ellison fan, really, but he’s got it, too— and Stephen King definitely doesn’t. Judee Sill and Jun Togawa are some musical examples of the type of person I mean. Joanna Newsom might be. The vast, vast majority of people who get called “outsider artists” absolutely are.)

It’s funny, this category is entirely clear, if broad, in my head, but pretty much impossible to describe and delineate using words. Especially if I want to avoid going into seriously offensive territory by mistake.

…I think a part of what I’m getting at, a part of this quality that draws and fascinates me, is, I always get the sense that these are people who live in a sort of distinct translucent parallel bubble universe all their own. They can move through and interact with our world, but it’s always gonna be cast in the warp and tint of that bubble’s outer wall for them.

“Lia,” you might say, rolling your eyes, “that’s true of literally every human being. We all have our own specific, idiosyncratic personal perspectives and senses and ways of interpreting information and experiences. We can’t remove ourselves from ourselves and get rid of that bias, or see exactly how things appear through anyone else’s eyes. Nobody on Earth can do that.”

To which I’d respond, “Well, duh, but I mean, like, in an especially extreme way? A way that makes a person just a little bit obviously alien to everyone else. A way that can be hard for most other people to accept without resorting to assumptions like ’this must be a self-consciously WEIRD persona they affect for people who are expecting them to be MEGA WEIRD; nobody’s Actually Just Like That’.”

But these people Actually Are; a key part of the type of person I’m talking about here is, while they have some affectations because all people have affectations, they’re really not trying to be weird at all. At least, I don’t get that sense. They have some awareness that other people think they’re strange— although I think they often underestimate the extent of their strangeness, and the extent to which it’s remarked on by others— and they might like that, or dislike that, or not care one way or another. But the strangeness comes naturally to them, and they’d never be able to think, behave, or communicate in a non-strange manner, even if they wanted to.

I suppose part of me envies this type of person, this type of artist. Inside their soap or plastic or glass bubbles, they seem…safe, I suppose, in a way. Not safe from a lot of things, but somewhat naturally protected against at least a few aspects of life’s venal banality, or its meaninglessness, or all the conceptual lenses people are constantly trying to wedge onto one another’s brains— when these people make art, they’re not trying to force a lens over your gray matter, at least not for keeps. They’re just trying to tell you about what they see, and what they see is rare and marvelous even when it’s unpleasant or disturbing or sad (and, frankly, even when the artist themselves seems happy and well-adjusted? it very often is). And it usually coheres, in its own way. I envy that, too. Coherency, a certain sureness of perspective. A perspective strong enough that I do almost feel, for a moment, like I’ve slipped into somebody else’s snowglobe world, for real. Shake the glitter down over me, or the chips of lead paint, or the tiny white crustaceans, or whatever passes for snow here.

Then again, I think part of the draw is also, somehow, that I’m a little afraid of becoming this type of person, or of already being this type of person and not quite realizing it— but the dysfunctional variant, the kind without the skill or talent or drive to convey their perspective to others. Not that I think I’m so rare or special, just unfortunately detuned and out of sync. Isolated in my skull, or just overly aware of the isolation inherent to having a mind that can know it’s a mind. When I try to communicate, it’s like I’m spilling buckets of brine down a cement walkway, without purpose, or like I’m just parroting responses to stimulus; a neuron fired and the standard lineup of words comes out the hands, the mouth. I’m usually pretty comfortable with being a totally vapid person, but there’s a large enough germ cluster or fungal growth of non-vapidity growing somewhere in the depths of me that I get dissatisfied with it at times. I get extremely dissatisfied with it. I often feel I understand both a lot more and a lot less than I’d like to about the machinations of humanity in general, you know?

Does anyone know what I’m talking about? Anyone have thoughts? Clarifications?

Anyway, what I like is when you ( “you” as in “me”, or “a hypothetical person I imagine might feel similar to myself”, colloquial “you”) read or watch or hear something and it’s strikingly obvious right away that it is the unselfconsciously bizarre product of a really, deeply, grotesquely and beautifully unusual brain, ideally also gifted to you without much pretense or concern about whether you’ll be able to understand and follow it, whether you’ll agree or disagree with whatever you think it’s Trying To Tell You— it is what it is. Aliens walk among us and magic is almost real. Disgusting, sordid magic.

…Or, I mean, it doesn’t have to be disgusting. Maybe I just like gross shit, and that’s its whole own separate thing.

The internet has truly led to a Golden Age of jokes that are just rewrites of actually funny jokes with three words changed so that now they’re about politics and suck ass