Some Weird Show
They're all weird.
Netflix has a new reality dating show called Age of Attraction, I think, and the gimmick is that a bunch of people are taken to an island (I assume), left to be attracted to each other, but all under a real-age-disclosure embargo. Oh, you like the looks of that lady? Jump scare: she’s 50! Oh, you think that man is distinguished and gray? Ha ha ha: he’s 22! I am not sure I understand the big problem. People are the age they appear to others, right? I guess it could make a difference if you really wanted to start a family and the woman turned out to be 60 or if you wanted to rent a car and the guy turned out to be 24. But I’ll never watch it so who cares? The big problem is someone’s else’s problem. Still, it made me think of a story.
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MIDSTREAM
Mosquitos! A boyfriend Anne had for a summer during grad school called them “needles with wings,” also “disease vectors,” but that’s what he was, too, a peerless wordsmith but in a way that could not be redeemed, head always down, insistent on injecting his sad and clever phrases into the minds of others, infecting them with his verbiage with impunity. Anne once had an uncle who said “verbage.” It was Uncle Don, married to her mother’s sister. Aunt Beverly had been married before and Anna had liked that guy more. Uncle Don owned a trucking company that worked with the oil industry and provided both upstream and downstream support. “Midstream, too,” Uncle Don said. He lifted weights every evening while watching cable news and whenever Anne came to dinner he held forth on where the country was going and in what (hell, handbasket). Much of the problem, he felt, was the overeducated class. He had blazed through high school, “a success in every subject,” he said, but then propelled himself powerfully into the workforce. “Too much now is just empty verbage,” he said. She corrected him once but the look in his eyes (haunted, hostile) had backed her off and she never said anything again, even when he mispronounced it a hundred times and other words too. Anne slept with Uncle Don much later, when Aunt Beverly had tired of trucks and weights and moved on to a mild florist who, if Beverly was to be believed, possessed deep reserves of passion. Anne had deep reserves of nothing anymore. She got out of bed and went to the weights and tried to lift what was on the bar but could not. She thought of the peerless wordsmith, who would also have been powerless with the weights, and then she went back to Don in bed and stared at the screened window, wondering how the mosquito had gotten through and made its way to her knee, where it now crouched, a tiny derrick about to drill. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]