Learning from Bojack

I've been watching Bojack Horseman, which at its best is brilliant, though at its worst it's definitively not. Last night's episode featured Bojack self-sabotaging himself savagely with negative self-talk ("you are a horrible person") which leads him to stop into a bar and spend the whole day there while out to get milk for his dementia-imparied mother (herself a shitbag piece of work who put these voices into his head) and his teenage daughter from a one-night stand who surprised him by showing up on his doorstep at the age of 18 or so, herself tortured by voices.

My situation is not so bad, though I do let things pile up and oppress me. there had been some gouges in the wall down beneath my bedside table from, apparently, moving the bed sometime many years before. They stood out white against the green of the wall and had been torturing me for sometime. Yesterday I finally went down to the basement, found the paint, went to the hardware store, bought some drywall spackle, filled them in, and painted it. Not perfectly, mind you. A professional would laugh at the job I did. But walking across the room if you're not looking for the defect, you won't see it. And nobody but us comes up here anyway.

Also, I've been attacking the fat stack of New Yorkers piled up on my chest of drawers, cutting it down to size. I just discovered that Peter Hessler has moved back to China, where he did what to my mind has been his best work. Admittedly, I haven't read more than a few articles of his work in Egypt or any of his work on Colorado, so maybe I just need to track that stuff down. Still, I'm excited.