When I woke up, I turned in bed to find Sarah breathing but unresponsive. The people at the hospice service had warned us this day was coming, and now it was here, earlier than anyone anticipated. I squeezed her hand and then walked out onto our porch—painted Hockney blue, flooded with sunlight, the main reason we bought the house—and called the hospice hotline. "This is the final stage," said the woman who answered the phone, empathy in her voice. "It may take as long as a few days." I began a rotation with Sarah's parents, who were already there with us, making sure that someone was always with her and that someone was always with our ten-month-old son. They would cover the first two shifts. I took the dog for a walk, trying to feel anything other than emptiness. The world felt like painted cardboard, the summer air like static. A dream that's overwhelming and mundane at the same time.
One year before, Sarah and I were decorating a nursery for our first child. Her pregnancy was healthy, and we had no reason to suspect that she had an illness of any kind, and certainly not colon cancer that was spreading to her liver. By the time it was caught and diagnosed—ten days after our son was born—it was stage 4. |
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I had no idea how to land my first client. It was a random April Friday, karaoke night at Sheri's Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada. I don't sing. Four of the ladies who worked there were professional singers, so I watched them take turns and picked at food with the other new girl. It was already my second shift. The first had been a bust.
One of the other ladies, Jules, a statuesque, voluptuous brunette, asked me to sing with her. I told her this would be only the third time I'd ever done karaoke. She didn't care. She wanted to show me that being seen was the first step to attracting a client. We duetted on "Cheri Cheri Lady," by Modern Talking. I was awful, but sure enough, within minutes of my being on display, one of the hostesses pulled me aside. She discreetly pointed across the spacious, dimly lit bar. Some elderly regulars hunched over drinks—Larry, who comes almost daily and never buys anything but an O'Doul's, is in his mid-eighties—and a few groups of younger patrons sat on large banquettes and couches. It took me a second to spot the guy she was singling out. "Paloma," she said. "That gentleman would like to speak to you." |
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There are so many digital platforms through which we interact these days that it's hardly surprising that we've nearly forgotten the most memorable way of all to communicate: with pen and paper. A CBS News poll conducted in 2021 found that less than a third of Americans had hand-written a single personal letter in the previous five years, while the National Literacy Trust last year revealed voluntary creative handwriting among school-age children declined a shocking 61 percent from 2010 to 2024. You don't need statistics, however, to know that handwriting as a form of human expression is on the way out. All you have to do is look in your mailbox. Amidst all the bills and unwanted flyers, take out menus and daily shit, a handwritten letter is, increasingly, as rare as proverbial rocking horse poo.
There's one way to remedy that: Start writing letters. Thank you notes, love letters, poems if you dare; give and ye shall receive. It's a good habit to get into. |
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If revisiting simpler times brings you joy, how's this: April 2023, when we fell in love with Jury Duty, Prime Video's (technically the now-defunct Freevee, RIP) surprise hit hidden-camera comedy. The closest TV has ever come to a Truman Show-style feat, showrunner Cody Heller filmed an entire criminal trial where every single jury member (and judge, witnesses, defendant, etc.) knew they were on a TV show, except for one man: Ronald Gladden.
Thankfully, the thirty-something solar contractor was a good sport, somehow keeping his cool while James Marsden (playing a version of himself) feigned genuine hurt when Gladden shaded Sonic the Hedgehog. But when fans clamored for a second season, the problem was obvious: How do you find a mark that had never heard of Jury Duty? |
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A man is out there looking for fraud. He is looking for thieves who are sluicing money from innocent American taxpayers and into their own pockets. He rides a lonely road, this man does. He knows people are out to get him. They're behind every rock, every tree, waiting for their chance to take him out. And he knows how they'll do it, too. They'll say that he himself was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York. They'll say that he ran a phony university, through which he'd been accused of bilking enough people that he had to settle lawsuits totaling $25 million. They'll talk about the steaks and the vodka and the magazine. They'll talk about contractors going unpaid and others sued into submission. He rides a lonely road, this man does. He could not ride it at all if he were weighed down by doubt or an inconvenient conscience. We knew both times we elected him as president that he was a con and a grifter. In New York real estate circles, where he left a trail of slime behind him that reached to the far horizons of human avarice, these are boons toward eventual success. His schemes were grubby and venal. But he gilded them and glittered them up and sold them as proof of counterfeit glory. Just like the Home Depot majesty he has bestowed upon the Oval Office—all glitz and tacky glamour in service of distraction and camouflage. |
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We're (thankfully) beyond the infomercial era of shake weights and belly-busting bands, but we are in the branded content era of fitfluencers and TikTok diet gurus. So at Esquire, we've taken it upon ourselves to make things simple because no one else will. We compiled 30 genuinely good pieces of workout equipment that will help you get into better shape, simple as. That's not to say we skipped the bells and whistles— you'll find smart trainers and high-tech treadmills here—but we've bypassed the snake oil. |
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