Welcome to Butt News!
Introducing the Butt News Movie Club
[Butt News is a free e-mail newsletter about movies and butts! You can receive Butt News in your inbox weekly by subscribing now. If you like it, please tell your friends!]
Hello!
I know that some of you subscribed to this newsletter like six years ago or something, and I am sorry for the delay. What happened was that I wrote one (VERY good) installment of the original Butt News but the interface was broken and the formatting didn’t work and none of my links worked and it came out bad and I got so mad about it that I forswore butts and never wrote another newsletter ever again. Until now!
This new incarnation of Butt News will be kind of loosey-goosey, kind of informal, not over-edited, just me talking to you. As friends! And in the spirit of friendship, we’re going to kick things off with a very cozy flagship series I’m calling Butt News Movie Club. Here’s the deal.
You’d think we’d all be sick as hell of cozy movie nights at this point, seeing as we’ve collectively been imprisoned in one unending legislatively mandated cozy movie night literally under threat of death for hwone poinht fhive yhear(s??), and now it’s finally summer and where I live upwards of 75% of us are at least half-vaccinated (I swear I am not a Republican but I ate a MUFFIN in a BUILDING yesterday), and yet somehow I’ve been craving a cozy movie night hard lately. I just want to be fully stromboli’d in my Korean fur blanket with a snow tiger on one side and tiger classic on the other side, I want my face on a BED PILLOW that I brought down to the couch (this cozy hack will change your life), and I want the lights out and the furnace popping off and savory snacks AND sweet snacks and an ice water and I fall asleep in the first 10 minutes because I have no problems.
What I want is to really feel it, the way we used to really feel our TV time, before TV time became all the time. Too much of a good thing is real, such as for instance after writing my last book I do not need to ever taste my certified emotional support snack Blue Diamond BOLD Salt & Vinegar Almonds ever again (just kidding!!!!!!!! They’re my babies!). I crave the release and the gratitude and the contrast of sitting down on the couch after a long week of not being on the couch, which, what is that.
It’s almost like, paradoxically, now that it’s summer and I can go outside again, I finally have the chance to really appreciate the couch again? We’re going to chase that feeling!
ADDITIONALLY, I’m pretty sure the #1 top thing driving my cozy fixation these days is that you always want what you can’t have, and over the past nine months I have managed to make cozy snuggles impossible and illegal inside of my home with just one weird trick: I got a Covid dog.
WHOM I LOVE AND IS MY SON I BIRTHED and whom you will surely be hearing about a disordered amount in this newsletter, but Barry (Barack “Barold” Hussein Saxophone) interferes with my full-body Mike Love Kokomo chillaxation lifestyle in the following ways:
bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork
never not having diseases
Since he finished all his shots and started venturing out into the world—where he enjoys taking magnum dumps (sometimes three per walk!), disrespecting women (me), and tenderly licking urine-glazed garbage cans—Barry has contracted:
A golf ball-sized abscess on his cheek caused by a “foxtail,” which is a kind of grass seed that can apparently WIGGLE INTO YOUR DOG’S FLESH on purpose like it has a brain, whence it sprouts into a beautiful fruit tree that bears juicy negative-$4,000s. That’s how much the surgery cost to remove it so it didn’t burrow all the way into his eyeball. Four thousand human American Joe Biden big buck dogedollars. It’s fine, Barry, I didn’t need it or anything, especially since your fucking DOGFOOD only costs $90 a bag!!
Giardia, a protozoa your dog picks up from snorting lines of other dogs’ poop, literally, causing him to projectile shit and vomit simultaneously upon every surface in your home for 17 to 89 days until you force-feed him enough liquid clay—a process almost more traumatic than laying down on a couch you know is comprehensively soaked with dog bile—to stop his insides from being a worm rave. (Also, I just Googled giardia to find out the name of the liquid clay medicine and the computer informs me that giardia is “Also called: beaver fever.” I’m suing the vet for not telling me that!1)
Dog HPV. A nasty ass cauliflower lip wart that got him banned from daycare for the third time this year.
Testicles. I’m not sure if Barry is straight or gay or bi or pan, because I don’t know if throw blankets have a gender? But before we had him neutered, every night at 8 pm, he would select a girlfriend from his harem (a.k.a. all my nicest textiles), mound it up into a body shape with (this is important) a sort of neck part, then bite the neck part, growling and whining, and hump ANGRILY until 10 or 11. Also called: beaver fever.
All of which is to say: What dog fluids AREN’T on my throw blankets!?
How can I enjoy a snuggle in a place like this? How do you wash a couch?? I have had a towel that Barry giardia-barfed on balled up on my front porch for three months, and you think I’m bopping to down to Rent-a-Center to pick up a steam cleaner? You think I’m hauling my Korean blanket down to the industrial laundromat!? Avoidance is a lifestyle!
Actually, though, I might now! I actually might. And Butt News is my motivation. I’m launching this new project for/with you—the Butt News Movie Club—and I’m going to need my couch back at full operational capacity. If you read my last book, Shit, Actually, then you know the deal—each week I’ll be re-watching a classic blockbuster movie and recapping/roasting it in horrible, annoying detail. The idea is that YOU will ALSO watch the same movie that week, read my recap, and hopefully get the feeling that I’m sitting right there with you in your living room being annoying in person! And we can discuss it in the comments, I think! I haven’t really looked into that part of it yet!
As a member of Butt News and Butt News Movie Club, you’ll receive (on average) two newsletters per week. The first, early in the week, will be a spicy fruit salad of whatever’s on my mind (miscellaneous complaining, political opinions, pics of my nasty dog), along with a heads up about what that week’s movie is going to be. Then on Friday you’ll receive your full Butt News Movie Club recap of the week! And then it’s cozy movie night, dog bile be danged! You can also comment/e-mail and suggest other movies you’d like me to do! We’re in this together!
Butt News is free, for now! I’m going to keep all the content free for the first month or so, and Butt News Movie Club will always be free, but eventually there will be special content for paid subscribers. And just because it’s currently free doesn’t mean you CAN’T support me and my work RIGHT NOW by becoming a monthly ($5/month) or annual ($50/year) paid subscriber! You are welcome to! If you REALLY REALLY LOVE ME and are RICH AS HELL you can even be a Founding Member and pay any amount of your choice over the annual $50.
It’s been a few years since I’ve written directly to the public with any regularity—TV shows and books just don’t have the same informality and immediacy, and I’m not even on Twitter—and I’ve missed you a lot. I’m really excited to get back in touch, and I’m so deeply grateful for your subscriptions. I cried in the coffee shop yesterday because I got so many subscriptions so fast. I was telling my husband Aham about it and he said, “It’s because you are literally a legendary writer who has been withholding your work out of resentment for how you have been treated and people have been waiting and waiting and hoping forever.” I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE I WAS DOING THAT BUT I’M SO SORRY I LEFT YOU. I’M BACK NOW. So thanks a billion and let’s go!
This week’s movie will be flawless Nora Ephron romance/bone-chilling slasher classic Sleepless in Seattle!
Love,
Lindy
Please know that if you e-mail to tell me that humans can get giardia too, it’s actually really common, and it’s called beaver fever because you get it from drinking out of mountain puddles full of beaver piss*, I will die. Despite my embarrassing chaotic energy I am actually a fairly obsessive and meticulous person, and I usually already know things and if it seems like I don’t know some basic thing it’s almost always because I am trying to be funny. Unless I specifically ask a question or you know a TRULY RARE AND INCREDIBLE FACT, please don’t explain things to me! When people tell me things I already know I have a negative emotional reaction that is probably extreme enough to qualify as a personality disorder! I’m sorry and thank you!! <3
*FOR EXAMPLE I KNOW IT’S FECES.
Can we all get tattoos that say, "Please Don't Explain Things To Me!"?
Thank you thank you thank you. As someone who routinely laughs hysterically at the *memory* of a passage from Shrill, I am so glad to have more of your writing to enjoy on a weekly basis.