the best thing I've ever read

Every once in a while I’ll read something that feels like it was written just for me. Not even for me, but to me, like when people think that god talks to them through the computer. My first memory of this is from 2008, when I read the following in Garden & Gun magazine:

When the jewelry designer Gogo Ferguson was introduced to Bill Clinton at a cocktail party on Martha’s Vineyard, she could only wonder why he kept staring at her earrings. Did he know she made them from raccoon penis bones? She didn’t ask. 

Probably most people wish they had written Moby-Dick or something, but I’ll go to my grave wishing I wrote the raccoon penis-bone earrings story. I want to get famous purely so someone can ask about the best thing I’ve ever read and I can be like “oh that’s easy. the first paragraph of a random article in Garden & Gun, hands down.”

I guess the most recent instance of this was when I learned that Michael Chabon’s upcoming book is about cake, outsider art, and a dog-eating snake. That’s basically my Tinder profile. But anyway it just happened again when I read this great thing where Stephin Merritt talks about his upcoming album, 50 Song Memoir, which has a song for each year of his life:

When someone asks me where I'm from, I have no short answer handy. The musical treatment shifts to reflect each locale, as exemplified by Alvin and the Chipmunks' album Around the World with the Chipmunks.

I honestly think that everything I've ever heard that guy say has entertained me. Magnetic Fields are one of my favorites live in part because when the audience claps he just scowls out at you. I'd like to think he'd do this even if he didn't have a hearing disorder.