u/Nice-Connection-9052

I have what I feel is a relatively mild germophobia. My distress from it is minimal because I just follow the rule that I don't let anything that goes in my mouth touch something that isn't clean. I don't eat with my hands unless I wash them and I don't touch anything besides the towel for drying off before I start eating. It's not how most people live, I know, but it's not that complicated compared to some I've met.

Maybe you understand why this is a problem with a night guard. I have to go to the kitchen to wash my hands before putting it in, and I'll have to do the same when I go to take it out. That's very difficult for me since I sometimes need to take medication in the night which I don't think will work with my night guard.

I don't feel any kind of way about the cleanliness of the thing itself, just the process of taking it in and out seems incompatible with my way of living. I thought before I got this thing it'd be more like the retainer I had after braces which could easily be popped out with the tongue and placed using a utensil. I use a lot of utensils to eat things other people would just eat with the hands, but I can't see how this thick, snug, smooth bit of plastic could be taken in and out any other way.

I'm a little surprised I couldn't find many other experiences like mine. Does anyone have any advice or ideas?

If I'm being honest, my salesman seemed to know less than I did about the Maverick. I'm good with my own research and had confidence in my choice. But I realized though, with my wife now driving my previous car, how much little stuff on it I knew about only because the guy who sold it to me told me about it.

I'd like to hear what other people have found useful. It doesn't even have to be lesser known, I bet there's some obvious stuff that I don't know about yet.

Just drove by a storm drain which appeared to be overflowing, water wasn't flowing into it from the street, top cover was submerged from just 10-15 minutes of the heavy rain that passed through tonight.

See a lot of road work issue reporting online but no idea about this.

I'm drawn to TT because of the scale of his raw intellect, which seems DFW-tier and his approach to contemporary technology seems to be more comprehensive than others. There's a passage in his novel from 2015 where he lays out gooning culture flawlessly, and I don't mean just edging but like actually the actual evolved form of it, with the entire remixing and multi view thing described in the famous Harpers article. At times he is an outstanding sentence writer, with an almost Nabakovian sense of diction and sonic qualities. But holy Christ are his stories so completely overworked, and yet seem to me to rely on all the wrong things.

His novel was puffed as a milennial Franzen. I happen to like Franzen personally, but it is completely true that the novel is pure hysterical realism. All four main characters are insanely smart, and they all seem to explicitly know what's wrong with them. Two are more or less diagnosed psychotics and two others get roped into psychotic startup culture though, so the plot still moves forward as we watch their lives deteriorate like it's a bus coming at them and they got stuck in the crosswalk. At the detail level it's like this too, like one of them has a stack of books by their bed that is described by the narrator that if there was an earthquake it would tip over and kill them (the novel is set in San Francisco). I truly want to say it's the work of someone who knows a million things but nothing about people.

Yet there is a certain life to the characters, their backstories, the way they think is very distinct. Even the way the world treats them is done with great empathy and understanding. I think TT does know things about people. The problem is really that in that novel he didn't see there was enough there in those characters. A big flaw that carries forward to his short story collection a couple years ago is that he explains everything to the point where I think he must have made a conscious decision to reject Iceberg Theory (he seems that self-conscious about writing to make that kind of colossal choice). Riffs are interminable, they don't finish until he has truly milked everything out of a subject. It's fun when it's something you like to hear expressed. He's got an incredible section on writing workshops in the novel where he lists every vapid comment you'll ever see in one. The problem is he does this for everything to the point where it's like we're reading the characters' blogs and they've run out of things to say about their personal lives.

But I'm willing to go ahead and toss out the novel, it was probably worked to death in the MFA workshops for three years and probably nothing can survive that intact. After that, he got a lot more attention for The Feminist, the short story that went was somehow more viral than Cat People or whatever that shit was. The Feminist was the one about the incel whose whole life is just him trying to accommodate what he imagined women are feeling as he keeps getting turned down for being a weirdo. This is the first story in the collection, and the best thing I can say about it is this character doesn't know what's wrong with them. The rest of the story I think sucks. It feels more like a treatment for a movie. By setting this story over the course of decades and having it still be about such an enormous cultural question of our time there's barely any room for any actual enchantment. There's no description, just establishing shots and dialogue. There's a few little irrelevant details peppered in, like how his foot hurts when a guy stepped on it. But I think the primary goal of The Feminist is just to tell a ridiculous story of an insane man whose chosen flavor is ideological hemlock.

The second story is about a femcel who hooks up with a male friend and he doesn't want a relationship, so she seethes, tells her toxic group chat about it, buys a feral raven (hysterical realism is not dead), tries to start a scene at his wedding, all of her toxic friends hate her too. Again, months and years pass, so a lot is missed. The big innovation of this story I think comes from the scenes which are formatted group chat transcripts which ring undeniably true, but at the same time I feel like his overall approach to technology is rarely that interesting. In this and other stories he flashes an awareness of all the online countercultures and insular behaviors like cyberstalking and so on but it never becomes truly in depth. I'd be happy to read a story about the people involved with one niche gender theory, niche political groups, niche porn category, niche insecurities etc etc. but he prefers to draw all of them in, it seems, to everything, possibly because it should be interesting to see how the characters have sorted themselves, but I think he mostly does this as a kind of critique carpet bomb. And I just don't care because the bottom line is always "this character is wasting their life and stuck in maladaptive circumstances by being too online." At times it feels like I'm just being tested on the number of stupid things I've heard about.

There's a story in there I think may be the longest which details the life of someone who purportedly set up a network of tens of thousands of twitter bots with fake lives and how the alleged inventor of this system was a nonbinary but oppositional defiant college student in 2004 who waged an ideological war against the proto-woke other queer students in their queer dorm. A lot of ground covered, intellectually, but the story itself makes as much sense as the second season of True Detective.

I can't help but wonder if his satire even could be called that. His writing, which again he's very talented and it's undeniably forceful, is impenetrable unless you already understand the problems he's describing. In that case he's just a storyteller weaving these stories about terribly broken people that I think we're rarely invited to actually empathize with.

Something I think his stories are almost uniformly lacking in their vast addresses of social questions is in the realm of the senses. He doesn't describe much in the senses outside of certain mental states and erogenous zones. There just doesn't seem to be room for them in these huge stories he tells. To me though, those are what actually draws the reader into a story, not engaging them on an intellectual battlefield whose terrain we mostly know by now. I actually see that distinction as the empathy (feeling what the character feels) vs cultural narcissism (wanting to recognize our own qualities including thoughts in the world).

What is really frustrating to me is that there is one story in there in which he really crushes the sensual, the satirical, and the humor. I have failed to mention that TT is actually pretty funny, and his story Ahegao is one of the funniest things I've ever read, like Portnoy level funny and about similar subject matter. Most importantly though Ahegao is dense with the sense of touch, texture, sound, everything important, even in a long segment which is an email the main character composes. He still explains everything he can in that story, but he respects that the character lacks self awareness, so his monologues are more like diversions while the subtext burns just beyond his sight.

How can a writer be like this, where he does everything perfectly in one story and then seems completely unaware of what makes that one story the best one? I listened to his interview on the Otherppl podcast (which seems to have gotten way worse since the sister pod with Mira Gonzalez started but whatever) and TT tells a story about how his agent told him he couldn't put a long essay about Rejection (the title and theme of the collection) because they couldn't sell it to a publisher. This seems like a completely bullshit story, the agent probably told him that because it was seventy more pages of TT beating everyone with his intellect.

Then again, am I just being a complete square? Do I not see the vision in his playfulness? He has another story in there I like, Our Dope Future, which is a reddit post from the pov of an insane homeschooled failed entrepreneur FIRE guy with a poor sense of ethics, and it works because the voice he inhabits is just completely unhinged, pure verbal fireworks. I wonder if all his stories are actually like that to some extent and I'm just tossing them off because my connection to the stories' intellectual ambitions doesn't exist. Or maybe he just has different goals. But at the same time I can't imagine taking his writing classes. It seems like you can't teach the things he's good at.