Coffee & TV: Broad City/Florida Girls, Traditional Medicinals Throat Coat Tea
Wednesday morning I texted Emily: Are you doing school drop off? Can you come visit me? I am so bored
Emily moved to a different, slightly-further-from-me corner of the neighborhood over the summer, but one of the reasons for the move was to get into the district of the public school located right behind my apartment, and lucky for me and for Raffi too I guess that all worked out. Raffi goes to a good school, and Emily is guaranteed to be a block away from me at least once a day.
I don’t abuse this proximity privilege - I think - I haven’t been around much since the school year began. I spent most of October and November with my parents in central Illinois, where I picked up the upper respiratory virus that has been owning me for two weeks now. I always get sick around the holidays - longtime Coffee & TV stans will recall! - but this time it’s been especially brutal and hard to kick. I really hoped Emily would be able to stop by. It had been so long since I’d seen her and so long since I talked to someone who wasn’t a blood relative.
My phone made the “text-Emily” noise (the alert tone is called “Tweet”, lol, love to make these jokes w myself):
Yes! Just have to finish dropoff
Want a coffee?
I wrote back that I had already made some and settled in to wait. I had made some coffee, but one of the symptoms of my virus was that (CW) it made everything taste like mucous, especially dairy, so my coffee-with-cream was cooling rapidly, untouched.
My preferred home cold ‘remedy’ is half of a lemon squeezed into Traditional Medicinals Throat Coat tea, brewed very strong, with a spoonful of honey and as much fresh grated ginger as I can stand. In recent years it’s become more difficult to find the tea, which always used to be on the shelf at my local Key Foods - people are In The Know! - and this illness has proved impervious to it. Or maybe Throat Coat never really worked and I just used to be tougher. Anyway, I had ran out of/failed to purchase all of the ingredients for my remedy since the onset of my illness, and I thought about asking Emily to pick up ginger and tea, but I didn’t want to give her an annoying chore, even though I knew she would probably do it. She might have to go to a couple of stores to get some Throat Coat and then we wouldn’t have any time to talk.
When Emily arrived we sat on my couch.
“What are you watching?” she said.
I had paused the TV to answer the door, and the image frozen on the screen was of a man with his yellow basketball shorts around his knees, his dick censored by a blur of pixels.
Me, oblivious: “Florida Girls? It’s about these four friends who live in a trailer in dirtbag Florida, and then one of them moves away for a better life, and the others have to adjust, and Changes Happen. I just started it, it’s OK so far…..”
I looked at the TV and laughed at where I pressed pause; this certainly would be sort of embarrassing had anyone other than Emily been visiting. While the doorbell rang a Florida Girl had been yelling “Freddy, put your dick AWAY!”
“I don’t know who that guy is yet. I think he might be someone’s brother, or their drug dealer, or -”
“Maybe he’s their, like, the guy in Broad City who’s always around, Abbi’s roommate, well not really her roommate. . . you know, what was his name?” Emily said.
“Bevers?”
“Aah, Bevers.”
“He might be their Bevers,” I said, pleased with the result of the nth round of our favorite game, Guess That _____ From Barely Articulated Context Clues.
We shared a moment of silence, I assumed for Broad City, a show that we used to love and watch regularly together and had lost track of — either because it took too long on hiatus, emerging into a world completely different from the one it exited in season 3, or because before Emily moved for Raffi’s school, tiny infant Raffi moved into what had been her TV room, with everything that meant and brought, or maybe because Broad City had just gotten bad.
“It sucks that show went so downhill,” Emily said.
“Yeah, it really did not weather the Trump administration well,” I said. “Or maybe it did! Maybe the last season is good. Maybe we just grew out of it.”
Ugh, this was a Chaotic Evil series of thoughts. We looked at each other again, stricken, and then started talking about other stuff, but as it always seems to, unless you are, say, avoiding the subject on purpose in the presence of your conservative parents, our conversation returned to the President.
I was just thinking the other day - and this is what I said to Emily - that one of the most oppressive things about this administration is the feeling that you are not allowed to think or talk or write about anything else — that everything else is ‘less than,’ somehow; not important, not what’s really going on — and that this is another way he won. We talk about him all the time, whether we want to or not. A malignant narcissist’s wildest dream, manifested to completion. Or just another version of the thought police.
I scrolled through Hulu last night, trying to figure out if I could pinpoint exactly when I stopped watching Broad City. Season 4 Episode 6, “Witches,” airing 10/25/17, was only partially watched. The slug is “Abbi feels old after discovering that she has a gray hair; Ilana sees a sex therapist.”
I do remember watching this, and turning it off in the middle, probably because I’m puritan-prudish about sex on TV (thanks mom and dad), and because I thought Ilana’s no-orgasms-since-Trump problem was unwatchably ridiculous. My watch history indicates I saw the first three episodes of Season 5. I just looked through some of the other Season 5 episode slugs: “Abbi’s new flame tells her that she’s not mature enough” - “The girls meet Ilana’s 16th cousin” - “the girls take a ‘trip’’ - “Abbi, Ilana and Bevers sell Abbi’s New York City belongings” - “The broads say goodbye.”
Is Ilana’s Trump problem unwatchably ridiculous? It might be unwatchable, for me, but it’s also another version of “other [important] things aren’t important.” Ilana is so embarrassed by her issue she does the classic “my friend has this problem” presentation to the therapist; I assumed that was because she’s talking about sex, but Ilana is obviously not embarrassed to talk about sex. Ilana *would* be embarrassed to talk to a therapist about orgasms in global hellscape 2017; even I judged her for it. In global hellscape 2019, if you’re fortunate enough to not be actively evading ICE or police brutality, it’s hard not to judge. I don’t know. In 2017 I thought for a while that I would need to keep milk in my bag (?) because of all the protests and riots and tear gas and in 2019 I know that since I look the way I do (white) I will mostly be fine, besides of course the quickening spiral of any prospects for long term financial stability down the global toilet of climate catastrophe and layoffs and the rising cost of health care and food and water and the next war we will start for oil etc. etc. etc.
N E WAY
I watched this clip, where Abbi tells Ilana she’s moving to Boulder, and wept/giggled freely. I haven’t watched the last episode, maybe I won’t ever, because I am a soft touch and because Abbi and Ilana will be OK, in Boulder or wherever, ask me how I know.
Until next time,
Ruth