Before I begin rambling about something else, I’d like to edit my post from yesterday.  Far From Home is the best live-action Spiderman.  But Into the Spiderverse is currently the best Spiderman movie that has been released.  We watched it again tonight .. just effing brilliant.

Brilliant.

Anyway, moving right along– I got my laptop out for the first time in ages and let me say, typing on my laptop is vastly superior to typing on my iPad.  I *do* keep touching the screen and getting frustrated when nothing happens (I’m special okay?) but otherwise, it’s really nice to type on a full-sized keyboard.

I finished reading American Buffalo  today.  I don’t know why it took me so long to read it because I loved every minute of it.  It filled my brain full of curiosity and questions and awe for the history of an animal I knew very little about.

I have a million things I want to say and yet, I can’t find a good place to start.

It feels like Steven Rinella has always been a part of John + my life but in reality, John probably only discovered him and his TV show and podcast (of the same name  — Meateater) about two plus years ago.  It has profoundly influenced our lives (moreso John’s than mine but by extension).  And when John ordered some of Steve’s books from the website (signed copies!!) I idly picked one up and then … never fully set it back down.

I haven’t watched a single TV episode and have only listened to a handful of podcasts.  But the book captured my imagination almost instantly.  It wove its way through a myriad of things I knew very little about, and because of that I was fascinated. I felt like I was truly learning something new for the first time in a very long time.  When I closed it for the last time today, it stayed with me, a shadow of every thought in my brain.

It wasn’t just the history of bison bison across hundreds of thousands of years or the complicated relationship of humans and buffalos.  It wasn’t just his quest to hunt and kill a buffalo in Alaska in 2005 after miraculously pulling one of only 24 licenses issued.  It wasn’t the archaeology or the anthropology or sociology or economic history.  It wasn’t Steve’s personal story, of his love of hunting, his brothers, his discovery of a buffalo skull that triggered the whole thing.  It was *all* of it.

It helped me understand an entirely new dimension of my husband.  It educated me on the complexities of the European expansion across the United States, the misconceptions of many different factions of people regarding Native American history, buffalo history, hunting history.

I really, really loved it.  Read it.

xox, g