Cocktail hour / Hour of reckoning

Today: Laurie Woolever, author of Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography, and Care and Feeding; Luke O’Neil, author of the newsletter Welcome to Hell World, and the story collections A Creature Wanting Form and We Had It Coming; and writer and artist S.I. Rosenbaum.

Issue No. 472

Quick Eternity
Laurie Woolever

In post memoriam
Luke O’Neil

Killers
S.I. Rosenbaum

Quick Eternity

by Laurie Woolever

In the 1990s and 2000s, when credit was cheap, and before anyone had yet disappeared into our personal screens or our megachurches, theme restaurants became more aggressive than a background show at dinner or peanut shells on the floor—the spaceship cosplay of Mars 2112, the flying shrimp theater at Benihana, the terrible Catskills patter of Johnny Rockets and the wet tedium of Rainforest Cafe, the quiet terror of Ninja. Eventually someone figured out, in the 2010s, that the food and beverage aspect wasn’t even necessary to get between a sucker and his money, and now we have what seems to be a permanent installation of The Friends Experience in New York, and the sticky sprinkle pool-vapidity of the multi-city Museum of Ice Cream, aka Charles Entertainment Cheese for the influencer death spiral set. This all makes a person (me) fantasize about “deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off,” to quote the first chapter of Moby-Dick.

I don’t do it. Instead, “[w]henever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet,” I think about a return visit to Quick Eternity, a (gently) Moby-Dick-themed cocktail bar and restaurant that stays out of your face, demanding little more of you than your presence in the isle of Manhattoes’s South Street Seaport. You’ll even be spared exposure to the newly-developed Seaport™ tourist district; it’s a standalone joint whose name comes from Ishmael’s observation that “...to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity.”

Is it an allusion to the hospitality business, a dangerous pursuit that has torn asunder countless livelihoods? Perhaps, but proprietor Bryan Schneider, a restaurant and bar veteran who’d been dreaming of the concept for a decade, seems to be weathering it.

As someone who both respects the literary cult of Melville and pathetically abandoned my only attempt, just over a year ago, to read the entire book before the ship left Bedford, I approached Quick Eternity with humble abashment and soon felt a new resolve to try again with the Longman Critical Edition which is generously footnoted, contains an extensive glossary, and acknowledges revisions to the original text, made by Melville and his British editors.

On Quick Eternity’s ground floor, the bar features Azikiwe Mohammed’s whaling mural, framed by faux whale tusks, an homage to The Spouter-Inn:

“Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right whale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it.”

Whether or not the signature cocktail names (Howling Infinite, Golden Gleamings, Limit of the Land), lifted from the novel’s earliest pages, ring any bells for you, the drinks themselves are made with care and imagination, and if you want to talk about The Whale, the bartender is happy to do so. The food is straightforwardly delicious, with some dishes paying homage to the seafaring story (both clam and oyster chowder, a tack board) and others just giving the people what they may well want: a thin-crusted pizza, and a substantial smash burger served with crisp, vinegar powder-dusted fries, a genius way to impart tang without sog.

You can eat at the bar, or upstairs, in a handsome dining room called The Gam, a seafaring term from Chapter 53 that describes the friendly meeting of two whaling ships. In one corner, you’ll find a micro-bookstore, selling a selection of new and used books, including vintage copies of Moby-Dick, which also serve as a striking way for the server to present your check. By that point in the evening you’re probably sunk anyhow. As Ishmael puts it in the last chapter: “The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did survive the wreck.” 

In post memoriam

by Luke O’Neil

It’s frigid in Massachusetts this morning. When I woke up early to assess the damage from some trees downed by the brutal winds overnight, I saw my neighbor carrying a big box out to their car. She said hello and then immediately ate shit on the icy sidewalk lol. After checking to make sure they weren’t seriously hurt, a certain phrase popped into my mind, as it has many dozens of times over the years.

“Check this shit out motherfucker…”

After that I went inside and read that Mike Fossey had died a few days before Christmas and a couple weeks after his 35th birthday. 

I cried for a minute or two and then started laughing. It’s such a strange feeling finding out someone is gone then spending the next couple of hours howling at their old posts. 

There aren’t many people who that could apply to but Fossey was indeed one of them. You’ll find hundreds or thousands of others writing something to that effect on Twitter or Bluesky right now. Mike F—who grew up just down the street from me here in Concord, MA—was without hyperbole one of the funniest people I, or most of us, ever knew, whether it was in real life or simply through his iconic Superman-avatar online persona. He was one of the best to ever do it, many are saying.

“His posts brought me much joy over the years,” the journalist Mike Isaac wrote when I shared the news of his passing. "’its not clear what move i was trying to do’ has rattled in my head for a decade.” 

“Mike was one of the guys laying the framework for what good jokes would look like in a novel format with a strict character limit,” John Darnielle said. 

It’s hard to write about joke posts and the people who make them without coming off as overly serious or spoiling the whole point—as a lot of people learned writing about “Weird Twitter” back in its heyday—but Fossey was a luminary in the golden age of Twitter in the 2010s, up there alongside the likes of Dril and others, that we got to watch invent the form in real time. 

The thing about a sense of humor is that it is learned and shared. 

Sometimes part of the appeal is how many people remain unable to pick up on the joke. Probably his most famous post was this one about a hot dog. The kind of tweet that was shared widely all over, to the delight or anger of many. 

This is a load-bearing feminist post, someone commented earlier.

This one, too. 

Fossey was never as overtly political as a lot of his peers (and most of us everywhere) have become online. But a clear political sensibility was there, underneath the silliness. 

But more than that, there was the poetic manipulation of language. The way someone like, say, Tim Robinson, speaks a phrase weird and it overwrites how you think about it forever. This is one of those for me:

Insanely surpassed. A phrase I don’t think anyone had ever uttered before but now it’s locked in our heads forever. 

I don’t know that I’ve had an Arnold Palmer in many years either without thinking about this one:

Or seen a news story about a drug bust without remembering this:

“It feels kind of wrong, like to the point of feeling embarrassing, to talk about Posting as a writing form, but it really is a type of writing, and the shape and style of a joke-post is its own thing,” Flaming Hydra David Roth said. 

“Mike Fossey's posts were so obviously on point in that regard. They're funny, of course, but the economy of how he wrote—creating a little scene, establishing characters in it, using a few details to shade it and make it funnier—was real writing. That wasn't the point, I sense, I think the point was to be funny, and he was funny. But he was also legitimately a master of this weird type of writing. You don't have any room to spare with the character count and all that, and he didn't waste anything. He was one of the greats at doing whatever this is.”

“After spending so much of my life ‘online’ it can be easy to ask ‘what’s the point?’” comedian Mike Ginn, a friend of Fossey’s, who called him “my windmill slam pick for the funniest poster of all-time,” told me. 

“I think the point is you get to make friends like Mike F. To connect with people across the country or world who you resonate with on some deep personal frequency. He’s hilarious, wonderful, and I’ll miss him forever.”

You could call him a jokes craftsman, and that would be accurate, but he was also a regular craftsman as well. A woodworker and artisan and in recent years a signmaker around the Boston area for some big projects, not to mention a fine photographer, as you can see on his Instagram.

I just went to look and noticed this at the top, which punched me in the gut.

Rest in peace too to Kaleb Horton. Another great and funny writer and poster we lost way too young. I am so sick of writing eulogies this year.

Aside from the gags he would often share images of the cabinets and tables and such he was working on, both for his job and for his family and friends. As much as I might regularly read his jokes and think I wish I could be that funny, it was truly admirable that he also had this real world talent as well. Something tangible to go along with the ineffable. 

I wasn’t super close with Mike. We were buddies online in the way that people are, although I got the chance to meet him a couple times. I remember the first, maybe eight or so years ago, meeting up at a concert in Harvard Square. He was sweet and funny in person, too, and we walked around the corner to smoke a joint. I remember being sincerely kind of nervous about it, worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up. That I wasn’t going to be funny enough. Like I was hanging out with a beloved famous comedian or something. Which is what he was, in fact. 

Sadly, like many of the best, a number of Fossey’s original Twitter accounts were suspended over the years and have since been mostly lost to time. Luckily a lot of people have kept screenshots of some of their favorites saved elsewhere. Here are a few of the best. 

More year-end thoughts from Luke O’Neil:
The best of Hell World 2025

The best 50ish songs of 2025

FINE ARTS TODAY

Killers

by S.I. Rosenbaum

Notes and Bibliography

The images of whales used throughout this piece are taken from actual whale stamps used in the logs of whaling vessels, including some said to be probably carved by the Wampanoag whaler Joel G. Jared. 

On the demographics of New Bedford and the whaling industry: 

NEW BEDFORD COMMUNITIES OF WHALING: People of Wampanoag, African, and Portuguese Island Descent, 1825–1925

A Generous Sea: Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and the Jewish Community in New Bedford Whaling & Whaling Heritage

For an extensively-researched report on Amos Smalley: The Legend of Amos P. Smalley, by Adam Mellion at All Visible Objects

On Melville’s use of a Maushop story: Chasing Flukes: “The wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the Redman”

For the history of Native involvement in whaling: 

Nancy Shoemaker’s books, Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and Contingencies of Race, and Living with Whales: Documents and Oral Histories of Native New England Whaling History are authoritative. 

Many thanks to Linda Coombs and the Wampanoag communities of Mashpee and Aquinnah. 

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