i can't stop thinking about the pasta dumped in the new jersey woods
a real thing that happened, not a panic! at the disco song
I had several paragraphs written for today's newsletter about Taylor Swift allegedly dating Matty Healy. Several. Until I realized that what I really wanted to talk about, what I really wanted to spend some time on today, was pasta. More specifically, the hundreds of pounds of pasta mysteriously deposited in the woods of Old Bridge Township, New Jersey last week. Every time I manage to stop thinking about it for a few hours, the story pulls me back in.
You might tell me — but, Clara, this is a pop culture newsletter. To which I can only say, what is more popular than pasta? How much culture has the Garden State bred? Please. Let's look at the material! As a (1) frequent pasta consumer and (2) former New Jersey resident, I feel uniquely suited to wax poetic about this particular incident.
If you haven't heard about this, if somehow the algorithm has denied you of this delight, allow me to be the first to tell you that last week, a (forever-changed) resident of Old Bridge was on his morning walk when he found, to his astonishment, what amounted to hundreds of pounds of pasta dumped in the woods. Every article I've read (reader, they add up) qualifies the news by rushing to tell us it was an illegal dumping of pasta, as if there could, presumably, be a law permitting the trashing of vast quantities of pasta in nature. Can you see it? A reminder that on each third Tuesday of the month, between 7:00 and 8:30 a.m., you may dispose of your household's unwanted pasta along the Iresick Brook. No gnocchi, please.
An illegal dumping! Of pasta! In a sleepy New Jersey town! I just know Amy Sherman-Palladino is shaking in her top hat, kicking herself for not including this subplot in the Gilmore Girls revival (of which we do not speak).
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