Scott Russell

Is there such thing as a flash blog post? I think I wrote one last night. It was just after I stepped out of the shower, where so many ideas are born. I wanted to get it written quickly before it disappeared, so I wrapped myself in a towel and crouched by the coffee table, lit by the glow of my computer screen. Here’s what poured out.

I was thinking about Carly Rae Jepsen. I saw that she put out a new song, and noticed that after the success of “Call Me Maybe” had faded, I had forgotten all about her. I also saw a Twitter conversation between Will Forte and Kid Cudi about Forte’s new show, “The Last Man on Earth,” and it made me think about the fraternity of celebrities, how famous people come to cross other boundaries and know each other. And I wondered, would Will Forte know who Carly Rae Jepsen was if they met? I imagined Forte being polite and pretending to recognize her, then Jepsen saying, “I’m Carly Rae Jepsen”—no recognition on Forte’s face—and then saying, “You know…’Call Me Maybe’?” Then he would remember. And it made me think about how sometimes three words or less can define how a person is remembered. For George W. Bush, for example, those words might be, for better or for worse, “Mission Accomplished.” For Barack Obama, with the same caveat, “Yes We Can.” What will my two or three words be? I hope they will be, “He was kind,” or maybe, “We were close.”