We're back! After their triumphant NYC debut, Lauren is back in DC, Drew's moved into Morningside Heights with his Jane Goodall-fancying roommate, and they're ready to chat Grandma's shit death house with their pal Donny Morrissey, an investigative journalist and fan of the show who was first K-pilled some years ago during a stint in county jail for heroin possession. This is a classic struggle session, with equal parts textual analysis and Martin anus riffing. You're going to want to shoot this one into your veins, listener!

NOTE FOR THE AUDIO FREAKS: There was a weird rustling sound on Donny's end to begin with but it's resolved by 38:40 so skip ahead to there if you really can't stand it (although you will miss a lot of good riffing).

0:00 - Lauren and Drew convene early to catch up and plug Our Struggle's 1ST ANNIVERSARY CALL IN SHOW, the deadline for which is August 21 (GOOGLE VOICE NUMBER: 443-584-6486). We've been getting a lot of delightful missives from listeners and would love to get more. So call in! Especially if you can help Lauren interpret her MRI report, a dramatic reading of which she gives at 8:15.

14:00 - Our boy Donny beams in from his Marc Maron-style LA garage and we quickly stumble upon an excerpt from Christopher Hitchens' memoir about being horny for Margaret Thatcher and definitely not horny at all for his good chum Martin Anus. After pondering how Martin A would fare on Twitter, Donny tells us about his K-pill experience in the clink (interestingly he couldn't Pynchonpill himself, even locked up for 23 hours a day) and Drew whips out the James Wood blurb on prison literature. Does the cleaning grandma's alcoholic shit death house section of Book 1 have a certain prison lit quality, in which every minor detail takes on great world building significance? 

1:20:39 - Lauren, Drew and Donny sat sail upon a sea of cleaning products, or is it a ocean of meaningless? At any rate we try to draw out what we feel is one of the most important paradigms in Book 1, about the erosion of meaning over time. We read from some of the most iconic passages in the book, about childhood, construction cranes, crabs. A lot of roasting of Yngve in this passage for everything from his outfits to his sleepwalking to his lutefisk eating -- the latter of which inspires us to interrogate our own relationships to fish.

2:10:10 - After what is surely an unhealthy amount of on-topic discussion, our three close readers lapse back into digression and chat neck pain, the notorious JC episode, Donny's hot take re: jail vs. prison. We spend at least a quarter of an hour discussing height percentiles with the help of tall.life, ultimately arriving at  the conclusion that Lauren is taller than Drew.

Thank you for listening! As always, write in to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. And please do call in! You have three days left!!!