🫖 Oh, hey! It’s March and I’m in the mood for some spring cleaning. Read my little expliqué below, or blindly skip to the essay and music. Thanks for being here! 🫖
I’ve been sittin’ and thinkin’ and have settled on some changes to le blog. I can’t say I’ve had a day in 2023 that wasn’t marked with writer’s block. The cadence of posting every week has been a struggle. Also, I’ve been craving a more structured approach to the benefits I offer to paid subscribers.
So, here’s what’s up. Moving forward, free subscribers can expect three-to-four essays per month, and now EVERY post will include a paid-only benefit. I am moving my weekly song recommendations behind the paywall and jeujeing them up to make them more juicy and well-explained. This week, the playlist will be available to all subscribers as an example. Next post, the curtain descends!
Finally, I’ve decided on a regular cadence for my additional paid columns: doxxed will go out on the first Thursday of every month, and I’ll publish tsundoku every third Thursday. Mark your calendars!
But what is arbitrary structure if not breakable? Let’s see how this bird flies! Or, tea pours. Or, whatever. Okay, enough signposting.
The night before leaving, Evana and I get big plates of spaghetti, split an edible and attempt to watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding. We are distressed by how long and incomprehensible it is (1 hour and 35 minutes with a formula destined to capture every heart in 2002). My roommate adds to our horror by telling us about a type of cyst that contains hair and teeth. I blindly argue that it can’t be ACTUAL hair and teeth, but rather tooth-like cells, hair-like substance. I have neither the motor skills nor stomach to Google it. We sleep fitfully and are still high when we wake up at 5 AM to head to LaGuardia.
Breakfast in Nashville and a long day of no-nonsense ahead of us. We go to a Home Depot parking lot to pick up our chariot, a twelve-foot Penske, the hue of Kraft macaroni and cheese. A math problem: watch out for red herrings! How many trips will it take Charlotte and Evana to move X amount of boxes from the storage unit to the Kraft-colored Penske with one trolley and five hours of sleep?
Evana reclaims custody of seven houseplants that sit as fellow passengers in the cab. As the days drive forward, their leaves and pots become littered with the primary-colored wrappers of our road snacks. Extra toasty Cheez Its. Planters hot peanuts. Peach rings. Gummy bears. M&Ms. Popcorners: preferably salted, but cheese will do in a pinch. So many Diet Cokes and coffees and energy drinks and a red slushie to share for kicks. We agree that blue raspberry is inferior. McDonalds hacks and conspiracies. Your Filet-O-Fish will be cooked fresh if you order it with pickles. The Coke is so addictive because they sneak sugar in the ice cubes. If your fry is too hot, take a bite and stick it out the car window. Thelma and Louise among the garbage and the flowers.
On our first night with Evana’s family in Concord, North Carolina (Con•CORD, not CON•cord), we average at 0.75 bottles of prosecco per person. Everyone is bubbly until the bubbles pop and we are knocked flat.
The next day we head to a bargain store called Wanda’s. Evana has her fingers crossed for cheap-but-decent furniture—a nonexistent Venn diagram in the New York market. We fondle Marie Antoinette coupes, comparing them to the shape and size of our own breasts. Evana descends into the cat-piss-scented basement while I attack the racks. She leaves empty-handed and I am toting two crinkling plastic bags of impractical antique clothing. A lime green suit and a hot pink dress and a stripey shirt and a little fur-lined cap. I mentally overestimate the cost by $20. We visit two more thrift shops, all of which are lacking decent furniture and leave me giggling with bags of detritus. I loop a bundle of plastic bananas through my hoop earring and mount rubber doll heads at the tip of every finger. Whimsical junk always brings out my inner child.
It’s a trip of rifling through history that is not my own. Boxes that I never packed. Stuff that I never loved. Birthdays of people I’m not related to. Dogs and cats that weren’t a part of my childhood. Places with no associations in my mind. Relationships with foundations deeper and more complex than the sapling of our friendship. We scream Hollaback Girl and Mitski. We listen to 36 minutes of an episode of Red Scare and four-and-a-half episodes of a podcast about Bennington in the 1980s. We give up when the host apologizes a second time for her “annoying laugh.” We share a box of tampons and two packs of gum. We cheer when we finally get out of the state of Maryland. When we get stuck in Brooklyn traffic, we are on the verge of tears. When we block an intersection, we yell back at the wall of cars angrily blaring their horns. They could care to be a bit more considerate of the twelve hours of pavement beneath our tires.
It is beautiful but exhausting. 1,033 miles on the road and the weight of deciphering a world that was not my own. I choose not to write that weekend. Seven more days pass that I choose not to write and my guilt and insecurity are mounting. I never catch up on sleep and my inner monologue gets crueler than usual.
I go to the office. I fill my days with pregnant sighs. Sighs with backstories. Sighs with two kids, a mortgage, and rheumatoid arthritis. I’m self-soothing, subliminally seeking sympathy. Everyone hates me and I’m doing a bad job. Kick and be kicked.
I go to the gym. Everyone looks normal and I’m an absent-minded professor with loose papers spilling out of my spandex getting all tangled up in the treadmills and ellipticals.
I am hollow. I am a vessel. I am a model ship.
I am pretentious. I am a bad writer. I am a child. I will never finish anything I’m proud of.
At twenty-four years old, I work up the courage to go to the dry cleaners for the first time in my life. I am afraid. I am afraid that it will cost one million dollars and I am afraid that I will go inside and ask if they can wash my coats and they will look at me like what the fuck am I talking about and will humiliate me and publicly shame me. I am afraid I will dejectedly lug my laundry home and put off washing my coats for another couple years. I think about all the things that my parents did by the time they were twenty-four. Surely they knew how to do their taxes and dry cleaning.
Everyone’s mocking Cole Sprouse for his Call Her Daddy interview. He smokes a few cigarettes inside which everyone is pretending to hate, but is undeniably chic. Despite his pretentions, I’m a sucker for the lil fella.
You know when you’re a kid, you don’t really see anyone past 25? Like everyone’s 25. Even if they’re 60. When I was young, I thought by 25 I would have it all worked out. I’d have the house and the white picket fence and the kids and the Labrador retriever and all that bullshit we grew up believin’.
—Cole Sprouse, absolute king
If there is a gun on the kitchen table, it will be shot. If there is a rumpled bag of laundry in the corner, it will not necessarily be done. If you put out bowls of cigarettes at a party, you have to let people smoke inside.
A cloudy glass of licorice. A tiny chalice of coffee. Cordials that are peppery, herbal, bittersweet. Everyone keeps asking us how we know each other, which is not a conversational doorknob. No phones allowed and a bowl full of ~deep questions~ that we cannot bear to indulge. We make up our own would you rathers. Would you rather smell good for the rest of your life or smell like nothing at all? Would you rather kill your mom or know that you’re going to die on your twenty-eighth birthday?
The next day, my head is foggy from all the syrupy liquors. I drink a Cherry Coke Zero. Cherry Zero Coke. Coke Cherry Zero. Coke Zero Cherry. Zero Cherry Coke. Zero Coke Cherry. Oh, sweet nothing.
It strikes me that for being an American monstrosity, Coca-Cola is just as elegant a flavor as anything I sampled at the speakeasy. I Google the secret formula. A member of the Quora community explains that Coke is so unique that it tastes like nothing but itself. A beautiful concept. Cinnamon, vanilla, neroli, orange, lemon, lavender, cocaine, dead rats and cigarette smoke.
I have a vague notion that I will write a post about thrift shopping and my relationship to clothing. I rewatch Lady Bird purportedly for research purposes. It’s really because I feel sad and want to feel sadder.
I invite a friend to a new bar in the neighborhood to reminisce about Berkeley. I get there early and try to write at the bar. Everyone is acting like it’s been their old haunt for seven years. It has those hanging Tiffany lamps that are everywhere these days. Midcentury Modern is dead. Long live the aesthetic of an Italian restaurant with dark wood and red booths.
We talk about how we’ve been frustrated and upset lately. Something’s in the air. We talk about our biggest fears. As an engineer, he fears that the machinery he has been working to invent the past three years will get released by someone else before his project can see the light of day. I flounder briefly and tell him that I fear that my writing is self-centered, bad, uncreative and pointless. He thinks I’m being too hard on myself. I respectfully disagree. We clink Coronas and smash our empty glasses down.
I attempt to read the latest Crumpstack at a bagel shop in Chelsea but the last few paragraphs are blurred out by the spinning wheel of another aural migraine. I feel relieved to be excused from reading any more of his pandering, insecure prose. I feel relieved to spend my time with friends that are good people rather than characters with Shakespearean names and cocaine addictions. I darken my screen, put on my sunglasses and begin to walk home. I overhear a man remarking to his friend: “This area is so fragile.” I don’t know what he means but it touches my heart.
I wish I could write how Coca-Cola tastes. A bastardization of so many flavors that it comes across like nothing else. Just quintessentially me.
We started in Nashville today, so it only makes sense to begin our musical journey in The Bargain Store with our friend Dolly. It’s a silly little ditty and the metaphors make me chuckle at their literal vulgarity. It’s cheap hoe Dolly goodness. 🎶 If you don't mind the fact that all the merchandise is used, but with a little mending it could be as good as new. 🎶 I’ve always loved this version of Lola by The Kinks that is effectively exactly the same as the original except replacing Coca-Cola with Cherry Cola. My guiding light when I so struggled for clarity in this post. 🎶 I met her in a club down in old Soho, where you drink champagne and it tastes just like Cherry Cola. C-O-L-A Cola. 🎶 After that, I’d like to pull us out of the Seventies and into my angry hateful self-talk which can sound a bit like the beginning of Coolin’ By Sound by Pavement. The part that always gets stuck in my head is when Malkmus says: 🎶 Shitty fuck, just a shitty fuck. 🎶 It also makes me think of the Stupid Piece of Sh*t episode of Bojack that plagues my mind from time to time. And, now we’re at the bar. My friend brings up a Led Zeppelin song—Ten Years Gone. He tells me I was the one to show it to him years ago. I raise an eyebrow. Doesn’t sound like me. He plays the opening chords and I shake my head without recognition. He feels like he is losing his mind, and suddenly remembers: you played it on your radio show in the middle of the night! Oh, right! I explain that it was a request called in by my dad. We laugh. 🎶 Changes fill my time, baby, that's alright with me. In the midst I think of you, and how it used to be. 🎶 Generally not a Zep fan, but I do love seeing East Village architecture featured on the Physical Graffiti album cover. And finally, let’s round things off with a love song: Two Doves by The Dirty Projectors and Deradoorian. Played by Evana on the road in Virginia or Maryland or somewhere and a charming soundtrack as we watched our country pass us by. 🎶 Call on me, call on me, call on me. 🎶
🫖 That’s all! As a reminder, this will be the last week that my playlists are available to free subscribers. Thanks for being here. 🫖