A month ago I slipped into one of those little panic spirals that I sometimes find myself in regarding the state of our townhouse and all of the stuff that threatens to burst from its seams. It’s hard to describe what these little attacks looks as they are happening, but I’ll try:

I’ll come home from the store with a Costco-tier package of paper towels, unsure where to put it, which will prompt me to rethink the entirety of how our pantry is organized. The baking supplies are heavy, so why do we store them so high? Why are canned tomatoes on a different shelf then the canned beans? So I’ll start shifting those around and midway through that exercise my mind will wander to how our dishes are stored. We spent good money on matching stoneware, so shouldn’t we store it in the glass door cabinets instead of the hodgepodge of clashing coffee cups that there now? At this point I abandon the cabinets with the un-cohabitating tomatoes and beans and will start precariously start taking out heavy stack of fragile plates, bowls, and glasses and start rehousing them across different cabinets.

In the middle of this exercise I start thinking bigger picture about those wooden shelves I’ve been meaning to install on the other side of the kitchen that would open up so many more storage options. But wait! Our dog’s crate is in currently in that space. So then I start wondering where in the house we crate her instead or, in much darker tones think you know this dog probably only has 3 or so years left in her and wonder if the shelves can just wait until then?

By this point I’ve lost 30 minutes of time anxiously mulling sundries around my kitchen with the bluntness of a toddler twisting a Rubix Cube, chasing an invented efficiency my brain has convinced me that every stressor in my life will be nullified if everything is placed thus so. I haven’t even put the damn paper towels away yet, and my wife is wondering what the hell I’ve been doing in the kitchen for a half hour while she’s trying to wrangle two kids.

I don’t know how I find myself in these spirals, but they crop up I’d say about once a month. If I were to guess, I’d say this OCD-driven cleaning and organization compulsion has almost certainly been bestowed onto me a some genetic destiny from my parents.

My mom, even while working retail 40+ hours a week, was a very dilligent and disciplined homemaker that strictly adhered to certain routines despite literally everything. Even if every country in the world unloaded their nuclear arsenal on one another, my mom would ensure there wasn’t a single item in the sink or an unscrubbed square inch of countertop before the last bombs dropped so we could start our post-nuclear holocaust life in the morning with an otherwise sanitized kitchen.

My dad on the other hand is quite slovenly with an obvious but undiganosed case of Obessive Compulsive Disorder that demands organization that only makes sense to him. When he came home late from a long day of work, the five or so Busch Light cans he drank into the early morning would often be lined up on the edge of the kitchen bar so precariously that a too-heavy step might send half of them to the ground. When out and about with him, as he ascends or descends staircases, he often times needs to hit each stair a couple of times just to make sure each landing felt right to him. In both examples, these were just small little actions that in his head, had to be done, or it would short circuit his current mode of being.

My parents led and continue to lead lives that feel a lot more stressful then mine, but when I notice stress in my own life, I find my response seems to be a bizarre fusion of their two neurosis: cleaning or organizing to an obsessive degree as a stress response. Even if I logically know that organizing shelves checks a very infinitesimal box in the face of a 20 year mortgage on raising two kids, in that moment, it feels like the most important thing in the world.

II.

Anyways, I think this latest panic spiral was brought on by the fact that, over Memorial Day weekend, we visited neighbors whose house we saw for the first time.

There is something voyeuristic about that first visit to a friend’s house because the way people decorate and arrange their house implies things about their inner lives that feels very intimate to me. It’s especially thrilling when visiting neighbors with similar floor plans, because you can very directly compare where they place their priorities and energies in life compared to your own.

In our kitchen/sunroom for example, we have a large galleyway bar with high-top stools we eat our family meals at in lieu of a dining room table, which allows our daughter to look out the window and scout for friends walking by so she can quickly abandon her meal, descend down a ladder-like barstool and rush to the front stormdoor to gnash her gnarly, food-stuffed hands onto the glass to greet passersby. In the same space, this couple instead has a pair of leather chairs and a single ottoman, naturally warmed by panes of light. You can visualize their idle mornings in this space, making a coffee, feet popped up on a shared ottoman, asking one another about stories they are skimming in the latest Washington Post.

The downside of this is that I never feel less confident about the state of our own house after visiting a friend. Whenever I’ve been charmed by a friend’s place, and the good company and food I enjoyed there, I come back to our house with what I can only describe as a post-orgasm guilt. Why are all of our walls so devoid of pictures and paintings and instead poked with nail holes and scuffed with skidmarks from the pictures and furniture that were previously housed there? Why is our back deck so devoid of greenery and natural shade that it’s always too baked by the sun to fully enjoy? Cue David Byrne.

To be clear, I do not think this is as superficial as the “keeping up with the Joneses” need for nicer or more expensive “stuff”. I could give a fuck about someone having nicer things, and seeing something like a bigger TV or some fancy kitchen gadget does not register with me whatsoever. One of my favorite pieces of furniture is a coffee table with two folding wings that an elementary-school aged Yellow Belt could trip into with a leading karate chop and mince into pressed-cardboard dust. Every time I try to tell myself I’m above IKEA furniture, I find myself right back in their slow-motion water slide warehouse, stomach full of Swedish meatballs, pushing a $400 cart of deconstructed BLORFLUK’s and HOMBUOK’s all made with shitty dowels, easily strippable screws, and sheer minimalist charm. Once I get the haul home, I find myself totally drained of my adrenochrome but excited about the prospect of the handful of tiny little building projects I get. Crate and Barrel? Pottery Barn? Miss me with that shit and leave me with my adult Lego set that does the Stanky Leg after 6 months of light usage.

So while the quality of the stuff in a house matter doesn’t matter, I do think how much care is put into how a home is kept and customized tells a story about your family to the people that visit. In the same way I obsessively edit these meandering missives for a tiny audience, I find myself constantly wanting the edit the story our abode tells, and find it to be something that is very important to me.

Part of this is always ensuring a level of cleanliness. I feel literal dopamine hits when I walk into a room and there isn’t a bit of clutter on the ground or a tumbleweed of dog fur circulating about, or when the throw pillows are actually in the corners of the couch as you always imagine they should be. The closer our house resembles a Zillow listing, the higher my average mood will be in spite of everything else.

The other part of this editing of a space, are little, low-ambition projects that tell a story to visitors about the life we lead. For example, one little thing I’ve done since our kids were born was making a yearly tradition of framing and hanging a picture of them at their current age, starting from the bottom of our entryway staircase and moving up, which over time will create a living timeline that shows each kid age as you ascend each step to the second floor. I would love it if our entire house was filled with open-journal tchotckies such as these.

III.

As you’d expect though, having two kids under four complicates this high-minded goal of maintaining a curated and clean house. Even though there is no earthly expectation for it, this obsessive personality trait I cannot seem to let go of that make homemaking a Sisyphean task guilt myself over time immemorial.

It goes without saying that kids are messy, as a lifetime of Bounty quicker-picker-upper commercials have instilled in all of us. However, as new parents we naively thought these messes could be quarantined to certain common areas of the house and that we would almost be able to segregate the “family” rooms of our house from the “adult” ones. It was a nonsense notion. Toddlers are like little Roman Generals that spare no quarter in gradually annexing each part of your house for their own glory.

The slow deevolution of our basement is a good microcosm for what’s occurred to our entire house. When our daughter was first born, we designed a kiddy-specific section of the room with colored mats, toy bins, and other Fisher Pricey ephemera. Beyond this threshold, we installed blackout curtains to contain and subdue all of the neon visual hell noise if we ever wanted to entertain adults on the other side of the room. It only took a couple of years for this vibrant principality to encroach past the blackout curtain Rubicon into the rest of the basement, as the “adult” portion of the room is now dedicated to her kitchenette set and her costume chest—toys dully splayed about the entire floor like a long-lost battleground my wife and I have since ceded. Even when we started decorating a nursery for our daughter’s little brother, she brazenly laid a stake on his birthright by putting all of her stuffed animals in his crib and periodically crawling into it to pretend-sleep, just as a brazen show of force to intimidate anyone who might encroach on her limitless boundaries.

Almost every room in the house now looms under the law of her oppressive regime, where we have rearranged floorplans and reorganized closet space to assume that little looting hands will pillage our sacred belongings, with little books and toys strategically placed and housed in each room to hopefully distract her. The older our daughter gets, the less “space” in our house feels like it’s truly ours.

Additionally, if toddlers are like little Roman generals, then you cannot underestimate the amount of tribute paid to them by the republic’s masses. We constantly feel as though we are dressing our daughter in clothes we didn’t pick out or or tripping over toys we didn’t buy. This is exacerbated by the fact my wife an I are only children, which makes for a quiet arms race where each pair of in-laws need to up the ante in terms of gift gifting, such that every visit is accompanied with a tall TJ Maxx bag and a crisis over what cabinet or bin we can stuff its contents into. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but sometimes being a parent makes you feel wasteful by proxy, and I fantasize of a dreamy evening where a Goodwill truck backs up to front door in the dead of night and allows me to clandestinely chuck all of miscellaneous crap that infiltrates your house.

It’s hard to stay mad at our little legionaires for their curiosity and the clutter they invite. Kids don’t have a screen of infinite internet to retreat into, and 80% of their world exists within the confines of your house. Rummaging though the cabinet space of every square inch of their house is practically a toddler luddite’s version of going on a Wikipedia wormhole of reading the episode summaries of the season of Game of Thrones you decided to skip—it’s just something to do to pass downtime. During the day when my daughter wants to sneak into the bathroom to unroll an entire toilet paper roll, it’s hard to not just let her, because it’s fun and man, they fit a lot of toilet paper onto those Mega rolls.

But when your kids are asleep and the house truly feels like your own again, you dream that your house to revert to its equilibrium where everything in its right place, and exists in the ideal form you’d be willing to invite people into your house to see. It’s just that the amount of work it takes to get there and maintain it feels limitless with the invasive clutter kids invite.

IV.

The one vestige of individual ego my wife and I maintain in this collapsing space that is our house is a single room we consider our panacea: the bump-out room on our ground floor that we call “The Nautical Room”.

There is something about this room that feels almost like a holy place—one that we feel that visiting during the day, or in the wrong mood, is an odd sacrilege. Before my wife brought her laptop into the room to to teach remotely for the year, it was a household discussion—we were both mutually worried about bringing work energy into The Nautical Room. As soon as the school year was completed, it was cermonoiusly removed.

The Nautical Room is a small room painted light blue with a galley-style coffee table, two clear acrylic chairs, and a massive tufted loveseat an old roommate requested us to recover from a foreclosing yarn store and “insisted” she was going to pick up from us but never did. The couch is the room’s massive centerpiece, with visibly distressed upholstery that’s worn from a decade plus of transient knitters scootching butts on it, but it’s massively comfortable despite its shabby looks.

We call it the “nautical room” due to all manner of vaugely sea-related estate sale knick-knacks that populate the room, such as the wooden ships that adorn the fireplace mantle, the ship wheel that hangs above it, or the tiny bust of a Gordon’s Fisherman looking gentleman, that all combined wouldn’t look terribly out of place on a Goodwill aisle endcap. The room contains an electric fireplace that we rarely light, instead opting to turn on the Christmas Lights strung around it.

If you can’t tell from the description—I don’t think this room would be the leading shot in a Better Homes and Gardens moodboard. Considering how unremarkably and kitsch it’s decorated, it’s remarkable how much reverence we give The Nautical Room. But there is an intangible energy to it that’s very calming. It feels naturally cooler then the rest of the house, perhaps due to its proximity to the AC unit, but perhaps due to how shaded it is by the trees outside, where the the only natural light that hits the windows is filtered through a stained glass window. The dust hangs in the air in a way that feels very serene and makes you feel serene being in it.

Additionally, The Nautical Room is Feng Shui’ed with all of our media passions. The built-in, wall-spanning bookshelves to the east are stuffed to the brim with literature of actual merit curated from my wife’s graduate studies awkwardly juxtaposed with my weird coterie of science fiction, fantasy, presidential biographies and board game collection. To the south west sits our shrine to vinyl hipsterdom: a white IKEA Kallax shelf that holds our record collection with a sound system on top. On the wall above, we have lightweight mounts for 6 records, which seasonally change depending upon our moods and tastes of the time, which makes the whole room feel somewhat fluid.

It doesn’t seem accidental that most of the cultural artifacts that pepper our personalities have collected in this room, because at times, The Nautical Room feels like a portal into what our lives might look like without kids. While I think my life would feel devoid of purpose without my kids, it feels healthy to have a small refuge that indulges in the alternate reality of all of the literary and musical sub-genre rabbit holes I might go down in another life.

I think because of this, we rarely let our toddler in The Nautical Room as it feels like some final encroachment on the adult portion of our personalities. The room itself almost discourages such visitation: Although my daughter can break into just about everything in the house, the ceiling bearings that hold the glass double-doors to the in place are so difficult to open it shields it the room from the chaos of our waking hour family life. In the evening, when our time is more our own, there is something special about cracking through that guarded threshold to share a bottle of Kombucha, listen to the Modern Baseball boys lament about the lost loves, and play The Castles of Burgandy to remind ourselves what just being in a couple was like.

We used to feel somewhat feel guilty about treating The Nautical Room this way, as if we are somehow cheating on the rest of the family by having this private domain away from it. But now more then ever, I think having one place of calm within a chaotic household within a chaotic world feels like a good, achievable compromise, and one I want to lean into more. As I go back to work, I think I need to find a way to let go of my obsessive peccadillos about maintaining an unrealistic portrait of how our house should be maintained. I’m proud to be a man with a family, and the story of our house shouldn’t whitewash the neon colored clutter, safety proofing plastic and diaper packaging that accompanies it. Give me one room to obsess over to treat as the refuge, and maybe that’s all I need.

—

Programming Note: Effective this week I will need to scale back the rate in which I am blogging here to (optimistically) one post a month. Thanks to anyone that has been occasionally popping in to read these thus far.

Microsoft is onto something with Game Pass

All of my gaming these days is done on an Xbox Series S via the insane selection of Microsoft Game Pass. For me this is somewhat ironic, because I have cooled on subscription models for other types of media.

Take movies for example: On Netflix, I found we’d often watch pleasant but forgettable films because we were landlocked to a service that we felt like it was a waste of money to leave the walls of. Netflix is constantly factory-modeling out a conveyer belt of new content that “trends” for a week but doesn’t seem to have any lasting cultural resonance. When I log on now for example, I see this movie being pushed called Skater Girl, and while I’m sure it’s a fine film, the description feels so “of the moment” of stories are being across multiple contemporary films that I feel like I can already visualize its story beats before even watching a trailer. Its acquisition by Netflix reeks of a cynical boardroom decision of “based on social media, this what the people want!”, and I feel like this mindset makes a lot of the risk-adverse “gets” by these streaming companies feel forgettable a week or so after you’ve watched them.

Instead, I find I engage with movies a lot more actively when I find a director or writer I like (Recently: Sofia Coppola, Nicole Holofcener, The Duplass Brothers) and try to 100% their work on Letterboxd, even if that means occasionally dropping $3.99 for a rental outside of a my preferred subscription services’ walled garden. This aspect of actively curating which films I want to see instead of passively picking what’s new makes watching film a lot richer even for a dummy like me, because I can try to appreciate the nuances of a directors’ trademarks over their entire career, and this wouldn’t be possible strictly adhering to only one or two subscription services for movies.

In my mind, video games are more befitting a subscription model than movies in that they need to be a better value for my time then my money. Although I cringe to admit it, I’ve been playing games for so long that if the gamefeel (yuck) feels poor or samey I don’t want to waste 10 to 25 to a 100 hours on it. Even if I buy a game that’s seemingly up my alley, I sometimes won’t know for sure if something will resonate with me until I’ve played a game for an hour or so. If I’ve paid $60 bucks for a game in this scenario, I may feel compelled to see something crummy to its conclusion, wasting my time to justify not wasting my money.

Xbox Game Pass removes this value judgement and for its $15/month entry fee, I treat the service like a decadent trip to a Brazilian Steakhouse. A bite of flank here—a couple of ribs there—a mouthful of pork chop with mint for my troubles—it’s all premium meat, baby and I’m feastin’. Who cares if I have a hodgepodge of plates stacking up behind me with enough random scraps of unfinished meat to process an entire 4th of July BBQ of of hot dogs—I paid my entry fee—I can keep that green puck up for as long for whatever games I like, and move on from a game as soon as it offends my sensibilities in even the slightest manner.

And the quality of games in the service is high! I know Microsoft is a big company, but the clip in which they are acquiring in house studios and games for this service feels like they are pissing capital in a way that is borderline unsustainable. Being an early adopter of Game Pass reminds me of being an early adopter of Uber, leeching off of venture capital with subsidized, 30 dollar drunken-rides home from D.C. Whereas previously I’d go on a veritable Odyssey of Metro rides—constantly hopping off trains along the way to covertly pee in the clandestine corners of certain stops—this wonderous service came into being that let me get home in a much easier way. Uber felt like an unsustainable steal at the time because it was, and they’ve since raised their prices once they crowded out the existing Taxi market. Microsoft Game Pass seems like a similarly good value that it’s a good time to be a member of, as they are desperately trying to take a generational bite out of Sony and Nintendo’s market share.

Anyways, given that whole shrill-laden preamble, I probably tried and dropped about 10 games over the course of the last 5 weeks, but here are some I’d wholeheartedly recommend:

A Plague Tale: Innocence (2019)

A lot of big cinematic games that consume a lot of mind space in the industry (and specialized by Sony Studios specifically) often leave me cold. While I’m typically blown away by the premises and performances of games like God of War or The Last Of Us on paper, when I actually get to physical act of playing those games, the mechanics of them bore or annoy me. Like, God Of War’s “reluctant fatherhood” arc seemed very intriguing, but when Big Burly Bleach Boi Kratos is so buff he moves like a Howitzer tank, and you are constantly getting spears in the back trying to 5 point turn the fucker around to retaliate, you lose me as a guy playing a video game. I shouldn’t have trouble parallel parking my demigod.

A Plague Tale: Innocence, probably due to budgetary constraints, eschews the need for puddle-deep hand-to-hand combat entirely and acts as a story driven game with very basic stealth mechanics and puzzles. You control a pair of two kids too weak to ever win a fight 1 on 1, and if you get caught, you basically take a sword to the chest and reload your save. This is a boon for folks like me that don’t want to suffer a just-fine combat system just to see if a games can actually tell a story worth a damn.

And this one seems like it can! A Plague Tale: Innocence tells an medieval-era story in France amid the backdrop of an Eldridge-horror feeling plague spread by tsunami’s of rats. The game starts off with the intriguing central premise where two kids—Amicia and Hugo— have their noble family murdered by the Inquisition as they hunt down Hugo due to some mysterious linkage between him and the plague’s origins. You have to travel a rat-infested French countryside, escaping the rats and the Inquisition along the way, chasing leads to find out what makes your family’s bloodline so special.

The underlying comedy of this game, which is perhaps unintentional, is the degree in which these two privileged noble kids have a such a terrible go at things and are put into comically more precarious and disgusting situations. In one chapter, you find yourself traversing a corpses-laden battlefield, and the next, they decide: “you know what would be more tragic? A field of PIG corpses”. It’s all gross as hell, but I enjoy the way the games finds a way to continually raise the stakes and find more reasons to make the ol Plague Rat printer go brrr.

This incidental comedy is enhanced by the voice over. While I always think video game voice acting in native-English is typically cringe inducing, this game developed in France with French Voice actors doing English VO, so everything sounds very cultured to my American scum ears. It makes it all the funnier when everyone is dropping “merci” and “monsieur” while a proper rat orgy hisses on in the background.

Ikenfell (2020)

Much like the Tolkienization of fantasy made certain tropes pertaining to elves and dwarves feel overwrought, it’s refreshing to play a game in the intriguing setting of “school of magic” that doesn’t seem overly married to tropes set up by Rowling. Ikenfell delivers on the promise of this setting by telling a twisty tale following a band of imperfect witches trying to track down a classmate who is seemingly trying to destroy the school and had previously wronged them in different, devastating interpersonal ways.

My favorite games these days are that go to the well on a singularly great gameplay mechanic without wasting your time on needless bloat, which is a design philosophy Ikenfell shares. Ikenfell is one of the few games to take a stab at the Mario RPG active combat formula and make it work with real stakes, where you must instinctively “tap” at the right times during attacks to either maximize the damage you are taking or minimize the damage you are receiving. Ikenfell actually makes this rhythm mechanic rather life and death though, as missing the “sweet” spots can greatly change the tide of battle or nearly knock out your character, requiring you to read execute to proceed. Since the game is constantly granting your party new attacks, as well as providing a good variety on its enemy types every chapter, Ikenfell provided a good challenge without overstaying its welcome.

The Wild At Heart (2021)

This is one of those games that best illustrates the value of Xbox Game Pass, because I would have hard-passed The Wild At Heart based on the trailer alone. Something about artstyle of the characters and the overplayed 80’s/The Goonies aesthetic is very trite on its face.

There is something about the actual playing of this game I find very meditative, though. You play as two kids that have run away from their abusive homes and seek refuge in a magically-hidden away portion of the woods protected by other social outcasts that have taken up a brotherhood called the Greenshields. As the newest member’s of the order, you command strike teams of different-talented forest sprites to undo an encroaching, ancient evil that threatens the Greenshields and the forest itself.

This game rips mechanics from Luigi’s Mansion and Pikmin by giving you both a vacuum and an army of minions to explore an overworld, solve environmental puzzles, and engage in light strategic combat. Aping Nintendo mechanics so blatantly always comes with a risk of feeling like a poor facsimile, but I feel like this game hits a Nintendo-esque sweet spot wherein the puzzles and combat are just difficult enough to feel engaging and satisfying without being overly taxing.

It’s all an excellent excuse to take in a Tycho-reminiscent ambient soundtrack that makes the act of exploring the games hand-painted environments very pleasant and meditative. It’s been a very serene game to decompress with for an hour or so before bedtime, solving a couple of puzzles and soaking in the vibes.

Words with Friends 2 (2012)

This obviously isn’t on Xbox Game Pass, but I’d be lying if it didn’t spill a little typeface on it.

Listen, I don’t have much to say about Words with Friends, because we all had like 10 active games on it with friends the year or so after we graduated college before purging it from our memories entirely. For whatever reason, my wife and I picked this up again as a way to pass the time in the hospital, as well as wake up our brains during late-night feedings, and I’m sure once I go back to work it will again be relegated to the App Store backbench.

What’s kind of bizarre about Words with Friends in 2021 is how much they’ve aped other industry trends to stay relevant and monetize the game. Much like Rocket League or Fortnite, there is a now a Words with Friends Season Pass where you can pay real money to earn cosmetics like exclusive “tile styles” (e.g, your scrabble tiles are now plaid) or emotes to send once you play a word (e.g, sending a cool dude with sunglasses when I play “sex” on both a triple letter and triple word bonus and somehow effortlessly get like 80 points). While I mock this, I actually fucking bought the current one at 3am one night trying to stay awake, because being on Paternity Leave untethers you from reality and in such a fragile state, and I decided that that an Owl lifting a barbell emote would be an unrecoverable burn worthy of 9.99 USD.

They added also added Mortal Kombat style single player campaign in which you compete a ladder of increasingly difficult AI’s, but instead of bloodthirsty and mystical Kung Fu masters, you square off an increasingly stronger roster of…..dads making bad puns? There is an uncanny valley aspect to all of it that deeply funny to me for a reasons I can’t articulate.

It’s not even a famous Christmas song, but I know it’s a Christmas song! There’s a little jingle-jangle in the background of the song. The lyrics are mostly incomprehensible, but I heard something about “the season” and “by the fire.” It’s a major key, I guess? 4/4 time? I’m not really sure what makes something a Christmas song. Maybe Derek from Married At First Sight DC could help me out.

What I feel more qualified to talk about is the opposite, which I’m craving almost as much as a second empanada: a good old-fashioned summer song.

Here’s what I think makes something a “summer song.” I need some specific mentions of summer—if not the word itself, at least some discussion of how hot it is or something similar. I want the five senses of summer. Let me smell the Hollister August perfume, which I can’t smell in real life because it’s selling on eBay for $455. I need a little bit of lyrical nihilism, but not too much. It’s summer, and it’s time for some petty crimes. I once had a friend who would brag about cursing on the Virginia Beach boardwalk, where it’s apparently illegal to curse. I want something like that but taken up a notch or two.

Speaking of notches, my metronome should be like 5/8 to 3/4 of the way up when I’m listening to a summer song. A summer song certainly isn’t a power ballad, but it’s not like Darude-Sandstorm fast, either.

It’s common to yearn for the winter during the months that your coconut oil is liquified on your shelf, but a good summer song recognizes the fleetingness of the season and all the feels that go along with that. Summer is definitely a special time, and especially for people in high school or college (read: the people for whom music is made), it’s a time when social barriers are relaxed a bit. You might be able to bang it out with someone who’d never speak to you otherwise in the summer. This results in summer music being very nostalgic for the present moment as it’s happening.

Finally, I believe summer music should be able to be played at a Vans skatepark. Or at the very least, as part of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack.

With these criteria in mind, here are my top five songs of summer, in no particular order:

MGMT - Electric Feel

Specific mentions of summer: X (but implied through swimming)

Summer imagery: ✅

Slight badassery: Two out of Four Lokos

Upbeat (but not overwhelmingly so) tempo: ✅

Nostalgia for now: ❌

Likelihood it would be played at a Vans skatepark: two out of five kickflips

Oh, the imagery of this song. What I remember most is how hot this line is: “Standing there with nothing on/ She gonna teach me how to swim.”

What I don’t remember is the weird out there extended metaphor leading up to this. Mostly because these Long Island homeboys seriously can’t enunciate. It’s certainly a vibe, I know when I went to see them at The National in 2008 (which was, by the way, peak season for MGMT) I was singing along like “hunh nah nah noo nah nahhh.” But apparently, the real lyrics are:

“All along the Western front/ People line up to receive/ She got the power in her hand/ To shock you like you won't believe/ Saw her in the amazon/ With the voltage running through her skin.”

I did not realize that this was about some Amazonian electric sex goddess, but I guess I watched the music video and will forever associate any swimming hole with these sexy rich guys from West Egg, so I consider this a solid summer song.

The Ataris - In This Diary

Specific mentions of summer: ✅

Summer imagery: ✅

Slight badassery: Two out of Four Lokos

Upbeat (but not overwhelming) tempo: ✅

Nostalgia for now: ✅

Likelihood it would be played at a Vans skatepark: 4 out of 5 kickflips

“Here in this diary, I write you visions of my summer” Kris Roe opens.

There’s badassery, but it’s so slight that it’s almost reminiscent of a youth group talking about their crazy times at camp:

“Breaking into hotel swimming pools/ And wreaking havoc on our world/ Hanging out at truck stops/ Just to pass the time.”

The nostalgia for now hits you over the head in the chorus: “Being grown up isn't half as fun as growing up/ These are the best days of our lives.”

But perhaps my favorite lyrics are just pure summer imagery. This dude had a great summer in the simplest, most childlike way, and he wants you to know about it: “Lighting fireworks in parking lots/ Illuminate the blackest nights/ Cherry cokes under this moonlit summer sky”

If I think back to my favorite summer memories, they too are often centered around little bursts of momentary contentment and bliss. Last year, it was mid pandemic, sitting 6 feet apart in Aideronak chairs on my front lawn with some friends and neighbors crushing beers in the Fourth of July after consuming something called a “meat box.” The summer I stayed in my college town, it was befriending our cute neighbors and sneaking into some fancier apartments’ swimming pools. I’m instantly brought back to moments when I can taste, smell, or touch them, and that’s what I love about this song.

Jack’s Mannequin - Holiday from Real

Specific mentions of summer: ✅

Summer imagery:✅

Slight badassery: Three out of Four Lokos

Upbeat (but not overwhelmingly so) tempo: ✅

Nostalgia for now: ✅

Likelihood it would be played at a Vans skatepark: three out of five kickflips

We open with the sound of seagulls, which matches the setting of cartoon Venice Beach conveyed on the album cover. All you need to hear is “California in the summer” mixed with “Fuck yeah, we can live like this” and it’s already a lyrical improvement on any run-of-the-mill Chili Peppers song.

The nihilism is totally tongue-in-cheek— “We’d fry our brains and say it’s so much fun out here” is said with about as much sugary, upbeat enthusiasm as Third Eye Blind’s “Doo doo doo, doo doo-doo doo” song about crystal meth.

Summer is the season of the Cool Girlfriend, and we know it’s real because “She lets me drive her car so I can score an eight from the lesbians out west of Venice.” (Side note: a top-voted comment on the YouTube video reads: “I'm a lesbian, but if he tried, he could probably get a bit more than an eighth from me! xD”)

This song almost sounds like someone who has never been to California trying to write a song about it based on what they’ve seen in TV shows and movies (which makes for a very catchy song!) When it came out in 2005, I was busy watching and rewatching seasons of The OC, plotting my escape to a land where I could hang on the beach with my hot friends and catch Death Cab for Cutie playing in the Bait Shop on a school night. Fuck yeah, we CAN live like this!

(Eleven years later, I finally made it out to Venice Beach and I thought it smelled too much like peepee for my tastes)

Frank Ocean - Swim Good

Specific mentions of summer: X (but we're swimming again)

Summer imagery:✅

Slight badassery: Four out of Four Lokos

Upbeat (but not overwhelmingly so) tempo: ✅

Nostalgia for now: ✅

Likelihood it would be played at a Vans skatepark: this is a tricky one. Back in my day, I’d say no, but these days, I think the kids are skating to hip hop more. In fact, Machine Gun Kelly came out and basically said it was his duty to play guitar and make a pop-punk album, because most kids had never been to a concert where someone played a guitar. I never thought Machine Gun Kelly would be the one to save rock n roll.

As far as nihilism goes, it’s Mr. Clockwork Channel Orange over here. The opening lines exert a baseline that asks to be played at maximum volume and a chilling lyrical bravado:

“That's a pretty big trunk on my Lincoln town car, ain't it?/ Big enough to take these broken hearts and put 'em in it/ Now I'm drivin' 'round on the boulevard, trunk bleedin'/ And everytime the cops pull me over, they don't ever see them.”

The video, only available on Vimeo (le artiste!) is also set in California, driving up the 1 at some points. And there are seagull noises again! You gotta love it.

Trust me—I know how much the world doesn’t need another overeducated white woman’s thinkpiece of Frank Ocean. That said, I still want to point out that this song came out before Frank Ocean did, and his “Take off this suit/ and swim good” is almost certainly a reference to taking off his heteronormative guise (sorry).

Even with those deeper meanings in mind, the simplicity of the chorus is what makes it work. In this summer, who doesn’t want to “Kick off my shoes/ and swim good”? It’s a simple feeling of freedom and refreshment, thus making it a perfect backdrop to summer.

The Front Bottoms - The Beers

Specific mentions of summer: ✅

Summer imagery: ✅

Slight badassery: Four out of Four Lokos

Upbeat (but not overwhelming) tempo: ✅

Nostalgia for now: ✅

Likelihood it would be played at a Vans skatepark: five out of five kickflips

This song really has a lot of intersectionality of summery elements. The chorus calls out summer (specifically, that summer) as a time that the singer was destroying himself to impress someone else:

“And I will remember that summer/ As the summer I was taking steroids/'Cause you like a man with muscles/ And I like you”

As for the titular beers? They’re everywhere, contained in every possible vessel in the (presumably, someone’s parents’) house:

“There's beer/ In coffee mugs, water bottles, and soda cups/ And it's clear as the windows I came through”

The song does feature some manic drumming that drives it along, and it’s a bit faster than the other songs on here, but there’s a lower tech sound to the keyboards in the background which make it sound as intimate as a beat you made with your cousins on a Casio in your grandparents’ basement.

I love this track because it’s as much of a summer party song as it is about feeling uncomfortable and yearning for something, and that’s a hard thing to pull off.

Runners Up

Yellowcard - Ocean Avenue

Catchy, beachy, and impossible not to sing along to. This youthful, upbeat summer anthem convinced me that yes, violins can be in a rock band. Also, to finally give a different coast some shine for once—Ocean Avenue is actually located in Jacksonville, FL.

Len - Steal My Sunshine

There’s not much to say about this electric, contagious one-hit-wonder that wasn’t already covered in this bizarre, comprehensive long-form Behind the Music piece.

Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe

Back in the summer of 2012, I worked at a summer camp for rich little kids and this was officially declared the camp song that summer. Each week, the counselors did a dance to this catchy hit, adding elements to outdo the previous performance each week. Think: ribbon dancers, confetti launchers. Here was the final performance. By the way, that nerdy violin guy? He was the center of quite a bit of drama by banging two different camp counselors at once.

III - Influencer content in Animal Crossing

This whole “keeping up with the Joneses” ethos also hung a cloud over the Animal Crossing game that was released last year as well. While video gaming as a medium is no strangers to influencer content thanks to rise of Twitch, it was interesting to see how social media influencing impacted a specific game like Animal Crossing, in a way that often felt negative.

Animal Crossing as a property had a well-deserved moment in 2020, but I’ve been a fan since the original US release of the franchise on the GameCube when Nintendo had no earthly idea how to market it:

Animal Crossing has such oppressive charm that it convinced a bunch of image-conscious middle-school boys to play a game about house decorating and living in a cutesy animal village at an age when we were simultaneously calling everything vaguely uncool or unmasculine “gay”. Me and my neighborhood goons would have ad-hoc sleep overs whenever there was an in-game rainstorm so we could stay up all night catching high-value Red Snapper, Barred Knifejaw and Fossil Fish that we would sell in-game the next morning for a massive profit. Looking back on this phenomenon as an adult, I always knew there was a mass-appeal charm to Animal Crossing that could make it bigger than Mario. That proved correct in 2020 thanks to the popularity of the Switch and the happenstance timing of New Horizon’s release at the beginning of COVID-19.

A brief primer for those somehow unfamiliar: Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a low-stakes sandbox game designed to feel like an island getaway with no ability to lose and no specific goals in mind. You do summer-camp esque outdoorsy tasks like fishing and bug catching, engage in light hearted dialogue with cutely-designed animal neighbors, and slowly develop a barren island with a tent into a wholly developed and decorated island getaway with a mansion. There is also a light social element to the game, where you also have the ability to visit friends islands and write them letters. By its very design, Animal Crossing is supposed to be a very laid back, low-stakes experience.

This is not at all how the game was played if you followed the game online in any capacity, in which “influencing” somehow took a game devoid of competitive elements and made it a competition.

The first theater of this competition involved folks attempting to break the games economy for the purpose of “rushing” to unlock everything. Early on though, there was a real anxiety in the community about other people being further along in unlocking bigger houses or island improvements, which was typically done by making money to progress aspects of the game

The fastest way to acquire currency is by playing the “stalk market” by buying turnips once a week, which you can either sell low or high depending upon fluctuating prices throughout the week before they spoil. Everyone’s island had a different “turnip” economy, so it encouraged you keeping in touch with your friends to let them know to visit whenever you had a high turnip price so your friends could flip and turn a tiny profit.

Given the pressure to keep up with the online conversation, cheating this “stalk market” was the surest way to quickly earn money and “catch up” with people further along then you, even if it meant cheating yourself out of the experience of properly playing the game.

A weird economy of third-party websites cropped up to support this community initiative to almost skip playing the actual game. Subreddits and websites appeared that would allow you to search online for islands across the world to unload your stalks, and literally wait in queues of up to 30 people—potentially hours of real-life waiting—to have the opportunity to go to high-price islands to unload your stalk supply.

This fear of “running behind social media” took a cute “ya win some, ya lose some” minigame and reduced it to as nourishing an experience of waiting in a Soviet breadline. After waiting for an hour or so for your number to be called, you’d haul an inventory full of turnips to some strangers island to sell for a game-breaking profit, and then pay a tribute to the local Generalissimo by leaving bags of money in front of their house as a tip like they were the middleman in your Cocaine Empire. If Nintendo was still chasing the MTV generation, I can almost hear in my head of what it would sound like if they unloaded some racks for Rick Ross to pen a song about it.

The downside of this is the obvious fact that exploiting the game like this cheats you out of having to engage with so many of the relaxing parts of playing the game like catching fish and insects, growing fruit, and building furniture. Speedrunning yourself into wealth in such blatantly unfun and bearucratic fashion feels so antithetical to a game that again, is about spending a relaxing, care free time on an island.

Once most players were Post-Scarcity due to the tactics above, the next theatre of war was to make islands as intricately designed as possible for social media plaudits.

As previously stated, the original Animal Crossing gave each player character their own house to upgrade and decorate as you please. This was always my favorite aspect of the game, because of the limited size and toolset, you could decorate a house in a personalized and relaxing way. For someone with no appreciable real-world aesthetic taste, aimlessly shifting furniture around in rooms like the one from my save below, to the tune of some excellent in-game “singles”, feels like the digital equivalent of tending to a Bonsai Tree that always puts me in a tranquil mood.

However, Animal Crossing: New Horizon allowed you to do perform this level of customization on your entire island, which made the possibility space of what you could “tend” unbearably massive, and gave you tools for doing so that were cumbersome and borderline unfun to engage with. Regardless, it didn’t stop people from creating some incredibly impressive and daunting designs like the examples below:

As impressive as this content is, knowing what I know about this game, I could see some of these things taking upwards of tens of hours to complete. If you extrapolate that over the course of populating an entire island in that level of detail, it could translate to hundreds of hours of work, which again, is an unhealthy amount of time for anyone to sink into what is supposed to be a low-key, relaxing game.

But since this is the content that gets passed around as “average” creations done in the game on social media, sure enough in the comments section of many such posts, you find impressed but wistful comments from Unwashed Normie Casuals about how cool these posts look, but how far behind they feel in being able to come up with such creations on their own:

Sometimes in the hunt for retweets and upvotes, a mere screenshot of a content-creators impressive display wasn’t enough. One miniature scandal I remember was the fact certain users started low-key post-processing their screenshots, to the point now where you can pay real money to access an economy of post-processing filters with Animal Crossing-designed settings in mind.

It’s so bizzare to see “no filter” disclaimers on video game screenshots like the early days of Instagram—a line of demarcation in some inter-community battle regarding Authenticity™ in Animal Crossing screenshots. Remember: this is a video game about living a worry-free life on an island, surrounded by quirky animal friends.

I think the combination of the two phenomenon above transformed a very “at your own pace” game into a competitive one for anyone who was passively involved in it’s online community, such that newer fans felt like they were playing it incorrectly by not dedicating the same effort as the hardcores. While I always anecdotally noticed this sentiment in the comments section of many popular posts, you can actually weirdly find actual reporting on this phenomenon of people burning themselves out on the most stress-free game possible due to social media:

“My ideas that I tried never felt cute, especially compared to images I’d see on Twitter, and it made the game very stressful to play, and see people talking about constantly online,” she told Polygon.

Again: this bums me out! As such a long time fan of Animal Crossing, it’s really disheartening to see people coming to this franchise the first time and having the wrong takeaways about it based on the strange incentives of the social media that surrounds it.

IV. Conclusion

As a parent, you are constantly looking for ways to kill time in 15 minute chunks to prevent your kids from coming up with more destructive distractions of their own. One of my constant go-to’s is open up a coloring book and a box of crayons.

Often times my daughter, likely parroting her experience of her day care provider to her, asks me to do the coloring for her and I oblige. Since having kids, I probably haven’t “colored” regularly in like 20 years, because why would I? But there is something pretty relaxing about it. Thanks to the limited pallete of colors in a box of crayons and the obvious guideance provided by a coloring book, the simple act of filling a page with color does feel somewhat meditative. Sometimes, I’ll even extend my little talents and I try to draw these terrible renditions of our daughter or my dog or a cartoon she likes and she can actually recognize them despite being such terrible facimililes, and it’s truly relaxing because it’s so no-stakes and the only audience is her.

While I don’t consider coloring a hobby, it feels decompressing in the way that I feel any hobby should. I am fully engaged on other aspects of my life in terms of my job, being married, and having kids, and my ego is satisfied by the nourishment I get in performing those roles mostly well. I go to hobbies to turn my brain off from my larger responsibilities, but still engage it in other stimulating ways that don’t require validation.

It feels to me, that the sort of influencer and sharing economy content that touches everything is dominated by people who seem to get satisfy their egos and derive their self worth on being perceived the best at a given hobby. The biggest board game collection. The most beautiful Animal Crossing island. Social media obviously optimizes to showing you “The Best” of anything created in any field, which makes anything merely adequate seem obsolete.

But hobbies should be the celebration of the adequate! Hobbies should be the things we retreat to melt away the stress from all of the high-performance activities we do in our professional or families lives, not as another avenue to harness that high-performance energy in and “compete” on.

I think the examples I discuss are ultimately pretty anodyne, because board gaming and Animal Crossing are not hobbies that result in creative output. But I wonder: how hard it would be to get into a hobby where there is? If I wanted to get into something like baking, or sketching, or woodworking, how immediately discouraged would I be comparing myself against people that have staked their entire identity against it? It a quite a paradox where an online community may be the easiest avenue to figure out where to start in a hobby, but that that same community might also massively discourage you from getting into it in the first place.

Maybe there is no massive wisdom to be garnered here, but for me personally, it’s another arrow in my quiver as to why social media ultimately feels like an empty calorie vice that takes away more than it adds from people’s lives. The less I engage with the things I like online, the more rich I find my enjoyment of them in the real world.

There is a tongue-in-cheek relationship advice podcast my wife and I enjoy where one of the central themes the host hammers home is how healthy it is for a couple to occasionally “talk a little shit”. Typically this is in the context of inter-couple spats, where instead of causing some public blow up at some perceived slight, you instead privately talk some shit about them within your couple unit, blow off the steam you need to, and move on.

Unfortunately, my wife and I have curated friends that we genuinely enjoy and leave us little room for us to dunk on them. Thus, for the sake of sustaining our relationship over the long haul, our concentrated cynicism must be channeled somewhere as to not shatter our frail superiority complexes. While typically this acrid bile gets lobbed on the reality show participants of shows like Married At First Sight or 90 Day Fiancé, this also comes in the form on clowning on influencers my wife hate-follows.

One of the highest profile train wrecks we occasionally check in on was the @fashionambitionist debacle, where a woman and her fiancé famously pre-planned her “surprise” engagement to be rolled out as a series multi-day Instagram stories over a multi-day timeframe. These goons had a pitch deck for brands that explained the trajectory of what locations and timelines of where the wife-to-be would be on her “pre-proposal” adventure, and along the way, would receive bread crumb “gifts” from her now-husband from whatever jewelry or skincare brands happened to be the highest bidder. Today, she has hocks her own brand of body suit (think: toddler onesies for adult women) and occasionally drops missives about how the haters can’t bring her down with no accounting of the chicanery she pulled to her audience.

But for every apex-predator of phony influencer, there are million bottom feeders nipping for the crown that bring us joy as well. Our indie-favorite was an acquaintance we knew when we lived in Nashville, who was personally very pleasant, but ferociously delusional about turning her and her husband into a full stack band/home goods store/ /YouTube lifestyle brand. Her day job was an event coordinator for the apartment complex we lived in, but we came to find out she was covertly recording the mixers she organized to use as B-Roll footage for her channel, where she instead claimed these were actually parties she was throwing for her friends. A lot of these events were intentionally done outside so her husband/producer could fly his 4K Drone Camera above people socializing, to imply that me getting on an elevator to go downstairs to get a solo cup of Charles Shaw after work was somehow a destination event that demanded an aerial production package.

I feel like the detrimental effects of influencer culture is a well known phenomenon in certain feminine-coded spheres of interest like fashion, makeup, fitness, cooking and parenting, where in all cases they present an ideal that’s impossible to live up to, but hint at obtainability provided you end up buying the right products they are happening to sell. Tracking this parasocial crossroads between “authenticity” and Referrel Codes-powered sales is practically a dedicated beat now at news organizations, supplanting a subset of celebrity culture as something for us proles to gawk at and mock. Since I don’t really have any stake in any of the aforementioned hobbies above, I never really considered how influencer culture might impact your ability to enjoy a hobby infested with it.

Over the last year or so though, I’ve noticed how aspects of influencer culture have been permeating subcultures where the I wouldn’t expect to see it: Board Gaming and Animal Crossing. The results are….really something.

II. Influencer-content and Board Games

At some point I followed a single Board Game related account on Instagram and The Algorithm—desperate for a signal—started feeding me a conveyer belt of what I can only describe as “board game influencer” content. My “Suggested Post” infinite scroll is now a virtual Helms Deep, constantly under siege by all manner of plastic orcs, dragons and 12 sided die.

Board gaming is having a moment as a screen-free, social activity for a generation whose primary vice is getting lost in anti-social, screen-heavy hate scrolling. Before this boom, board game establishments would be heavily adorned with uninviting Warhammer posters, unfolded white card tables seated with 3 wolf-moon shirted gamers, and musty carpeting that hasn’t had a vacuum pull Pocky crumbs from its fibers since the fall of the Roman Republic. Today, newer board game stores have the cleanliness and calm of a book store. In addition, there is a new breed of Board Gaming Cafes where you can grab a beer or a coffee and play a board game as a casual hang.

Now that board gaming is finding a growing audience, you can find the same influencer trappings from other domains hilariously juxtaposed over a hobby with dorky origins that doesn’t seem well positioned for it:

Some of this content is very just very silly. Like, what am I looking at here? Is this supposed to be the board game equipment version of Marilyn Monroe emerging from the cake for Vitamin-D deprived indoor kids? If Ernest Cline made an “epic for-the-win” future World War parable in his godawful Ready Player One universe, this would be the pin up poster sent to the pockmarked heroes on the front line to boost their morale. I’m just trying to imagine the audacity of rolling up to play a board game at a friends place, squatting my hulking ass into a game’s box as if I possess the subtle grace of a demure Calico, and immediately flattening the structural integrity of it, forcing the hosts to store the game in a Ziploc freezer bag. Nobody do this at my house, please!

This influencer gets served to me frequently and so many of her posts are her sitting in a box, sometimes with a tankard of grog or a rule book, making reference to a board game she’s about to “play with friends” despite the audience never seeing them in frame, giving the whole enterprise of a feeling of, well:

It’s clear to me these shots are a product of a weekly modeling shoot with game miscellany she breadcrumb drops throughout the week, but the artifice of influencer culture demands her to tell the fiction that every day, she’s going to throw on some Final Fantasy inspired straps-for-pants to sit at a friends card table in the basement 2 hours playing yet another game.

And it wouldn’t be an influencer arrangement without some cross brand synergy, like the above post that contains sponcon for something called “GeekGrind” coffee. Why do geeks need their own brand of coffee? Isn’t Coffee Culture already geeky and pretentious enough such that we don’t need to slap some Elves or Goblins on the bag and some flavor text about how the beans “are harvested from Moonlight Glen and ground naturally by the heavy steps of the native Spriggan” or some other nerd-shit? The pandering is exhausting!

Another interesting sub-genre of board gamer influencer content is overly-dramatic, staged board game photography, complete with what appears to be post processing. I don’t know what it says about BIDENS AMERICA we have such an elite overproduction of white guys with DSLR cameras, but we desperately must find another muse for them to turn their gaze and ring lights to.

However, the content that I see most of, and find the most irksome, is the “Collection Porn” aspect of Board Gaming social media. This influencer content feels a lot more pernicious.

If the stereotypical American Dream is a homestead with a white picket fence and two toe-haired spuds named named Timmy and Jill, Real Board Gamers™ aspire instead for a studio apartment and multiple White Kallax shelves overflowing with games designed by dudes that should have been punched in the face by Indy in Raiders of The Lost Ark—dudes with names like Klaus Jürgen Wrede and Friedemann Friese. So many accounts that get fed to me are dorky-but-chipper couples that quietly partner with publishers to subtlely market new products to you to keep living up to this ideal.

The sheer volume of games you see in some of these humble-brag posts is a little distressing for me to be so commonly shown as an aspirational goal for the hobby:

Look—I love board games as a medium. I love hatching a cockamamie suicide run plan with friends in Forbidden Desert only for us to botch the execution and get entombed in hot sand. I love the psychic warfare my wife and I share when playing Carcassonne: The Castle, subtly trying to undo each other’s big buildings with stray pirate workers in not-as-of-yet-connected castles. I love building and deploying a deck of complimentary cards in Seasons such that every scoring in the final year becomes a Financial Audit where you need to bean count every turn like a seasoned CPA. It’s hard to describe how satisfying I find board games, but the closest analog is how my wife describes ASMR videos to me. When a board games engine really starts roaring, it has the effect of an Eastern European women brushing her newly manicured fake nails over a binaural microphone, scratching a bone-deep analytical itch I can’t get scratched otherwise.

Scratching this itch is not a trivial investment of time, though! It may take three or five or as many as twenty playthroughs to understand the machinations of a well-engineered board game. If I were to quantify it for the sake of argument, I’d wager it may take me two hours or so before I can truly even comprehend and enjoy a game I’m playing, while I might need ten hours before I can really enjoy a game at a high level of play.

So when I get served pictures like the above, or dreadful Instagram Reel content like this nonsense, it’s distressing! It makes board gaming feel like an unsustainable purchase treadmill of buying whats new, playing a couple rounds, and moving onto the next game, which is so shallow and consumerist. Some of my favorite games, like Carcassonne: The Castle or Azul or The Castles of Burgandy, I’ve played with my wife an upwards of 30 times each. How could you possibly plumb those depths with a collection as big as the below? To me, having a collection of this size is the equivalent of going to one of those dimly lit Prohibition-era cosplay bars, ordering every drink off the menu, and proceeding to peckishly eat the fruit garnish or floss your teeth with the herb sprig from every glass instead of just drinking a fucking cocktail and enjoying its complexity.

So yeah, this sudden realization of what board gamer influencer content looks like presents a “keeping up with the Joneses” ethos of constant acquistion that makes the hobby, from the outside looking in, look as pointlessly shelf-filling and dust-collecting as POP figurines, which feels kind of a drag!

This is a 2 part post. Part 2 can be found here.

I’ve written all types of topics for all kinds of clients. Restaurant consultants. Realtors. B2B flooring services. Physical therapists. You name it, and I’ve written the dreck that they file under the “blog” section of their website. 

At first, I would ask a lot of questions to make sure I got these blogs just right. Do you want me to focus on this aspect or that aspect of antimicrobial flooring? Should the restaurant trends of 2020 article acknowledge that restaurants were largely only doing takeout at this point? These questions were ultimately met with a resounding “whatever.”

Because over time, I figured out: what I’m writing does not exist for its content itself. Instead, the majority of these blogs exist solely for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes. So basically, if I get a random detail about antimicrobial flooring wrong, they could not give two fucks. Because their aim is not to inform the world about microbial flooring. It’s to have their B2B flooring business shoot up to the top of the search results when someone googles “Antimicrobial flooring.” And as a result, the standard for this content is much, much lower.

So I guess I fundamentally knew this about “Blog” content. But it was 3 am, and I was a pregnant insomniac, so I was easing the boredom by looking up some middle name inspiration for Baby Boy. (Although, these websites would actually call him DS--Dear Son.)

My middle of the night brain typed “Pop Punk Baby Names” into Google. I don’t know what I was expecting to find that I didn’t already know. As much as I loved The Front Bottoms, I already knew I wasn’t going to name my kid Mat or Brian. I was probably looking for a name inspired by something like Blink, if their names weren’t Mark (the Bible!), Tom (the cabin!), or Travis (comes out of the womb with cowboy boots!)

I instead found many inauthentic-feeling pages of SEO-farmed content that made me laugh as loud as I could without waking the sleeping members of my household.

BabyGaga - “25 Punk Baby Names With an Edge”

This article is full of names from bonafide founding fathers (and mothers) of punk rock; however, it is editorialized with little quips and comments that make it sound like a book report written by a fifth-grader. For example, for the name Sid (Vicious):

“‘Their relationship was full of ups and downs, leading to the eventual mysterious murder of Nancy. Not long after, on February 2, 1979, Vicious was found dead in New York City,’ writes Biography. I mean, you can’t say that’s not edgy! Sid Vicious is an iconic figure in punk music, and the name Sid is actually pretty darn cool!”

So...we just went from murder/mysterious death to “pretty darn cool” in two sentences. Neat!

Fatherly - “14 Baby Names Inspired by Punk Rock”

This one is for a website that tries to let you know their audience is cool dude dads. They let you know they don’t really buy into gender stereotypes by categorizing the names into “boys” and “girls,” quotation marks included. The brief intro quips:

“Now that the little rebel is on the way to help smash the patriarchy and cause some havoc in their Montessori school...”

This name list comes in HOT with the first baby name suggestion, “Jello.” Other name suggestions are as off the wall as “Souixsie,” “Cherry,” and just plain old “X.” It’s as if this is a list of names that no one would dare to touch, but that’s okay, because they’re not a regular dad website, they’re a cool dad website. (And no one is reading this content anyway.)

CafeMom - “20 Unique ‘Emo’ Baby Names Former Scene Kids Will Love”

Ahem, AS A FORMER SCENE KID MYSELF, I take offense with this list. It was obviously created by someone who either had no clue what they were talking about, or someone who was forced to come up with a list of 20 when they only really had good ideas for about 5. “Gerard”? Love it. “Helena”? Considered naming my daughter this, but decided to give it to my Roomba instead.

Further down the list, we get...”Avril”? Swing and a miss. Even further down, grasping at straws, our author tries to convince us that actually, Egar Allan Poe was the FIRST real Emo, and we should give “Annabel Lee” a shot.

Southern Living - “Baby Names Inspired by Southern Cities”

How the hell did I get here? Well, remember it’s 3 AM and I am very pregnant. At one point, I was trying to convince my husband that “Tennessee” was a good middle name idea, because we used to live in Nashville, and Tennessee Williams is my favorite playwright. So I guess a part of me thought that maybe there was a name like this that wasn’t exactly that name, but something close to it that was hiding in plain sight.

This article begins in a strangely personal way for one of these listicles, starting with an anecdote about how the author’s father was in vet school at Auburn, and his classmates joked that he was going to name his baby “Mississippi Magnolia” (why??) But the list itself is just a slideshow of names with no explanation because there was no defending the choices on this list of names. First up: Stella, after Stella, TN. Ah, the great unincorporated area of Stella. Even after living in Tennessee and going on a few road trips around the state--never heard of it. It continues with a few obvious choices like Savannah, but mainly WTF ideas like Camden after “Camden, FL.” My favorite “southern” baby name, that hammers home the author did not do a modicum of research to farm this content? McLean, after that iconic quaint little dixie town in VA.

The Paradox of Baby Name Articles

I'm not here to question anyone’s street cred behind their name choices. After all, my husband and I can’t even remember how we thought of the first names of either of our children. Beyond that, I’m infamously named after a sweater brand (first and middle name!) my parents encountered shopping at a store while pregnant. I’ve never asked what store, but I’ve read between the lines of my parents’ shopping habits and the only places I’ve ever encountered this obscure label to uncover: I am named after a Marshalls/TJ Maxx brand. I’m basically a bargain-basement Calvin Klein or Ralph Lauren, which I guess is better than being named for a brand that famous.

But regarding the topic of something like punk rock baby names...if you have to read about it on a list, then do you really possess enough of an innate connection to the name to name your kid after it? It would be one thing if these suggestions were like “John” or “Emily.” But no. These lists are trying to convince you to name your kid after Jello Biafra or Siouxsie and the Banshees. If you’ve never heard of these things, why on earth would you go out on a limb and name your kid something totally out there that you only just learned about from some random intern at Nameberry?

I suppose the cynic and SEO blogger in me just thinks these articles are clickbait farms. That like my weird 600-word pieces on the most exciting flooring trends of 2021, the articles don’t exist to be read. They exist to send Nameberry or Southern Living or whatever to the top of the Google charts. If we need to tell people it’s cool to name their kid Jello, well then we gotta do what we gotta do.

The Weird Pivot of SEO Articles

So coming back to my SEO blogging adventures and my behind-the-scenes perspective on this strange art. The funniest part of these articles is what I call “the weird pivot.” This is the part at the end where I have to tie in a call to action for the thing the client is selling. 

It definitely comes across a little awkward in my article about loans designed to help women and POCs who own businesses, to have to add a paragraph at the end that basically states: “...And did you know that there are prepaid (read: expensive af) monthly legal services that can help ANY business owner? Sign up today!”

My recent insomnia has led me to read more Parents.com magazine articles than I’d like to admit. I stumbled across a series that they do where they basically report on Reddit /AmITheAsshole threads as if they are news. These come across as if they’re written by your out-of-touch aunt who is doing a book report on Reddit. My favorite touches are how they censor “ass****” and how they treat Reddit usernames as if they are god-given, earnestly reporting that advice came from r/Gaylectric or r/MaximumVermicelli88. 

These articles, too, have weird pivots, which must be part of their blogger’s assignment. Someone at Parents.com is asking these writers to tie these exercises in schadenfreude-fueled voyeurism to A Bigger Issue, and the end result is downright hilarious.

In one article, they report on a Reddit user asking if she’s an ass**** for refusing that her sister-in-law bake her a diaper cake for her baby shower. They give all the deets, plus a few funny comments from other users, but ultimately, the weird call to action: do you, yourself have an unwanted diaper cake or unwanted diapers of any kind? Donate them to the National Diaper Bank Network today!

In an even stranger, juicier one, they report on a Reddit dad’s story of a clingy coworker who called herself his “work wife,” even though the feeling wasn’t mutual. “She obviously likes you!” his coworkers told him. (Um, what?! Are his coworkers 9-year-olds?) He asks if he is an asshole for kicking said coworker out of his wife’s baby shower after she loudly declared she’d be his “second mom.” I am here for this drama--it sounds like the most exciting possible turn of events that could happen at a baby shower. But of course, Parents magazine isn’t here for the drama. They want to turn this article into a teachable moment, so it becomes about how to teach your kids that sexual harassment is never okay.

Game Respect Game

So what, exactly, is my point? Am I here to call out every writer who has ever churned out some pointless trash for that sweet, sweet PayPal payout? I mean, I’d be a total hypocrite if I did. It’s hard as hell to get paid as a writer, and no one is ever going to pay you a cent for your poetry or your linked set of short stories or really anything you yourself deem worthwhile. 

Instead, it’s all about the hits, baby! And what they mean by that is it’s all about insomniac moms auto-clicking from article to article, gasping in horror at the suggestion to name their baby “Wentz” or even just “Emo,” because goddamn, this CafeMom writer was lazy af. Love it or hate it, someone just clicked on it, and a click is a click. There are no bad clicks.

Oh god, this is where the weird pivot should go, shouldn’t it?

III.

Surprise, surprise: COVID sent me into a depression last year the likes of which I’ve never felt in my life. No sense in spilling typeface on it. We were all there.

I was maybe a bit surprised to the extent I was depressed though, because in some ways, COVID provided me a lifestyle that was my natural inclination. I consider myself a home body, somewhat of an introvert, and can run off the fumes of listening to and re-listening to the same podcast episodes while playing the same video game series ad infinitum. Outside of the general health scares and societal fears, why did COVID make my day to day life so dreary?

I think the source of my depression was because COVID was the final death knell of whatever last vestige of randomness I had in my adult life. COVID, from the outset, completely killed the possibility of spontaneity.

COVID reinforced an adults already rigid set of routines to make you live as cloistered as possible, only venturing out to do things that were deemed essential. The weekday routine at our house was brutally rigid, involving getting our daughter awake and out the door, working our respective jobs remotely, getting our daughter home from school, feeding her dinner and putting her to sleep. By the time my wife and I had time to ourselves we were braindead, and even if we weren’t, what could you go and do at 8PM by yourself on a weeknight anyway when anything of consequence was closed?

Even if your pre-COVID routine was rigid and predictable, it robbed you of very simple acts of random pleasure venturing out into society can provide. Even something as simple as the commute to work, where you may need to take a different route because of an accident, or find a new song to love off of a playlist, or decide to pick up a bagel sandwich and coffee, was swept off the table. I even developed a pang for being in an office. When people talk about the “death of the physical office”, I think they are greatly discounting that an office environment was a great catalyst for randomness that you can’t really recreate with remote work and Slack channels. Little pockets of small-talk fueled by an office environment— some of which may morale boost you out of mundane parts of a day, but others of which may serve the business in a productive way—is never going to be recreated via schedule Zoom calls and calendar blocks.

Looking back, it’s was almost pathetic the types of things I derived pleasure from just in the hunt for a new, routine-breaking experience during early pandemic. I remember at some point, a Lidl opened up down the road, and one of the most exciting parts of my week was shopping at a new grocery store witch exciting private label European products. Do you understand how embarassing it is, that for the whole of 2020, one of my most thrilling recollections was turning my cart into an unexplored new aisle of a grocery store? That I remember the electricity in my fingers as I picked up and perused all manner of store-brand Hazelnut Butters, Tea Cookies and Haribo-knockoff gummy treat? That is a dire fuckin’ existence that can only exist when you are starved of any semblance of randomness!

So while COVID killed a lot of the randomness that makes life feel vivid, l also think randomness fueled a lot of my rehabilitation as well.

I’ll leave this weird phase of my life with a much greater appreciation for the neighborhood we live in, which was a catalyst for so many of the random and enriching interactions we had during this period. You generally assume suburbia to be pretty sleepy, but since COVID, our neighborhood took a social vibrancy akin to a city block. For the period of time it was still taboo to see your people, disparate sets of neighbors who typically outsourced their social time out of the neighborhood now started to naturally rely on one another. People would just sit on the front deck to take in the sun more, or go on walks just get some blood flowing. That pent up energy and desire to just get out there resulted in people talking to one another more.

One of my favorite things that seem to happen on nice weather days, are the impromptu block parties that just pop up in peoples yards. One neighbor comes to talk to another, or one toddler beelines over to her friend, and it soon becomes the nucleus of a social conglomeration that other passerby’s would also to glom onto. The dynamisms and unplanned nature of these fleeting chats recollect the energy of a college dorm room, with rotating sets of people dropping in and out of a hang.

Even the nature of my interactions with people, I feel personally more random in terms of conversations I start or comments I make. Perhaps it’s due to a year of cloistering, but I feel like I’ve gotten oddly less self-conscious in terms of strange remarks or jokes I might make, as my inner voice is leaks out a bit more with people I don’t know as intimately. Similar to dressing well, I think being a bit more socially daring is tied to the fact I want my interactions to be purposeful and memorable after a year of being deprived from them. In a way, I welcome this change, because I think introducing a little randomness into conversation can push small talk into something more significant.

IV.

Regarding relationships, I left Section II on a bit of down note, complaining about how the longer relationships progress, the less spontaneous your life can accidentally become unless you keep an eye on it. This obviously isn’t entirely true, and one possible vector to ensure this isn’t the case is if a relationship progresses to the decision to have kids. Having kids is a booster-shot of randomness injected into your life, as parenthood taps into a reserve of love so primal and potent that your reactions and instincts feel random to what you know even know about yourself.

Perhaps I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth here, because a mere section ago I was complaining that raising a kid during COVID required a strenuous rigidity that kills randomness. That’s true. But that contradiction is true of the dynamics of having kids in general—in their waking hours, when they are stomping their socked feet in the dogs water bowl or precariously mimicking older-kid gymnastic moves on an older-kid playground, you are often fraught with paternal anxiety and clock-counting to bedtime. When you finally close the door on them at the end of the night, all you do is miss their presence terribly.

Being a parent feels like a great unlearning and unburdening of the habits that you have cultivated since high school that have forced you to shed randomness. Save for certain routines, if you try to force a kid to adhere to a schedule as strict as the ones you do at work or in school, you are setting up for constant anxiety and disappointment. Instead, when you are watching your kid, you are in a constant reactive posture taking on the whims and impulses of the being with the attention span of a moth—pinballing you around their carnival of ideas, activities, and explorations that may last as long as hours or as little as seconds. In order to keep up with your child, you need to be spontaneous and silly in ways that are antithetical to what you adult brain is trained to do, and you find yourselves channeling silly voices and mannerisms you did as a kid as a remembered muscle-memory to speak their language.

Sure, parenthood is rife with banal moments compared to the most thrilling of parties or the most sensual of dates, but within those banal moments you find moments of profundity through your child’s eyes. There is this book I’ve been reading with my daughter around bedtime that involves a crew of construction trucks going to bed at the end of the workday, and every time we get to the second page, she cheerily explains “he’s peeing!” at a mixer laying cement. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard and parenthood is rife with these little random in-jokes that become the private lexicon of your family.

Another underrated factor of having kids is that they are great catalysts of creating spontaneous social interactions. While previously spontaneous, meeting new people seems to increasingly be pushed into self-selected lists that exist on disparate web apps where you need you self-select as status that indicates “I am open to XYZ”. You obviously see this the most with online dating: people self-select into the “types” of relationships they want to find themselves on whatever brand of dating app you choose to use. (Tinder for flings, OKCupid for something serious, FarmersOnly for animal husbandry both in and out of the bedroom). Even finding friendship can follow a similar trajectory, where you may rely on something like MeetUp.com, or clubs or churches that pair you based on some common thread or interest.

In parallel to the services like these, it also feels like there has been a cultural shift from just approaching and talking to strangers. Certainly, men feel this pressure from a romantic perspective, but I think this suspicion flows downstream into even more anodyne interactions as well. I know when I am out and about, I take an initially defensive posture when someone strikes up a conversation because I always assume it will translate into a direct sales pitch or a invitation to a new age church, and am often times right .1

Having kids is an underrated tool of organically and spontaneously meeting other people in a volume I haven’t experienced since college. Since, there is no preconceived notion or baggage when two like-aged toddler’s start interacting with one another, children almost do the heavy lifting the adults should be doing in providing a pretext to interact. In that way, having kids is a interesting back door into an entirely random new network, and an unexpected way they introduce more randomness into your social life.

V.

Writing this felt like a blood-letting of sorts I needed to do to come to terms with some of the thoughts and feelings I’ve had over the last year, so I apologize if it was a bit rambly and unfocused. Maybe the whole “randomness” angle was me searching for a frame less obvious then “2020 year bad”.

Regardless, I do think there is something to the fact that over my life time, due to life and technological circumstance, randomness is getting increasingly priced out of my life, and it feels like something to be conscious of. Coming out of such an odd time in my life, I hope a lesson I take to heart is to embrace putting myself and my family situations with opportunities for randomness and ensuring a life filled with a level of dynamism.

In Feburary I went in for a physical and was surprised to learn that I lost some weight over the course of COVID, reaching the ideal 2021 physique: CDC-certified chonk enough to qualify as 1B, but 10 pounds slimmer than I’d been 18 months before.

I attribute this evolution to replacing a diet that previously consisted of catered office work lunches with one that included crippling, looming anxiety for most of 2020. I mean, I barely worked out in the last year, but somehow got trimmer? I guess once the COVID threat is squashed, I’ll need to fall asleep listening to global conspiracy podcasts and hire someone to sit outside our house at night in a unmarked white van at night so I can effortlessly maintain this bodacious bod.

Like most people, most of my wardrobe sat in in stasis for the last 18 months so, it felt like the perfect time to refresh it. If you lose a little weight, even accidently, you want to present yourself as best as possible, especially now that the simple pleasure of visiting friends feels more rare and precious now than it did in 2020.

So I tried out Stitch Fix. Stitch Fix has existed for some time, but for those unaware, its basically a styling app where you enter some metrics about your figure, what brands you wear, and have the opportunity to “swipe” on pieces you like/dislike. On a predefined schedule, the company will ship you a “fix” of five items tailored to what they know about you. The charms here are obvious and repeated a million other services: it’s very fun to get a surprise in the mail, specifically one that “feels” tailored to your preferences. From there, you try on the clothes, pay for what you keep, ship back the rest, and leave detailed reviews so that the next box they send you is curated with an even higher level of intelligence.

I know this is bordering on sounding like sponsored content. Like, you are gonna scroll down just a paragraph more and get bludgeoned with a referral code and some sob story about how if you use my code, I can get cheaper outfits for my rapidly growing daughter who Hulks out of her clothes at such an alarming weight we face financial ruin. Trust that I am going somewhere with this.

I like Stitch Fix. While you won’t see me on the bleeding edge of fashion, I have purchased a couple of functional pieces that were maybe a little out of my comfort zone, to replace old staples of mine that looked kinda dweeby. I realized through using the app that I’m actually a 33 waist instead of a 34, and that I look good in blush pink colors. It taught me about the the concept of Tonal Dressing, so you better believe whenever you see The Kid in 2021, I’m gonna have the fit of a Sherwin Williams paint-swatch.

I know, I feel like I have the energy of a dude that compliments you on your 10 year old New Balances with dog shit on the soles in the Cereal aisle at Target, just as a reason to strike up a conversation with you so he can invite you to a Hilton Garden Inn and game you into reselling a rat-poison filled energy drink. Bear with me.

But, I like the Stitch Fix alot. A kinda weird amount, maybe? Maybe it’s because I’m using less social media, but I am taken aback by objectively how much of the Beep Bop Booping I do in my downtime is now on Stitch Fix. I am constantly logging into the app to “like” or “dislike” the endless feed of shirts, accessories, and outfits they ask me to rate. Every time I do it, I feel like I am sanding the edges of the algorithm in such a way that the next mystery box they send me will reveal some universal fashion truth about myself. Just how powerful is this tech? If I do this for another year or so, will they send me a fursuit—prompting me to break down, clutch it tenderly and sob violently— just to realize how right it feels?

Jokes aside, I did want to drill into why I’ve been so charmed by Stitch Fix. I mean, I care about clothes and fashion to an extent, but not enough to justify my current fascination with this app and service.

What I landed on was the following: I think I’ve loved Stitch Fix so much because the service provided a jolt of randomness into my life, in a year when randomness was a rare luxury.

What do I mean by randomness? For the purpose of this essay, I mean situations that stir up your instincts reactively and emotionally, instead of situations that are anticipated or planned. Humans are animals too after all, and the less randomness inserted into your life, the more you can self-zombify through the motions of your day to day existence. Randomness feels like something we cede more and more of the older we get, perhaps by design, but perhaps to our detriment.

Stitch Fix, in a small way, got me to try out clothing that I typically wouldn’t buy myself, forcing me to rethink and react to how I might dress instead of coasting on how I’ve habitually dressed. It’s own way, it provided a small, but tangible type of joy that feels fueled by randomness1.

Given that randomness was in a such short supply in the last year, I wanted to reflect on the role random situations have played in my life, and how a level of randomness can result in a more fulfilling life.

II.

When I think of the most “random” time in my life, at least in the framing of randomness I’ve defined above, it would be the quintessential public high school experience. It’s almost a trope, right? When you think of “random” and “high school”, it brings to mind a caricature of a specific brand of high schooler. For me, it conjures the image of a girl with Gir backpack, neon-dyed purple hair and fingerless arm gloves that was always offering to hug everyone. In retrospect, I can’t begrudge her, because how she was presenting herself was emblematic of what everyone was doing in their own way: trying to forge a sustainable identity in a crucible of changing dynamics that changed with each class period, each year. Public high school puts you through a wild gamut of interactions with the most diverse group of people you’ll probably ever interact with in your life from an intelligence, race and class perspective, and figuring out how to situate yourself in that randomness was fundamentally healthy but exhausting.

I think it’s a very universal experience, in the quiet moments of your day, to just suddenly become paralyzed by some soul-crushing moment of how you acted in high school. Just the other day, I poured some French press coffee into a mug and caught myself starring at it for what felt like 5 minutes, recalling the Freshman year homecoming that ended in me tearfully apologizing to my date in front of 4 other girls for being such an shy wierdo, apropos of nothing, while we were 3/4ths of the way through a video tape copy of Scarface in my buddy Andy’s bedroom. It’s probably one of ten in a rotating slideshow of such memories from high school that can short-circuit anything I’m doing, and God forbid it happens while I’m driving so I don’t cringe myself into oncoming traffic for the sweet relief of death.

Everyone has memories like these because they are emblematic of the sheer randomness of the high school experience: constantly being placed in uncomfortable social situations and having to make the best of them despite not having a solid footing of who you are yet. While those cringey memories were usually the byproduct of the spontaneity of the interactions you found yourself in, that randomness also made for your greatest memories—the ones where you rose to the occasion.

Some of my fondest memories from high school involved me and the goon squad hanging out somewhere with a case of beer, all of us sending out a bunch of invites on our shitty flip phones, and just seeing who was going to show up. The reality of underaged drinking meant in order to find beer a legit place to drink it, people from different cliques would often converge in situations that would seem unheard of in the halls of school itself. Some of the most invigorating memories I have from those days took place in spontaneous get-togethers in friends’ basements, on the pontoon boat, in the baseball team shed, or in the woods. In those random, non-sanctioned environments, I’d talk to the to the girls who I deigned too “intimating” and “popular” in the walls of high school, or we’d hatch the plans for the rest of the evening, where we’d get a buzz and decide to hop the fence of a nearby pool at 2am, or walk to a gas station for shitty microwave burritos. There were no “plans” to be made more so than groups of people converging and following an impulse.

—

From this point in your life, you gradually cede more and spontaneity from your life as you mature.

As a freshman in college, you’d pack onto crowded city buses, reeking of pre-game Burnett’s and Jager, and voyage off campus to unfamiliar and intimidating apartment complexes, keeping your ears open for wherever is bumping music, and essentially act as a door-to-door salesman with the following pitch: “sir or madam, can I sell you the opportunity to underage drink in your living room?”. These adventurous, chartless evenings are wholesale replaced by your senior year, when you are actually invited to the functions you attend, which were relatively subdued and populated with people you already knew.

Eventually you graduate and finally settle into a career. The reason the dating scene is so vibrant and fun right out of college is because it’s one of the last, best vestiges of randomness once you start scheduling your life around the rigid demands and schedule of a 9-to-5 job. There is an energy to meeting someone for the first time, mutually trying to probe if you could slot into one another’s lives and trying learn someone from a blank slate, that puts you in a very “in the moment” posture that is hard to replicate in other aspects of your life. Just little things, like meeting someone’s gaze, or trying to crack the code of how to make someone laugh or smile when you don’t know them yet, are emotional rushes fueled by the randomness of being in the moment with someone and feeling your way forward.

But this to, is a source of randomness that eventually fades once you partner up. Being in a loving relationship, specifically a long term one like a marriage, is very nourishing, but it does take natural spontaneity out of your life. Being in a relationship pits you in a polite, covert cold war where both parties are constantly anticipating one another’s wants and needs. This typically results in safe, predictable compromises on where you eat, what you watch, and who you visit with when. Once your own impulses need to be considered alongside your partners, planning around the collective “we” makes it fundamentally harder to be random. Eventually, you start to act as competing secretaries, managing one another’s social calendars weeks in advance and reducing the possibility to have any free time where just something spur of the moment could come up. This problem compounds itself even further when your once-single friends also get into relationships, and planning a group dinner suddenly becomes as easy to coordinate on as the Joint Sessions of the United Nations.

And maybe this is a me-problem, but I know I certainly closed off a level of spontaneity once I got settled into a committed relationship. There is a small voice in my head—a perhaps incorrect one—that says being a man in a relationship means I need to keep a level of composure in most situations, to stay buttoned up and on guard, and make sure we both get home safe. That impulse, right or wrong, creates a natural inclination to have rigid and subdued plans—not staying out too late, not getting to wild and not over programming weekends, that closes out of possibility for the types of situations you may slip into and give you the most memorable experiences.

—

In summary, the way I see it is as follows: life’s trajectory compels you to dispel of the randomness that once animated your formative years. I’m not knocking it. I think if you hit your 30’s and you’re entirely rootless and living off of impulses—no tether to a career you can tolerate, a property to maintain and pay off, or a family to nurture—you are probably introducing a different set of challenges for yourself and setting yourself up for a listless middle age.

So maybe it’s OK to an extent that the older you get, the more of a trajectory you are on to slowly kill randomness from your life. That being said though, living through 2020 put into stark relief how a life devoid of randomness can slowly kill you.

This is Part 1 of two-part essay. Part 2 can be found here.

When I get nostalgic about music, I think most fondly of my musical discovery journey in college, when I worked at WXJM and was on the bleeding-edge of whatever indie-ish rock/pop that was making a wave at the time. College is a period of time where individuals exist at an intersection between peak open-mindedness and peak-disposable personal time, therefore, whatever taste I have in music today is largely drafting off of the acts or genres I got into back then.

Thanks to Spotify and apps like it, one compulsion I often indulge in is looking into the latter-day work of the bands I loved back then, especially in cases where I’ve soured on their work since. It’s a purely a self-interested curiosity. I am always quietly rooting for such acts’ newer output to be some amazing return-to-form as a validation in my taste at the time—the same the validation that that every generation craves regarding their favs of the era—that yes, music truly WAS better in my day, and all of these bands still have IT. 9 times out of 10 I do this exercise ironically and am massively let down by what certain acts have become.

But sometimes I’m not! Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised by the latter-day output of bands that are past their prime, and as a result, I wanted to dedicate some posts on the EP to give these bands some shine, starting with Weezer.

Weezer

What you remember: Weezer [The Blue Album] (“Say It Ain’t So”, “Buddy Holly”, “Undone - The Sweater Song”, Pinkerton (“El Scorcho”)

What you should try: Weezer [The White Album]

Weezer exists in a small pantheon of artists I will show up for, day one, every single project they put out because I just have to know. Like tearing the sky with my minds eye only to reveal the eldritch horror that manipulates us all, I am psychically compelled to know whatever machinations Rivers Cuomo has for us all even if my human brain will be driven mad by what I find.

There is a difference between occasionally securing the bag and putting out trend-hopping horseshit time after time immemorial. Cuomo can’t help himself. His most recent brush with the zeitgeist seemed almost accidental via a competent “Africa” cover that memed itself onto the radio. Since Rivers had a whiff of the spotlight again, the somewhat innocent joke spawned an entire album of mediocre, passionless boring cover songs, also chasing memedom. The cover art alone betrays how little his band was thrilled to be involved with this project—you replace the teal background with the wall of a holding cell, it would look like a witness ID lineup for an public wanking incident from the 1980’s.

Weezer’s 2016 S/T album (henceforth referred to as The White Album) is a peek into a parallel universe where the 18 year valley of quality between it’s release and 1998’s Pinkerton never happened. Rivers Cuomo, giving up his college vow of celibacy that informed so much of the angsty, yearning energy of the (at the time) poorly received Pinkerton, moves from Harvard to California back to tries to recapture the slacker garage rock vibes of their original S/T with a more distinctly coastal, life affirming flavor: Surf-Wax America—the album.

This isn’t just head-canon—The White Album diabolically pulls moments from Weezer critically acclaimed work, bordering on fan service. The Brian Wilson-esque opening track “California Kids”—complete with an "oooohWeeeeOooooh” laden chorus—makes reference to your “old friends back in Boston” to narratively mark this album as a Pinkerton successor. This song is immediately followed up “Wind In Our Sail”, whose split-second opening chord directly melody-checks the opening riffs of Pinkerton’s “Falling For You”. The oppressive feedback fuzz from “Tired of Sex” gets specifically requested by Cuomo on the top “Do You Wanna Get High?”, which somehow associates a pill popping binge to listening to Burt Bacharach, making drug abuse sound unhip in the specific way only Weezer can.

The truth of the matter is that, yes Rivers, I do wanna get high. I know all of these cute little cues to their earlier works is bullshit pandering. I don’t care! Pinkerton was such a formative album to me that I go into every new Weezer album nose first, hoping to snort a trace of it. On, the White Album, I finally got some trace residue of the real deal instead of inhaling bleach and forgetting long division.

So sure, the White Album is certainly a lesser work that leans on the legacy of their debut and Pinkerton. I still think it’s good! It’s an open-windows pop rock album that shows off Cuomo’s undeniable ability to write a hook and still be bewildered by love as a dude approaching middle age. Love is a aweing, religious force in Cuomo’s mind: (Girl We Got A) Good Thing describes a good couple as “a couple Hare Krishna’s” while Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori culminates into an unironic exclamation how two teenage crushes made him “believe in god”. While these statements borderline on corny, they at least feel earnestly so, and earnestness has been sorely lacking from the majority of Weezer’s later work.

Even if the thought of stomaching a new Weezer album in 2021 is too much to stomach, if you were ever a fan of this band, I’d behoove you to at least check out one (unfortunately titled) track: “L.A. Girlz”. I think “L.A. Girlz” stands next to tracks like Undone and Say It Ain’t So in the pantheon of Weezer’s best songs—an anthem that oscillates between romantic bravado and cowardice in the way Cuomo has perfected. The bridge to the end of the song, repeating the mantra of “does anybody love anybody as much as I love you, baby?” with varying degrees of confidence before ripping into a guitar solo is the perfect distillation of why anyone ever liked this band, and why idiots like me suffer through indignity after indignity looking for a return to form.

As trite as it is playing a California album in California, The White Album will always hold a special place in my heart as an album I remember bumping out of our rental car during the a week long, multi-stop road-trip down Route 1. This was the last large-scale vacation my wife and I took just the two of us before we settled into trying to start our family in earnest, and this album feels like a reminder of what it feels to be in carefree love with an open sunroof, where your only worldly concerns are keeping the good vibrations rolling.

So thank you for that Rivers. I’ll pick one of these songs and keep them a healthy four or five tracks away from “Amber” and “Crash Into Me” on my summer playlist, lest people start to question my cred.

Sheila, a smart, confident, black woman with a Halle Berry haircut, says the most profound thing I’ve heard in 10 seasons of this miserable show:

“I spent my whole 20s trying to convince men I’m worthy. I’m not going to sit here and try to convince my husband of that. You should already think so.”

The husband, for context, is a man she met for the first time at the altar. The show is called Married At First Sight, and it is a complete shitshow, although there are some very strange Christian undertones, a team of experts that includes a pastor (audience favorite Pastor Cal), and an uplifting theme song of: “No holding back! No holding back!”

My own husband, my Forever Person, is the funniest person I know. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a relevant one is his idea for a live version of Married at First Sight, where the show plays on a giant screen in an outdoor amphitheater like Wolf Trap, and a classically trained symphony performs the soundtrack live—mischievous music when one of the husbands is saying something dumb, sentimental music when the experts of the show force the contestants to look at their wedding album. Multiple people play a giant drum for the theme song, and a gospel choir comes together, singing what sounds like marriage propaganda hypnosis: “It’s not a bad thing! It’s not a bad thing!”

“That’s some deep shit,” I say to my husband of Sheila’s assessment. “I feel that.” 

I have never had to convince my husband of my worth. In fact, in the first years of our friendship, I set about trying to do the opposite. “I hate almost everyone I meet,” I confided in him on one of our nightly runs that we went on as friends and roommates. This was intended to shock him, but instead, he started doing an accent and quoting a similar line from There Will Be Blood. 

In the time before I’d found my Forever Person, convincing men of my worth was the name of the game. If I could just come through in the right set of circumstances, I’d finally convince someone I liked to like me back. Since the right set of circumstances never came, I spiraled into a self-hating depression, where I often got too drunk just to make things interesting, or holed up in a singular library carrel all day, listening to the same songs until I cried, embodying a meme that didn’t exist yet: forever alone.

Pastor Calvin Roberson-Approved Boys

I went through all college desperate to find my Forever Person. I started to worry--not that he didn’t exist, but that he did and I didn’t deserve him.

The song “Fix You,” just came out, and I was on a mission to find a man as boring as a Coldplay album.

If I could just find him—a sweater vested, mother-loving, intellectual—maybe I could become a little smarter myself. Maybe I could start loving my own mother more.

I swung and I missed, again and again. At first, I thought, I just needed to get this type of guy drunk and then he could see how much fun a girl like me could be. I wanted to be someone’s first blonde after a long line of brunettes.

This ended in many scenes. The one that makes me cringe the most is me banging my arms on the window of the Honors Dorm, hollering after two brainy, virginal guys whose names and personalities were almost interchangeable: “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” Luckily, they were fast asleep and my roommates quietly whisked me away, as they were growing used to doing.

Then I went for the opposite approach. If only these guys could witness me in a serious situation, then maybe they could take me seriously, too. I took the same classes as them and invited them to study with me. I went to church with them. For the amount of time we spent together, the fact that they had zero romantic interest in me was equal parts frustrating and mind-blowing.

I spent long hours contemplating my loneliness in the McGregor Room of the Alderman Library, lovingly referred to by the dorks I went to school with as the Harry Potter room. Maybe if I was better, if I was the right kind of person, I thought, I would like things like Harry Potter, wholesome things that were put on this earth for good humans to like. But I was a bad human.

My headphones were pumping in nice-guy, hospital drama soundtrack band The Fray, crooning the words, “Heaven forbid you end up alone and you don’t know why.”

Unfortunately, I did know why. To put it in a fairly Victorian way, I was already ruined.

There is a Band Called Travis and They Aren’t Country 

It might not be in the exact way my mom had summarized it when it didn’t work out with the curly haired boy who made me the mix CD I stayed up all night listening to, the boy who made me feel alive by telling me to close my eyes, point my finger somewhere on the map of the downtown mall to pick out where we’d eat lunch.

She’d said: I don’t really think it makes sense for someone who isn’t a virgin to date someone who is.

This would have tragically wiped out the entire category of boy I intended to marry. But it wasn’t like I was a man. I could teach myself to ignore sex for a couple of years while passionately kissing boys and telling them I loved them. That could be enough for me.

Rather than what my mom had said, there seemed to be another reason I was cosmically fucked. It had to be karma.

My high school boyfriend burned me a CD with the song “Why Does It Always Rain On Me?” By a forgettable 90s band called Travis. The song posits like a curse: “Is it because I lied when I was 17?” 

This unreal miracle of a high school boyfriend had his own car and brought me roses every time we went on a date. He came over to my house every Thursday with a Starbucks Frappuccino and Trolli Brite Crawlers to watch The OC. He made me a website that I’ve since spent hours on the WayBack Machine trying to recover, where my senior photo flashed across the screen with skinny hearts he’d designed on Adobe Illustrator, my favorite songs playing dramatically in the background.

Even at the time he must have known I wasn’t worthy.

I think we broke up five times in total, and even when it was finally over for real, I still pulled shit like messaging him about the house he just bought, driving two hours to said new house in the middle of the night, drinking a beer in his brand new kitchen and adding my bottle cap to the collection magnetized to the stainless steel fridge, then waking up hours before my morning class and driving back, pretending none of it ever happened.

I’m Not the Kind of Girl You Take Home

I could take things back even further to elementary school. I remember hearing Sheryl Crow on the radio sing: “I’m not the kind of girl you take home,” and feeling like this was already true of my 10-year-old self.

Later as a yearbook teacher, I hated the senior superlative “Best to Take Home to Parents.” I found it insulting for some reason. Like why is this necessarily a good thing? Parents sucked. If anything, didn’t this mean you possessed the art of conning adults? Or worse, that you were such a boring person, you were the kind of person someone’s mom and dad would actually like?

I never was the kind of person who could please someone else’s mom and dad (or my own, for that matter). Even in elementary and middle school, I got the idea about myself that I was frivolous, vapid, and maybe a little bit slutty. This was because of the way I wanted to dress, which was based on style inspo from music video dancers (which, by the way, was the future career I chose in middle school for my I-Search paper).

In short, for much of my youth, I saw myself as a preteen party girl. A good-time girl. Not marriage material.

Somewhere Out There

But even during my darkest times, I saw glimmers of my Forever Person, every now and again. I knew they had to be out there.

The funny guy working on the student newspaper with me, who, when I did a shoddy cutout of a local war veteran’s head, told me I was messing him up more than the war had.

The freshman who said he wanted to go back to his dorm, smoke some fatties and watch Indiana Jones.

The chubby guy sitting on a keg in the dark, whose eyes lit up as he sang to us a la Avril Lavigne: “I’m sittin on a keg...I’m waitin in the dark...”

My real Forever Person, unknown and two hours away, making a YouTube documentary about his friends trying to chug a gallon of milk in an hour.

International House of Pain

As it sometimes happens, you find someone who you think might be your Forever Person, but then you quickly realize they are not and you both kind of get stuck. They become a Four Year Person.

You go have a sad, hungover, gluttonous meal together at IHOP. In fact, since you spend 24 hours a day together, but it’s never that good, your whole life starts to feel like IHOP.

You see a sad old woman eating alone and it moves you to tears. Despite your current relationship status, this is how you see your inevitable future. The Fray starts inexplicably playing in your ears once again.

You tell your Four Year Person that this is the saddest thing, that you see your future self in this woman.

He disagrees with your assessment. “I bet she has a husband,” he says, thinking this will cheer you up. “They probably had a fight this morning, and she went off to have a nice breakfast without him.”

This, perhaps, was a more accurate extrapolation of your future together.

Love Song for No One

Do I believe in soulmates? Not exactly. But I can only explain all of the sadness and rage of my former loneliness this way: I was missing someone I hadn’t met yet.

Soulmates or not, stars aligning or not, I have a vivid memory of receiving the first correspondence from my Forever Person while I was in the middle of teaching a creative writing class to 3rd and 4th graders in Ashburn. I remember getting in my car and driving through construction around the airport on Route 28. I remember staring at the chubby traffic cones, orange and white and orange again, and honestly thinking: I am going to marry this person.

And while I feel for Sheila, and while I trust the experts—especially Calvin Roberson—I’m worried that this won’t work out. And that she’ll enter her 30s feeling the same way she felt in her 20s: unworthy. 

Because it took me most of my life to convince myself I could even deserve a Forever Person. But here he is, as real as ever, enthusiastically air drumming to the Married At First Sight theme song on the couch right next to me.

I’ve been obsessed with the concept of a latrix recently and whether it could ever come into existence organically today.

What’s a latrix? This is certainly the first time I’ve typed it, and maybe even the first time I’ve read it typed. Pretty alienating concept for me to start an essay with, given that maybe less than thirty people in the world even know or remember what it is.

So let me scuttle a latrix for now and start with something you maybe have heard of: a neck. Bear with me if this was also a regional thing, but a neck was a popular high-school bro reason to exact some tepid physical punishment on your friends. It’s not “necking” someone with a kiss like in a British teen romance, but a means of in-group real time fact checking—whenever your friends say something blatantly incorrect, you would get to “neck” them.

Delivering a neck was swift. The second your friend was spittin’ that dumb shit, you’d exclaim “THAT’S A NECK!” and place your elbow on the back of their neck, quickly running your arm down it through the lengths of your pinky finger, aiming to burn them with the friction. In practice, this often ended up being more of a fore-arm karate chop, but this was considered poor form.

Either way, you were judge, jury, and executioner when delivering a neck. The only way your friend could get out of it was claiming a “self-serve” where they would acknowledge they were wrong and neck themselves before anyone else got the chance to—throwing themselves upon the mercy of the goon squad.

Someone gets some a piece of pop culture trivia wrong? “NECK”. Someone misremembers the details of a story from a party the night before? “yo that’s a NECK”. Someone inflating the numbers on their Gears of War K/D ratio from the night before? “NECK YOURSELF”. Necks served an important social function—a self-regulating tool between high-school dudes getting out pent up angst by meting arbitrary justice to one another.

I have no idea how big the concept of necks were in terms of my age group around the country, but when I was in high school in Virginia in the late aughts, most people in my high school knew what a neck was. When I interacted with kids at other schools locally, they knew what it was also. My wife went to high school around the same time as me further away in the district and had heard of it as well, but without the aforementioned “justice” component, essentially reducing it to a slap on the neck with a brand name.

When I look at Urban Dictionary submissions from the time I was in school though, and even thereafter, I get the impression a Neck had a variety of forms but was reletively wide spread. Troubling enough, reviewing these definitions over the years, it seems many cretins subscribe to the Neanderthal neck slap as the defacto Neck technique over the sophisticated slide chop, which is truly philistine behavior.

Regardless, the variety of usages and punishments from over a decades worth of definitions validates to me that Necking was like an offline “meme” from and age before we called them that.

II.

The last time I was in a physical high school was a couple of summers ago, helping my wife set up her classroom before her next year of instruction. In a series of trips between her car and her classroom, I hauled crates of textbooks, a minifridge, and a litany of other weirdly sized or shapes items through a series of empty high school hallways. Given it was the summer, the series of club posters, administrative flyers and other paraphernalia you’d expect to adorn the walls of a bustling high school weren’t there, leaving the walls empty with the exception of a variety of painted murals.

These murals were reminiscent of similar ones that were in my high school, seemingly “donated” by the artsy-kids from each graduating class. What was cool about them though, was that each mural seemed to be a very time-specific tribute to all of the big cultural moments that happened that school year, crystallized into one class-year memorial. I liked the 2019 one, pulled together with the framing of Avengers: Endgame so much I snapped a picture of it:

Listen, I know it’s a stale-ass meme at this point, but fuck it! I’m tickled by the fact Big Chungus is immortalized in a high school for freshman to confusingly tilt their heads at in 2049. That’s kinda cool in some twee-subversive way.

But the fact I thought the mural was cool gave me a little pause. I’m not young or particularly plugged in. Why did I know about most of this stuff?

A latrix is not something an adult would have heard of at the time, and it’s certainly not on Urban Dictionary. A latrix was a hyper-local variant of a neck, that seemed to exist amongst athletes on a couple of different teams from a couple of different grades in my high school.

Whereas a neck was a slice or a chop on the back of your neck, a latrix was a multi-finger poke right to the small of your throat. It was was very similar to a method called a “guzzler”, but instead of flicking the top of ones throat as you would in a guzzler, you would almost viper-chop the bottom of it. That was a latrix.

If memory serves, you would deliver a latrix in the similar context to a neck. In it’s own way, it was a completely logical evolution: If you have a friend spouting bullshit all the time with the self-awareness to protect his neck, he’s leaving that supple, tender throat ripe for pummelin’.

If a latrix was barely different then a guzzler and barely different then a neck, why does it exist at all? Why not? What else is childhood but overlapping lifespans of jokes, catchphrases and actions you goon around with to make your friends laugh until you run them into the dirt and have new ones sprout from the ashes?

Maybe I’m a crusty sap indulging in nostalgia, but what feels magical about a latrix is that there are probably twenty or so people in the world that I could run into today that I could reference it to that would trigger an amazing rush of memories. For me, I imagine walking into a musty locker room after a lacrosse practice and protecting both the front and the back of my neck, trying to humorously but accurately get the details of some weekend party correct as not to get a punishing. For me, there was a time when giving a latrix or a neck or a guzzler were all a part of this rich tapestry of a language that lived and died in a formative boyhood era; subconsciously burrowed in our brains before we scattered like pollen in the wind.

While a latrix is a one off example of a high-school in-joke I randomly do remember, it also represents the hundreds of pointless catchphrases or in-jokes that I’ve since forgotten, which while sad, also feels like an indelible component of a healthy childhood that feels good to leave behind. I’d like to think nearly everyone has a group of friends from long ago with their own secret culture and lore that sounds equally asinine when typed up in essay-form.

So back to the mural, and bear with me as I try to thread a needle betwixt two disparate thoughts: While I’m (a) not saying that a latrix was a big enough of an inside joke to merit making it’s way onto some hypothetical high-school mural and (b) I also understand that if a mural is gonna encapsulate an entire year you’d want it to be as mass-appeal as possible, something about the two concepts when I turn them over in my head doesn’t feel right. Was our culture always so flat that an out of touch 30 year old could look at something created by high school seniors, for high school seniors and completely comprehend it? Or is something else happening?

III.

The reason I’ve been thinking about necks and latrixs recently is I’m wondering if kids talk like this anymore, or even feel the compulsion to come up with their own in-jokes. My buddy who invented the latrix works with kids, and also said that most in-jokes he hears kids talk about are heavily influenced by pop culture or politics, but not so much out of just quirky happenstance. My wife has noticed the same: now that she’s been teaching about 10 years, most in-jokes her students tell seemingly spawn from memes and TikTok videos.

While this is all anecdotal, it got me thinking: Do in-jokes organically come up in groups of friends anymore, or did the proliferation of abundant 4G and social media kill the concept entirely?

In a pre-smartphone world, culture was a lot more hyper-localized when your world was as small and navel-gazing as a high schoolers. Weather you were amongst friends or not, or in a chatty mood or not, time around a lunch table had to be filled, and unless you were burying your head in your arms and pretending to sleep, there was no retreating from it into a cell phone. High school is a series of forced and at times banal interactions where awkward teens have to spark conversational embers from nothing, and I think the mechanics of such conversations could breed weird turns, leaving any number of incidentally funny misunderstandings or phrases to take on a life of their own.

I wonder if in the era of the smartphone and instant gratification, does the space exist for this happen? As soon as a teen feels an iota of of boredom or the awkwardness of a break in conversation, they have an infinite scroll is waiting for them. If they want to share something funny, they can scroll through a meme account, find an especially dank one, and copy/paste it away to a group chat to snag some residual cred as a finders fee. Considering high school is already an awkward era where everyone is trying to fit in—why expend the energy or take the risk of being unique or funny on your own terms when you can outsource what to talk about to Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or wherever else things are trending?

There is something about having a constantly digital gavage of “trends” and “viral moments” bearing down on you at at all times that has quietly but profoundly taken up lot of space over the course of the last ten years. Every day on a big social media platform, there seems to be a narrative or a moment that demands for you to have an opinion or joke about, even if you don’t particularly care about it. It feels like to me, where the mental space previously existed for kids organically develop their weirdness, we now have tools to fill that space before any of those weird sparks of creativity can catch.

For example, I would wager a bet that if Big Chungus was a big in-joke at my wife’s high school, I bet it was equally big at nearly every high school in the country. Doesn’t something about that feel weird? That instead of little high school communities having their own dialects, quirks and culture that pass around via word of mouth, they are all kind of share the same one beamed down by some impersonal social media consensus? Isn’t also a bit weird too that oh, by the way, my adult contemporaries are gawfawing at the same Chungus jokes they are? When the Chungus is so Big, that it demands so much mindspace at such a massive scale, then that Chungus is too Big for me to abide.

IV.

As a write this, I’m pretty self aware that these are some real those were the good ol’ days lamentations of a neo-boomer emerging from his fast-fashion flannel chrysalis. It really is a digital-age version of strapping on my Teva’s, picking up some GMO-free micro greens from the back of a truckbed, and driving home in my Subaru Crosstrek with a “Shop Local” bumper sticker on the back. “Meme Local!”, I unironically exclaim.

So sure, maybe I’m hyping it. Maybe the mass-appeal sellout Big Chungus is equally creative as a homegrown, indie latrix and this is all a tortured point I’m chasing my tail on.

I guess what I ultimately fear, especially in the context of a generation steeped in this environment, is everyone starting to sound exactly the fucking same, and what that means at scale.

Even amongst my own peers online, I notice a particular voice or set of catchphrases— sometimes even ones I catch myself using. You can’t not go your social media and not see a small collection of these:

1. Calling things the G.O.A.T.

2. Posting a meal with Om Nom Nom.

3. Talking about some show with an emotionally evocative and saying “all the feels” or “I’m not crying your crying”.

4. Posting some personal project with “I did a thing”

5. Friends visiting friends with a caption of “reunited and it feels so good”.

These are probably outdated examples because I don’t use social media as often, but I think you get my point—when you actually read the content friends are tagging pictures with and posting, it begins to feel and sound like everyone doing impression of what Social Media should look like until it collapses into a singularity. It’s like a hall of mirrors where the pictures are all different but the voices are all the same.

If a single “voice” is democratized as some Geth-assimilated consensus and is pushed down to anyone who lives a modicum of their lives online, what does it mean for kids that grow up into it from the jump? Where do the original ideas come from? How does art, film, or music get made without sounding immediately like everything else? It almost feels as though as the best way to maintain a level of uniqueness and creativity is to stay as offline to cultivate your own persona, but this feels like a luxury people increasingly do not have.

I’m not unique in the sense that I didn’t particularly like high school or myself in high school, but as an adult with a hindsight, I do think a lot of my personality was indelibly shaped by the way my synapses were forced to fire during that time during a buffet of cringey school, job or dating interactions. It’s hard to imagine how I’d be different if I had a cultivated culture from social media catch me if I fell, but I’d have to assume I’d have a poorer mind for it.

V.

Around the time I started finishing this draft up, my group chat from college lit up. One of my college friends got the second vaccine and was laid up the entire next day, saying it made him feel like a “baby back bitch”.

I was caught off guard, because this again felt like another vague high school memory that slipped out of a crack in the amber. Baby back bitch. What is it’s origin? In my telling, this was the by product of a generation of boys hearing Chili’s baby back rib jingles on local rock stations and trying to make something edgy out of it. Did it make its way to Woodbridge, or did it come from Woodbridge to here?

I suppose it all doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I just hope that little pockets of weirdness are out there thriving, and that the other voices we invite into our lives with the subtlety of a power washer into our retinas aren’t making us poorer for it.

After dinner, my wife or I have the responsibility of getting our daughter and her “oogy googy” hands up to the bathtub. Depending upon the meal, and how comparatively nice one of us is dressed, one of us bites the bullet to start the evening routine.

Once our daughter is in the bathroom. she quickly runs to turn the hot water spout on the tub, while I turn on the cold one and plug the drain. Now it’s time to get nakey-nakey, and while I help with her shirt, she manages to a way to kick off the fused amalgamation of her pants and diaper across the room herself. Once I’ve put in three pumps of bubble bath and swished my hand around in the water to make the bubbles form, she’ll climb in the tub.

Mommy takes over and watches her for most of the bath, sometimes from afar but these days, in the tub with her. I’ll go down and clean the kitchen, or as much of a dent I can in the fifteen minutes or so of free time I have to do so. On good nights, the surfaces will be clean enough to hit with a spray: apple orchard for the granite, grapefruit for the table. These days, I’ll feel content just getting the dishwasher fill enough to run. It feels pointless trying to keep up.

6:52

At some point I’ll hear a chorus singing from the upstairs hallway, in unison singing “heyyyyyyy Daddy JAY-ake”. I’ll walk upstairs and pick up some nighttime clothes before approaching the master bathroom.

I hesitate at the threshold of the door to the bathroom. Sometimes, I will wave my hand in—with a thumbs up gesture or a devil horns—or sometimes I’ll protrude my butt and dance such that from the bathtub it looks like a disembodied phantom posterior is wiggling from the bedroom. My daughter laughs and laughs and hides her head behind a Peppa Pig bucket and exclaims I’m not to see me anywhere! while hiding from the ghost butt.

I walk in and sprawl out a large towel onto the floor and state that “its time for the baby burrito” On the harder nights, she’ll appeal to her mom from between her legs, pleading to stay in a bit longer. Eventually, she will relent by vaulting herself over the bathtub and curl herself into the fetal position on the floor, letting me fold the towel around her for a brief moment to soak up the water.

In a flash, she hops up and beelines to the toilet. She puts down the seat and pulls the training seat off the of the nearby hook and gargoyles herself on top of it until she can sit properly. While she once perched on it more easily using a stool, she now insists “that’s for the bathtub” and that this is the way moving forward.

Whether she “goes” or not, after a couple of minutes, she’ll expectantly ask two candies?! These days, we just give her the one, and every time we do, we get interrogated on it: What color is that? It’s green! Oh. What letter is that? It’s an M No, it’s an O! (Presumably, the shape of the mini M&M is an O).

If she does that on the potty, we always say five candies are up for grabs. Five candies?!?! She laughs it off. It’s too ridiculous an amount of candies to even wrap your head around.

7:00

Mommy gets out of the bath and heads into the shower while I put my on daughters nighttime clothes, eventually leaving to give Mommy some space and continue the nightly routine.

We walk into the guest bathroom and she immediately gets in the guest shower/tub. I fold the unicorn toothpaste tube to eke out a shiny, sparkling button of paste onto the toothbrush. It gets harder and harder each night, as it’s mostly empty from the multiple times she’s snuck into the bathroom to drink it without us noticing.

I hand the anointed toothbrush to Fiona and she exclaims lets hide, presumably from Mommy who is showering with wall between us. We climb into the guest bathtub and she covertly brushes her teeth in a thicket of a white and gold shower curtain, as I stand barefoot in the tub next to her, checking my phone.

Our patience is too thin to actually wait for mom to finish her shower to scare her, so we play hide-and-seek instead. My daughter stays in the tub and counts to ten, and I quickly dart into her room, hiding in one of four places: in the closet, behind the door, behind the changing table, or under the blanket. Sometimes I will put her oversized toy deer underneath her blanket and hide in the other room, to really throw her off her game. We’ll repeat this game 3 or 4 times, always ending with a triumphant I found you and a playful punch in the leg.

7:15

Around this time, Mommy joins us, draped in baby burrito towel from earlier. We are already hidden under my daughters blanket, shushing one another so we don’t betray our cover to Mommy. After laughing and laughing, my daughter crawls out and continues the façade in a different manner, asking Mommy hm, where is Daddy Jake? He must be in the tunnel. After I’ve emerged from said tunnel, she laughs and laughs.

Mommy and I coax her into bed by bringing out the “First Days of School” word book. It is not a book with a plot; rather, it is a book of labeled pictures, sometimes with British-isms like “Crisps”, “Plimsolls”, and “Maths Words”.

On the first page, she wants us to read “shoes, boots, a hat, a jacket” as fast as we can. Then she points to a picture of a book that’s a tiny replica of the very book we are reading. That’s like the end book

On the second page, we point to a picture of a woman pushing a boy on a tricycle, which is an uncanny representation of her best friend and his mom from the neighborhood. We point to the cartoon mom’s blue purse (which is also blue in real life) and ask “What’s in here?” Trucks, just like in real life.

Next, we read the entire alphabet printed on a series of tiles on the fourth page, at whatever pace she traces her hand across the letters on the page. The O is my favorite she declares, perhaps with the taste of a mini M&M still lingering. Since there are three lines of nine letters each, there’s a single blank tile after Z. Somebody put a blank one she announces, we need another letter.

The next page is for colors and it features little ink blots in each hue. Somebody spilled on the page! They spilled Red, Yellow, Green, Pink...”When she correctly identifies them all, she claps and yells good job! for herself. Underneath the colors, she tells us, These are called shapes. The circle? That’s my favorite shape. The triangle, apparently, is our favorite shape.

By the time we reach the page about lunch time, she’s tired and wants us to do the labeling. On the next page with storybook creatures, she runs her finger up and down the bottom row, demanding faster as we exaggeratedly spew the line-up of, “King, Queen, Princess, Prince, Fairy Godmother.” On the last page, we review the actions of the day as the little cartoon boy goes through the motions, ending with: bath time, bed time. She mimics the boy in the book, grabbing a blankie and her stuffed flamingo, and posing like he does in a stage-yawn.

7:30

Before we can leave her for the night, we have to do “Two Minutes”. Typically Mommy does it, but sometimes I do it, but regardless, one of us theatrically asks Siri to set a timer for two minutes and lay down on the floor next to her while she lays in bed.

The room is clean, probably the cleanest room in the house, without a dirty sock or Seek-and-Find magazine out of place. The closet is closed, the dresser drawers are latched, and all of the “friends” are in bed with her. I am laying on a thin, furry white carpet looking at the ceiling fan lazily spin above.

It’s perfectly still and quiet, save for the lazy whir of the fan and the shuffling of a tiny body in sheets next to me. It’s the first time all day I’ve been in my own headspace about anything. Her bedroom is as vessel catapulting across the universe at unfathomable speeds and we exist in a stasis, lost and safe.

Sometimes, we list off everybody in the neighborhood that constitutes her universe: the boy in the book, the mom with the trucks, every friend, every dog and every parent. Sometimes, she’ll ask to hold my hand. Sometimes I will, and I’ll hold it so tight I worry I might crush it into dust. Sometimes she will hand me her foot to hold, joking that this is my hand and laugh and laugh.

7:32

The alarm goes off. While the fibers of the carpet pull at my body, yearning me to stay laying, I force myself to sit up and lean over the bed that holds my daughter. I tell her shes “the most special-ist girl in the whole wide world”—a similar sentiment thing my dad expressed to me every night no matter how late he got home and no matter how stale his breath was. She says “I love you daddy Jake”. After an embrace, I get up off the floor and exit the room.

I.

Green Eggs and Ham, the Netflix Original Series, follows protagonists Sam-I-Am and Guy-Am-I as they go on a Planes, Trains and Automobile style road-trip through a Seussian-world. Tasked with bringing an endangered mammal to its ancestral home, they must evade the pursuit of a Trumpesque magnate and his paid lackeys. Along the way, they form an unlikely friendship that gets tested, confront their personal demons, and even find love. This is an adaptation of the Dr. Seuss classic, Green Eggs and Ham

Before I get too ahead of myself, you may find yourself asking “who is Guy Am I?” Come on! You know Guy-Am-I! Guy-Am-I is the grumpy counterpart to Sam-I-Am with the moppish brown hat is constantly turning down Green Eggs and Ham, no matter the circumstances! Finally earning a name in this adaptation, we also learn he is an amateur inventor, whose creations always explode once he uses them. As a result, despite having the undying support of his family, Guy-Am-I harbors great feelings of professional malaise and cannot shake the feeling that he is a failure to his family and his own ambitions, which has made him a very bitter and solitary person. This is one reason he does not want to eat the titular food, because keep in mind, this is an adaptation of the Dr. Seuss classic Green Eggs and Ham.

When Guy-Am-I’s latest job interview ends in him buffeting the panel with shrapnel from his latest botched invention, he accidentally gets mixed up with Sam-I-Am, a plucky foil with an indomitable spirit. Sam-I-Am has recently liberated a mythical “Chickeraffe” (Chicken Giraffe) from the Zoo and is smuggling it to the same town Guy-Am-I is retreating back to after his latest professional failure. Their fates entwined, this unlikely duo embarks on a buddy-road trip of sorts loosely based on the book. Will you eat them on a train? Cue train episode. Would you eat them with a goat? Cue evil goat (G.O.A.T) with tattoos and an eye patch trying to steal the Chickeraffe. Would you eat them with a fox? Cue fox inexplicably voiced by Tracy Morgan who is in love with a chicken, but has to restrain his impulses to eat her eggs (which is a Freudian psychosexual nightmare in itself). All of these random elements all make sense when you remember that this is in fact, an adaptation of the Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham.

Eventually, Sam-I-Am and Guy-Am-I’s (these are their Christian names apparently) intersect with the mother-daughter pair of Mrs. Shelly and EB (who inexplicably, like everyone else in the series, have normal names). Mrs. Shelly is an overbearing mom who abandoned her dreams as an artist and took a sensible job as a literal “bean counter” to provide a steady but dreadfully boring life for her daughter EB, who resents her for being so overbearing. It’s only when Mrs. Shelly and Guy-Am-I, who both have naturally grouchy posture, start to fall in love and warm each another’s hearts they both loosen up towards Sam-I-Am and Shelly respectively.

As you’d expect, Sam-I-Am tries to get Guy-am-I to try Green Eggs and Ham quite a bit throughout the series, but he typically relents. It isn’t until the big triumphant moment in the final episode, Guy-Am-I finally reluctantly tries Green Eggs and Ham to prove his friendship and devotion to Sam-I-Am, ends up liking them, and does a proud public declaration portraying he would eat them in the rain, on a train, on a boat, with a goat, et cetera, making good on the iconic conclusion to the Dr. Seuss book of the same name. This is poignant because shortly thereafter, Sam-I-Am reveals that the reason he loves Green Eggs and Ham so much is because they are one of the few pleasant memories he has of his mother before she was abandoned by him and forced him into a life of petty crime and scamming. The source of his love for Green Eggs and Ham (Remember? The Book?) is an endless hunt for the ones that taste just like his moms to used make in an effort to find her, and sure enough, when he does at the series conclusion, a whole new misadventure is set up between this unlikely pair.

II.

I tried not to be overly frothing with disdain in describing the plot above, and apologies for my lack of critical nuance here but who wants or likes any of that shit!?! Who was pining for an emotionally raw Green Eggs and Ham origin story written with the passion of a Tennessee Williams play? WHO IS THIS FOR!?

Certainly not my kid. Since the aforementioned plot is totally above her head, she loves Green Eggs and Ham for the reasons you should love a cartoon. She loves Sam-I-Am who, voiced by the affable Adam DeVine, and is friendly, magnetic and wacky enough to draw a toddlers attention. She loves the Rivers Cuomo-penned theme song, which burrows into your brain with the velocity of an unloaded sniper rifle clip. It’s funny to imagine, given every other embarrassing, trend-chasing rock Cuomo has forced his band to turn over, that this theme song was the final straw that the rest of Weezer could not sign the bands name too.

So yeah, I get it—looking through the prism of children’s entertainment, it clears the very low bar I need it to: the kid likes watching it, and while she does, I’m not actively annoyed by it. The production value is high enough that its very presence in the air of a room doesn’t give me a low grade headache. The animation style is lushly hand drawn, which is rare in a world where most of the kids show algo-served to us contain uncanny-valley CGI that threaten to turn into a screamer video at any moment. Considering a lot of children’s television don’t meet this metric, this is good!

But the neurosis-laden plot and insistence on giving narrative reverence to a book that only existed to have funny rhymes with silly pictures accompanying them makes it clear that it wasn’t enough for it’s creators to make a mere kids' show. No, this is a kids show that is actually for the parents, and under that prism, it’s painful and pandering.

III.

I remember early on parenthood, I read this review of True And The Rainbow Kingdom written by a mother who was accusing the main character of trading in colonial white-savior tropes (Read: she gets magic powers from a mythical tree to save her friends) and thinking “wow I hope parenting doesn’t poison my brain this hard”. The irony isn’t lost on me that two years later, desperate for stimulation and meaning, my addled brain and I are Wilhelm Scream-ing into the same vacuous void of children’s television.

While I do think Green Eggs and Ham is bad, I’m not particularly offended by it more than I am fascinated by it: It’s bad in a way that feels emblematic of a general rut entertainment is in these days.

While I watched this show, I tried to imagine the incentive structure of how it came together. What was the conglomeration of corporations and artists that came together to make such a high production version of something with no natural audience?

Part of the blame has to lie with the suits at Netflix. Streaming platforms are an in arms race for original content, and for the same reason SiriusXM will try to buoy its relevance by featuring celebrities that don’t understand the medium and barely appear on air, Netflix probably has to do something similar with it’s programming portfolio. Green Eggs and Ham? As a TV Show? Well people recognize it, so lets make it! What started as a bullet point in some junior executive’s portfolio management .ppt eventually had to become an actual show, and when you look at the stacked voice cast for Green Eggs and Ham, it has the energy of a producer throwing money at a concept with no soul to make it too big to fail.

Part of the blame must lie with the writing staff. How many overeducated, job-starved script writers, subsisting off a diet of Grubhub deliveries and podcast appearances, would jump at an opportunity for a soulless gig of spinning up an adaptation of Green Eggs and Ham? These folks have probably written, shopped and scrapped countless passion projects to no professional buzz, so fuck it right? They know they could demo the suits who approved this project whatever they needed to see in a minute long super-cut (Sam-I-Am? ✅ Guy Refusing Eggs? ✅ Guy Accepting Eggs? ✅), so why not use the remaining run time to smuggle in your own story about insecurities and adulthood despite it being a massively awkward fit? At least your industry peers will see you capable of making something emotionally resonant, even if it doesn’t make any sense for Green Eggs and Ham!

But the biggest problem of all must be with the audience, and what it says about how we consume content. How many thousands of parents like myself would click on a Green Eggs and Ham show over some unknown property? What does it means for our attention economy that, as a whole, we want retreads of things we are familiar with instead of something that can be new and evocative on its own terms? If parents want to have a profound experience of art related to their struggles of adulthood and parenthood, but they have to go to a Green Eggs and Ham to do so, doesn’t something about that feel a bit off?

I felt this problem acutely when I tried and stopped watching Wandavision. Wandavision started as this really unsettling Twilight Show concept of two people becoming increasingly self aware they were in a stuck in a series of sitcoms, like some some caped-up version of Too Many Cooks. But about 4 episodes in, the oppressive reality of the Marvel IP came crashing in, reminding you that this is actually continuing the storyline from Endgame and remember when Kat Denning was in that Thor movie and now she’s back!? From that moment on, the show itself lost all of it’s mystique. But would a concept as strange as Wandavision with that budget even exist without that connective tissue to draw eyes to it?

Something seems a bit broken. A Cruella Deville origin story. A 5th Batman in my lifetime. A 2nd Ghostbusters Reboot. What is this fascination with constantly rehashing or navel gazing at the past, and what does it say about what we go to television and movies for? I’m not exactly sure yet, but it feels like a collective desire for media to coddle us instead of challenge us, which feels like an impulse worth fighting against once you become self aware of it.

IV.

Not that you asked, but here is my free idea for a good Green Eggs and Ham show: a Spy vs. Spy or Tom and Jerry type show where Sam-I-Am goes through increasingly elaborate ways to get to get the other guy to try Green Eggs and Ham, involving ridiculous scenarios, conspiracies and crazy contraptions. That’s it. That’s all it ever had to be.

I’ve had a real “unexamined life is not worth living” feeling that’s crept up on me in the last year. COVID-paranoia, marriage, quarantine, parenthood, work, agoraphobia—these are gears of various radii and torque that gnash together in a way that has made me feel a bit out of control of my own life, as my own voice and desires are superseded by the responsibilities foisted upon me in a particularly brutal year.

Fuck does that sound dramatic. This is not a cry for help and I’m not about to take a Hemlock-juice cleanse. Everyone’s had a shitty year and mine has been less shitty then most, but coming out the other end of it, I do yearn to critically engage with aspects of my own day-to-day thoughts in a way I am currently not. If my life is going to be an escalating treadmill of responsibility, it seems like it might be spiritually rewarding for me probe at it.

Writing again, even on an inconsistent basis, feels like a way to do that.

Something I lament is that I feel like a much more passive-thinker then I used to be. I think it’s because we live in an era of a “first takes advantage”, where push-notifications foist upon us opinions we don’t care about on events we don’t know about, but feel quietly obligated to catch up on. I intake the same algorithm-gavage of content everyone else does, filtered through whatever political lean I postured in college, and it’s oppressive! It feels harder than it used to write an original essay—let alone an original thought—when thousands of people—some dumber, some smarter, but all certainly louder than you—compete to fill your head with a zeitgeist you don’t even care about.

Anyways, I’ve been trying to turn my brain off this noise by leaving social media and focusing screen-time on group chats and more personalized communication. When I was a single and unencumbered dude, back when Facebook felt personal and authentic, I felt like I was a quirky guy with weird ideas that I liked putting out into the world in a way that I’ve since accidently trained myself not to be.

ephemera press is going to be a project where I hold myself accountable to the sparse sparks of creative thoughts I still occasionally have.

I think my life is difficult, rewarding, and would be positively banal to a general audience, so I don’t know how autobiographical EP will be. However within my daily rituals—when I’m chatting with my wife over coffee while my daughter is mysteriously quiet in the other room—or I’m watching my daughter interact with her cabal of neighborhood cronies—I sometimes feel like I stumble upon a kernal of some profound, universal truth. Typically, I immediately void my brain of these thoughts for something more pressing, like stopping the dog from eating week old pasta salad out of the garbage With ephemera press, I want to force myself to tease out these moments where I feel like I’m onto something to an essay, even when I’m not.

As an aside, I also think ephemera press is just a dope ass name for a thing. Like if I commissioned some artist—concept unseen—to create a logo for something generically called “ephemera press” it would probably have a slick geometrical vaporwave aesthetic to it. It sounds like one of the titles an ambient artist would submit to the label that’s insisting that “you can’t make every track untitled because it will break our Spotify optimization”.

This is all arrogant preamble for me to say the following: I’m forcing myself to write again and damnit, I am going to start by reviewing the Netflix adaptation of Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham. Since I generously expect maybe 10 people to regularly read this anyway, I’m going to self-indulgently harness some middle-school goth “so random!” energy on this dumb thing my daughter has been watching and go from there.

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This year is the ten-year anniversary of Modern Guilt, an album that came and went without much fanfare that I feel deserves re-examination in 2018. Especially viewed from my perspective today, Modern Guilt feels like Beck unwittingly wrote a manifesto to the dangers of being Extremely Online in a divisive age.

Modern Guilt was my backdoor into Beck's catalog, and I only gave it a shot due to my obsession at the time regarding anything produced by Danger Mouse (The Mouse and the Mask, Demon Days). Although some of my favorite Beck songs are on other albums, Modern Guilt stands out as his most consistent work.

My specific memories of listening to Modern Guilt were from my car as I finished up assigned readings for a summer economic's class I was taking at George Mason University, a class I think back on fondly for making very complex things seem so simple. The distorted, surf-rock bass fuzz of "Gamma Ray" complimented the heat radiating off the dash as I finished up my last minute readings.

In terms of his alignment with "the zeitgeist", Modern Guilt occupies a period when Beck was in the valley of his career bell curve. It was released well-after "Loser", Sea Change, and his Futurama appearance, but before a six-year hiatus where Beck returned to prominence by winning a Grammy with Morning Phase and re-establishing radio presence with Colors.

Critics were tepid on Modern Guilt upon it's release. Some called it a "vanity project", and the general consensus was that Beck was no longer much of an innovator compared to his earlier work.

In retrospect though, I feel like Beck was ahead of the curve as ever. Modern Guilt's apocalyptic vision from 2008 feels like a premonition of things that have come to pass in 2018.

Modern Guilt begins with "Orphans", where Beck doesn't waste very much time ushering you into his sonic hellscape:

Think I'm stranded but I don't know where

I got this diamond that don't know how to shine

In the sun where these dark winds wail

And these children leave their rulers behind

If you can't tell, the lyricism is fucking bleak, even bleaker then the terminally morose Sea Change! Whereas Sea Change was depressing portrait of a dying relationship, "Orphans" (and by extension, the rest of Modern Guilt) sounds like a postscript for a society that's already dead. Save for a couple generous flourishes of acoustic guitar, the factory-precision drumming makes the track resemble the work of machine instead of a band. Beck's singing does little to add any humanity to the proceedings as he sounds like a world-weary vagabond roaming the wastes to pass wisdom on to the remaining few tasked to rebuild. "Orphans" sets an unsettling tone that looms over the rest of the album.

The next couple of tracks, "Gamma Ray" and "Chemtrails", thematically make for an ironic juxtaposition in 2018.

The aforementioned "Gamma Ray" is an irradiated surf-rock track driven by a menacing bass line. It's the soundtrack to a groovy beach boogie where a perpetually rising tide drowns all the participants.

"Chemtrails" feels a lot more somber and forgiving, as Beck's falsetto croons over a mournful interplay of synths and pianos and propelled forward by some of the most outstanding drumming I've heard outside of a RJD2 or The National album. (That guitar solo reprise at the end ain't half bad, either).

It's interesting that these two tracks bookend one another. One track is about the impending threat of global warming, while the other is about, well, Chemtrails. In theory, they are two existential threats that are in ideological opposition to one another. One threat I feel is real, and the other I feel is conspiratorial.

One of scariest things about our present moment is the ease in which you can find someone diametrically and vociferously opposed to your beliefs on literally any topic. Someone who would easily show up in a comment section calling me a shill or an NPC for stating what should be a universally accepted set of facts. Somebody who could back up any insane assertion under the sun with a curated set of dubious yet slickly produced set of memes or YouTube explainers.

It speaks to the dichotomy of political discourse today, as our republic is diverges into a series of multiverses before our very eyes. Be it on the lines of "Russiagate" or "Pizzagate", our ideological spectrum is beginning to vivisect itself into an multiple organisms, each with their own reality of facts. However, like the themes of both of these songs, our collective political discourse is unified by one prevailing emotion: fear.

The albums centerpiece is the titular track, which is probably Beck's most forthright explanation of what this sense of "Modern Guilt" really is--a prevailing sense of alienation from public life and the vague threat that the public is out to get you. As Beck explained in an NPR interview around the release of the album, the lyrics for this song apparently came off the top of his head without much forethought, as if they were a distant feeling he could finally put some words to:

Standing outside the glass on the sidewalk

These people talk about impossible things

And I'm falling out of the conversation

And I'm a pawn piece in a human shield

With Twitter as our new public square, it's hard not to feel alienated by the absurdity of political conversations taking place in front of our eyes. The most extreme viewpoints from bad actors are amplified and reflected off of one another, propping up flashy charlatans across the ideological spectrum and giving them symbiosis with one another. Nuance and moderation is a liability, as our short term attentions are wired to consume narratives in a crisp 280 characters. It's a 24/7 car accident whose flotsam runs off into the streams and tributaries that sustain every other aspect of the news cycle. Everyone hates it but no one can escape from it.

The track concludes with the following sentiment:

Modern guilt is all in our hands

Modern guilt won't get me to bed

Say what you will, smoke your last cigarette

Don't know what I've done but I feel afraid

When the majority of political discussion you read online feels increasingly driven by bad-faith actors, it's hard not to feel increasingly divorced from the conversation to an almost paranoid degree. Online discourse is now an intellectual bloodsport–a modern day Coliseum for a society weaned off of physical violence. Nothing is out of bounds when it comes to getting a "win" for your team, be it intentionally taking something out of context, trying to get you fired, doxxing you, or swatting your house.

Beck's conception of "Modern Guilt" feels incredibly like being online in 2018; a feeling that some seemingly innocuous opinion you had or stance you took will, with enough time or context that's been removed, take you down in an disproportionate fashion.

In the bleak picture of society Beck paints on "Modern Guilt", it feels like the only way to win in society online is to not be public at all. Instead, the only logical path forward in life is to keep your head low, sight-line on your feet, and go about your business with a quiet anonymous dignity. Much like like the covert art of Modern Guilt itself.

Modern Guilt concludes where it started on "Volcano". Beck, still a lost wanderer in a monochromatic hellscape, is no wiser than when he started on "Orphans", yet propels himself forward with a mechanical, droning lurch. We learn his metaphorical destination is a real-life volcano that a woman flung herself into in the 1930's. However, Beck doesn't want to suffer the fate of this woman, but instead feels obligated to suffer a microcosm of her pain as his own.

That, to me, feels like the final component of our modern guilt in 2018: a prevailing obligation take on a portion of the suffering or misgivings of the entire connected world. Where the more news you consume or "connected" you are, any empathy you possess begins to feels like a defect as the Online Social Contract demands you to constantly feel down.

In my personal life, I feel very successful and fulfilled. I have a wife and child with a job where I am respected and makes me financially solvent. I am in control of my own destiny, and feel empowered by it. From that perspective, I am 100% fulfilled.

Still though, I don't need to look online outside of my tiny world to find news that is Bad, or that a prevailing trend or something I consume is Bad. Often, such news will be tailored and pop onto your phone without you even seeking it out. It's hard to feel personally fulfilled when aspects of the world around you feels so bleak.

Beck distills this sentiment with his most personal moment on the record, and one of the few lines that feels like it earnestly of his own voice:

I'm tired of people who only want to be pleased

But I still want to please you.

The metaphysical "you" feels like a greek choir of moral judgement, saying you are Wrong or not Good enough in the face of a world you ultimately cannot effectively change.

It's hard to imagine what the reception of Modern Guilt would be today, given that it feels so thematically appropriate for our time. While Danger Mouse's production still sounds unique to me, he's been prolific in so many genres and has so many imitators that perhaps it musically would sound rote. In terms of Beck's career, it was probably smarter that he releases pop-bait tracks like "Dreams" and I am forced to listen them as grocery store background music for the rest of my days.

Modern Guilt ultimately feels like Beck's Pinkerton–an album that wasn't given the kudos that it deserved at the time and resulted in artistic over-corrections that changed his career trajectory for the worst.

It's a shame, because a world-weary Beck feels more essential then ever. Beck's existential musing off of Modern Guilt feel very prescient in 2018, and echo a variety of fits and moods I get into when I binge-follow events of the day online. At the very least, it's a good reminder to log off.

Drake is fucking trash now. I've been thinking it for awhile, but 2018 is when I finally take the off ramp.

It started with Views. Views was supposed to be the chosen one! A victory lap after three back to back bangers! Views promised to blow out Drake's "started from the bottom" mythos into an album-long autobiography about his upbringing and city that raised him. In my own head canon of Views, Drake was going to get even more hyper-focused on his relationship with his parents, meeting Lil Wayne, breaking up Nebby and whatever nectar mined from that hive of delicious internal Drake strife that I want to morphine drip right into my spine.

Instead, he drops this frigid detached mess that gives me no sense of Toronto or Drake at all. Even Drake seems confused about his own identity. This man just starts dropping "tings" like a Jamaican badman as if he doesn't have a seven album deep catalog, all so he can backdoor himself into a new genre whose audience he can exploit.

It wasn't until More Life and Scorpion when Drake learned how to game the Spotify algorithm and went completely off the rails. Sure, "Passionfruit" and "Nice for What" slapped hard, but any new Drake album after 2016 is 80% filler that any objective executive producer should have put into hospice care for all of our sake. Drake is the bitcoin miner of streaming platforms: dropping overly long and anemic albums, boring his fans to sleep with the album stuck on repeat on so he can passively farm listens for cash.

If I sound hyper-cynical about a pop-star that I shouldn't have fanboyed for in the first place: I am! And wow did I fanboy him. After he hopped on that The Weeknd track, when Drake dropped Take Care in 2011 I was proselytizing this man to anyone that would listen. As shameful as it is to admit, a 23 year old Jake even had a poster of the Take Care cover hung on my wall above my bed. Was a small part of me was leaning into Drake fandom for laughs? Sure. But as much as I can claim I was doing this shit ironically, I was still doing it.

So what changed? What is it about about 2018 Drake that 2018 Jake just cannot reconcile with? How could I abandon the guy who I trusted to watch me sleep every night as the weight of the world was bore by his velvet-studded shoulders? It causes me to interrogate why I loved Drake and Take Care so much in the first place.

The singles for Take Care, Drake's crowning achievement, started trickling out the summer of 2011. Leading the charge was "Marvin's Room", a quintessential Drake song and a perfect lead single that early on, showed his shrewdness as an Top 40 entertainer.

On one hand, it's a song where Drake shows a painful lack of self-awareness by revealing way-too much about himself via an anthem to a pathetic drunk dial, with self-immolating and too-on-the-nose lyrics like "I've had sex four times this week let me explain//having a hard time adjusting to fame". The song, like many songs off of Take Care, has a decidedly nocturnal quality to it with an ethereal, barely-there beat.

On the other hand, Drake leading with the chin on his presumed "lack of self awareness" reveals on how much awareness he actually had. "Marvin's Room" invited scorn, mockery and above all else: attention. And it works.

My onboarding onto Take Care is a perfect example of this phenomenon at work. Before I listened to Drake, I heard a "Marvin's Room" parody song called "Locker Room". a barely-clever ditty about cock envy and suffering from shrinkage. (Actual line: "mine is small because of the cold water"). It was.....woof.

Point being: whether people liked Drake or not, they were talking about him, and this dude has a Caesarian ability to conquer and dominate mindshare. Inviting obvious cheap shots is a sleight of hand Drake has used ever since to great success, be it his dad-tier dance moves in Hotline Bling, his easily memeable "Drake sitting on things" cover of Views, or cashing out on Degrassi nostalgia on his most boring single ever.

Taking "Marvin's Song" out of the context of Drake's career trajectory though, the song is ultimately not about Drake's self-awareness (or lack thereof) and also not even really about a particular relationship that deteriorated in his life. It's a song about frustration. It's a song about weathering the choppy, transitional waters of "the come up" and simultaneously yearning for a more halcyon time when things were more comfortable and familiar. "Marvin's Song" is a desperate, drunken reply to the siren's song of a lifetime lived before complication set in, and after I got past the insipid small-dick parody track, I discovered an artist I felt eerily in sync with.

As Drake crooned for simpler times on "Marvin's Room", 2011 was a difficult, transitional year for me as well. I recently graduated college and was working at an internship before my full-time job at a big federal consulting firm began. It was a very romantic position for someone with historically low-self esteem to be in: I metroed into Washington D.C. every day and walked between the shadows cast by tall buildings to a corporate job where I wore a tie and slacks. I ate lunches on the rooftop of a tall granite monolith a block away from The Washington Post, overlooking the D.C. skyline with young, attractive people that were equally hungry for success. I had a sense I was I poised to control my destiny.

That is, until I didn't. Two unforeseen events hit me at once that summer:

First, I quickly learned after graduation that my parent's were unable to pay for my student loans, and that I'd be expected to assume eighty thousand dollars in debt, to be repaid at a rate of approximately 800 dollars a month, effective immediately.

Theoretically, I had no problem paying my student debt since after all, it was an investment in me, however the circumstances in which the responsibility was thrust upon me which was dubious. Since I was kept in the dark about the expectations, I lived without concerns regarding any type of budget, or having to take on a part time job during the school year. Additionally, I believed my parents possibly leveraged my student debt to allay some of their own privates debts, which led me to distrust how much of the the eighty thousand dollars debt was really incurred by me at all.

Secondly, about a month or two into my internship, I found out my federal clearance that was a prerequisite for my first job out of school didn't come through, and my conditional job offer from the federal contractor was rescinded. This meant that after the runway of the internship ran out, I had no steady income to depend on.

When this news hit me, the gravity of the loan situation felt devastating and on my metro ride home I was on the precipice of a breakdown. I remembering angrily calling my mom and dad from the Orange Line train bound for West Falls Church demanding them to be at the house when I arrived home. As soon as I reached the front door, I spiraled into a rage blackout, lashing out about how they kept me in the dark about what was expected of me. I openly questioned their motives in taking out all of this debt on my behalf without encouraging me to have insight into where the money was going.

To date, it's the most contentious fight I ever had with my parents and I barely remember it: I just remember blind rage, tears and self-loathing over my circumstances. Mostly, I felt fearful of my ability to clear the bar now expected of me and felt destined to fail.

Take Care is undoubtedly a bloated album that thematically covers a wild gamut, but it's strongest are moments are Drake's delivering a massive fuck you to everyone who ever doubted him and whatever circumstances he felt were holding him back.

The most delicious example of this is "Shot For Me". It's a no-holds barred cheap shot to all of Drake's exes, triggered by nothing but his own ego, that has all the grace of someone leaping into a ring and delivering a chair shot to a wrestler that wasn't looking. In Drake's world, revenge is dish best served via his omniscience, where he has reached such a level of fame that everyone that ever wronged him is duty-bound to respect him. The production is that of a warm, end-of-night lounge jam but his singing is a Venus flytrap: sweetly sung with a venomous bite, demanding everyone who ever doubted him to drink to his success. It's a hilarious song that is oddly empowering, and always has made me wish that Korean Karaoke places carried Drake deep cuts.

Dunking on exes is very in line with many other tracks off of Take Care, where Drake shows a disdain for any nostalgia that conflicts with his own growth. On "We'll Be Fine" Drake declares he's "tryin' to let go of the past" while drinking to the present over a luxury beat that demands you crank the bass and make your entire car wiggle. Drake's bravado was on peak display on "Headlines" when he effortlessly drops bar after bar toasting to his inevitable greatest. It isn't until Drake says "they say they miss the old Drake, girl don't tempt me" where he stumbles in sounding entirely in control of his own destiny. The only thing Drake seems afraid of is looking backwards, and a past where Drake is not an overnight success is not a past Drake is interested in dwelling on.

Even Drake's crooner tracks off Take Care speak to the sad inevitability of severing his past in order to embrace his future. 40's minimalist production on the spacious break-up song "Doing it Wrong", hovers Drake in the atmosphere above a dead planet. While physically present for his girlfriends mourning period, Drake is already detached; emotionally a million miles away and looking forward. This song is preceded by an underrated interlude called "Good Ones Go", where in the Drakiest way possible, summarizes the challenge of bettering yourself to the detriment of others.

I'm spendin' time just taking care of me right now

I'm gettin' money just taking care of me, girl

'Cause you'd be tired of taking care of me by now

A lot of the tracks off of this album really spoke to me. Years prior to the current moment I found myself in, I already started surgically cutting people out of my life whose behavior and life trajectory I thought conflicted with my own success. When the blow up with my parents went down, I started thinking that they too were a liability to me, to the point where I finally felt obligated to move out of the house. In retrospect, there were a lot of relationships I intentionally let wither on the vine around this time because I felt they were the wrong people to have in my life in that time. Cold? Undoubtedly. But at the time it all felt justifiable while I was trying to get my money right.

It's probably a net-positive that the anxious "come up" energy that Drake and I were both vibing in 2011 feels so foreign to me now.

In the course of a couple months I got my job situation under control and over the course of the next few years I ended up paying off my debts. While I begrudged my parents for a year or so about the loan situation, I eventually let it go and felt reconciled with it. After all, they nurtured and supported me for 18 years, and I wouldn't be where I am in life without them. The further removed from the situation I am, the more I realize it was a minor hiccup in the trajectory of my life.

That's because upwardly-mobile middle class kids like Drake and I never had it as bad as we probably thought we did. While Drake claims to have "started from the bottom", he also claims to be the kid that took his mom's Acura or his uncle's Lexus to shoot Degrassi or tool around Toronto. While my parents absolutely had financial troubles of their own, I sure as hell got dropped off at one of the best public schools in the country in a Lexus myself. Point being, in the grand scheme of human society, Drake and I were better positioned for success then we gave ourselves credit for.

Drake has a level of self-awareness about this, too. "Look What You've Done" is the most earnest track off Take Care, and also one of my favorites in his catalog. Over a subdued, haunting piano riff, Drake delivers not a rap a diary-entry ode to his Mom and Uncle, the two people whose support he credits for his inevitable success. While the majority of Take Care is a testament to burning the past for a brighter future, on this track Drake delivers a knowing acknowledgement of who got him to this point before he ascends into stardom.

Everyone lionizes their own personal narrative to make themselves the hero of their own story though, and this gives Take Care it's universal and timeless appeal.

Hindsight doesn't detract from the nervous energy you feel in that period in your life when you aren't sure if you will capably stand on your two feet. Take Care triangulates the sacrifices you make and the tension and triumph you feel in the midst of trying to "make it". It is Drake's most successful and relatable work.

Although his Junior and Senior albums did in fact get meaner, everything past If You Are Reading This, It's Too Late has betrayed Drake's early career charm. On Take Care, Drake is constantly promising to people that he will go back to the way he was once he found success, but at this point he's been corrupted by it.

His persona now so fucking exhausting. Drake grew a beard and became Evil Drake: getting strategically molested by Madonna for Twitter heat, starting petty and ultimately boring rap beefs, and creepdogging on young women and getting memed for it. It's negatively impacted the music, too. The tenor of his music shifted from that of a hungry kid on the come up into an detached Don trying to maintain the family business at all costs. As someone who feels like he's "made it" in his own way, 2018 Drake feels tiresome to me in that he doesn't remember where he came from, or appreciate what he has.

I will always appreciate what Drake created with Take Care, though. Heading home after a night of blowing off steam, be it driving alone on a moonlight washed interstate or the last Orange line train home, it was always nice having Drake along for the ride.

2012's Centipede Hz, the spastic kid brother to it's space-case sibling Merriweather Post Pavilion, is an underrated album in Animal Collective's catalog. While I loved Merriweather Post Pavilion, Centipede Hz corrects the band's course by understanding what that album did not: that the highest highs are colored by stress and tension.

The album underscores this by creating the sonic illusion of changing a radio station (the titular Hz) between many of the album's songs. The statement is implicit: much like twisting the knobs on an old radio receiver, Animal Collective requires its listeners to find what they are looking for through interstitials of cacophony.

After college graduation I was hitting my stride. I was financially independent from my parents, living in a Craigslist arrangement with three women. I was back in my hometown with a community of healthy friendships, employed with a good Consulting job I was doing a good job at.

In a sitcom-esque fashion though, it wasn't long before I started developing feelings for my landlord, West. West was not only someone I was living with and paying rent to, but was presently in an up-and-down relationship with a long-term boyfriend of three years. Regardless of the massive red flags, I couldn't help myself from making whatever innocuous plans I could to be in her orbit.

West was beautiful, driven and hilariously acerbic. We formed a friendship in the margins of downtime found throughout the week: an afternoon run after work, a conversation over coffee on a Saturday morning, or a beer on the back deck trying to out-sing one another in "How's It Gonna Be".

In this stolen time, we play-acted a healthy romantic relationship in every aspect but a physical one. In our most unguarded of moments, we would push each other to that brink as well. Every couple months or so West and I would find ourselves on too-small couches; two steam trolleys barreling towards each other until violently pulling off the tracks before collision.

Bewitched as I was by West, the facts were the facts: she was seeing someone and there was no way we were going to be together. Perhaps not coincidentally around this time , I started emailing my ex-girlfriend, East.

East and I broke up the summer of 2011, in the weeks before I packed my college apartment up to relocate home while she stayed in town. I remember discussing it matter-of-factly on the deck of the complex's pool, the sun beating down such that she seemed so far away, her face hidden behind the matte of my own squinting eyelashes.

The break-up didn't feel like some overwrought conclusion one of us inflicted on the other, but a cosmic inevitability, as if we both inherently understood that our lives had different trajectories. Once I moved away, the relationship was over. After it was casually decided, we left the pool to make love, ate at the burrito truck, and life went on.

Over the course of the next year, East and I reconnected and would occasionally see one another to spend a weekend together, making love and rekindling the feeling of the halcyon time after college before real life started. It wasn't long before I remembered how much I liked about East: her compassion, her natural state of calm and her quiet confidence. I felt like we both were on a similar wave length, searching for an ultimate someone, but happy to kill the downtime with one another.

And that's how it was for awhile. I spent my downtime during the week getting to know West, and every couple months, I would spend the weekend with East. Despite the surrealness of the situation I found myself in, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't positively buoyant about it. Even though I wasn't traditionally dating anyone, I was getting an intoxicating feeling from two very different, but impressive and important women: a feeling of validation.

Sure, I wasn't *with* either of them, but I didn't need to be. Right?

The crunchiness, pace and imperfection of the instrumentation sets a tone for the rest of the album: Animal Collective is a band that says "fuck it, we'll do it live".

Centipede Hz starts with "Moonjock" a psychedelic road trip down the I-95 corridor viewed through youthful eyes from the back seat of a parents car.

It's followed by "Today's Supernatural", which portrays the thrill and horror of child wandering alone at an amusement park, encountering an off-tune organ grinder and a manic carnival barker yelling at you to "L-L-L-L-L-LET GO!". While jubilant, the song has a tinge of delirium as it yells at you exclaiming "sometimes you've gotta get MAD!".

Eventually, the pace slows with "Applesauce", a nostalgic ballad that elegantly slides along until it's suddenly propelled with cymbal crashes and staccato shrieks as if singer isn't just happy to reminisce about the past, but desperate to.

In its first disc, Centipede Hz maintains a sense of manic joy that constantly seems on the cusp of a comedown.

One weekend after visiting East, I returned to West's townhouse to the sight of West and her boyfriend watching TV, cuddled up with one another on the couch. Despite just having spent the weekend with another woman, the sight of them intimate together immediately through me off despite having no entitlement to that emotion. In order to look unperturbed, I plopped into a nearby bean bag chair and started shooting the shit with the two of them, eyes transfixed on whatever video game I started half-heartedly playing in an attempt to look casual

Eventually, in an attempt to do her own level of seeming-normal, West asked me how my trip was. I replied, in a tone that was probably a bit more pointed then I intended, by saying "I really enjoy visiting East. She really centers me.". It was meant to be a subtle dagger intended only for West, weaponizing my relationship with East.

I am sure that to West's boyfriend, on it's surface it was a conversation that was completely in bounds for two platonic friends, however subterranean fissure lines were emerging. Eventually I walked upstairs to the sounds of them cavorting and laughing with each other, probably at my doofy earnestness, like a typical couple would. I was insanely jealous.

In the months to follow, I started entertaining increasingly unhealthy and possessive attitudes towards East as well. At times, I'd unilaterally make a grand declaration we shouldn't talk to each other anymore to ease in us (read: me) in "moving on" from the relationship. Then, when she herself was in the process of moving on, I privately rooted for her suitors to fail on the off chance she'd be available for a weekend when I needed to see her.

For the better part of 2011, the dial was on the fringes of two different radio signals: a twist to the right was a world I didn't fit into and a twist to the left was a world being built sole on my desperate imagination. Neither of the signals came through clearly as I bathed in dissonant static, breeding a disdain for both East and West.

At some point in the fever pitch of my situation with East and West, I'm in the pit of Merriweather Post Pavilion for my first Animal Collective show. On the stage, giant glowing teeth and a massive manufactured rib-cage enclose the band like they are performing in the throat of an ancient Leviathan. Animal Collective is touring Centipede Hz and, given they named their previous album after this venue, it seemed like it was going to be a special show. I invited a handful of friends to come with me.

In this cadre was my friend South. I had turned down dating South in high school in the midst of one of those classic crisis-of-confidence moments, realizing too late I had feelings for her. Regardless, we still remained friends, platonicly sharing beds throughout college when visiting.

Halfway through the set, the band lurches into playing songs from the second half of Centipede Hz, starting with the droning psychedelia of "New Town Burnout"; synth notes striking like spider-web lightning in the sky with a basketball break-beat that feels like a late night walk home under dimly lit street lights.

The concerts slows to a methadone drip, yet my heart-rate feels conspicuously high. Although I am keeping my head mostly down, vibing the set, I start to notice South dancing intensely with a AnCo fan that smoked her up earlier in the set. Something about that moment turns over in my stomach. An odd blend of paternalism and jealousy over South I have no right to feel starts boiling inside me.

As the song descends into a low fog, mechanical bells chime through the descending noise with assembly line precision. As the band seques into "Monkey Riches" and Avey Tare starts yearning about "a golden age", the pit reacts to the increased tempo of the chorus in a cathartic mosh.

I'm not a part of it though, wholly divorced from the music and the moment. As I obsessively transfix on South, a tide of anger and sadness swell inside me.

As the crowd raged around me, I understand it. In that moment South was East. I had loved some one without realizing it until it was already gone. South was West. I had loved someone who wasn't available to be loved. The momentum of the crowd started to consume me, and I felt my center of gravity contour with the whims of the mass.

I am unwillingly whipped around the waves of the joyous throng of the crowd, tasting the mist of their sweat and having their warm, wet bodies press against me, isolated from all of them. While they dance ebulliently without care, I am a self-serving sine wave violently lashing out at every cardinal direction. Up is down. Left is right.

The mosh pit swelled to the point where I couldn't tell if I was the one pushing, or the one being pushed. I am hurting them. I am hurt by them. Whatever force I applied was equally applied back onto me, feeding the kinetics of a larger, uncaring organism. I no longer felt control of my own body and succumbed to the will of the pit, eventually forcibly being ejected by it.

As my heart attempted to escape my rib cage, I too escaped the pit. I realized a couple of days after the fact that I had been experiencing a panic attack.

Centipede Hz's highlight is "Mercury Man", a spiritual re-imagining of Bowie's "Space Oddity". While Major Tom was stranded in an empty, calming nothingness though, the wayward soul in "Mercury Man" is careening through a meteor shower peppered by spectral clicks and beeps. Faced with certain disaster, the Mercury Man's only mortal concern is not his survival but the desperation to have his inner voice heard across a universe-wide gulf of noise:

We must be somewhere Can't find it nowhere love Is it me? I keep calling It feels like there's no one there

It's an ironic statement for a band that has always hidden incredibly vulnerable and human lyrics underneath at times, mechanical and inaccessible mechanical melodies.

The album concludes with "Amanita", where Animal Collective laments the things that get left behind in an ever-evolving society while celebrating the ability to move on. The beginning of the song feels like a military anthem, with an imperial synth-line and marching band drum flourishes. Eventually though, the discipline and order of the beginning of the song explodes into a chaotic and triumphant finale, with Avey Tare announcing a strategic retreat:

What are you gonna do? Go into the forest until I can't remember my name I'm gonna come back and things will be different

The year Centipede Hz was released, I was addicted to the high of loving and being loved with a childish level of greed. While I loved both East and West, I simultaneously showed disregard to both them and the men in their lives, caping myself in the belief that anything in the pursuit of love was noble.

A year and a half after our break up, I would eventually write an email to East where I told her for the first time I loved her. I would tell her that I had feelings for West and that I was sorry for being wishy-washy and sorry for apologizing and sorry I was even writing an email in the first place. East, in her infinite generosity, would respond with the infinite amount grace stating she just "wants to be the Elaine to my Jerry".

I'd smile at the thought of her for one last time, delete her reply, and never talk to her again.

A month later, West would break up with her boyfriend. Our year and a half of pent up flirtation culminated in a late night hook-up, after which, something clearly felt wrong. A week later, she would give me my two months notice to move out of her place.

I wouldn't take that long though. The next day, I called into sick into work, packed my things, and moved out of her house.

With fifteen minutes to kill, I stood in the precipice of a Ritz Carlton bathroom door, staring down a mirror adorned lavishly with a gold-plated frame. While my face looked stern and determined, my feet betrayed my confidence by tapping in a nervous cadence. Presumably, I saw some macho action hero do this in a movie at some point.

Appraising myself, I suddenly noticed the imperfections of the fit of the Men's Warehouse suit my Dad helped me pick out a couple months prior. The chest of the jacket was far too big, hanging off my shoulders like loose skin, while the crotch hung too low. I felt like a little boy that broke into his dads closet to dress like him.

I was about to begin the vetting process for my first corporate job out of college. The evening at the Ritz, my meals and the mileage I took in driving up from Harrisonburg were all compensated courtesy of Deloitte, a high-powered consulting firm.

Although I had reservations about getting a job at a monolithic firm like Deloitte, I felt that landing an entry-level consulting job was a critical step in achieving my manhood. "Local boy with the middling high-school resume and goon-tier grocery store experience makes good". My singular goal out of college was to live with financial independence, and a job with Deloitte was a means to that end. It was a goal that wasn't necessarily driven by ambition, but by fear. Fear of being a burden. Fear of not becoming a man.

As good as I looked on paper though, I was self aware to my short-comings. As book-smart as I was, I was never as naturally confident or outgoing as a lot of my classmates at a highly social college like James Madison University. I knew I wasn't naturally predisposed for all of the schmoozing and salesmanship involved with trying to land a career.

So, instead of being myself, I joked with friends I was merely method-acting a character that was the best version of myself: "Corporate Jake". Corporate Jake exuded confidence, was highly articulate on a wide range of topics, and asked questions the betrayed a deep and genuine interest in everything. Playing this character made it easier for me to feel more at ease in the inherently phony sausage factory of corporate recruitment.

Thus, as I stayed behind in the hotel room, it was Corporate Jake walked down the marble staircase into the promenade and smiled wide, poised to stake his claim and realize his manhood.

Apropos of nothing, I asked my wife Marissa to describe Matt Berninger, the principal lyricist and lead singer of The National:

"An ex-professional blonde, bearded man with posture like a freshly starched shirt and the voice of light brown leather dipped in bourbon and honey."

I couldn't have said it better myself. In a genre predominantly defined by crippling indecision or spacey bedroom yearning, Matt Berninger exudes manliness in the realm of independent rock.

Matt Berninger's singing—the most distinctive element of The National's sound—is a grizzled baritone that exudes wisdom and authority such that he'd be equally suited hunting banditos as a sheriff the wild west. His physical presence is just as imposing: having seen him live, his tall frame hulks over the microphone as if his roadies could only rustle up a My First Rock Show playset to perform with.

Marissa, whose crush on Matt Berninger has clearly rubbed off on me, recently picked up Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers on vinyl, an album I admittedly hadn't paid much attention to previously. The album was released at pivotal moment in the band's career as they were shedding the last vestiges of an alt-country sound and deciding if they should drop their nine-to-five careers to commit to The National full time.

Matt Berninger specifically was working a corporate job as a Creative Director for a digital media agency, a job he felt empowered as "a grownup man in the world, paying his own rent, and buying his own TV”. Facing down his thirties on the precipice of such a life changing decision, Matt Berninger's professional identity and therefore, his concept of manhood was in question. It's this tension permeates the album.

The tone of Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers is set by the slow-burn opening track "Cardinal Song", a song resembling "How To Win Friends and Influence People" as if it were written by Patrick Batemen. On it, Matt Berninger forcibly posits to the listener that a man's ultimate act of seduction is to never "let her see your cardinal eyes" or, let on who you really are.

An hour later, Corporate Jake was in the dimly lit private room of The Palm restaurant, sitting at one of the many round tables covered in pressed white linen alongside other students and associates for the company. Deloitte claimed the purpose of the dinner was to make applicants feel comfortable before formal interviews the following morning, but in reality, the interview had already begun.

As the group dined on plates of expertly prepared NY Strip Steak and Chilean Sea Bass, the mixed company of employees and students had ephemeral conversations about inoffensive topics like the Washington Redskins and the Washington Capitals.

Corporate Jake, trying to feign himself as regular bro with charming jock-tendencies, pivoted to discussing his tribulations trying (and failing) at youth hockey, including the "hilarious" story of the time he got a concussion. The other applicants at the table laughed at the anecdote because it met the minimum threshold of being considered humorous. They too, wanted to seem like competent and normal adults.

Corporate Jake began to feel empowered as if he wasn't interviewing for a job at all, but instead acting as a double-agent in a private game of espionage. Not even for a moment did he even hint at my actual distracting passions of writing, of playing narrative-driven video games, or of DJing at the college radio station. By parroting all of the right things and not betraying a single iota of my true self to the other agents, Corporate Jake was owning the room.

The night went on like this as waiters loomed between the tables, refilling glasses of wine and taking plates away, their actions muted by the dull roar of anxious chatter. After the meal was complete, they circulated after-dinner cocktails from their top-shelf collection of liquor. Even though I hated the stuff, Corporate Jake was the type of guy that would drink a whiskey straight, so he did.

With a single malt in hand, Corporate Jake started to work the room, chatting up any unengaged consultant in the room their life on the job. Despite having no practical experience to relate with, Corporate Jake regurgitated textbook best practices in the most natural form he could in attempt to appear as an equal that was already doing the basics of a career he had no practical experience in. His future interviewers seemed genuinely impressed.

By the end of the night, Corporate Jake considered his showing a success: he talked enough to be considered memorable, but also listened enough as to not seem like a blowhard.

He couldn't remember a single thing he said and he couldn't remember it even mattering. He went to sleep that night feeling the interviews the next day were but a formality. The job was already his.

On Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers, Matt Berninger questions concepts of manhood via the husbands and fathers that are the protagonists of his songs, showing the long-term pitfalls of stoicism and shying away from your true self.

On "Slipping Husband", we hear a titular husband's inner monologue as an intervention is staged against him by his own psyche as he addresses his private shortcomings as a man against an increasingly frustrated Greek choir. The song ends with a Wilhelm Scream from his subconscious urging him to "get a drink in you before you start to bore us!". We're only left to assume the husband will grab a bottle and continue his suffering privately instead of emoting any of his pain.

"Available" roars out the gate with a furious electric guitar, detailing a wife's gradual intoxication, seduction and bedding of her emotionally detached husband. The song ends with a rage-filled coda where the husband explodes at the wife for "dressing him down" when her only crime was to trying to rekindle a physical intimacy in lieu of an emotional intimacy that is long dead.

The most haunting song on the album for me though, is "Patterns of Fairytales", where sleepy keyboards and a campfire guitar bring to mind a moonlit McMansion in some Anytown, USA sprawl. Listening to it, I imagine a single lit room as a distraught husband listens to the mixes he made for his emotionally estranged wife decades prior, feeling a thousand miles of distance from the blood sleeping in the adjacent room. It paints a disturbing postscript for a lifetime of stoicism.

The concept of "Corporate Jake" was something I inherently learned from my dad when I was much younger. We'll call him Blue Collar Bob.

During a Field Day in 8th grade, I got called into the front office so the administration could inform me that my mom was in the hospital. Since all of the adults were so calm and collected about it, I took the news in stride and went back outside for a water balloon fight.

When I arrived home from school later that afternoon, my dad had arrived earlier from work presumably due to the news about my mom. As I walked in to the house, the first thing Blue Collar Bob said to me regarding Mom's health was "What, did you go and piss your pants?", in reference to a water stain on my shorts.

Later that day, my dad apologized to me profusely for making a pretty asshole jab. He worked on a job site, he claimed, and ball-busting with the crew was just the language in which his work was conducted. In prior construction jobs, he'd been shorted by shady subcontractors and had knives and guns pulled on him.

While I understood the over-correction from a parenting perspective, even at the time I can't honestly say I was bothered by his ribbing because on some level, I got it. I internalized that my Dad needed to be a hardened version of himself to provide for himself and his family.

My dad recently retired from his career at the beginning of the year after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. The cancer festering in his prostate is slowly seeping into his pelvic bone where it can eventually reach the blood stream, which at this point would be a death sentence. As a result, the doctor prescribed an aggressive treatment plan of six rounds of chemotherapy scheduled every couple of weeks.

I'm 600 miles a way in a city we moved to for purely selfish reasons and once a week I text him to see how he's doing and he insists he's fine. I try to set up weekly calls, some of which he will actually take, and when he does, he provides a cheery, optimistic update in a manner of five minutes before rushing to get off the phone. I hope for the best based on the reality he provided me.

At least, this is how I felt until I visited home last week. The voice that greeted me with "Hey JakeyP" when I walked into the house feels feint and belabored. The month or so of chemotherapy has aged him fifteen years as his previously thick hair is now a ghostly shadow.

You wouldn't know it when talking to him, though. Sure, he's a bit tired, but he's fine! How am I doing? Any good new restaurants on my block? How is Marissa? How is the dog?

Later that evening, as he's getting ready for bed, as we are continuing a similarly surface-level conversation, dad starts taking off his clothes as if I wasn't even there. His body is a warzone; frail and blotchy as a poison tries selectively to kill another poison inside of him. By being nude in front of me, it was as though he was trying to show me a level of suffering that he didn't want me to verbally empathize with, betraying one type of modesty for another.

I flew back knowing, despite being told the opposite, that things absolutely were not OK.

Coming out of college, I believed a cornerstone of masculinity was having a stranglehold of your emotions so they wouldn't interfere with your public business. The mindset around "Corporate Jake" allowed me to get a good job (not at Deloitte, thankfully) and ultimately be a low-maintenance friend and family member.

As a husband that wants to be emotionally honest to his wife and eventually his family, I'm beginning to question that belief.

My entire life, I thought I knew the "real" side of my dad. I thought the hardened side of him that worked sixty hour weeks for fifty years was a facade. After seeing him in this state though, ill and emotionally closed off, I'm unsure now if I know the real him at all or just another edition of Blue Collar Bob, still applying for the job of being an immortal, omniscient provider that will always be there to protect me.

In light of this, I look at the mindset I put myself in to get that first job out of school and it frightens me. I don't want to fall into the trap my Dad did. I don't want to permanently alter my identity, be it professionally or personally, to cope with the traumas of adulthood. I don't want to sacrifice the part of me that feels, and close off from those who love me, for the sake of antiquated definition of "acting like a man".

As of late, I again feel like little boy in the too-big suit, sleeves dangling, trying to be act braver then I am, and I think it's OK to start admitting that.

"We look younger than we feel, and older than we are."

Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers ends in a different place where it started with the track "Lucky You". Whereas "Cardinal Song" described manhood as wearing a perpetual veneer, "Lucky You" shows a protagonist cracked, bruised and bare, with all of their flaws on display.

"Lucky You" is unmistakably a break up song, however, it's still optimistic within the context of the album. It's a stark contrast: while the married man with the cardinal eyes dies emotionally alone, the dumped man from "Lucky You", at least for a time, had a set of arms to collapse into that wholly understood him.

Matt Berninger ended up shedding his corporate veneer and pursued The National, indulging his emotional core at a pivotal time in his life. As I face down my thirties and my own litany of trying situations in my family, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers an important reminder I should do the same if I too want to remain whole.

In my junior year of college I curated (with the help of friends) a music discovery blog with an unabashedly self-important title: "Conspicuous Consumption Clique". In "the ccclique", a handful of my friends and I would post YouTube links of songs that were resonating with us that week accompanied with a brief explanation as to why.

The blog had no ambition of becoming the next BrooklynVegan or TinyMixTapes, and our web analytics proved it. The majority of the clicks came from spambots in Russia and China, and our overseas "fanbase" was far less interested in our collective taste more than trying to sell us mail-order brides and discount Viagra via dubious URLs in the comment section. Instead, the blog only existed for the people that posted on it, specifically the purpose of promoting "conspicuous consumption" in the music we listened to.

"Conspicuous Consumption" was an intentionally cheeky name for the blog, coined after an economic theory. According to Wikipedia, conspicuous consumption is "using [ones] purchasing power [to] mark social status [and] publicly manifest prestige". I thought this was a funny way to think about the music discovery blog: a passive-aggressive game of cultural oneupsmanship where we competed to scoop one another on quality music we were listening to.

As an aside: re-reading through the archives of the blog now, I don't know how effective I was in turning people on to the music I liked. I don't think anyone was dying to hear a new Animal Collective track when I called their songs "eskimo seduction music" or sounding like a "food processor having sex with a radio transistor."

In my hunt, I meticulously maintained and scoured an .RSS feed of a handful of other personally-curated music blogs in order to discovered new music. One of these blogs introduced me to The Books when they released in Lost and Safe in 2009, and I posted about them.

"An Animated Description of Mr. Maps" was the song that really drew me into the The Books catalog. It felt unlike anything I'd ever heard at the time: a song driven by bombastic drums and the vocalist dueting with...samples? The song constructs a biography for a synesthesia-afflicted man who "sees Mars, but feels Neptune", depicted by lyrics that are equal parts sung and sampled from a variety of audio sources.

Generally, I am pro-sampling in music: Typically when sampling is used, its used as an efficient way to invoke a level of nostalgia or familiarity in a song without having to create something entirely new. Despite that though, I believe samples are generally used in a very cynical manner.

It's a cynical use of sampling when Girl Talk, on a single album, distilled 322 distinct songs into an album's worth of music for college freshman to drink jungle juice and dry hump to. Girl Talk is high-adrenaline music that is fun to listen to, but it's hard not to be cynical about the idea of the artist mechanically sifting through hundreds of hours of pop music looking it's most digestible kernel, mining them as if you were rooting through a garbage dump for precious ores.

It's a cynical use of sampling when Kanye West opens a song with a gospel choir and then immediately proceeds to rap over their vocals to talk about fucking a model with a bleached asshole. It's a banging beat with a hilarious lyrical juxtaposition and I'm positive the church ladies who belted out those vocals that day want nothing to do with it.

On Lost and Safe, The Books earnestly sample people with care, giving respect and a legitimate voice to those samples by imbuing them as the thematic soul of the songs they reside in—not treating them as window-dressing.

In "Never Changes To Stop", a duet between some warm country guitar and a longing standing bass melody is elevated to a very specific place by the songs sample: an ornery teacher lecturing his class to be Absolutely Still, Absolutely Quiet. Every time I listen to this song, I envision sepia sunlight pouring into rows of desks as dust visibly hangs in stasis. It evokes a very specific feeling I've had, a mental purgatory where you're half awake and half asleep in a classroom; trying to pay attention but finding the lecture pass through you, unable to interpret it. Nobody Talking, Nobody Moving.

Another track that samples respectfully is "Be Good To Them Always". The song is defined by a frantic series of disorienting, manipulated string solos that are strung together by the punctuation of a basketball aggressively smashing pavement. The song is a existential critique of an American society "going smash"; one that can only be salvaged by people treating one another better. However, it's not just the singer making this plea—half of the lyrics are sung as "duets" with a variety of different vocal samples, all coming from a variety of ages, genders and perspectives. These samples elevate the track from being the misanthropic rantings of a loner to hymn of a society trying to keep from eating itself alive.

On "Be Good To Them Always" and throughout Lost and Safe, the songs feel put together like a college in service of a larger picture, or, as the song itself clearly states:

"Oh, he's in the middle of putting things together and organizing himself!"

After maintaining the ccclique for a year and a half or so, I was "peak zeitgeist" in terms of my critical appreciation for music. In order to apply this knowledge, I decided to work at WXJM, the schools public radio station.

Working at WXJM was a self-indulgent dream gig. The music played on an amazing sound-system in the station, and as the music played, I had the opportunity to burn hundreds of hours of free music from the station's music library. After little time, I recruited by buddy Kyle Clapman to do the show with me, which henceforth went by the unfortunate title of "Wake and Jake with The Clap".

Much like the ccclique, our audience was nonexistent. The only call I ever took from the "general public" was someone lecturing me when I mispronounced the city of Staunton, VA for during live event promo. The most flattering compliment I ever got on the show from a stranger had nothing to do with the music at all, but instead, was about a drinking game her friends played. They drank whenever Kyle and I's between-song banter was too awkward.

The audience wasn't the point though. Kyle and I would slink into the station at 7:45 am every a Sunday, riding a buzz from the night before, and go segment-for-segment trying to play what we thought was the most vital and important music of the day, practically dancing in our office chairs as we jammed out. In a way, much like the ccclique, it was another conspicuous consumption showdown.

Preparing the playlists for each show was a meticulous process. Every week, I would prepare four, ten to thirteen minute segments of music and a small statement regarding each of the songs and how they relayed.

I was obsessive about it. I wanted a particular piano flourish from one song to end with a similar melody that started the next one. I wanted the themes from one song to flow into the themes of another from an entirely different genre or era. I wanted a popular song to be book-ended by lesser known artists that were playing in the same sonic landscape. I wanted to make sense of the massive, personalized wiki of music that existed in my head by organizing it's most slipshod elements into something cohesive.

I must have spent four to five hours a week tinkering with those playlists, all for a show that would be listened to by a handful of people before being immediately lost in time.

On an episode of Song Exploder, Nick Zaummuto (The Books' principle songwriter) described how he composed "Smells Like Content", the band's most listened to song on Spotify and my personal favorite off of Lost and Safe.

Whereas The Books previously relied on samples to act as their voice, Lost and Safe marked when they started using their own, and the music is better for it."Smells Like Content" is the best example off of the album's sudden embrace of sung lyrics.

The song is a philosophical musing about cyclical patterns of humanity over time and our ability to understand a world where "parts of wholes are described" The lyrics absolutely gush with vivid, literary imagery like "street corners [...] gnashing together like gears inside the head of some omniscient engineer". The song is a manifesto and it knows it, evidenced by the dialed down instrumentation that lets the lyricism shine: a mere base guitar slowly being strummed over a hum of a record vinyl looping after the last song's been played.

According to the podcast, the lyrics for the "manifesto" were organized by Nick was helping his girlfriend move over a three day period:

That's where the lyrics came from, knitting together a very disparate bits of information that came into my head over those three days.

[...]

It wasn't me writing a song from a personal perspective [...] but the universe writing the song. You know, there was nobody else to sing the songs in my head, so it had to be me!

When I listened to this episode a week back, I was blown away by this revelation. The lyrics were not inherently "written" but derived from what he saw around him during that time, be it from the dialogue from a television show to the engravings on a nearby library. Whereas I previously thought the lyrics were slaved over for months, they were merely a realignment of memorable little moments curated from a couple of days. Samples.

The theory of conspicuous consumption was posited to be condemnation of an inherently competitive society. The thought is that if all people are economically equal, those people would still try to one-up one another in terms of the tastes and aesthetics of the things they self-identified with. This posits a situation where"wealth" becomes defined by taste instead of money, with the end result being the same: an ultimately hollow inner-life.

I certainly desired to feel "wealthy" with regards to my taste in music, however despite all that, I possess no inherent musical talent myself past belting out a mediocre versions of Maroon 5's "This Love" at a shitty dive bar. However, in order to to feel more musical throughout college, I was driven by this exhausting energy of trying to "put things together" between the songs I loved to brute force myself within proximity of the artistry I loved. Despite sticking with the "conspicuous consumption" brand for this blog, I do think the concept is an inherently cynical one.

I will say this though: the obsessive energy that drove my conspicuous consumption of music in college is same energy that was an artistic motivator for the The Books.

The reason Lost and Safe resonated with me is the itch every music fan feels when trying to put a playlist together for a friend, or somebody they love, is a literal component of the bands creative process. Whereas I created forgettable playlists though, The Books' deployment of the auditory flotsam was used to create art.

On Lost and Safe, The Books' were a band held hostage by the randomness and chaos of an inescapable media landscape that demanded to be sorted like a newspaper-clipping ransom note: a thrift shop grab bag of toys and doodads stitched together to resemble something remarkably human.

Near the tail-end of our senior year of college, Kyle and I saw The Books live in concert on their last tour before they broke up. Harrisonburg, VA was not a musical destination by any means, but the radio station nonetheless booked them in a small movie theater venue downtown to perform. The crowd was small, and since I recognized most of the attendees from the radio station, I doubt many people from the general public were there.

In that way though, it was perfect: a critics band performing in front of critics, collectively consuming music that was satisfying on a primal level.

That miracle glided into our lives on a four-wheeled walker with a perpetually half-cocked grin on his face. Charles Cave, our new Latin teacher, quickly became a living legend in our high-school.

However, in all fairness, I do have to say "Latin teacher" loosely, as I can't read a line of rudimentary Latin to this day. Mr. Cave was in his 70's and cut his teeth teaching Latin and Chess to inner-city students in DC. At this stage in his career, Mr. Cave seemed far more interested in shooting the shit with low-maintenance suburban kids then running through cases and declensions.

Mr. Cave charmed everyone he met. He would tell us fantastical stories about a time he got shot in the head and walked himself to the hospital, or how his college football team needed to custom order a helmet for his massive noggin. He would innocuously do a Charleston-style dance next to the cute girls in class as he held his walker. He sent students out the door to fetch hot sink water to stir instant coffee crystals into and for lunch, he ate Hungry Man meals that he let defrost on his desk until they were room-temperature. He was the coolest fucking teacher ever and every student who had him loved him, so much so that he tripled the amount of Latin sections the school offered the year after he was on the job.

It wasn't long until the administrative staff started catching on to the farce, and we always tried to subtlety help Mr. Cave out when it appeared he was in professional trouble. When he was being observed, we asked plenty of questions to put up the facade of an engaged classroom. We joined his Latin Club to make it look as though his students really wanted to enrich ourselves in an even deeper level with the era. For our loyal service, it wasn't long until Kevin and I were in Mr. Cave's circle of trust, evidenced by him calling us "Downtown Dudes".

When Mr. Cave told us we were Downtown Dudes, I'm not sure if any one of us actually knew what it meant past it being a cool turn of phrase. There was very little "downtown" about living in some of the most yuppie suburbs in the entire country, but I liked what it implied. "Dude" is absolutely on the cooler end of the spectrum when it comes to masculine nouns. "Downtown" brings to mind a hipness, a brand of street-smarts and a certain level of worldly wisdom.

But why did I earn such a title? Gun to my head, if I had to tell you what about me as a sophomore in high-school made me a Downtown Dude, my first instinct would be to tell you I listened to Steely Dan.

What can I possibly say about the legendary Steely Dan in 2017 that hasn't been said countless times before by people much more eloquent than me?

The basics are as follows: Steely Dan was formed in the 1960's by the songwriting duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, whose career walked the line from actually-good yacht rock to unparalleled jazz rock. Although the line-ups changed, the duo consistently deployed Blackwater-tier mercenaries of rock and jazz to create tightly constructed ballads. Every album they put out didn't feel like an album at all, but a collection of short stories with just enough sweeping instrumentation and epic solo's that the listener could fill in the blanks of whatever narrative the band gave you.

One of Steely Dan's greatest rogue galleries was collected on The Royal Scam, an album which told the stories of unlikable people in lowlife situations. It opens with "Kid Charlemange", the story of failing drug dealer on a verge of irrelevance that is a less inspirational than Kayne West's sample led people to believe. The triumphant yet ominous strut of the keyboard bounce along with an occasional dissonant note like a fighter shadow boxing himself before twisting his ankle. Kid Charlamange is no hero, but Donald Fagen and his background singers act as his Greek choir and respectfully eulogize his Made In America tragedy.

Another album highlight, "Haitian Divorce", is a menacing taste of jazz-club tropicália. The whining, seductive guitar drags the protagonist through a marital spat, a scandalous evening out with a mysterious man, and her triumphant return to her husband only to give birth to a baby that doesn't look quite right. While festive on it's face, the song moves with the deliberate creep of the end of the night with spilled drinks and bad intentions.

The majority of the other songs on the album are no more optimistic. The Royal Scam provides profiles in theft, crime, loveless sex, adultery and espionage, and as varied as the storylines were, so was the instrumentation. Listening to "Sign in Stranger" sounds like a confident strut into the only saloon in town as a player piano scores your first drink with a bevvy of celebratory flourishes. However on the titular "The Royal Scam", that same piano is used to a different effect, deliberately ambling along to the tune of a paranoid junkie picking up their pace as if they're being tailed.

Like every Steely Dan album The Royal Scam was flawlessly produced, but compared to the rest of their catalog it's easily the band's most cynical work. The music projected a weariness and skepticism of the world at large, spoken from the confident, slick voice of Donald Fagen as someone could see all the angles and knew how everything was going to shake out. The voice of a Downtown Dude.

I was hardly a Downtown Dude a year earlier in Latin I, and there's one specific day where that was made painfully obvious. On it's face it was a pretty non-descript class, albeit one with a palpable energy in the room with every student trading knowing glances and smiles. At one point during Mrs. Hailey's lesson, a girl excused herself to go to the bathroom. Five minutes later, a guy did the same, getting a pat from his buddy on his back as he walked out the room. About fifteen minutes later they both arrived back to the majority of the class conspiratorially snickering.

The secret was certainly unbeknownst to Mrs. Hailey. However, it was also unbeknownst to Kevin and me, as we seemed to be the only students unaware of whatever transpired. As per usual, we were haplessly out of the loop, earning our C by focusing on a competitive round of Advance Wars instead of listening to the lecture.

Weeks after the fact, I remember hearing tons of rumors the two of them left class to share a joint. Or hook up? Or hook up in exchange for a joint? Or maybe nothing at all. Point being, while our contemporaries were tittering about in the midst of the high-school intrigue happening before them, Kevin and I were clacking away in our own little world on a Game Boy Advance.

So why did a young man, who listened to pretty standard alternative rock like Third Eye Blind, Incubus and the Red Hot Chili Peppers randomly get into Steely Dan?

First of all, it was sarcastic as hell. Steely Dan is famously known for rarely having a "true" love song that didn't have a dark joke lingering beneath the jazzy tunes. The Royal Scam is no different, featuring a song like "The Fez". The song features a horned up charlatan trying to talk his lover out of having to wear a "fez" on his prick because of his holy prerogative, all as some comically-dramatic Transylvania organs spook in the background. If The Royal Scam is trying to solicit a spit take at any point, this is it.

However, that is a relatively surface-level aesthetic to obsess over. I think the emotional appeal of Steely Dan, particularly The Royal Scam to me at the time was as follows:

As a sophomore in high-school who incredibly far removed from the innocuous, experimental high-school experience of doing drugs and having sex, The Royal Scam was an album that was incredibly post-drugs and post-sex.

Hearing songs like "Kid Charlamange" and "Haitian Divorce" allowed me to feel post-high school in a way that made me comfortable in not participating in even the most innocuous high-school experimentation. In the world of The Royal Scam, drugs and relationships all led to the same forgone conclusion, so perhaps I was in the right all along for not getting invited to "immature" house parties or being bogged down in "doomed" relationships.

In retrospect, I think the reason Mr. Cave is called me a Downtown Dude was because we mutually helped one another "fake it til you make it". All three years I took his class, Kevin and I helped Mr. Cave maintain an air of legitimacy and keep his job. In exchange, I had straight A's all the way through Latin IV. Game recognized game, and we both respected each others hustle despite our different stations in life.

To that point, Steely Dan made me feel like a Downtown Dude because it helped me "fake it til you make it" throughout my sophomore year in school. The Royal Scam bestowed upon me an unearned maturity and wisdom in topics where I was too prudish of an outcast to experience myself. Maybe not royal per se, but certainly a scam I pulled on myself to feel more comfortable in my skin.

"I recall when I was small how I spent my days alone, the busy world was not for me so I went and found my own. I would climb the garden wall with a candle in my hand, I'd hide inside a hall of rock and sand."

Those are the first lyrics that open "The Caves of Altamira", the only optimistic song on the The Royal Scam. The song opens with a grand, sweeping brass section and immediately segues into Fagen crooning with childlike wonder about exploring a fantastical realm. It's an interesting curio in not only The Royal Scam, but the entire Steely Dan library, as the grandness, warmth and lack of an ulterior motive completely clashes with a lot of the band's catalog. In the The Royal Scam especially, "The Caves of Altamira" showed that the Downtown Dude could took only solace in solitude.

I obsessed over this song in high-school. I'd listen to it while I culled heads of romaine and red leaf lettuce alone in the produce back-office of Safeway every Tuesday and Thursday evening after school, instead of doing any extracurricular with friends. I would hear it the back of my head when I stayed home alone in on yet another Friday or Saturday night to play games like The Thousand Year Door and Beyond Good and Evil. If the rest of the album was about feeling tired and dejected of the vices of the world around you, The Caves of Altamira is a triumphant embracing of an inner life in spite of it.

The Royal Scam was a soundtrack for a time in my life where I felt simultaneously detached from a lot of my peers but also tried to feel above it all. It goes without saying that in retrospect, my high-school self-doubt were merely the garden variety anxieties of a narcissistic teenager. I was a nondescript, straight white dude that went mostly unbothered and if I had to guess, people thought I was trying to be cooler than the room by acting so detached. Regardless of the circumstances though, these insecurities brought me to Steely Dan, a band that vastly broadened my taste in music and made me feel like a Downtown Dude when I needed to the most.