Here is the great video for Pistol Annies’ “Hush Hush,” which has been lodged in my brain for more than week now. And here is something I have written for Slate about the seemingly unlikely but increasingly cozy relationship between weed and country music. And now I would like some green bean casserole please.
A couple of chips and salsa at the beginning of my shift for quality control purposes. Work exploded into rollicking margarita-fueled bedlam and I was running around like a crazy person. I had to pee for five hours. At one point my hands started quivering weirdly and I wondered if the pee had gone back up inside my body and was poisoning my blood. I had a couple tacos before the kitchen closed, at 9:30, ribeye with cilantro and onion and salsa verde. Some pals of mine had come to eat at my restaurant for a birthday celebration, one of them was Sam, one of them was Teri, I gave them a free dessert, a cajeta crème brulee thing. I had a couple of bites of it once the rest of the customers were gone. I accidentally opened up a bottle of Dos Equis Amber for no reason so once the restaurant was closed I drank it. I deserved it. I got home at 1:25 AM and ate a Golden Delicious apple.
My new favorite thing on the internet/in the world, thank you Lindsey.
Basia Bulat covers Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” for The AV Club, makes me cry a little at my desk, reminds me how much I loved Oh My Darling when it came out. In 2007! God! I think I put “The Pilgriming Vine” on every mix I made that year and it’s still great.
So, so into it. Also: “Weed Instead of Roses”!
Source: Spotify
During the worst dark nights of the soul, my smaller failings rise up one by one in a chorus of metallic voices: that unwritten, obligatory important letter; my tipsy, laughing, unintentional, klutzy faux pas booming into a sudden silence; the failure to speak when speaking would have helped someone…
These things are much worse to recall than any of my gigantic, life-changing mistakes. Those are boulders too big to see all at once, hulking, unmoving, and strangely safe, whereas the little things generate a cascade that turns into an avalanche. They’re all connected to one another somehow, neurochemically, so that remembering just one of them sets off a chain reaction sparking all the way back through the decades with increasing urgency until I’ve looped through my entire life, all the way back to the first one, which now seems worse than ever in light of all the others.”
Kate Christensen’s Blue Plate Special is out in July, and this is from the very first page, so you know you’ll want to devour it as soon as possible. (via maudnewton)
I understand that it is a healthy and worthwhile thing to read books that challenge your thinking, that “make you see the world” “in new ways” and “expand your horizons” and “broaden your thinking” and “take you out of yourself” and all that, but also there is nothing quite like reading a series of sentences that precisely capture a feeling or a thought or experience you have had but that you have not yet put into words, or that you tried and failed to put into words, or that you put into words but not quite the right words, or that you encountered in such an abstract way that you hadn’t quite got to the point of thinking about them in terms of language, but now you don’t have to, because they exist in the world in the form of someone else’s effort, pure comfort and reassurance that you are not crazy, or at least not alone. This is the same feeling I get when I go into a hardware store, sometimes. Thankful that someone else has done the work to invent all these bits and pieces to solve my problems and stop up my gaps. Which is to say, I’m really really excited about this book.
I love this album but I know I would have loved it more ten years ago—exactly ten years ago, actually, the summer between high school and college, when I was 18 and when being 23 seemed like the most extraordinary, frightening, fantastic thing. This is it, exactly it, the 23 I thought about at 18. It was a tall tower I could see from miles away that I never stopped approaching until it was suddenly in my rearview, just as far away as it had always been. I was never going to be that 23, just like I’ll never be that 18 again, or the 23 I actually was again, but I thought about it then, and I think about it now sometimes, mostly when I’m listening to this record, this time traveler from my never-lived past.
Source: Spotify
Laura Stevenson’s The Wheel is out today and I can’t think of the last album that I felt this way about. Like it was possibly made in a lab for me? Which is a perhaps deludedly narcissistic way to feel about art, but I feel it. I reviewed the record for eMusic—here—but it feels insufficient. To even come close to explaining exactly how deeply I feel this record I would have to spend months trying to write through/about my very early-dawning (still lingering) awareness/fear of death… which happens to be something I’ve been doing anyway, so that’s convenient, but not exactly something to burden casual eMusic browsers with. Anyway, this record. You should hear it.
Source: Spotify
So you want to be a writer / FANTASTIC IDEA
Source: Spotify
At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life. I push them open and walk through.
