Content Nausea No. 116: Avant Sleepwalk

Check to check / Week to week / Drink to drink / We're always asleep

Welcome to the 116th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 115 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog. I don’t know how that holds up.

You can read the first two installments of RECORD SUNDAY here and here.

---

Another sort of a dump issue of the newsletter that has been living in my drafts for the past two weeks. It was originally going to be a travelogue of covering a 16-game college football season, and then it was going to be some thoughts about the Eagles winning the Super Bowl and being in Philadelphia for that. But it’s more than a week after that, too. Maybe March is when your New Year’s resolutions really hit their stride?

---

Some content I wrote this week

Dug into an external hard drive, a Google Drive that I had mostly forgotten about, convoluted online archives and more to find the first time Saquon Barkley ever came up in my coverage. It was October 2015 when I was covering Maryland for The Baltimore Sun Media Group. I’ve written a lot about him since. I wrote about that here.

---

Some content I listened to this week

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to keep up with Larry Fitzmaurice’s Last Donut of the Night newsletter, particularly the “Baker’s Dozen” installments where he blurbs out a selection of songs. But during the fall, I got too busy, and all of those fell by the wayside. So after doing an insane email cleanout around the beginning of the January, I kept all of the Baker’s Dozens from late December on, and over the weekend, I started going through each edition while I was at my desk doing some other organizational tasks. He came back from vacation Monday, and I’m almost caught up. (Ed. note: I’ve fallen behind again). Still got to catch up on some of the interviews from December and January, though I skipped the Mogwai one (iykyk).

The 022k25 playlist is basically all songs I’ve found from Baker’s Dozens. I’m hopeful that those songs open some doors to albums that I’ve overlooked or missed over the past couple of years. It’s becoming a theme that I might be overusing, but I want to be more intentional about listening to music. I hope this helps.

Here’s the 012k25 playlist:

Nothing too thought out there in terms of themes or anything like that. Some random singles in there. I want to get back to being better with playlists this year, too, which I haven’t been since, like, the 2021 Bradley Beal era.

I’ve started keeping a TextEdit file minimized on my desktop to jot down any newsletter-related thoughts or dump quotes and links, and at some point, I wrote that Widowspeak’s 2022 record The Jacket is a “very good, underrated album that probably slipped by me in 2022.” I don’t think it actually slipped by me? I remember listening to it a lot. But interesting thought that I circled back to in January.

I need to look up when the Anxious record is coming out (ed: it’s Feb. 21) but I’ve enjoyed the singles. “Some Girls” is good. Fun band to stumble over in early 2022 (or 2021?) and their set opening for Oso Oso in Ann Arbor in October 2022 was great:

I remember when Perfume Genius came onto the scene back from the day — not sure if I ever played “Mr. Peterson” on In Afternoon Air — and I would have never predicted the project getting this big. Very cool. Like “It’s A Mirror” and looking forward to what’s next:

“People of Substance” is such a Craig Finn sentiment and it’s such a great Craig Finn song:

(There’s probably more songs that I could have added over the past two weeks, but maybe I’ll unload that backlog next week).

---

Some content I read this week

I have to give Allison a shoutout for starting a newsletter! Subscribe to PERMANENT RECORD! Siegs is one of my oldest friends and it’s fun to see some of the conversations we’ve had end up in writing. I will not see Nosferatu, but she made me much more curious about it than I would have been otherwise. Also enjoyed her on Brat and demure. Our writing has come a long way from Tumblr and the Patriot Room.

Since I wrote that paragraph, Allison also wrote about Saturday Night Live ahead of the 50th anniversary special. It got me to want to watch it Sunday night, and it ended up being a fun walk down memory lane. Sometimes you forget that you can laugh out loud at television.

I finished my first book of 2025: Taste in Music: Eating on Tour with Indie Musicians by Alex Bleeker and Luke Pyenson. Carlie gave it to me for Christmas, and it’s a beautiful book in terms of the layout and the photos. The essays are excellent, too.

I’ve also finished three other books in the intervening weeks: Hell Is a World Without You by Jason Kirk; Worry by Alexandra Tanner; and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell. For space’s sake, I don’t have much to break down, but I enjoyed all three for different reasons. I’ve started reading You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip by Kelsey McKinney. I’ve also hit a good rhythm with the local library and my holds, which has been fun.

I started to clean out the #content tag on Pocket because it, along with my entire queue, has become unwieldy amid a lack of newsletters (and lack of reading). Some subjects I’m passing over: year-end stuff, the election, Brat, the Phillies winning the NL East, the A’s leaving Oakland, the death of Rich Homie Quan, the beginning of the NFL season, the conventions, the Olympics, the death of Willie Mays, Zach Bryan, Hawk Tuah, the death of Bill Walton, the death of Steve Albini, Caitlin Clark, the death of Brooks Robinson and suddenly there were stories from 2022 and earlier that I never shared.

So some pieces… (I’m going to save the bookmarked pieces from the past two weeks for next week’s theoretical newsletter. My Pocket is really starting to buckle under the weight of itself).

• “Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?” by Hua Hsu, The New Yorker

Pelly is a romantic, but her book isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. It’s about how we have come to view art and creativity, what it means to be an individual, and what we learn when we first hum along to a beloved pop song.

• “You might just have to be bored” by Kate Lindsay, Embedded

As someone who has made plenty of contributions to the getting-off-your-phone content industry, I can confidently say that the real solution is not that complicated. There’s no theory to learn or science to practice. You don’t have to do anything to fix your attention span. You just have to be bored.

• “The Ravens Will Just Have To Stew In Their Failure” by Ray Ratto, Defector

…the result will operate as a trigger for years of recriminations, because that's how sports works—the losses always linger longer.

• “Choosing to walk” by Rayne Fisher-Quann, internet princess

When you choose to walk, you choose not to pursue immediate gratification or even comfort but simply to expand the number of things that might happen to you. Walking invests in the potentiality of your experience with almost no promise of tangible reward at all, which is something like being alive.

• “How My Trip to Quit Sugar Became a Journey Into Hell” by Caity Weaver, The New York Times Magazine

• “Alphabetical Order: Beastie Boys - 'Ill Communication'” by Dan Ozzi, Zero Cred

• “Embrace Greatness. Embrace Patrick Mahomes.” by Tyler Dunne, Go Long

• “The search for a high school basketball all-time scorer that time forgot” by Brendan Quinn, The Athletic

• “Nobody Knows How To Act And That's OK” by Erik Garcia Gunderson, Blazer Banter

• “On the Grid: How Surveillance Became a Love Language” by Zoe Hitzig, The Drift

I’m sorry, but it’s no surprise that I ended up with a bunch of Defector links stacked up:

• “We Need To Get Off The Internet” by Israel Daramola

• “The Future Is Too Easy” by David Roth

• “Patrick Mahomes Will Always Make You Pay” by Drew Magary

• “The Old Rules Are For Losers” by Kelsey McKinney

• “Rickey Henderson Believed In Rickey Henderson” by Ray Ratto

And another list of links from late last year:

• “In Lubbock, Aaliyah Chavez is nation’s unlikely No. 1 recruit — and a symbol of a new era in hoops” by Aaron Kasinitz, LoneStarLive

• “The Life, Death, and Memphis Blues of Jay Reatard” by Andrea Lisle, Oxford American

• “The Hollow Allure of Spotify Wrapped” by Brady Brickner-Wood, The New Yorker

• “How the Indie Rock Boom Went Bust” by Larry Fitzmaurice, Hearing Things

• “Lost In The Future” by Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At?

• “Not sentimental, no” by Jeremy Gordon, Air Gordon pt. 2

• “TV on the Radio’s Guide to Pre-Gentrification Williamsburg” by Ryan Dombal

• “RIP Billymark’s” by Sophie Haigney, The Paris Review

• “Fudgetown, USA: How a Michigan vacation town transformed the sweet into a nationwide tourist attraction” by Heather Radke, Taste

OK, that’s a step forward for me and Pocket.

---

Some other content I saw or thought about this week

The KIND Snacks corporation has had me in a chokehold over the past couple of years in terms of the granola and granola bars that I eat, and it’s at the point where I don’t know if it’s good or not. I already know it’s not as “healthy” as I assume (I know, getting the peanut butter chocolate instead of the just the chocolate granola bars doesn’t make a difference), but it’s the routine at this point. Last week when I went to Wegmans, the almond butter clusters that I get for my yogurt were out, so I pivoted. I ended up back in the gluten-free section and took a flyer on the Bob’s Red Mill peanut butter granola, and it’s amazing. It’s so good. I’m not paying attention to the health content. But it’s so much tastier and just fresher than the KIND offering. Real game-changer. If I did a Perfectly Imperfect, this would be one of the recommendations.

---

Thank you for reading the 116th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.

Unconscious
Unconscious and it's getting late
Unconscious
Unconscious and it's getting late

—D.G.

Record Sunday #2: The first records

Joy Division, Vivian Girls, Portland and Brooklyn

DECEMBER 2006: JACKPOT RECORDS, PORTLAND, ORE.

When I was graduating high school, I ranked my favorite bands in an order that I felt would be permanent (3-5 might have been in a different order):

1. Sonic Youth

2. Joy Division

3. Modest Mouse

4. Lightspeed Champion

5. Polar Bear Club

Obviously, this hasn’t held true. Hello, Cloud Nothings; hello, Real Estate; etc. I think the proper framing of the list would be either “favorite high school bands” or “most formative high school bands” — we’re going to be talking about that F-word a lot in this series — but I was a teenager who thought he had a fixed view of the world.

I don’t remember much about buying this record. It was a rarity to visit Oregon for Christmas, and this is the only time I can ever remember doing it. But on one end of the trip, we stopped in Portland, and Anna directed some record shopping. I was a freshman in high school, and I was deep into Sonic Youth and Joy Division, considering them the only two bands that really needed to exist.

The Grey Assembly wasn’t Unknown Pleasures or Closer. It seemed cooler. It was a bootleg. It had “Digital” on it. There was a ramshackle quality to it that I don’t think is normally associated with Joy Division’s studio records. It opened my eyes to the discography beyond “She’s Lost Control.”

Later, I would get the Substance compilation and Unknown Pleasures on CD. I named a two-piece band that Benn and I had “Interzone” because of the Joy Division song, not the William S. Burroughs book. Benn got me a Joy Division shirt, and when I wore it to school on a dress-down day, our pre-calc teacher asked me if the man on my shirt was having a seizure, which led to perhaps the best “Well, actually…” moment I’ve ever experienced.

Though this was the first record I ever bought, it would be a couple years until my collection actually started. But The Grey Assembly serves as a good reminder of a “time and place” and the type of music that shaped where I am today.

---

AUG. 2, 2009: EARWAX RECORDS, BROOKLYN, N.Y.

There are two weekends from high school that shaped how I would view music for the foreseeable future (maybe the rest of my life?): Whartscape in Baltimore in mid-July 2008 and a long weekend in Brooklyn in late-July/early-August 2009. Everything was different from then on. I wrote about that second weekend here back in 2019.

In hindsight, this day was a shitshow. We were supposed to go to the Pool Party to see No Deachunter in the afternoon and then I was supposed to get the MegaBus back to White Marsh afterward. I had summer school at community college the next morning. I had all of my stuff with me, including my bulky laptop. But it rained, the show got postponed and canceled and postponed, and fast-forward a couple hours, we were sitting outside of Brooklyn Bowl listening to Deerhunter and Dan Deacon and No Age and waiting to get let in for our late show.

There are a couple days like this in my memory where time becomes unstuck and I have no idea how everything could have happened.

We had all afternoon to kill in Williamsburg, which was a playground for a 17-year-old in 2009. Everything was obviously the coolest thing I had ever seen, including Earwax at its old location at 5th and Bedford.

Two nights earlier, we had seen Vivian Girls play at the Whitney. The night before, we had seen The Babies (and a host of others) at Death By Audio. The Vivs self-titled felt like an appropriate purchase to commemorate the weekend.

It’s pointless to wax nostalgic about 2009 because I was not “there” for it — I was an interloper — but if you say the words “Brooklyn 2009” the first thing that comes my mind is Cassie Ramone’s album art. The line drawings, the color palette, the water towers, the warehouse windows, etc. All of that comes back to my head. And then the sound of “Tell The World.”

That’s the weird era for me. At different points, I’ve had the album cover hanging in a frame in different rooms and apartments, and it’s a very comforting piece of art. That goes for the record, too.

When I got home from this trip, I immediately tried to write a bunch of songs that resembled Vivian Girls, Wavves and No Age (I was not talented enough to attempt to write Deerhunter songs). They mostly fell flat, but entering my senior year of high school, I felt I had found a key piece of my identity.

---

Previously on RECORD SUNDAY:

• Record Sunday #1: A birthday haul for a 31-year-old

---

Happy Sunday, and I hope you enjoy RECORD SUNDAY today and in the future.

—D.G.

Record Sunday #1: A birthday haul for a 31-year-old

Sonic Youth, Joy Division, Wilco and more on a birthday trip to New York.

I own too many records, and I’m fine with that. The first record I bought for myself was Joy Division’s The Grey Assembly at Jackpot Records in Portland, Ore., in December 2006. The next record I bought was the Vivian Girls self-titled at Earwax Records in Brooklyn, N.Y., in August 2009. Things gradually ramped up through 2010 when I graduated high school, went to college and started to attending shows on a regular basis. I wanted something to commemorate those nights at 9:30 Club or Black Cat or wherever else.

Fast forward to January 2025 and I’m in State College, Pa., where I’ve got an eight-square Kallax that is three-quarters of the way full, plus a packed record cart shelf and a bookcase with a couple scattered sets. Do I listen to them enough? Have I listened to all of the ones that I own? That’s a different conversation for a different day. But the collection I’ve amassed is one of my most prized possessions.

This the first installment in what I hope will become a weekly featured called RECORD SUNDAY in which I explore my collection. Every Sunday, I’ll go through collection and pick out a group of records that I bought at one time (I have a spreadsheet for my collection that includes the dates and locations for almost every record I’ve acquired) and write about it. I’ll jump around to different hauls and explore different stores, bands and albums. It seems pretty, simple, right? I tried to do this on Tumblr in 2012 when my collection was a much more manageable size. I called that My Record Collection. It didn’t last long. (s/o to Anna, the OG RECORD SUNDAY participant).

For this first edition, we’ll start with a trip to some familiar haunts around New York for my 31st birthday in 2023.

---

MAY 12, 2023: CAPTURED TRACKS SHOP, BROOKLYN, N.Y.

RECORDS: Bad Moon Rising by Sonic Youth; Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division; More Songs About Buildings and Food by Talking Heads; Nuggets Volume Three: Pop by Various Artists.

There are going to be a series of recurring characters over the course of this series. Captured Tracks is going to be one of them. The venerable Brooklyn record label put out some formative albums of the late 2000s and early 2010s, and the record stores it was associated with were frequent haunts. I forget when the Captured Tracks Shop opened in Greenpoint and I’m pretty sure it’s moved since I went there. I haven’t kept up. But it was on my list of places to visit, and I made sure to make it worth it.

This haul set the tone for the weekend. Sonic Youth, Joy Division and Talking Heads were all ~formative~ high school bands, and on the cusp of another birthday, it felt appropriate. Bad Moon Rising featured prominently in the final U.S. Sonic Youth show in Williamsburg in 2011, so it’s always had a place in my heart. Plus, I covered “Death Valley ’69” on acoustic guitar when I was in high school. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is an all-time song, so to get it on 12” was great. And David Byrne has the same birthday as me — and I bought More Songs About Buildings and Food on CD when I was younger — so that felt appropriate to buy, too. Every record here felt like a quality add that I would return to.

---

MAY 14, 2023: BROOKLYN RECORD EXCHANGE, BROOKLYN, N.Y.

RECORDS: Anxiety by Autre Ne Veut; 14 Booming Hits by Freddy Cannon; Bill Haley’s Chicks by Bill Haley & His Comets; Frat Rock by Various Artists,

SEVEN INCHES: “The Time Has Come” / “Jimmy Keeps Asking For You” by Darlene; “That’s What I Like About You” / “I’m Leaving It Up To You” by Dale & Grace; “Memory” / “Undelivered” by The Mantles; “Droplet On A Hot Stone” by Julian Lynch; “Fantasy” by Yalls; “Hamilton Road” by Ducktails.

Brooklyn Record Exchange, fka as Co-Op 87, is a building that will come up frequently here. Anna brought me a long to do a lot of damage here in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 and so on and so on. So there’s a loge of nostalgia here to indulge.

Anxiety features one of my favorite songs of the early 2010s in “Play by Play,” and we also saw Autre Ne Veut at Northside at Shea Stadium in 2011. We listened to this record a ton in college after it came out, and it goes. As an aside Mk.gee reminds of a more guitar-oriented Autre Ne Veut.

In 2013, we visited Co-Op and found a Freddy Cannon 7” with “PERFECT FUCKING SONG” written on the sleeve. I think it was “Tallahassee Lassie,” and the PFS phrase has entered my vernacular. It’s something I think about a lot. Plus, Freddy Cannon rocks, and a singles comp by someone named Cannon with “Booming” in the title? That’s perfect.

The Frat Rock comp and the Bill Haley record refreshed the oldies in my record collection. The Darlene and Dale & Grace singles also had Freddy Cannon-esque endorsements. One was a “BURNING ’64 Rock Ballad” and the other was “RARE FEM VOX COUNTRY!” I had to get those.

As for the other three 7” singles… Julian Lynch and Ducktails were part of the Underwater Peoples scene that created much of my favorite music of the early 2010s. Lynch, to me, was criminally underrated, and “Droplet On A Hot Stone” is a song that immediately makes me feel like it’s after midnight in 2011 or 2012 and I’m listening on headphones in my dorm room or on my floor at home again. “Hamilton Road” is a good song with a great music video, and we’ll leave it at that. The Mantles were contemporaries, and I like to take flyers on singles from bands that I liked but don’t necessarily know the songs.

---

MAY 14, 2023: EMILY, BROOKLYN, N.Y.

RECORD: No Cover: Carpark’s 21st Anniversary Covers Comp by Various Artists.

Belated thank you for the birthday present, Emily! This is a very fun comp by another record label that’s put out a lot of records that we loved in college. And of course, Cloud Nothings is on it with Sad13 covering “Hey Cool Kid.” I think my personal favorite on here is Emily Reo covering “Gila” by Beach House.

---

MAY 14, 2023: ACADEMY RECORDS ANNEX, BROOKLYN, N.Y.

RECORDS: Mercy by The Men; Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco; Bonny Doon by Bonny Doon; Saint Dymphna by Gang Gang Dance; Wide Awake! by Parquet Courts.

My first visit to the Academy Records Annex in Williamsburg/Greenpoint (someone can correct me on my geography) delivered with Emily and Tommy. I could have left with so many more records than this. If you’ve been reading the newsletter for a while, the Parquet Courts purchase is obvious (good record, too), while The Men are one of my favorite “rock” bands of the early 2010s, and even if I haven’t kept up with their output of late, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Mercy is pretty good.

I don’t think I ever listened to Saint Dymphna in full until I bought this record. But a couple of the first car mix CDs I ever got from Anna featured “Princes” and “House Jam.” It’s blissful to be 17 or 18 and driving around the suburbs with the windows down listening to those songs. Every once in a while, I still exclaim, “Oh shit, Gang Gang” to myself. Great record to throw on while doing some housework.

Bonny Doon was sort of tangentially on my radar up until 2021 or so. I saw them open for Snail Mail at the Parkway Theatre in Baltimore in 2018 and knew they played a prominent role in Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud in 2020. But Longwave hit in 2021, and Bonny Doon entered heavy rotation. Emily pulled this one out of the stacks and I was like, yes, I need to buy this.

A lot of people can write a lot of things about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, probably more elegantly than I can. I “discovered” the record in 2008 and my burned copy was a cilver CD that said “YHF!” in black Sharpie. I listened to it a lot. At an acoustic Scooter + Jinx show, we covered “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” and “Heavy Metal Drummer” and I tried so much to learn “Kamera” and couldn’t quite pin it down. It’s a great record, and I hadn’t seen it in the wild too often. It felt appropriate for a newly 31-year-old man to buy.

---

MAY 15, 2023: ANNA, STATE COLLEGE, Pa.

RECORD: At the Royal Albert Hall by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

I capped the weekend by getting back to State College (RIP the LGA-SCE flight) to a care package from Anna, which featured the recent Creedence Clearwater Revival live album. We were raised on a John Fogerty live album, and to get those songs straight from 1970 is a great experience. I still haven’t watched the film that goes with it yet.

---

Happy Sunday, and I hope you enjoy RECORD SUNDAY today and in the future.

—D.G.

Content Nausea No. 115: Continuous Thunder

Heart's terrain is never a prairie / But you weren't wary

Welcome to the 115th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 114 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.

---

It took a couple hours into 2025 for me to have my first groundbreaking thought of the new year: “Wow, Camelback Mountain really does look like camel when you stare at it for long enough.” Scintillating, right?

I find most New Year’s resolutions to be banal and mundane, but one of mine for this year is this newsletter. And if that’s the case, then I feel like I should get one out today of all days. It’s 10:02 p.m. ET — I’m currently sitting in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport at 8:02 MT — so I’ve got a little bit of a deadline to get it in under the wire. And I’ll spare you the rest of my New Year’s resolutions.

I did have a wrap-up prepared (I wanted to call it “year-end content,” but despite the name of this newsletter, using “content” unironically is something I’m trying to stop in the new year), but that was before I spent about 10 hours from Sunday afternoon into Sunday night hugging porcelain in Scottsdale, Ariz. The best laid plans, etc. There’s a couple ways to look at something like that. It was humbling, it was inconvenient and in my most generous reading of the situation, it was cleansing. If I really wanted to, I could take it as a symbolic reset entering 2025.

The last time I felt optimistic about a year was 2021, which was kind of weird at the time, given 2020, but some things were happening, and it was one of those points in your life where you feel like you’re “getting” it. And as usual, you swiftly get reminded that isn’t the case because you’ll never get it. I took the photo above at 11:59 p.m. on New Year’s Eve in my old apartment in Philadelphia. I got an ESPO print about the four seasons in 2021 or something along those lines. It ended up being a couple different beginnings, just in ways I wasn’t expecting and didn’t necessarily want.

But it’s four years later. I’ve spent the past four New Year’s Eves/Days in Tampa, Fla.; Los Angeles; Southampton, N.Y., via Atlanta; and now the triumvirate of Scottsdale, Glendale and Phoenix. And thinking back on it, there are some reasons for optimism in 2025. I can’t necessarily articulate them. But even before entering my “cleansed” state, I felt my mindset was trending in that direction. And here we are. It’s another year. I got 10,000 steps today. I didn’t do yoga today. I haven’t set up my 2025 planner yet. I have a lot of work to do. (Check back with my after tonight’s redeye flight).

So there we go. No detailed re-telling of 2024 — which featured my first trip to Europe, a cross-country road trip, a first trip to Asheville, some good lake time, a couple great weddings and a ton of other fun — and no elaborate road map for 2025. Maybe I’ll get you a favorite albums and songs wrap in the next couple of weeks.

No promises with that, either. But I do have a couple of ideas here that I really want to put into practice. As always, we’ll see what that looks like. This post, though, is Step No. 1. Happy New Year, and welcome to 2025.

---

Thank you for reading the 115th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.

Oh, and if I had all of the answers
And you had the body you wanted
Would we love with a legendary fire?

—D.G.

Content Nausea No. 114: Near To The Wild Heart Of Life

I used to be good, but now I'm bad

Welcome to the 114th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 113 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.

---

Over the course of the next week or so, the typical year-end wrap-up is going to contain plenty of allusions to changes that I didn’t make, that I wish I had made, that I still want to make and that I’m trying to plan on making for 2025. There’s a lot of that below. And I’m sorry if it gets a little annoying.

But we’re in a weird time of reflection — Helena Fitzgerald beautifully captured it four years ago in this essay — and it’s easy to get stuck in the could have, should have, will have that come with the year’s changeover. I am also off-kilter because I’m still working full time and am planning for trips/potential trips to Phoenix, Chicago, Philadelphia, Fort Lauderdale/Miami and Atlanta in the next month. Some day I will have a job that fits nicely into the holiday season.

But as 2024 comes to a close, there is one change that sticks out to me. And it’s not diet or exercise or mental health or any of the actual constructive stuff that we’re supposed to think about during the year.

I changed my go-to type of pen. I wasn’t sure about it. But I did, and I don’t think I’m going back.

Last year, I got pens from my dad in my Christmas stocking: The Sharpie S-Gel, 0.7mm with black ink. It’s a hefty pen with a good grip. It clicks in, and it has a clip. I was a little dubious of using a gel pen, since I have awful handwriting and I don’t want to smear it to make it look worse than it already does. But I gave it a test drive when I was in Atlanta for the Peach Bowl, and I liked it. So why not?

I restocked my pen supply. I got the 0.5mm of the pen to use in my planner and on my calendar. I got the 0.7mm with a dark green body to use with my daily notebooks. I got it with a bright white body to use with my work notebooks. I’m all in on the Sharpie S-Gel, and I’m going to continue to use it next year. It’s a great pen.

But I do need to provide a bit of a eulogy for the pen it replaced. In late 2014, I saw the journalist/critic Jenn Pelly tweet a link with the caption, “this is an ideal holiday gift for writers, the best pen in the world. … i write everything w/ these pens.” I clicked and saw a thin yellow pen with a fine point called the Mitsubishi No. 460. According to another stationery website, the writing on the side of the pen translates to, “for thin writing on official documents.” And I was bored and living at home and had some money to spend that I should have been saving, so I thought, “Why not?”

According to the email receipt from Tokyo Pen Shop dated Dec. 5, 2014, I bought six of them for $10.50 (plus $5 shipping). And for nearly a decade, they became my staple pen. That covers time working for The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, PennLive and Lions247. That covers time covering high school sports, Maryland, high school sports again, the Eagles and Penn State. I used the pens at the Super Bowl in February 2018. Wherever I was, I had one pen either in my hand or behind my ear or stuffed up into a hat (the Mitsubishi No. 460’s main design flaw was no clip, imo).

Look at this aesthetic portrait from 2015 featuring the pen:

In October 2020, I learned that the pen body had been discontinued. According to Content Nausea, I was “devastated” to learn that. And honestly, I was. It had been a daily staple of my life. Buying the pens for the first time coincided with the first time that I got a set of Field Notes notebooks and started making daily to-do lists. The pens and notebooks were part of the daily structure of my life. Also, it felt cool to use a pen that no one else was using.

For the next couple of years, I ordered refills from Tokyo Pen Shop and kept using the same bodies I had. But pens are objects meant to be lost, and the numbers dwindled. In a quick sweep of my apartment, I found two in my backpack and two in the pen cup on my office desk. There might be more hidden elsewhere, like in my disaster of a bedroom desk. According to Tokyo Pen Shop receipts, I ordered 26 of the pens between December 2014 and November 2017. And four is all that’s left. I want to keep them around. I still have plenty of refills to work through, too.

There is no perfect pen. The Sharpie S-Gel can be finicky sometimes because it is gel, and I’ve broken the clip on a bunch of the pens. But it gets the job done, and that’s what I’m looking for. Plus, for as much as I loved the Mitsubishi No. 460, the lines were on the lighter side. The Sharpie S-Gel provides an element of boldness that I appreciate.

In 2025, the Sharpie S-Gel is posted to remain the choice. I ran out of ink in the green-bodied one I had been using all fall. I can’t find the rest of the green-bodied ones I bought from Target, but as I have learned in looking through my backpacks and desks, there’s plenty more where that came from.

---

BOOKS I READ IN 2024

According to Goodreads, I set a goal of 24 books to read this year last January, and I read 20. When I was Christmas shopping last week, I picked up a paperback of Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux. I assume that I’ll finish it by the New Year, so that will make 21. Next year, the goal will probably be 25 books for 2025. I want to re-assess my relationship to literature (and a lot of other things) in the new year to foster healthier reading habits other than my usual 15 minutes first thing in the morning. My habits have changed over the past couple of years — obviously, the absence of isolation because of a global pandemic has something to do with it, as it does practically everything — and reading feels less fulfilling than it did a couple years ago. How do I get back to that? Big questions for next year that I probably won’t get around to answering.

In addition to Getting Lost, my “currently reading” shelf on Goodreads still features: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (started in March 2022); Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe (started in April 2021); and Moby Dick (started in May 2021). I think a first step for next year will be giving myself a clean slate in the “currently reading” department.

Anyway, here’s what I read in 2024, along with some thoughts on that if I feel it’s necessary.

- They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib

I always see people post about their yearly rituals, whether that’s reading or watching something at the same time every year. I don’t really have that, other than posting certain Facebook statuses every Thanksgiving or Flag Day or whenever else. I re-read They Can’t Kill Us in January with the idea of maybe making it into a ritual for myself. I’m packing to go home/travel for work over the holidays, and the paperback is sneaking into my bag. We’ll see.

- O Beautiful by Jung Sun

I neglected my library card for much of 2024, and utilizing it is a top goal for 2025. The library’s replacement was seeing a relatively inexpensive paperback in Target and being like, why not? O Beautiful was a pretty quick read. I liked it.

- Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Great book. Maybe I’ll watch the move when I’m traveling. But the book was gripping and well-told. The rest of Grann’s work is making its way to a “to read” list that exists only in my head.

- Come and Get it by Kiley Reid

Woo Pig! [mild spoiler?] but the reveal of the reason for the one character getting ostracized from her university was darkly funny to me, but it was a great illustration of how tenuous social status can be imo.

- The Guest by Emma Cline

I had to stay trendy.

- How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy

There were good writing exercises in this that I didn’t do. I told myself I would revisit it after I finished it in February, but I did not.

- Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley

One thing I have gotten better about over the past few years is noting things I see/hear and then circling back to learn more. I hadn’t heard of Sloane Crosley when I listened to her How Long Gone interview when I was driving out to the Hamptons for Memorial Day in 2022, but afterward, I requested her books from the library and dove in. This book was the payoff for that interest and fandom. It’s a beautiful portrait if grief. It’s one of those things that I felt like I needed to read at the time. I’ll revisit it.

- The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue

- There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

Maybe my favorite book of the year. I love reading works about something that was at the center of someone’s universe but existed largely on the periphery of the wider world.

- Sonic Life: A Memoir by Thurston Moore

Say what you want about Thurston Moore (lol), but a really fun portrait of a moment of time in New York. Some great characters and cameos in this.

- I’d Rather Not by Robert Skinner

- The Last of His Kind: Clayton Kershaw and the Burden of Greatness by Andy McCullough

- 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid by Willie Mays

- The Years by Annie Ernaux

Ernaux is another one of those writers who existed on the periphery for me, but after she won the Nobel Prize or whatever it was, I was like, I guess I should read. It’s been rewarding.

- Either/Or by Elif Batuman

It really felt like I was picking right up where I left off with The Idiot, however many years ago I finished that.

- Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

I enjoy Sally Rooney books. In my power ranking of the four, this would probably slot in at No. 2 behind Normal People with Conversations with Friends and Beautiful World following up. It was a great plane book, too.

- The Franchise: A Curated History of the Philadelphia Eagles by Zach Berman

- The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Another example of just picking up a book at Target. It was fine, I guess.

- The League: How Five Rivals Created the NFL and Launched a Sports Empire by John Eisenberg

This was my plane book after Intermezzo for some later season road trips. It was really entertaining for a history book. Dads will love this book.

- Life is Messy by Matthew Kelly

---

ARTICLES I READ IN 2024

You want to talk about an unruly digital space? My Pocket queue is just that. In the late 2010s, I was pretty good about cleaning it out at the start of the new year. The past couple years? Yeah, that hasn’t happened. I don’t think there’s a way to see how many links I have saved currently. But there’s a lot. That’s another digital space that deserves maintenance in the new year, and it’s another space that I want to reconsider my relationship to.

I still make the effort to tag stories that I feel are among the best things I’ve read all year. The “content” tag, which is how I bookmark things that I try to share in this newsletter, is overrun because of a lack of newsletters, but the “2024” tag is a way for things to filter through. Seven links made the cut, apparently.

Here they are:

- A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld by Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker

- Nine hours at the most unhinged hole in golf by Zak Jason, Business Insider

- Celebrated poet, MacArthur genius — but Hanif Abdurraqib is just glad to have survived past 25 by Katherine Rowland, The Guardian

- RIP Billymark’s by Sophie Haigney, The Paris Review

- Death of the Party by Raven Leilani, N+1

- Lost In The Future by Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At?

- The Life, Death and Memphis Blues of Jay Reatard by Andria Lisle, Oxford American

There is always a world where I have more to say and more to share — I’m remembering when I would note good podcast episodes to share later, wow what a time — and maybe 2025 will be one of those times.

---

Thank you for reading the 114th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.

“You can’t condemn your love
To linger here and die
Can’t leave your dreams to chance
Or to a spirit in the sky
May your heart always be ardent
Your conscience always clear
And succumb to the city and surrender, baby
I’ll be waiting here”

—D.G.