Content Nausea No. 10: Stoned and Starving
I was walking through Ridgewood, Queens...
Welcome to the 10th edition of Content Nausea. Double-digits! I made it! Last week, I wrote about the Home Run Derby, the end of an era for the Oklahoma City Thunder and more. This week’s edition is shorter. Here is the welcome post one more time.
The summer vibes playlist is here. This is the playlist for the summer days where you’re driving out of Bel Air on Route 22 and you keep doing down past putt-putt and the Arctic Circle, down into Carsins Run and up past Ripken Stadium. This playlist is for when you’re on Route 22 and you veer left onto 155 and you follow it out past Churchville Rec and the dairy farms on the undulating hills. There are a couple stop signs and stoplights when it flattens out, and eventually, you drop down the hill into Havre de Grace. This playlist is for turning onto 136, whether you’re coming in or going out. It preps your mind for the moment Harford County opens out before you after you cross Deer Creek and gun it coming up the hill. It can feel like invincibility, night or day. This playlist is for when it’s 95 degrees with 100 percent humidity. It’s for the Mid-Atlantic, suburban summer.
Some things I wrote this week
PTO y’all!
Some other things I read or listened to or watched or thought about
Look at me, I’m adulting with burnout
I apologize for sounding like a dad trying to take beer away from teenagers, but it is so easy and tempting to log on and complain about our terrible lives and how the world is terrible instead of going out into the world and doing something that might even make us feel genuinely good. I might go so far as to argue that the phenomenon of burnout among Millennials is not caused by the effects of late capitalism on our lives, but by the late-capitalistic social-media platforms that purport to bring us closer to each other and the world. Such platforms have the power to trap us in a degrading circuit of commiseration, false intimacy, and narcissism, which has the capacity to simultaneously make us feel like the most important person in the world and like total shit.
I read Normal People by Sally Rooney on a six-hour flight last week and felt it was an honest portrayal of a modern relationship and how the past can stick with us.
I also started Entourage from the beginning on that flight [s/o Matt].
s/o to the above breakfast sandwich from Fried Egg I’m In Love in Portland. It was delicious.
Think about the most successful people you know. Think about the happiest people you know. Think about the most adult people you know. The odds are that the one thing they all have in common is they have looked deeply into their souls and decided that either they were and had been all along the person that they always aspired to be or they realized that the flawed, fatigued face that they see staring back in the mirror is indeed exactly who they are, and even if it is the kind of person who says one thing and does another, who doesn’t try as hard as they should not to damage other people while they barrel toward their own self-fulfillment, who will elbow everyone out of the way once they’ve decided it’s their time to be rewarded, they’re okay with it. Once a person reaches that kind of acceptance a gigantic psychic burden has been lifted, and all the discord and doubt that has been holding them back for so long vanishes into the ether. It is at that point that a person becomes an adult. Those of us who are still not there are mired in our liminal (sorry, I find that word obnoxious too) state for the very reason that we refuse to acknowledge how defective and irreparable we really are. Or at least that’s the theory.
I am working through the third season of Last Chance U on Netflix ahead of the fourth one coming out today, and I am developing some #thoughts on it.
Portland International Airport remains the most chill airport.
After seeing Jason Isbell last month, I unlocked another sportswriter achievement by having dinner at Pok Pok. It was great.
Thank you for reading the 10th edition of Content Nausea. Please tell me if there are any typos or what you liked about this. It will get better.
I was debating Swedish Fish
Roasted peanuts or licorice
—D.G.