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.
Pumped for this resolution.