Content Nausea No. 36: You've Got Me Wonderin' Now
Toothache's better than heartache baby, I've figured that much out
Welcome to the 36th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 35 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.
Last night marked five months since The Last Normal Day, and even then, it wasn’t that Normal. As long-time readers (aka my friends) know, I’m not too keen on tying things to Time. But the thought wormed its way into my head at the beginning of the month. Two weeks ago, I saw the same four people that I spent time with on The Last Normal Day, and we joked about how things had come full circle.
I’ve spent some time with that concept over the past couple weeks. To me, full circle always sort of implied the completion of something, and it felt a little off as the phrase to use. But the more I thought about it, it became the perfect phrase or concept to drill down on. We’ve gone in circles for the past five months. I’m still in my apartment sitting at the computer and trying to limit or avoid human contact as much as possible. We’re still in the same place, and I guess that’s what a circle really is.
Anyway, I hope you all are staying sane.
Some content I wrote this week
Why one Eagles player is playing during the coronavirus pandemic after losing his brother to COVID-19.
The Eagles really seem to like Greg Ward.
A 26-year-old decided to retire before even playing a snap for the Eagles.
Darius Slay is happy to be with the Eagles.
Some content I listened to this week
The 082k20 playlist is off to a good start. I thought I did a really good job on the 072k20 playlist, too, to be honest with you.
The above playlist has this Magdalena Bay song that rules:
I regret to inform you that I am At It Again after listening to Yeezus on a car ride last weekend. Sorry, “Blood On The Leaves” still goes. Let’s bring those chaotic vibes into August 2k20!
I saw The Goodbye Party open for Andrew Savage at PhilaMOCA in 2017, and the band is back with a new single that is excellent:
It’s August, so I’m listening to Oso Oso again:
Wednesday marked the nine-year anniversary of Sonic Youth’s final U.S. show at the Williamsburg Waterfront, so it sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. That was arguably the best/favorite/most important show I’ve ever been to, and it’s available to listen to via Bandcamp. There are some deep cuts! They played “Starfield Road”!!!!!! I’ll save most of my thoughts for the 10-year anniversary. But listening to Sonic Youth a little more consistently sent me back to Lee Ranaldo, and I made a playlist of his Sonic Youth songs:
“Genetic” rules.
Some content I read this week
There is a good chance that college football won’t happen this season, which is an incredible (but understandable) bummer. I spent a couple hours today entertaining getting cable for the fall, and it made me a little sad to think that I wouldn’t be able to sit on my couch from noon through 2 a.m. to watch college football games from across the country. Granted, I won’t put it past the SEC to make it happen, but the idea of watching Maryland getting boat-raced by Penn State or Michigan or Ohio State to end the season on a pleasant April afternoon instead of a dismal November evening is kind of appealing…
Anyway, Amanda Mull did a nice job pulling together all of the factors that are involved in what’s happening right now in this piece for The Atlantic.
Luke O’Neil talked to Patrick Hruby about this in Welcome To Hell World, too:
The failures we see in college sports to control the virus are very much reflective of the failures we have in America as a whole. Particularly the lack of leadership, lack of a centralized plan, lack of getting everyone on the same page to follow the same safety guidelines. Americans kind of have broken brains when it comes to rugged individualism and personal responsibility and like, hey, everyone is free to take their own risks in life and pay the consequences… The problem with that is that a virus doesn’t care. It doesn't work that way at all. If I contract the virus, whether or not I get sick, or die, or have no symptoms, I can still pass it to you. And you can pass it to other people. I hate to say “we live in a society,” but we actually do live in a society. To control things like the virus you have to work together. Everyone has to get on board. We’re all our brothers’ keepers. Americans have horrendously hard time with that.
Hruby, who has his own Very Good Substack, is a must-read on these matters, and he’s always thought-provoking. Plus, he can write anything — I read a piece he wrote on cricket this week in Best American Sports Writing 2008. But I have spent a little bit on the concept of the “rugged individualism” he mentions. I was listening to a podcast this week that began to unpack the different between “individualism” and “selfishness” in American culture, and I think there’s a case to be made that our culture is not really individualistic at all, and it skews much more toward selfish. There’s some nuance there that I won’t dive any further into.
I cannot afford Entireworld sweatpants, but I enjoyed this piece in The New York Times about fashion industry upheaval that I don’t quite understand.
I’m excited that Deadspin is being reborn as Defector, and I was overjoyed to hear Drew Magary and David Roth answer questions such as, “Nipples for eyes or eyes for nipples?” on The Distraction podcast. Anyway, Magary wrote about the president. And truth.
It is mentioned above in the Hruby piece, but “personal responsibility” is another concept I have been spending plenty of time thinking about in recent months. It’s the most I’ve thought about it outside of a Titus Andronicus show, and Will Leitch sort of touched on it in a newsletter last week in the context of college students returning to campus, including in his town of Athens, Georgia. He won’t shame them, and I wouldn’t either. I know some decisions I have made amid all of this at age 28. I can’t quite imagine what I would have done at age 20 or 21:
Part of the point of college—I would argue a large part of the point—is that it is a way station between childhood and the real outside planet, a place to figure out this knotty planet on your own, to be exposed to people and viewpoints and experiences you hadn’t been exposed to before, to make mistakes, to have that one last time in your life that you can feel special and unique and cocooned in a way that you will never be again. This has legitimate value: I learned more about myself during those four years than any other four-year span of my life. But the reason I learned so much, of course, is because that whole time, I was only thinking about myself. That’s what college is. It’s why we resent college kids when we’re older: Who has time to think about themselves anymore? Asking a college kid to have a worldview outside the bubble of college is to ask them not to be a college kid at all.
Leitch also wrote about baseball for New York.
The USPS: kind of important!
Sam Hockley-Smith’s Gross Life newsletter is one of my favorites, even if he doesn’t post too often. The most recent edition is on music writing, and it struck a chord with me.
Speaking of newsletters, Maya had a pithy outcomes banger about writer’s block, which was quite relatable! Might steal that as a newsletter idea in the future.
Kyle Chayka on how Gigi Hadid & Drake are living in The New Yorker.
On “uninteresting places.”
A great Slate piece on a place where I spent two days for work in 2015 and left feeling pretty uncomfortable: “Liberty University Poured Millions Into Sports. Now Its Black Athletes Are Leaving.”
A more humorous Slate read on learning to love Colin Jost.
Another Ed Yong story about the coronavirus in The Atlantic that really doesn’t make you Feel Good.
Some other content I saw or thought about this week
Some wisdom from the group text to start: “Foolishness and handsomeness are not mutually exclusive.”
Also, a letter of recommendation: Wegmans ginger seltzer is really good (ty Emily). I thought it would taste like flat or watered down ginger ale, but there was still plenty of zing. I wish Wegmans seltzer came in more aesthetically pleasing cans.
Damian Lillard rules:
Please never let him leave the Blazers.
Thank you for reading the 36th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
Forced into morning, tempted into night
Tally all the things that you broke
Bending her branches, snapping, sapping and writhing
For me alone
Yeah, I guess sunburn's better than heartburn (barely)
I know that much by now
And I thought I knew a thing or two about the blues but you've got me wonderin' now
—D.G.