Emchap's Shit from the Internet 11/25/20 🍠
In a quirk of neural association, there is an entire genre of music that makes me profoundly homesick for the Candler Park festival circa 2015, right around sunset when the air was a little above room temperature and the sun was setting and there were fireflies. It’s not a real place now and it probably has been re-visited so many times in my head that it wasn’t ever a real place so much as a conglomeration of various young adult memories that my brain is convinced was a true 30-second span that I can somehow return to through sheer force of nostalgic will.
It’s whatever genre Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes is, the sort of stepped-down Polyphonic Spree-lite, cult leader with jangly backing rhythm music. It’s the same genre as Shovels and Rope or the Lumineers (today’s culprit)—the sort of music meant to be played over roadtrip montages. It is vaguely embarrassing that it works as well on me as it does.
Making decisions about the future always makes me more nostalgic, even though I know that that same stretch of Atlanta was where I spent an entire trip back in 2018 stress-vomiting because I was worried I’d run in to someone; my brain has never, ever been good at not assigning outsized importance to the past. I think some part of myself just wants the reassurance that I could go back (I can’t) while I think about moving to Portland or Portugal or who knows where all else. The place I’m looking for has only ever existed in some corner of my head.
I’m making buttermilk chicken tomorrow, and I hope everyone has as good a holiday as is possible in this ridiculous year.
Shit to read
Vermont is a model for what your government can look like if it’s not just run on spite and Calvinism.
The amount that health insurance factors in to American life choices is truly deranged.
Just a messy longread about an imploding startup.
Shit to eat
Thanksgiving.
Shit to listen to
Alice’s Restaurant, a song I only became aware of at a Thanksgiving party hosted by a Brit, which seems fitting.
This Thanksgiving episode of Samin Nosrat and Hrishi Hirway’s podcast, which contained a deeply moving dedication to Hrishi’s mom (who just died) at the top.
Shit to buy
See Shit to eat.