Talking Heads and Sweaty Walks
Diamond Concierge Service #004
I know, I know. I was going to send out the Diamond Autumn Guide to all paid subscribers this week and I didn’t. Sorry. The thing is that I’m very much about the vibes being right, and it was 90 degrees this week in NYC, as well as smelling and feeling like being trapped in an armpit during Mardi Gras. I couldn’t think of anything less cozy, so I didn’t send it out. Look for it sometime next week. Also, I’m going to announce this soon, but in November I’ll be starting a little book club thing here. I think the first one will be free for everybody, but hopefully the book I pick and the conversation we have around it is so engaging you can’t help but get hooked and you’ll pay for a subscription. Anyways…
Functioning during the week after Labor Day is a big ask in general. I got a lot of writing done, and then I’d find myself sitting there feeling depleted by about 1. I’ve been trying to take more breaks, to not just sit at my computer scrolling needlessly, falling down Wikipedia wormholes, and wondering if I’ll get a second wind. For a long time, I found myself dealing with online FOMO, like I felt I’d truly miss something if I wasn’t on Twitter for an hour or refreshing my e-mail every few seconds for…whatever. Yes, part of that was out of necessity since being online is sort of part of my very loose job description, but there was a moment a year or two ago when I had to ask myself if I was dealing with addiction. It was sometime in late-2020 and I was just staring at the laptop screen as if something was going to happen, and I realized that literally everybody I know, almost every single person in the world at that same moment, was likely doing something very similar. Nothing was getting done, so what was I expecting?
That’s when I started slowly breaking away. I know it’s easy to hate on Elon Musk for being a terrible boss, apartheid nepo baby, possibly an anti-Semite, definitely an enabler of a lot of bad ideas, Putin’s “unwitting weapon,” and chronically unfunny person, but some days I’ll think about how thankful I am that he truly did destroy Twitter. I did like being on there from time to time. I’m a child of AOL chat rooms and punk message boards, so the first way I ever felt like I was truly connecting to people was through a computer screen. But at some point, I had to admit I had Twitter brain worms and the only way to get rid of them was to be on Twitter less. He made that easy for me. The one thing was that I spent about 12 or 13 years scrolling, liking, thinking up unfunny things to tweet, and I needed to figure out how to fill that time since I was doing it less. The easiest thing I could think of was to just take walks.
I mention the walk thing for two reasons. The first is because my dear friend Isaac Fitzgerald let me take him for a walk around the Upper West Side and wrote about it at his Walk It Off newsletter. The other is because as disgusting as this week felt, a muggy week tends to be the best sort for walking. I don’t know why this is, especially since I hate heat. But I’ve started to think that there’s something about the discomfort that adds to the experience. I walked outside the other day, put on the Beirut album The Flying Club Cup, and just started walking towards Prospect Park. I’m normally super into curating my walking music, but because. of the heat and the sweat, the smells, and the general lack of comfort, I think my mind just went into a sort of meditative mode, maybe something close to “survival mode,” but not as dramatic. I think I was on auto-pilot, which might not sound that strange to some of you, but trying to get my mind to shut up even for a few minutes has been my great struggle. The amount of medicine, medication, weed, and whatever else I’ve used to try and just go blank should be enough. And yet…nope.
Yet after an hour of truly struggling to make it through a walk, I got home, showered, and decompressed for about 30 minutes. My brain slowly started to click back on, and I thought to myself, “Damn. I feel really inspired right now after being a soggy, hot mess. Maybe I’ll go sit down and try to get some work done.”
But I didn’t. I decided I was just going to see how long I could do nothing. I’m happy to report, it was for the rest of the day, and then the next morning, I got to editing a big piece I’ve been working on and felt refreshed. Now I’m starting to wonder, à la Lisa Simpson coming up with “Poindextrose,” if sweat is the key to unlocking something. Maybe this is the excuse I need to finally figure out how to build a sauna on my roof. I’ll call it Jason’s Inspiration Hut.
Melt Reads
I swear that each E. Alex Jung “The Year I Ate New York” entry is better than the last. Popularizing the New York Happy Meal was a stroke of genius, but this latest report, from the chronically overlooked Avenue T institution, the Mill Basin Deli, should. returned into a movie.
I sometimes think we don’t appreciate Steven Soderbergh enough. And, in general, I love it when any writer gets to wax about how they learn to appreciate an artist more, but Kirthana Ramisetti writing about Soderbergh’s diaries was a really refreshing and fun take on how to better appreciate a director who is so prolific that it might be tough to nail down what his “thing” truly is.
I still think it’s like a minor holiday when a new John Jeremiah Sullivan essay drops. Although, I’m not so sure I should say “drops” before mentioning that his one, long paragraph essay in the latest issue of Harper’s is about plumbing and I counted “BMs” five times in it.
Read: “Man Called Fran” by John Jeremiah Sullivan at Harper’s
Melt Stuff
I’ve got two things this week because I’m too busy trying to focus on the stuff for the autumn guide while simultaneously wearing my “I Give Up on the Summer” uniform of shorts and whatever T-shirt I pull out of my drawer. And that one thing is the Stüssy x Talking Heads collab which I was too slow to pull the trigger on, so I did not cop that Stop Making Sense shirt, but they seem to have a few Remain In the Light ones. If they have your fit, I’d suggest grabbing one ASAP.
The other thing is I heard P.J. Clark’s Sidecar is reopening next week. I’m a bigger fan of the more touristy one across from Lincoln Center, but when I worked in Midtown, I really loved sneaking away to the OG on 3rd Ave. And sometimes, if. it was too full, I’d talk my way into the “members only” Sidecar for a Martini and some fries. I’m happy to hear it’s opening back up. Hopefully I still have some of my old charm to get myself through the door.
lol love that soderbergh bit. I kinda want to make my own watch read diary now.