I am missing Amar quite a bit right now. Or maybe the idea of Amar - we'd drifted in and out of closeness over the years, but he represented something more broadly wrt the zeitgeist. Being connected to the Culture. He'd like that I think.
He did an annual music list which served as a touchpoint for a lot of people. The rest of the distribution list is keeping it going this year which is both wonderful and heartbreaking. It is still a little surreal and shocking for someone to just be gone like that.
Anyway - here is what I posted on that thread:
staycation is kinda nice. i wake up in the morning and my brain wants to deal with work things i'm responsible for and then i realize - nah - i don't need to do this. very liberating indeed.
so instead i'm taking pleasure in voluntary house tidying (this is what growing up actually means - hello adult paradigm). catching up on champions league football (atletico "fashy" madrid are officially my least favorite club). doing deep dives into old school jamaican ska (hot take - ska >>> reggae - reggae messed with the best parts of ska).
There will be lists. Not quite ready with them yet, and I struggled to keep up with new music this past year, so I'll probably just fall back on everything old is new again (at least to me). But I did read a bit. And I certainly watched a lot of TV (didn't we all?).
Speaking of TV - Book of Boba is pretty lame. Mando was fun but the Boba Fett show just seems like they took all the charm out of the previous show, while throwing in a bunch of stupid, nonsensical scenarios. Maybe I'm just reaching the end of the line with the bloated corpse of the extended Star Wars universe. And if we're being honest with ourselves, maybe it was never that great to begin with, and more derivative than anything else. But hey - this is the mono-culture nostalgia.
Anyway - here's hoping for an upswing in 2022.
Less COVID, more Klay.
And hopefully we'll get to go on some family adventures.
at some point politics went from being public to personal for me. a private thing that matters to me but not something I feel comfortable talking about in any kind of public forum, because it feels so damn stressful. I mean I still believe more or less the same things I've believed for a long time. and no - age has not made me "more conservative" or whatever (I really don't understand this one). I just decided to stop making it a public thing since I have no capacity left in me to have a discourse around any of this stuff. that said, you should still vote no on (or before) tuesday. okthxbye.
I am genuinely happy for Giannis. He seems like a fundamentally good dude, and a normal human being (apart from being 7 feet tall and insanely athletic). He is funny and real and has a such an inspiring backstory. He seems to be the opposite of the LeBron industrial complex that has controlled the basketball narrative over the past decade. Bonus points for beating Chris Paul - the most annoying dude of his generation (Point God? More like Point Godawful amirite?).
On a more sombre note, I am truly terrified of how these finals are going to end up being a series of superspreader events with no discernable masking or distancing, and the Delta Variant gaining steam. Adam Silver - I'm really disappointed in how you've dealt with this after being so serious about the bubble last year. I'm really, really hoping that this will spur people into taking vaccination more seriously. We shall see.
The last couple of days have been not terrible. It is saying something about the collective trauma of the last four years that "not terrible" is all I'll allow myself right now, but small steps right?
So in no particular order, stuff that happened:
I know a lot of people are super anxious about the election right now, but I'm just going to put this out there. It is OK to be cautiously optimistic.
