hu cares | hedge maze

Dear LiveJournal,

There’s an old tweet from horse_ebooks I think about a lot: “Everything happens so much.” And it really does. How do you write about everything, when it happens so much? What is the point of writing if you cannot capture everything? The happening is the art.

Take, for instance, the eclipse. I mean, what is there to say that hasn’t been said? The moon went in front of the sun and for a day, I sat in a park with hundreds of other people just staring up at the sky with special silly little glasses. Just a bunch of silly little humans doing silly human things! Humans selling loaded waffle fries, humans on stage playing a fantastic cover of Dark Side of the Moon, humans cheering and smooching one another as it got darker and darker. I felt very shall I compare thee to a summer’s day about it all. How could words possibly do any of this justice? It was all vibes, man.

Going home, for me, is equally indescribable. Immaculate vibes there, too. I can tell you the who, what, and where, but all of it amounts to one big inside joke: you just had to be there. More specifically, you had to be me, from 1987 to present. (If you’re out there, let me know; I’m down for some spooky crossing timelines stuff.)

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Music: Chappell Roan on repeat

Mood: quixotic

p.s. LiveJournal still has all its mood icons available here!!

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What I can say, though, is that it’s a real gift to have two places on this earth that feel like home, and to be seen and loved in so many ways. It’s my parents buying a case of Spindrift at Costco before my visit because they know I love it. It’s the friend driving me home from the eclipse and asking me to put on my favorite Taylor Swift songs, because he’s been meaning to explore more of her music. It’s the friend I meet up with for dinner who’s wearing a shirt I also have, because she sent me a matching one years ago. It’s the friend who, three drinks in, observes that my sweatshirt is the same pattern as my old LiveJournal background. It’s the friend who makes four little pizzas because I’m coming over, the friend who schleps out to meet me at the bar after his kids’ bedtime, the friend who makes me a fire, the friend who shows me a new bike route, the friend who puts on the Reptar costume I sent him and rollerblades. (That one truly is an inside joke; sorry.)

Every time I’m back in Louisville, I want to stay. My last night in town, a big thunderstorm blew through while we were in a bar; as a friend drove me back to my car, the air was still heavy with moisture, the roads breathing mist. Noe one was on the road, and we had the windows down, and he put on “Party in the CIA,” Weird Al’s cover of Party in the USA, which is actually very good in case you’re wondering. The vibes were immaculate and I wanted to hang out just a little longer. I always just want to hang a little longer! And boy is Louisville easy to hang out in, to run into people and just chill — hell, I was sitting at gate A3, ready to leave the damn city, when I noticed two friends and their baby sitting across the way at A4. Tell me that isn’t the most Louisville shit.

On the plane ride home, I watched Past Lives, which I loved but cannot recommend watching on a plane because I sobbed through the ending. (Shoutout to the woman in 24E who very politely ignored me.) The movie centers around Hae Sung and Na Young or Nora, who were middle school sweethearts until Nora’s family immigrates to Canada. Twenty four years later, they meet up in New York, and he says to her: “You had to leave because you’re you. And the reason I liked you is because you’re you. And who you are is someone who leaves.”

I always knew I would leave; I’ve always been a novelty monster. But even after seeing what else was out there, there’s no place I love more. Riding a rental bike across the East End bridge, I was struck by how much the Ohio looked like the Aguarico. The redbuds wowed me, the thick carpets neatly-edged bluegrass as exotic as seeing orchids on the jungle floor. And though Louisville stays static in my head, being back there reminds me that I never return to quite the same city. I’m glad to see the city changing but sometimes it feels like a betrayal. The big VA hospital under construction will probably be better for business than the cornfields. And it was high time they put in stop signs at the intersection of Willow and Eastern Parkway, but how dare they!

Moving back to my hometown has always felt like something other people did. But this time, I wondered what it’d be like. Would I actually be happy, or is it just easy to imagine happiness in the absence of real world boundaries, on an expiration date? You can do anything for two weeks, and you can also not do anything for two weeks: you don’t see the weeds growing back home, the mail piling up, the glitchy smoke detector waking you up at 2am. Instead you’re just at Nachbar with your friends, and one of them has paid for your bourbon.

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Unsolicited recommendations

• My friends Joe and Charlie are hiking the PCT and they have a podcast/YouTube channel called Pacific Crest Tales. Smash that like button and subscribe!

• The ever-amazing Erica Berry wrote an essay for Electric Lit on how personal narrative is often written off as “navel-gazing” but can be a rich way to examine the world, and ourselves. It’s been a month but I’m still thinking about it, especially in light of Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department and Tavi Gevinson’s T. Swift-themed Fan Fiction. I have a lot of thoughts but I’ll leave you with just two: 1) Have you ever heard of a man’s work being dismissed as navel-gaze-y? and 2) What if these are the navels I want to gaze upon?

• Committing to the bit.

• A group of four science journalists just launched Sequencer, a reader-supported, worker-owned science mag. They’re a smart, fun, and voicy bunch; so far, they’ve run a nice mix of some great deep science nerd deep dive stuff, and some second-day analysis pieces tied to recent news. Check ‘em out!

• I never thought I’d see Cher and a young Nic Cage make out but then I watched Moonstruck (1987). It is a masterpiece.

• Nerd gummies as a bike snack! Way cheaper than Honey Stinger gummies and more delicious than Bolts.

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Lately

• Some psychedelics advocates were formerly in the marijuana space — and many of them have looked to marijuana’s failures as a cautionary tale. I wrote about that for The Atlantic.

• Slate podcast What Next: TBD had me on to talk about psychedelics reform.

• Please send me cicada photos! During the 2021 Brood X emergence, I was deep in Cicada Mania and wrote about the weird history and potential decline of periodical cicadas for Biographic, so I’m very excited about the co-emergence of Broods XIII and XIX.

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Thanks for reading! And to prevent Substack from yelling at me when I hit “publish,” here is the requisite mention that you can subscribe to this newsletter if you haven’t already.