February 5: I'm worth what I'll convince myself to be

I told myself a month ago that 2022 would be the year I stopped kidding myself. I’m approaching my mid-thirties at an alarming rate, my career is nowhere close to what I thought it would be, and my mental health hasn’t magically gotten better after years of carefully cultivated coping. As the year changed over, I felt the sharp panic that I can’t afford to pretend all this potential people have seen in me since childhood will suddenly blossom into something wonderful and impressive as though that’s all it could ever have done. It is time, in other words, to rediscover sincerity and to reapproach the risk that I might not become everything I wanted to be, and to re-evaluate what self-acceptance looks like in light of that.

I write about taste because it’s been a constant source of angst for as long as I can remember. Ironically, talking about taste can be a way to distance yourself from judgment. When, as a 12 year old homeschooled kid trying to blend in with the public school soccer team, I spent hours poring over equipment catalogs, learning the difference between synthetic materials, kangaroo leather, and European brands, I was affording myself a kind of mastery over the subject of soccer even if I couldn’t afford a single piece of special equipment. When, in college, I began to distance myself from the broad strokes and crass sounds of Christian rock, finding in its place Radiohead and The Decemberists, I was trading one kind of cultural currency for another, one that I thought would serve me better moving out from under the repressive cultural forces of Evangelical spaces. When, in graduate school, I pretended to have read a million novels and theorists whose content I’d only brushed in passing, I staved off the idea that perhaps I hadn’t read those things, in part, because I simply hadn’t wanted to.

We’ve talked a lot here in this newsletter about the joy in discovery. I’ve tried to center my recommendations on that notion because it’s a bulwark against the temptation to listen, read, and watch simply to keep up, or worse, to author a self on top of the self. When I look back at all those moments of insincerity I see someone starting out with the idea of a person he would like to be, who then selects the things he consumes in the hopes it will transform him forthwith. And, it does, at least a little.

But then, a decade and a half later, you still find yourself putting a Relient K album on and realizing:

“Oh wow. No, I do love this.”

Listen: Digimaiden by NANORAY

Energy levels coming out of January are alarmingly low. This first month of the year has, to my senses, felt like three. Thank the rave gods then for this blistering pixie stick of a record which has been my wake up and work soundtrack all week long. NANORAY is a producer out of Omaha, Nebraska who, I guess, just wanders the plains out there subjecting everyone to the absolute sickest beats. Digimaiden sits within a subgenre of a subgenre of a subgenre called Hardcore Breaks, which applies contemporary production cues to traditions of UK Bass, Dubstep, Drum & Bass, and all kinds of rave-influenced EDM. The result is a sticky-sweet explosion of danceable, drugged out tunes. It’s the aural equivalent of a 5 Gum meme, it’s like the soundtrack to Sonic the Hedgehog’s personal sugar rush, it’s a bleary blast of tunes that will almost certainly make you feel old. Give it a shot anyway - feel like we all could use the hit of positive adrenaline.

Read: Tender is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica

CW: cannibalism, death, animal cruelty, sexual assault, dementia, child death, gore

To make an extremely hard left turn away from the blissed out reverie of that first rec, I finished this incredible book by Argentinian writer, Augustina Bazterrica and despite it being worthy of every content warning under the sun, I have to pass it your way. Tender is the Flesh is a grim satire exploring the extremities of human cruelty in a world where cannabalism has not only been legalized, but industrialized. We follow Marcos, the right hand man of an upstanding slaughterhouse known for providing Argentina with some of the finest “head” - the euphemism the world settled on for human cattle. Through his eyes, Bazterrica showcases each stage of the industry in gruesome, flat detail, with all the disinterest of a PBS documentary, while also holding space for Marcos’ own personal grief stemming from the loss of his son and the dementia of his father. It’s easy to read this logline and react simply to the shock value - but this isn’t the literary equivalent of Human Centipede. It’s a book about the material effects of language, the selfishness of men, and the mutability of even our most basic assumptions about the world we live in.

Listen: Forget and Not Slow Down by Relient K

My weird little corner of Twitter saw a controversial music statement go semi-viral this past week. The claim was this: Relient K is a better pop punk band than Blink-182 ever was.

And you know what? It’s true.

Sitting here in the year two thousand and twenty-two it’s easy to forget that this humble, goofy, Jesus-y band had a three album streak in the 2000s where each record hit the top 15 on the U.S. Billboard 200. That streak kicked off with fan-favorite, mmhmm, and its infectious, Christian self-doubt anthem “Be My Escape”, and then continued with the a more modern rock sound on Five Score and Seven Years Ago. But it’s this 2009 record that I spent this week re-discovering and, now that emo-ish pop punk seems to be having a resurgence, I think it deserves its time back out in the sun. With Forget and Not Slow Down, Relient K says a firm farewell to the lighthearted goofiness that defined much of their early career and still hung in there even during this more mature period. Instead, they apply their wit to a series of more grounded themes, including new fatherhood, mental illness, and marriage. It has all the sincerity of a youth pastor with, miraculously, none of the toxicity, and it’s all wrapped up in an irresistibly tuneful package. Songs like “Candelight”, “Part Of It”, and “Savannah” see the band confidently flexing their hook-writing muscles, trading sarcastic punk riffs for honey-sweet pop melodies. It’s an anti-depressant in album form and if you’ve never spent any time with it, go back now and check it out.

Listen: “The Case Against Loving Your Job” on The Ezra Klein Show

I’ve spoken before here about a few different hallmarks of Millennial life. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show from late last year touches on another core marker of my generation: the belief that our work - our day-to-day job - ought to connect with us on a near spiritual level. It ought to mean something and that meaning should drive us to love our jobs. For me, adulthood so far has been a steady sequence of disillusionment, disabusing me of one hopeful notion after another, and this shared pandemic of ours has really done a number on the collective belief in the personal value of work. The good news is on the other side of that disillusionment might lie a better, healthier labor culture - an idea that Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone” explores here. The conversation wanders among the tensions of the “great resignation”, looking closely at what it means that so many of us are leaving our jobs in higher numbers than we’ve seen in a long time, and how that intersects with the current anemic state of labor organization. It’s an insightful and informative episode that introduces some critical histories of labor politics in this country and speaks with compassion to the conditions that so many workers are facing day in and out.

Next week this newsletter will be a year old. Thanks for being here, for reading, for engaging. As far as I'm concerned, you deserve the world.

Be well,

Jordan Cassidy