FIRST, as a person in tech design myself, I can tell you that no one actually cares about your brand or site design refresh. The only people who actually care are those who are getting paid to work on it and promote it. This is normal and okay; the best thing we can do as designers is act like we’ve been there before.

SECOND, let’s take a step back and recalibrate what we mean by the word “finally.”

There is no “finally” for your rebrand, or your new web app, or your podcast episode. There is no “finally” for something you dreamt up in a boardroom three months ago, or for an AI agent you spun up last week, or for anything that doesn’t drill to the core of our human needs. Finally, you say, as if somewhere, people have been suffering under the weight of whatever it is you’re trying to solve: email inboxes or spelling errors or cheaper development. It’s an assumption of importance and compliance, designed to remove agency — because if SOMEONE says “FINALLY” we assume we ACTUALLY wanted whatever is FINALLY showing up.

Look at who is saying “finally.” They’re organizations clustered around problems that belong to those who already things handled. The AI that manages your calendar and the app that delivers your cold fast food and your rebrand with the fresh new fonts, these are things that attract money, attention, and cultural oxygen because they are the problems of people with enough capital — financial, social, political — to make their minor discomforts feel like shit we need to solve.

Finally. For fuck’s sake.

Finally is for things that keep hungry kids fed. Finally is for laws that help everyone feel safe, or programs that provide adequate health care. You can type 100 emails about how your organization has finally solved the tricky work of to-do lists, but it will never distract from the fact that “finally” is saved for curing fucking cancer, not recurring calendar invites.

The problems that actually break people — Medical debt! Bigotry! Housing! Oppression! — don’t get announcement posts or launch dates. They just continue. And the people who work their ass off to chip away at some of those problems, they just keep working. Because even when there’s success, there’s so much more to do.

THAT’S what should bother us — not that people build things and are proud of them, but that we’ve handed “finally” over to the comfortable. That a “rEvOlUtIoNaRy NeW iNtErFaCe” gets the triumphant language while the things that might actually change how someone lives just keep losing — another vote, another round of funding, another year.

Nobody’s waiting for your rebrand. Somewhere — everywhere — someone is still waiting for a real solution. A real answer. Finally.

But this one was a little different, because it was specifically about how this particular influencer makes her videos, and even more specifically about how she purposely layers her individual lines so they slightly overlap. The lack of space between words and sentences and thought is, apparently, not a affectation but an actual feature — no gaps, no silence; every pause had been cut, because pauses, the logic goes, are where you lose people.

There’s this thing people do when they sense they’re losing someone’s attention in a conversation, where rather than reassessing their story and being more relatable, they speed up, like they’re a game show contestant trying to get the answer in before the buzzer. They compress everything that’s left into the remaining space, as if the problem were the pace, not the content. (I have never done this myself, obviously, because my entire family is very willing and insultingly quick to just tell me when my story about Mike Watt solo albums is boring and pointless.)

Speeding up feels like doing something, and doing something feels better than the alternative — pausing long enough to actually figure out what went wrong.

Pausing adds air, and we want to remove air. And, it turns out, we’re getting very good at removing air. Not just from influencer audio, but from everything: the algorithm figured this out before anyone put it into words — fill the feed, fill the silence, fill the commute, fill the moment between putting the phone down and picking it back up. Productivity tools followed, then AI. The pause before you respond to a message becomes a suggestion from an AI tool. That moment of quiet thinking gets filled in before you have a chance comprehend the filling-in at all. Every gap is framed as a problem to solve, and every silence is dead air, and we are all, gradually, being trained to experience the space between things as waste.

There’s a moment in Fugazi’s “Long Division,” during the opening riff, 26 seconds into the song, where everyone drops out and the note hangs, just for a second. It’s a quick breath, barely noticeable the first time but an irreplaceable moment — a gap that strengthens and prepares. It’s load-bearing; it creates a pocket of air that makes everything around it feel more intentional and more physical. Post-punk bands like Wire and post-punk revival bands like Spoon have built entire careers around these gaps — around the white space that keeps the rhythm section afloat. The best producers in hip hop understood the same thing — RZA built gaps into the beat on “C.R.E.A.M.” so that Raekwon could snuggle into that space; DJ Premier’s beat for Nas’ “N.Y. State of Mind” begins with a stilted beat, staggered blips that at times drop out for a bit of a breath.

When you hear these songs, you don’t think about the gaps, but they’re there. They’re all part of a groove — a cadence I’m drawn to with these post-punk and post-hardcore bands that pair heavy rhythm sections and sparse guitars. They know when to stop. They are precise and restrained, using that air to create tension and control the mood. It’s anticipation. We learn this variance when we learn to write — to vary sentence length and paragraph structure in order to emphasize and balance the laborious work of reading. The space is structural. It’s what makes the next moment matter.

We all crave space in different ways. During the pandemic, I spent more than 500 hours playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I mapped every corner and hit 100% completion for the first time in any game I’d ever played. But completion wasn’t the point: Breath of the Wild is a peaceful game, and in between the moments of designed anxiety — the guardian music, the overwhelm of a mob attack — I built my own peace quietly moving from region to region. Just me and a quiet piano soundtrack and a reintroduction to the idea of space. When the world outside my window had narrowed to something very very scary, I found a way to roam in Breath of the Wild. I found a way to celebrate the intentionality of including “wandering without urgency” as a game mechanic. To celebrate space.

Which is the thing that Instagram reel, and every algorithm we encounter every day, and every productivity tool has never figured out: removing the air doesn’t make what remains more valuable. It makes it harder to breathe.

This isn’t an argument for slowing down. I’m not suggesting you move to the woods, delete your apps, and rediscover the rhythm of the seasons. And while we all should be listening to more Low and Codeine, this isn’t about meditation and drone. It’s something smaller. It’s keeping that air in the things we create, and maybe even adding a bit more. It’s about embracing the space; stepping outside, taking a break. Coming back in. Hearing the rest of the song, and understanding how the gap helped keep us engaged.

I know this because I did some work. I did some work because I have an obsession, apparently, with the idea of the radio, in its most base construction: a place where you go to listen to music without having to actually choose that music.

The paralysis of streaming choice pushed me back toward the randomness and lack of control that radio and the music-focused era of MTV once provided. After a few nights of watching uninterrupted block of MTV’s indie/underground show 120 Minutes on YouTube, I decided I wanted to make my own version of a 90s alt “radio station.”

(Station is a bit of a stretch. Really, all I did was create a very large playlist — 1,149 songs, 3.1 days of music — but the process itself was the key.)

My issue with any existing 90s playlist is that they were all made by someone else — like, for example, someone who sees Spin Doctors and thinks “Yeah, that’s alternative!” (It’s not!). I wanted my own 90s playlist to reflect what I might have been happy to see at the time and also what I have come to appreciate in hindsight. And, while this entire hand-crafted playlist task might have felt fussy and pointless, I found a lot of peace going down my list of artists, poking around at what was considered a part of the alt-rock canon at the time, and placing them within the context of that time. It was mesmerizing, and I found by the end that it was a deep and personal project that I am kind of proud of, in the way that anyone can be proud of a playlist.

I call it KCWV 91.7 because I am a huge dork. More to the point: I did all of this because I could not help myself. Because the act of digging — of cross-referencing, of finding the gaps, of arguing with myself about what counts — is the actual thing I wanted to do. The playlist was just the excuse.

A playlist is an act of creative expression.

When I create a playlist, I’m not just selecting songs. I’m feeling things out — poking at the corners of the package to see where the seams are, trying to figure out what will fit within the guides I’ve given myself. For the monthly mixtapes I put in here each week, I’m playing with expectations: balancing moods and genres and genders and topics. For a playlist like these “radio stations,” I’m having a conversation with my own taste. I’m worrying about inclusion (Gin Blossoms are corny, but I love them) and exclusion (Live are ultra-corny, and while I used to love them I now kind of hate them).

I’m working with friction. The glue to a playlist is friction — how to create a responsive flow when the list is shuffled and no one controls the transitions, and how to create purposeful tension for something designed to be listened to front-to-back. This friction helps me make decisions. It determines whether a transition is smooth, or if an artist sounds out of step, or if any of this will be interesting in the first place.

The friction is where I turn a playlist into an act of self-expression. It’s what makes the work personal, what gives it identity. And it insists that the final playlist itself is not the actual point of any of it. The act of creation is. Which is to day, no algorithms or AI playlist generators were harmed (or consulted) in any way.

A personally-curated playlist reminds me a bit of zine culture. I went to punk shows in high school, which means I was exposed to the zine at a time when it felt like the most DIY thing in the world. I’ve read a lot of zines. Hundreds? Thousands? A lot of them were: not good. But, a the same time, they felt like a creative release: an explosion of fan mail and love letters to whatever cause was top of mind. And while a lot of them were, again, not good, I read all of them, because they were — and still are — the most accurate and genuine representation of someone’s mind. They’re physically awkward, and no one is really asking for them. Yet, when you hold one, it feels real. You can feel the decisions in a zine. The layout, the handwriting, the cut-and-paste edges.

Someone is in there.

The opposite of that is also true.

The one thing that AI-generated work cannot fake is texture. You never get the idea that someone spent any time with it.

I used a little AI during this project, briefly, for two things: analyzing the raw data from the site that catalogs every video ever played on 120 Minutes (this is how I know the Juliana Hatfield numbers), and filling in gaps in my knowledge of artists I didn’t fully recognize. This is how I realized that Suzanne Vega, who I thought was just the woman who sang “Luka,” also wrote “99.9F°,” which is a wonderful little song I’d have totally forgotten about. For this kind of mechanical work — data analysis, discovery prompts — it’s a useful tool. I love it for what search could eventually become.

But I do not love it for creative work, because it is not good at creative work. To be clear, it is VERY good at APPROXIMATING what creative work looks like. And it is bad for creative workers, because it offers a shortcut, and the worst thing for the creative process is a shortcut.

The efficiencies of a tool that automates file organization or synthesizes data do not translate to the creative process — and we can see that because when AI does creative things, it’s boring. It’s out of touch. It’s Steve Buscemi holding a skateboard, “hello fellow kids”-ing the ideas we have in our heads.

AI can absolutely build me a playlist. It can fill a fictional radio station in the time it would take me to research Juliana Hatfield. But it doesn’t matter, because I was not there for it. I didn’t argue with myself at 11PM about how much Pavement makes sense, or whether Melvins land too far on the heavy side, or whether anyone will give me shit if I put the one Blues Traveler song I kind of liked in high school on there. (I did not put that song on there for that exact reason.)

The output might be identical to the untrained eye. But the untrained eye isn’t the only audience. We don’t just make things for other people. In fact, the biggest reason we make things is for ourselves — to feel the small satisfactions, to claim the experience, to put our minds at ease. To outsource that is harmful to ourselves and to the work.

This is not a screed against AI. This is a question about what we actually want from creative work.

I make these playlists, ostensibly, for you. But in reality … I make them for me. I have a very limited readership and get maybe a single comment each month. This is not an ego-boosting exercise. So when I ask myself who I’m doing this for, the answer is always myself. A playlist is for myself. A newsletter is for myself. It might be for a future me or a present me; sometimes it’s so clearly for a past me that I question if even I care anymore. But none of the external response actually needs to happen, because this process, this creation, is for me and me alone. Making something complete and coherent, even if no one is paying attention, is a way of taking yourself seriously. Of acknowledging you have something worth creating, no matter how small. With your hands. With your mind. With you for you.

The best part of this weekend’s No Kings protests was the handmade signs. A beautiful sea of signs, created by a beautiful sea of people fighting against, among other things, the exact thing most AI tech bosses would have you embrace: the increasing normality of selfishly uniformed thinking. The more we get used to a lower standard, the more we’re okay with every other standard lowering alongside it.

Every person with a sign made that sign because they thought that message was important. The real benefit of a protest is seeing yourself — recognizing that the individual feelings and anxieties and fears are not yours alone, that you are not on an island raging against a storm, but part of a movement. Protests are for visibility, but more than that they are for ourselves. They help us understand who we are among all of it.

And you can tell, because the signs are all handmade. Some are beautiful and ornate, and some are ugly and utilitarian. They’re someone’s Sharpie marks on someone’s cardboard. Someone’s actual handwriting and someone’s actual jokes. Someone’s actual anger. Someone’s actual hope.

There’s something happening right now where being visibly, messily human is the only credential that holds up. Algorithms can fake polish but they cannot fake presence. The playlists, the zine, the scribbled letter. The garden, the painting, the casserole. They’re all the same gesture as the handwritten sign.

I was here. I made this. This is what I think.

But there was this. A cardboard jewel case, a cover with orange and yellow fire (I think), and a lowercase “n.” Six songs, 91 blank tracks, and then two more songs. The first song started at silence, getting louder over its entire one minute and three seconds, until it suddenly cut out to start the next. Then, the sound of white noise or an air duct or something not unlike the wind straining through a slightly cracked window on the interstate.

The white noise cut out. The words began.

This is the first day, of my last days.

And then the guitars. H O L Y S H I T. I don’t know guitars or anything but I can only imagine these guitars were specially built by agents of Hell, distorted and screaming, the sound garbled past the point of mortality, unlike any guitars I’d heard in my life. This was not Kirk Hammett. This was not Scott Ian. This was certainly not Kurt Cobain. This was something else.

This was Nine Inch Nails, and this is what it was like listening to “Wish” for the first time. Nothing had ever sounded like this in the history of recorded music and I was hearing it, right then, for the first time, and my head might have exploded, except I know it didn’t explode because I am still here and I continue to listen to that song and will continue to listen to that song until I am no longer alive to listen to that song. This song is a part of me; it changed one small element of how I think about music, about heaviness, about electronic sounds and cool jewel cases and weird album numbering systems.

And that’s literally all I remember. The feeling.

The older I get, there are more songs like this; songs with no return address, where I still remember the sounds and the transitions and the overall vibe while losing the memory itself. Not that the details aren’t always there — it would probably take me about five seconds to text someone and confirm who introduced me to Broken — but that the details no longer matter. Just the song itself. The borders dissolved and the context was lost.

Two weeks ago, as our ongoing denial of global warming served us a perfect February spring day, it happened again: The Promise Ring’s 30 Degrees Everywhere — an album I can generally place in time (released in September, in heavy rotation the winter of 96–97 in advance of an opening slot for Texas is the Reason in early January 1997), but cannot place why it puts me in springtime. I don’t know who introduced me to it, though it was definitely introduced to me, because you don’t just stumble onto The Promise Ring in the mid-nineties without help. I don’t remember what I thought before it started or what I did when it was over. I just remember “Everywhere in Denver” — one chord, chugga chugga chugging into my life, Davey von Bohlen’s voice arriving lisp-riddled. It’s impossible to explain to anyone but myself. That’s just how music goes, I guess.

There’s a word for this, kind of: palimpsest. Because parchment was expensive, it would tend to be re-used — the words erased and scraped off but the impression still remaining like ghost text. The “feeling” remains, in a way, and if you squint enough you can apply this to these songs. I can still feel it there with José González’s cover of “Heartbeats,” with the first few minutes of “Firestorm,” with the spacey desolation of “Cowboy Dan.” We think of songs as reminders — you hear something in a grocery store and you’re suddenly nineteen, in a specific car, on a specific road, the whole memory arriving uninvited. The song is the trigger; the situation is the thing. That’s the normal way it works.

But there’s a version where the impression is all there is, the details scraped away while the vibe remains. You hear “Wish” and you feel something — some residue of a moment, the vague emotional shape of an experience — but when you reach for the details, there’s nothing to grab.

The song becomes a weird ghost. Recognized as having mattered, but lost in time, like a photograph of a room you don’t remember being in.

These songs have implied history. You can feel that something happened, a door that opened a crack and then closed again, the shape of the room still faintly there in the dark. Something happened. The song remembers it, even if I don’t.

“They called Coney Island, ‘the playground of the world.’ There was no place like it, in the whole world, like Coney Island when I was a youngster.”

Side two of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven begins with the voice of Murray Ostril. We don’t know who Murray Ostril is. He is all of us; he is no one. He is probably fake. It doesn’t matter. He’s describing something that doesn’t exist anymore, in a way. The physical location is still there. But the place — the feeling, the experience — is long gone.

The world Murray Ostril is describing isn’t accessible through memory or longing. It’s on the other side of a wall. You can remember it existing, but you can’t touch it, can’t return to it, can’t even properly grieve it because the gap between then and now is too absolute.

It’s supposed to come across as sad, I suppose. It works.

“No place in the world like it, and it was so fabulous. Now, it’s shrunk down to almost nothing, you see. And, uh, I still remember in my mind how things used to be, and uh, you know, I feel very bad. But people from all over the world came here. From all over the world, it was the playground — they called it the playground of the world, over here.”

We’re not doing okay.

We’re not doing okay, because things aren’t okay. We’re not doing okay because ICE — and by extension, our government — is performing acts of fascism. They are murdering non-violent observers. They are working solely as an agent of vindictiveness, unconstitutionally laying waste to whatever rule of order we’d once thought was safe.

Except it’s winter in Minnesota. The cold is oppressive, and those of us who have lived in Minnesota — especially those raised and nurtured by Minnesota — learn to live with this oppression by taking action: warm coats, ice shacks, Schell’s Bock.

So of course it’s Minnesota who is standing up, who is showing everyone else how it’s done. How to stand up to tyranny for real: how to brave sub-zero temperatures, how to document, how to give enough of a shit to bear witness. How to care for your neighbors. How to fight against fascism. The same resilience that gets you through February, weaponized into care, into showing up, into fucking showing up.

Even when it’s hardest, Minnesota is still crystal clear. Refusing to look away even when it’s safer, even when it hurts. Checking on each other while taking care of themselves. The core tenets of empathy, of society; the beauty of living in a place that teaches you that survival is communal, that you look out for your neighbor because next week you might need them to look out for you.

The government is murdering people for practicing that empathy. For asking for help. For standing outside and watching. For caring enough to be present. We hear it. We hear it in every last word.

“Are you okay?”

"I’m not mad.”

“I can’t breathe.”

The core tenet of post-rock is tension. It’s a lull, and it’s a build. “Sleep” opens with Murray’s voice and then as it fades away a wail builds in the background. A few notes, sparse and patient. There’s no rush. There’s all the time in the world, or at least that’s what it wants you to believe.

Then something shifts. Not dramatically. Just a little more insistent. A few more instruments. The volume creeps up so gradually you don’t notice it’s happening until you realize you’re leaning forward, waiting. The pattern repeats but it’s heavier now, denser. Each repetition adds weight. You can feel it accumulating.

But there’s more to post-rock than the build. Post-rock baits. Post-rock withholds. Every measure promises something and then fucking refuses. It makes you complicit in your own anxiety — you’re listening for the break, anticipating it, needing it, and the song just adds layers; gets louder, accelerates. This is the pattern. This is “Mogwai Fear Satan.” This is “Challenger Part 1 – Flight.”

This is “Sleep.” A perfect example, especially in the second movement, “Monheim” — a slow burn that hints at chaos. A train heading off the tracks, a teapot ready to boil over. The guitars get louder and more distorted. The drums get more frantic. Everything is moving toward something inevitable.

And then it breaks.

The break is loud. It’s really loud, and that’s the point.

The break is what happens when the tension becomes unsustainable. When the structure can’t hold anymore. Everything that was building, all that accumulated weight and pressure, detonates into noise and, for a moment, everything is undone. We don’t know what comes after. We don’t know if what emerges will be better or worse, just that it will be different. Irrevocably different.

That’s where we are. Somewhere in the build, watching the machinery accelerate, feeling the weight accumulate measure by measure. We’re tired of the build but terrified of the break. Because once it comes — revolution or tyranny or something we don’t even have words for yet — the song never returns to what it was. The break changes everything.

Murray Ostril’s world doesn’t come back. The playground doesn’t rebuild itself. After the break, you’re in a different piece of music entirely, and you don’t get to choose which one.

“And we used to sleep on the beach here, sleep overnight. They don’t do that anymore. Things changed, you see. They don’t sleep anymore on the beach…”

We’re all suspended in the same moment — leaning forward, waiting, knowing.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m tired of the build-up. Tired of living through the kind of moments that get written about later, that get studied and analyzed and turned into something coherent when right now it’s just chaos and fear and this sick idea that we’re watching something break in real time. So, yeah. I’m tired of the build-up.

More than that, I’m afraid for the break. Afraid because once it comes, we don’t get to go back. Afraid because we don’t know which side of it we’ll land on — revolution or tyranny or something we don’t even have words for yet. Afraid because the break is loud and destructive and it changes everything. Afraid some of the people standing in the cold won’t make it through.

But we don’t get to be afraid for long. That’s not how it works. The tension doesn’t resolve because you’re exhausted by it. The teapot doesn’t stop whistling because you’ve stopped listening. Things changed, you see. They don’t sleep anymore on the beach.

So we hold what we can. We keep each other warm. We stand outside when it matters, even when — especially when — it’s hardest. The break will come on its own terms, not ours.

Until then, there’s the build. There’s the waiting. There’s the single sustaining thread that reminds us there was music once, and might be again. It might have gotten harder to hear, but it’s still out there. The discomfort — the not knowing, the waiting in the cold, the fear — that’s what keeps Minnesota sharp. That’s what keeps Minnesota ready.

Soon enough, it will be our turn. Grant us the strength to stand like Minnesota always has.

You can only stream Godspeed You? Black Emperor’s “Sleep” on YouTube these days.

But you stand with Minnesota in a ton of ways. Visit Stand With Minnesota and give however you can.

The moment is a little different every time. Sometimes it’s in the middle of a Stick Ups commercial — the one where the giant fish bone flies out of the garbage, a reality that imagines we’re placing SO MANY full fish skeletons into our garbages that we need a long-term solution — and sometimes it’s during one of the thousands of 1–800-COLLECT commercials that plagued MTV during the late 90s. The commercial doesn’t matter. It always happens — I snap out of a kind of catatonic state and realize I’m just watching the same shit I complained about watching when I was a kid and then I feel dumb and a little ashamed and then I just decide to go to bed.

And then a few days later, I throw another compilation on.

It’s absurd. I know it’s absurd. I’m a grown man watching commercials from my childhood for products that don’t exist anymore. But, for the first 34 minutes at least, it’s deceptively relaxing — there’s a sense of relief. It works, because there’s a specific frequency to these things — the voiceover cadence, the primary colors, the way every ad promises you’ll be cooler or happier or more complete if you just had this one thing — and my brain responds to it like a familiar song I haven’t heard in twenty years.

So I keep watching, and eventually I go to bed.

I ran across a tweet the other day (not linked, you’ll have to find it yourself) that said:

btw in your 20’s and 30’s you’ll start rediscovering the niche interests and hobbies you had as a kid. it’s very important you revisit them. your younger self was actually on to something.

Below that was a response:

facts. adulthood isn’t about becoming someone new, it’s about remembering who you were before the world told you who to be.

I ran across this tweet while a compilation of old commercials was playing in the background, so it landed with a bit of a splash. This year has pulled my mind in two directions: one side has been fraught with what I can only describe as terror as an oligarchy has torn apart social construct and promised a new world of uncontrollable hubris, all while managing our own crises at home; the other side has promised the warm comfort of nostalgic escape — a deep dive into an era I didn’t understand then and am only now beginning to piece together. This has meant a return to the music, to the media, and these stupid commercials of the mid–90s, a kind of “Happy Days” level escapism that I once found embarrassing and now find absolutely crucial.

And so those tweets connected. I see myself in them. We all do, probably: it’s a bit of justification for what has felt a bit like childish regression.

But here’s the thing about regression — maybe we’ve got it backwards. Maybe returning to the things that comforted us isn’t about refusing to grow up. Maybe it’s about refusing to forget what safety felt like in the first place.

The world is hard right now in ways I don’t need to catalog because you’re living in it too. Every day brings new reasons to feel unmoored, new evidence that the systems we thought were stable were actually just held together by shared agreement, and that agreement has been voided by people who never needed it anyway. So yes, I watch compilations of commercials where the biggest problem is whether your garbage smells like fish. I return to albums I loved at fifteen. I seek out the specific feeling of a Saturday morning in 1993 when the world felt small enough to understand and my biggest concern was whether I’d saved enough allowance to buy the Wayne’s World soundtrack.

This isn’t denial. It’s not even really nostalgia in the traditional sense — I’m not trying to convince myself the past was better or that we should go back. I’m using it as a reference point. A reminder that I used to know what comfort felt like without having to think about it, without having to construct it deliberately. And if I can remember that feeling, maybe I can build some version of it now. Not the same version — I’m not twelve anymore, and the world has changed in ways that can’t be unchanged. But some version. A groove that fits who I actually am instead of who I think I should be.

Because that’s the real distinction, isn’t it? What’s actually part of you versus what you think should be part of you. The interests you cultivated because they seemed important versus the ones that just… fit. I’ve spent years trying to care about things that felt like the right things to care about — the sophisticated or respectable or productive things. Some of them stuck because they were genuinely mine. Some fell away because I was just performing. But the stuff from when I was younger, before I knew what I was supposed to like, before I learned to curate myself for an audience — that stuff tends to be uncomplicatedly true.

Our younger selves were on to something. Not because children have some pure unfiltered access to authenticity, but because they haven’t learned yet what they’re supposed to want. They just want what they want. And somewhere in that mess of action figures and MTV and whatever weird thing you were into that made no sense to anyone else, there’s a thread of actual preference. Actual you. The trick is figuring out which parts are still true and which parts were just developmental — what you needed then versus what you still need now.

So maybe the 90s commercials aren’t about the commercials at all.

Maybe they’re about permission. Permission to return to something that makes no logical sense but does some other kind of sense that’s harder to explain. Permission to build a life that includes space for the things that comfort you, even if — especially if — those things look like regression from the outside. Because the alternative is what? Performing adulthood according to some standard that was always arbitrary anyway? Pretending you don’t need the things you need because needing them seems childish?

I’m 35 minutes into a commercial compilation again. The giant fish skeleton is flying out of the garbage. Someone is calling collect and saving a bunch of money.

I’m not trying to go backward. I don’t want to go backward. Now sucks, but Then wasn’t always that much better. I’m just trying to remember what it felt like to be myself before I learned it was supposed to be more complicated than that. The world is going to keep being hard. The oligarchs are going to keep doing oligarch things. And I can’t spend every waking moment braced against that or I’ll have nothing left. So I’m building something here — this small weird space where I get to remember who I was before I learned to be anyone else. A place to catch my breath. A place to remember what I’m fighting for in the first place, which isn’t some abstract ideal but the actual specific feeling of being safe enough to be yourself without apology.

This is how I stay in it. This is how I keep enough of myself intact to show up for the fights that matter — by protecting the parts of me that are still mine, that can’t be taken or leveraged or turned into someone else’s profit. So, with my sense of irony fully intact, I’ll keep watching these stupid commercials. I’ll keep making the playlists. I’ll keep returning to the things that teenage me loved before he learned to justify his loves. Not because I’m hiding, but because I’m remembering.

And when I come back from that — refreshed, centered, myself again — I’m better equipped to face whatever’s next. The nostalgia isn’t the retreat. It’s the foundation. It’s where I go to remember what’s worth protecting, and why I’m not giving up.

But then I get to this moment, right now — Sunday, November 30; the end of the month — and I’m banging my head against the wall to create something new this month and hahahahahahahaha oops, I just stumbled across how MY hobby also manifests as a creation, in a sense.

Here’s the thing: I often worry that being A Music Guy translates to a kind of gate-keepy-slash-eye-roll personality — that I assume my taste is relevant or that my choices are gospel. “Worry” maybe isn’t even a strong enough word; I often fear that I’m being pedantic or dismissive or overly eager when I talk about music or burn a CD or share a playlist or send you a link for a concert you might not ever actually watch. I fear that it is misrepresented — I am not a taste maker (laughable even at its most earnest) and I am definitely not a taste keeper.

I just really like talking about music, and I really like talking to people about it. That’s what we all do, isn’t it? We do things because we like to do them, but we also sometimes do things because we want to connect with other people ABOUT those things! It allows us a connection and shared experience without needing to be in the same place at the same time. Hobbies are for our own pacification, but also to help us find our own people.

Which puts those “playlists nobody asked for” in a new light. The ones I make for road trips or send to my kids with zero explanation except “trust me on this one.” The way I’ll put on an album at dinner and wait to see if anyone bites, if anyone asks who this is or what year it’s from. That’s something, right? Not a scarf, but something. I’m not making objects — I’m making connections, or trying to. Building a shared language out of other people’s songs.

I’m thankful my family tolerates this. That they let me be the person who pauses mid-conversation to say “wait, listen to this part” or who derails a perfectly normal evening by needing everyone to understand why this particular Texas is the Reason song matters. They could roll their eyes more than they do. Instead they humor me, and sometimes — not always, but sometimes — they hear what I’m hearing. That’s the thing I’m making, I guess. A space where music can matter out loud, where intake becomes conversation.

I’m thankful you all tolerate this as well. So, anyway — here’s a playlist. Technically, nobody asked for it, but it’s something I made.

The center of Sioux Falls is circled by an auxiliary Interstate Highway — I–229 — which connects South Dakota’s two main Interstates (I–29 and I–90). I–229 was originally designed to provide access to the southern and eastern parts of the city directly from the Interstate, and upon completion formed a kind of border to the city itself. But, as the city has grown, the interstate is no longer on the “edge of town.” I–229 is now fully enveloped, like a tree growing around a metal ring.

Because of this, the existing interchanges no longer support the amount of people who live in the area, which has led to a multi-year reimagining of every major interchange along I–229. To those of us who grew up in Sioux Falls, it’s been a frustrating show of progress — each interchange takes a full two years to rebuild. This means for two full years at least ONE of the interchanges is squeezed down to a single lane.

Right now, that single lane is on our drive to work and school. And we’re facing a traffic crisis: no one has the guts to follow through on a zipper merge.

For those not familiar, a zipper merge is a normal thing that people in large cities deal with all the time. When two roads converge, the traffic has to go somewhere. Either one road takes precedence and the other road just waits for an opening, or both roads merge into each other. The second one is a zipper merge, the idea being that each lane take turns merging into the new single lane.

That’s what’s supposed to happen, at least.

On our drive, though, the zipper merge is a kind of challenge. Part of this is self-identification; Sioux Falls has a metro population of nearly 308,000 people — think Boulder, CO, or Duluth, MN — and this leads to a kind of internal confusion where half of the people who live here think we’re a big city (we’re not) an the other half think we’re a small town (we haven’t been in 40 years). And small towns don’t need to zipper merge.

The other part is visibility. Our drive goes down a pretty big hill, and from the top of the hill you can see to the bottom, where we’re asked to merge into a single lane.

This makes people nervous.

This makes people nervous, because no one wants to be the reason that traffic is slowed. No one wants to deal with the anxiety of trying to get into a single lane during rush hour. Which means EVERYONE tries to get into the single lane in advance. Half a block ahead of the merge point. Two blocks ahead of the merge point. Hell, there are people who know which lane to be in and they start in that lane a half-mile in advance.

This is great for us! WE KNOW HOW TO ZIPPER MERGE! We zoom ahead in our single lane all the way to the bottom of the hill, and then merge at the merge point, like we’re supposed to. About one in every 10 cars does this — ONE IN TEN! — but everyone else is making traffic worse, including the people who merged early. Because when you merge a half-mile before the merge point, you’re not being polite. You’re creating a single-lane traffic jam that stretches backwards for blocks, while a perfectly good lane sits empty next to you. You’re turning a system designed to handle rush hour into a parking lot designed to foster guilt.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because this is a classic example of complying in advance. Within certain circles, and especially in the gentle passive aggressive niceness of the Midwest, we assume that getting in the right place as fast as possible is key, even when complying in advance is actively harmful — is actively making everyone’s commute longer.

Now, listen — there are a lot of situations in which complying in advance is helpful. Getting to the airport two hours early for your flight. Arriving at a restaurant before your reservation time. Lining up for a concert before the doors open. These are all situations where the system rewards you for being early, where compliance codes as preparation, especially where your early action doesn’t interfere with anyone else’s ability to participate in the system.

But a zipper merge isn’t a concert. It’s not a reservation. The merge point isn’t the deadline — it’s the mechanism. And when everyone tries to “comply” before the compliance point, the mechanism breaks.

There’s a line between the two, and it’s drawn when thoughtful preparation degrades into fearful self-censorship. When you’re afraid of the reaction to doing the right thing. When you join the dutiful line of cars in one lane because you think you’re supposed to, despite the fact that the system is designed to work better when you all work together.

Yeah, you’re right. This isn’t really about driving. Complying in advance out of fear doesn’t just break traffic systems. It breaks democracies.

When you comply before you’re asked — when you self-censor, when you fall in line before the line is even drawn — you’re not avoiding conflict. You’re teaching power what it can get away with. You’re doing the authoritarian’s work for them. Every book you don’t read because someone might object. Every conversation you don’t have because it might be uncomfortable. Every time you see injustice and stay quiet because speaking up might make you look like the problem — you’re merging a half-mile early. You’re fueling the traffic jam. You’re giving fascism more spaces to grow.

Don’t do that. Don’t merge early. Do it only when you need to, only when it makes sense. Only at the point where it helps all of us, where it strengthens our world. The early mergers in our city think the people who zipper merge correctly are rude and selfish, as if you’re cutting in line. They might honk! They might refuse to let you in! They’re wrong — they’ve convinced themselves that their anxiety and their inability to follow the rules should be everyone else’s problem. And this is exactly how authoritarianism works: it convinces people that those who resist, who insist on doing things the right way, who refuse to comply in advance, are the troublemakers. The real threat.

But we’re not a threat. We’re just using both lanes. We’re just doing the right thing. We’re just doing what the system needs us to do to work.

So every morning, as we drive down that hill, we practice. We stay in our lane all the way to the merge point. We signal. We take our turn. And we accept that some people will be angry about it, will think we’re the problem, will refuse to let us in. Because the alternative — merging early, sitting in that long anxious line, pretending that our fear is politeness — isn’t neutral. It’s not avoiding the problem. It’s making everyone’s commute longer. It’s breaking the system. It’s complying in advance.

And that’s not something any of us can afford to practice right now.

(Ha. Ha. Get it? What a reminder: Apple, from back when they were still exciting and not just another technological behemoth hell-bent on melting the world down for spare parts.)

I was on Spotify, and so far I’m pretty happy with the change to Apple Music — after all, not only does this giant music streaming app do a few things that I like a bit better than the other giant music streaming app, it also does all of the other things EXACTLY THE SAME.

Of course it does. They ARE the same, nearly. This entire migration reminded me that, despite the marketing and the design and the corporate overlord responsible, each of these streaming services is essentially identical. They stream 99.99% of the same artists. They offer all of the same features, and they’re all mostly available on the same devices.

I’m not choosing to move to Apple Music because of some mind-blowing shift in thinking — I’m choosing to move due to the small differences between the two.

So the focus shifts to comparing differences. Spotify has differences from Apple Music, which has differences from Tidal, which has differences from YouTube Music. Some differences are easy to give up — for example, I have no problem giving up some of Spotify’s worst features, such as how the app has become riddled with AI slop, or how the company is actively investing in AI weapons. These are things I can’t tolerate, and they finally forced my hand after being really close to switching due to previous, nearly-non-tolerable differences: the lack of artist compensation, the sudden influx of bad podcasts, Joe Rogan.

(There’s no cut and dry, of course — Apple themselves is not a saint, what with the exploitive labor and the antitrust of it all. Just buy vinyl direct from the artist — it’s the only safe bet.)

But beyond the political and social issues, I’ve been learning a lot about how much difference I can live with. Apple Music is missing a few features I’ve grown used to (stream counts, a common memory between devices, a focus on discovery), but I’m already forgetting about these as I get used to the new ecosystem.

The playlist art, though. It’s rough.

I make a lot of playlists, which means I get used to a lot of playlist cover art. For this newsletter, I actually make my own cover art, pulled from a template I created in Figma. It’s easy, and it makes things look better than the default, which for Spotify is just a grid of album art, pulling from the first four unique albums found in the playlist. It’s not ideal, but at least it’s related to the music. If I don’t create my own cover art, I’m not endlessly bothered by the mashup that Spotify chooses.

But Apple Music? Oof. There’s a weird aesthetic happening over at Apple these days — the liquid whatever of the new iOS is maybe one of the worst design choices I’ve ever seen, or at least the worst since the skeuomorphic pleather calendar. Apple Music, which is already a much clunkier app than Spotify, enforces that clunkiness with some dire auto-generated playlist defaults: a generic gradient seemingly unrelated to anything, with the playlist title (adorned in Apple’s already generic-ass font) slapped on top.

It turns out this was the difference I couldn’t tolerate.

And so, this past week, after meticulously using an app called Playlisty to move roughly 100 playlists into Apple Music, I’ve begun developing reusable cover art templates for OTHER playlist types. I have templates for concert setlists (image of band on the tour in question, name of band, and date), genre playlists (black-and-white photo of something connected to that genre, title based on a well-known lyric), and decade playlists (big bold year on top of a black-and-white image from that decade’s music). It’s taken more time, but that’s what I needed to do to make the differences okay. That’s what I needed to do in order to move forward.

We all grow up in different situations — in different towns and in different countries and with different parents — and part of that growing up is learning how to handle differences. We learn it from our culture, and we learn it from our parents, and we learn it from the people we look up to. And, for us as humans all sharing the same world, the differences are really all that matter. The differences are what give us our identity — our personality.

Humans share over 99% of their DNA with one another. Songs are written using the same set of notes, books are written using the same structure of language, and recipes are all created with specific core elements at heart. Every song, every home, every pumpkin pie, every human is essentially identical save these small percentages of difference. Small percentages of distinction and uniqueness.

And so when we choose our friends and our partners, we do so based on the ways they’re different from other people. When we settle into our beliefs and values, that spectrum ties closely to our ability to tolerate and at times celebrate differences.

The differences are what make the world interesting — the music you listen to, the way you decorate your space, your culture and your worldview. But embracing and celebrating differences — or even tolerating differences — isn’t a thing that comes naturally. It takes a bit of skill. It takes practice. It takes willingly showing interest in something beyond what you’re used to, adapting and being willing to change. For some things it’s as easy as setting up a new routine — some new templates, some layers and a common font — and for other things … it takes a lot more. It takes reassessing our own beliefs.

It takes patience, but mostly it just means being willing to be wrong. It means adapting, even if it’s not convenient, in order to make those differences work.

The last time I changed streaming services, it was because Rdio went out of business. I was forced, and I landed on Spotify because it was new, fresh, and exciting. Since then, the small differences are what kept me from leaving, until Spotify’s differences became too great — differences I could not tolerate, in the same way I can’t tolerate a recipe with olives, or a human with Nazi ideation. The luxury in being able to make a switch without being forced — to change and evolve out of your own volition — is really a privilege.

But it’s a privilege we all have. We can change anytime we like, as long as we’re willing to put in the work. We can change anytime we like, and we don’t need to wait until it’s too late.

If the moon was a single pixel, the website of the solar system would be 1.7 million pixels wide. I know this because I spent a few minutes staring at a tediously accurate scale model of the solar system: “If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel,” by Josh Worth. I also know this because one of my co-workers did the math, and he also determined that the width in his browser was capped at 33,554,428 pixels, and then joked this would probably help when “I’m doing content strategy,” and I’m not sure if it will but I’m happy to have this new information.

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It takes 90 pounds of butter to sculpt each of the Minnesota State Fair’s daily butter princess sculptures, which are then housed in a refrigerated glass vault in the Minnesota State Fair Dairy Building — a vault that, at nearly all moments of the fair, is surrounded by hundreds of fair-goers. Now, imagine a great heist centered around that vault, and then get very excited because my friend and eternal dungeon master Amanda just introduced our group to Butter Princess, a table-top RPG based around the Minnesota State Fair. It sounds incredible — but, to be completely honest, I’m also hopefully holding out for a game based on the three-week-long 4-H teen musical camp: The Minnesota 4-H State Arts-In.

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Jerry Casale was at Kent State protesting both the invasion of Cambodia and the increasing military presence on campus when the National Guard opened fire and killed four of his classmates, two of whom he knew personally — the Kent State massacre. In response to this, Casale and his friends took the concept of “de-evolution” — a weird joke, probably! — and turned an eye on society’s threadbare empathy and commercialism. They stayed weird, though, and that’s why it worked: in the face of one of the nation’s most turbulent times, Devo kept being weird while also adding every band’s favorite tool: subversion. Anger is important, as is sadness and frustration, but let’s shout out “fucking with convention” as a new way to tackle life’s horrors. (The new documentary is very good, by the way.)

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If our eyes were the same ratio to our head as a great horned owl, our eyes would be the size of oranges. This would be weird, because none of our glasses would fit anymore. This is a new thing I learned about owls this week when reading Bridget A. Lyons’ book Entwined, a great book that uses animal metaphor to explain culture’s whole thing. From this, I also learned that while owls are solitary creatures, great horned owls mate for life. They do their spring duty, and then flit off to wherever they feel most comfortable, returning the next year to find their mate again. They are monogamous, but distant.

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I’m sorry. I’m just writing out facts because it feels good to know I learned something this month. In reality, we’re all hurting a bit.

This lack of narrative is because I’m in Idaho. I’m in Idaho because my aunt passed away earlier this month, and we’re celebrating with a memorial at my grandmother’s house. It’s really hard, especially for those that were always here — for those who spent the most time with my aunt. She was one of the most generous and fun people I ever knew — always with a gift, always dropping everything for those of us who’d kept out of the valley. We showed up, and so did she. That’s what I remember. That’s how I see her.

I’ve spent my entire life flitting in and out of both Teton Valleys — the Idaho side and the Wyoming side — enough that I consider it a deep part of my identity. I know that I’ve spent some small part in every nook and cranny, especially on the Idaho side, among the 450 square miles of flat land in between Victor and Driggs. My history is here. This is where my aunt chose to stay for as long as she could, just like my grandparents, just like my great aunts before.

I don’t know how else to say this, so I’ll try to tell a quick story.

Yesterday, we ran a few errands before the memorial. We went to the grocery store, and a coffee shop, and eventually a flower shop and a clothing store. We picked up things from places we’ve known for years. We walked the same paths we walk every summer when we visit. And … it felt different. It’s been feeling different for a while. I can feel a distance that I don’t recognize; where I once felt confidence and a sense of pride, I now feel like I’m fading into the wallpaper.

On the way home yesterday, I might have it figured out: I still hold this place in my heart, unchanged, as if I was still 13 or 17 or 23 or whichever age I felt at most a part of the valley. But I’m not 13 or 17 or 23. I’m nearly 47, and these people have grown up and around and within this valley independent of that vision I still have.

This is not meant to be about me. None of this is. It’s just that my connection to this valley is the people I still know, and I can feel comfortable because I always know I have someplace to be. Not as a visitor, but as family. A birthright that remains as long as someone remembers where we came from.

And that’s when it kind of hits. That’s when I feel that loss. To me, my aunt was part of the valley — part of the fabric — and when I think about belonging in this valley, I know that I do so by the grace of those who still live here. Now, with our loss, that connection is a little thinner. Now, that connection is a bit smaller. And I’ll miss that connection, just as we all miss her as a person.

This is all heavy and it’s hard and we are all doing our best to figure out how to handle it — how to collect our feelings in the right buckets, I guess — and it’s good that we’re figuring it out because this is just how life goes. Regardless of what we do to prepare for our own futures, we’re waylaid by grief. Personal grief, societal grief; grief is here.

But also, around us, in billions of little streams, the world continues on, and I’ve always been told that it’s important to grasp onto the small joys. And, man, I know, that’s dangerously close to being something you’d hear from an instagram influencer but also … it’s still kind of true.

So anyway, I learned some things this month. I learned a lot, probably, but those four things were a way to distract me a bit. It helped a lot to write them out. It helped to remember that, like a great horned owl, we keep our connections for life, even if we’re flitting in and out. And it helps to know how much we’ll miss my aunt. It helps to know she’ll be here in the valley. It helps, a little.