#16 An Inner Passage

or, what it sounds like to have 52 pounds of fish in your freezer.

Sep 25, 2023

We spent much of August in Alaska, a place of such beauty, words struggle to form adequately. It’s a place of deep solitude, pride, contradictions, and a population whose best and worst qualities may be one in the same. It’s also a place where the background music will make you think you’ve time traveled a decade or two as you are eating better pizza than you would have imagined. With this, I have now been to all 50 states, a goal I had before turning 40 (which happens in about a month?).

I returned the same way I tend to every fall, over scheduled professionally and in what feels like a foreign social landscape. If you are a well read intellectual, or like me just have a well read intellectual friend, you’ve seen that article about if friendships can survive after children appear, or the one about how we’re apparently becoming bad friends because we are overly focused on our significant others and families, and apparently big feelings about friendship and how we spend our time together are just in the zeitgeist.

I had begun to write an essay about all of this and how somehow this physical place and this emotional place form a neat metaphor, but I think I’ve accepted that for the next few months, if I wait for these ideas to be articulated to my satisfaction I won’t send out another playlist for awhile, and these feel like really meaningful things to send out to the ether as sonic status reports.

This playlist is about Alaska; about glaciers and mountains and jumping salmon and fireweed. It’s also about cancellations and maybe spending too much time with only one person no matter how much you love them and friendship and loneliness and the way fall in California continues to destabilize me 12 years in.