Dear friends,
You know when someone sends you an email, and you intend to reply but get distracted by other things, and then a week goes by and you start to feel more anxious about it, but you reassure yourself that you'll just write them an EXTRA long and super interesting email and it'll balance out... but then another week passes, then another, then a month, then two months, then three months, then six months, and now you're just too embarrassed, it's gotten to the point where you have to either write your friend a personalized novel or just never talk to them again? That's pretty similar to my relationship with my newsletter. All of this lengthy preamble is to explain why it's been over a year since I've sent one of these along.
I'll catch you up on the good stuff quickly. In May 2021, I headed out on a cross country drive with my daughter, Mathilda. (The rest of the family, including our three dogs, had already flown to LA, where we'd be living until August.)
On the first day of the trip, Mathilda and I zipped down to Virginia in my cherry red Prius—a vehicle that announces to state troopers, "I'm a liberal, please give me a speeding ticket." We stayed overnight in Richmond with my friends Joseph and JS; I got to sleep in their pony-themed guest room which was as adorable as it sounds, though I secretly hope that one day they redecorate it as a Panio-themed guest room.
We set out the next morning with the goal of reaching Nashville by nightfall, a 615 mile drive. As any parent of teenagers knows, they're not a chatty bunch, so I'd prepared some podcasts and audiobooks to listen to. However I kept spacing out, especially with the audiobooks. Finally I put on Raymond Chandler’s The High Window and that one held my interest, although I did giggle whenever the narrator said “the man with the pork pie hat.”
We made it to Nashville, checked into the hotel, and then went downtown to sightsee. Broadway and "the gulch” were packed with people, which was a little disorienting as we'd just come from a still pretty locked-down New York. There were party buses and party vans everywhere, karaoke parlors blasting Bon Jovi next to pizza by the slice windows. Mathilda and I rented bird scooters and zipped around the city. We went into an empty parking lot and rode around in circles like the speedy little introverts that we are, then ditched the birds for burritos.
A lot of funny stuff happened on the trip but this is already getting pretty long so I'll save some anecdotes for another time (there's a great one about Little Rock). I'll end the travelogue with a picture of us while hiking in the Grand Canyon — a bee had just landed on me, thus the alarmed expression on M's face.
Reading List
Since I'm in LA, I thought I'd feature a couple great new books by California-based writers...
1. Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
A fascinating and wildly perceptive look at how cultish groups—from Jonestown and Scientology to SoulCycle and social media gurus—use language as the ultimate form of persuasion and power. Once you read this, you'll start asking yourself, "Wait, was THAT a cult? Was I IN A CULT?" Yep, you probably were.
2. Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California by Matthew Specktor
Brokenness, failure, collapse... these are tough subjects to make enticing, especially these days when, post-pandemic(ish) we all just want to run around outside and forget about anything distressing. But Specktor's memoir/cultural history/wolf howl of a book about struggling in LA is so deeply personal, honest, and articulate, that I kept getting drawn back into it. And in the end, there's a persistent thread of optimism running through it that's well-earned and more reassuring for it.
Thanks for reading! See you next time…
-Panio