Animal Crackers and Bodega Coffee

Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation depicts a character who decides what she really needs, at the deepest levels in her soul of souls, is to just take a nap for a year. Her early attempts at the medication experiments required to do so leave her in intermittent and disorienting states of consciousness, begrudgingly awake, waiting for sleep to return in an emotional cocoon of old movies, animal crackers, and, paradoxically, shitty coffee from the bodega downstairs. It’s a hell of a mood. I truly can’t decide if I’ve had afternoons that felt more like this in the office before the pandemic or working from home during it. (It is not after the pandemic. It is still a pandemic.) (I sort of assume that sentence will always be accurate. It will never not be the pandemic now.)

A hazy playlist blend of work music, sometimes instrumental, sometimes incomprehensible. Ranges from the experimental free jazz of Harriet Tubman to the experimental noise pop of Sleigh Bells. Ranges from the soothing wisps of Grizzly Bear to soothing shoegaze of Broken Social Scene. There are two Grimes songs, and I’m sorry.

A playlist for this vibe:

Area X

A playlist that’s been in the works for quite some time. One of the original “moods” that sort of inspired me to start working on the seeds of what would eventually become this site, Area X is a playlist for moments in which you feel slightly out of time and space. Area X is a playlist for exploring those weird woods on the edge of town that seem to go on forever. Area X is a playlist for when you a trapped in a liminal space in a unnamed Midwestern America town. It’s a playlist for when you’re exploring an environment that’s just slightly strange compared to our own.