Golden Cold One

ISSUE #10

It's another fine day to reach into the Suggestion Box, and this week's theme comes in the form of an email I got from our friend on the writing team at Adam Ruins Everything. That's right, Earwyrms has reach and influence. I have the ears of gilded folk on the golden coast, and you're in their company, reading the selfsame words. Proximity to greatness is a special kind of thrill. It's like going to a discotheque and knowing that Timothée Chalamet lives in the basement.

You know, however, that greatness resides in all of us, so you've had access to that thrill your whole life. This week's theme is an exercise that aims to tap into that deep wellspring of greatness. The easiest way to explain it is to walk you through it, so I encourage you to act out the next steps as soon as you can: after work on a Friday (today, even!), head home, walk to your nearest beer, and open it. Go out to the porch, or to the balcony, or just to the biggest window in your apartment. The key is to be facing the light of the golden hour, in a relaxed and comfortable place. That's when you hit play.

Take your time, sip slowly. Don't think about the struggles going on at work, on Twitter, in your heart. Let it melt away. Our racing minds are always wanting something new, but maybe that desire is more trouble than it's worth. Maybe we should just be content with this. This is nice in itself, right? Look at how every object seems to smile in this light. You don't have to pay a subscription fee for the sun. It shines down equally on people of all race, gender, sexuality, religion. It warms everybody without prejudice.

These golden moments are one of our key weapons in the battle against the mind's great enemy: fundamental dissatisfaction. Buddhism tells us this ubiquitous disappointment in our own lives is inextricable from our human soul. There's a term for it, the First of the Four Noble Truths: dukkha. From what I understand - and it's an imperfect translation - its meaning floats somewhere between "stress" and "pain," "dissatisfaction" and "suffering." In specific, I speak of one of three aspects of dukkha: the sankhara-dukkha, the suffering of conditioned experience. This is the reason things never quite measure up to our expectations. It's our potential to get sick of just about anything in the world, no matter how much you wanted it at one point in time. The familiar tends to dull the senses.

This is, of course, a conflation of the concept, from my limited understanding. It's deserving of a lifetime of study. Still, it's a feeling immediately familiar to any of us. There's a whole industry built around trying to vanquish this disappointment. It's that empty feeling in all of us that sends advertisers into a feeding frenzy. "Buy this game; this app; this shirt." "Come to Seattle, get a pool!" They tell us these things will make it go away. Of course, it doesn't matter if you're on a yacht or a stoop, that hole will probably never go away. The best we do is learn to quiet it, and love it as part of ourselves.

Duncan Trussell, one of my favorite spiritual thinkers, characterized this insatiable part of us once as a fish who spends its life thinking, "One day, I'm gonna be dry." Well, a dry fish is a dead fish, and it's parallel to someone thinking, "One day, I'm going to have exactly what I want." It's one of the biggest ways we torture ourselves. It's what most self-help books fail to recognize. There is a legitimate psychology to the "change your mindset" school of positive thinking, but it's not an almighty force. Buddhists at least acknowledge that the enemy we're fighting has endless resources. This is why grand and mythical language often complements science to make a more complete picture, because it's easier to imagine silencing Satan than a serotonin deficiency. Be happy with water, fish; be happy with sun, self.

A drink (one!) is another way to fight it, if you're so inclined. There's a special power that one beer can give us. Being one-drink-in steels our resolve, and brighten the corners. Anything between 7% and 9% will have you singing. Did you know just one beer makes you look even better? I imagine people once saw it as an magic elixir. Joyce said, "White wine is like electricity."

Used responsibly, a beer is a blessing. We're emotional souls, so we all bear the burden of our brothers and sisters in suffering. It's overwhelming; it is! We all want to do vigilant work that is important and morally good, but to do that, we do need to recharge. "A single drink brings about a surge of euphoria, followed by a diminishment in fear and agitation," wrote Olivia Laing in The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking. We could all use some time to calm our fraying nerves. So, relax a little, don't feel guilty. These songs are here to help us enjoy the significance of these golden hours.

One week from now, I have a very special issue planned: The Best Songs of 2018 So Far. I've been working on it in the background all month, so I'm excited to finally send it out soon. Until then, take a load off!