One Hundred Weeks of Earwyrms
ISSUE #100
One hundred Earwyrms! Can you believe it? One hundred weeks of passing off the same seven Frank Ocean songs as a new playlist. I'm sincerely grateful to everyone who's ever opened even one of these over the years. For #100, I couldn't resist going back through my favorite issues and compiling them here—most of my 30 million subscribers missed the early ones. Here are my worst quotes:
"It's 4/20 and every time I smoke weed I have to sit in the bathroom for fifty minutes or I'll throw up or poop, or both."
— The awful first sentence of the first issue
Issue #1: Hollandaise It
April 20, 2018
"Let me just lean into it: the Stoic philosopher Epictetus was all about the ethics of the many roles we play in life—some inherited like sons and sisters, and some chosen like marketers or eco-lawyers. I've been looking at my roles, and hating what I’ve done with them. I just wanted to choose one that exercises my humanity, by sending you playlists made from my organic experience, even if I'll ultimately lose the battle to the machines."
— Why I started doing this in the first place
Issue #2: Ray Bradbury Didn't Own a Toaster
April 27, 2018
"God created the jukebox to teach us that beauty rests in the finite selection. Too many options just spoil us. Save that shit for heaven. That's why beautiful people only have one nose instead of thirty."
— From our first commissioned playlist
Issue #7: Loaded Home Fries
June 1, 2018
"The fundamental problem with a piano is that you cannot sustain a note. A violin can measure eternity with just a rocking of the wrist, back and forth like a parent with a child. The piano teaches us that all things fade. Even if you try to grasp a chord with the pedal, it will go away. No amount of work will keep those notes there. In that, it requires either change or repetition, but always action. We touch it like we touch each other, with tips of fingers and recurring attention."
— On my favorite instrument
Issue #30: Playlist Piano
November 9, 2018
"Igor, bandleader: Yes, technically The Monster was the first to Mash. But don't be mistaken—this was Boris's show. It would never have worked without that man behind-the-scenes, tinkering away, serving electric shocks, always improving whatever he could."
— An Oral History of the Monster Mash: As Told by Boris Pickett, The Monster, Staff and Guests
Issue #27: An Oral History of the Monster Mash
October 19th, 2018
"Split the Venetian blinds with your finger, and I'm in the yard in a 1966 Cadillac Fleetwood.
"Get in, loser," I shout. The chiaroscuro is straight-up nasty, charcoal night covers half my body. Is this a Chris Van Allsburg book? You get in, I crack my knuckles. We back out into the street. [...]
"You're gonna love this," I shout over the roar of the engine. That guitar line hits two minutes into "Dive," and I turn it up as loud as it can go. I put the top down, the wheels leave the pavement. We're off.
We crest the tree-line. Soon, we're hundreds of feet above the city—the stars, our traffic lights; the highways below, our electric veins."
— Tales of the Flying Beast, Ch. 1
Issue #5: Chitty Chitty, Etc.
May 18, 2018
"Where there once was darkness now sits a giant peach-pink speedboat. It's glowing like the shapes that dance on your eyelids when you rub the sleep away. The name on the side reads "Coast Malone"
"Get in, loser," I shout from behind the wheel. The sailor's cap serves as my halo, the Hawaiian shirt my billowing wings. With my hook-hand, I hold the wheel; in my human one, $300 cash. You approach, and step onto the deck.
Moments later, we're speeding over the waves, each one bouncing us a little higher. Soon, I whistle like I'm summoning a sheepdog. The horizon reveals a wave the size of a Ferris wheel. I gun straight for it.
"Hold on!" I shout over the roar of the engine, "I bet you can guess what's gonna happen next!" I cackle maniacally, and we hit it full-speed. We soar straight up, into the star-streaked sky, Armstrong and Aldrin in a speeding yacht-rocket, aiming right for Andromeda and the Great Beyond."
— Tales of the Flying Beast, Ch. 2
Issue #30: Boats Against the Current
August 31, 2018
""Let me show you something," I say, before you can stop me. I close the grill's lid and climb on top of it. I put the cash in my breast pocket, and hold out my hand, Aladdin when he's perched on the carpet. "Hop on."
"I can't," you say, eyes cast downward.
"Come on. Like old times."
You raise your head to look me in my yellow eyes. "No. Not this time. Those days are gone." [...]
"So be it." I look to the moon, and wait. A shiver rises in the air, anticipation vibrating the very wind. The ground shakes, and the grill starts to rise, hovering just above eye-level.
You step back, shielding your eyes. Fire erupts from each leg of the grill as it rockets skyward. The heat is incredible, and yet I remain, mounted, focused, a ghost rider, ushered forth by the breezes of hell, shrinking into the blackness of space. Soon, there's no sign I was ever there at all."
— Tales of the Flying Beast, Ch. 3
Issue #56: BBQ Bangers
May 24, 2019
"Rivers are Earth's primordial arteries, vessels of life, before they were supplanted by railroads and highways. Running water is in our genetic memory, our prehistoric home that still calls back to us. We once followed rivers like we followed the stars.
We plug back into this when we float or raft. It's the ultimate relaxation: being enveloped in water is amniotic, a perfect anxiolytic, a molecular embrace. Every inch of your skin is being held."
— Issue #69: Shootin' the Hooch
August 23, 2019
"Gryffindor is the only house I've never been mistaken for, I think because bravery and valor are not often associated with a man whose hands still shake violently every time he tries to sneak wine into a movie theater (three to four times a week). I think Gryffs are often unfairly viewed as the frat brothers and sorority sisters, the jocks, the buttoned-up preps—and sure, there's something a little normcore about the House of Harry, but the Gryffindor, as with all houses, contains multitudes."
— Issue #21: Gryffindor
September 7, 2018
"You swim in a morass of qualities that seem more like lessons for toddlers, like "honesty," "loyalty," and "patience." First thought: "Wait, aren't all people those things?" Well, of course not; they are, in fact, some of the hardest things to be, which is difficult to see as a teenager. This is understanding that you age into. And so, the pendulum of public opinion has swung back in recent years, as we've all grown wiser and the blind elite have begun to listen for the true worth of the Hufflepuff."
— Issue #22: Hufflepuff
September 14, 2018
"A Ravenclaw wants to learn as much as they can in this short lifetime—not to conquer or prevail, but to witness and wonder. [...] Ignorance being bliss is one of humankind's most persistent aphorisms, precisely because its ratio of daily utterance to enduring truth is so impressive. Knowledge can be as much a curse as it is an enlightenment (anyone who's ever been cheated on knows this), and not only for the hard work it takes to obtain it, but also for its destabilizing nature, and the risk we run of uncovering a bleak or dismal truth hiding beneath it all."
— Issue #23: Ravenclaw
September 21, 2018
"There's another type of person who gets into Slytherin: the scum-bum. I snuck in with this crowd (surprise, I'm in Slytherin), a Bad Thing in the barest sense, all rotten and stinking, who bubbled up from the Mississippi to wreak havoc on all those who would witness me, spouting countless stanzas of degenerate poetry like "fart poop out your butthole." When you feel like a dirtbag, it's easy to identify as a Slytherin—who wants to be liked, anyway? It's rigged against all of us, a game you can't win. "Popularity's a con, man—hey, you ever seen a Harmony Korine movie?" This is, of course, why we're all insufferable."
— Issue #24: Slytherin
September 28, 2018
"This moon has power over us, whether it's imbued or otherwise. Its gravity wakes our strongest impulses, tugging our desires with the pulse of the tides. Something inside us is pulled by its tractor beam. It boils whatever is waiting in our blood. It has so much meaning that it obliterates all meaning."
— On the Harvest Moon
Issue #72: Friday the 13th
September 13th, 2019
"If I can address Oppy directly: it's unfair that you had to die, when you were so good and brave. You lasted 14 years, 295 days beyond expectation, even after the death of your twin; you traveled farther than a marathon through reaches unknown, places we can only dream of, places that make us feel smaller than pebbles, and you faced it unafraid. You died on stormy seas, like sailors of old, one of the most human endings of all, the kind we tell in our most rousing eulogies. I hope we get up there some day, to give you a proper funeral."
— A eulogy for Opportunity, the rover that died on Mars
Issue #42: My Battery is Low and It's Getting Dark
February 15, 2019
Thank you so much for reading. Here's to a hundred more.
Technically, halfway through the year is next Monday, July 1st. This is a leap year, after all. They’re the only years where there’s an even split in days; the only times the divide falls at midnight, not noon.