Loaded Home Fries

ISSUE #7

It's a special day: we got our first custom playlist from the Suggestion Box. The prompt, to paraphrase, was Songs to Play if I Owned a Diner. I'm sure you can picture it: I'm wearing the paper hat, the white apron, I'm serving well and wiping down tables, singing to customers in my rich baritone like the clerk at the candy shop from Willy Wonka.

Don't stop at your first assumptions, though. This is my diner, after all. In reality, I'm goth as hell. When I'm behind the counter, I look like Robert Smith from The Cure. My hair is jet black and pops out in crooked wisps like spider legs. This place should feel like the Haunted Mansion. It'll be at the bottom of an old quarry, and a graveyard should sit just off to the side, where animatronic heads pop up from the ground and sing our menu before you even have to open the door.

Come in, walk to the back and you'll find the jukebox. But this ain't no TouchTunes. Fuck a touch screen, fuck a dollar per song. This is the good stuff, a cabinet of chipped walnut the size of a dresser, and it only costs a dime. It'll be like the box from Dave's Fox Head, that writers bar in Iowa City where everyone says John Irving hung out. Despite popular impressions, that place isn't about our headcanon of famous writers who drank there, the winded ghosts of all those egos. No, it's all about the jukebox. So cheap, and instead of records, it was filled with homemade mixes, of Bowie and Etta James, The Stooges and Marvin Gaye. That's the best jukebox in town.

God created the jukebox to teach us that beauty rests in the finite selection. Too many options just spoils us. Save that shit for heaven. That's why beautiful people only have one nose instead of thirty. With a certain number of songs to choose from, you're going to stop at the intersection where two tastes meet. That's why it was so fun to wheel through somebody's iPod, and it's why I love seeing what's on your bookshelf. Everything you recognize is a mutual connection, art that's ready to be engaged. A diner's menu gives you the same freedom of moderation. You have the burger, the melt, the wrap, that's it. We don't need much to get by.

This suggestion comes from our friend Paige Wilkinson. I wanted to use the songs she suggested, out of respect and because I loved them, but ultimately they sounded too different from what I'd have on my jukebox. So I took her first suggestion, "Age of Consent," and used my favorite cover of it instead, to link our ideas but not to lean on it too heavily. It's the same way a Star Wars stand-alone film will open with "In a galaxy far, far away," but won't have the crawl. I figured this playlist exists in her universe, but it will be my take on it. I'm still ironing out my conventions.

She described the songs she wanted as dreamy, stuff you can play for a Sunday morning full of comfort food. It's apt because the diner itself seems to come from a collective dream, a place trying to capture a time that never existed. The fifties were nothing like Grease or American Graffiti. They were racist, and everybody was horny with nothing to do about it. As we try to unmoor it from its problematic past, the filtered remains point to the diner as a symbol of refuge. It's the space we want, not the attitudes, the space to put up a harbor from the capitalist storm that leaves us no time for leisure. That's why people are always opening new restaurants. It's why we make movies too. You have to build your own sanctuary, for no higher purpose than play and imagination and to prove that not everything that comes out of us is bad.

I could use that diner right now. Until I can accomplish the impossible task of writing and paying rent at the same time, I have to have the day job, and my company was recently bought out by a corporate big brother with little room for someone like me. I'm forced to step back into an old position, always on call, which does not afford me the time to be a Marilynne Robinson in these newsletters, as I wish I could be. I used to work at Forever 21, which is how I know Paige, and, to my surprise, I'm finding that even retail was better than this. At least working in that stock room I got to triple the amount of music I experienced. My hands may have been unboxing camis and avocado crop tops, but my ears were hearing Courtney Barnett for the first time. It's where I discovered Cayetana, first heard Run the Jewels and Future Islands, Perfume Genius and Sharon Van Etten. Unlikely as it seems, that was my sanctuary, for a while. Here's hoping we all find our own soon.

Sit down, you're making the bats anxious. I'll get you a Bloody Mary.

With love,

Jeff