stoweboyd:

“Everybody has experienced the defeat of their lives. Nobody has a life that worked out the way they wanted it to work out. We all begin as the hero of our own dramas, in centre stage, and inevitably life moves us out of centre stage, defeats the hero, overturns the plot and the strategy and we’re left on the sidelines, wondering why we no longer have a part, or want a part, in the whole damn thing. So everybody’s experienced this. When it’s presented to us sweetly, the feeling goes from heart to heart and we feel less isolated and we feel part of the great human chain, which is really involved with the recognition of defeat.”

— Leonard Cohen on why people enjoy listening to melancholy songs. From a BBC radio interview in 2007. (via johnthelutheran)

A thin older man next to me on subway is reading a yellowed, much read, earnest, serious, paperback, in Russian, about practical tips on protection from “chronic fatigue syndrome, hexes and curses”. It is 100F today and humid, but he is wearing a soviet-era-looking purple-and blue windbreaker.

On my other side, a burly guy with many tattoos and a trucker hat on his eyes, seemingly sleeping.

The thing I learned at tonight’s coop shift was that someone has friends who are a couple who haven’t had sex in 2.5 years and that it was somehow shocking for everyone there, and that someone just returned from the Glacier National Park, which is on track to have no glaciers by 2030 – i.e. when L is a teenager. And that all the cool kids are into Oatly now. It finally happened, and there is now a movie about our coop. Not in the wide release.

But they played a trippy Argentinian band Chancha via Circuito on the radio on the way home, and it made it all okay.