New Miserable Experience, Nate

A brief list of new miserable experiences, circa 2026:

• Emotional and psychological whiplash from first enjoying, then being anxious, about unseasonably warm weather
• Wrestling with the idea of immigration—not in a political sense, but in the evolutionary movement-of-humanity-as-a-biological-imperative sense—and with the notion of there not being anywhere else to go, species-wise
• Trying to order food via telephone and being told to use the app
• Trying to call a restaurant and discovering their only consumer-facing platform is a social media page
• Getting three children into the goddamn minivan by 8:30 every school day without feeling as if you spend your waking hours screaming at the little beasts you love so much, yet wish they would just brush their fucking teeth and learn how to put their socks on or lift a single item in the living room when looking for a shoe
• Idly looking at houses in your old neighborhood and realizing you've been priced out in what seems like no time at all
• Seeing a character on television intended to be the totem of slovenly unfitness and realizing you'd swap bodies with that jabroni right now
• Thinking about your father alone on his wedding anniversary now that his wife has died
• Hearing the long-thought-lost music of an old friend and discovering that not only was it always better than your own output, but that it remains great in both timescapes
• Trying to call and cancel a pest control service subscription, being told to wait on the line for the next available service representative, then waiting for 25 minutes before being dumped onto a voicemail box that is, you're not going to believe this shit, already fucking full

In short: It was a nice week for some downtrodden power-pop with brief forays into country and calypso. I don't know if Gilson will wind up submitting a review this week, but in case he doesn't, he called it when he said if this album had been released ten years ago it would be seen as a generational indie rock record. I'll go a step further and say it'd be somewhere in the Hotelier / Cheap Girls / Beach Slang lane, and yes I recognize two of those three bands are not welcomed to be mentioned here. Come on down to the comments and correct me, Joe, you Bari Weiss-ass. 

Additional miserable experience:

• Calling someone a "Bari Weiss-ass" for reasons that are not clear to yourself, or likely to the person they were directed at