It's not quite a large enough sample to be significant, and too inherently insignificant to really be worth the sampling, but we've done enough Drew Is About To Go On Vacation episodes of the podcast by now that I can detect their specific vibrational energy. Drew is both a little bit more eager than usual to wrap things up and just absolutely relaxed; I am maybe a bit more inclined to wander afield and go long and as close to absolutely relaxed as I get, as if I was getting some sort of residual contact high from the vacation that the big fella is about to take. It is not quite the episode that would be recorded from a vacation—we've done some of those, too, and likely will do some more—but it has all the energy of having more or less wrapped up work. All of which is to say that, at this anxious and ominous broader moment, I found this week's episode to be kind of a relief, and to reiterate I am not even going on vacation.
Another reason these episodes tend to be especially light is that they're recorded a bit in advance—we did this one last Thursday—and so we have to stay away from anything too newsy or topical. Which, again, is a great way to wind up with a very relaxed and positive podcast experience. This one begins with a conversation about the hell of late-winter/early-spring low battery brain and the importance of taking a few days in February and March to recover from the experience of being alive in February and March, and never really gets much more hard-hitting than that.
We talk about the work that tourism ads do on your brain, with Drew singling out Ricky Martin's early oughts Puerto Rico ad campaign and me getting as close to singing the Beautiful Mt. Airy Lodge jingle as I probably ever will. It's very free associative from there, with a consideration of the good and bad of the very early '00s, my recent fixation on overfancified '70s and '80s aesthetics—this, basically—and our shared preference for even the most garish French Connection-era aesthetics over the tyranny of tasteful minimalism and zipless Amazon Prime-style efficiency. Included in this is me complaining about the Fanatics-led neutering of my beloved Ebbets Field Flannels, a shared appreciation for Brownie The Elf, and two old dudes talking about the joys of buying stuff secondhand. Forget it, man, it's Vacationtown.
And then it was time for the Funbag, where a question about the coolest living musician—the reader posits Kim Gordon, which is so obviously the correct answer that we mostly just talked about second place and how and why I in particular had evolved to be intimidated by people like her. The wide-ranging conversation about other possible candidates became more of an assessment of how a famous art-type person should act and how important it is to have fun out there. How we wound up talking about John Hyams' brutal and brilliant Universal Soldier sequels and Drew's lonely defense of Gareth Edwards's forgotten action opus The Creator, I do not fully know. It's just how these episodes work. A question about the extent to which advanced memetics and general online shit has spilled over into the normal world allowed Drew to speak out against memes in general and speak upon the concept of "borrowed interest" in communication, and for both of us to talk about how we try to wring decently clear writing out of our web-addled brains. How well or how poorly we are able to do this is up to you all to decide, but it definitely seems like a vacation wouldn't hurt that cause.
If you would like to subscribe to The Distraction, you can do that through Apple Podcasts, wherever else you might get your podcasts, and Spotify if absolutely necessary. Thank you as always for your support.
