A second sobriety in "the backrooms."
Here is a Secret Letter for my paid subscribers. ✍️ Inside: the deepest parts of my mind are very beige and it's awful (but maybe also unexpectedly helpful).
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I sometimes watch the “slow-living” aesthetic videos on YouTube, where beautiful women with fifty-seven children and a herd of cows bake sourdough and pick dandelions. I have neither children nor cows, but I do like baking bread, and the bulk of my work (writing, writing, writing) happens at home. Spending lots of time at home (alone) is inevitably “slow” in the sense that my pace is my own. And a writer’s life has some aesthetic interestingness to it, what with the books and the papers and the coffee cups. I am not the audience for these tradwife slow-livers, but I am their compatriot.
When I first started living alone, the slowness of single living was painful. When I stopped drinking, time moved doubly slowly. And after a whole decade on an academic career escalator (which I jumped off of), the terrifying slowness of no longer having a fast-track job felt monstrous. The new slowness of my life is only recently beginning to feel normal… but not quite.
My slow-living sometimes feels more akin to time in “the backrooms” than time on a cow farm.
