I'm driving north. I'm driving north, again, but everything feels fine. South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky. Moods like this come sometimes, trending toward bleaker moments, the narcotic flood of freedom pressing against misery just as cold flattens its nose against my Ranger's windows.

It's the nauseating quality of love—barely worth enduring at all, but who can help it? There's no getting off this ride. We swing to the same spot every year. If we gave form to time and stretched it, the Earth would look like a giant slinky. Spear a certain point and you dissect me every year.

Try sustaining equilibrium and you'll find that it's impossible. Will we ever reach a self that takes only what we can give? Ever give enough to match what we extract? It's a wicked concept forged in the fires of ideals, like justice or closure or the perfect way to load a dishwasher.

The tide—the slow breathing of the Earth. Breathe in and the sea contracts. Breathe out and the waves will swell. Our lungs move on behalf of our brains, but the ocean takes orders from the glowing moon. The celestial champion of love.

There is nothing we feel more often than air—an assertion so obvious as to sound idiotic. Yet nothing's more easily forgotten than that which is with us every day. We are wrapped in atmosphere at every moment.

All matter contains energy, crouched and waiting to burst. Fire is crackling potential erupting to visibility, life's secrets spilling forth into physical expression. It spouts out of nowhere using only what was hidden, like imagination surging through the borders of reality and appearing in the form of dance, song, or play.

Stand barefoot on a bluff in the late days of spring and the toasted stones will warm you as would another's hands. Crunch a perfect apple in your mouth and you will find the grit can mirror silt.

My Augusts are filled with the most dizzying mysteries. Faced with deducing what happened to the year, I play detective in my very own sun-drenched noir.

Here I’ve gathered songs that sound like lost highways—the endless, midnight ones that pass nothing but stardust. Our propulsion comes from music as much as an engine, as heartbeats propel us through perception and feeling, over empty streets with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested.

Professionals like to insist that every year has a Song of the Summer. It's a media thing. They even come to a consensus sometimes, though that's been harder and harder to do the farther we get from 2010.

Today, I lie buoyant on my summer sheets, television screen paused on the video game I just can't stop playing. Its pause gives me a little break from dying—at the hands of giant insects; in puddles bubbling with acid; on the spikes placed in pits laid by deranged urban planners.

Dark Academia, if you haven't already heard, is a subculture emerging on TikTok and Instagram that adopts the aesthetics of the ivy-trussed campus: think browns and burgundies, greys and ivories, blazers and books like Mrs. Dalloway and The Idiot (Dostoevsky's, though the case could be made for Batuman's as well).

Waxahatchee writes poetry so precise it carves silhouettes out of thin air, and she sings through smoke that's more clove than Marlboro. It feels like sandpaper for the soul.

My house is haunted. There are rooms I cannot enter, and every night I speak with ghosts. We bicker in the shower and argue at the cutting board. Their forms vary, appearing sometimes as others and sometimes myself, come to resurrect some buried humiliation from my past.

One of the most frequent questions I get is about how I’ve been able to pick up temporary work throughout my travels without falling afoul of the law.

I like to keep Earwyrms open as a outlet where other writers and critics can submit their playlists and essays as well. This week's was written and curated by Ben Kasl, a writer and improviser living in Chicago.

The following is excerpted from On Tyranny, written before the new rules of the pandemic.

I'll be clear: Black lives matter. Abolish the police. All cops are bastards. Amplify black voices. This week's is a playlist of black artists who deserve to be recognized, based on this thread by Moses Sumney.

Everyone I know is reading Normal People by Sally Rooney. These rare times when a book becomes this popular might be our brightest moments, even if the work in question is sometimes frustrating.

Michael Jordan is the concept of celebrity writ large, a name we're demanded to reckon with whether we know shit about him or not. He was first to mutate from person to brand, foretelling the rise of our culture of influencers.