Adam's Cool Website

What I'm Into This Week, End of Summer Edition

A sea story, a Star Wars podcast, and a heaping dose of jet lag were three of the highlights of my month.

The Swedish Fjallraven Classic was the highlight of my month—you can read more on Backpacker

I always get weird around the end of summer—and make no mistake, the end of August is the end of summer, whatever the pedants try to tell you about the the tilt of the Earth. Saying that fall doesn’t really begin until the equinox always struck me as a kind of self-deception, a desperate bid to cling onto the dog days' tail for a little while longer. The days are getting shorter, evenings are getting crisper, banners with pumpkin spice ads are planted in front of every drive-thru coffeeshop in town. When I wake up tomorrow morning, autumn will be here.

It’s still hot, though. Of course it’s still hot: Here in Denver, we get fall nights but summer days in September, and the midday temps are high enough to melt sand into glass. I’ll probably have the air conditioning running up until the leaves start to drop. But I’m already looking ahead: tuning the skis, getting the chimney swept, and thinking about what I want to get out of the colder months this year.

Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr.

When I was a college student, on slow days I’d sometimes wander into the dusty corners of the stacks in our library’s basement and dig around the old travelogues. They all had names like An Englishman’s Travels in Sibera and the Orient and consisted of the most minute, artless, descriptions of some rich European’s gap year. I loved them, and still do. The writers of those proto-travel-blogs believed they were describing an unfamiliar place for their people at home. But what they didn’t comprehend—what few writers have the perspective to comprehend, at least until much later—is that they were writing about a moment too, chronicling a long-gone world for a bored college student who would pick up their book a century later.

Lately, I’ve been working my way through Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, one of the most famous memoirs from the end of the Age of Sail. Dana, the son of a well-to-do Massachusetts family, was a student at Harvard when a growing problem with his vision led him to join the merchant ship Pilgrim as a seaman in 1834. Over the course of two years, Dana—who later became an attorney specializing in maritime law—would sail around Cape Horn and up and down the coast of California, grappling with a sailor’s exhausting workload and his captain’s abuse as his ship sold its goods and collected cowhides to bring back to the East Coast.

The book, which Dana wrote based on notes he kept on board, has the clarity of a well-kept diary, albeit one packed with nautical jargon. (“Again it was clew up and haul down, reef and furl, until we had got her down to close-reefed topsails, double-reefed trysail, and reefed fore spenser,” he writes in one typical passage.) While Dana went on to make his name as a champion of mariners’ rights and an opponent of slavery, he doesn’t completely escape the casual bigotry that can make so many of these old Anglo-American travel stories hard to read—the way he talked about his encounters with California’s mestizo and Native residents occasionally pulled me out of the narrative. But if the measure of a travelogue’s ultimate success is whether it can make you feel like you were there? This sea spray-soaked story is at least worth a look.

A More Civilized Age

I’m midway through a rewatch of Andor, a show that may honestly be one of my favorite stories ever put on a screen of any size. I’ve told anyone who will listen that I enjoyed Andor so much, it made me like the rest of Star Wars more in retrospect—even its milquetoast, CG-gorged, Disney-era incarnations. That’s also a little how I feel about A More Civilized Age.

Named after a comment Obi-Wan Kenobi tosses off about lightsabers in A New Hope, A More Civilized Age is a Clone Wars podcast run by a handful of some of the more interesting voices in games and media criticism, Austin Walker, Ali Acampora (both of Friends at the Table), Rob Zacny, and Natalie Watson. I think Clone Wars is a pretty mid show—it’s a cartoon for kids that, unlike a lot of animated series now, mostly feels like a cartoon for kids. But the hosts’ enthusiasm for Star Wars (even when it sucks), their occasional sparring over space pirate and (mostly) lovable rogue Hondo Ohnaka, and the work they’ve done to situate the show in its Iraq War-era millieu keeps me tuning in every week and watching along anyway. With the WGA strike still in full swing, the crew has opted to switch from watching the series to doing a play-through of Knights of the Old Republic instead; so far, I’ve dug the shift.

MF DOOM Suite by New Jazz Underground

I had never heard of New Jazz Underground, a group that seems to mostly be known for their performances on YouTube, until the algorithm dropped their jazz tribute to late rap legend MF DOOM into my feed. I heard DOOM’s music for the first time in high school, when I found a copy of The Mouse and the Mask, his Adult Swim-themed collaboration with Danger Mouse, in our local public library’s music section. DOOM went too soon, dying from a reaction to a blood pressure medication at age 49 on Halloween 2021, and the tributes were interminable. (Though sometimes eye-poppingly good: Cookin Soul's upbeat, crate-digging remix of "Hey!" played nonstop in my house and head for a week.) But New Jazz Underground's, a freewheeling, hard bop-inflected rendition of four of DOOM's classics, took the crown for me. If you listen to nothing else, stick around for "All Caps."

Appreciation Post: Jet Lag

Why would anyone appreciate jet lag? I spent the middle of the month on the Fjällräven Classic in northern Sweden, getting my internal clock ravaged by the twin forces of an eight-hour time difference and a sun that didn't set until 10 p.m. and rose at 3:30 in the morning. When I got home, I found myself going to bed at 7 with my 4-year-old and waking up 8 or 9 hours later in the pre-dawn dark.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Backpacker Magazine (@backpackermag)

And you know what? I loved it. I loved getting a few quiet hours to myself when I was at my most energetic and awake. I had forgotten what it felt like to have time to ground and prep myself before going into my day, instead of just rolling out of bed, slapping on clothes, and getting to it. I lost my fight to keep that schedule–I've gradually crept back to midnight bedtime. But I keep telling myself that I'll get it back, and I won't wait for my next trip to Europe to do it.