Sixty degrees in February, and it’s never going to snow this winter. Twenty boxes of salmiakki arrived from Helsinki today. Salmiakki is Finnish salted licorice, and it can range from a tart confection to shrieking gasoline. It arrived in the nick of time because I’d been fantasizing about smoking again. I miss those minutes of unique solitude, the ritual of fire and ash. The world looked better when America smoked. A tactile world of cigarettes, record players, and newsprint rather than sitting with scrunched-up faces, tapping at pieces of glass. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

The stock market plunged in response to coronavirus outbreaks in South Korea, Italy, and Iran. All day long, people have been on television saying we’re fucked. A trillion dollars lost in a day, they said, and the global economy could drop as much as twenty percent. I open another box of salmiakki and turn on the television so I can ignore it. Chipper commercials say things like “jawbone damage may occur” and “America’s most trusted home surveillance system.”

DJ Shadow – Building Steam With a Grain of Salt

From Endtroducing… | Mo Wax, 1997 | More

More classic salt.