Every Friday
Happy hour at the Houston rodeo pondering the nature of reality.
Our texts the past few weeks have mostly been variations of “oh shit it’s already Friday” and “just cooked on the draft” post Thursday happy hour. Due to Relay quiet hours, this week features content from our various degen group chats: Creatives Only, Harris 2024, and Freedom Bender.
April and May are packed with weekends when the Relay boys are all together — or close to it — in New York or Nashville. Cheers to another weekend full of long runs and serious point farming at tonight’s dinner resy. Thanks to all 10 of our readers for sticking with us. Dive on in:
A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how".
— Victor Frankl
Most of the time if you need me, I’m in the fridge area. Even today I’m actually guarding the fridge most of the time, I set up my workspace right in front of the fridge, at both my home and my studio, so that if anyone needs to fucking get to it, that person needs to see me first.
— Action Bronson
Top of Mind
The More You Study Consciousness, the Weirder It Gets
If you take a carnivorous plant, or a sensitive plant… and you give it xenon, or any number of other anesthetics that work on us, there will be a period where they appear to be asleep, and then they’ll regain their ability.
So the fact is that plants have two states of being — at least two states of being — lights on, lights off. That, to some, implies consciousness.
If you’ve listened to any variation of mainstream podcasts in the last few weeks, there’s a decent chance you’ve come across Michael Pollan on his press tour promoting his new book A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.
Everywhere he goes, the pitch is roughly the same: consciousness is the only thing we know directly and the thing we understand the least, and Pollan has spent years chasing the people and experiments that make that paradox feel even stranger. No one is quite sure how or why, but the once-fringe idea that the brain might be more receiver than generator of consciousness is getting a fresh hearing in more corners of neuroscience and philosophy (the materialists aren’t happy about it).
There’s always a moment in these conversations where he hits the outer edge of what I can follow, and my brain just sputters out and pulls over to the shoulder of the mental highway. He veers into talking about pan-psychism (after doing a deep dive, I’m pretty sure its the basis of the ontology in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive) and while I only retained ~45% of what he was saying, I left the conversations more convinced than ever that we have next to no true understanding about the nature of reality. Cheers!
We Sent a New Yorker to the Houston Rodeo. It Got Wild.
I didn’t know then that I’d see the heir to our country’s most prominent cowboy family take a gamble and lose, and in so doing honor his name; that I’d sample some of the state’s finest wines mere moments after waiting in vain for a sow to give birth; that I’d search for an eight-foot-tall chicken covered in half a million mirrored tiles named Hennifer, who supposedly dangled in the daylight like a grain-fed god; or that a country-pop singer would pull off a performance that shattered my brain. That would all come later.
I’ve been traveling a bit the last couple of weeks (Texas, NYC, back to Nash) and every time I do lately, I’m struck by how everywhere is turning into everywhere else. That is to say, the development firms are all following the same playbook to turn metros into frictionless, aesthetically pleasing environments where if you turn your head and squint, you could be in Dallas/Atlanta/Boston/Nashville/Austin/Brooklyn.
Enter: the Houston rodeo. A Texas institution hellbent on breaking up the monotonous sameness of the modern sporting landscape. What other event can claim pig races where farm animals hurl themselves after Oreos for glory while also serving as a must-play stop for the biggest touring artists? It’s chaotic and earnest, but at least it's one-of-one.
ICYMI: Happy Hour Edition
Things have changed drastically since. Ebert, 33, of Silver Spring, is accused of intentionally driving a car into Williams Yates, the father of lead singer Brendan Yates, and leaving the 79-year-old with severe trauma to his legs.
The body is complicated. When experts give the public advice on drugs, they are trying to insulate us from that complexity. But there is no way to do that without making trade-offs. Society has implicitly chosen tradeoffs that mean certain “less important” facts are de-prioritized. It’s not obvious that this is the wrong choice. I feel foolish for not having more respect for the body’s complexity and for the difficulty of the task all the experts are trying to accomplish. This is not medical advice.
I wasn’t looking for them or digging them up, harvesting their stories before they had the chance to become fully grown. The truths about my life came from my deepest intuition. Things I wasn’t ready to say out loud to myself, but they found a place in the music.
Best of Substack this Week
This Week in Relay’s Shopping Cart
Classic Chef Pants, (Ian)
Easton put me onto Service Works recently. Are we still buying clothes that weren’t made in America? Some are saying we are not.
Burgundy wall sconce, (James)
8 weeks after this initially landed in the shopping cart and I still haven’t managed to secure one before they sell out. Also — turns out half of you aren’t a fan. Nevertheless, the hunt continues.
It’s Not That Deep, Randy
Thanks for reading—or for mega scrolling all the way down here.
The internet is an overwhelming mess of headlines, ads, and mid takes from the worst people you know. Big Tech owns our attention spans. Everything is content. Nothing makes sense.
We’re not here to “fix discourse” or “build a better internet.” Relay is just our attempt to riff on what we’re already talking about at happy hour without feeling like we’ve been hit by a content truck. Some analysis, some memes, call it a day.
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Still chasing that high from the first night at brets