7/27/17

i'm thankful for the food, which was amazing. i'm thankful for freshly baked sourdough bread with a quenelle of airy tangy butter. i'm thankful for sashimi with melon and citrus. i'm thankful for pork buns (which we got an extra order of) and i'm thankful for karaage chicken. i'm thankful to tell the waitress "we would like one of each of the desserts"—i'm thankful for panna cotta floating in a pool of macerated strawberry juice and chocolate mouse surrounded by espresso mulch. i'm thankful that i took a risk and had a cocktail (bierschnaps, chocolate milk, black cherry club soda) because the place has great cocktails and i'm thankful that it didn't make me sick.

i'm thankful that we got home from walking back from the restaurant and, satiated and sweaty, laid on the floor of our bedroom naked under the ceiling fan listening to music for a long time. i'm thankful that we listened to a lot of different things but mostly lana. i'm thankful for how many of lana's songs have perfect escalations from verse to bridge to chorus or verse to chorus to bridge, how there's the sense that a given section is really pretty and then it cuts to a prettier section and then an even better one kicks in. i'm thankful for the rule of threes.

i'm thankful for something d noticed about her voice, which is that when she's singing a chorus with those massed unison harmonies it's like she's exhaling a thick stream of smoke. i'm thankful for "groupie love," whose chorus is one of the sweetest sounding on the album and am thankful for rocky's verse later on, which on genius people are saying is him rapping from lana's perspective as his fan (https://genius.com/12386947) but which to me is actually him talking about him being her fan, which is maybe a projection but is how i'd rather imagine it.

i'm thankful for "pleasure" by feist, which i didn't appreciate at first but which d has won me over to. i'm thankful for the way in that song two thirds of the way through a wind section kicks in, floating over the wrenching sweaty distorted guitar. i'm thankful that the play with textures makes me think of found art installations and also the beatles (i'm thankful for strawberry fields, forever). i'm thankful for the varieties of space in the song.

i'm thankful to have played d jim james's "a new life," which is a hopelessly uncool wedding dance of a song but one which i secretly find very beautiful and which i think about our relationship while listening. i'm thankful for "wordless chorus," which is d's favorite my morning jacket song. i'm thankful for the high falsetto wails (except joyful and wail isn't the right word for that but i don't know what the right one is) which feel like a kind of love. i'm thankful we fell asleep full and happy.