a summer cocktail of a playlist

i'm thankful for geoff dyer, whose work i love and reread a lot and whose book paris trance i always reread every summer since the first summer i read it in graduate school (though i have not yet reread it this summer) because it is imo a perfect summer romance book (expatriates in their early twenties living and loving freely in and around paris), so good at evoking what i think is most wonderful about summer, which is the sense of time and space, the freedom (and freedom to revel in idleness and nothing) inherent in the slow motion heat mirage world. i'm thankful to look back at the summers we had in grad school with such fondness now and to feel so silly about how i stressed then about using that time productively on my work rather than just enjoying it (since i never got all that much work done anyway) but i'm thankful that i spent plenty of time enjoying it too.

i'm thankful that after finishing drowning practice and casting around for something easy at hand yesterday, i picked up dyer's travel book (i mean every book of his is kind of a travel book but this one is explicitly in the mold of "travel book") yoga for people who can't be bothered to do it, which i started forever ago but never read much of and which is not romantic in the way that paris trance is (paris trance is kind of an outlier among all of his books tonally/stylistically besides jeff in venice, death in varanasi, a book i half like but not enough to return to it annually) but is funny and complain-y and curmudgeonly in the way that most of his books so wonderfully are. i'm thankful that there was a chapter about miami, where i spent several summers in my twenties, and i'm thankful that though it felt somewhat slight and would not make my top 3 of his books (in order: 1. out of sheer rage, 2. zona, 3. paris trance) for the satisfaction of finishing a book in one sitting (i'm thankful to have been inspired by k who we met for dinner a few weeks ago and when asked about her day said she had read two books so it had been a good day), which is always a satisfying little pleasure, and i'm thankful that i also to have learned that he has a new book that just came out of which i wasn't aware and maybe i'll read soon.

i'm thankful that in paris trance there is a scene where the characters have a party in a small apartment and do ecstasy and dance all night (i think the scene takes place in the summer (and everyone sweating in the heat of the little rooms of the apartment) but that might also be just me remembering it in such a way that it better suits my mood (so smooth)), which is this really wonderful romantic rendering of an experience, and i'm thankful that the other evening after dinner we listened to this playlist clairo made that is definitely cooler than what the characters in that book would have been listening to at their party but which is such a summer cocktail of a playlist (i'm thankful that our favorite restaurant does a frozen cocktail they call the jesus and tequila) and one i'll think of (and listen to again) when i'm rereading paris trance this summer, will imagine into the texture of the book (i'm thankful for how the process of reading fiction involves our brains filling in details from our own experience to enrich the world and make it feel more real also makes the book more our own, tangling up our sense memories with those of the characters).