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. On cue, our president tweeted, “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”—a reminder that we live in an idiot’s hallucination and our financial system is little more than a game of make-believe. 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.