Freshening Up the Feelings

Welcome to Portfolio of Enthusiasms … 

Q: Kind of a strange name for a newsletter, isn’t it?

A: Interrupting already, eh? Let me explain.

A decade ago, I began working on a book about Jimmy Buffett and the long march of “Margaritaville” from a top-10 hit to something no song had ever become – a vast IP universe. Star Wars with palm trees. Marvel with retirement communities. It was the right project at the right time, a good time when I needed one. 

I had just turned 40 and been laid off from a job I loved writing about music for a newspaper. Before that I’d written about sports for the same newspaper. Writing for a newspaper is all I had ever wanted to do, and it was gone. So I was trying to figure out what that meant, and I thought if I could figure out how a song had so deftly navigated decades of change, maybe I could too. Among others, there was a three-year-old kid counting on me to find an answer or two.

Plus, Jimmy Buffett was a one-of-one figure in American pop culture. He was alt-country in Nashville before alt-country had a name and part of the Austin scene before it was The Austin Scene. He ran with Hunter Thompson and Jimmy Carter. He flew. He sailed. He fished. He surfed.  

He had depth that had been hidden a bit by success and branding (or by successful branding, I suppose). I wanted to try to reframe the story. I got to live on a sailboat in the Keys for a week and drink beer on the beach in Pascagoula, Mississippi while Jimmy stood a few feet away singing about his grandfather, who’d lived nearby. I saw Jimmy play his earliest Key West songs in Key West and sat in a windowless, colorless government office in Las Vegas combing through the transcript of the time he testified before the Nevada Gaming Control Board. I found a DVD of an old fishing documentary that never saw much of a release and ordered it.

Tarpon is a snapshot of Key West in the early 1970s, back when the island was cheap and when there was room to breathe and be yourself. On the top line, Tarpon is a fishing documentary, a love letter to sun-washed flats that’s religious in its devotion to fish and the art of catching them. But it’s also the story of creativity and inspiration and youthful energy. Buffett did the music. Jim Harrison wrote and narrated the film. One passage, which leads the trailer for the recent re-release, has echoed in my head for years:

“Who said that we go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms? So you try to seek out in life moments that give you this immense jolt of electricity. It’s a tranquilizer better than any chemical tranquilizer. So you try to have something that gives you this electricity and freshens up your feeling about being alive.”

Funny thing. Somewhere on the road my head twisted up that soundbite. In my memory, it was shorter. Simply, We go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms. That’s the lesser version. In that version, there’s acceptance: This thing happens and we just have to deal with it. Too bad. In Harrison’s actual words, there is defiance. Choose defiance every time if you can.

I’m 50 now, and I don’t much care about influencers. But there was controversy recently among the New York TikTok influencer set. Someone called them boring. All of them, apparently. A lot of people agreed.

“You do not need to know the specific influencers enmeshed in the discussion (though Vulture has a good run down), live in New York, or even follow influencers to get the point,” Mia Sato wrote in The Verge. “Social media is awash in people who look, sound, and act like their peers, often for money. This ‘drama’ is narrowly focused on one type of person, but it is a microcosm of the internet writ large: the most visible content online is just a slightly different version of something else.”

Liz Pelly offers another telling of the same story, different industry in her book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. “It is,” she writes, “the story of the twenty-first century’s overeager and opportunistic tech solutionists and their overhyped machines, looking around for problems to solve, arrogantly disregarding the social problems left in their wake. It’s the story of listeners being sold music more as a utility than an art form.”

Shorter: “Everything’s a casino,” Lizzy O’Leary wrote, linking to a Slate package on our impending national crypto scam. 

Everything is a casino and it doesn’t feel good. The people in charge of things don’t care about the things they’re in charge of — and it’s not clear they even like them. The would-be Techno Saviors dedicate their time to strip mining our data and our humanity and for what? So Sam Altman can try to be a bigger, richer asshole than Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or even Elon? (Good luck there, champ.)

That’s not a happy thought or a fair trade for that humanity, for the all the joys and frustrations of the world. Portfolio of Enthusiasms is my attempt to claw back some of myself — from these times we live in, from middle age, from the unending enshittification of everything, from career twists and turns that have pulled me away from writing the things I love to write about. I want my enthusiasms back. Maybe I’ll find some new ones along the way?

I want to talk to people about the things that excite them. I want to scribble again about concerts and games and books and sports and TV shows or whatever else is interesting at the moment. I want desperately to do something other than give in or give up.

And in the midst of so much darkness, I need to force myself to think about better things for a few minutes. I want a break — for myself and, hopefully, for any of you who may read this. Maybe we can even cook up a conversation as we go, a little something outside the algorithm. Or, in the words of the great Craig Finn: “A little break from the barrage.”

Thanks to Darren Cools for the Portfolio of Enthusiasms logo. Check out his design work here.