Crimes against yourself
Plus rare underwear returns comet-like, abundant Cool Clothes intel & more
Enjoy our extensive new Natural Fiber Workout Gear Report.
We just dropped the smash-hit Spyplane Ultimate Bay Area Guide.
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— Jonah & Erin
Spyplane back once again. Today we’ve got:
Rare & excellent underwear returns, comet-like
A studio visit with one of earth’s best small lines, whose spring pieces are dropping now, and if you are, like, “Spyplane, how do I dress tight when it’s hot out?” this collection contains several answers
Chill ultrathin $130 sandals made in Vermont
Cheeky Adult Contemporary Musical Dreamscapes
And more!
Let’s get to it —
We spend 99.999% of our time here at the sletter celebrating the artisanal & the high-craft. But that doesn’t mean we deny the potential for encounters with poetry in mass-produced contexts.
Case in point: Doritos are disgusting. But a single Dorito? Friends, it’s an incredible thing.
Earlier this month I (Jonah) did a boyz weekend with a couple friends up on the Sonoma coast. We hiked, schvitzed, swam, cooked, played Dominoes, ate magic mushies on the beach, got sunburned, smoked perfectly mid Mendocino pre-rolls, and watched Final Destination Bloodlines. Along the way, we consecrated these “Dudes Kicking Back with the Fellas” energies with a well-timed gas-station-junk-food pit stop — and part of the haul a bag of the first “Flamin’ Hot” Lime Doritos I’ve ever tasted.
I avoid eating this kind of thing, not because I have tons of self-control but because I have very little. I’ve learned to set myself overly rigid limits, otherwise my defenses will collapse and I will regret the crimes I commit against myself. In this case, I vowed to cap it at a spartan 4 chips, spread across an hour of driving.
The benefits were twofold: 1) I didn’t feel horrible, and 2) rather than just nod off into a gorge-mode fugue state, I could lock into the delightful feats of engineering the chips embodied. The almost crystalline thinness? The tantalizingly precise “fracture force” of the chip under my teeth? Millions of dollars of PepsiCo R&D probably went into calibrating that, ditto the ratio of fake-lime citric-acid to sweet-piquant-umami red MSG dust carpeting. Marvelous.
I am not suggesting you eat this garbage. It will almost certainly taste worse outside the specific scenario of coastal Highway 1 in a psilocybin afterglow with the broskis. But I do want to acknowledge that not all garbage is created equal, and that those 4 chips were the kind of s--t to make a man contemplate the razor’s edge between restraint and abandon, euphoria and ruin. To ask himself, “Is it possible to spend more time perched on the euphoric side of that divide? Can I get in and out of the casino in the black, again and again, without the house taking all my money and ruining my life?”
It’s tempting to consider. But I think the opposite is true: that any state of euphoria worth the name is in fact a function of extreme rarity, and that any attempts to make it routine, as opposed to ritualized, are folly, guaranteed to lead to disappointment & worse.
Sick clothes, however, are of a different nature. It’s undeniably beautiful to mark our experiences of various Significant Life Moments by wearing special garments, yes. But beyond that, there’s no real downside as I see it to wearing an excellent garment “too much.” Quite the contrary, we’re on the record in our belief that a great piece only looks better the more you flambé it.
On that note…
Cool new clothes alert —