Analog Weekend

Though we don’t always manage it, Courtney and I love to slow down on the weekends. Nothing helps that along more than the wee bit of friction created by the old ways. By which I mean analog media.

We celebrated Record Store Day by visiting Hitt Records downtown, and it was so encouraging to see how crowded the tiny space was with fellow analog media-lovers. We were overflowing the place, and the numerous bins and boxes outside on the sidewalks found us elbow to elbow (how could we not go digging for our next diamond in the rough when all records outside were $2?).

We came home with six albums.

They provided the perfect soundtrack to evening cocktails, themselves a sort of a testament to slowing down. Building the drinks, ingredient by ingredient, as opposed to simply popping the top on a pre-made drink.

But we probably reached our slowest on Sunday. Courtney had surprised me with a long-discussed luxury: a subscription to the Sunday New York Times.

Oh, what a luxury it is, and what a fantastic Sunday it made. The silence of two people reading, punctuated by the it-could-only-be-a-newspaper crinkling and rustling. The smell of newsprint mixing with the live-giving aroma of freshly brewed coffee. The reality (and slight inconvenience) of ink on our fingers — proof positive we’d handled all the news that’s fit to print.

What I loved most was how an activity that we’d envisioned as a quiet morning experience stretched out across the day. The afternoon patio-sitting was made even better with a stack of papers that had to be weighed down so they wouldn’t fly away in the breeze. Evening cocktails with a side of news. A few more short stories consumed in between monitoring the grill and dodging its smoke.

In the least preachy way imaginable: Slow Sundays are the best days, and if you’re lucky enough to indulge in the luxuries of analog media, they make for one of the best combos I’ve experienced in a long time.