The Real City Is Still Here But The Clock Is Running

Permission to Think – $4 — The thing I wrote for people who can’t stop long enough to figure out what they actually think. A short book about the space between receiving information and doing something useful with it.

Supreme Second Brain – iNotion’s Notion setup for a brain full of loose information — A working system, not a productivity aesthetic. The most useful version of the second-brain setup because it actually has places to put things. (Affiliate link, the building takes a cut.)

Nashville Before It Finishes Becoming Something Else

The city I grew up in is becoming a brand. The real version is still here, but you can feel the clock.

Nashville ate what it was to become what it is now, and what it is now is mostly a bachelorette party with traffic and a bill that doesn’t arrive until you’ve already committed to dinner.

I live here because I’m from here and because the VA is here and because the rent, while it has lost its mind in the last five years, still hasn’t reached the full psychosis of coastal pricing. The bones of the city are good. The music is still here if you know where to look, which is not Broadway.

A texture change is happening. The kind that comes before a neighborhood becomes a brand. The old places get replaced by places that look like old places but charge for the authenticity. A honky-tonk opened in 2019 with intentional scuff marks on the walls. A hot chicken place written up in fourteen national publications that tastes like it was designed by committee and focus-grouped twice before anyone touched a fryer.

The real Nashville persists the way a river persists under a city built over it. You feel it on Tuesday nights at a venue that hasn’t been discovered yet. In the way people talk at a gas station on Dickerson Pike at eleven in the morning.

I stay because the real thing is still here.

I stay because I can feel the clock on that.

Where are you from that’s becoming something you don’t recognize. ~ J.D.