slushy
on kindness, violence, and other things i liked this year
hello,
it’s been well over a year since i last wrote here.
i made a risky decision or three that tossed some of my stable (but miserable) foundations to the clouds — job, home, job again — my primary motive being: these toxic succubi shall no longer be permitted to ‘suck all the flavour out of my slushy’. anxiety gurgled, crossed fingers turned sclerotic, but those were the cost of taking a chance on making a life i like.
so far, i’m glad with where everything’s landing.
i missed writing this letter, whatever it is, so i’ve shared a list of favourite bits from the past week year-ish below — things that nearly made me start again a few times, so it felt a waste to not frankenstein them into one piece.
i’ll get back to the regular weekly schedule with ten three things i’ve enjoyed soon — but i’m starting slow & easy, in the hope it keeps me moving. let me know what you think & chuck me a few quid for coffee if you have it.
lotsa love,
daniel
one
i can handle
way more than i can handle
awards season — bon iver
i give myself to you
as long as we move
on the floor
dancers, hip to hip
dancing, cheek to cheek
(collide us as we work it out)
dancer — idles
two
‘you’ve got a fist of anger stuck in your chest — i hear it when you speak about what happened — that’s what we need to do something with’
as i leapt from the sinking ship of an agency being ‘directed’ by a moron who happened to also be a tyrannical man-child (yeah, that felt good), i thought: escape should feel better. i felt relief, sure, but i was fuming — at him & the agency & how corporate work sees people as tools & what we worker bees accept within this capitalist life out of deep-rooted fear that money’s all that keeps us off the streets. i tumbled dangerously into big, slippery thoughts.
rather than slam lots of sentences like the above through my keyboard & fling them his way (i may have already suggested fucking off in my final ‘chat’ with him anyway), i thought about how to best confront & process whatever messy knot of feelings i was living with. i tried a bunch. i told the agency explicitly that i wasn’t interested in freelancing as a writer for them. i recorded rants on long walks to listen back & respond to when my head was calmer — that was a new one, surprisingly helpful — and, early on, i tried something… else.
i told chatgpt how i felt, then asked it to draw that back at me. the above ‘lino print of someone on a bridge that’s on fire’ has been kept on this draft letter for well over a year now, i assumed because of some semblance of impact on me — plus i like the dark, choppy aesthetic.
it’s since occurred to me, though, that the slithers of information i’d fed it were direct instructions, positive bias. it looked like what i told it to look like. rather than pausing for a bit — mulling over some chaos of art, photography, music, film, literature, edvard munch’s anxiety, idles’ never fight a man with a perm, working out if i felt similar to feel seen — chatgpt had instead erased the contemplative journey. it stole the wondering, the working things out.
tl;dr — fuck artificial intelligence. i’ll use my brain & my time.
three
recommendations from Amsterdam:
kattenkabinet (or: the cat cabinet) is dedicated to cat-focused artwork from around the world & through time (photo below). we followed this with a trip to kattencafe kopjes, the country’s first & finest cat café, featuring fat cakes, good coffee, and plentiful cats wandering about who want to act aloof but really want to play with that string in your hand.
the number of van gogh museum sunflower series-selfies was a little depressing to see, but then art is often made to feel inaccessible — enter: audio tours, featuring some old bloke on a pair of rickety headphones talking about what drugs the painter was taking when they made this particular piece, then taking a seat for ten minutes to stare at something that caught your eye & seeing where your head goes. bliss. this, followed by the dutch masters immersive experience with fabrique des lumières (photo below & up top). the pairing of the two was mind-bendingly beautiful — learning about an artist’s life through their paintings & audio tour, followed by their work being projected inside all the walls of a vast warehouse space, with the dark mysticism of radiohead’s pyramid song complementing. it made me quiet-cry.
stroopwafels.
four
Can I turn here? Okay, good. I can? Thank you. But what if I don't know if I want to? Sir?
I just regret everything and using my turn signal is too much trouble. Fuck you. Why should you get to know where I'm going. I don't.
Think of the sound that helicopter blades make on deep water — fwumph-fwumph, fwumph-fwumph.
i got more from the story about mary robison’s why did i ever (2001) than the book itself. “She’d taken to driving aimlessly at night under the influence of Ritalin, chain-smoking, and talking into a tape recorder. Parked beneath streetlamps, with her sunroof open, she transcribed the tapes on an electric typewriter plugged into her cigarette lighter.” the story is made from hundreds of fragments, mostly a sentence or two, sometimes a few pages, seemingly thrown to the wind & jumbled, a few pieces lost altogether that leave pits & yawning gaps, but we read them in the order they landed.
it was bloody painful to read, but i respect the defiance against simply satisfying readers while simultaneously trying to “faithfully represent the chaos that is lived experience.” it’s, intentionally, a mess and — to be a bit on the nose — the chaos felt relatable. i cling to the idea that stories can start from any which place.
five
for this one, you’ll first need to go buy a ticket at your local cinema to see sinners (dir. ryan coogler, 2025) — let me know if you want company.
in one particularly memorable scene, one i think’ll stay with me for a fair while, delroy lindo laments while telling a particularly dark story. he starts to moan, groan, hurt out loud at the memory… & the sound of that pain slips into the first note of a song, entirely improvised by the actor (& supposedly nearly cut from the film). pain into art, right before your eyes. absolute magic.
(gutted i couldn’t find a clip, but here’s my review & the trailer below.)
six
Getting past toxic preconditions [of what you ‘need to do’ before doing ‘the thing you want to do’] is less a matter of being willing to step into the unknown than of realising that you’re already in the unknown. And that since the rest of your life will doubtless contain a mix of pains and pleasures anyway — in proportions you’re completely unable to predict — you’ve got less to lose by just doing the things you’ve been contemplating doing, or showing up for life in the manner that feels most sane, relaxed, and energising to you.
from oliver burkeman’s the imperfectionist letter.
“the secret of life is to waste time in ways that you like”
this from jerry seinfeld works, too. (shared by my friend, vanessa.)
seven
what a magical way to tell an important story.
for anyone who enjoyed the singers on the boat, you might enjoy árstíðir (‘seasons’ in english) — they’re an icelandic, classically-influenced indie-folk band i love very much, who i first heard on this viral train station hymn.
eight
in every job that must be done
there is an element of fun.
you find the fun, and snap —
the job's a game!a spoonful of sugar — julie andrews
my first run in a handful of years was along a sunny coastal path in greece, at seven in the morning to avoid the heavy heat. i’ve kept going at home since then, building to one run in the week, one on the weekend, occasional races for good vibes, and zero fundraising / additional pressures that make it feel like a chore — when what it needs to be is a chance to knacker myself out, catch my breath, and unwind at the end of long days.
that shift in mindset has felt like a small kindness to myself, so much so that i’ve applied it to weightlifting and, for the first time in my life, i’m both lifting weights & running regularly. it got me thinking about the gap between who i am, who i want to be, and how that gap will only close sustainably through actions i enjoy rather than immaculate planning.
now, i’m hoping to do the same with writing — pair it with some post-run tea, do it for fifteen minutes each time, something like that. ideas welcome!
nine
i’m trying to shift away from podcasts to audiobooks for listening material — i enjoy bathing in off-the-cuff, casual conversation, but it isn’t contributing much to the learning i want to do. that said, some i’ll hold onto:
last podcast on the left — covers ‘all the horrors our world has to offer, both imagined and real, from demons & slashers to cults & serial killers.’ guaranteed to satisfy your bloodlust.
dungeons & daddies — a (non-bdsm) podcast about four dads from our world transported into a realm of high fantasy and magic, and their hilarious d&d quest to rescue their sons.
60 songs that explain the 90s — first came songs for the 90s (i need to listen back through these) & now we have songs for the 2000s. ‘jump back to the clinton years or reboot your old iPods to see what went on.’
insert credit — ‘relentlessly on-topic smorgasbord’ of hard-hitting (only kidding, it’s mostly ridiculous) video game questions as addressed by a panel of industry experts. i actually watch this in youtube, because hearing video games mentioned without seeing them makes me sad.
insert credit asked an interesting question i’d love to explore further in future: what’s the most important thing you’ve learned from video games?
they exampled patience, water + electricity = usually bad, as well as the chance to explore other countries & cultures in (we assume) relatively accurate portrayals. at a speeding glance through my own memory bank, i thought of
klonoa taught me when i was ten that the people / animals we love can go away, permanently, without notice, and it’s hard to be okay with
call of duty showed me ‘they’ want you not to see some kinds of people as targets a hell of a lot more than other people
fifa taught me to pass the bloody ball if you’re not getting any further on your own
crash team racing showed me saturday morning playstation could be a space where me & my sister were friends again — and where being an all-rounder (rather than gigantic & burly / tiny & fast) won more often
ten
some other bits & bobs i’ve really enjoyed recently.
the ballpark they sit in comes from a recent urge to violently protect people & their creativity, particularly those unable to do so for themselves, but not feeling as though i know enough about why & how to do that. i want to think more & know more & do more with that knowing.
until next time, have a grand day.
daniel
daniel kelly is a writer & freelance creative brain.
he adores his two tuxedo cats, runs & lifts heavy stuff, shows contempt towards the pomposity of capital letters, listens to hours of audiobooks & podcasts daily, and uses the oxford comma — dashes & occasional italics, too.