Leaving (One-Track Demo)

Love Is Gonna Be The Thing (One-Track Demo)

Low Down (One-Track Demo)

The Fiction Diction (One-Track Demo)

Long before music, baseball was Mark Lanegan’s first love. Growing up in Ellensburg, Washington, Lanegan did what most 20th century American boys did: he played pickup games until it was too dark to see the ball.

For certain music fans, it’s difficult to reconcile the counterculture lineage of an artist like Lanegan with said artist’s passion for popular sports. Billy Joel throwing out the first pitch at Shea Stadium? Sure, whatever, who the hell cares? But Mark Lanegan, the dark prince of grunge, a high school hurler with professional aspirations?

Episode 35: Daydream Reliever

Erica and I did not set out to make 2022 a big concert year, especially a year of big concerts, but that's what happened after scoring tickets to Nine Inch Nails' homecoming show and a shared bottle of wine led to an impulse trip to Long Island to see Phish while our kid was away at band camp.

We are not tourists of our own pasts, but it's hard to ignore the nostalgic tinge to these two concert experiences or the aging Gen X vibes – different yet similar – that dominated both.

Episode 36: A Portrait of Generation X as Middle-Aged Summer Concert Series Nostalgia Trippers

Holiday drinking is an international sport, a holly-jolly right for all. The Christmas lights go up and everyone gets lit, ho ho ho and a bottle of rum. I’ve suited up and worked my elbow every season since my freshman year of college, but for the first time in 26 years, I took myself out of the game until Christmas Eve following the last underwhelming sip of red wine on Halloween night.

Spending the season sober was a calculated decision, one I had been considering for months – for years, really – as I found my relationship with alcohol changing.

Episode 37: The 12 (NA) Beers of Christmas

Every family history has a few good “dumb shit” stories, when something happens that’s so dumb it crosses the threshold of stupidity into the absurd, and once it’s over the only thing left to do is laugh about it and file it away as another dumb shit story to be told and retold in the years to come. And when it came time for Travis and me to pick up our Rocco's Super Bowl sheet pizzas near the end of Dad's 75th birthday weekend, shit got dumb.

Episode 38: Bring Us the Head of Craig Brubeck, Who Stole Our Rocco’s Super Bowl Sheet Pizzas

Are you the same person you used to be?
The question was posed in the October 2022 New Yorker article “Becoming You,” and it’s an easy one, perhaps an inevitable one, for a middle-aged person to ask while staring into the real or proverbial mirror. Especially after moving back to your place of birth after two decades away.

Episode 39: Across the Great Divide(s) b/w Glory Days

We've come to the final(?) episode of The Suburban Abyss, a tying up of loose ends of sorts, featuring a long walk through the Streetsboro Flea Market, a short walk through our neighborhood in the leafy green nowhere and one big question I had not considered since moving back to Ohio nearly four years ago.

Episode 40: Epilogue / Goodbye Dirt Mall

Transmissions from the leafy green nowhere.

Music, pop culture, pandemic life. Yard work, remote work and the eternal quest for discount groceries.

A podcast written and produced by Chad Andrew Dryden.

Episode 37: The 12 (NA) Beers of Christmas

thesuburbanabyss

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