By Josh Gondelman — 01 Dec 2025

#160. Early Snow and You

The future (winter) is now (meteorologically).

A quick reminder up top that if you enjoy this newsletter, I'd love if you'd subscribe! I'd double-love if you became a paid subscriber, but what I'm really trying to do is avoid people being surprised I'm coming to their city for a show when they see my 50th social media post about it three hours before showtime when they could just learn here that I'm going to be in the area. Thanks for considering!

Hi everyone,

I hope you all were able to get some restorative family time or non-family time, (whichever is your preference) last week! On Tuesday, we visited Maris's parents to celebrate a milestone birthday for her dad. I will not divulge his age, but I will say that everyone was relieved when he declared it was the last time he'd celebrate by doing ten pushups for every year he's been alive.

I'm going to see my own parents this weekend when I'm back in town on the Aimee Mann/Ted Leo Christmas Show tour, which provided the organizing principle for the rest of my week. The initial run of four shows in NYC (plus an afternoon of rehearsal) was so much fun. I love the crackling sensation of things coming together and the slightly shaggy "we're puttin' on a show, gang!" energy onstage as the different elements start falling into place and settling in in front of the audience. In college, my roommates and I put on a weekly sketch show called Friends Like These, and my favorite shows were the ones where we came in just prepared enough for the whole thing to not go off the rails, but loose enough that we were still surprising each other onstage by improvising through unforeseen flubs and plot holes. The Christmas show is much steadier than that (all the musicians--and PFT, obviously--are such pros), but because of everyone's expertise, there's still a little wiggle room night-to-night to play around.

Starting Tuesday, I'll be zipping around the northeast quarter of the country with this crew for two weeks doing eleven more shows in ten more cities. I've never toured on a bus like this before, so I am eager to learn the written and unwritten rules of the road. I've got a lot of "grand" plans for myself (read a book, finish writing a script) but I have no idea how compatible those lofty ideals will be with bus life. I could be a totally different guy on a bus. Sleepier than usual, or intent on doing ten pushups for every year I've been alive each day when I wake up.

Key art for The Nightly on Hatch featuring me, Matt, Sophia, Jacquis, Kristen, and KP against a soothing navy background. — I am maybe wearing this sweater too frequently of late.

Speaking of sleepiness, The Nightly (fka Pillow Talk) the podcast I've been co-hosting for Hatch+ now has its own RSS feed, which means you can enjoy it even if you don't have a Hatch device. You can subscribe to the show anywhere you listen to podcasts! I've been working with the Hatch team (and the wonderful crew of co-hosts) since the summer, and it's been a really excellent experience. The Nightly is a 20-ish minute chat show that's designed to be engaging enough to be enjoyable, but gentle enough to fall asleep to. It's a fascinating tightrope to walk as a performer, and I think we're in a nice groove. I often fall asleep to podcasts, and I hope that if you're a person who does the same, you consider giving ours a shot!

Speaking of things I co-host: I'll be hanging out at tonight's Frankenstein's Baby show at Union Hall and then hosting the 12/15 edition with Tyrone. (But that show feels a million years away at the moment because of my upcoming tour schedule!)

A NOTE

In last week's newsletter I talked a lot of shit about homemade cranberry sauce, which was somehow the most controversial stance that has ever been taken in this newsletter. While I am not sorry for what I said, I do regret taking on this topic lightly, and I hope that longtime That's Marvelous readers (including the unexpected cohort of homemade cranberry sauce die hards) will forgive my flippancy.

PEP TALK FOR EARLY SNOW

Photo of a train in Norway plowing through snow. By Kabelleger / David Gubler (http://www.bahnbilder.ch). - Own work : http://bahnbilder.ch/picture/7697., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17355492 — How I feel leaving my apartment this weekend.

Throughout the northern United States, snow has started to fall for the first time this year. The news has been met widely, if not uniformly, with a resounding: "Dammit!"

Not everyone is mad at a late-November or early-December snowstorm, but there's certainly a feeling among many people that it's not time yet. We just had Thanksgiving. There's a long crawl across frigid tundra to manage before Christmas (and a shorter crawl to navigate before Hanukkah, but there's no built in downtime for that holiday, unfortunately).

To you, early snow, I want to say...you are right on time. A gentle dusting of powder (do NOT make jokes about cocaine in the comments) signifies a definitive change in seasons, a visible transition. We're far closer to the start of winter than we are to the beginning of autumn. Besides, it felt like 19 degrees outside recently (Fahrenheit), and 19 degrees with the trees bedecked with glistening flakes is so much more appealing than 19 degrees with bare skeletal tree branches extending outward like a wizard's creepy fingers.

And another thing! Kids love snow! In fairness, kids love a lot of things that are useless and annoying. They can't stop saying "6,7" despite there being no intrinsic meaning to their use of the phrase. Side note: I have read so many explainers of the "six seven" phenomenon, and while I appreciate the context, we need a website that's just a list of things you absolutely don't need to worry about if you've ever done your taxes in your life. Let the kids say their sequential numbers and their skibidi toilet, and fill those of us who do their own laundry in if something becomes a danger to public health. Until then, it's none of our concern, and that is okay! Especially those of us with no kids of our own. We are under no obligation to know what twelve-year-olds think is cool or do for fun unless we're looking for a gift for a niece or nephew.

Where I started going with that before being derailed by my terror at the passing of time was: Children understand the majesty of nature. Specifically, they understand that when decoupled from obligation (Snow day!) a little squall of winter weather can be delightful. When you are not worried about getting to work, or running errands, or entertaining your children who are home from school while you do your job remotely...a flurry of opaque precipitation is kind of wonderful.

(Editor's note: I do say this from a position of no-car privilege. One year before I got rid of my elderly Toyota Corolla, street cleaning was cancelled for two weeks on account of several consecutive snow storms. By the time I actually needed my car to drive to an out of town gig, it had been entombed in a frozen snowbank like Han Solo suspended in carbonite. It took two hours to dislodge my sedan from its icy sequestration, which was enough to make me curse snow, God, the concept of gigs, and all locations inaccessible via subway. So, I know your pain, winter drivers.)

Early snow, we may not be prepared for you, but in cases like this, it's never the fault of the one who's ahead of their time. It's the fault of those of us who are slow to adjust. It's incumbent on us to bundle up, enjoy the majesty of nature, and ignore how excited children get about a forecast predicting 6-7 inches.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I did a little editing of this pep talk request and added a nickname!

I am unemployed and don't want to continue my career in communications. But how do I find a new path if I don't have a passion?
- Communications Breakdown

I don't know if this will make you feel better or worse, but lots of people with intense professional and creative passions also feel adrift and despondent about their careers. I mean, I can't imagine it helps that much. "Hey, cheer up! It's bad for everyone, everywhere." I hear myself, I swear I do.

What I'm trying to say is, having specific goals doesn't always add clarity to one's life. For example, let's say you had an extremely specific goal like "make partner at the firm" (is that still a thing people want?) or "become the Pope" (we know one guy achieved that dream recently). Sure, you have direction and maybe even a sense of purpose, but every day you are not the Pope, you're failing at your goal. Or, even if you are feeling a sense of progress, there's still the nagging fear that you will fall short of the one thing you really, really want. I imagine actual Pope-aspirants are instructed not to feel that way, but that's its own hurdle to overcome, the attendant suffering that comes with desire. All of this makes me think that the ideal Pope would probably be a Buddhist, which is impossible for obvious reasons.

Captain Ahab had a passion, you know what I mean? And while aimlessness can teeter on the brink of ennui (wow The Brink of Ennui would make a GREAT title for a six hundred page novel where almost nothing happens), passion can take you to the precipice of obsession, which is a stone's throw away from a cliff of disappointment. Damn, I'm titling so many novels here. I'm on fire.

My assumption is that while maybe you don't have a driving force, professionally, there are things that you like and don't like. Even if you aren't an avowed foodie, you probably have dishes you prefer and ones you avoid. Maybe you like your greens bitter, or you resist the experience of eating a big old sandwich where the fixins fall out the bottom when you bite the top, and they get on your jeans and you look like a real chump. Maybe you enjoy grapes but detest artificial grape flavoring. Whatever the specifics, they guide you towards individual decisions and overall trends. You don't need a culinary passion to know you're lactose intolerant or that you prefer your chocolate chip cookies slightly under-baked. Sometimes those preferences are easier to cater to than an urgent craving for bread and butter pickle chips, but NOT the name brand ones, the ones from the place across town that brines their own cukes in the kind of barrel people used to wear in the olden days when they were broke. (No offense to any pregnant people reading this with specific pickle--or other--cravings they are dealing with.)

I bet you have professional preferences too, and maybe even ones that are simpler to honor than the immutable desire to become a hand surgeon or an architect who only designs jai alai stadiums. When in the day is best for you to be at work? Or, before we go down that road, would you rather not go to a workplace at all? Would you rather work with your hands or does that kind of labor not suit your body and skill set? It doesn't take passion to know that (for example) you'd rather be thrown out of a helicopter into the ocean than spend 40-60 hours per week in an office, or that if you tried woodworking, you might end up fingerless within minutes.

Even if you don't know what you want your job to be, you probably have some inclination of what you want your life to be like. And a job is just one wedge in the pie chart of a life. Just as you know by now in your gut whether or not you like hot blueberries, you probably have a hunch whether a professional situation might work for you, even if neither pie nor productivity is your passion.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Dan the Automator - "Broke a Couple of Rules"

I only recently discovered that Dan the Automator did the score for the movie Booksmart (a film I liked a lot)! A BlueSky user whose name I do not remember told me so after I posted that I was dismayed at hearing an MF Doom (well, Madvillain) song in a commercial for a Large Language Model. This other very nice person told me that they had the same experience with one of the Dan the Automator tracks from the Booksmart score. What I took from that was: Damn. But also: Whoa, Dan the Automator made the score for Booksmart? I looked it up and enjoyed it quite a bit. After Thanksgiving dinner, I played Maris a little bit of it and also some Handsome Boy Modeling School, but I stopped just short of firing up Deltron 3030, which I don't think she would like as much.

This song has a fun bounce to it in a way that reminded me of a bunch of late 90s and early 00s alt hip hop stuff that molded the way my brain listens to music. It sounds electronic but in an organic way. Does that make sense? It made me think for the first time in a while of seeing RJD2 and DJ Dangermouse at Axis (or was it Avalon) in Boston, and hearing Danger Mouse drop the Legendary K.O. song that interpolated both Kanye West's "Gold Digger" and his quote about George Bush not caring about Black people (spoken on tv to Mike Myers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina).

I cannot imagine this song will stir up this many memories for you, but I do think you might enjoy it!

Also, I (stupidly, although it's a fixable situation) never went too deep with Jimmy Cliff's work, but I saw The Harder They Come in a college film class, and loved the soundtrack (obviously). After Cliff's passing, Maris and I gave the whole album a spin on our drive back from New Jersey on Tuesday, and it was a lovely end to the night. Anyway...here's "You Can Get It If You Really Want," a pick-me-up song if ever there was one.