PARADISE FOUD

It's time to give tuning out its due. We all need a break from the group chat(s).

- INDRAN PARAMASIVAM

I’M CURRENTLY READING The Horse by Willy Vlautin, a novel that details how its protagonist, a depressed addict, is ushered towards the saving light of redemption when a blind horse appears at his doorstep one day.

The first two chapters detail a loneliness so crushingly airtight that even though I read them in a hyperpublic space—a food court in a mall that attracts a teeming lunch-hour crowd—I was powerless to fight off feeling the pain of that solitary life emanating from those pages. The only solace the main character experiences comes when he listens to music. As he plays a song he likes, he “vanishes into himself”. That combination of words stopped me dead in my non-literal tracks.