In the latest installment of the actually awful day I am having, I stepped outside for a walk and heard a song I recognized: "Highwayman" (1985), performed by the eponymous outlaw country supergroup. I used to fall asleep to that record as a child, along with Greg Brown and Gordon Bok. After a Doppler moment, I realized it was emanating from the couple of young men biking up the street, I assume streaming it off one of their phones. It must have come on the radio. They were not listening to it because they liked it. As they passed me, they were scoffing about how bombastic and pretentious it is for a genre that is basically all about sad dudes and their trucks. Aside from my personal protectiveness toward the song and factual disagreement with several of the premises contained in that statement, it was an unreal experience, like overhearing a parody of hipsters who dislike country music on class principle and have never heard Rhiannon Giddens or Orville Peck or David Allan Coe's "You Never Even Called Me by My Name" (1975). There is so much macro-suck in the world, why does anyone need to contribute the micro? I played Crooked Still's "Did You Sleep Well?" (2008) to clear the specter of sad truck dudes and discovered the band just cameoed on The Last of Us (2023–), soundtracking a beat of queer romance. My dinner of fancy tinned fish on toasted hunks of sourdough would have felt more successful if I had not sliced one of my fingers open while explicitly trying not to damage my other hand further.