Hi y’all,
- After a couple of false starts I’ve determined that it’s too hard to write about how lovely and big and fun it is to become a father - and harder still to comment with any humor or clarity on the parts people warn you about in the first few weeks (lack of sleep, figuring out the schedule, getting peed on mid-diaper-change). So I’m removing that as a barrier to getting this newsletter out and simply quoting Elizabeth Stone: “Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”
- As an antidote, I’m reminded of a great Austin Kleon quote: “I’m convinced this is also true of writing: if you start with big, conceptual, abstract ideas about what you want the piece to be, it’s easy to freeze. But if you just start with a good sentence and ask yourself, ‘What comes next?’ the thing builds itself.” In the coming weeks I’m going to try to apply that to writing anything about this new stage
- For months I’ve been clearing things out to make space for a bigger life - or that’s what I told myself. Mostly household stuff that failed the “used it this year, will use it next” test and got donated. What I didn’t expect was that the habit would spread to my inbox. I’ve been enthusiastically unsubscribing from emails for the past month and it’s been freeing: a couple of clicks a day, and the gems buried in the Newsletters and Notifications heap have started to surface. Newsletters I actually want to read, notifications from causes I actually care about, the very occasional mailing from a brand I think is cool. It’s great, and not nearly the burden I thought it would be.
- This week, walked to our local outfitters in downtown Louisville this week, ACME Goods. Couldn’t recommend it more if you’re interested in discovering new brands or picking up something you won’t see on anyone else. As a little gift to myself for becoming a dad I bought a corduroy jacket I really like from Kardo, a Delhi label that works with Indian artisans. There’s a little pink flower hand-stitched at the bottom hem, and I love it.
- I don’t know why, but I really love that the lead singer of Nine Days (the band behind the NOW 5 staple “Absolutely (Story of a Girl)”) is now a teacher. Here he is in his classroom, talking about those days and playing the acoustic version for his students. There’s something in it (and I don’t want to project too much onto strangers whose situations I don’t know) about how all that glitters might not be gold. Or, if that’s too trite, maybe just this: he seems pretty damn happy playing for this audience.
- With our daughter arriving in early October, we’re skipping our annual pilgrimage to Moab for our Halloween camping weekend. It’s the weekend we’ve circled on the calendar every year, and we’ve been lucky to have so many good friends join us out in the desert over the past half decade. For those who don’t know, Macy and I actually met at a Halloween party in Moab years ago, so hosting our own has had an extra little pop of meaning. We hope to pick the tradition back up next year. It may also double as our daughter’s first birthday party, which is one more lovely layer.
Past Moab Halloween's
- Speaking of Halloween, this week’s music recommendation: “If I Had a Heart” by Fever Ray. Slow and plodding in an ominous, mysterious way, and a perfect match for the video, which pans over the aftermath of some kind of horror-movie disaster in a European mansion, with the hint that something isn’t finished. Fever Ray is the solo project of one half of The Knife, the great Swedish electronic duo, and this is the opener on the 2009 self-titled debut. They’ve put out great records in the seventeen years since (I’m a huge fan of the most recent, Radical Romantics), but that first one is still the one I reach for when it gets dark at 6.
Joey
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