"You've got your own place, you've got a future, you've got a bowl full of olives next to the toilet."
The last sentence you read in the Daily Dispatch before my hiatus was, “…and why ruin a good story with the truth?” I have spent the better part of a week trying to think of a good explanation for why I haven’t written in four months. Whatever you think the reason is, I’m fine with it. Enjoy wondering, if you even wondered at all. Enjoy missing something, if you missed this at all. Unintentionally, in sitting down this morning to write, I realized, if someone went on their first date on the Friday night I last sent a Daily Dispatch, and they followed the Niki and Seth relationship schedule, they’d be engaged now. Kinda wild.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
After further investigation, that was, in fact, not the last sentence. There was a whole issue regarding details and vulnerability. Great issue. Highly recommend. I realized this error this morning (Friday) as I was finishing what I had already written. As you can tell by the fact I haven’t sent an issue in months, I’m a bit out of practice. After noticing my error, I decided to just roll with it instead of adding the below to the graveyard of half written Daily Dispatch issues. Yeah, I’ve been writing, I just haven’t been writing anything fully. Here are some excerpts from the cutting room floor:
- Sponsor: Tile
Missing nuclear bombs
https://armscontrolcenter.org/fact-sheet-the-missing-tybee-bomb/
/ Wikipedia is lying to us
https://media.npr.org/documents/2008/feb/1966bombdoc.pdf
(This was after I learned about how many nuclear bombs that have been “lost”. I still think this idea has legs, but we’ll just have to find the right angle.)
- I grew up in church. I’m still growing up and still in church. I’ve heard a great many sermons and many great sermons.
(I don’t actually remember what this was going to be. However, This is an important sentence for a few reasons. One, it’s true, but two, it was the last sentence I wrote before the hiatus. You all remember where we left off, right? We were really moving and grooving with this whole Daily DIspatch thing. We had honed in our voice and been just the right amount of silly and serious. I ended up grabbing lunch with someone whose writing I really respect. He was complimentary of my writing in a way that meant a lot to me. We discussed different aspects of life at that lunch. He had noticed that I mention my faith from time to time, I don’t hide it, but I haven’t written explicitly about it. It was more of a passing comment, I feel, than a request of any sort, but I began wondering how to write about religion in the Daily Dispatch style. It is clear this goal has not been met. We’ll figure it out.)
Enough of what could have been, let us move forward to what is. What is this week’s sponsor? We are going to do another vicarious sponsorship. We have done this before to avoid legal trouble, but this time it is for proper attribution of an idea. My brother Cole, also has a great newsletter of his own called the Information Inquiry. (He has also taken a hiatus before. I’m not the only one so back off. Us newsletter writers are not zoo animals for you to poke with a stick. We don’t wake up everyday thinking of ways to entertain you with our wit and wisdom. (sub parenthetical here: I do. I wake up everyday thinking of ways to entertain you all, I just didn’t want Cole to feel bad) anyways, end of original parenthesis.) In his Information Inquiry, he actually conducted an interview with a brand called Poplight. The issue is linked here: https://colewinton.substack.com/p/information-inquiry-your-news-today-82b
We are sponsored by Poplight this week whether they know it or not. Additionally, Picasso once said, “Look at a-me, I’m a-Picasso!” but he also said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” So, I’m going to steal Cole’s idea and interview someone at some point. If you all have any ideas on who I should interview, please let me know.
Ok, back to the issue. Do you even remember the intro to this week’s issue? Ah who cares…
Speaking of time gone by, my 10 year high school reunion is coming up this month and, sorry Lucas, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it. I know if a random stranger saw me, they’d think, “There is no way that guy could have graduated high school 10 years ago! He looks so young and spry. Was he a Doogie Howser type? Does him forcing a Doogie Howser reference into my own fictional thoughts betray his age? Wait, if he can literally write thoughts into my brain, does this mean I’m not real? I don’t exist… I was created as a joke. I was never born and I will never actually live…” But it turns out, I am that old! Despite not being able to attend, I have taken the time to click through some of the profiles of people in the reunion Facebook group. Not only was there the uniquely adult revelation of, “Oh yeah! I forgot that person existed!” and then memories of that person flooding, but also seeing how people’s lives have progressed and changed in ways I never would have guessed has been fascinating. When you only see a snapshot of your old friends and acquaintances once every few years, gradual changes look like abrupt, bizarre metamorphoses: when looking through the high school crazies now settled down and the quiet people now… less so, I felt like Community’s Abed getting a glimpse into alternate timelines.
“I have often noticed,” writes Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita, “that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind.” One of the things I like about my friend Javi is that whenever I see him he is always so exactly himself, in fact even more himself than I’d remembered; he always is exactly where you don’t expect him to be, is always with people you didn’t expect him to know, and always such a close friend to those people that they wonder why he’s saying hi to you. He is as consistent as a cartoon character, like Garfield on a Monday. That said, he will from time to time break character and do something truly surprising. When I first found out the complete goofball Javi I knew in college was also, in fact, a very financially responsible adult who had completely paid for his college on his own, it reminded me that people do have more complexities than we like to see. For some reason, I preferred boxing him in as purely the guy who once called our friend Jonas pretending to be a customer and wasted an hour of his time getting help finding, “A big ass fan. Like, the biggest fan you have.” or the Javi who once locked himself in our friend Austin’s room with Austin’s keys and phone causing him to miss all of his obligations that day leaving him with no other choice to spend the rest of the day with Javi. It’s easy to forget that we only ever see facets of other people, never the whole, and in those facets what we’re mostly seeing is some aspect of ourselves.
Years ago I read an essay called “The Referendum,” about how people look at each other’s different life choices (careers, marriage, kids, homes) with envy or disapproval, out of an underlying anxiety about having chosen the wrong life themselves. The essay speculates that by the time you’re past life’s midpoint, and your own life starts to look more like a resolved reality than a work-in-progress, your investment in defending or second-guessing your own decisions ebbs. Going through the Facebook profiles, I’m simply interested in seeing how everyone else’s choices turned out, what became of us all. I like it, for purely selfish, spectatorial reasons, whenever people do the less conventional, less expected thing in life, the same way I enjoy certain friends who aren’t necessarily “nice” people, because they’re like characters in a book who reliably make any scene they’re in more interesting.
I referenced the show Community and the character Abed earlier, there is an episode where the group has a dinner party and have to roll a die to determine who is getting the pizza from downstairs. What follows is 7 different timelines of their lives depending on who the die landed on. It is a truly brilliant episode. For contect, please see below:
The other day, a coworker asked me if I have ever tried writing fiction. We have dabbled in it occasionally in the Daily Dispatch, but my one real attempt at it was a complete failure. I once attempted to write a heist novel that was so flat and generic. I find it difficult to construct a satisfying story that resembles anything like real life. Real life seems to write as a long, meandering, pointless story without resolution, in which nothing much happens for long stretches, punctuated by the occasional incredible coincidence or improbable tragedy. It’s what Homer Simpson called “just a bunch of stuff that happened.” The best fiction acknowledges that characters are too complex to define and only bad stock characters are consistent and predictable. Great literary characters, like people in real life, remain a little elusive, their motives unclear even to themselves. The novels I reread most often are ones whose characters are credible, familiar, but exist just on the other side of comprehensibility. Every time I reread, I hope that they’d make different decisions at crucial moments so, maybe, it might all turn out differently.
This is why I have so little helpful advice to give younger colleagues. Unless your life has gone boringly according to plan, it probably isn’t a replicable sequence of intentional steps. It doesn’t tend to resemble a pathway intentionally following the most efficient route, but rather stepping-stones, a random scattering of happenstance that led you where you are now.
I remember, around high school graduation, trying to guess where people would end up. I wasn’t far off in some cases although, like most people, I made the mistake of extrapolating in a straight-line trajectory from the present, failing to account for the twists and turns. I imagine traveling back in time now to the eve of high school graduation to tell my old group their fortunes: You become a Child Neurologist (no surprise there; that’s one life that went according to plan). You’re an engineer, who has dedicated so much of you life to fostering children and now have your first biologically. You drift from one job to another while, it appears, trying to make it through life as an addict. Come to think of it, that’s a terrible idea. It’s probably a mercy that our future selves are quarantined off from us, that time’s firewall protects us from spoilers.
I’ll let Abed end this week’s issue:
“I don’t think you should. Chaos already dominates enough of our lives. The universe is an endless, raging sea of randomness. Our job isn’t to fight it, but to weather it together on the raft of life, held together by those few, rare, beautiful things that we know to be predictable… us. It won’t matter what happens to us as long as we stay honest and accepting each other’s flaws and virtues. Annie will always be driven, Shirley will always be giving, Pierce will never apologize, Britta’s sort of a wild card from my perspective, and Jeff will forever remain a conniving son of a bitch.”
