let's blog, baby

lol hi

I think the simplest way to kick this off is to tell you what we’re doing here. And the simplest way to do that is to tell you about two things that happened this fall. And I sure do love it when things are simple. So… let’s do that. 

THING NUMBER ONE

I had some health stuff a few months ago. It wasn’t a lot of fun. This is not exactly a shocking development because I always have health stuff going on to some degree. I have a spinal cord injury. (Power wheelchair, use of one arm and zero legs, the whole deal.) We’ve been over this all before in other places and we can go over it again later sometime. I only bring it up here because it kind of ties into the recent health stuff, which is… actually not worth getting into, partially because it’s hard to explain and I am bad at explaining it and partially because I’m mostly fine now anyway. It got weird for a minute there, though. Weird in the way where you come out of it and take stock of things in your life a little bit. Weird in the way where you look at what you’re doing and wonder if you can be doing more of… something… somewhere. That kind of weird. 

I do want to stress that I’m mostly fine now, or at least as fine as I was before. The only little thing I’m still dealing with is suuuuper crazy vivid dreams, which is probably a medicine thing, and which I only mention at all because I had one the other night where Paul Giamatti and I were chased out of my local Wawa by rampaging Mad Max teens with machine guns. That was actually kind of awesome. Paul Giamatti reached out and grabbed onto a truck that was speeding by and zipped off down the street dangling from it by one arm. I would watch this movie tomorrow. 

THING NUMBER TWO

The internet is changing. It was slow at first but it feels like it’s happening faster now. I don’t know if it’s better or worse or if I’m just the kind of old where I take preemptive ibuprofen before I go on a long car ride because “my back might hurt later.” But it’s definitely changing.

One obvious example: I’ve enjoyed Twitter for many years and still enjoy parts of it enough to stick around, but there is some noticeable “the host of the party is turning on the lights and starting to sweep the kitchen” energy over there. This is a bummer in a lot of ways, some of them having to do with losing cool/fun communities that have developed over the last decade and some having to do with me losing a place to share some stuff I’ve done for the job that pays for my rent and my onion rings, both of which I consider equally important. And I know there are other options out there, your various Blueskys and Threads and such, but it all feels kind of uncertain and unsettled so far and I already have so many tabs open that my brain and computer fan are both whirring a little too loud. Again, I prefer simple.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO…

…. uh, this!

I’m going to try out using Substack a little more going forward. I’m not going to blast your inbox too frequently, I promise. My goal is to send out a little email on most Sunday mornings — shorter than this one, hopefully — that shares some things from the week I wrote and/or read and/or watched that I thought were cool. There will probably be a silly little intro with some personal writing that doesn’t really fit anywhere else. I don’t have any plans to charge for it, at least not if this is all it ever is. Mostly, I just want to find and/or maintain a cool little community and update you guys on stuff I’m doing or seeing or reading that I think might interest the type of person who chooses to subscribe to it all. That's basically it. 

Two notes in conclusion:

• I will probably be bad at this at first because I am really just remarkably terrible at using new websites and starting new projects

• Yes, I do find it very funny that I had a health scare and my big takeaway was “I should start a blog”

Thank you. 

Stuff I Typed

— a review of the upcoming fifth installment of Fargo, which is good and fun and features Juno Temple kind of doing Home Alone and Jon Hamm in a cowboy hat

— my weekly Rundown column, with sections about the Golden Bachelor’s massive lion tattoo and the Mean Girls musical and my beloved Dollarita Steve

Stuff I Clicked On

— Kit Kat heist

— I do not understand the Michigan college football scandal at all beyond finding it very funny, but Ryan Nanni does and can kind of explain it

— My buddy Alan explains when TV will be normal again

— Four dudes were charged in the theft of a solid gold toilet

— Dan McQuade wrote about Princess Diana’s Eagles jacket

— The orcas are fed up

— Here’s a compilation of Jiminy Glick’s greatest hits I watched again this week

Okay, that’s enough for a first blog. Have a good week.