The Riff

Hi.

You would think with The Front Runner publishing in nineteen days from the day of this rager, I’d be eager to talk about that. I’ll save that for June 1 for when the book is out, I had my seven days or so in the sun, then slouch back to the bowels of Mirkwood.

But this rager has more to do with not feeling productive. Now, we have all internalized capitalism, this idea that our lives, our jobs, our bodies must be optimized for peak performance AT ALL TIMES. We are nothing but factories working the day, swing, and graveyard shifts.

Of late, the post-book funk has weighed down my ability to get anything done. Many days I reflect on what happened over the previous, say, twelve hours, and I ask myself, “What did you actually do today?” I rarely come up with a satisfactory answer, which makes me feel crummy that I’ve wasted yet another day of potential forward progress. My future self is tapping his foot saying, “Bruh?” My American-football-metaphor self is saying, “Throw the ball away and stop taking more and more sacks for losses!”

Forward progress feels good, but it’s also something of hedonic trap where you need more and more to feel like you accomplished anything at all.

Back in the old days of American football, before the passing game took over, teams would often run the ball in a style of play called “three yards and a cloud of dust.” It’s this idea of slow, incremental marching down the field in manageable, unglamorous, — dare I say boring — chunks.

That’s not sexy in our next-day-shipping culture. If you need to lose 25 pounds, it’s best to take two years to do it. At the end of two years, you’ll look back and thank your past self for that rigor, discipline, and patience. Same goes for writing and reporting … even on deadline (depending on the deadline).

Now, what “three yards and a cloud of dust” looks like to you is entirely your call. For me, these days, I need to write down at the end of the day exactly what I did so I have a record of accomplishment, lest I feel lazy (I’m not the hardest worker out there and I’m very easily distracted by bullshit: dishes, vacuuming, sweeping, folding laundry, various yard tasks, cooking, compulsive email checking [why, B.O.?], social media checking [WHY, B.O.?!], YouTube, Masterclass, playing Zelda, this list goes on).

But three yards is progress, though in the moment it doesn’t feel like much. Can I make five phone calls today? That’s 25 in a week, 100 in a month, 1,200 in a year, and if half of those yield a fruitful interview, that’s one damn fine chunk of reporting for a biography. But when it’s 1st-and-10 and you’re looking at that first run up the middle for three yards, it’s easy to dismiss it as not enough. But, after a while, you look behind you, and you say, “Damn, I was way back there and now I’m here.”

As you know, this rager starts here and goes up to 11!

The Books

1. Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange (Tin House) by Katie Goh

2. The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook (Vintage) by Hampton Sides

3. Fugitive Tilts: Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Ishion Hutchinson

4. The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex (Knopf) by Melissa Febos

The Other Stuff

5. Somebody is learning iMovie. I did a video here and here on the Patreon page, available to all tiers, even the free tier for the lurkers.

6. I started a weekly (podly?) podstack, a companion Substack that offers you a transcript download, either a riff or my favorite quotes from the episode, the parting shot, and a look back into the archives for that week. It comes out right around the time each podcast drops, usually within 48 hours. This holds me accountable to the transcripts for the eventual CNF Pod craft book.

7. I have to be careful about talking about my dogs too much lest I get lambasted for being TOO much more like Marc Maron than I already am. For those who find themselves deep in the woods, a dog might seriously hurt itself. So we got these dog sling things to “medivac” our furry friends to safety.

8. Steven Hyden wrote about the “most CD” albums. Not best, the “mostest.” You gotta read it.

9. This TED talk (This is What a Digital Coup Looks Like) by Carole Cadwalladr is sobering. Hat tip to Damon Brown’s Bring Your Worth TV for the rec.

10. David Foster Wallace’s 5 Rules for Great Writing

11. Some put the entire Tears of the Kingdom CD collection on YouTube. To avoid ads, just don’t have the window showing and the music will just play from track to track. I wrote a lot of The Front Runner to this playlist. Movie soundtracks were pretty key for me, too.

Book Events

Wednesday, May 21, 6 p.m., Pub Day 5K with Run Hub in Eugene. Three-five-mile run, then we head over to nearby ColdFire Brewing for a book talk/signing/reading (I hope not a reading).

Thursday, May 29, 7 p.m., at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, in conversation with Ruby McConnell

That’s it.

Until June, rage on, CNFers,

b.o.