Dear Allies,
I checked and it has been four years since I sent a newsletter. (HI.) July 2017: I was advertising a vinyl release, my first on One More Revolution Records. Since then: two more vinyl releases and one CD/digital thing (with Jason!). A full-time teaching job. <<Ok, listing all the things that have happened in four years is a losing strategy, especially in this very first substacked version of my newsletter.>> Also, if you visited the above you would see all of those releases. Still some left of that first one from 2017, but not many. Abundance of other releases, though! Get excited?
**By the way, I am hoping that your opt-in to my updates and such also extends to this updated version of my updates and such. But if I am mistaken about that, please do let me know and I will expunge your contact information from my iBrain.**
Back to the matter at hand: getting back in touch, (How are you?) and negotiating the pleasure of writing things down, discovering what one thinks in so doing, with the very real awareness of crowding the airwaves/stealing focus/being generally annoying. It was very different at that four-years-ago moment, when I would basically not shut up. About the election (you might remember the one I mean), about my new label (above), about Newfound Awarnesses and the delight (odd, I think) in articulating them.
The warring impulses to be everywhere and to disappear. The want of a middle path, and here we are. What guides me at best is something my friend Josh Quillen said at a SōSI talk a long time ago. What if all your “stuff” was actually about making someone’s day better? What if that were the motivation?
So here’s a recent thing I wanted to share, a piece of writing that seemed to offer something to new friends, and maybe it would offer something to old friends, as well. And it catches you up on something I have been up to increasingly (just sitting there).
One more thing I wanted to share, which is that I sat outside on the deck last night, by the fire table, with the rope lights turned on, and that is certainly not something I typically do during the workweek because I am busy shouldering imaginary burdens and couldn’t possibly. But that little thing cracked open a space, a gap, and made me realize that there is more room than I think, more freedom than I think. So I suppose I wanted to invite you onto the proverbial deck, under the proverbial rope lights, by the proverbial fire, on a school night.
Exes and ohs,
A