Read it: The Captain's Newsletter, 2021-W17 - Brick by brick by brick
One man's exciting journey building a wall is another man's painfully boring experience as the first guy just won't shut up about it.
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Read it: The Captain's Newsletter, 2021-W16 - Give me the shot
When I walk in the club, all eyes on me
I'm with the party rock crew, all drinks are free
We like Ciroc, we love mRNA, lipids ((4-hydroxybutyl)azanediyl)bis(hexane-6,1-diyl)bis(2-hexyldecanoate), 2 [(polyethylene glycol)-2000]-N,N-ditetradecylacetamide, 1,2-Distearoyl-sn-glycero-3- phosphocholine, and cholesterol), potassium chloride, monobasic potassium phosphate, sodium chloride, dibasic sodium phosphate dihydrate, and sucrose.
We came to party rock, everybody it's on
Shots shots shots shots shots
Shots shots shots shots shots
Shots shots shots shots shots
Shots, everybody
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Read it: The Captain's Newsletter, 2021-W15 - Unnecessarily specific
Every week in the newsletter post here I seem to write some strange filler garbage. I don't know why. I guess it's the release of another newsletter, accompanied by the release of tension from having put something out into the world, however modest it is. Not today. I offer you a peaceful and bland post. Read the newsletter and/or subscribe, champ.
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Read it: The Captain's Newsletter, 2021-W14 - Get yr shovel
What do you do with all those alternate futures you hold in your head? Nothing. They don't exist. They never existed. They never will exist. Take a shovel. Dig a hole. Put those alternate futures in the hole. Fill the hole with the dirt you dug up. Pat it down. Yes. Good. Your alternate futures didn't exist anyway, but just in case, we buried them in the dirt. Now let's all go do the sensible thing and lift up a bottle of our best Irish whiskey and send those fantasies off to wherever fantasies go when they're no longer needed. Also: tomatoes. The newsletter is 50% tomatoes by volume every week.
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Read it: The Captain's Newsletter, 2021-W13 - Acrophobic
The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic, with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that we can write our Constitution.
—Kurt Vonnegut. Cat's Cradle (1963).
Who's in charge of the pollen around here. You? You? Anyone? Anyway. Someone should take responsibility for this mess. I was digging around in my Box of Drugs—not as interesting as it sounds—looking for some allergy medicine. Nothing. NOTHING. Ugh. I don't know who's in charge of the pollen, but I do know who's in charge of keeping his own allergy medicine stocked. And that guy isn't prepared. Ugh. No matter. We'll survive. We'll survive the best way we know how, by reading the Newsletter.
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Read it: The Captain's Newsletter, 2021-W12 - Good enough
Here we are (here I am) taking a big, long breath at the end of a grinding week, at the end of a grinding month, at the end of a grinding quarter. It was a good week, month, quarter, etc. But damn, I think I'm going to find another gear this next quarter. "Find another gear" is typically some kind of sports euphemism for "go faster", but I'm not sure if I'm feeling that right now. I'm looking at that big "N" by the gear shifter and thinking to myself, I wonder what that one does. I probably won't use it*—sometimes just remembering that it's there is comforting enough.
(*Ask me about the time(s) I've passed cars heading down into Death Valley via Towne Pass while in neutral. The ol' gold Pontiac Grand Am weren't called the Coffin on Wheels fer nothin'.)
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The Captain's Newsletter, 2021-W11 - The negotiation
Let's just survive until the end of this first infernal quarter of 2021. If we make it that far, we can make it as far as we want to go.
The Captain's Newsletter, 2021-W10 - The oneness
Wherein the author tries to make sense of the world by way of the one, true Boognish. If you don't know what that means, you're either missing out or not missing out, depending on whether or not you would like or not like the thing being referred to that you may or may not know whether you like or not.
That sentence was a mess. A shorter version is: I've met so few people who can tolerate my favorite band, Ween, and though I'd like to recruit you to the club, I also know that you're going to hate it. And that turns out to be, for good or ill, a fairly apt metaphor for how I live my life.
The Captain's Newsletter, 2021-W09 - Stuck in the bucket seat
This site is on the verge of becoming a garden blog. Maybe. I don't care. I think my favorite part of turning 40, so far, is how a simple change of number completely stripped away any remaining feelings I had about looking Uncool. That doesn't mean I was confused and thinking that had a shot at not being Uncool, there was just this lingering feeling—a voice, a nudge—that would flare up whenever Uncool things were about to be done. That voice got old and died. RIP, ye olde nag.
Read it. There are some links you might like. None of them are too serious—maybe one. Do what you can to get through the day. Take a nap. Have a shower and a drink, then start a fire in the backyard and throw a printed copy of the newsletter into the fire to propitiate the sky gods—do it before it's too late.
You can subscribe by sending me cash or putting your email in this form, whichever one you think I'd like more. No refunds, no takebacks, no unsubscribes.
The Captain's Newsletter, 2021-W07 - The duel
As I laying dying one day, I'm going to spend a brief moment thinking about all of the episodes of my life when I wasn't just wasting time—because a moment will probably encapsulate it. The rest of my life is just chasing one squirrel or another. I'm jealous, sometimes, of the people I've met who have achieved Supreme Focus while working on something. It's a beautiful thing. But sometimes I'm not jealous. The asides, the deviations, the sidetracks, the daydreams, the wrong turns, the missed connections, the strikeouts, the bombs, the faceplants, the wide-rights, the bricks, the clanks, the crash landings—that's where all my good ideas come from. Given the choice, I suppose I'd just do things right at the outset, but I've come to grips with being exceedingly good at crawling out of the broken window of a damaged plan and having Better Luck Next Time.
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