Reflections on a rough Winter 2024
Unemployment, creativity and the outdoors, and hustle culture.
Spring is here, and one of the pleasures of the past month and a half has been going for long walks on the nearby Clear Creek Trail and reading from one of the books.
So a lot’s happened over the last season: some good and some bad.
WHAT I’VE DONE POORLY: I lost my job in February, and honestly, it’s been a relief. I have been able to take care of the kids and the house, get more exercise, and write a lot more.
WHAT I’VE DONE WELL: I’ve turned a challenging situation into an okay situation. And it's an excellent situation. I’m freelancing a lot, writing essays that are doing well, earning some money, and writing a ton—as much as 20-25 pages a week.
WHAT NEEDS ADJUSTMENT: I need a new job, or I need a regular income. So, I’ve filed for disability. This is a half acknowledgment that I am—by law—doubly disabled, even though I don’t since I tried talking about reasonable accommodations from my previous employer, and it became kind of a problem. It became a whole thing, and I think what’s working out for the best right now is remote, freelance, and maybe some teaching this summer and fall. I’m up for a pretty good job right now, but I have several layers of red tape to get through to start the job, so I’m taking it with a grain of salt because I feel like the rug might be pulled out from me at any moment.
If it works out, great; if it doesn’t, I’m not surprised or disappointed.
(Checks email. Yep, the rug’s been pulled out from under me. Figures.)
That being said, this is always what I’ve wanted explicitly or done in this way—what I’ve always wanted, but I’ve finally gone all in with the pro-writing life. The list will be rolled out throughout this spring. More on that below.
Writing Life
The first thing is regular output, so I've started doing weekly Medium articles. Here are the full articles:
Toxic Productivity, Autism Edition. Thanks to
for prompting me to explain why Cal Newport’s advice is ineffective and really all about his ego and privilege.
What I'm going to do for paid subscribers:
I’m returning the week in review letters with what I read, listened to, or watched. Sometimes, they'll be visual journals, like this week I'm going to Pittsburgh with Meggan, so I may just put out photos of that trip; they'll also include the weekly friends-only links to my medium essays. They'll change frequently. Sometimes, they’ll be essays, Lit Notes, and other times a week in review with links.
I'm starting a monthly podcast that provides audio readings of the month's short story. I’ve been told in the past that my voice is calming and really interesting, nasally in a New Yorker way, but deep and calm in an outdoorsy contemplative way. So I’m going to use that a lot more.
In the chat-which for the longest time, I didn't know what the point was. It's meant to be a message board, so why have chat and notes? I don't know what, it anything, I'll use Notes for, or Threads, or Twitter. I think I’m not interested in any of them. But chat will have weekly writing prompts, and I'd like to hear from you guys on what you're reading, listening to, watching, etc. Call it our media diet club. I'm actually pretty excited about this part because I have a TON of writing prompts from my teaching days that I adore and aren't getting used to.
There will be discounts on books that come out, and, yep that means by the end of spring I'm going to publish a book, it's a collection of kind of Greatest Hits articles from my public writing before I was diagnosed autistic and ADHD.
It's called No Horn Blowing Except For Anger. It's pretty much all my New York writing, from CBR, Broken Frontier, MTV, my various blogs, my comic book on climate change at Walden Pond, and probably my Master's thesis on Grant Morrison, Renaissance Philosopher Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, and All-Star Superman. You could probably call it my How Were You Not Diagnosed Autistic Before You Were? book.
Finally, the fictional Stories From the Spectrum on my neurodivergent family will remain free because I think we need to move stories about families that are anything but typical Revolutionary Road-type stories. We need stories that aren’t about dysfunctional or abusive families, but functional ones that are a hot fucking mess. So I hope you'll join me for what will be a fun spring.
Fuel
Books.* West Heart Kill* by Dann McDorman was an interesting exercise in style and content for your general run-of-the-mill murder at a secluded resort detective novel. In the sense that this is a book written in the second person, then first, then as a play where the reader( us) is a character throughout, it's meta-fiction that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. And that’s always interesting. I’ve always been fascinated by that idea, and I have a proclivity for meta-ness in my fiction and nonfiction.
NONFICTION: Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood. This was really funny, entertaining, and meaningful, and it appealed to the ex-Catholic in me in ways I haven't expressed all that much. But I will probably talk about it more in a Lit Note here.
COMIC: Superman-Space Age. It's a rare treat that you go to the store and pick up a book you had not heard anything about and find it to be a classic.
FILM: DUNE, PART 2. As good as everyone says it is. Capital C-Cinema. The most notable thing I was completely absorbed by is the sense of scale that Villeneuve uses to show just how small humans are in comparison to nature. I think that's what really good sci-fi does-it compares human problems to be smaller in comparison to nature's scale, when you have both working together-like riding a sand worm-then you get some amazing things.
Feature: Scott Frank's profile in the New Yorker. I love these kinds of profiles that are full of detail on a writer's life. Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Logan are some of my favorite movies of my life so I dove into his most recent work and found alot of it a mixed bag. My favorite was definitely GODLESS which was a slow deliberate burn with a really great payoff.
From My Notes
I think my best stuff comes to me when I write and read outdoors. It could be as easy as my back porch or on a stump outside near the trail at my house or a hike way out of town.
I am about all of it, so I encourage you to try it for a month. I appreciate it, and so does, I think, my family because I've caused a lot of problems for them this past season, and I'd like to solve them in a sustainable way.
Thanks for being here.
Cheers,
Dave
From Griffy Lake Nature Preserve.