I write things
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How Was Your Day?
Why do we insist on the question: “How was your day?” I know it’s a colloquialism. I know it’s intended as an exchange of pleasantries, where I say: “Fine!” “Well!” “Doin’ alright, how ‘bout yourself?” Then you say, “Good!” and we move on. It’s an exercise in acknowledgment, which I believe in. But, occasionally, someone asks it (…)
On The Absence Of Art
I cannot understand the world’s desire to “speed read.” My preference is to slow it down, sit with an idea and let it marinate a little. More often, however, I get taken hostage by words. I cannot get beyond a paragraph because the words render me powerless to turn the page until I contend with them. (…)
What Happened When I Stopped Watching The News
I have a secret. One I prefer stay mine, but I need to tell you the secret in order to make another point. So here we go. My secret is: I don’t watch the news. I don’t read the news, I don’t watch it, I’m off Twitter, I cannot tell you who did what where, (…)
Time To Think
It started as an ordinary discussion of books and life, but ended (naturally) with a fight about Emily Dickinson. Not the Dickinson you remember from high school, the one on Apple TV (featuring Wiz Khalifa as death and John Mulaney as Thoreau. I KNOW RIGHT.). In the show, teenage Emily refuses to participate in household (…)
Hold The Vision
There are two parallel universes emerging right now. One living in and with a pandemic and one merely annoyed by it. Day after day I get messages from friends and readers whose lives have been turned upside-down, while their newsfeeds boast of an unaffected population, still going to clubs and birthday parties and vacations to (…)
Write Copy You’re Proud Of
There’s a category of businesses I call “cookie-cutter” because they all look the same. You can tell who runs a cookie-cutter business because they’re obsessed with business “formulas” for scaling. And they do it quite well. If you want to run a cookie-cutter business it will probably work, at least for a little while. Books (…)
Copy Lessons From Ski School
When I was 5 my parents put me in ski school to learn how to ski. Five hours later they returned and I was a pile of tears. Not only could I not ski, I now HATED skiing. I had (and still have) terrible spatial awareness and my body doesn’t listen to my instructions. When (…)
My Christmas Wish Is A New Emergent Culture
Just skip a week. This is what people suggest when I tell them I’m tired. “Just skip a week, no one will notice.” They tell me to quit writing emails, not cook dinner, don’t go to the gym, leave the laundry on the floor, get a sitter. They say none of you will notice if (…)
The Right Words Can’t Fix The Wrong Strategy
A colleague keeps asking for my thoughts on promoting his book and I haven’t had the courage to tell him I could not get past the first chapter. In my defense, the book is already published, so my feedback at this point isn’t mission-critical. If the man wanted true feedback he’d have sent it when (…)
Pretension is Optional: What Wine and Writing Have In Common
We were in a cave. They call it a wine cellar, but it was a cave. Parts of it were charming and other parts were super creepy and you could tell that if the walls could talk they’d have had stories because they looked like they’d seen some shit since 1422. The thing I remember (…)