Hey, You, Catch Me Off Guard Please

One of the more rewarding aspects of getting a few of these newsletters out over the past couple of weeks is that it forces me to remember that old voice within me, however finicky, stand-offish, or outright silent it is sometimes. The fact that this voice is still there, still talking back, responding, and even having an opinion of it, forces me to accept that, after all this time, it still wants to get out and say something.

It’s good to know that it’s still curious and wants to learn, share, and connect for the sake of connection and not anything else but that.

I bring this up because I saw an interview the other day - not sure where - with the artist/rapper Andre 3000, who explained why he hasn’t released a rap album in almost two decades and, even crazier, that he may never wrap again.

"I love rap music but don't feel the same passion and excitement as I used to. I feel like I have nothing new or original to say, and I don't want to force myself to rap just for the sake of it. I respect and admire the new generation of rappers, but it does not feel like I belong to the current rap scene. I would love to rap with peers and friends, but that is not happening for him right now."

It hit me from a few different angles, the first being the airs of ego death from a statement like this. You can hear the stress and the burden society puts on this man to hold up a character he no longer wants to hold up anymore. I love being a writer as it is a medium to connect with people through words, language syntax, and stories. There is nothing better than that, but sometimes, the “benchmarks” (if I can call it that) that the industry/society/etc. actually, being a writer/voice puts more pressure on saying something than something of value. Secondly, and briefly, I’ve never felt I belonged to any “writing scene.” I’ve always done this alone and, in many ways, since my audience, however small, is a community I don’t think I’ve found yet. So, this loss of Andre 3000 touches on this “new rap scene” hits even harder.

This week, I want to do five quick things I have been stewing on (only a sentence long for each) and then a brief introduction to an essay I’m working on this week revolving around Albert Camus, French-Algerian writer, philosopher, and journalist, his book, "The Myth of Sisyphus" and how, in the face of the absurdism of life and meaning, gratitude can be an act of rebellion.

In this newsletter, we’ll cover…

Five things that caught me off guard this week.

A brief excerpt from the essay “Gratitude as Rebellion.”

Things That Made Me Look Twice

A video by the creator Ryan Dunlap about “productivity anxiety” stopped me in my chair. I’m usually a flicker of videos (I need to get off this shit), but I’d never heard of this term before, and the fact that 80% surveyed from the report were feeling this way brought me back to my intro from last week. Video here.

A story about Embodied Inc., the company behind the Moxie robot, which catered to kids, and the fact they went bankrupt abruptly ended these children's connection with these bots immediately. It's one of the saddest but most telling of the times moments I’ve read about lately—full story here with a very suspect old commercial here.

An image, this image above. I’m too tired to unpack it, define it, analyze it. Still, I’ll say the fact we force people to do these kinds of things, like dance around in the freezing snow and wind for the sake of a tradition from 1924 - for TV/community (?) - is clear how addicted and sick this country is on the fronts of media/consumerism. How cold is enough? How much is enough? I guess I did say something.

A fact that made me laugh this week was that the McRib returned to the McDonald's menu on December 3, 2024, a day before Bitcoin hit $100,000 for the first time in the asset’s history.

A thread from @NTFabiano detailing how writing by hand is generally better for you prompted me to start writing everything by hand this week. I enjoy it more, especially when I get going so fast that it feels like I’m having a bit of a lift-off. Complete study of that here.

Excerpt from the Essay “Gratitude as Rebellion”

On my work and writing desk is a pretty lame statue I bought from Amazon (sorry) of two skinny figures pushing a single boulder up a slanted slope. The figures are slim, skinny, almost alien-like, nothing like me. The boulder these two are pushing is large and wide with a crack in it, very much like me. Seeing there are two of these figures, I should probably denote who they are specifically in my mind: it’s me today and my younger self many years ago. Please don’t get too weepy now, but in many ways, I miss that rapscallion, that dare-do-well who had a few things to lose but many more things to gain. So, thinking of that time in our lives, I look to him in times of need to push my present self up to where I need to be today, which, having lived in life now for 36 years, feels more tightened than back then. Some days, the leader is me today, and others, vice versa, my present self pushes my former self to come out in my writing, work, and life.

I bought with the intention that whenever I was stuck, whenever I was down and wanted to give up and say fuck it all, I would look at this little statue I bought from Amazon and think, Keep pushing. Keep going. This is part of the whole. And where it comes from is the myth of Sisyphus, a legendary tale from Greek mythology about a cunning king who was punished by the gods for an eternal, futile task to push a massive boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down each time he neared the top. I’m sure we can all relate, be it in the way you may stare glazed some days, making the same over easy eggs, or how even your favorite music or song no longer brings out the same level of emotion as it once did. It's natural, very much in life, but hard to accept and see/feel. But that jaded feeling, that murky gray area, is a place I think we all feel at some point or long points in our lives. This led me to seek answers and remedies to get me back to a place of genuine gratitude which eventually got me to Albert Camus’s, The Myth of Sisyphus, a book about viewing the absurdity of man's life with the situation of Sisyphus and how gratitude, in the face of this absurdity, may be the perfect form of rebellion.

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