Hi,

I’m starting things this week with a quick expression of gratitude. There’s a “milestone” birthday coming up fast and, as you’ve probably already noticed, it’s got me even more thinky than usual about who I am, where I am, and who’s along for the ride. I’ve been thinking a lot about how lucky I am to have such a kind and supportive audience with whom to share my thoughts. So thank you. Keep me honest and let me know how I can do better, but thank you for all the incredibly encouraging notes you’ve sent so far.

Moon pie

Though I missed writing about it last week, I wanted to touch on the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11. Like so many armchair space enthusiasts, the entire space program of the 1960s has fascinated me for years—the heroism of both the famous and unknown participants, the mixture of pragmatic engineering and wide-eyed dream, the long-lost unity I occasionally imagine must have held the nation enthralled.

If you’re like me and can’t get enough space, particularly Apollo, I encourage you to read through the epic Apollo Flight Journal or Apollo Lunar Surface Journals. There is enough geek material there to last you until the next moon shot. I first learned of these awesome resources from the equally awesome and much more digestible retrospective at Ars Technica.

The best book I’ve personally read about Apollo is the excellent Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, by Craig Nelson (not that Craig Nelson). I love this book, and can also recommend the Audible version.

It seems like every marketing conference I’ve been to in the past few years has featured at least one talk by David Meerman Scott. And Mr. Scott has recently published Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program, which looks excellent. While speaking on Marketing the Moon at the BMA conference this year, Mr. Scott showed off some jaw-dropping Apollo memorabilia from his personal collection—stuff I can’t imagine owning, much less feeling comfortable taking on the road.

(Sidebar: He’s also published Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History, so I also imagine he and I would make for pretty sympatico pals. David! Let’s hang!)

While we’re at it, here’s a fun article on Apollo 11’s Scariest Moments and, of course, a cool infographic on the Apollo missions.

Just a bunch of really good links

• A friend of mine posted a link to this article to his site, Reforming Faith, and it really struck a chord: “Unacceptable: What it’s like to be a Liberal Christian in a Sea of Conservativism”
• There’s two kinds of people in this world (and I’m one of ’em): people who love Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon and people who think it’s creepy. I’m a little of both, but if you’re more the former, don’t miss Aimee Bender’s appreciation in the NYT.
• Robin Sloan is a terrific writer and he’s written the definitive Medium thinkpiece on Minecraft.
• Anthony Bourdain continues to really intrigue me. I can’t tell if I love him or hate him or envy him—which I guess is what makes him such a perfect intellectual cypher. Anyway, Dave Pell linked to this great interview with Bourdain, “Exploring Simple Pleasures in a Very Complicated World.”
• At the risk of my coworkers reading anything into this link, I loved this piece from Jezebel, “The Key to Greater Work Happiness Is Taking and Giving Less Shit,” riffing on a HBR article by Greg McKeown:
  

  But overall, McKeown’s message is beautifully simple: Don’t let anyone give you too much of their shit, and don’t give anyone else too much of your shit. LESS SHIT. Less shit is key to everything you guys (except actual bowel movements or maybe things requiring fertilizer. ANYWAY).

On that note…

Next week I’m planning to dump lots of 40s at you, and I don’t mean Olde English. While you’re waiting, here’s the Chicago Tribune from 40 years ago today (hack this URL to explore any date: archives.chicagotribune.com/YYYY/MM/DD/ – thanks Angie!).

Talk to you soon!

Mike

Let’s think of this week’s letter as the B-side to last week’s somber reflection on loss. In fact, as Erin McKeown sang on “Slung-Lo,” “I’m turning this B-side around to a de-light.”

Newton’s First Law of Motion

Three weeks ago I asked my mom what she wanted to do to celebrate her birthday this year and without a moment’s hesitation she replied, “you could take me zip lining.”

Mind, this is no adrenaline junky grandma we’re talking about. Though prone to a lead foot behind the wheel, my mother is typically more likely to remind you not to fall than to encourage you over a ledge. Yet here she was, ready to start her 85th year on Earth, and her first in more than half a century without my dad, by taking an actual leap into something new, something dangerous, to prove to herself that she could.

Sometimes the parables write themselves.

Now I’m standing on a metal platform 70 feet above a Wisconsin Dells resort, tethered twice to a zip line stretching hundreds of feet ahead toward a similar platform obscured by yearning leaves and the tops of trees beneath me. Waiting to step into warm July air, I watch mom recede into the distance, the cable thrumming a science-fictional frequency.

For a moment, I’m unsure whether my well advertised height anxiety will keep me from following this remarkable woman ahead into something new. If she can do this…

Our guide gives the go-ahead, flips open the gate, and I push off into nothingness. I can feel the cable flex with my weight and I am zipping! My thoughts leap from fear into joy.

Much of the next 45 minutes or so is a blur. Waving to my wife and kids. Knocking my foot on the top branch of a tree. Once again, a child learning lessons from a mother, learning that doing is almost always better than not-doing.

Ok. More words and links next week. But since it is stuck in my head now, and the chorus seems appropriate this week, here are more lyrics from “Slung-Lo.” (If you’re not familiar with Erin McKeown, do check out her work!

“She was so down, look at her now

She’s never been so high!

Everyone knows, give it some time

The clouds’ll clear the sky!”

Have a great week!

Mike

You are in for a real grim treat today, as you’re invited to join me in working through some of my grief over my father’s death this past February. Consider this your “trigger warning.” If you’re feeling sensitive to the topics of death or loss you may want to archive today’s letter and wait ’til next week.

Sometime in the past two weeks, someone arranged for three matching marble slabs—one fully carved for my dad, one partial for my mom, and one to memorialize my stillborn brother—to be lifted onto an unmarked truck and driven to a cemetery in northern Illinois.

Another person signed for the stones. Sometime later still, a small group installed (Planted? Deposited?) the headstones onto their own final resting place. I wonder if these were the same young men who tried hard not to meet my eye while they waited for me to leave my father’s freshly dug grave after lowering the casket. Those three worked hard on that cold February morning, but with the efficiency of practice, gloved hands working the machines, quietly instructing each other like lovers. Then another pulled up in a dump truck to fill that unfillable hole with sand.

I remember thanking those guys as we walked through the snow back to the car. They seemed unaccustomed to being acknowledged, but grateful.

So many layers to descend. Under the sand a concrete vault, the lid painted a strange bronze color, his name etched on a plate beneath a brass cross, entombed. Not two weeks after the burial we received a postal offer to purchase an extended warranty for the vault, the most ridiculous mail I’ve ever opened.

Deeper.

Inside the reinforced concrete that will protect the shape of the cemetery (if not it’s contents, warranty or not) is a sleek and heavy casket. The outside is carved from solid pecan, grown in West Virginia, and made by hand. What an honor it must feel to make such a thing. To turn a tree into art that will only be displayed for a day or two, and yet last in the mind forever.

The wood is remarkably beautiful and warm to touch. A small sliver of Scotch tape remains on the lid where flowers were draped and attached. The whole assembly is heavier than I ever imagined possible, and locks with the turn of a brass key.

Inside that work of art now, a satiny sheet covers his body, a mummy, this pharaoh. And like a pharaoh we send him on with memories and gifts: cards, letters, and pictures, including two valentines from my mother marking the day he proposed and this day he is buried.

A dark suit, his only, is artfully arranged over him. White Oxford cloth shirt cinched close at the neck by the silver tie he wore on his wedding day. The scent of summer sweat and commuter rail mixed with worn cotton is a smell that takes me instantly back to him arriving home from work during childhood summers, brown briefcase in his hand, the combination to the lock our street address.

This, tangled with stale cigarette smoke, was the scent of my father, not the unwashed body/detergent/urine smell of his last days so much like a baby’s first. Not the cloying floral of the room or the mortuary cosmetics on his cold, waxy skin.

Deeper.

Beneath that still, I suppose there must still be adenocarcinoma filling his chest, alongside the implanted defibrillator that saved his life twice in the year it lived within him, somberly deactivated only hours before his death by a rattled but respectful representative from the manufacturer. Poor guy couldn’t get out of that house fast enough, but who could blame him?

“Johnny, gonna need you to take a short lunch today. You’re needed at a deathbed vigil to remote-wipe an ICD so it won’t painfully try to revive a man who simply can live no more.”

I thanked him too.

Deeper still, is there anything more? Anything left now that we have traveled from pristine black granite through earth and concrete and wood and cloth and finally through to corrupt and spent flesh? Have we found all there is to touch and feel?

A father. A husband. A grandpa. A son. A man. A boy. All these roles and forms that make a human being and that we cage within a single name, maybe two, as if it were so simple to define so much that was in the end, simply, Phil. Dad.

Surely we know that a name is mere shorthand for something more, though it is what remains, facing the sky forever.

Grace notes

• Before moving briefly to New York in 1996, I joked that everything I knew about the city came from listening to Lou Reed. Until fairly recently, that was also true of grief. Reed’s beautiful record “Magic and Loss” makes for worthy accompaniment to struggling with thoughts such as these.
• We now live in a world with no living Ramones. They Might Be Giants’ John Flansburgh penned a fitting tribute to Tommy Ramone, and the band’s legacy,in Slate.
  

  “A Ramones song cannot be unheard. The Ramones changed the pH balance of rock music’s pond water. Their existence challenged everyone else’s. They’re not part of a school. They built the building.”

• Let’s close for the week with the art of the Dad-joke, perfected: Nice one, Dad.

Thanks for reading this week. TTYS!

Mike

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When I was avoiding writing this newsletter, fearful of committing to something I hadn’t yet found the true shape of, this was the issue that kept me from starting. A letter where I’m not sure what to say, where I haven’t squirreled away themed links ahead of time and Sunday night approached with a blank text file and a family that would prefer my attention.

Before too long the familiar voice appears—the Welsh Troll as Roderick would call it—and I’m wondering what I’m even doing. What possible purpose this letter can serve when there is such a magnificent renaissance of good writing and good email letters out there.

So I keep writing. And editing. And reading the links I’ve saved. Then I come across a particularly inspiring piece from Gwenda Bond, whose writing I’ve followed on and off for years since my first nascent attempts at being a bookblogger. The essay, “Ten Reasons To Keep Your Eyes On Your Own Paper (Or, Go Team Writers),” hit me like a ton of bricks and reminded me that one of the main reasons I committed to this letter in the first place was simply to force myself to put pixels on the page.

Bond writes:

The only answer to all these questions is to keep writing and see. Keep trying to get better. Keep your eyes on your own paper. All writing careers are icebergs–there’s more happening than what you see above the surface–but I can guarantee you that any news that would make you envious or sad or disappointed is probably the result of the person doing one key thing: Writing.

So I keep writing.

And much of what I’ve written tonight is no longer in this letter, though I hope you’ll read it somewhere else eventually.

Along the way, here are some links that have kept me entertained or distracted this week. I hope they’ll tide you over too.

• A stunning real-time data visualization (I won’t say infographic. I won’t say infographic.) of how bananas America’s online and offline consumption habit is. (In the two minutes it took me to write this bullet, McDonald’s sold over 3,500 burgers and Amazon sold over $200k in merchandise.)
• Life shaman Alton Brown’s Top 5 Tactics to Make Steak
• This awesome piece from Mauricio Estrella details how he used the repetition of typing his computer password to change his life. I love this idea, and have practiced something similar for awhile, ever since I started using passphrases in addition to random character strings for passwords.
• If that last link was too positive and you need a reason to both marvel and despair, take note that the dead trees and fallen leaves near Chernobyl aren’t decaying.

A gallery in your pocket

If you’re interested in how technology and culture play together (and if you’re reading this newsletter I sincerely hope you are, or you’re going to eventually get bored), don’t miss “Ways of Seeing Instagram,” Ben Davis’ exploration of art theory (specifically John Berger’s Ways of Seeing as influenced by Walter Benjamin) in the age of social networking.

Davis asks, “Isn’t it striking that the most-typical and most-maligned genres of Instagram imagery happen to correspond to the primary genres of Western secular art? All that #foodporn is still-life; all those #selfies, self-portraits.”

Quoting Davis at length:

Technology has so democratized image-making that it has put the artistic power once mainly associated with aristocrats—to stylize your image and project yourself to an audience as desirable—into everyone’s hands. (Although the parallel to art as “celebration of private property” is probably most vivid in the case of those who most closely resemble modern-day aristocrats. See: “Rich Kids of Instagram”). But images retain their function as game pieces in the competition for social status. “Doesn’t this look delicious?” “Aren’t I fabulous?” “Look where I am!” “Look what I have!”

Interesting stuff, for sure. I’ll spare you my thoughts, however, on John Berger’s quoted prediction in the piece, “that Instagram, or other things like it, ‘should replace museums.’” Yeah, right.

Inside your Fuego, we keep it rolling

I know this is an unpopular opinion in some parts, but I’ve enjoyed the music of Phish for more than twenty years. And while I won’t apologize for some of their more ridiculous moments and their self-idulgent streak, they do still manage to make some pretty good music that melts improvisation with tight composition. They have a new album out, Fuego, and here’s good HD footage of the title track performed on the Fourth of July in Saratoga Springs, New York.

What else?

Okay: links, music, art. Books? I’m currently enjoying the second installment in Jeff Vandermeer’s super weird, extremely compelling Southern Rech trilogy, Authority.
Vandermeer is a great writer and champion of New Weird. If you’re into fiction that asks way more questions than it answers, start with Annihilation, strap in, and enjoy the ride.

Alright, my dears, let’s agree to kick some serious ass this week. Sound like a plan? Good. See you soon.

Mike

(Feel like writing back? Just reply to mike@morrow.io or tweet @mikemorrow.)

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