Not a lot of gas in the tank at the end of this past week.

There’s something about losing Robin Williams, and the way it transpired, that seems to have ricocheted through many different circles and touched many of us in different ways.

So much has already been said about Williams this week. I’ll only add that what I admired most about his approach was his vulnerability, the warmth and sweetness that seemed to motivate both his mania and his acting.

If you only make space for one hour of retrospective on Williams’ life and career, you won’t do better than listen to Marc Maron’s remembrance on WTF, including a very candid interview with Williams from 2010. There’s some comedy-inside-baseball sprinkled throughout, but also some very powerful and moving stuff. Give it a listen.

As with any high-profile suicide, there’s also been a resurgence of discussion on mental illness and self harm. I particularly appreciated this piece from Helen Rosner, “Not Everyone Feels This Way.” Sadly it’s also worth bookmarking the following recommendations from the CDC on how the media can responsibly report on suicide to prevent so-called suicide “contagion.”

And of course there was the all-too-familiar, though shocking and awful events in Ferguson, Missouri.

We must do better.

As much as we may want to forget the past week, I found articles specifically about remembering (and photography) especially poignant. The first is Thomas Ricker’s piece, “Stop Being a Tourist,” which bemoans that “the internet and smartphones have made us all tourists, gawking at our own lives.”

Pair with “We Are All Glassholes Now” by the wonderfully named Ellis Hamburger. For a slightly more optimistic, but no less thought-provoking angle, read John Carey’s “Don’t Forget To Remember This”:

Photography is a privilege we are lucky to have, but it should never get in the way of our happiness, it should pull us toward it like a magnetic force. The secret to great photography has nothing to do with your philosophy, your choice of format, or your pedigree. Let your camera be your compass. Live first, then shoot.

Carey continues:

The solution here is obvious and most of us are already well aware of this tune, don’t shoot to share, shoot because you love what your shooting. Shoot to remember. Make your photographs in your own image and personality. Use photography to tell the story of you.

That’s all well and good when talking about vacations or kid photos, but it’s hard to know what to do when things look so bleak in the world around you. I’m reminded of the Fred Rogers quote about looking for the helpers, but the helpers were awfully hard to see. Luckily, they were still around.

My own escape from the turmoil took the shape of Patrick Rothfuss’ novel The Name of the Wind (not to be confused with Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s wonderful The Shadow of the Wind). With the exception of some of Gene Wolfe’s work, The Name of the Wind is the first fantasy novel I’ve read since I was in high school that’s really gotten its hooks into me.

But, if all else fails, and you have the privilege to do so, perhaps just fix yourself a peach wine slushie and watch this utterly wonderful video of baby They Might be Giants playing “Birdhouse in Your Soul” with the Tonight Show Orchestra in 1990.

Be nice to each other this week, ’k?

TTYS.
Mike

What a remarkable week it has been! Yes, I turned forty and, no, the world didn’t end. Instead, life is already opening up all around me like so many of you warned me it would. Thank you for all the well wishes and notes. I truly feel like the best is yet to come.

Part of that optimism may stem from still being full from a once-in-a-lifetime birthday meal at Rick Bayless’ Topolobampo last week. It was a feast befitting a milestone. We were genuinely speechless over some of the food, and the team behind the restaurant has done an amazing job at creating refined and modern interpretations of soulful Mexican cooking, without being bogged down by pretentiousness or art for art’s sake. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

We also spotted Linda Yu from Chicago’s ABC 7 and drank quite a bit of very good wine.

This weekend we also visited the House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin. If you’re not familiar with HOTR, it’s a staple of “Weird Wisconsin” tours that Neil Gaiman wrote into American Gods as a portal to another dimension. As Gaiman wrote on his blog:

I had to tone down my description of it and leave things out in the book in order to make it believable.

and:

It’s a monument to kitsch and wonder and madness and uncertainty.

True story, Neil. One of the best overviews of the location I’ve found on the web is from earlier this year in Slate.

The place reminded me of a more rundown and sinister version of the Sanfilippo Estate and “Place de La Musique” in Barrington where I met Mr. Gaiman, along with other literary luminaries in a never-to-be-forgotten tribute event for Gene Wolfe and the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

The visit caused me to ditch my previous draft of this letter and start exploring some of my thoughts on the kooky, creepy, sideshow museums that I seem to have developed an interest in. Here’s where my thoughts have gone so far.

The notion of the misunderstood genius, often an artist, unappreciated in his or her lifetime but revered for the ages, is an enduring one in American culture. I can see why. It’s comforting for those of us whose adult lives don’t quite match the super-heroic expectations we set for ourselves as children. It’s also a peculiar brand of afterlife story, to believe that no matter what one endures here and now, redemption will come someday from a more sympathetic future.

I’ve become particularly intrigued over the years, not just with such people and their stories, but with the way their lives tend to leave behind otherwise inexplicable monuments to their particular drives, and the way they become attractions for those of us “normals” to stand at the foothills of their madness.

Look at the weird legacies left by eccentrics like Sarah Winchester and the Winchester Mystery House, Bob Cassilly’s City Museum in St. Louis, or Alex Jordan and the House on the Rock.

For each, the outcomes of their obsessions draw thousands of tourists each year. Our thrill comes not only from viewing the collections or the results of their passions, but from the glimpses at the obsessions and neuroses that drove them into existence. The compulsion that drives someone to defy social consensus is fascinating to those of us who are hemmed in by those same constructs.

Perhaps I’m showing some kind of selection bias, but at least in the three examples above there’s a kind delicious creepiness at play. Something slightly sinister leaks from the walls that makes it all the more fun, even as we imagine these auteurs visions to be unreachably far beyond our own.

[I’m sure I’ll write more on this topic someday. Send me your thoughts!]

On to some Serious Business.

One more thing. If you follow me elsewhere, you may already know that one project I’ve had underway finally saw its first light of day last week, but in case you missed it: I’m a podcaster now! My friend and podcasting partner Toni McLellan said it best in her own kick-ass newsletter:

In other news, my friend Mike and I just released the first episode of a just-for-fun podcast called Serious Business. We are silly, hopeful, engaged, and at times irreverent, so if you’re into that sort of thing, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

You can listen to the first episode and find links to subscribe at seriousbusinesspodcast.com. I’m having a blast recording the shows, or as my daughter calls it, “talking to Toni in the basement.”

Normal!

Until next time,

Mike

I suppose we all feel this way to some extent as we get older, but birthdays have pretty much always struck me as bittersweet. Another year gone, another year older…but hey! A “holiday” all about me!

Birthdays: New Year’s for narcissists.

Beginning in July and marching steadily through August, “birthday season” for our family counted down the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year. My birthday always felt like the last call for summer—a signal to begin the start of clothes- and supply-shopping, scheduling the last big summer projects (only a few more weeks to finish that ramp we started and abandoned), and making sure we got the most of the neigborhood pool passes.

I still get a similar sensation in the first weeks of August—part birthday high, part New-Year’s-Eve melancholy, part new-school-year dread.

Indeed, it’s hard for me to separate my feelings on the threshold of my fifth decade with those I see in my kids heading back to school in a couple of weeks: A little sad that the past is behind me, a little eager to start something new. Excited for the opportunities to make new friends and work hard, to discover new things about myself and the world. To fear looming authority figures and long for more play.

I think of the turning of previous decades:

• My tenth birthday: spent in Estes Park, Colorado, with my parents. An inflatable birthday cake (inexplicably pink and white) and a hike to Bear Lake. Missing our new puppy who we’d left in boarding for the trip. I still had an imaginary friend. We were spies.
• My twentieth birthday: hopeful and naïve in the certainties of a life still lived mostly through books and liberal arts classroom debates, overshadowed in my memory by it not being my twenty-first.
• My thirtieth birthday: sleep-deprived, a happy mess, still on paternity leave with a barely one-month old daughter.
• My fortieth birthday: coming in a year stained but not overshadowed by loss, a summer for trying new things, a decade for expanding and building upon this foundation I’ve created with my various partners in crime.

Though I have a strong sense of stepping into something new, and I don’t doubt I’ll be trolled and teased (lovingly, I’m sure) for being over the hill, I don’t feel any apprehension about turning forty.

If anything I am more hopeful than ever about what the next years may bring. I feel more confident in my own skin, closer to myself—and to you, my friends—than in years. I fear change much less than before. I’m getting better at asking for what I want out of life, and not pouting when I don’t get it.

Writing this letter each week is part of that change, and while I know some weeks are more interesting than others, I appreciate you joining me for the ride.

Since I’m still clearly in the mood for looking inward, here are some…

Links for introspection

• Introspection? We don’t need no introspection (Yes we do)! Too bad we all go to such great lengths to avoid it.
• As much as we love tech and the toys it brings us, we must also confront the growing evidence that the tech industry is also sick from within. Issie Lapowski shows us “What Tech’s Ugly Gender Problem Really Looks Like.”
• Winnie Lim on “recalibrating the definition of self.”
• Kevin Kelly at his best: You are not late.
  

  What you may not have realized is that today truly is a wide open frontier. It is the best time EVER in human history to begin.

• The results of Harvard’s 75-year study on what makes for a happy man are in. Spoiler alert, the results are not all that surprising.
  

  “The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points to a straightforward five-word conclusion: Happiness is love. Full stop.”

Full stop indeed. I can’t top that!

Have a good week!
Mike