Pleased to Meet Me

an introduction

I've spent a lot of time writing over the years—emails, text messages, legal briefs, apologies for not doing some of the aforementioned sooner—but writing for fun I saved for twitter. And I mean "fun" in the rollercoaster ride sense of the word, and not in the polite description of a bad camping trip kind of way. It's fun in the never quite going off the rails but enough jostling to make you queasy thinking about going off the rails kind of way.

I bring up twitter because this, my dear reader, is an early attempt at expectations setting. This isn't an elegy for twitter's decline, at least not explicitly. The twitter analogue here is that I don't expect this to be a fully thought-out, always well-written, let alone edited, space. But maybe amusing? Mostly harmless?

I'm expecting this to be a solid B+ of a newsletter. An X-Files Season 3 monster-of-the-week newsletter. (That's another expectation to set: too frequent X-Files invocations.) I'm not an underachiever by nature, but I also know waiting around for an A+ newsletter (by my exacting X-Files Season 3 mytharch standards) to be crafted would mean I'd never get around to filling this thing with words. Too stressful! Consider me aiming to neither over- or under- this thing, I'm just here to achieve...

Alright, I've described the basement level of this thing. So what's on the main floor? The description up top says, "Law and life from the alleged future. An already outdated but beautiful brochure," but I suspect that I'll emphasize the "life" part the most. The "law" piece will crop up, but I don't need my ethics attorney worrying about another place he has to keep tabs on me. (I'm a good client.)

So this is like a lifestyle blog? Maybe! Life in newsletter form, for me, could be a small triumph, like artfully dodging a pothole on my e-bike (did I mention I have an e-bike? I'll probably bring that up a bunch too), or a funny thing I heard a kid being dragged through the grocery store might say. It could be a movie I liked, a picture I took, or a music mix I made. Could be sad, morbid, or lonely-sounding too! (If it is any of the latter three, I'll probably work in an exclamation mark to soften it.) Point is, I'll be figuring this out along with anyone reading this. If you ask me to describe it after this post, I'll say, "Ay, I'm working here!" then go back to jackhammering.

So why not write about any of that movie and e-bike stuff here right now in this letter? Well, good question! I probably need to live a little more in the newsletter mindset. Walk around in the headspace of someone who knows that he wrote a first post and doesn't want to abandon it. Really see who this person is who wants to invade your email box. Because for right now, best I can gather is that he seems like he just wants to get the first post done and forget it as quickly as possible, like a decent tweet.