Warm Bake > Hot Take

This section of StoryShedding is reserved for long, thoughtful, smoky gazes into what’s going on and why that might be not worth the incessant pain of knee-jerking hot takes.

To wit:

nails it. Mmmmmm, warm baking over hot taking.

So here’s a story and it’s not about me, but in a way it is (probably the way nearly all of us approach a story):

About a month or so ago I was waiting to check out at a Walgreens drugstore on East Lake Street and a young Black woman was behind me on the phone. She was talking to her caller about something that connected with me—in a surprising way. “I haven’t been able to buy new clothes in over three years! Everything is wearing out!”

Willing to bet she and I are not alone in this plight. The dough has not been rising yeast has been dead for three years. Or more.

I’d be remiss not mentioning another soldier in the Battle of Hot Take Forest:

This is juggling an armload of Michaels and Mikes, but maybe there’s something to this beyond what the eye immediately perceives. can nose out your random hot taker in an L.A. second.

And get in line, you pissy little twiddler!

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

“We apologize for the lack of hands this past month. Assume the one pounding the desktop is doing so in joyful agreement.”
—The Management

It’s true: StoryShed jumped from Season 11 to Season 12 very spritely and didn’t take adequate time to read through others’ Substacks. But there were a couple interesting things to touch on and return to later, pulled from the restack bin and elsewhere.

“There used to be a professional layer between most people and raw information,” writes Hana Lee Goldin of my amazing new Substack find Card Catalog. “Librarians, researchers, editors, fact-checkers: people whose entire job was to understand how information was organized, who produced it, what motivated them, and where the gaps were in any given source. You didn’t need to think much about any of that, because someone else already had.” Hana gives you tips on how to be your own librarian! In the 21st century!

I’ll be reading this entry well into late June, testing my new knowledge and grateful for the gifts Substack gives.

***

Lastly the esteemed Jason Feifer rocked my “old person world” with this inspiring bit, particularly how if you’re still alive you’re nowhere near the end and still in the middle of things.

“When you’re in the middle of something uncertain, frustrating, or unfinished,” Feifer writes, “try asking yourself these three questions…” 1. “What did I think this season was for?” 2. “What has this season actually taught me?” and 3. “What might this be preparing me for next?” To Feifer, a “season” he means: “This isn’t it yet. Real life begins later. But our entire lives could feel like that. Ask anyone who’s wildly successful, and they’ll always tell you: Nothing ever feels like a finish line. There’s always something ahead.”

That could mean a career trajectory, a relationship, a family issue, or anything—anything really—that’s is part of your life.

I like his last question: “What might this be preparing me for next?”

Because it’s a great segue into…

“Into the Shack” is now Story Stackin’

I’M AN IDEA GUY. Old school, mass-producing, never-ending, full of ideas. However, I grew up in an environment where that wasn’t overtly encouraged, but I persevered. Of course. That said (which, what does that even mean any more?), StoryShed needs collaborators BIG TIME. Historically I’m awful at that.

So, a brief rant, if you’ll allow me.

I will need to move out of my apartment before year’s end. It’s not likely I’ll find a new job at my age and, while I’ve applied for social security benefits four years before I intended to (gee thanks, idiot regime), I fully intend to take StoryShed Media as far as I can for as long as I can, and that means making money. So the connection to apartment is: “What if where I lived was where I worked, like, a studio or artists cooperative, or …”

Going forward, Story Stackin’ will introduce a move I’m warming to: The Lab. It would be a creative shop, but there’s no way I’m doing it alone. I got fired up about it mid-month and need to put together a business plan, but The Lab would be a money-making arm of StoryShed Media. (Hopefully without sucking all the fun and life out of my fun and my life.)

Stick around. More to come.

The Morning Muse

WHERE O WHERE ART thou, my Muse?

I thought it was maybe something I said (or failed to say). Usually me “working” doesn’t particularly inspire her/him/they/Amorphous Blob of Amusement and Wonder.

You have to be rested, healthy (no pain, odd itching, or nervous tics), not burdened with worry or care, and somewhat excited about at least your immediate future. That has not been the case for 2026 since last snowfall or ICE OUT.

Ahem.

• HOLY MOTHER OF SPLOD

• Steamin’ Pilates diaper

• Into the ruddy gloom of May

• atomized, forgotten

• Of course there were no Carthaginians at the time

• placating without renovating that ends in desiccating with no hope of rejuvenating—the aim of the GOP in stripping away the protective waxy layer on middle class’ eventual earning power, therefore causing them to dry out and ultimately perish

• Tiger Beat magazine for aspiring seniors with a spring in their step

• candlelit spinners for twins

• bugby

• Psycho dredge

• diamond nudies

• a plague upon both your spouses

• not now brown cow

For what we’ve endured, we thank you O Muse.

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Thought for the Week

“Of all creatures that breathe and creep about on Mother Earth, there is none so helpless as a man. As long as heaven leaves him in prosperity and health, he never thinks hard times are on their way. Yet when the blessed gods have brought misfortune on his head, he simply has to steel himself and bear it. In fact our outlook upon life here on earth depends entirely on the way in which Providence is treating us at the moment. Look at myself. There was a time when I was marked out to be one of the lucky ones, yet what must I do but let my own strength run away with me and take to a life of lawless violence under the delusion that my father and my brothers would stand by me? Let that be a lesson to every man never to disregard the laws of god but quietly to enjoy whatever blessings Providence may afford.”

—Homer from The Odyssey, Book XVIII, translated by E.V. Rieu, 1946, Penguin Books (USA).

Tuneage for You

“Real Man” Todd Rundgren (1975; live on the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test) <3

Share StoryShed Media

I was particularly glad to kick off this Season 12 about Daytalking with a new friend—a new life!—and an open letter to my middle nephew’s first child, Sophie, born on Monday, May 4, which you can read here in case you missed it:

There’s a second long-form essay in the works this season, particularly on living spaces and the other humans that inhabit them with or without you.

Look for that in early June.

Lastly for this season, two collaborations with working artists. I’d been wanting to do this for awhile, ever since and I talked a couple summers ago. I love her work and I’m cheered to see she’s still on it.

Which leads me to new friend who has turned out eye-popping photos from concert venues to his COVID-19 book Keep Your Distance.

Glenn and I talked for about a half hour on a lot of things, and you can find a recording of our Zoom chat below.

We also talked about sharing three pieces of work, and I’ll kick it off with two photos, one taken at night, the other during the day—both of which I may have included in previous Substack Notes or essays…

The old payphone in the neighborhood was surprising—I was riding with two friends from a Halloween party I think, and we had to stop and check this out. Apparently it had a dial tone and everything. You could make a call!

What, I imagined, if you picked up the receiver and heard a low-murmuring voice and said, “Hello?” and got a response: “Who is this?”

“Where are you calling from?”

“I’m right below your feet.” Followed by maniacal laughter and a dial tone. Creepy.

The “Nightwalking in Broad Daylight” was a different brand of strange: What if you walked inside the empty shop and the world outside melted into … 1952?

I like photos that evoke stories, as you can see.

Lastly, here’s a photo from 1980 that I particularly like because: 1) Black and white, 2) the subjects were a friend, my mother and father, and 3) no one is looking directly at the camera or “posing”—it almost feels like a still from an old indie film…

Glenn shared this: “I love the shot of your parents and friend. The era and the expressions have a John Cassavetes feel to them. The phone booth is cool. I’m constantly looking for these analog anomalies. The former gas station (one that’s well preserved, which doesn’t happen often where I come from) is a nice shot too. I like all of the electrical wires that seem to be protecting it from the elements.”

For Glenn’s three photos, he sent over these…

Glenn: “Sharing favorites can be difficult when you have tens of thousands of photos in your archive, so I decided to play off yours with two and add a third that I just like because it shows how weird life has been in the recent past.”

Glenn: “The first one (the couple above) was taken on the coastline of Maine. I felt like I was in a scene from a Bergman film — overcast, pensive, and based on their body language, not too happy. Ironically, I initially thought this would work well in black and white, but it doesn’t. You lose too much of the sky.”

Glenn: “The second is a phone booth in rural Virginia. I liked that somehow it was still there despite the overgrowth. Strange enough, you could still make a call, although it looked like the building surrounding it had been abandoned for years.”

Glenn: “The last one was taken in Central Park in the first summer of COVID. As strange as it sounds, the photos I got during that time are some of my favorites that I’ve taken because it was just such a strange time. When, for example, will you see an almost empty Central Park on a warm summer weekend day?”

Mike: “I loved this photo catch-up with you, Glenn. It was fun to see what you’re up to and to share your work. Thanks for stopping by StoryShed HQ!”

Notes and extra texture

Our Zoom chat from Friday, May 15, 2026:

Highlights!

• “Writing is about processing,” Glenn said. [8 minutes in.]

• Process and workflows… “Digital was the game-changer…” Glenn [at 9 mins.]

• “My grandmother was a paper hoarder…” [We talk about dealing with old photos and papers at 14 mins in.] and the Department of Personal Archaeology (DOPA).

• “So what?” and “What’s next?” Best advice to keep in mind.

Fun chat with Glenn!

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You can find more on Glenn Cook’s Substack “Our Reality Show”:

Detroit 2015…

The Music Diaries…

Oregon Coast…

I talked with your Dad last night and he gave me the deets.

You busted on the scene at exactly 12:48 p.m. this past Monday, May 4, 2026, weighing in at 7 pounds and 4 ounces. Grandpa Brian sent me your picture via text to my iPhone, which I saw the next morning, Tuesday, May 5. We’ll probably catch up over the forthcoming Mother’s Day weekend. Tyler, your father, sounded happy and your Mom, Melody, was also by the phone. I guess you were sleeping. Tyler said you were 20.25 inches from head to toe. You probably were exhausted from your trip, so slept the entire time. Let me just tell you this…

People are crazy happy you’re finally here.

So, you.

You—just walk right in and light up a room, don’tcha?

Who am I, I mean aside from your great uncle? That’s a question I’ve been pursuing my entire life. I’d say that would be a worthy pursuit for yourself, but you’ll need to get some training wheels on first. Or not! Who am I to say?

I am the Great Oz—whelp, actually just Uncle Mike, your paternal grandfather’s only brother. Like you, a first-born, but who knows…maybe siblings are in your future. Do I hope so? That depends. Your great grandmother Jackie (your grandpa’s ma, and mine of course) was an only child and while she may have had her issues (as we all do) she finally met her husband and, well, you wouldn’t be here today if that didn’t happen. Nor would I!

Here are some pictures: You from Monday and me from over 60 years ago. Do I remember my day of birth? Not a dribble. What do I remember? Well, it probably kicked in a couple years later: sights, sounds, smells, the touch of our Cocker Spaniel Taffy’s super-soft fur, it was all so overwhelming. You may experience that too. All the overwhelm will chill out over time.

Here’s another photo that you will not be able to relate to, but I must share it. In it (from left to right) there’s me, your great-great grandfather Raymond, your great grandfather Paul, your grandfather Brian and grandmother Stacey all sitting around the old family dining table in probably the late 1980s, at an old farmhouse in Minnetrista, Minnesota, on Whaletail Lake.

So, at that point, your father wasn’t even born yet. Nor your mother.

Wild, huh?

We can go further back.

Great-great grandfather Ray (although his birth name was David Raymond, everyone called him Ray or Raymond) is sandwiched between his father Bert Adams and mother Lena with his little sister Edith.

What year was that?

Based on Ray’s age here, I’d say no later than 1907 (he was born Oct. 10, 1900).

You probably want to know more about your mom and dad. I can speak about your Pa, who is probably the kindest young man I’ve ever met. He will be a wonderful father and, as a new elementary school teacher, will likely have much to share with you. You have two other paternal uncles, Uncle Garrett and Uncle Colin, and Uncle Marcus on your Mom’s side of the family.

Wanna hear a fun fact? You and your Uncle Colin share the same birthday! Wanna hear something else that’s wild?

When you turn my current age (as I’m writing this) the year will be 2092. One hundred years earlier (on May 4, 1992) Colin was born and I held him for the first time. I know because I wrote it down in a journal. You see, as I write this it’s Sunday, May 10, 2026, and on Saturday, May 9, 1992, I wrote:

“I need more of that patience talk again. This time with everybody. This in the wake of a great week. My little nephew, Colin Maupin. I held him for the first time Tuesday night. He’s beautiful.”

Colin probably doesn’t remember that, just like you won’t remember your first week of life. Nor me mine.

Fortunately your great-grandmother Jackie (or her father, Ray) took the above photos of me on my first day of life at Coleman Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. (I wonder if the United States of America will still exist in 2092? It’s a valid question given the year you were born but more on that shortly.) I’m also including a photo of my first “bedroom” aka “the nursery” which your Grandpa Brian probably occupied two years after me.

Much later, Great-grandpa Paul (your Dad Tyler will remember him as “Pappo”) took me out for my first root beer, which might’ve been at Indianapolis’ famous Steak ’n’ Shake drive-in, but I’m thinking it was Al Green’s Drive-in, where Pappo later told me he worked as a short-order cook for a spell.

What’s a “drive-in”?

Oh baby, you had to be there! They were so cool.

You could pull up and eat in your car, which to tell you the truth never had much appeal to me when you could just as easily go to a park and sit on the grass and eat there! But that’s what you did back then.

Okay, this is probably too much for your first day, so lemme end with some thoughts for you (and probably more for me):

Presentability

In your first couple years, especially as a first-born child, you will be extremely popular and this might, as we like to say, “go to your head.”

You will be expected to be presentable at all times and that too will crimp your ego at its tender edges. As you age, it will become less important and eventually you will become invisible—even if you’re garbed in day-glo pink. Don’t sweat presentability, Sophie. Or others’ opinions of how you look or who you are or what you do.

The pressure will be great. Resist if you must.

You’ve got this.

Gender and others

You were born female, but you’ll need to figure out who you are. Likely you’ll stay that way. But it’s possible you might not. No one can know that but you. How will you know?

Well, along the lines of “Presentability” above, no one can judge but you, in time. What’s exciting is looking at all the things that women have achieved over the course of history and will continue to achieve. You can be a part of this! I hope you do.

Look for people who support your choices, and eschew those who don’t.

Men will be everywhere and always seem to know what’s right (that’s bullshit and you should learn to smell that early). Some females will not become your allies. It will seem difficult to find friends, but I’m sure you will, however things turn out.

I look forward to seeing you grow!

Education is what you make it

Your great uncle Mike struggled with formal education because he got so impatient with teachers and authority figures. He—okay, let’s change that…I—loved learning but I didn’t like school. Ever.

The best advice I ever got came from an observation someone (I can’t recall who, but not family, it was a friend) who said, “You like to read, why don’t you just finish an English degree and get it all done?” So, I said, “I get to read books?” “Yeah, and write papers, and get the goddamn degree already.”

So that’s what I did. Eventually.

Find what you love to do and that will be your education. Surround yourself with people who do what you love to do. Like presentability, gender, and the opinions of others, all that was under siege the year you were born. It was intense and I suspect it will get moreso. Therefore, choose education. It will open doors to other options, not the least of which is finding yourself near people who might value what you value.

You’ll feel great satisfaction in this choice.

Love over gold, sweet girl

Money was a thing all my life and, frankly, it’s annoying as hell.

Maybe by 2092 your world will have done away with it or found some more acceptable way for humans to live—and maybe even thrive.

Just know this: love over gold.

And, always...

To thine own self be true.

Love ya Soph!

Your Great Uncle Mike

Extra texture

You too can become an aspiring artist at the age of 4! Just enroll in Kindergarten College like your great uncle Mike did! On live TV!

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RIGHT, DOTTIE?!

Hey ho, to the Roundtable let’s go—and dip into the kitchen for that…

Warm Bake > Hot Take

False flags and conspiracy theories are totally too hot to drop straight into your mitts and, well, nothing to see here, folks. My warm bake is … well, isn’t this what it was all along? C’mon.

You bought it, America, and you broke it.

That’s just my warm bake.

Also, April is the cruelest month. I always forget that, coming off Morose March. Here’s another warm bake: May is the way.

What is YOUR warm bake lately?

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Now let’s check out what’s cookin’ over at other folks’ campfires…

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

“I say it here—it comes out there…” intoned TV news reporter Aaron Altman in James L. Brooks’ Broadcast News.

Eminent Americans’ had a delightful chat with our Substack friend about a dark secret love of mine too: Genre television! (My crack was, among others, the TV drama Family—yeah, that one with Kristy McNichol.)

“I’d noticed over the past few years,” Oppenheimer writes, “that whenever I posted something to Substack about whatever random genre TV I happened to watching at the moment, Alexie would often pop in to respond. It became clear that we shared an earnest love of TV as emotional comfort food, and I wanted to talk to him about that. It naturally spins off into all sorts of other issues about childhood, reservation culture, literature and other forms of media, and politics.”

Their conversation is lovely generational dive into how culture meshes with family, and family is somehow delivered by culture or TV and radio—or not. I was flashing back to my own experience about family, moods, and media. Go listen!

GODDAMNIT I FEEL SEEN! Reading Lindsey of ’s “When a Humor Writer Gets Depressed” was the naked-in-public dream moment where it happened. “Fortunately, as a millennial woman with many friends who have been down this path,” Lindsey writes, “I felt zero shame in immediately making appointments for a therapist and for meds. As someone who has witnessed the suffering of older family members who were not afforded such grace, I am inordinately grateful for how both culture and medicine have changed and smoothed the path to mental health care.”

It meant a lot to me since I felt like pulling the trigger—WAIT, NOT THAT ONE!—on meds again this past April. What I didn’t realize was I needed to be a better steward of my writing time. When I did that, the boat felt, well, boaty-floaty again.

Thanks, Lindsey. WHEW. Lifesaver.

WRITER: NEEDS WORK. PLEASE INQUIRE WITHIN. Literally.

had some marvelous tips for writers of all stripes (young ones, old ones, big ones, tall ones, ones that climb on rocks…): “Five Things You Can Do This Week To Get Closer To Representation.” I appreciated Raquelle’s straight shootin’ style. You will too.

Lastly, dreams will always fascinate me. recently published a crazy-good essay on why our sleeping brains come up with odd new people (like, you know, you’ve never met before—just this afternoon I took a nap and met “Lydia” and a new potential girlfriend named “Penny,” so man, my Night Shift has been BUSY!).

Hillary’s “Why we dream of other people when we dream” was—lol—EYE-OPENING. This nails it: “…dreams aren’t random noise or meaningless fragments. They’re sophisticated biological machinery designed to keep the engine of human connection humming. Your brain refuses to let you be truly alone, even for one night. It would rather hallucinate an entire tribe than accept solitude.”

Fun stuff.

Into the Shack

HOLY MOTHER OF SPLOD did Season 11 feel like the goddamn Epic of Gilgamush or WHUT? The unholy combo of late spring in the Upper Midwest, weird people on the street and in the news, stupid-ass construction in my living space, and just the hellhole that is the former United States of Amerika.

I dunno. You tell me.

That said, I’m not in a good place anymore. Changes will need to be made as soon as humanly possible. Someone gave me this while in a bad place and I share it with you if you’re going through similarly hard times:

Breaking is kinda good, if you look at it the right way: Breaking glass means Oopsie someone’s angry or drunk or sad—or angry-drunk-sad. A door is ajar, a window is cracked open, the pavement below your feet ruptures and green things sprout up through the crevasses.

Broken is pretty bad cos it means:

1) it takes longer to fix; or

2) it’s toast. GRAVEYARD DIGGING TIME.

Over the course of March and April, feeling overwhelmed (a natural spring occurrence, as I tend to forget conveniently) and it nearly broke me, but I rested up and thought—look, you seasonal moron, just do what you can. Stop with the “extra, extra, read all about it crap.” No one needs that.

So, I wrapped up StoryShed Season 11, will take a short early May break, and back in with Season 12: Daytalking, hopefully with a couple Substack friends ( and , check your DMs!) and a new essay I’ve been noodling since winter. Oh, and writing to Scrivener bits and bobs of short stories and that monster novel—ahem.

The Morning Muse

CONFIRMED: THE MUSE SHELTERS in my bathroom!

She/he/they/it speaketh only from there (well, sometimes in the kitchen, but mostly the bathroom). Why? And must I stay in the bathroom all day to get Full-Throttle Muse?

I shall do nothing of the sort.

• Hobble up and over to the left.

• Barky McArf and the Barking McArfurs

• Cross-Sectional Pig Lady Binder Clips

• “We’d like two choco-caramel buttercream cones and an Iceberg Bhagetti to go please!”

• Spooky Poo has departed the Ghosty Chair

  —need proof?

• Tiger straps and kitten shawls / Shall not deter me / From these local brawls

• KEEP GOING YA BASTARD

• “How’d you get so good?”

  “Resisted the Call of the Vile.”

  “No, really.”

  “Yes really.”

• Again, this time with feeling… MMMMmmoney ain’t it funny?

• Perhaps you smell offense where no offense was odorized?

• Participle non-participation party

• The room was literally stuffed with gimcrack antebellum memorabilia and strategically deployed seniors.

• Her name was Penelope but she let me call her “Penny.”

• hypertonic crusty residue

• Lydia Tiddlesdorf: “The pleasure,” she says with eyeroll and well-punctuated pause, “is all mine.”

• Well hello there, partner. Thought I’d squeezed all the love outta ya but see yer rind’s needin’ a tighter twist…

• Keppersfield, Anywhere … But Here

• “…we are seeing the yellow of the carotenoids blending with the light green of new chlorophyll!”

  Mmmmmm, tasty leafy goodness drizzled with precisely aged arboreal vinegar of indeterminate vintage.

• Kin i keep ’im huh huh please please please

• Eeena, deena, doowah, duh.

Thought for the Week

“Ophelia was very much in love with Hamlet, and when Hamlet went to Germany to study metaphysics and lager beer, she thought about him all the time. ‘That’s what love or infatuation seems to me,’ said Ophelia, ‘it’s when you think of someone all the time, wondering what the loved one is thinking, what he is doing, and if he will ever love you the way you love him,’ which is not very likely, most things tending to be one-sided affairs.”

—Delmore Schwartz, from Hamlet, or There Is Something Wrong With Everyone, from The Cool School, edited by Glenn O’Brien, 2013, p. 77, Penguin Group (USA).

Tuneage for You

“Ophelia” The Band (1975; writer: Robbie Robertson; here from Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, 1978, although the actual concert was held in November 1976) <3

“Ashes of laughter, the ghost is clear,
Why do the best things always disappear?”

Thanks as always to for her playful otters image!

That happened to me last December.

I first discovered writer Richard Bryant from his LinkedIn posts where I learned about his Substack “Elevate the Discourse” (see link below in “Extra texture.”) Richard became a supporter and subscriber to StoryShed and we probably had a handful of convos over the course of 2024–25. In November 2025 we’d planned on collaborating on a long-form post: a course I wanted to teach prior to the pandemic on death and dying (I’d planned its curriculum a couple years after my parents died in 2008).

Richard and I last spoke on a Zoom call that November—specifically about the How2Die course and what that might look like rolled out on Substack. He suggested a sort of correspondence—like C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters—on what “How2Die” might mean if stretched out over many posts. I thought that was a fine idea, but we didn’t set a deliverable date on the first letter—or even who would author it—and that’s when I learned from his wife Mary that Richard had suddenly passed away.

I was heartbroken for Richard’s family and friends in North Carolina, and wished I had the resources to make it to his memorial service.

Not having a friend at this point in life (I’m in my mid-60s and Richard was only 51) is particularly discomforting…I lost so many old friends to the pandemic and ongoing political situation in the U.S., and it’s been isolating and frightening.

—And to be honest, as I was writing this, I fell into despair.

2

The first living being I ever watched die was our family dog, a Cocker Spaniel named Taffy. Mom and Dad got her from my great uncle Horace Magee, a retired postmaster who raised show dogs in Mom’s hometown of New Castle, Indiana.

Of course you probably want to see Taffy, don’t you?

She was a good dog and we loved her of course, since she always herded me and my brother away from the street when we were children. She was soft and friendly and I don’t particularly recall her barking much.

We lost Taffy when we were then living just outside Olney, Maryland, renting a house wedged between a cow pasture and a horse field. Taffy died just inside the huge garage that was stuffed with storage items left by a previous renter. I remember petting her as she lay in the dust beside the garage door, and finally watching her snort out a last breath.

—Just like that, gone. Not there anymore. Only her body.

Dad buried her beside the old playhouse next to an apple tree. And then promptly went out and found a Sheltie puppy my brother named “Lassie.”

So it goes. One in, one out.

3

Now I’m feeling fucking angry. Why? Because of doubt.

I so wanted to avoid pull quotes for this essay. And I didn’t know what I was going to say or do in the wake of Richard’s passing. We never got to write that correspondence and put it up on Substack. I never got to work with him on refining How2Die, which in the end would try to prove Socrates’ assertion there is “life after death.”

Richard agreed that it was true—Socrates did prove something of the sort. But then my friend shuffled off this mortal coil. Like Socrates.

I thought of a story by J.R.R. Tolkien titled “Leaf by Niggle,” which I re-read, then sought out Humphrey Carpenter’s acclaimed biography of the Middle Earth author. I knew “Leaf by Niggle” was something of an allegory—a type of tale Tolkien abhorred to his bones. But I didn’t know about his affinity for trees.

“And though he liked drawing trees [Tolkien] liked most of all to be with trees,” Carpenter writes in his biography:

He would climb them, lean against them, even talk to them. It saddened him to discover that not everyone shared his feelings towards them. One incident in particular remained in his memory: ‘There was a willow hanging over a mill-pool and I learned to climb it. It belonged to a butcher on the Stratford Road, I think. One day they cut it down. They didn’t do anything with it: the log just lay there. I never forgot that.’1

Suddenly I wanted to know if Richard Bryant felt the same way about trees. I decided since this is the last essay on Stargazing, and ahead of a new season of Daytalking, that I’d reach out to Mary to find out where her husband stood on the topic of trees and Tolkien. I’ll report back if I hear from her.

And I didn’t know that J.R.R. Tolkien was an accomplished painter and artist. Writes Carpenter: “He was at his best when picturing his beloved trees, and like Arthur Rackham (whose work he admired) he could give to twisted root and branch a sinister mobility that was at the same time entirely true to nature.”2

But why do I think “Leaf by Niggle” is anything like the How2Die course, or anything remotely like the Socratic method Richard and I hoped to explore?

I don’t. But it paints a compelling picture of what post-human “reality” might involve. I discovered Tolkien’s story has five somewhat distinct sections, the first of which begins: “There was once a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make. He did not want to go, indeed the whole idea was distasteful to him; but he could not get out of it” and plainly tells us, “He was the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees.”3

In every respect Tolkien’s short story starts out as a classical fairy tale, down to the “There once was…” or “Once upon a time…” trope.

And of course the “long journey” Niggle doesn’t want to make is the same for us all: the end of our lives and what lies beyond.

4

‘What really happens,’ Tolkien wrote, ‘is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true;’ it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from the outside.4

Of course, we all dream at night.

You awaken in the morning and think, “That was an odd dream,” because the spell of dreaming has been broken. But what if life were the seemingly unbroken spell and death was just another awakening? What might that mean?

This is Tolkien’s notion of sub-creation and the writer (or artist, painter, what have you) is the sub-creator. Our lives are merely sub-creations of our own making: family, friends, lovers and colleagues are characters coming and going from these creations. Perhaps the conscious world is trying to imprint their sub-creations on your sub-creation—confusing, I know, but keep in mind what is beyond sub-creation, in some Ur-universe, perhaps a place closer to “reality” than you or I might realize.

The world—that insistent reality we awaken to every day—says to you, as it did to Niggle: “‘There has been a flood in the valley, and many families are homeless. You should have helped your neighbor to make temporary repairs and prevent the damage from getting more costly to mend than necessary. That is the law. There is plenty of material here: canvas, wood, waterproof paint.’”5

That material was Niggle’s painting—a vast tree, each leaf of which he painstakingly worked on for years, and yet “That is the law” is immaterial when you’re talking about multiple levels of existence, right?

There is something beyond that, as Carpenter points out: “…in [Tolkien’s] essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ and in his story ‘Leaf by Niggle,’ both of which suggest that a man may be given by God the gift of recording ‘a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.’”6

I believe Tolkien instinctively knew that, probably from an early age.

But how does he prove there’s consciousness—life!—after death? And how “sudden” is that glimpse into an underlying reality?

5

“So far I have felt all the normal feelings of a man my age,” Tolkien wrote after learning of his friend C.S. Lewis’s death in 1963, “like an old tree that is losing its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots.”7

This is my experience going into my mid-60s—and yet I have no way of knowing what Richard was going through before he passed away last December.

Tolkien writes in his story: “Niggle was lying in the dark, resting completely; so that, as he had not been either feeling or thinking at all, he might have been lying there for hours or for years, as far as he could tell.”8

What is consciousness? What is unconsciousness?

What is life—or for that matter, death?

“The carriage was ordered long ago. It has come at last. It’s waiting. You start today on your journey, you know.”9

I’ve no patience for people in their one groove—those who’ve found their track and they’re staying put. I realize this makes me harder to define, but what of that? Do you judge a tree by its trunk or by its leaves? Is it dead or alive or somewhere in between?

I think Richard had an amazing life: family, a life partner, and a life’s work he could really be proud of. While over ten years my junior, that makes me feel I need to step up and do better for myself. Maybe in this case he’s Niggle and I’m his neighbor Mr. Parish, who comes on after him to the place with the marvelous Tree: Niggle’s Parish? Or Tree by Bryant? I think he’d like that.

Because, when it happens, there’ll be no preface or early warning.

When you go—man, you’re gone.

6

Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide. ‘It’s gift!’ he said. He was referring to his art, and also to the result; but he was using the word quite literally.10

The crazy thing about Tolkien’s story is how it ends: back in “reality,” which is odd because the final vision, quoted above, is sublime on its own. But two workers “on Earth” are grumbling about Niggle and Mr. Parish and they have a prescription for anyone who would follow them:

‘But you don’t, and so we get useless people of his sort. If I ran this country I should put him and his like to some job that they’re fit for, washing dishes in a communal kitchen or something, and I should see that they did it properly. Or I would put them away. I should have put him away long ago. …Push him through the tunnel into the great Rubbish Heap: that’s what I mean.’11

If you think you’ll be remembered after death, good luck with that. The memory decay happens quickly, and to lasting effect:

That was probably the last time Niggle’s name ever came up in conversation. However, Atkins preserved the odd corner. Most of it crumbled; but one beautiful leaf remained intact. Atkins had it framed. Later he left it to the Town Museum, and for a long while ‘Leaf: by Niggle’ hung there in a recess, and was noticed by a few eyes. But eventually the Museum was burnt down, and the leaf, and Niggle, were entirely forgotten in his old country.12

During our last Zoom chat, Richard mentioned a possible title for our project, “An Oral History of Life After Death” and I think he quoted something from First Corinthians 15.

Instead, I offer this poem:

Though myriads go with him who goes,

Alone he goes where no wind blows,

Unto the land which no one knows.

***

For all must go where no wind blows,

And none can go for him who goes;

None, none return whence no one knows.

—Ebenezer Elliott (1781–1849)

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Footnotes and extra texture

I bumped into a Tolkien letter 98 (18 March 1945) to publisher Stanley Unwin. Tolkien talks about how he came to write “Leaf by Niggle”:

…that story was the only thing I have ever done which cost me absolutely no pains at all. Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting. I woke up one day (more the 2 years ago) with that odd thing virtually complete in my head. It took only a few hours to get down, and then copy out.

Richard Bryant’s obituary.

A last thought from Richard:

“Dying alone is not simply a matter of having people around us when the end comes. It is about living a life rich in connection and purpose, where solitude and companionship are not at odds but are two sides of the same coin.”

Rich would’ve enjoyed the humor here, too:

And here’s why:

Elevate the Discourse with Richard Bryant

Socrates: Ancient Greece’s Most Annoying Party Guest

Socrates is that friend who thinks it’s funny to ask questions and never gives you a straight answer. When you’re trying to get lunch, he’s going, “But what is lunch? How do you know you’re hungry? Is hunger even real…

Read more

2 years ago · 68 likes · 34 comments · Richard Bryant

Your choice!

That said, here’s a—

Warm Bake > Hot Take

SOMETHING, I DON’T KNOW what, is happening to (at?) Substack. Good? Bad? Indifferent? You tell me. That’s as close as I come to a hot take these past two weeks.

Either it’s undergoing explosive growth (which accounts for the flatlining of new free or paid subscribers) or we have an infusion of Nazi infiltrators stalking Notes, DMs, and comments.

Again, you tell me. No clue.

So, warm bake, which is where I normally dwell: Wrapping up Season 11: Stargazing (the first episode of which is below) and it feels like I’ve been at it forever and will be relieved to move on to Season 12: Daytalking (a sample follows), which seems to be a subscriber favorite because there’s mutual love for collaborations and that’s what Daytalking essentially means.

Daytalking = relationships.

Also a warm bake: Are you feelin’ the AI heat yet?

Here’s to hoping you’ll stick around!

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

I’VE DISCOVERED A NEW workflow for this section of StoryShedding: revisiting restacks from the previous two weeks! Usually I only restack a post if it’s something I feel others might enjoy, and putting those restacks here is for the late-to-the-party, I-must’ve-missed-it crowd (no worries, I’m late to every party I’ve ever attended, eventually).

Here’s what went down:

L.E. Mullin’s “Ignore the genre. This is what happens” spells it out bluntly. Genre-bending is possible, but there’s a price. There’s also an “in,” which is best achieved by deft signaling: “People want a romance when they buy a romance novel. But they also want to feel they’re inside someone else’s mind.” Go check it out.

“The First Draft Is You Telling Yourself The Story,” by J. Penberth Rabold of The Writer’s Table, knows where it’s at: “…audience comes later. In revision. When you take what you discovered and shape it so others can discover it too.” Rabold states. “But you can’t revise what you never discovered. You can’t polish truth you never wrote in the first place.” Don’t be afraid of drafts. Also, don’t sweat editing. Go in with an open curiosity, a dash of wonder, and then mold it, refine it, as only you see necessary.

SERIOUSLY THE BEST THING you will read on Substack so far: “Honesty Makes People Uncomfortable and Rock and Roll Was Always Supposed to Make People Uncomfortable” by of Ear Candy Update. “Almost Famous is a movie,” he writes, “about the dangerous, ridiculous, holy business of loving something that cannot love you back.” I’m fuckin’ hooked.

Think that’s just schmaltzy? Try again cupcake: “Sentimentality is only a cheap word people use when they are afraid that tenderness might have structural value.” And this hit me like a gut punch—something every creator needs to deeply consider: “A lesser movie would use the backstage world to punish fantasy. Almost Famous does not do that. It insists that fantasy is how a great many people survive their ordinary lives, and that the abuse of fantasy does not cancel its necessity. The disaster is not that the dream exists. The disaster is when the dream gets detached from the human beings who made it possible in the first place. When that happens, everybody starts talking about authenticity like it’s a brand and not a moral problem.” Bravo, Jason.

DAYUM. We gotta up our game over here!

Into the Shack

THIS PAST MONTH I’VE tried something different and it’s been an adjustment: Writing all my long-form essays NOT on Substack but in Scrivener, the word processor I’ve had for years. I just updated Scrivener and it’s a lot to wrap your head around with new bells and whistles, but it’s perfect for keeping long-form stuff in one place, including research, image assets, notes, and, well, drafts.

In fact, I’ve started binder folders for long-term StoryShed projects (ones I hope to publish myself or find a publisher for) that are fiction I’ve been sitting on for too long. Our Substack friend might be pleased to know one of these binder folders is a new draft of my novel Monster Road, which is a sequel to a novella I wrote when I left high school eons ago, The Crowded Room (Phlegethon Publications, 2005—yes, self-published, AHEM). Stay tuned, El. I wanna know how it turns out too!

A couple new StoryShed biz-related news bits: StoryShed Publications is planning sometime later this year to roll out a 2nd Revised Edition of The Encyclopedia of Necessary Atrocities. What the hell is that? you might wonder. Essentially inviting 26 independent writers to contribute to a book-length project. Stick around and find out! The other subsidiary, DOPA (Department of Personal Archaeology) is getting some needed branding and design from our friends at Smart Set in Minneapolis. Look for news on that wicked lil’ baby beast also this year.

Lastly, the final episode of Season 11, Stargazing #4 is still in draft mode, but I’m setting a due date for publication of April 15. Then a short break and on we go to Season 12: Daytalking.

Grateful to my free or paid subscribers! If you have the resources, please buy me a coffee:

Thanks for the Java!

The Morning Muse

LOOK, OUR FRIEND THE Muse has been dipping in and out lately!

It’s sort of like that house cat you can’t find, and then you look in a closed dresser drawer and—BOOM, there’s the damn cat, blinkin’ up at you like it’s never seen you before (though you feed it every day).

So here she comes again shakin’ everybody’s circuits…

• Felix Cadaver

• Marsupial baggage moments

• At the crest of Alley-oop

• Generational silos

• Tim Robbins as the Producer who murders the Screenwriter. I can relate to that on so many levels.

• No Greg It’s Not Just You

• Casket Punching Bag, soda, potato chips, naptime plushie

• Expectational Serendipity (aka “hope”?)

• Paramecium pie

• You’re a handful for no compelling reason, amirite?

• All the Clouds of Indiana

• Avery Blandhurst Pinero

I’ve discovered a portal to the Muse—the bathroom! :-O

Thought for the Week

“After Edith’s death more than fifty years later [Tolkien] wrote to his son Christopher, explaining why he wished to include the name “Lúthien” on her tombstone:”

She was (and knew she was) my Lúthien. I will say no more now. But I should like ere long to have a long talk with you. For if as seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography—it is against my nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths—someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began—all of which (over and above personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives—and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed the memories of our youthful love. For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade and went hand and hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.

—J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter, HarperCollins Publishers paperback, p. 105.

Tuneage for You

“While You See A Chance” Steve Winwood (1980; writers: Steve Winwood and Will Jennings) <3

My new decade (1980-1989) began with this very song. I went from living on my late parents’ hobby farm in the sticks to writing my first spec screenplay and traveling to the UK (twice that decade, actually) and landing my first apartment and full-time job. It was my power era. Everyone should have one, IMHO.

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—Stephen King, first sentence of his novella The Body1

STORIES, IF THEY’RE ANY good, are like seeds well-sown in fertile soil—they will usually take root.

But once the sprouts are above ground?

Who knows.

A reader might get an idea for a new product or service, or a parent tell the story to an anxious child who can’t get to sleep. Two friends sharing a breakup experience might bond more deeply over a similar narrative they read elsewhere. Stories can become anything: A series of linking tales, a one-off epic with a cast of thousands, or even a haiku. Many stories—based on novels, stage plays, or short stories—have become movies, thereby introducing another ripple in a story’s life span.

One of my screenplay pitches was first a feature news story I read about a Midwestern rural church in crisis mode while planning its annual Valentine’s Day dinner. The event traditionally had the congregation’s women cooking the meal for the men, and, well—a huge Lysistrata moment went down—the women rebelled. The men had to “man up” and run the show. As you might guess, it brought out their worst and (I hoped the story would reveal) their best. My working title was Hungry Hearts.

I still think it has potential given the world today. That is, my seeds haven’t yet sprouted. But one day they might. Who knows.

So how does one even begin to tell a story? Why one thing over another? And does it even matter? “Depends” is the answer I’ve gotten in the past. You see, I love stories. Stories are the music I continue to play. I was a music kid; it was my language before I had language. Mom insisted I learn keyboards (she and Pop bought an upright piano, then later traded it in for an organ), but I liked brass instruments. Weird, huh?

So did I become a musician? Well, kinda, sorta—didn’t.

What else could you play?

I tried the bass guitar, since my ear turned toward rhythm and the bass lines I heard on radio songs. Finally I returned to writing—once I’d sussed my way around QWERTY and typewriters in high school, and later computer keyboards, it was very similar to the tactile pleasure of stroking piano keys. Earlier I’d written by hand and my father agreed to have my stories typed out by his office secretary so I could share them with classmates at the junior high cafeteria table.

Please note—that detail is crucial to what follows.

1

“In writing classes, if nowhere else, it is entirely permissible to spend large chunks of your time off in your own little dreamworld. Still—do you really need permission and a hall-pass to go there? Do you need someone to make you a paper badge with the word WRITER on it before you can believe you are one? God, I hope not.”

—Stephen King, On Writing2

LIKE MOST OF THE world, I was heartbroken to learn of the deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer last December. I’d followed his work throughout his career, from a teenager watching All in the Family on TV and later films such as A Few Good Men and When Harry Met Sally.

This Is Spinal Tap was probably the first of his I saw in a theater, but close on its heels (and still in my DVD collection) was Stand By Me.

Why this, why now?

In a fit of nostalgia and curiosity (the latter being ripe for StoryShed’s Stargazing season), I revisited Stand By Me and also re-read the source material from Stephen King’s novella. Hey, I’m no hardcore Stephen King fanboy. I first read Carrie back during my “sabbatical years” and I struggled my way through it. Then I bought his collection of stories and novellas, Different Seasons, and delved deeper. Maybe there was something to this crazy cat. (His The Body is in that collection.) Also, I’m aware that the backstory of King’s tale into a workable screenplay by the duo of Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans (in collaboration with producer Andrew Scheinman and director Rob Reiner) is probably a fascinating tale but one I’m not privy to. If anyone out there does, hit us up!

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So, in the interest of this essay, I did a contrast and compare of Reiner’s film and King’s novella and came up with some insights into how certain storytelling approaches work—and moreover why—depending on the medium.

You with me on this?

Let’s get to it.

2

“I remember an immense feeling of possibility at the idea, as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given leave to open any I liked. There were more doors than one person could ever open in a lifetime, I thought (and still think).”

—Stephen King, On Writing3

SOMEWHERE IN A STACK of juvenile short stories is a murder mystery (if I recall, titled “When Night Comes…”) and a wistful piece about a boy whose family moves across the country so much that his only friend is AM radio (definitely titled “The Radio”) both of which I wrote in junior high school.

Like King’s quote above, there are more doors (stories, tales, poems) than one person could ever open—that one person being me—in a lifetime. Was that a daunting thought?

Oh no. Exhilarating.

I would write at night, fix it later, then give the handwritten stories to my dad to type up and photocopy. I’d bring them to my friends in the school cafeteria to read around the lunch table and get their feedback. (Usually it was praise I was fishing for, ’natch.)

“I had them now. They were all leaning forward. I felt an intoxicating sense of power.”

—Stephen King, The Body4

One of the first differences you notice between King’s novella and Reiner’s film is there are TWO Gordon Lachance short stories in the book and only one used (as a side narrative) in the movie. It occurred to me King likes meta-media in his fiction: radio songs, newspaper headlines, excerpts from diaries and short stories, anything he feels will serve the story’s purpose.

In The Body, King starts with a story Gordie wrote 10 years after the events of the novella, in 1970, when he was in his early 20s. Titled “Stud City,” its two main characters, Chico and his girlfriend Jane, are up and awake from a night having sex at his father’s house while Dad and stepmother are away. He’s missing his older brother Johnny, who had died in a freak speedway accident years earlier.

If you think about it, both The Body and Stand By Me are meditations on loss and grieving—how our minds function (or fail to) when the people who mattered most to us are suddenly gone.

Rob Reiner chose to dramatize the second story King presents, the tale of David Hogan, “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan” published in “March 1975”—that is, 15 years after the events of The Body. So, Gordie carried the story from a Summer of ’60 campfire to “Cavalier magazine” all that time. Inspiring.

“Lard Ass” is young writer Gordon Lachance’s exposé on the abuse of power, albeit in the small town of Castle Rock. “How much money actually changed hands,” says Gordie as the narrator of Lard Ass’s story, “during the week or so following pie-night I have no way of knowing, but if you held a gun to my head and forced me to guess, I’d put it at close to a thousand dollars—that probably sounds like a pretty paltry figure, but it was a lot of money to be passing around in such a small town fifteen years ago.”5

Reiner’s choice of Lard Ass over Chico is a telling one. A story of revenge might better serve the overarching conflict of four boys on a quest to find another boy’s dead body (while older bullies have the same goal—older boys who Reiner sets up as deserving a comeuppance) for the adaptation. But he doesn’t entirely abandon Chico of “Stud City.”

The filmmakers behind Stand By Me used the essence of that story in a flashback sequence while Gordie retrieves a baseball cap his late brother Denny (played by John Cusack) gave him. It was a brilliant solution to both sides of the film’s thematic coin: grief and becoming (for both Gordie, played by Wil Wheaton, and best friend Chris Chambers, played by River Phoenix) and its flip side of revenge and comeuppance (the four boys as a whole: Gordie, Chris, Vern, and Teddy against … Ace, Eyeball and gang—as well as Castle Rock’s adults and parents).

So, let’s make this into a movie!

Whoa, not so fast, man. Why do you say that?

The screenplay tracks with the book, right?

Well, mostly, yeah. But there are differences, some significant. As happens when a book is adapted into a movie.

Let’s zoom in.

3

“I have spent a good many years since—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.”

—Stephen King, On Writing6

THE FILMMAKERS BEHIND STAND By Me wisely sensed that adapting King’s The Body required a narrator’s voiceover. It’s there in the novella from the get-go and Richard Dreyfuss does a stellar job carrying Gordie’s “voice” into adulthood.

Stand By Me is not merely a repository for nostalgia. Reiner and company wisely cribbed that message from King:

“This is really a good time,” Vern said simply, and he didn’t just mean being off-limits inside the dump, or fudging our folks, or going on a hike up the railroad tracks into Harlow; he meant those things but it seems to me now that there was more, and that we all knew it. Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who were were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.7

That’s a powerful feeling, and reading the passage and watching the film’s scene (Vern says it during the after-dinner campfire smoke, which is echoed in voiceover by Dreyfuss) hits it home.

It’s probably one of my favorite moments in both stories. And it reminds me of another lovely scene, also in both book and movie: The “deer” moment. In the film, it’s striking, spare—a moment of pure Zen.

When you read The Body, it erupts in King’s marvelous prose:

I was about to get up when I looked to my right and saw a deer standing in the railroad bed not ten yards from me. My heart went up into my throat so high that I think I could have put my hand in my mouth and touched it. My stomach and genitals filled with hot dry excitement. I didn’t move. I couldn’t have moved if I had wanted to. Her eyes weren’t brown but a dark, dusty black—the kind of velvet you see backgrounding jewelry displays. Her small ears were scuffed suede. She looked serenely at me, head slightly lowered in what I took for curiosity, seeing a kid with his hair in a sleep-scarecrow of whirls and many-tined cowlicks, wearing jeans with cuffs and a brown khaki shirt with the elbows mended and the collar turned up in the hoody tradition of the day. What I was seeing was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that was appalling.8

Gordie eventually rejoins his friends back at the campsite. Reiner and crew repay the pleasure of King’s words with a voiceover coda from Dreyfuss, practically verbatim from the novella:

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell them about the deer, but ended up not doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself. I’ve never spoken or written of it until just now, today.9

Here’s why that works both for the novella and the film: It further underscores Gordie’s internal conflict (in any good artwork there is internal and external conflict—more on that in a sec), which is the natural isolation of a writer (or artist) growing through perception and reflection, trial and error, navigating relationships with others, and (one hopes) coming into their own.

It wasn’t lost on me that King ends that chapter with a statement that immediately echoes his opening sentence: “The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.”10

So what is that supposed to mean?

You tell me. How often have you had friends or partners you could completely confide in? Someone with whom you gave all your energy and love?

Who were the Chris Chambers to the Gordie Lachances in your life?

4

“Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”

—Stephen King, On Writing11

CONFLICT GENERATES CURIOSITY. That said, a sensible person isn’t necessarily spoiling for a fight. But a curious person realizes questions often come off as dangerous, barbed needles. I know this to be true. Why?

Yeah, WHY?

Hang on … because the tension inherent in conflict is like the dictum “nature abhors a vacuum.” One demands displacement of the other. And there we are wondering what will fill that empty space. It’s a niggling question. Stephen King also knows this to be true. It runs like an artery pumping blood through all his writing. (Literally and metaphorically.)

And Rob Reiner?

He went through the ringer on it time and time again. Son of famous father Carl Reiner, he was, I believe, more than anxious to step out on his own.

In Stand By Me, the filmmakers smartly amped up the conflict by using the flashback sequence with deceased brother Denny’s baseball cap gift to Gordie—which is rudely snatched by the snarling and dour gang leader, Ace Merrill (played by Kiefer Sutherland) and Chris Chambers’ older brother “Eyeball” Chambers (played by Bradley Gregg) early in the film.

King, however, rolls on for chapters before it’s even on our radar that the older boys’ gang is close on our heroes’ heels.

To King’s credit, Chris Chambers has an internal conflict similar to Gordie’s. He’s a good kid from a bad family. He’s growing away from that legacy. The scene in both the novella and the film with Chris allegedly stealing the school milk money underscores that. “So just say,” he tells Gordie, “that I stole the milk-money but then old lady Simons stole it from me. Just suppose I told that story. Me, Chris Chambers. Kid brother of Frank Chambers and Eyeball Chambers. You think anybody would have believed that?”12

As the boys edge closer to the dead body, both the external and internal conflicts deepen—and we see in both the novella and film clear signs of that: the older gang’s lies finally come to light, and the confessions our heroes make, and the scars they still carry, further emerge.

As good storytelling must do.

5

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

—Stephen King, On Writing13

TOWARD THE END THE boys reach the Royal River.

“Clouds began to build in the sky around two o’clock,” King writes, “but first none of us took them seriously. It hadn’t rained since the early days of July, so why should it rain now?”

Here’s a minor plot complication where the two mediums diverge.

King chose to deepen the atmospherics by having Ray Brower’s body discovered during a thunderstorm. Reiner and company downplay that by adding wind to the climatic scene. For my money, it was a good choice and one that worked better for the film adaptation, allowing the audience to fully concentrate on the violent moment between our heroes and the bullies, fighting over who first discovers the corpse.

Probably the biggest deviation of the film adaptation from the novella is who fires the hand gun at the climatic ending.

That’s right! Gordie fires the gun!

In the film, yes, it’s Gordie. But in King’s story it’s Chris Chambers who raises the pistol into the air and fires it. Why do you suppose the filmmakers changed that crucial detail?

But Chris had the gun in his bedroll.

That’s true. And we never see the gun changing hands, but we do see Gordie and Vern backing away when the bullies arrive on the scene. Reiner and crew flipped the interaction with Ace Merrill confronting Chris but, likely to my imagination, Gordie grabbed the bedroll when he and Vern briefly disappear. That allows time for Gordie to produce the gun and fire the shot, directing attention away from Chris and over to Gordie’s knockout one-liner...

“Suck my fat one, you cheap dimestore hood,” which he sneers in both the King novella and Reiner’s film, and more effective with a smokin’ hot weapon in Gordie’s grip.

This was a brilliant move. It gives Gordie the payoff we needed with the set-up of Ace and Eyeball stealing Denny’s baseball cap from Gordie. It’s also a metaphorical payoff for all the adults who thought his best friend Chris Chambers stole the milk-money. And for Gordie protecting Ray Brower’s body as a stand-in for the memory of his beloved brother Denny.

Goddamn flippin’ beautiful.

6

“Some people don’t want to hear the truth, of course, but that’s not your problem. What would be is wanting to be a writer without wanting to shoot straight.”

—Stephen King, On Writing14

AS SOMETIMES WITH ALL beautiful things, we circle back to where we began.

Two boys on a summer’s day ride their bicycles on a country road past a Land Rover station wagon in which sits an older man sadly looking down at a newspaper article about another man’s murder: Gordon Lachance, established writer and childhood friend to Chris Chambers, said homicide victim.

Both The Body and Stand By Me are anything but nostalgia pieces. Together they’re testimony to the power of art through marvelous storytelling craft, humor and insight, conflict and resolution, mystery and imagination.

The filmmakers behind Stand By Me chose an image I will never forget, one that personalized their take on what Stephen King wrote in The Body. Chris Chambers and Gordie Lachance part company on that late summer’s day in 1960. However, one stays in this world; the other fades into the ether.

“Speech destroys the functions of love” Stephen King writes, “—that’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true.”

He continues in a way that I have no intention to improve on, nor ever could:

If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn’t what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those lovebites. It’s the other way around, that’s the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it from me. I’ve made my life from the words, and I know that is so.15

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Notes and extra texture

“…working with Reiner was more than just another job. His sets were known for their warmth, collaboration and storytelling passion. As they stood together under the lights of the Oscars stage, it felt less like a formal tribute and more like a reunion of people remembering the man who helped shape some of the most beloved moments in their careers. The quiet respect in that moment reminded everyone in the room how powerful a filmmaker’s legacy can be.”
—Finnish screenwriter and producer Juhani Nurmi16

Oscars 2026 Billy Crystal hosts a tribute to Rob and Michele Reiner (YouTube clip courtesy of A.M.P.A.S ©2026)

Warm Bake > Hot Take

THE ONLY WARM BAKE over the past two weeks was how to spend less time on social media (especially my prime directive of Substack Notes) and more hunkered down with writing and work prospecting (and building up the business workflows and new software to learn). Truth told I have no lingering dislike for social media. It’s just a part of what you do if you live in 2026. You can get addicted to it, like anything. Don’t do that, ’k?

“Beware the Ides of March” was the OG hot take. What would a warm bake on that be? “Stay frosty into mid-month?”

We in the Upper Midwest were whalloped with snow and ice but spring began yesterday, so hope … yadda yadda … eternal.

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

READING A LOT OF great work on Substack these days but, due to unemployment anxiety, not retaining much.

Ellis J. Sutton’s Notes from the Studio struck a nerve with me. In a good way. You see, as a young artist, I was horrified by the idea that I might suck. His post “Your Taste Is Great, Your Skill Sucks” brought that back home. “No amount of watching films or reading books,” he writes, “can replace the lessons that come from actually making something and seeing how it lands with an audience.” Check it out!

Scratching my tech itch this past fortnight was David William Silva’s eye-opening post about how we’ve gotten to this stage of AI and LLMs. “Large Language Models,” he writes, “are a dead end on the path to human-level intelligence.” There’s no avoiding the future, but, he argues, what do other technologists think of where this is all heading. Well worth your time.

Need some good news? Well, sidle up over here to this South London bookshop. Totally made me happy to see independent booksellers succeed! Congrats!

Go check out the aforementioned!

Into the Shack

BACK TO DRAFT ON StoryShed Season 11, #3, which I think most readers and subscribers will enjoy: What kind of storytelling chops does it take to adapt fiction into a film script? The choice of writer and filmmaker might instantly please you. Draft mode continues, so have yet to reach editing mode, which only happens after draft is “at length.” End of March is best-guess publication here on Substack.

StoryShed is developing two subsidiaries going into 2026: DOPA (Department of Personal Archaeology) for helping people (myself included) to digitize, organize, and possibly publish personal memorabilia into sharable formats (slideshows, digital albums, printed books, and family histories). This will need to be a team effort and I’d love an advisory board to assist. Hit me up if this is in your wheelhouse. The other possible subsidiary is StoryShed Publications, Ltd. A potential anthology of short fiction-creative nonfiction as a debut in the works.

Would you, could you, please buy me a coffee (or consider upgrading to a paid subscription to StoryShed Media)?

Thank you!

Thanks for the Joe!

The Morning Muse

WE GO FORWARD AGAIN with the Muse, caboose! She/he/they/it speaketh! Huzzah and hooray!

How did this happen? Well, I felt sad the Muse went away but didn’t obsess about it. I just said to myself one morning: “I miss you and wish—no, I’d HOPE—that you reconsider and visit me again.”

Seemed to do the trick.

• AEO is the new SEO. E-I-E-I-oh.

• Spanish Eyeball

• “Okay, let’s rub these two together and see if they make three.”

• J.R. Stokeybear

• The End Times Re-enactment Society

• Mariana Snailfish frolics among human-shaped plastic at the bottom of the sea

• Ernie Nermie (aka Ern Nermola, King of Shit as Shinola)

• “I just wanna do the one thing.”

  “That’s not allowed.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you have chosen the default Forever Multitasking option.”

  “Can’t I change it?”

  “It wouldn’t be called the Forever Multitasking option now would it? Look. Don’t be that guy.”

• Attack Crater awaits

• Here comes Chobee the Buttonholer

Thanks for the visit, Muse! I won’t abuse your attention.

Thought for the Week

“There was silence when Tabby finished reading. No one knew exactly how to react. Cables seemed to run through the poem, tightening the lines until they almost hummed. I found the combination of crafty diction and delirious imagery exciting and illuminating. Her poem also made me feel that I wasn’t alone in my belief that good writing can be simultaneously intoxicating and idea-driven. If stone-sober people can fuck like they’re out of their minds—can actually be out of their minds while caught in that throe—why shouldn’t writers be able to go bonkers and still stay sane?”

—Stephen King, On Writing, Scribner, 2010, p. 64, italics mine.

Tuneage for You

“Goodbye to Love” The Carpenters (1972; writers: Richard Carpenter and John Bettis)

Note via Wikipedia: “The Carpenters received hate mail (claiming [they] had sold out and gone hard rock) because of Richard's idea for a fuzz guitar solo in a love ballad.” Source: Randy Schmidt, Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter. Chicago Review Press, 2010. p. 88.

Warm Bake > Hot Take

“Beware the Ides of March” was the OG hot take. What would a warm bake on that be? “Stay frosty into mid-month?” As far as getting superstitious about months of the year, here are a couple questions for you:

• Do you ever approach certain months with caution, just due to past experiences during those months?

• Do you have months that are uniformly solid—ones you tend to lean into?

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For me, April and October have been problematic, whereas May and September are generally my favorite months of the year, for different reasons: deep spring and the onset of summer and late summer and the onset of autumn.

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

Reading a lot of great work on Substack these days but, due to unemployment anxiety, not retaining much. My bandwidth is jammed. I’m sure that will change.

For now, go read ’s “Today” on her She’s Gone Chilaquiles Substack. Marvelous writing.

Into the Shack

Back to draft on StoryShed Season 11, #3, which I think most readers and subscribers will enjoy: what works or doesn’t work when translating a book or short story into a film? Stick around and let’s find out together.

Outside of that, been bantering about book ideas, mostly non-fiction (a local history book, maybe a biography) and whether I want to revisit an old collection of my short stories.

We’ll see. Maybe after we put Season 11 to bed by April.

The Morning Muse

There was no muse these past two weeks.

I hope it returns soon. It’s easy to spook the muse.

As the saying goes…

Thought for the Week

“…when we say ‘American’ it is not a fact, it is an act, of faith, a matter of lines on a map and words on paper, an outline it will take generations and centuries more to fill.”

—John Updike, “How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time” (1972)

Tuneage for You

“The American in Me” Steve Forbert (1991) <3

—Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”

LET’S START WITH THE city bus driver.

He was driving Route 7 on Saturday, February 14, 2026, heading south through Minneapolis’ Nokomis neighborhood, blocks from where I now live.

A quick digression: I haven’t owned a car since 2015. When I left magazine publishing in April 2012 (and launched StoryShed Media LLC), I sold my 2002 VW Jetta. It was weird being an American in America without a car. Within a year or two, that stigma wore off. No one cared. And guess what? All the money I’d saved not owning a car—it was a revelation! So, I depended mostly on city bus travel. As long as I wasn’t far from a bus stop, all was good.

Sometimes my fellow riders and I would get a funny, friendly bus driver. Mostly the drivers meld into the machinery like phantoms behind the wheel. I like the engaging bus driver, but will take the ghost in a heartbeat.

That Saturday I got neither.

I should’ve known when I boarded his bus at the transit station and asked if he knew where I should get off (I was going to a DFL committee meeting at a Minneapolis public library, so the location should’ve been familiar to him) “What’s the cross-street?” he muttered. I didn’t know. Our relationship, such as it was, went—literally and figuratively—south from there.

My second clue was when the bus stopped in the middle of the street not far from the station. What the hell—? I thought. I was near the front of the bus and I saw the driver had opened his window to yell at a USPS carrier who’d parked too close to a stop. The postal worker seemed perplexed.

Finally we were moving again and near my stop. I thanked the driver (a young man with a beard and wearing the uniform with the official cap) and got ready to get off when the door didn’t open. I glanced back and he sneered, “Behind the line!” then shook his head as if I was the most clueless moron on the planet. I stepped back and, after what seemed like a long couple seconds, he opened the door.

I leapt off the bus and thought, “Wow. What an asshole.”

I didn’t dwell on it over the committee work we had to do that afternoon, but on the bus ride back I wondered if I’d get the same driver and what I’d do or say to him. When that returning bus arrived, it was a different driver. But still I was curious: “What was up with the other guy?” It was with a sense of sadness and dismay that I considered he probably wasn’t happy being a bus driver. He had control issues (with the postal worker, with me as a rider—probably anything within his line of sight), and it occurred to me: that cat’s gonna burn to a cinder if he doesn’t flex it up soon or Soon.

Mr. Inflexible Bus Driver was basically a vampire of his own mind, craving expectations from life that life will never fully allow him to enjoy.

How did I know that?

Because I recognized my younger self in him, naturally.

1

“Heard of a van, it’s loaded with weapons
Packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites out by the highway
A place where nobody knows…”

LET’S REEL IT BACK two days to Thursday, Feb. 12. I’m feeling pretty good, the sun is out and the forecast’s for warmer weather—a total fluke for mid-winter Minnesota.

I’d finished business with my local post office and was waiting for a southbound local bus home. Another guy was waiting at the stop.

Isaiah is a 26-year-old mixed race young man with thin facial hair and a curious mind. When I met him at the stop for the same route Driver Crankypants works, we talked about a transit app I use on my iPhone. He downloaded it and thanked me for the tip. He said he lives with his aunt and was looking for a job—in fact, was on his way to an interview as we spoke. I wished him luck. Then he shot me a nervous glance. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Fire away.”

“What do you think of all the ICE stuff?”

“Fuck ’em,” I said. He chuckled, obviously relieved. (I’m sure I went off a bit more after saying that but I can’t recall the full extent of my rant. It was juicy.)

It was my turn to ask Isaiah questions. After all, he mentioned living with his aunt, so I asked about other family, friends, what kind of support he had. He seemed gratified by the attention. For my part, I was concerned: Would he find a job? How would he learn new skills and expand his network? Then I realized his asking me that question proved a bent toward curiosity and I’m sure I reassured him on the interview as we boarded the arriving bus.

We didn’t sit together; I was itching to get back to my own work and didn’t want him to be any later to his interview. He glanced over at me and I smiled to him as I left the bus, “Good luck, Isaiah!”

He smiled and waved back.1

* * *

Pascal is a young Parisian boy in a movie from my childhood.

“He retrieves a balloon tied to a lamppost,” writes critic Michael Koresky, “only to discover that it seems to have a mind and personality of its own. At times the balloon follows him around like a loyal dog, at others like a teasing best friend; the two form an inseparable bond, one that only an uncaring world would dare to untether.”2

How director Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (1956) ties into current events is a mystery I hope to unravel here (among other things).

“Call it My First Art Movie,” Koresky writes.

Mine as well, good sir.

2

“The sound of gunfire off in the distance
I’m gettin’ used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, I lived in a ghetto
I’ve lived all over this town.”

IT’S TRUE. I HAVE lived “all over this town.”

Since 1992 I’ve been an urban dweller, after teenage years in suburbia (if you can call a Lake Minnetonka cabin that), then an inner-ring suburb (Hopkins), and then adopting St. Paul as my home for 24 years. In 2019 I moved to South Minneapolis, which feels older to me in my memories than St. Paul, as downtown Minneapolis was my haunt as a high school student. Later, in college, friends from the University of Minnesota (where my late father worked as the Health Sciences Planning Coordinator for a quarter of a century) and I often traipsed around Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood, fresh from dancing downtown at Uncle Sam’s (now known as First Avenue) or partying in storefront upstairs rentals and throwing up in back alleys.

Oh what a time it was.

My first-ever rental was at the age of 27 in Hopkins, after I landed my first corporate job as a proofreader in a Creative Services department (that experience is well worth another essay, no doubt). That debut apartment was a lot like the one I’m in now, but vintage to the location (that is, built in the 1970s) whereas the current place was two-years new when I signed the lease in 2019.

St. Paul city life hit me fast when I quit that corporate job on December 7, 1992, to launch my first business, Available Light Creative, focusing on copywriting, editing, and desktop publishing. From 1993 to 2019 I moved five times, each an attempt to get closer to somewhere I could call “home.” Dad insisted I get a mortgage and buy something “to build equity.” I didn’t want a house, so narrowed the search to condos, town homes, small properties. In 2006 I found a cooperative condo I liked (built in the 1950s) in St. Paul’s Summit Hill neighborhood, and I thought “home at last!” That year I’d been hired as managing editor of a national magazine, Law & Politics, and their flagship Super Lawyers magazine. I thought I’d “arrived.”

Maybe I had.

* * *

There was a time when our French lad Pascal thought his life would always be the same: Walking from home to school, from school to the pastry shop for a treat, and then home again to supper and sleep. Wake up in the morning and do it all again.

Sound familiar? Me too.

Then one day, something happens: he makes a new friend that will change his life.

Where did I first see The Red Balloon? I’m willing to bet it was in the mid-1960s, after we’d moved to Maryland, where I attended Olney Elementary School. “Though the film often triggers cheerful nostalgia in its adult devotees,” Michael Koresky writes, “who remember it for its bursts of candy apple red, it is actually remarkably subdued.”3

That “candy apple red” caught my eye and spoke to me as a pulsating, vital life force. It drew me in. Pascal could’ve been me; I could’ve been Pascal. The film was like a private church service, learning a ritual I was only then beginning to understand: How to be in the world. How to find yourself.

And maybe, how to recognize home?

3

“Transmit the message to the receiver
Hope for an answer someday
I got three passports, a couple of visas
You don’t even know my real name.”

“THE WRITER’S JOB IS to get the main character up a tree,” so the Nabokov-attributed quote goes, “and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.”

If January 2026 were a tree, and I’m the main character of this story, then golly-gee, you betcha, I’m frantically bracing myself ’round the trunk of that ol’ tree for the incoming missiles.

That artillery is easy to recognize: First it was the federal ICE occupation of the Twin Cities and the subsequent murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, as well as the detention, physical assault and verbal abuse, stalking and terrorizing of countless other Minnesotans. The second was being laid off my full time job on Wednesday, January 28, and scrambling to secure financials for the months ahead. Close on that came waves of doubt and worry: Would I be homeless? How will I find enough paying work now that I’m in my mid-60s? What do I do about health care and—BAM.

A fourth stone was hurled.

My bedroom has bed bugs. That explained the welts, itching, scratching and—well, actual bugs. Full of blood. “Really?” I thought. “C’mon, man. This is too much.”

So, an exterminator is on the way. I’ve been sleeping on a living room sofa and prepping the bedroom for the forthcoming killing field. The apartment lease puts the onus of extermination payment on the renter, so I’m out $1,300.

And on top of that, rent will soon be due.

Thanks, Vladimir. You can put that other stone down now.

* * *

Pascal discovers his new friend a mere three minutes into The Red Balloon. At first it’s just a boy and his balloon—that’s all people see, if they notice at all. The balloon has made him late for school (he can’t take it aboard the city bus, so he has to run to get there in time).

The balloon waits for him to leave school and he takes it home for the first time, only to have it tossed out the window by someone, either a parent or the maid.

And that’s when something miraculous occurs.

4

“High on a hillside, the trucks are loading
Everything’s ready to roll
I sleep in the daytime, and I work in the nighttime
I might not ever get home.”

HERE’S THE DEAL. I have been out protesting, but not all the time. I have not had in-your-face encounters with ICE. I don’t intend to—no how, no way. There are plenty of ways to effectively oppose this so-called government.4

One thing I’ve noticed living in Occupied Minnesota: there are people who get this is illegal, morally corrupt, and absolutely indefensible…and there are folks who put their blinders on and continue to act as if we’re living in a state of near normalcy.

Yup. Amazing, huh?

You see, the thing really crawling under my skin (aside from repeated exposure to Cimex lectularius) is general American indifference to the changes all around. It’s not only the social aspects, but consumer culture, corporate compliance with the regime (yes, it’s a regime, not an administration) and the financial tentacles that emanate out from those sources. We’ve never lived through anything like it. It has definitely changed the decisions I make on a daily basis—where I shop, who I choose to deal with, what I say and to whom, and—being newly unemployed—it’s affecting how I’m being viewed by others who once saw me as “dependable” and “tactful.”

Look, I can’t change others’ opinions of me. Like my Crankypants Bus Driver, he couldn’t care less who I was that day he refused to open that bus door. He saw me as an impediment to his worldview—a mere reprobate. I needed to toe the line.

I needed to be given a lesson. And he was gonna let me have it.

* * *

“You must obey me,” Pascal says to his sentient red balloon, “and be good!”

Naturally, when any human realizes that kind of power, they want to exert it at every opportunity. But there’s The Moment that is the core of Lamorisse’s film. Bright little Pascal does something astounding—maybe one of the first moral lessons I took from The Red Balloon as a child. He grabs the balloon by its string…

And then he lets go.

Trust, emotional intelligence, faith, and belief in his newfound friend.

That’s when the balloon responds in kind by playfully evading him, but always—always—coming back.

5

“Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?
You oughta know not to stand by the window
Somebody’s seen you up there.”

“THEY CAN SURVIVE FOR months without a blood meal.”5

That’s the fact, Jack. Those pajama party sleepovers with your buggy little friends are gonna cost ya some platelets.

This was a first—well, everything this year has been a first. One, I’ve never been laid off a job, ever. I’ve quit jobs to go to school or because I was offered another one. And I think a long time ago I had fleas (probably from a family pet) and of course I’ve been bitten by mosquitos and black flies while camping in northern Minnesota.

But I’ve never experienced the horror of bed bugs.

In one respect it could be worse: a bed bug swarm, or bed bugs with noisy flapping wings (they don’t have wings at all), or a superpower like morphing into Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The thing is they like the dark, they like my bed, and they aren’t about to venture out of the bedroom to poke around in the fridge at midnight for a shot of V8. Ain’t gonna happen.

According to this source, “Although bed bugs can be infected with at least 28 human pathogens, no studies have found that the insects are capable of transmitting any of these to humans.”6 Things are looking up! Apparently they keep it clean, aside from a vampiric lifestyle: “They are not attracted to dirt or grime, but rather to the carbon dioxide, warmth, and odor of humans.”

Is there a deodorant repugnant to bed bugs? If so, point me to it!

* * *

The Red Balloon’s director was a documentary filmmaker. But for this movie he needed to, as Koresky states, “rely on the persuasions of cinematography, editing, and sound—and some very thin threads—to make his audience believe in magic, that his titular character was a plausible living being, emoting and reacting without the benefit of a voice or even a face.”7

In one of my favorite scenes, Pascal and his balloon pal visit a flea market. While the boy regards a painting of a young girl, RB admires itself in a mirror. Their time together is like a delightful independent date: they separate to experience the environment, then rejoin to continue their journey.

Like best friends do.

6

“I got some groceries, some peanut butter
To last a couple of days
But I ain’t got no speakers, ain’t got no headphones
Ain’t got no records to play…”

FRAGILITY IS A STRANGE condition and probably more common than most people realize. You could be looking at a famous bodybuilder—who’s suddenly dead from a massive heart attack. Then there’s that 90-lb. weakling who wins a marathon. Strength and fragility are deceptive on the surface. Sometimes you have to dig deeper, and even then you might come up with nothing.

I say this because every time I’ve had major life crises (like I’m going through now) the first thing I notice is how fragile life is, deep down, at the core. Prior to the crisis I was on autopilot—going through the motions to keep the hamster wheel turning and everything seeming “fine.” Behind all that, there’s a man with a machine set to demolish the wheel. Or I realize that I’m the man with a machine, setting myself up for a fall.

Which brings me back to that Route 7 bus driver. I suppose I need to thank him; his behavior was a mirror to my past.

Raised by a Type A authoritarian father, and variously soothed by an arts-loving mother, I rebelled against anything that smacked of rigidity and order. “Michael, go left!” they demanded. And I went right. My late 20s were rough. Once I was living on my own, I had more emotionally rough days than good. I felt restless and angry.

I met with a psychiatrist (and later a psychologist) in the late 1980s after I began experiencing depressive symptoms at the same time my mother was being treated for severe catatonic depression. Like mother, it seemed, like son. The shrink declared in one later session that he believed I suffered from dysthymia, a long-term, simmering-under-the-surface form of depression. He put me on meds (Prozac at first, later Zoloft) and that seemed to help. When I met with the psychologist, an overly chirpy older man named Sigurd, I felt prodded and needled by his approach. “You, Michael,” he said to me bluntly, “seem to prefer the Middle Finger Way.” Just an observation, he added.

While I resented that at the time, I’ve never forgotten it.

Because he was correct.

* * *

When Pascal goes to buy a pastry, and commands the balloon to wait for him outside—suddenly it’s abducted by the gang of street boys. Only moments before, RB slipped out of Pascal’s hands to follow a girl with a blue balloon. When Pascal retrieves it, blue balloon follows suit and pursues RB.

So in short seconds we’ve gone from fancy and delight to horror and dismay.

Remind you of anything?

7

“Why stay in college? Why go to night school?
Gonna be different this time!
Can’t write a letter, can’t send no postcard
I ain’t got time for that now.”

BLOODSUCKERS ARE EVERYWHERE. YOU can tell by how they behave.

What did the Route 7 bus driver do? He remained authoritarian, inflexible. What did my bus stop companion Isaiah do? He gave me the gift of his curiosity and attention. And I returned the same in kind.

Bloodsuckers are drainers. There’s no capacity to give, only take. Their forms are many: idiotic rules and regulations, inflexible work hours and micromanaging bosses, property management companies that feed on their residents as if they’re non-rechargeable batteries, ready to be shit-canned at the first dip in financial viability. Governments that refuse to govern, senators and representatives who fail to give attention to and serve their constituents.

Drainers, bloodsuckers, all.

Bloodsuckers exist in alienated families and unrewarding friendships, marriages, and long-term relationships, too. These are often the most difficult to disengage from. In many cases there’s gaslighting: “Oh, you don’t really believe that,” you might be told. Or, “Everyone has these challenges/some have it worse…what makes you so different?”

Over the years it’s been a never-ending battle to discern bloodsuckers from heart-warmers—givers who will support you no matter what. Even more confusing is when those roles change (either logically or inexplicably) and new decisions must be made or old ones reconsidered.

Like where I am right now.

* * *

Pascal and his mother (or is she his grandmother?) walk hand in hand up the cathedral steps to a church service. Close on their heels is RB, which slips through the massive oaken doors—only to be swiftly expelled, and with Pascal chasing behind.

Together they escape the churchyard for higher ground.

8

“Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock
We blended in with the crowd
We got computers, we’re tapping phone lines
I know that that ain’t allowed…”

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13, WAS my last full-time paycheck. It was meager, but was at least cheering to see a deposit into the bank account over a debit.

At my age, finding a new full-time job will be next to impossible. But maybe that’s not what the times require. After all I’ve got years of work experience in trade book publishing, small publications and magazines, a goddamn bachelor’s degree, and post-graduate work at the renowned Denver Publishing Institute (Class of ’03). And StoryShed Media LLC is a going concern with projects and collaborations and plenty of work to do.

It’s my lifeblood, no doubt.

I will probably need to move, either out of the city (which sort of breaks my heart) or even out of state (maybe heading east over west; north over south), so between now and then a winnowing process has already begun: selling things I no longer need or use, recycling, donating, or selling anything valuable to put in savings, and prospecting for contract and part-time work to tide things over.

It’s not insurmountable, but definitely daunting.

The winter of 2025-26 has been a roller coaster, and a hateful ride at that.

Slather on the slime that are the criminals yet to be apprehended in the Epstein files, the murderers lurking in the regime along with their protectors, and the muck only gets stinkier and deeper and, well, muckier.

Come what may, I plan to fight on. You too?

* * *

Pascal’s friend RB is abducted by the street gang twice—at first he’s able to outwit them and retrieve RB, which adds to the film’s building tension. We’re curious about how this will end.

We don’t know.

9

“We dress like students, we dress like housewives
Or in a suit and a tie
I changed my hairstyle so many times now
I don’t know what I look like!”

AT THE DFL COMMITTEE session that Saturday of the Inflexible Bus Driver, 50 or 60 South Minneapolis residents packed into a small public library meeting room. Our task for the day was to sort through platform resolutions by category. That was a first step. I felt relieved to be among neighbors and doing something productive about my community. I sensed they felt the same way. It was a lively, pulsating hive of heart-warmers.

But as the buzz in that room got buzz-ier, and everyone was standing and shifting around sorting resolution papers, I noticed a change. The apparent extroverts were happy to dip in wherever needed. As an introvert (with occasional extrovert tendencies) I was feeling drained, not by the people or the mission, just all the activity. One woman, Elizabeth, who at the introductions said she worked as a writer-editor, had scooched closer to the door leading to the main library space and caught my eye. I pretty much sensed why.

It was all too much. She had felt it too.

[Meanwhile, back at my infested apartment, an imagined conversation with my bedroom-emerging bed bug:]

Me: “Oh. Hi there. How—?”

BB: (suspicious) “—Where you been, boy?”

Me: “Well, uh, I was tired so crashed out on the sofa, I been meaning to tell ya—”

BB: “SHUT UP, human. I will have blood. You got stones that move and trees all speakin’ and street be sayin’ magot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth—”

Me: “Excuse me, Mr. Bug…”

BB: “Name’s Bert.”

Me: “Sorry, Bert. Um. I was just gonna mention they’re comin’ for you tomorrow.”

BB: “Git back in that bed, boy! If’n I’m set to die, I’ma goin’ out with a belly full of blood. Your blood. —That’s the secret’st man of blood.”

Me: “Your Shakespeare’s very good.”

“Why thank ye. Now… BED!”

* * *

Down narrow back alleys, winding streets, and steep stairways, Pascal and Red Balloon evade the street gang.

After RB is abducted a final time, Pascal searches for it, finding it hovering above a back lot and being pelted with rocks and pebbles from the boys’ slingshots.

“Fly away, balloon!” Pascal screams.

10

“You make me shiver, I feel so tender
We make a pretty good team
Don’t get exhausted, I’ll do some driving
You oughta get you some sleep.”

TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM work. Or so they say.

But people today are a scattered bunch. I wonder if bed bugs are more social. It doesn’t seem so. Like predator politicians (I don’t care which party), they wake up and look for a host to feed on. That’s their whole raison d'être, time and time again, since they first slithered up from the primordial soup of modern history.

Looked at one way, the despair is overwhelming. Some days I don’t know how I can pick my poor ol’ bug-bitten body up and out onto the mean streets of Minneapolis, with its grimy off-white canvas, trash-strewn bus stops and street corners, the gaunt, haunted faces of chain-smoking city dwellers, glancing up at the cold steel gray sky as if it were a fucking magazine to flip through. It seems impossible to keep going.

But I do.

* * *

That open back lot is Red Balloon’s Golgotha.

Pascal is its John, the Beloved Disciple.

And we are witnesses to the end—a single slingshot missile pierces RB, at which it withers and deflates, its skin crusting over like a dried riverbed and its bright candy apple red fading to earth.

One last indignity—a boy’s foot stomps on what’s left.

11

“Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks?
They won’t help me survive
My chest is aching, burns like a furnace
The burning keeps me alive.”

THE SONG FADES AS I suppose my life will. No applause, no cheering, no celebration party, no babies to kiss or ships to christen with a bottle of champagne.

Or maybe that’s a premature conclusion?

I don’t know—I can’t know. There are too many factors in play, largely outside of my control. This, I think, is true of everyone—no matter how rich you are.

What good are the notebooks? They might be the only good thing, sorry David Byrne.

Maybe the burning is the desire to create and to contribute, to give others your attention and curiosity, your aid and comfort, your one beating heart, pumping with the blood that only you can provide, and which is never mine to take from you, ever.

What if that were true for everyone?

What kind of world would that be?

Leave a comment

* * *

And what if in The Red Balloon that kill shot from one stupid kid were the end of the movie—just “cut to black” and title over: La Fin? Kinda depressing, right?

Nope. Not for me, nor for you.

What happens next is pure magic. Unbelievable. Yet it makes sense; it feels true.

Because it is.

BUY ME A COFFEE PLEEEEZ

Extra texture and notes

How does burning keep you alive? Ask Jack London.

If you ask a bed bug it will say it doesn’t like hot anything. Stinky-smelly-tastes-like-jelly human warm, yes—but super hot, oven hot—that’s a hard no.

Special thank you to Tom Murphy for use of his marvelous dingbats. Also thanks to for her intro divider.

Still, we aim for…

Warm Bake > Hot Take

IN A MONTH THAT’S halfway through—and which has been nothing BUT hot takes—my warm bake has been burning classical music to my old iTunes collection. I had some favorites in mind (one being Ottorino Respighi and his 1928 orchestral work The Birds) but instead stumbled upon and loaded up on Satie, Saint-Saëns, Mahler, and Mendelssohn. For some jazz, I happily snatched up Miles Davis’ 1969 work In A Silent Way.

Marvelous stuff! And helping me keep my sanity.

Another warm bake vs. hot take is how wrong the local city mag is reading the current room, but how well my repotted Monstera is just getting on with its life despite everything to the contrary…

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

MAYBE I’LL HAVE TIME to catch up with my regular subs to friends out there, but every week since my late January layoff has been a blur of—let’s say a Series of Unfortunate Occurrences. (See the following “Into the Shack” for more deets.)

“The people who change the world,” writes the Substacker behind Not Boring, Packy McCormick, “are the ones who take weird ideas seriously. Even if you don’t plan to change the world, taking weird ideas seriously is a more interesting way to live.” In his essay “Take Weird Ideas Seriously,” I got my Geeky Science Writing itch scratched as well as confirmation that any bizarre verbiage that emerges from the Morning Muse might be worth a review—as weird as it might sound at the time.

Oh, and don’t miss out on the Two-Headed Flatworm! Worth the price of admission (which was free but I’m sure Packy would love if you subscribed, which I did).

This past Thursday, Heather Delaney Reese published a post that chilled me to the bone. “This new language,” she wrote, “is designed to tell those people: you may have a piece of paper that says you’re American, but you’re not American the way we are. You’re a different kind of citizen. A lesser kind. And it won’t stop there. It never does.”

The dismantling of the American experiment is happening before our eyes, and TBH friends, every day to date has been heartbreaking. “…somewhere in the middle of all of that, they’ll come for people like you and me. The ones speaking out. The ones sharing. The ones with a voice and a platform who refuse to stay quiet about what’s happening. Because that’s the final stage of every authoritarian playbook. First you remove the people who don’t look like you. Then you remove the people who don’t think like you. And by the time the rest of the country notices, there’s no one left to speak up.”

Rather than despair, she asks us to set aside our exhaustion and fear:

“Sometimes it’s exhausting being in this space, watching, day after day, what powerful people in this country are willing to do to tear it apart. And in those moments, I think back to the people who came before us. The ones who faced violence, cruelty, and injustice far worse than what most of us have ever known, and still stood up anyway.”

I for one was hugely moved by her message.

Lastly, check out Nolan Green’s Soundscapes from Leiden. Particularly calming for me was his latest, #18. Keep ’em comin, Nolan!

of sound and fury

THE JOY OF BEING HUMAN

Netherlands Soundscapes aren’t postcards. They aren’t travel guides. They aren’t even music videos. They’re little bursts of life you might otherwise miss. The shimmer of light on a canal, the sound of a bike tire on cobblestones, the gust of wind through a narrow alley…

Read more

4 months ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · Nolan Green

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Into the Shack

SINCE THE END OF January’s layoff, I’m in the Shack ALL THE TIME. Is that a good thing? Depends.

Take for example my adopted practice of slicing StoryShed’s long-form posts into seasons (currently at Season 11: Stargazing). It’s been helpful in that I spend maybe a couple days brainstorming topics and themes within that season’s scope, arrange them by whatever feels more pressing and timely (or which takes less research and planning, asset-gathering, you name it) and the act of doing that since I started in early September 2023 has been a comfort to me. It’s manageable creative work that restores my spirit. What I was aiming for.

Well, until that changes—and I pivot.

I’m sticking with the original plan for Season 11 (Episode 1 on Curiosity is already published) but pushing out drafts for episodes 2 and 3 to 3 and 4—which is always the last essay of each season—and slotting in a new essay for episode 2 that’s in draft mode now—securing assets and doing some research. The reason? I got super-excited about what the new episode 2 could be if well executed and that excited me enough to plow forward with the draft.

What’s it about?

Well, I haven’t written much about all the news coming out of Minnesota and specifically Minneapolis, and the recent layoff and surrounding “unfortunate events” almost screamed to be put into a longer essay—dressed with a window into my film-loving past and ever-music-loving present.

Stay tuned, friends. I’m pumped.

Part of Season 11, #2 will include a visit from the Oracle on Thursday, Feb. 12 that kick-started the episode’s creation. The battered penny (the Oracle) read “1982” so I scrambled to find an entry in the journals and was rewarded with this!

The Morning Muse

UNEMPLOYMENT SPOOKS THE MUSE. Idle hands make for the devil’s work. That said, I gave it my best shot this fortnight.

• Rossford Biscotti

• “Find the children—and destroy them.”

• Dogpile Mile

• “It is, if I may say so, a very muscular plant.”

• “Awww, fuck. Now I gotta bury you.”
  [Note: I was staring out the apartment window to see below a man smoking a cigarette outside his house in the backyard. A yellow Lab approaches him in the snow with a ball-like toy in its teeth, supplicating the man with its front paws and head down and then scampering away playfully. I imagined the man pulling out a handgun and shooting the dog in the head. Immediately I was repulsed, but thought, “You know, in the right movie, at the right moment, in a context that made sense with all that came before, this might work.”]

• Doth my bendy offendth thee?

• “I bought a pencil sharpener and it was the best decision I made all week.”

Auf wiedersehen, darling.

Thought for the Week

“Barris was living in Sacramento when he started customizing cars in 1940. As the plot develops, you have the old story of the creative child, the break from the mold of the parents, the garret struggle, the bohemian life, the first success, the accolade of the esoteric following, and finally the money starts pouring in. With this difference: We’re out on Easter Island, in the buried netherworld of teen-age Californians, and those objects, those cars, they have to do with the gods and the spirit and a lot of mystic stuff in the community.”

—Tom Wolfe’s lede to “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1965.

Tuneage for You

“Another Park, Another Sunday” The Doobie Brothers (1974; writer: Tom Johnston)

The only way out is through.

So, let’s hit the gas chambers—urk! Showers! No, wait. Ovens!

(Oh forget about it.)

Warm Bake > Hot Take

HOT ENOUGH FOR YA? Can’t take the heat, get outta the kitchen.

That’s what I did last week. Oh, and this…

Marvelous.

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

GREAT STUFF STILL BEING published on Substack but due to the news Into the Shack, I had my hands full.

Expect StoryShedding #8 to have a superabundance in another two weeks.

Cheers.

Into the Shack

WHELP, I WAS LAID off my full-time job last week.

Was it a surprise? No not entirely. You see, most of late summer 2025 and into the fall, I was busy prepping StoryShed Media for taking payments and enlarging activities into ghostwriting, copywriting, publishing consultation, and similar great uses of my skills and experience.

I will be StoryShed Media 24/7 now.

You can help! You can buy me a coffee. I’d like that a lot.

Buy Me a Coffee!

The Morning Muse

I FIRED BACK AT the muse the other day. I said, “Why the f—k?”

Muse: “Whut.”

Me: “Why this crap? What’s useful about it? How can it make me money? I need money.”

That’s when my Muse instantly vaporized. It doesn’t pay (literally) to question the process (or as the Muse its/his/her/their pronouns). It varies depending on the season, quality of sleep, who knows…?

• "Domine, quo vadis?" "Lamne cibum cepisti?"

• pile it on and on and on

• Battered and Crusty Nasal Syndrome

• Fork in the Road and who knows what after that

• Five Things I Never Got to Ask Al Milgrom

• chemical, but useful

• The Buddha Challenge

• icing on the Twitterboo

• “Take two frogs and call me in the morning.” (IYKYK.)

Over and out for now!

Thought for the Week

“Minstrel shows were finally put out of their misery by Black entertainers corking up and joining the circuit; that may sound ridiculous, but the practice of African-American performers applying black makeup along with exaggerated lips and eyes was widespread in the U.S. during the last decades of the nineteenth century. These thick-skinned pioneers eventually gained the upper hand, imitating themselves better than any Whites could (and subtly taking the piss out of White performers while they were at it). Black artists singing ‘coon songs’ to a ragtime beat were among the biggest draws of the 1890s; they steadily diluted the form’s lurid racism until Black performers were established as a foundational element of the U.S. entertainment industry. In music halls and vaudeville theaters across the country, they showed Whites much more than just the right way to do the buck-and-wing and the Cakewalk; they made comedy more sophisticated, transformed the energy of vaudeville, and, along the way, modernized American popular music.”

—Joe Boyd, “How we begin to remember,” from And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music, ZE Books, 2025.

Tuneage for You

“Where Are We Going?” Marvin Gaye (1973; writers: Larry Mizell and Edward Larry Gordon)

—The Beatles, “Octopus’s Garden”

A CONFESSION: I DEFINITELY struggled to write this.

It’s not like I had a bad plan—oh no. This StoryShed season (number 11, about Stargazing—more in a sec) is my treasure chest, the place where I generally feel the freest because it’s a topic near and dear to my heart: curiosity.

What kicked it off was the stray thought: Why are some folks allergic to curiosity? That is to say, why are some people curiosity-resistant?

What is the root cause of incuriosity?

You see, writing a blog about my life for nearly 10 years produced an interesting realization—I have three fairly distinct personality traits since I was at least seven years old. I now call these traits Daytalking, Nightwalking, and Stargazing.

Daytalking was a term that burbled up from somewhere in my head while I was writing a piece about Elton John’s “Your Song,” for my old WordPress blog.

Nightwalking followed in an essay about roaming my old lakeside neighborhood on summer nights and thinking about the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin.” As the blog post relates, “…nightwalking was for dark, murky, wild longings, daytalking was about openly having it out, singing loud and proud, making it clear that ‘you can tell everybody, this is your song.’”

Stargazing’s original song was one of my earliest memories: Learning to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” particularly the line “How I wonder what you are.”

A later blog post titled “Future Games” attempted to grasp the totality of Stargazing (at least for me). In it I wrote, “I used those early posts as sensory-based memory recall: I’d close my eyes and imagine what warm sunlight felt like on my young skin, nostrils filled with chlorine from the local pool, or [hearing] the jangle of a transistor radio playing nearby. It was intoxicating—it was pleasurable; I was a happy kid!”

So, Daytalking equals relationships, conversation, belonging, and “being-togetherness.” Nightwalking is lonelier and entirely solo, but with a heavy soundtrack and night shadows.

And Stargazing, where we’ve landed right now, is about curiosity, wonder, awe, the delight of discovery and the never-ending mysteries of—well, everything.

But back to the topic at hand—why do some people so completely lack curiosity?

And is it a larger problem for society?

THERE’S A SCENE IN J.D. Salinger’s short story “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” where the main character and narrator, a 19-year-old we only know by the name of John Smith, has landed a job at a small art school in Montreal. I’m grateful to for spurring me to re-read the story. Like most of Salinger’s stories, oddly enough, he seems to tap into any question I happen to be mulling over. It’s eerie.

Anyway, the buildup to that scene is how our lone artist in Montreal longs for a connection with his remote students—and he finds one in a correspondence with a nun named Sister Irma. He begins fantasizing about her:

…I thought, forcibly, of my star pupil. I tried to visualize the day I would visit her at her convent. I saw her coming to meet me—near a high, wire fence—a shy, beautiful girl of eighteen who had not taken her final vows and was still free to go out into the world with the Peter Abelard-type man of her choice. I saw us walking slowly, silently, toward a far, verdant part of the convent grounds, where suddenly, and without sin, I would put my arm around her waist. The image was too ecstatic to hold in place, and, finally, I let go, and fell asleep.

Well, a word of advice to the “forcibly thoughtful” M. De Daumier-Smith: Not only was the image “too ecstatic,” it was psychological poison.

Let me explain.

When I first noodled this episode of Season 11, I wanted to write about my ongoing curiosity with octopus intelligence. I wondered about how their “brain” is actually their entire being, from the central brain to the far reaches of their tentacles. I started with a statement (much like De Daumier-Smith’s cascading statements: “I would…I saw…”) and wrote down: “The octopus has 8 tentacles (or 6, or even 10).”

Then I turned that around and asked a question: “How many tentacles are on an octopus?”

I was surprised to learn the answer: None.

Squid and cuttlefish have 8 arms and two tentacles. Octopuses (or octopi) have just 8 arms with suckers.

Then I quickly jotted down this term: “The tyranny of the imagination.” What, I wondered, is greater than that? “The supple strength of inquiry?”

From there I went deeper. Maybe the tyranny wasn’t the imagination, but a false statement or incorrect assumption (or even an outright lie). Turning that around, the greater approach might be using “the subtle power of inquiry.” Let’s get personal with that.

You might say: “You are angry at me.” I might respond with a yes or no and not say anything more (a closed response). If you turned that statement into a question, “Are you angry with me?” I still might give you a closed answer. We’re getting nowhere at this point. By asking an open question, “How are you feeling about me just now?” we’re exploring things more deeply and…

—Well, we’re cooking with gas.

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You see, like Salinger’s “forcibly thoughtful” Mr. Smith, perhaps people make more assumptions and statements than they do asking questions. Don’t get me wrong—I can be as incurious and as presumptive as the next person. The thing is, when I get that way I nearly always (grumpily) wonder: “This isn’t right. Why am I feeling this way?”

So I did more exploring and discovered this study, which I found eye-opening [italics mine]:

“Brain-Imaging Study Reveals Curiosity as it Emerges”

“…the findings could have diagnostic and even therapeutic implications for those with depression, apathy or anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure), which are conditions often marked by a lack of curiosity. …Curiosity entails a sort of enthusiasm, a willingness to expend energy and investigate your surroundings. And it’s intrinsically motivated, meaning that nobody is paying you to be curious; you are curious merely based on the hope that something good will come when you learn,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “Those are just some of the amazing things about curiosity.”

So, what initially began as a question for me, “Could I make an octopus friend this year and what would it feel like to be regarded (or doused with water) by an octopus?” and turned it into an exploration of why I love asking oddball questions in the first place.

Hey, I still have yet to make that new octopus friend. But the year is young. (And yes, I’ve seen the doc My Octopus Teacher and really enjoyed it.)

And I’m not sure how I can encourage more people to exercise their curiosity, except to say, “You might really enjoy it.”

Notes and extra texture

Learn about octopus superpowers…

Meet Ariel and Lucy, the Octopi! Friends tip: Always let them know they’re the boss.

Learn more about an octopus’s social life… 5:45 min in: “Octopuses that bump into each other either mate, eat each other—or both.” :-O

We’ll dig into that with the Shack, but first…

Warm Bake > Hot Take

SO, SO MANY HOT takes here in the Twin Cities this month. Do we like this much attention? NO WE DO NOT.

We are warm bakers, not hot takers. That being said, we rise (like freshly baked bread!) to a challenge and that challenge is the current federal regime.

Keep the pressure on, folks. Also…

Here’s what we need, kids—

Thanks for all the hugs.

They feel SO GOOD.

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

Less reading other ’stacks this week because, well, DEPRESSED. Can you guess why? But a few missives slipped under my locked door.

“This is our crisis scenario,” Carbon Upfront! Substack writes, “about a decade from now when we have 70 million seriously ageing baby boomers, mostly alone, trapped in their suburban homes that they cannot afford to keep cool or dry because of a rapidly changing climate, possibly in the middle of an inter-generational political war.”

His essay, written in response to this post by , chilled me to the bone and spurred more curiosity about what we, as individuals can do to stem the forthcoming crisis. Not entirely blaming Boomers might be a good first step, but also moving things forward at the ballot box and in the workplace is another possibility.

Nice piece from slipped into my DMs this past week ahead of Davos. Check it out here.

Apparently a lot of changes in Substackia going into 2026.

We’ll keep you posted as usual.

Into the Shack

JANUARY! Usually so tough, so spare, so vital! What’s happened?

Where’s your spunk?

To all loyal StoryShed subscribers: The StoryShedding digest will now be hitting in boxes on a bi-weekly basis now. Why? Weekly was starting to detract from regular seasonal essays. It’s been cheering to know readers are enjoying the digest and I’m happy to continue it!

Season 11: Stargazing, Episode 1 isn’t going well. It’s having existential issues but management is hoping to smooth out current tensions.

The Morning Muse

ALL THAT PERTAINS AFTER the goddess has stripped you of your raw desire.

• …every last masticated morsel

• Let’s make like a chevron and sagittate

• It’s open-faced sandwiches and safe recreation in the pavilion all afternoon, dude.

• pyroglyphics

• Elder udder under advisement—over and out

• Larry Shotgun

• splurge merch

• “The winter sun was just rising, its rosy glow blushing the tops of bare trees.”

• Brotides (roaring from the back of the barroom)

• When good intentions yield bad results

• Percocet bathtub paints

• Flabberguested households

• “I have no reciprocal pride for this person, take them away.”

• Bykwon Beedoodle

• An interview with storyteller Tom Cassidy

• Fornicating bushbabies, all bug-eyed and reeling

• stormwalk

• The Blinchley Ouroboros

• Wednesday maybe yes likely no

• A bird in flight / is winged appetite

“Wait, I did WHAT?”

Thought for the Week

[Saint-Saëns] brings into the midst of our present restlessness something of the sweetness and clarity of past periods, something that seems like fragments of a vanished world.

—Romain Rolland, “On Camille Saint-Saëns” from Milton Cross’ Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Music, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962.

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Tuneage for You

“Hail! California” Camille Saint-Saëns (1915; here performed by La Sirène, le 28 novembre 2021 à l'église de la Madeleine, Paris, arranged by Kevin R. Tam.)

Let’s dig in. Take the chill off.

Warm Bake > Hot Take

FRESHLY BAKED JANUARIES HAVE a distinct odor—I’d say aroma, but that wouldn’t be the right word for 2026 so far: an overwhelming stench of hot takes and not enough doughy-woahy inviting warm bakes.

My “hot take facial tic” has been flashin’ like a westbound railroad crossing and it’s not even a full week into the year. Let’s run down the list, shall we?

• Starting a war with Venezuela? Tick VG.

• Murdering Americans in their own streets. ICE’ll be knocking on your door next.

• U.S. healthcare system in financial free fall? Got it. Ouch.

• No functioning American government? Hello, Congress? SCOTUS? Anyone?

• Communication breakdowns in families, communities, individual selves? Hotline to a psychiatrist, STAT!

So, what’s a person to do? It’s a valid question—one I understand everyone is asking.

You can bake it, but you can’t take it anymore.

And another thing I’ve been stewing over, y’all. Listen up.

People are gonna judge you no matter what you do. That’s why doing your best involves showing up and giving it your best shot. You’re not going to win ’em all but that’s part of the plan (or so I’m told by former adults no longer on this material plane).

I grew up with a lot of animosity coming at me for doing what I considered creative work. I don’t think I stopped once, but did have a hugely despondent moment in the summer of 1995. That’s a story for another time, but suffice to say I survived it. And a shit-ton of other, possibly worse things. Here’s what I’ve learned…

Some folks wanna bring you down, and will wait outside your door until they see your sorry hide cold and crinkly and belly-up. What’s funny is to give them that—to a point. Thespian Hour, my sweet Flower of Power. Fake it until you get the psychic reach-around. And then go for the kill, Bill.

Me? Just over here keepin’ the lovin’ oven warm … and not overheating.

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

OK, OK. I WILL admit I’ve been restacking a lot of Notes lately, and I’m curious. Does anyone else restack a Note that includes a Substack essay just so they can remember to go back and read it in more detail later? Cos I do that. A lot.

There’s more great writing than I have time to read, but I make a point to give it my best shot. What I can’t do currently in the way of paid subscriptions I try to make up for in sheer reading. And sharing. Whatever I can.

So, what’s been on my radar?

* * *

While we mourn the murder of Minneapolis resident Renée Nicole Macklin Good, let’s remember her not only through her life but also her poetry.

This stunned me and its ending brought me to tears:

You can read her entire poem here.

* * *

of Mistakes Were Made kindly reminds us that “we can’t control the universe. But we can always give a hug to someone we love.” Do yourself a hug by going to read his marvelous “Toward Eternity.”

Thanks for writing it, Lee.

* * *

of the Beautiful Losers Substack is takin’ names and numbers with her recent essay “Against the Cult of Productivity.” Younger writers seem especially quick to glom on to the cult by “strategically dealing with audience churn” and “optimizing output.” Fuck that shiz.

I’ve a complete Season 11 mapped out, but not entirely drafted. From this vantage point, I can see episodes 1 and 4 as problematic, and episodes 2 and 3 as oddly enticing. So write those first?

Maybe, maybe not.

Sometimes when you start on something that attracts you, it allows psychical space for the ones that—at the time—particularly don’t. “Let it all grow dark and rich and strange,” Mann writes, “and maybe even glow and pulse and fill with imperceptible light. Let the worms of wisdom do their work.”

Glow lil’ glowworms, glow!

* * *

Regular StoryShed Media subscribers might not be aware that for over a year now I’ve been joyously collaborating with Boston writer and photographer on the Curious George Questionnaire, which introduces Substack creators to new readers (and potentially, subscribers). We’re keeping it free as we enter 2026, and always happy to discover new respondents and have former ones return for chats and new collaborations. If that interests you, follow George! As our mascot, George often mysteriously dips “out in the field,” still bringing home new curiosities and friends.

Look for his latest find next Friday morning, January 16.

Into the Shack

BIG WIN OVER HERE at StoryShed HQ this past week: I’m back on Scrivener (a word processing software that’s miles above MS Word, Apple Pages, etc.) after I left my old Macbook Pro as a media player and bought my new Macbook Air a couple years ago. The license lapsed, but I was able to get Scrivener 3.0 for a 45% discount and that’s cool because I’m filing it under StoryShed Media LLC’s business expenses for 2026. I’m pumped.

Now I need to relearn Scrivener. lol.

Season 11, Episode 1 is still in draft mode, but had a research expedition last Sunday to an aquarium shop in south Minneapolis—alas, they don’t carry octopuses. Oddly, the co-owner was a former journalist (TV, the local ABC affiliate I think he said) and he was fascinated by my project into octopus intelligence. I am too! I’m now hoping Mall of America’s SEA LIFE aquarium can help me out, or on the retail (dead octopus) side, Fortune Fish and Gourmet just north of where I live.

Stay tuned. Definitely dropping first episode by end of the month.

The Morning Muse

STORYSHED MEDIA IS AVAILABLE for your next “brainstorming” meeting or children’s balloon-animal birthday party. Let’s go racin’ in the sheets—of paper—together.

• The friends you have might not necessarily be the friends you need.

• An insufficient attempt to relieve a depressed standup comedian: “I demand that you immediately Billy Crystalize!”

• high-density liverwurst

• Chester Alan Arthur Cheeseborough, Esq.

• “It’s Monroe, doc!” “Donsluritis, to be precise.”

• blaster pad

• Roasted apatina

• “I would buy stuff like my father’s aftershave but let’s first consider the implications.”

• a shot of potato

• border shag

• Brigadoom: Two European tourists discover a magical MAGA town that appears for only one day every 100 years. Songs include “Come to Me, Bend That Knee” and “Tether on the Hill.” “Almost Like Being a Slut” was one of its hit songs.

• Naturally occurring stupid

• Better this than that, buh less of those than this

• Aldo Fusconi

• To an over-amorous date: “Hey. Make like a submarine and lower that periscope.”

• Idegyro: A ballerina of the mind

• “Bivalve pancakes for the whole table!”

• Kaylee’s downstairs

• A prayer wheel, but only to be used as a spare.

• Stinky Magee and the Dual Quad Carburetors
  ”Who’d you go see last night?”
  “Stinky’s DQC at the Beam House.”
  “Whoa. Any good?”
  “The best!”

Now off you go, you small boys!

Thought for the Week

“The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.”

—Stephen King, “The Body,” end of Chapter 20

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Tuneage for You

Take us out, Mr. Jimmy!

“A New Life” Jim James (2015) <3

If you’re seeing this it’s Saturday morning, Jan. 3, 2026. Who knew, right? Here’s hoping your holidays (or whatever/however you celebrate them) were swell. And hello new friends, current subscribers, and interested followers. All are welcome to Storyshedding or StoryShedding, however it tumbles out.

Let’s get right to…

Warm Bake > Hot Take

THINKING OF MY LATE father ahead of his birthday on Jan. 1st (he would’ve been 93). In his younger days he was a natty dresser and kept things sharp in a Leonard Cohen sort of way.

Close on the heels of Dad’s birthday, my only brother has his day today, Jan. 3. So, here’s to my amazing brother—a man for whom few problems exist that he cannot wrench into reasonable solutions.

Dedicating tuneage down below to Brian on his birthday.

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

LET’S RACK ’EM UP!

Must Read Dept. this past week from fellow Minnesotan and marvelous songwriter and storyteller : “Critical thinking,” he writes, “whether intellectual or moral, is an imperative. A necessary discipline. A refusal to deny what is factual and provable. A refusal to turn fear into blame. A refusal to let history repeat itself under a different name, and under different circumstances.”

Go check it out.

Sad News

This past Sunday, Dec. 28, 2025, fellow Substacker (Elevate the Discourse) and friend Richard Bryant passed away, leaving his wife, children, and beloved cat Teacup—and all of us who enjoyed his writing and many kindnesses.

Rich and I talked about collaborating on a future project—now, ironically based on a class syllabus I wanted to present called How2Die—but couldn’t figure out how to translate it to Substack with the sort of interactivity and lively cohort the course would need. He was excited about the prospect and so I’ve decided to roll out a mini-version in episode 3 of this season of Stargazing: “Does J.R.R. Tolkien Prove There’s Life After Death?”

More to come. Here’s hoping I do Richard proud.

Godspeed, my friend.

Into the Shack

Now that it is 2026, I’ve tried to make sure StoryShed’s Substack feeds the outside writing muse and income-producing (cos, gotta eat, roof over head, you know the drill, etc.) side of things. It’s funny, but growing up I was “taught” that making art was something lazy people did—it’s the exact opposite, folks. The lazy people are just … phoning it in and hoping for the best with whatever employer they have if they’re lucky to even say that. It’s sad. It shouldn’t be that way, alas.

As usual.

So, over here inside the shack/shed, I’m steaming ahead with Season 11: Stargazing and trying to find that new octopus friend! Stay tuned.

The Morning Muse

Let’s cut to the chase…

• “There’s a guy I want you to meet!” “What’s his name?” “Gilbert Frothingham.” “Really now…”

• Cleanup in Aisle Me

• The Haversteen Packet

• “booziddle” …let’s use it in a sentence: “Wouldn’t give a booziddle if’n ya handed me Nero’s smokin’ fiddle.”

• Kemosabe snorebait

• Change Your Life with Corn Syrup and Decoupage

• Your Eustace diamond for my cheesy comestible?

• hey-ho baggage moment

• Suzanne Bazillions

• callowbear

• “One time, long ago, somebody cared about me. But in hindsight, it was only superficially.”

That’ll do, Pig.

Thought for the Week

“Simpler and more sustaining is Johnson’s recipe: the safest antidote to sorrow is employment. He was referring to grief at others’ deaths, adducing the example of soldiers and seamen among whom he found much kindness but little grief: ‘Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul … remedied by exercise and motion.’”

—D.J. Enright from The Oxford Book of Death, “On Suicide,” Oxford University Press, 1987.

Tuneage for You!

“The Greatest Discovery” by Elton John (1970; lyrics: Bernie Taupin; released on his debut album featuring “Your Song,” here live in Sydney, Australia in 1986).

It’s the only song I know about brothers first being introduced by their parents.

For my brother Brian on his birthday.

January is a good thing, if regarded with care and consideration.

That’s just my…

Warm Bake > Hot Take

I WILL ALWAYS REGARD octopi with the respect they deserve. I also never found “calamari” particularly delicious, so was happy to stop ordering it at restaurants. I’m sure there’s a preparation that’s mind-blowing, but not as mind-blowing as the smarts behind your average octopus.

I think I love them.

So, to inaugurate StoryShed’s forthcoming Season 11 on Stargazing, Episode 1 has a goal:

“I am determined to personally meet—and maybe befriend!—an octopus.”

Stay tuned.

But wait! There’s more!

After seeing Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet this past week, there was a scene I couldn’t get out of my mind. I needed to talk to someone about it. (There’s probably more about the film worth talking about, but this wouldn’t let me go!) I wondered if a sample of the shooting script was available online and Deadline.com did not disappoint:

This version of the script doesn’t indicate what Zhao eventually directed and kept after editing, which I explained to my friend Chris the meaning behind her camera choices in this scene. It niggled me but I think I’ve teased out an answer.

Zhao sets this scene as a single shot through the house window, almost as if the audience is a “Peeping Tom” on the Shakespeare family in the middle of the night. Will is up writing (and drinking, apparently) and Agnes has been roused from bed to see what he’s working on. He refuses to show her (or explain to us) what he’s writing or why it is important to him. But we can tell it’s vital—he’s distressed.

A lesser director would’ve cut away from the window, bringing us closer with the flattering aspect of “being closer to the drama,” maybe a two-shot of Will and Agnes. Zhao doesn’t do that—almost as an act of refusal.

In the end, it works. We will eventually see what he’s written (or will write) just as Agnes will in the theater with her husband’s production of Hamlet.

It’s the payoff we need, and one Zhao so richly delivers.

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

Confession: I haven’t been doing much Substack reading this past week. Had to dip into the workday for a short stretch, and now—through to the first week of January 2026, I have time to read your ’stacks. Yay!

’s Hot Plate! Print Edition Substack returns to classic comics—wherein he reminds me I once read Glen Baxter with relish (and no, not the sweet pickle kind—a particularly Baxterian reaction line if you ask me)…

For the holiday season, ‘s “Four Perspectives on Bing Crosby” took me straight back to my late parents’ musical tastes. “In the midst of the most savage war of the century,” Gioia writes, “Bing Crosby was a touchstone of decency and humanity for the troops on the front line.”

Oh for those lovely, sweet qualities once again.

Into the Shack

No, not StoryShitting (although that has happened before), when we re-enter the Shack, but more planning ahead and sharing with subscribers.

StoryShed Season 11: Stargazing will drop episode 1 no later than Jan. 15. Since the term “Stargazing” in my triad is about curiosity, each of the four episodes will tackle a separate question and attempt to tease it out in one go (I’m a little worried about length, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it). The loose plan:

• Episode 1: Let’s Get Curious About Incuriosity (the octopus story)

• Episode 2: Storytelling 101 With Steve and Rob

• Episode 3: Did J.R.R. Tolkien Prove There’s Life After Death?

• Episode 4: Au Revoir, Monsieur Libido?

A couple of those will be behind the paywall since StoryShed has added paid subscribers and they deserve the TLC. It also means you can upgrade your subscription to monthly (or yearly is your best value)…

See y’all in January!

The Morning Muse

YOU CAN SAY ANYTHING you want, it’s true. You can say anything. If you didn’t have to fear family wrath, societal shame, deportation or prison time, and you said what you said, what would you say?

That’s the spirit of the Morning Muse.

So here she comes again shakin’ everybody’s circuits…

• The Oaken Barrel Singers of Liguria

• Jason Warblo, sound technician

• Shut up, shut up! You had me at Mango Barbacoa.

• Larry Dousman, Jr.

• Kabuki, without the lingering aftertaste

• When your paunch reflects your haunch you experience failure to launch.

• …he looks like he shits Tootsie Rolls in fast succession

• love surveillance

• Richard Peru

• corrugated prophet

• Seppuku, but with raclette cheese

• “There’s not a single likeable thing about you.” “Not true!” “How so?” “I like me!”

• Emanating from a bakery that plays only Led Zeppelin: “Wanna whole lotta loaf…wanna whole lotta loaf…”

• A retail Spartacus

• First Octopus: “How would you like to be called a mollusk?” Second Octopus: “I would not like it one bit.”

• Term for “gets up in the middle of the night to sadly rearrange all the furniture”…

  Wabi-sobby?

Now we’re out, Scout.

Thought for the Week

Instead of a quote, here are some song lyrics that for me completely illustrate Daytalking, Nightwalking, and Stargazing through life’s stages.

“Morning of My Life by Barry Alan Gibb

[Stargazing] In the morning when the moon is at its rest

You will find me at the time I love the best

Watching rainbows play on sunlight

Pools of water iced from cold nights,

In the morning

’Tis the morning of my life.

[Daytalking] In the daytime I will meet you as before

You will find me waiting by the ocean floor

Building castles in the shifting sands

In a world that no one understands

In the morning

’Tis the morning of my life

’Tis the morning of my life.

[Bridge—Stargazing again] In the morning of my life

The minutes take so long to drift away

Please be patient with your life

It’s only morning and you’re still to live your day.

[Nightwalking] In the evening I will fly you to the moon

To the top right hand corner

Of the ceiling in my room

Where we’ll stay until the sun shines

Another day to swing on clotheslines

May I be yawning

’Tis the morning of my life

’Tis the morning of my life

In the morning

In the morning

In the morning…”

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Tuneage for You!

“Morning Of My Life” The Bee Gees (1970; writer: Barry Alan Gibb; Live in Las Vegas, 1997) <3

That’s my epithet for satisfaction. Happiness. Contentment. I’ll even share it, like, if we’re chatting and you are impressed by something and share it with me, and I like it too, BOOM—“Beauty.”

Because beauty should always be celebrated, right?

Beauty.

As I’m a reluctant collage artist, calling out since he’s doing some great work (this should be filed below, but it lands where it lands).

Bad me, but I GAVE this collage to a Minnesota writer whose name is Chris but I didn’t get his last name or handle when we met on Twitter (when I was Comdar, ugh.)…Chris in St. Paul (last I heard) has the original artwork. Here it is in full:

Warm Bake > Hot Take

Probably never was a time Rob Reiner wasn’t somewhere in the back of my mind.

Even watching my Nixon-voting Republican father laughing at his exchanges as Mike Stivic (Archie Bunker’s daughter Gloria’s husband) harangues in All in the Family. We laughed as a family. I remember that. I loved that (in retrospect). We were all there: Mom, Dad, me and my brother. In front of the television.

Now?

Fuck TV.

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

Shouts ‘n’ Murmurs. Kudos to stuff we’re seeing on the ’stack…

“Print books aren’t competing with screens. They’re doing something else entirely. They’re not optimized. They’re not efficient. They don’t scale.

They endure.”

—from “Print Books Are Not Dead” by the Substack. I was so inspired by this that I mentioned some project ideas to my new printer (who does book manufacturing as well as cards, letterheads, and envelopes) this past week. We’ll see, but the ship has sailed for me on self-publishing. Only online or with other writers in an anthology (I’m looking at you and gang!).

My iPhone alarm goes off at 5:30am every morning. In the winter I’m often up earlier, so I have to babysit the alarm. At EXACTLY 5:44am (it would be 4:44am Mountain Time for the original author) sends out his daily Chocolate Taoist message. If you’re not getting those, well, get those.

So much great reading. So little time.

Into the Shack

You may or may not be curious about “what I’m doing.” Hey, I barely know myself.

That is not to say I haven’t done things in the past. But the past has passed and what’s done is done and nigh the twain shall meet except when things are left undone.

In an effort to encourage community (i.e., accountability) I’m reminded of past creative projects (abandoned stories and novels, wished-for poems, screenplay concepts of a concept, and unfinished artwork)…so in StoryShedding going forward, I’ll lay out the creative work and a calendar for hitting those marks. Likely the first of the January will see drafting of the memoir Daytalking, Nightwalking, Stargazing ms., since there’s a support structure for doing just that!

Stick around.

The Morning Muse

What, you probably wonder (at least I do) is the freakin’ point of the Morning Muse? Why spew out things that don’t mean anything if you’re not going to use them in a creative meeting, brainstorming session, or in a novel, play, or poem?

Why indeed! So to answer that…

• Lily von Carnage

• Think “porcupine” but say “Porky-pine”

• Montenegro slaghog

• Profferole—I don’t know…something gustatory? (Almost there, a profiterole is edible, a “profferole” is a position or acting role, I guess, you can pre-offer?)

• Camera as object only, no pictures

• Into the geriatric swirl we go

• stultifying investiture

• your jiggle-swiggle is worth a giggle

• aqua cleavage response time

• Dorks With Corks (wine shoppe)

• artery parchment

• Kiki Blurg-Personae

• Testicle bicycle basket

• Staring at ominous tree branches and feeling oddly comforted

• …yet ribbons of distraction ensue

From a Dec. 16, 1986, journal entry:

I know I’ve told myself in the past that it’s easy to ascribe too much value to something: a person, an event… but sometimes these things move as if they had a will of their own, and I’m just there to watch as it bobs to the surface every now and then. But wanting love, returned love, unearned love. That’s approval, part of the ties with a family; even it it’s a family of two; me, and another, no doubt, no distrust.

That should do for now. Ahem.

Thought for the Week

“IT IS TODAY A commonplace of American journalism that a news story must illustrate hind-to-end writing. Unlike other literary forms, the climax is at the beginning. The lead, or opening paragraph or paragraphs, gives the reader the essential facts. The body of the story is merely detailed expository material, its paragraph structure a series of separate units without transitions connecting them with what went before or what is to follow, and arranged in order of decreasing importance. The body of the news story must meet the cutoff test. If at any point after the lead a deletion should be made in the story, the essential facts will remain.”

—Louis L. Snyder and Richard B. Morris, A Treasury of Great Reporting, 2nd edition. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962.

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Tuneage for You!

Out we goooooo…

“Born Fighter” Nick Lowe (1979) here with Rockpile on “Get It Together,” filmed on Dec. 26, 1979! (Rockpile: Billy Bremner, guitar; Dave Edmunds, guitar; Nick Lowe, guitar, and Terry Williams, drums)

You: But it says sledding. StorySledding.

Me: Hey. It’s wintertime. There’s snow on the ground. We’re going sledding.

“ROSEBUD…”

Crap. There goes another perfectly good snow globe.

Stick around to see what develops after we clean up the mess!

And maybe you’ll find some things that help you attain anything you’re hoping to create, or just for you to freakin’ enjoy.

It’s all good.

Warm Bake > Hot Take

WE HAZ THE MEATS!

So, apparently Substack Notes (which, is of course “social media”) is eating some creators’ brains. I must confess that the addictive nature of Notes can be at times overwhelming and are sure able to pull an honest creator away from the task at hand (writing, editing, and publishing their ’stack).

I am from the sticks, so grateful just to be here.

Outside of that, no warm bake this week. Maybe later.

What Is the Sound of One Substack Clapping?

Sort of the Shouts ‘n’ Murmurs of Substack, y’all. Who’s doin’ what on Substack that you might’ve missed!

Let’s get to it…

This was fascinating: “If you pander to idiots, you will make yourself dumber in the process.” —

“The idea of sitting in a dark room with two hundred strangers and somehow being moved or transported by what happens on a screen … to me it’s like someone trying to get one over on me. I never wanted to impose that on anyone else.” —Film director Bill Forsyth from ’ essay on his film Comfort & Joy (1984).

I love Comfort & Joy even though it’s no Local Hero, which is a small masterpiece. To each their own. Personal trivia: I THINK I was at a party in Glasgow in 1982 with my then-girlfriend Abigail and Altered Images lead singer (and Forsyth ingénue) Clare Grogan was also there. Don’t think we spoke two words together.

My friend has a charming new logo for her Substack and I wanted to share it since it screams fun and excitement—truly! (Way to go, Beth!)

…moving on…

Into the Shack

Yeah you got it…let’s see what ChatGPT can do for us…

…uhhhhh …NOPE.

So by Friday, a Creative Mornings participant turned me on to Gemini’s Nano Banana and I asked IT what it might come up with…

Welp, that seemed like a step up (or down, whatever your reference point is), but I asked it, “Why is he feeding the badger a cup of tea?”

Here’s how it responded:

…to which I responded: “OK now you’re just being lazy!”

It added more light in the forest and books floating like falling leaves…

—that’s when I decided I’d had enough playtime with AI for the day.

Hey kids! I was doing my drip coffeemaker all wrong!

Here’s the scoop: When I grind fresh coffee beans (about 2-3 cups worth is all my system can handle in a morning) I was piling the ground beans in a conical-shaped pile in the cone-shaped coffee filter, and then making a divot in the top so the hot water could brew down and around the grounds, thinking it would make for a uniform brew.

How wrong I was. Leave the pile conical! Let the hot water do the work. My coffee this morning was much brighter and “coffee-forward” so now this is the way. If you stop over for a cuppa, this is what you’ll get.

Just sayin’.

“A trifle underdone” aka the Morning Muse

play me baby…

This section is for stuff I used to do on Medium and early Substack (2020-22) prior to the current StoryShed seasonal calendar. Maybe they will inspire other writers or totally put readers off—I don’t know.

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Essentially, I’ve been jotting down weird phrases, terms, made-up names, nonsense products and services, bright ideas or depressing notions, and whatever silliness passes through my brain, usually hitting me in the shower or while preparing breakfast.

Later in the day, the muse goes away (my guess, out shopping—wise move, muse!)…

• “A snow angel, once forgotten…”

• Precocious feline

• Simon Gretch

• Stig Grainger

• Chicken proverb

• Dennis Herlich

• Emmentaler Ballet

• My crepuscular roommate (more twilight creature than dawn-scratcher), density motivator, sidereal pancake

• going out with a recipe…

Spiced Molasses Cookies from Maine’s The Lost Kitchen!

Thought for the Week

“WE HANKER TO GO ON, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time. Something will surely have to be found to take the place of sitting on the porch re-examining one’s watch.”

—Lewis Thomas, from The Lives of a Cell (1971)

Tuneage aka Later, ’gator

“Why Can’t We Be Friends?” War (1975)

But all his assiduity and tenderness were without effect, for he could neither soften her heart nor open her hand, and was reduced to the utmost miseries of want while he was endeavoring to awaken the affection of a mother. He was therefore obliged to seek some other means of support; and, having no profession, became by necessity an author…”

—Samuel Johnson, “The Sufferings of Savage,” from Lives of the English Poets

THERE IT IS—THE precise moment when hope and expectation meet “the utmost miseries” during the “frequent practice [of walking] in the dark evenings for several hours.”

Ah, well I remember it.

And even though the late, great Mr. Richard Savage’s nocturnal prowlings were a solid three hundred years ago, it still screams “Nightwalking!” to me today.

Nightwalking is a form of dedication—almost like moving your feet toward an altar made of night air, kneeling like a supplicant before God-knows-freakin’-what, and moving your lips to the music of prayer.

If that sounds a bit airy-fairy, ookie-pookie pudding ‘n’ pie … well, so be it.

It’s been a good Nightwalking season this year: best in late summer when there are crickets chirping or frogs croaking, or autumn just before “all the leaves are gone, and the sky is gray.”1 Which of course reminds me (and always will) that music, because it’s largely from the heart, ties in deeply with Nightwalking. My ol’ nocturnal stumblefoot ain’t at its best when it comes to coughing up the right words. But it’ll whistle a tune or hum an old hymn and just keep walking on.

When I reread Samuel Johnson’s take on his friend Richard Savage’s early life, it’s heartbreaking—with a dash of sweetness and the gut-punch of a lowdown after-burn. My own “Nightwalking heart” wants to make sense of his abandonment by and longing for his mother. If only he had someone with whom he could talk it over!

Then Stargazing kicks in (definitely a form of imagination) and muses: “What if Richard Savage suddenly turned into a bright-winged moth and banged at his mother’s window? Would she see him then? Might she open the window, allowing him to fly to her, fluttering about her head, possibly delighting her and himself and breaking the leaden isolation of his night walk?”

But we mustn’t forget the candle in her hand, right? He now being a moth—well, you do the math.

Fast-forward into the twentieth century—1978 to be exact—and a Nightwalking songwriter by the name of Justin Hayward sings a tune originally penned by Jeff Wayne, Gary Osborne, and Paul Vigrass titled “Forever Autumn.”2

That year I was leaving high school and in two years’ time forever saying goodbye to my Nightwalking jaunts of the ’70s: Casco Point’s “Circle,” on Lake Minnetonka. That song would’ve definitely been looping through my head.

And I adored it.

BEFORE HE DIED IN 1862 at the age of 45 of tuberculosis, Henry David Thoreau kept his pen firmly in hand. In his essay “Night and Moonlight,” he gives voice to mute Nightwalking: “Many men walk by day,” he writes, “[but] few walk by night. It is a very different season.”3

He goes on to acknowledge a sort of “consciousness” behind Nightwalking [emphasis mine]:

The woods are heavy and dark. Nature slumbers. You see the moonlight reflected from particular stumps in the recesses of the forest, as if she selected what to shine on.

Thoreau’s attention to detail might seem trivial to the early 21st century distracted mind, but perhaps that’s leaning away from Nightwalking’s beating heart and closer to our overtired and overthinking heads. Even a century and more later, he seems to agree:

How insupportable would be the days, if the night with its dews and darkness did not come to restore the drooping world. As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the intellect…

If Nightwalking could talk, or if it had a companion through the gloom—all its dews and darkness—maybe it would finally spill its overflowing yet secret heart.

In Nightwalking musical terms, I’m reminded of Gayle Caldwell’s 1968 song, “Cycles,” which I first discovered through Rickie Lee Jones’ 2000 album It’s Like This and then later, to my surprise, Frank Sinatra’s version.4

Caldwell’s original (and to my mind, Sinatra’s too) is somewhat jaunty, but Rickie Lee Jones nails the tone both lyrically and musically throughout, including a tinge of wryness from what I think is a stand-up bass.

But you might be wondering, how is “Cycles” like Nightwalking?

Well, it’s as close as I can imagine to articulating two opposing thoughts (and their resonating emotions) at the same time: Things are bad, but hey, they’ve been that way before and there’s no reason to think—like the seasonal cycles, even the rising and setting of the sun—that they won’t at some point become better again.

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In the end, I’d say that’s a good use of one’s melancholic reflections.

And also Prime Time Nightwalking.

Exciting StoryShed Subscriber News

StoryShed has started a new seasonal tradition…watching Albert Lamorisse’s classic film The Red Balloon (1956) every November going forward. Why? It’s probably one of the first movies I ever saw (likely in elementary or kindergarten, even when they’d show European films to kids that might have disturbing overtones) and its message (actually, is there really one outside of being open to all the world has to offer?) is perennial—timeless, even.

Have you ever seen The Red Balloon?

What did you think?

Leave your comments below!

It’s been a fantastic year for StoryShed Media here on Substack.

Highlights include: The Ingmar Bergman Winter Survival Series from earlier in 2025, and the long-form essay (covering the entire Season 8 episodes) America Is a Haunted Place, with my impressions of the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Supernatural America exhibition from 2022. Plus all the regular essays on Daytalking, Nightwalking, and Stargazing, and all the ones planned for 2026!

Coming up for Season 11: Stargazing (in January 2026) each episode of the season will pose a different question and mull it over or seek solutions. You won’t want to miss it.

After analyzing posts and full-length essays from the past year, I’ve decided (at least compared with most other ‘stacker friends) I’M NOT PUBLISHING ENOUGH! To that end, I won’t be publishing every day (unless you’re a news organization on Substack, or a ‘stacker with a vast quantity of content to publish—which is possible—but it doesn’t make much sense for my work), but I will be keeping the seasons at four episodes per season, and ADDING a weekly digest starting next week (end of the week of Dec. 8, publishing first thing Saturday mornings, 9 a.m. CST, so 12/13/25 will be the debut issue).

What is this digest? I’m thinking short and sweet—a sort of StoryShed “Mini-Me” with a working title of The Shack or StoryShedding. The hope is the digest will connect more with StoryShed’s free and paid subscribers and get word out about all the good work other creators are doing on Substack.

Hopefully a win-win for readers and fellow writers.

SPEAKING OF WHICH you can now upgrade to a paid subscription (yearly is your best value!) with this link…

If money is tight (and I mean, who can’t say that?) I would really appreciate a recommend or restack to keep StoryShed’s line-of-sight with the algo.

Thank you for subscribing or following, and happy holidays—however you choose to celebrate them!

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Notes and extra texture

Grateful for Listen to the Land’s Jo Petroni for her marvelous illustrations, as usual.