Elephants and Perfectionism

Some updates, The Crown, and a song I really, really love

I’m terribly sorry, but we’re going to have to start with…

Photo by James Hammond on Unsplash

…in the room of my brain.

People liked The Notebook Rule

Surprise, surprise, what they always say turns out to be true: you can never truly predict what’s going to be a hit.

I’m tempted to rattle off a bunch of numbers, but suffice it to say The Notebook Rule did at least 5X better than anything else I’ve ever published here. To the tune of a 15% bump in subscribers in one weekend.

😳

This, of course, qualifies as unalloyed good news. I’m immensely gratified by the enthusiasm that this subject has generated.

But (even modest) popularity always comes with hazards. For instance, Substack has occupied much more of my attention than I felt like I could afford this last week. As I write this, it’s Thursday, and I just finished responding to at least a dozen great comments, after having stepped back for a few days to manage higher (bill paying) priorities.

Even still, guess how many times I’ve written “check email / Substack notifications” in my notebook, per the stipulation of The Notebook Rule. Actually, hang on, I can tell you, let me go check…

…

Eh, it’s hard to count — as you can imagine, the pages of the Notebook are not neatly organized. But it’s a lot. I don’t want to get bogged down with the numbers.

The point is,

for this whole past week, I’ve been sweating about how to follow it up. Should I spin off a whole other newsletter? Should I publish something totally unrelated to maintain the eclectic integrity of this newsletter? Should I create a different subcategory so people who don’t care can just unsubscribe?

Then I talked to my friend this afternoon, and he said, in effect, “You’re overthinking it.” Which was kind of disappointing feedback after I told him I felt like I was overthinking it.

But then, confirmation has plenty of value I guess.

So instead of making any grand decisions about how to “handle” a successful post, I’m just going to share a couple of things I wanted to share anyway, including an observation about a recurring theme which I’m SURE will entirely fail to resonate with you…

Perfectionism

I’ve done a lot of not-writing-this-post this week for fear that I wouldn’t do justice to the subjects that have been most on my mind.

But we all know what a villain perfectionism is, and now that I’ve named it, I can kick it in the crotch and make a big happy mess and we’ll all be better for it, right?

Good enough!

Here are the Things I’m going to spend the rest of this post on:

1. An Arch/Eternal update

2. A short and comically underbaked review of The Crown

3. A song

Isn’t THREE such a good number? If I mention the Rule of Threes, right after writing a whole post about The Notebook Rule, you might think I’m a real RULES guy, but I didn’t come up with the Rule of Threes, the universe did, so get off my back.

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An Arch/Eternal Update

I’ve been working! It’s going…slowly! But also good! It’s going good.

And I don’t know what to do.

I mean, I’m creeping up on a draft that I might want people to read, but I’m having a real hard time deciding how to try to make that happen. And I’d like some kind of plan before I hit the finish line. Not only for the practical purpose of expediting the process, but also for the delicious motivational juice I need to actually get there.

I’m tempted to fire up a Wattpad account and start feeding it out into the world there. Fiction friends — any thoughts or advice?

For a while, I’ve had a vague idea that I’d pick up where I left off publishing it chapter by chapter on Substack, but guys, this is a long sucker, and the evidence seems to overwhelmingly suggest that Substack is really not built for serialized novels. Why fight it?

Anyway, these are some of my (imperfect and disorganized) thoughts. I’m getting to a good place with the book, which starts triggering some unhappy anxieties about what to do with it.

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The Crown Might Be the Best Show Ever Made

I was tempted to just leave it at that. But then, with only a fraction less laziness, I realized I could copy/paste something I wrote in a personal email the other day:

My wife and I just finished The Crown last night. Is it the greatest TV show ever made? It might be. A monumental achievement by any metric, and a profound cultural artifact, that manages to capture an astonishing breadth of human experience, as well as entomb and ennoble a social and political establishment that defined and influenced more than a thousand years of modern history. Breathtaking. Astonishing. Somewhat incomprehensible. Literally how did they do that?

In another conversation with a friend just yesterday, I mentioned this show, and he said, “Oh, people keep recommending that show to me, but I just don’t care about the royal family at all.”

And I said dude. Me freaking neither. Before watching this show, I couldn’t have told you any of their names. And yes that includes Queen Elizabeth. If you had asked me, who is the Queen of England, I would have said I’m sorry I feel stupid but I do not know. Even though the answer (quick reminder: it’s Queen Elizabeth) literally didn’t change for like SEVENTY YEARS.

I said, “Watch the first episode, and if it doesn’t grab you, it’s safe to say you won’t dig the show.”

Every single episode of that show is like a short, Oscar-worth film.

The cast! The writing! The cinematography! The production design! The music!

The everything.

We can say about The Crown what we can say about any monumental artistic achievement in film or television:

We’re lucky it exists.

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That Song

A cover, actually. Wear good headphones and turn it up. This thing’s got layers and layers.

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Bonus Thing

(Because who likes a list of four? Nobody, that’s who. Not a single person in the whole disorganized universe. Why are we even talking about this?)

If you are one of the literally 15% of my subscribers who’s here because I promised to keep writing about screens and digital dope and stuff, fear not! There’s much more coming.

For now, though, I’d like to (re)share this thought that I posted on Notes a few days ago:

And then, a beautifully succinct follow-up by a guy I’m hoping to have on my podcast soon (if you’re reading this, Josh, please respond to your email):

If I started a separate newsletter on this topic, I might call it Techno-Humanism. What do you think? Does it light you up or turn your stomach? Do you have any better ideas?

You know what to do.