A Week of Being Kin Lane - June 16th, 2025
I am continuing to shift gears towards working on my new startup Naftiko. I really do enjoy this part of the startup journey. I am neck deep in market research and thinking broadly and deeply about how we consume APIs. We are all doing it. Yes, you are too. Do you need to talk about it?
My friend LeTroy Gardner and I are partnering on a new podcast series. I worked with LeTroy at Postman on the second season of Breaking Changes, which has been the most fulfilling and successful podcast series I have done in my career—thanks to LeTroy. We are a good team, and I look forward to the creative energy that comes out of us working together again.
I voted for Zohran Kwame Mamdan in the NYC election. I like his style. He gets NYC. He is not part of the existing democratic establishment and I feel will better represent New York. I absolutely love getting to know NYC politics and have a role to play in shaping the future of this city, which is a place I intend to stay put the rest of my days on this planet.
I read a great piece on Tugboats this week. The story started with the first tugboat in Scotland in 1801 but also 18 years later when the “Nautilus inaugurated the modern towing and tugboat industries in the United States on January 26, 1818, when she towed the sailing ship Corsair through the ice-choked lower harbor of New York from one mile below the Narrows to the quarantine dock.” I developed a love of tugboats while working on them in the Merchant Marines 35 years ago. I know. I know. I will have to tell some more stories about that some day.
My friend and former boss, coworker, and employee (it’s complicated) from the Postman days (she is no longer there) came to town this week. We met at Columbus Circle in the rain. I was supposed to meet her during our normal walk, but I spaced. So Poppy and I quickly hauled ass back up to the park on the bike. It was good to see her. I really miss working with Joyce and hope we can do it again somewhere sometime.
When we walk to Central Park every morning there is sometimes a black Bodega cat sitting out on the sidewalk. Poppy is obsessed with this cat. Even when it is not there she acts like it is, or it wil be any second. We are still unsure if she’d hurt a cat, and she seems to just really want to observe them, but who knows—she is a Rottweiler after all.
I was reading the Secret Life of Government Cheese this week, and how we began stockpiling a national cheese reserve in Springfield, Missouri. It is a pretty funny example of how an industry has captured the federal regulatory narrative and popular imagination, but one that I have Stockholm Syndrome with because of growing up on free cheese from welfare poor boxes during the 1970s and 1980s.
The No Kings Day protests this weekend left me with some hope for this country. It does concern me how the events have eluded coverage from mainstream media and mentions are non-existence on Twitter and other more conservative bubbles. However, I am hopeful that if shit continues to decline with this administration that people will come out to the streets.
Audrey and I just finished watching the documentary Pee-wee as Himself. I have to admit that his comedy and movies went over my head in the 1980s. I smiled and nodded when my friends gushed about him, but I just dismissed him as another silly backdrop of 1980s pop culture. After hearing him tell his own story, and seeing the director of the documentary struggle with telling his story, I find myself very moved. What an interesting and creative soul. What a visionary. I love when the world reveals itself like this to me, showing me the magic that flows from creative souls like Paul’s, while also revealing how much work I still have on myself and the world around me.
The weather in NYC cooled off this weekend, but during the weekdays things were getting pretty hot—forcing Poppy and I to ride in the morning right after our walks in Central Park. This meant that if we weren’t out the door by 9:00 AM, Poppy R. Lane was laying in front of the bicycle trying to tell me that I need to stop what I am doing and “BIKE”!!
I have been reading short stories by Ray Bradbury the last couple of weeks. I am enjoying them, but it is a different mode of science fiction that what I have been reading from Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, and R. F. Kuang. It was definitely a different time period very obsessed with rockets. Much more rigid scifi. Much more, how do I say it… male. But it is very good. Just a different mode of interpreting the future.
“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” ― Ray Bradbury