Ranking my abandoned newsletter drafts
It’s getting warmer outside but it’s still the cold offseason. My man Mike Vernon has got you covered with scoops about the portal—head to his new non-Substack HEARINGS for more. Thank you for your work sir and I hope your mental health is doing alright!
Anyway, I often think about what other broad quasi-Jayhawk related content I could jam on for the NEWSLETTER, and sometimes I get going before abandoning a post because it was a bad idea in the first place.
Not everything I’m going to list here applies, as I’d still like to write a few of these guys. Maybe this is a greedy way of heat-checking what people might care about, but mostly I thought a ranking post would be some good offseason fodder. It’s slow, I don’t really have takes about the NCAA situation, and the portal is playing out however it’ll play out. Rock Chalk excelsior!
Anyway, here we go.
#8 “Correcting History with NBA2K23”
I made a big point of expensing my copy of NBA2K23 so I could write about my experiments in the newsletter, but I never got around to it… until now! But yeah, within NBA2K’s awesome ERAS mode, I kept the Kings in KC, drafted Jordan and Manning, and ran rampant over the league to the tune of five rings until a somewhat bungled megatrade for rookie Jason Kidd set our Kings back a year or two and by then Jordan wasn’t in his prime anymore.
#7 “An Unpublished Grantland Story”
RIP Grantland first and foremost. I was a regular contributor to Grantland from 2013 right to the very end, and one time they sent me to have Thanksgiving dinner with the Morris Twins, their family and the rest of the Phoenix Suns. It was a fun day, though the story didn’t really have too much dramatic tension. I ultimately decided against publishing the draft here, just because it felt too much to me that I was bragging about the experience without any real substantial comment or observation. Angel Morris gave me a ton of food to take on the Amtrak. Also, Ray Rice news dropped the day I filed, and to this day an editor never touched it (I still got paid, though!).
#6 “Can Bill Self Change?”
I refuse to look at or remember what this entailed. But it was definitely something written in a despondent state after some ultimately meaningless conference loss where some regularly useful element of Bill’s coaching style ended up being our downfall. That’s ball I guess! Glad I didn’t smash this one.
#5 “Adventures in NBA Topshot, Pt. 1'“
PART ONE, LOL. Like I was about to write The Godfather trilogy or something. A wise poet once said “The years start coming and they don’t stop coming!” And that’s what Topshot makes me think about. I cashed out every card I had except one featuring Lu Dort, which I shall leave to the next generation of my family.
#4 “A Reminder”
Haha, still applies I guess! That’s why it deserved a top half ranking.
#3 “Banner Talk Part 2”
Ah yes, my Lost World. I’m still going to do this one, but instead of being a linear sequel to the Banner Talk OG post I’ll probably do one of these 30-years-on kind of like the gap between The Sportswriter and Let Me Be Frank With You. If society crumbles I’ll figure out how to publish it in whatever way that is popular.
#2 “The Shack”
I’d assume some of you have an experience—or are at least familiar with—the KU student-run radio station KJHK. I was a rotation DJ all four years I was at school at Kansas, and found life at “The Shack” to be strange, magical and maybe even slightly evil (or maybe more fairly, there was a kind of edgy charged energy in the room at all times). I remember thinking that a member of music staff was a god because he brought a bottle of wine to David Bazan on stage, if that gives you a sense of how heady the times were.
I liked the early morning shifts, 12-2AM, 2-4AM, and also had a late Friday afternoon show senior year which was a really fun time to be on the air. I never tapped in for a specialty program, though I fantasized about it—the genre-based shows were generally jazz or roots music, which was not my expertise. I wanted to do a rap music show but could never uncover enough rap CDs that were edited and didn’t have DNPs—words you could not play on public radio according to FCC restrictions. So the only rap CDs in the building were like, Jedi Mind Tricks or that kind of thing.
With regularity, I would put on Built to Spill’s 20-minute cover of “Cortez the Killer” on, drive to Burrito King, order and be back by the time it was over. Also KJHK is where I discovered that I loved the band Hole.
I’m still going to write this because it feels therapeutic in a lot of ways. I’m wondering if I should have made any of this information public. Oh well too late!
#1 “No One Asked for This”
The year is 1996. I am ten years old, and I am caught in the thrall of The Prodigy’s “Breathe.” I remember this song’s world being EXTREME and exciting to me—whether it’s the lite house thump which is its own musical gateway drug, the whole aesthetic of the video (roaches crawling into stuff was HUGE in 1996), fully nonsense but hard-sounding lyrics, the WHATCHA…. WHOOSH TCHING! swooping sword sounds which I later found out was a Wu-Tang sample … all of it. No sonic element was a bridge too far for “Breathe.” “Breathe” gooooooeessssss!
To this day, I find the production choices on “Breathe” strange, maximal, hard to line up, beautiful to think about. I could probably talk about “Breathe” all day. That “clock as ticking” nuclear alarm wobble at the beginning? The strumming break-down like it’s Ed Sheeran busking in the tube circa like 2007? I know I’m doing a gooooooddd deal of retconning here but this song is the Arrival alien, [ARRIVAL FILM AND SHORT STORY SPOILER} all time = the same time.
There are more entries into the “No One Asked” spec series, including maybe 1200 words about Happier Than Ever like six months after the fact.
I’ll write all this out one day.