Dusting Off the Dashboard

Welcome, Everyone, and especially to new subscribers. In addition to Sunday posts that arrive at 6pm Pacific, there are occasional Glovebox and sundry posts that’ll come during the week like this one. If you use the Substack app (free, easy, I use it myself), you won’t be bothered by extra emails in your inbox—you’ll just see new posts populate in the app. In the coming weeks I’ll be writing about values (wtf?? why?!), time, death (again!), more thoughts on “ambition,” working/not-working with literary agents, and other writing business/publishing shitshow stuff, though some of these posts will be paywalled. Consider a paid subscription so you don’t miss anything. I’m also going to be opening up FRONT SEAT OFFICE HOUR for paid subscribers, date, time, and frequency TBD. Thanks for subscribing!

Reading: Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation by Camonghne Felix; this great interview with Lois Arkin of Los Angeles Eco-Village over at Making a Neighborhood. (When I was moving back to Los Angeles from Olympia, Washington in 2001, I strongly considered becoming a member of the Eco-Village, and reading this interview reminded me of why, and makes me think—how can we create more like this?)

Watching: Succession (SPOILER AHEAD) (watching how the kids react to the big event in the latest episode was gutting for me, because, still, nine years after the fact, when I witness the fresh grief of someone’s, anyone’s, father dying, I dissolve right back into my own grief, gdammit); Yellowjackets (honestly? I’ve watched the first two episodes of the second season, and now that we have seen what everyone was tantalizingly led to believe they’d see in the first season, I might be done!); Beef (*just* the first fifteen minutes, because then the twelve-year-old came in and was mad we were watching it without her [we are those parents that let a kid watch questionable stuff if we’re watching it with them], so now we have to start from the top again. But in those first fifteen minutes, I laughed a lot. Yikes).