The Missive #82
Orange and black, take me back to Halloween.
I’ve spent the last five years prioritising building over playing or creating. Around a year ago, I realised I didn’t embark on this “build” with a scope of works. This meant I had no indication of when I was done, and that meant I never felt done, which made my life feel like this:
I entered 2025 with an intention to prioritise play more. I booked music festival tickets with my friends and a weekend away to visit my sister, but it didn’t feel like enough. I’ve never been good at play - even as a child I preferred to chat with adults, and I often struggle to connect with children under the age of 5.
My go-to forms of play (music and writing) were things my parents praised me for, which meant I did them repeatedly, which meant I got good at them and eventually turned them into skills I could use to feed and house myself. I needed to look back at things I enjoyed as a child that I was never good at, and couldn’t monetise.
So, this is how I ended up playing pickleball. Pickleball is played on a small court, using paddles and a plastic ball with holes in it. It’s like if you were playing ping pong standing on the table. Alternatively, it’s tennis for people who aren’t up to the physical rigor of tennis. It’s the perfect social game - easy to pick up, hard to master, a great way to start chats. Plus, the ball makes a really satisfying sound when you hit it.
Back in Newy, I played three times a week on three different courts. It was a great way to get outside and active, and it also helped me work on my social skills which had atrophied after five years of illness, lockdowns and remote work. Pickleball is predominantly a doubles game, and I had to work on being sportswomanly as much as I worked on my technique. I slowly convinced my friends to try it, and they brought their friends. There was a bit of overlap with my LGBTQIA book club, so I had an accidental LGBTQIA pickleball league on my hands. I got coaching myself to make sure I was teaching my friends correctly, and these pickleball sessions became something for us all to look forward to while slogging it out in parts of life that felt harder.
I struggled to find a good social league when I moved to Melbourne, but I eventually fell into a Saturday afternoon league walking distance from my house. The regulars are mostly around 20 years older than me and we have very little in common except this weird game - but isn’t that the point of social sport?
I loved Lego when I was a kid. I often asked for it and got Barbies instead. As I got older I realised wanting to play Lego with the boys was a bit of a social faux pas, so I dialled back my enthusiasm.
More recently, work gave me a budget to buy Lego for a team bonding. I thought I’d pay that generosity forward and get some sets my nieces in Canberra would like, so I could send it up to them afterwards.
I left the Bluey and Harry Potter sets unopened in front of my colleagues and started on the 3-in-1 Creator set, which you could use to make an orca family, a penguin family or a panda family. The moment I poured the bricks out and organised them by colour, something in my brain switched off. It’s the same thing I hope will switch off every time I doomscroll, but this time it actually worked. I spent four hours that weekend assembling the orca family, and it if wasn’t for me having to travel a lot in the next couple of weeks, I would have finished the penguins too.
Take this as a sign to do something that is fun, unscalable and impossible to monetize. It’s so good for you!
Reading
“The country is reflecting on historic and current inequities with a goal of meaningful change,” she says. “But to me, there are constants: Take care of the children that you bring into this world. Don’t steal other people’s property. Respect the community where you live.”
“She never again had to worry about what she ate or how much she weighed. She didn’t have to worry about those cigarettes she could never quit smoking and what they were doing to her lungs. She didn’t have to work anymore or feel bad that she never went to the gym. She didn’t have to do anything now except, in her own words, “live my life to the max, man, and then flame the fuck out.” In other words, she didn’t have to do anything now except what she wanted to do — which had always been her dream anyway.”
— I couldn’t finish Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book for a number of reasons, including that it was chaotic and undercooked. The above paragraph describing her late partner’s emotional response to being diagnosed with a terminal illness really stuck with me, though. Here’s the excerpt.
Joan Didion: “Letters to John”. These are Joan’s therapy notes, written for her husband John Dunne. It felt a bit ick - this book was published posthumously from her archive and never intended to be a book, and it’s a hard read knowing her daughter is doomed to die young from complications of alcoholism.
Taylor Jenkins Reid - Daisy Jones and the Six
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Watching
Platonic (Apple TV) Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen are old friends who reconnect as they hit 40. Made me miss all my male friends 🥺
The Four Seasons (Netflix). Tina Fey, Steve Carrell and Colman Domingo are in this comedy about longtime friends navigating change in their 50s.
Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home (iview). Bittersweet watch. I wish he’d had more time back in England.
Listening
Hayley Williams performing True Believer was a powerful artistic statement in the current political climate late night shows are finding themselves in. It’s impossible to pull out one or two great lines from it — you just have to watch and listen to the whole thing.
I’m just so sick of AI slop and AI curation. People who think Suno is great will never understand the joy of making mid rock music in a shed by the train line with 3-4 friends, and then playing it for an audience of dozens.
Reading Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine finally pushed me off Spotify and onto YouTube Music. It’s not much better ethically and is also full of slop. However, it’s included in my YouTube Premium subscription which means I can free up more money to pay for downloads from Qobuz and Bandcamp. I’m really enjoying this, and moving those downloads to my portable music player. This process has also got me back into my 25-year-old digital music collection.
I’ve also doubled down on human-curated music from community and online radio. Check out Passing Notes (ambient electronica) and No Barriers (punk and hardcore) on Melbourne’s PBS.
…
Former Mastodon guitarist Brent Hinds died in a motorbike crash back in August. He was a real Alabama wild man whose first instrument was banjo, and his distinctive vocals and playing style helped make the band a festival-headlining Grammy-winning success. I was particularly obsessed with their 2009 album Crack The Skye, which was mostly written by Hinds while he was laid up on the couch struggling with a brain injury. I spent hours learning how to play Crack The Skye and always marvelled at how he made these complicated leads sound so smooth. Divinations is a great demonstration of his skills: nasal vocals, banjo lick, crunchy riffs, surf-a-billy bridge and a ripping solo.
He left the band under a cloud of controversy earlier this year, and it’s so sad we’ll never get to hear more from him. This live video of him playing Halloween in Brazil is how I like to remember him ( 3 mins 42 seconds onward is real rockstar hours).