Thanks for tuning in, and welcome! I’m gratified by the good response and all the new subscriptions… this is finally rolling, and I’m glad to have you with me at the start.
A first question (from multiple directions) when I shared the debut of this newsletter was “how did I not know you had a website?”.
I gave the short and proximal answer: I stealth-launched it, as a way to sneak it past the perfectionist censor who has a permanent seat in my prefrontal cortex and tells me over and over: “it’s not done yet, it’s not ready”.
That’s true, as far as it goes.
But it’s also true that I founded The Rush of it All way back in 2009, and it’s been up and running ever since as the home of my photo galleries. It was always the plan to make it a writing site1 — it just wasn’t supposed to take so long.
Life gives you grist for the mill, but it also devours time and cares nothing about your good intentions.
And so I arrived to deep middle-age with plenty of experiences, all the grist I could ever need, overflowing with this urge to “tell about it”, but with no good platform established for that telling.
Which leads (eventually) to the current version of TROIA, which I fiddled with and fretted over for several months, then finally stealth-launched a year ago (on my 55th birthday), and which I now take fully public with this newsletter launch.
The TROIA name and concept is much older, though. The earliest reference I can find to it is in this excerpt from my journal entry of 11 January 1996:
This is the start of an idea that came to me while I was rolling up I-79 this morning on my way to Grandma Calvert’s house. I was cruising along doing fine and something made me start to think about how good things are.
I often get those little mini-highs when I am driving that road. I get the feeling, and that phrase that I can’t quite identify the source of or the correct wording of or the context of pops into my head, something about “...the rush of it all.”2
And then the Lite Beer from Miller commercial theme played in my head (“Life is Good”) and it all came together… I should write this down, and add to it anytime I get similar feelings (or even when I don’t). It will be a good exercise in thankfulness and optimism. It will keep me looking for the good in things. It should also make an interesting collection. So here’s the first one, in rough form:
“Wednesday afternoon, two feet of snow and five degrees above zero, a black Jeep Cherokee with four-wheel drive and a full tank of gas, Pink Floyd on the radio, the foothills of the Alleghenies spread out in front of me, and I’m heading north.”
Anyway, here’s to origin stories, long gestations, beating the censor, memories, and forward motion.
A quick look at the website
Pandemic Diary
I didn’t start building this “curated collection of lightly-edited excerpts from my daily journal” until January 2021, so Pandemic Diary really is a collection, not a construction. My goal was to capture the flavor of this time (the good, the bad, and the ordinary) in a way that will be meaningful to me in 20 or 30 years, so it includes much that isn’t directly C19-related. Life doesn’t come to us in compartments, and context is everything.
About politics and people
If you start reading your way through Pandemic Diary, you’ll eventually get to some political bits, and they might offend you. As I look back at them now, some of them embarrass me, too. I’m not apologizing — they are a true snapshot of what I thought then (and still believe now), but they have a mean-spirited quality that I don’t like, and I wrestled with the decision to include them (Should I publish about politics?).
I still wrestle with that decision, but I’m leaving them in.
I hope that I’d find more polite and respectful ways of saying things now. But that was then, and this is a picture of then, and these are honest captures of the intensity of feeling in those times. Pretending it wasn’t that way is not a sound approach to making things better now.
What’s next?
Desert Storm Dispatches (a limited series)
This year was the 30th anniversary of Desert Storm and my first deployment to Iraq. I wanted to roll this out as a 30-years-ago-today series of posts, but I was too slow for that. Mainly I was overwhelmed by the volume of material I have from that period.
But I’m working my way through it, transcribing the text of old letters and logbooks like this one…
…and scanning old 35mm slides like these…
It is a slow process, but stay tuned…
Adventure Report: UTMB 2017
Next up on the adventure front — this long-overdue account of one of the hardest and best runs I’ve ever done (and maybe some insight into the training that went into it).
That’s all for this edition — I hope it was helpful. Thanks for reading, and we’ll talk again in 2 weeks (or sooner if you like… use the comments section below, or email me anytime).
If you’re curious, here’s an ancient prototype of TROIA: rushofitall.blogspot.com, complete with “Copyright 2010” and a single post from March of that year (the original version of Soccer Faces)
I still don’t know the source of that phrase, or where it popped into my head from. If you recognize it, please share that with me.