With my head in a fog, unable to sharpen my wits to finish the new essays, I offer instead two pieces from the last half decade of letters to friends around the loose theme of uncertainty, which cajoled my handful of functioning brain cells to put them together. When I publish emails here, I edit them only very lightly. Some pieces were originally off-the-cuff, others were serious replies in months-long back and forth conversations, yet others were plain outlandish, and words ran away with each other in little gangs. Occasionally I laugh when I reread them, or wince, or wonder how I ever knew or thought such a thing. But with these feral photons, I wanted to create a different kind of space for myself, and by extension, for my readers here on Substack, one that I had not yet found online but was experiencing in my network of friends and colleagues. Not tidy, but lively and somewhat shaggy, a place to roam and rant, but also to rest and consider. I hope you have found a little of that here, over the last year. I have.
First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, November 13th 2023.
Episode 51 - Uncertainty