For The Record- 18. January. 2025
Well, how did I get here?
Note: One of the questions I received in our last AMA was about how I wound up on Substack. My answer landed on the cutting room floor due to space constraints, but I was recently asked by a couple of new community members, so I thought I would share it again here.
It's been three weeks, and it’s safe to say that 2025 is not off to the best start. LA is burning, the incoming administration is uncertain, and all the usual global tensions are in full swing. On top of that, we lost Bob Uecker and David Lynch on the same day.
The vibes are off. It feels like another year that got off to an inauspicious start.
If asked, most people can tell you when they first felt the gravity of COVID. When things “got real” for them. Maybe it was a close friend getting sick. Perhaps it was seeing someone in a gas mask walking the aisles of the grocery store. For many, it was when the NBA abruptly called the season off.
In my case, it was March 17th, 2020. Over the previous winter, my older son had finally earned himself a spot with a high-level soccer team in town. They’d trained all winter indoors and were finally outside, practicing on the campus of a local college1. There had been a lot of uncertainty until this point, but most people still thought this would be over in a couple of weeks and were trying with increasing desperation to convince themselves that life was still business as usual.
While he was playing, my younger son and I took a walk around the surrounding campus. I was 8 weeks past blowing out my knee (0/10. Do not recommend), and in that weird space where being ambulatory again becomes a kind of bizarre compulsion. It was like I was making up for lost time or something. School had not been canceled yet, but there were signs that it was coming — again, at this point, we thought it would be brief. I think most folks saw it as an extended Spring break.
The calculus changed that night. It started with a (literal) buzz. I received a text from our school district asking me to check my email for an important notice. In very clinical language, it essentially said, “Don’t come back tomorrow.”
That initially meant the rest of the week…then until after Spring break…and then for the balance of the academic year.
The bottom fell out of our routines. We went from Spirit Days to setting an appointment to grab what you need from your lockers. It had all the trappings of an extraction mission, and I was struck by how eerie it all felt and how odd it was that this was the first time I’d ever been past the main entrance. Would it be the last?
At the same time, my company decided to issue “essential worker” letters for us to carry in case checkpoints were set up. The vibes were definitely off then.
We were in for a long road; we just didn’t know it yet…
Meanwhile, traffic at the airline I work for cratered. It was breathtakingly fast, and within days, we went from competing for gate space with other carriers to planes so empty that standard weight and balance rules went out the window.
And after a flurry of disorienting changes came…nothing. Literally. Down to 1–2 flights/day and long stretches of silence, broken only by terminal announcements no one was around to hear.
Much of my day was spent monitoring air-to-ground radios in case a plane needed to divert here. My airport is close to downtown, but it felt like I was at a modern-day Distant Early Warning listening post. To fill the void, I decided to revive my long-dormant habit of writing.
I’d been writing, but it was mostly confined to posting on industry forums or social media. A lot of it — too much, really — was quibbling about aviation minutiae or other such things.
March blurred into April and April into May. Even as the (now online) school year stumbled to its end, there was still a glimmer of hope that in-person classes would resume in the fall.
It wasn’t meant to be.
As the reality of another year of learning by Chromebook hit, I decided I, too, would take classes online. I have a degree2 that’s almost complete, and I figured knocking out an elective made sense.
If my kids were doing it, I could too.
I enrolled in “Writing For Social Media.” At a minimum, I figured my extensive history of shitposting would serve me well. Our class was a great mix of quick assignments — sending a Twitter DM to my instructor is easily the best one I’ve ever received — with much more involved ones like building a WordPress site from scratch, writing for SEO, etc.
So, my kids were learning via Zoom, and I was building a small body of written work.
I had subscribed to Tim Denning’s newsletter for a while. At this point, I’m honestly not even sure how I wound up there. But he partnered with Todd Brison to create a cohort-based course on online writing — specifically Medium — called “Medium badassery.” Great course, goofy title.
Sidebar: A friend from that class first came up with the title “On Repeat.” If you're reading this, thanks, Marisa!
I was already a Medium member, and these stories were piling up, so I figured I’d try cross-posting from the blog I had built and see what happened. Why not? I didn’t have anything to lose, and it’s not like much else was happening.
In the course, they didn’t push the idea of “finding your niche” but encouraged us to write about exciting things. For me, that meant soccer, aviation, and music. I decided to “shop” an article about New Order around and see what happened.
Todd and Tim walked us through how to pitch a publication, and I’m pretty sure I paraphrased that language when writing. In short order, it was accepted and published.
Feedback was swift. From two of my classmates:
That submission — and its acceptance — sent me down the road I’m currently on. I knew I didn’t want to be on one platform, so I expanded onto Substack. To me, it felt like it had more caché. I also found the longtail form of writing more appealing (and, to be honest, a bit of a pressure test for my work).
Most of all, I liked the platform’s architecture.
What I craved most was a way to connect directly with like-minded people. If you've seen my About page, it says, “I couldn’t find it, so I built it.” That’s precisely what happened. Medium has plenty of strengths, but two-way discourse and a way to directly reach your audience aren’t on the list.
Today, almost all of my work is housed here. I still have the webpage I built, but it’s mostly full of wind and ghosts. My space here has gone through more than a few iterations (and names!) but has found its rhythm—no pun intended.
It’s funny; we look forward to the new year but assess it based on hindsight, comparing it to previous years and past experiences. 2025 is off to a sketchy start, but so was 2020, and—at least for me— that turned out pretty well, even if I didn’t know it at the time.
The good news is that this year is still full of possibilities, and we’ve all got the same 300+ days to turn it around. I’m still realistic enough to have that knee brace, but I’m also cautiously optimistic.3
We’ve been down this road before and know how it usually turns out.
As always, thanks for being here.
Kevin—
Now for some weekend reading links:
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