Reflections

It's been a year.

Laurette’s Head With a Coffee Cup, Henri Matisse, 1916-1917

I’m sitting in a strip mall coffee shop, half-zoned out, partially blinded by the sunlight blazing through wall-length windows, surrounded by people I have reflexively and probably unfairly pegged pejoratively in my mind as “northsiders.”

The narcissism of small differences.

I have been awake for two hours, but my brain is still all REEH-REEH-REEH. The engine won’t turn over. Why does this happen when I skip a shower? What is it about standing in hot water for 10 minutes that seems to cleanse the contents of my skull? Is it psychosomatic or is there some deeper neurobiological process at work?

I am thinking, or at least I am trying to think—haltingly, badly, like a senior citizen caught in a lie—about what to write. And I feel a bit of pressure, because this week marks the one-year anniversary of when I first started sending this newsletter out every Saturday.

Well technically, I started in September of 2023 with a post about my then-recently deceased dog. Then I published sparingly until March 1, 2025, when I sent out this piece about quitting the New York Times word games. (I have since relapsed.)

Since then, I’ve managed to send you some sort of bullshit—including bullshit like this 47-word navel-gazer of a poem that had for two years been taking up space on my laptop in a folder called “MISC”—every single week.

Fifty-two consecutive posts or blogs or whatever-you-wanna-call-‘em. Yet I’m still not sure what I’m doing here.

That’s not true. At the most elemental level, I’m here because I want an audience. I don’t care if it’s small or if it’s made up mostly of my friends and family. Without readers, what’s the point?

Look, I admire people who write simply for the joy of it. There’s more nobility in that than in blasting one’s half-baked sentences out to anyone willing to look at them. Be that as it may, a person who for whatever demented reason thinks of himself as a “writer” eventually needs that notion verified by the presence of an audience. Otherwise he starts to crack up a little. Or, he stops writing.

Another thing a person who thinks of himself as a writer needs is practice. When I worked as a full-time newspaper journalist, and later as a freelance magazine writer, that was baked into my everyday life. But I wrote my last serious magazine piece five years ago.

I quit because I’d become busy running a branding shop (and raising kids) with my wife—and also because, anymore, the time and effort required to report and write long-form journalism is rarely commensurate with the pay.

I still run the branding business and it involves a lot of writing, but a more strategic and controlled sort of it. It’s challenging work, and actually often requires as much creativity (if one can quantify such a thing) as writing a poem or a story. But it’s not self-expression. Rather, it requires a sublimation of self. Nothing is more contrary to doing great commercial creative work than making it about you.

Gosh, look at me, rambling on. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re sitting in a strip mall coffee shop and the northsiders all look like shadow people against the wall-length window and your brain is full of cobwebs because you didn’t stand under hot water before leaving the house.

What am I trying to say here?

Thank you for reading, first and foremost. For liking and sharing my posts. Or for not sharing them, but still liking them. Or at least not disliking them so much that you smashed that unsubscribe button. You being here makes it feel like I’m not just pissing in the wind.

Although, honestly, I often am pissing in the wind. Turns out it comes with the territory of writing a generic newsletter. There’s lots of groping and flailing each week. No doubt, groping and flailing are my primary modes. This newsletter is called An Ongoing Concern but it could just as well be called Some Shit Matt Wrote This Week. I’ve sent you poems, story fragments, personal essays, comic essays, political satire, and so on. While it has been nice not to be boxed in by a narrow editorial focus, it has also been stressful. Call it the anxiety of freedom.

The idea I’d held loosely in my mind was that, after a year of publishing, I would alight on an idea of what this newsletter should actually “be about.” That something would emerge in month eight or month nine, and I would know. That’s my niche, my brand, my ticket to minor online fame and modest monetization.

Didn’t happen. What now?

I’ll keep assaulting your inbox, but at a slower pace to make room for other personal projects that wouldn’t have surfaced had I not spent the last year doing this. Because even with all the groping and flailing, writing this weekly missive has been edifying.

It’s also been mentally salutary. Translating thoughts into sentences, and editing and rearranging those sentences into a sequence of paragraphs that form a semi-coherent narrative—it’s an extension of thought for me. Hell, I hardly know what I think until I write it. This newsletter hasn’t just been about verifying my identity as a writer, but about verifying my existence as a thinking human. Cogito ergo sum, etc. etc.

Anyway, again, and finally: thank you for being here. I’ll keep showing up in your inbox every so often if you’ll have me. Hopefully when I do, it’ll be worth the click. And if one of my “projects” makes its way into the world, you’ll be the first to know.

And now, apropos of nothing, a prose poem:

Morning Coffee

The morning holds me like a baby. I breathe in, let her fill me with herself. The morning is a self, after all, no less than I. Two selves, both risking it all, and risking nothing, too, just to be here today. Me in her arms, her encasing me in a symphonic cloak of sound and space. I avoid eye contact for fear of disappearing into her blue-black eyes. She hurts me when I struggle—when I try to wrestle my way out of her clutches. She makes me tired, one supposes, so she can keep me here, a companion in this sloshing space we share. 

Now for the ritual sacrifice. The ceramic edge gleams in the private light.