Coming Out Of My Drafts, And I've Been Doing Just Fine | Notes, Tips, Musings 001
Over the last six months, I've written a lot of first paragraphs. I don't know if I've gotten any better at writing them, but I've written them. After a flurry of creative energy in the early days of my unemployment, posting to Substack on a monthly (and in some cases, semi-monthly) basis, I got stuck in the mud.
As the weeks went on and new, ever-expanding piece conceits took hold of my feeble mind, I wrote first paragraphs with the breathless speed of a rocket ship trying to reach escape velocity. If only I could phrase it just right, make the act just enjoyable enough, I could make it to a second paragraph, and then a third, and so on. Here are a few of my attempts, a year in first paragraphs.
For the sake of sharing coherent ideas, I'm actually going to show you multiple paragraphs at a time. Don't be annoying about it.
June 2024
Dot Com: “Also, we took Tracy's cell phone, his wallet...”
Tracy Jordan: “... and my mood ring! And I don't know how I feel about that.”
My favorite 30 Rock joke by far. It’s been on my mind because I now own a mood ring. I won it in the basement arcade of the hotel we’re staying at for our school’s senior trip, after many dollars loaded onto my arcade credit card thing and many rounds of a Flintstones-themed game of shooting tokens at a pile of tokens to get the tokens to fall down a chute that tracked my tokens. With a “yabba dabba doo,” I scored the 100 point Fred chip, bringing me above the 450 I needed for my prize. This was the most efficient way to earn tickets, better than the Deal or No Deal cabinet, better than the throw-the-balls-at-clowns-while-they-mock-you game, better even than skeeball.
Since purchasing my new jewelry, I’ve been checking in on my mood throughout the day. How do I feel right now? “Despair,” it turns out. A deep blue, pervasive despair. At times, flashes of what is either the light green of happiness or the sickly teal of surprise. I can’t say for sure because I’m red-green color deficient.
July 2024
This piece is several months in the making, so assume all relative markers of time to be inaccurate. Attempts to chart a definitive timeline of my life’s events from this piece will be as fruitless as trying to fit Tears of the Kingdom into the official Nintendo Zelda timeline (more on that later).
One of the blessings of teaching high school is meeting budding comedic minds at the awakening of their J-Gene (their jester gene, their joke gene, their joshing gene, etc.). My seniors graduated the morning I’m writing this paragraph (see, what did I tell you?); it’s got me thinking about what I’m going to miss from the Class of 2024. One senior comes to mind, let’s call them “Dusty,” who has kind of been the Fabio Medina of clever turns of phrase this school year. In case you’ve been counting, I’ve made two X-Men references so far.
I’m calling them Dusty after one of their best gags: I was checking in with another AP Research student during class about the status of their data collection when Dusty said “yeah, is it collecting data…or collecting dust?!” Another classic, not dust-related this time: one day, in the lunchroom, the person working in the cafeteria gave me a tray of leftover apples. I wandered aimlessly, far too many apples in hand. Dusty spotted me, ushered me over, and said “you’re going to keep a lot of doctors away with those!” Then, thinking better of it, said “wait wait, I have another one. You look like a guy from one of those math problems.”
August 2024
I told you I’d be back with more Olympics things to say! As we bring this year’s Summer Olympics in Paris to a close, I’m feeling that special ennui reserved for the temporary end of all the good things you need to wait for: eclipses, seasons of the good streaming shows, catch-ups with friends who say they want to get together more often, and the Olympic Games.
Of course, it’s the scarcity that makes it special - we can’t hold a Summer Games every year and expect those events to feel as individually significant. So no, even though I would love to find myself right back here in July 2025, I’m not going to advocate that we over-saturate ourselves with triathlons and Noah Lyles memes (that said, shout out to a card-carrying member-king of the Cool People Who Also It Turns Out Like TCGs Club).
But, I ask you, where has our bravery gone? Where are the heroes of 1924, who wanted to take a ski trip and then when it became popular retroactively said actually you know what fam that was an Olympics? Where are the visionaries of 1992, who said you know what doing both of these in the same year is lame as hell so let’s space ‘em out? Why does our imagination die in Winter? It’s time we unfetter our dreams and allow them to gallop freely through the fields of our months and years.
September 2024
It was not Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (Montesquieu for short and Monty if you’re nasty) in De l'esprit des lois who first devised the “separation of powers” into three parts when he wrote “In every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative; the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law.”
No no, that political theory dates much further back, to the Second Age of Middle Earth with the creation of Vilya, Narya, and Nenya, the Three Rings of the Elves. As Galadriel begins and Celebrimbor finishes, ““One will always corrupt. Two will divide…” “But with three there is balance.”
October 2024
Since posting my politics article last month, I’ve been stricken with what I’m calling “brainstorm-rot” - writer’s block for a new generation! The Starry lemon-lime soft drink of the neo-blogging era! Essentially, I take a shower (first mistake), come up with a great idea, riff on that idea and draft some paragraphs, turn that idea into a hyper-structured piece of combinatory non-fiction that has to look a certain way (it has to!) or else it needn’t be written at all, get scared of that idea, dip into brain rot and bed rot, sleep, shower, repeat.
For this piece, I had a few showers’ worth of ideas to go off of. It’s fall, yeah? Okay, got it, got it, what’s up with fall? Well, fall makes me think of how this is the first year of my life since before I was in pre-school that I haven’t been on a school calendar in October…
“Write a piece about Magic.”
What? Who said that?
November 2024
Woof. I’ll be the first to admit, my last piece on how it’s fun to think about politics again didn’t age super well. The Democrats did a Democrat and asked themselves “hey, wait a minute, shouldn’t we avoid learning anything at all from 2016 and tack to the center-right with nothing to offer voters but vague platitudes about ‘democracy’ or whatever?” and then they responded to themselves “yes, that’s a great idea - but, one note: can we also involve SNL and Dick Cheney somehow?” So, you know, none of the universal healthcare-having/anti-racist/queer-futurist utopia-where-your-dad-Tim-Walz-loves-you-in-a-gentle-way that we were starting to hope for.
If you want to get mad at me for participating in the ~liberal vibes~ and change-complacency that keeps getting us into these fascistic messes, you’re welcome to. Just...not today. I’m a small little guy. And it’s my birthday. And also my brother was holding the controller when I wrote that. I’ll have something more substantive to say about politics or depression or both soon, but now for something completely different.
December 2024
I’m over on Bluesky now, notthatmagellan.bsky.social, where you can see me making posts like this:
or this:
or even this:
I’ve also been talking a lot lately about Kendrick Lamar’s newest album, GNX.
January 2025
I am now publishing this newsletter through Ghost, as opposed to Substack. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, the vibes are off over there.
This change also gives me a chance to wipe the slate clean and do a soft reset on the Not That Magellan newsletter, now with a clearer sense of how I want it to look. I was preoccupied before with putting out articles that resonated in sequence with one another, a goal which worked exactly counter to the capriciousness of my take-brain. Here's how you'll see pieces titled and organized going forward: they'll either be "Notes, Tips, Musings" (a catch-all for quick thoughts that stand on their own) or they'll be something else that will have a more considered lens and structure. There will be several different flavors of something else, but their organizing principle is that they will not be miscellaneous. Well, they will be, but this is sort of a small-infinity/big-infinity distinction.
February 2025
You're living through the only perfect square year that you'll experience in your lifetime (452 = 2025), unless you plan on making it to 462 = 2116 or you've been kicking it since 442 = 1936 and you're a nonagenarian with an uncharacteristic appetite for Millennial existentialism. Even if you are said nonagenarian, this is probably the first perfect square year you get to enjoy because the last one was overshadowed by the rise of fascism in the global West and the crushing ramifications of a worldwide Great Depression hastened by unfettered, rapacious corporate greed with little in the way of meaningful government guardrails to curb predatory credit practices and rampant speculative gambling. Wait...
I'll be honest, I wrote that joke in 2024, expecting it to hit in an "oof, a bit too close for comfort!" way instead of a "this isn't even a joke anymore" way. I've had a hard time appreciating small joys this year - it's been clouded over by the looming specter and then runaway train disaster that is the Trump/Musk fascist coup. It's been especially hard because, as I originally conceived of it, this was going to be a piece that somehow connected a 25-square grid with my increasingly ambiguous conception of my own gender. That already felt like it was going to be a stretch, but a fun and a silly one. Now, with the autocratic right persecuting trans people in schools, in medicine, in sports, in bathrooms, in the fucking dictionary, such personal reflections as that which I originally intended here feel at once frivolous, vital, urgent, and impossible.
March 2025 [This one's a short story]
They must have designed The Lattice to frustrate civics students. There was no other explanation. Why else would you -
“How about this one?”
Dima took in all the wrong details. The clashing off-whiteness of the flashcard against the off-whiteness of the wall. Dribbles of cola from an unexpected explosion staining the paper. Pearl's finger pressure curling it into a new shape, from which it might not recoil. The buzz of the ceiling lamp filling the space between. The story on all sides.
A tear near the top right corner of the card, a small rip which had been on the top left when the two of them were reviewing the vocabulary definition-to-term, before switching to term-to-definition. On the other side, the rip had lined up with a small gap between Pearl’s front teeth, her incisors poised to chomp down on “the faction, within the philosophical coalition, defined by their desired fusion of sentimentality and power.”
“Dima?”
On this side, the rip lined up with a dimple at the corner of Pearl's mouth. No matter what emotion she felt, somehow it always came across through a smile. Right now, she was annoyed.
Dima's eyes focused on the translucent, backwards handwriting peeking through the flashcard from its far side. With Pearl's fingers in the way, it read (flipped around properly in the mind): “the faction, the philosophical, by their desired fusion, power.”
“The Turning!” Dima blurted out in eager self-satisfaction.
Pearl's dimple deepened and her eyelashes hardened around widened whites.
“Hurray!” she groaned. “You can…read.”
The near side of the card came into focus: “THE TURNING”.
“Ah.”
“That's enough for tonight, yeah? I need to get home anyway.” Pearl pawed at the corners of a pile of hand-cut paper cards, finding a stack in them.
“Sorry,” Dima sighed. “I'm having a hard time focusing.”
Pearl finished the stack with a slap of THE TURNING beneath both palms. The pressure she pushed into the stack, into the couch below, was matched only by the equal and opposite force that curled her lips upward into a toothless smile.
“It's fine. It's okay. Don't worry about it.”
April 2025
In his most recent "Drive To Work" podcast, Magic: The Gathering's Head Designer Mark Rosewater discusses "Mel," one of the two "aesthetic profiles" used to represent what players find beautiful about Magic. In contrast with their counterparts, the Vorthos (who find beauty in the artistic qualities of a card - story, lore, art, dialogue), Mels find aesthetic beauty in the mechanical functionality of the card-as-game-object. While I enjoy dips into the story of Magic here and there, I see cards first as a set of trade-offs and potentialities, as charming particularities in the vast possibility space of game design. I keep a running list of "Oddballs," cards that do a thing so strange that it makes me happy that they exist.
May 2025
Books peaked in 2003, when The Holy Ghost themself whispered "check it out this page could have a little piece of rough paper in it and that's sort of like the scales" and Dragonology was born. One wonders how humanity continued from that point, devising sentences, typing them, binding them together in flimsy pages, crowding shelves with lesser works in the shadow of that Good Book with the little part that feels like a feather.
The "Ology" series would try to recapture that divine inspiration, but nobody longs to caress a pirate or an alien or a g-g-g-g-ghost the way they do a dragon. I could put on my tweed jacket and ask you if you like my tweed jacket and say thank you I thrifted it isn't it cool that it already had the elbow patches on it and then straighten the sleeves of my tweed jacket and clear my throat and wax academic about why I think the human hand is drawn to the rough, luminescent skin of the dragon, but the urge defies explanation.
June 2025
I can't figure out a pithy way to tell you that I've been blithely depressed. Living day to day in a thin, grey haze. I've been finding a lot of comfort in watching Smosh videos, specifically their unscripted ensemble content on Smosh Games and Smosh Pit. In the course of watching their assortment of board game live plays, Whose Line-adjacent short form spontaneity, quiz shows, and viral challenges, the goal hasn't been to turn off the analytical brain so prone to mulling, fixating. Instead, the goal has been to give that brain a new direction in which to focus its attention. I've spent so much damn time thinking about which Smosh cast members I enjoy seeing in videos the most, and why that is, and I have to talk about it somewhere!
As you may have noticed within one of those first paragraphs, I'm over here on Ghost now. Please consider subscribing to bear witness to what I hope will be a messy era of letting these paragraphs out of their cage.
Onward, to second paragraphs.