This is not an About page.

CBL #93 - Some thoughts on thinking/acting, naming/doing, and where this blog is headed

Writers often craft stories around a McGuffin, an object that drives the plot but is ultimately meaningless. Until very recently, the McGuffin in the story of “Charlie, the writer,” was the perfect About page for this blog.

Consider the following scene: I put my three-year-old daughter to bed. My baby son is asleep. My wife is falling asleep. Even the dogs are falling asleep. I arm the security system, lock the doors, turn off the lights, turn on my bedside lamp, and go to lie down. “Should I read my book?” I think. Which one? You ask. It doesn’t matter. I don’t know. There are five or six on the bedside table I’m in the process of reading, but I won’t crack any. Instead, I will open a note on my phone, put “New About Page MM/DD” and start writing something like, “The reason I started writing . . .”

With a big professional transition coming up, I recently cleaned out Evernote (the note-taking and to-do list app I use to organize my life). And it’s frankly embarrassing how many half-written About pages I found there–results of endless mind maps, brainstorms, and even dropping my blog posts into an AI chatbot to ask it what my vibes are.

When I started writing this blog years ago, I wanted to write fiction, and somehow I'd forgotten that. I was enamored with the idea of being a novelist. I looked up to people who were skilled writers, who loved books, but with lives outside writing that were bold and interesting, too. So I started this blog to reflect this in my own life: think > act > reflect > write. My goal in starting this blog was to read great stuff, and then publicly grapple with those ideas and analyze those stories, maybe even learning about the people who wrote them. I would share the fruits of this process regularly alongside dispatches from my own life, and in the end, I’d crystallize what I thought was true, beautiful, funny, and useful into books.

But over time, I lost the forest for the trees. I got so obsessed with analysis and planning that I ignored the actual work. I was neither reading nor writing. I forgot one of my favorite pieces of advice, that I got when I got sober fifteen years ago, “you can’t think your way into a right way of acting, but you can act your way into a right way of thinking.”

I’m confident in my writing, but my revealed behavior shows I’m less confident in my “arc as a writer,” and fear that what I want to accomplish reveals something about me. Like even now, writing this, I have a fear that I am sharing something which cuts to a much deeper level of my psyche than I’m even aware of. Like, I will publish this essay and some motivations or needs for validations I have but don’t understand will become obvious to everyone but me, and I will suddenly transform into some kind of earnest, artistic version of Tim Robinson in that one sketch from his show “I Think You Should Leave,” where the hot dog mobile crashes into the clothing store, and everyone is trying to figure out what’s going on, and Robinson sidles out from the crowd going, “whoever did this just confess we promise we won’t be mad!” wearing a full-body, head-to-toe hot dog costume.

As much as I’ve talked about what I want to do, and how I didn’t do it, I think the best way to demonstrate what I actually want to do is to show you. Because I have been reading a lot lately, and I am taking action as a result. And it is extremely relevant to the idea of how thinking and acting interact, and how what we read can change us if we reflect and act on it.

After a particularly long week of thinking about the blog where I had even lost sleep making lists and analyses, I stumbled upon a video of novelist Ray Bradbury addressing aspiring novelists. He said that finishing a novel is hard, so you should write a short story a week until you have finished one hundred, then you’ll be ready. And if you don’t know what to write about, fill your head with great stuff: read a short story, a poem, and an essay every night for one thousand nights.

Immediately, I was like, “yes!” And then, as if I’d learned nothing at all, “time to plan what to read!” So I made a few lists and later that day, in a conversation with writer friends, tried to get their feedback on whether or not I should write a big post about doing a “Bradbury Challenge.” Their response made me realize that I had delivered my idea in the distinct register of “newspapers on the wall covered with tacks connected by string.” They basically said to just do it and write about it later. So I got to work and found a book of short stories and some essays I’d saved on my computer.

The short story I read was called “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, and it was magnificent. It was subtle and not what I expected. The opening paragraph is completely unlike the essays I read online these days: the sentences are staccato and don’t tell you much about what is going to happen. Then the main character is kind of unlikable and prejudiced. Not much happens. The ending is inconclusive, but powerful. The moral of the story could pretty much be “you can act your way into thinking the right way, but you can’t think your way into acting the right way.”

I ended up reading two essays. The first was “Why you should care about cricket” by Wright Thompson. It’s about Wright Thompson’s journey to India to see the India vs. England Cricket World Championship in 2011.

The central idea of the piece is that he doesn’t know anything about cricket, India, or the biggest cricket star in the world, Sachin Tendulkar, but to understand cricket and India, the key is to understand Tendulkar. He is the representative and metaphor for the stage that India is at culturally and developmentally, as well as an emblem for the evolving game of cricket, and he is the greatest player in the history of cricket, to boot.

The whole piece is fantastic, but it was about three-quarters of the way when it goes from great to one of the best pieces of short non-fiction in any genre I’ve ever read. I don’t know if this will hit the same way out of context, but this is Wright Thompson, after days of enormous buildup, finally watching Sachin playing in the big game, and “he gets it.”

A feeling arises, a rare one, that you are part of a group watching something special. The power of sport is that, on occasion, it redeems the messes we create around it. Cricket can be stronger than the forces changing it. Victories are fleeting, but the poems are what matters. I don't know if cricket is about to be ruined, or if Sachin is no longer needed, if he's retiring or if he'll defy expectations and play 10 more years. These are things we can guess about but never know.

I do know this: I am a fan. I am sunburned but do not care. I lose track of time. That's not a narrative flourish. Hours seem like moments. Rapture comes to the people here. I see Sachin constructing a score, and I understand the planning, and the years of experience, that lead a man to this field on this day, and to the artistry he now holds as part of himself, like a chamber of his heart. We are congregants in a church. We are watching the son of a poet. The stand-up comedian is serious. This is a perfect at-bat, Andy tells me. This is art, and I am lucky to see it. Soon, Sachin will be gone. This feeling will be gone. Right now, it is alive. It has the power of a name, immortal and pure.

"You don't have to know anything about it," my friend Gokul says.

England sends in Graeme Swann, the best spin bowler in the world. It is targeting Sachin. One mistake and he's gone. The crowd grows tense. Swann winds up. The roar of the crowd rises, like the start of a football game. The ball arrives. The crack echoes through the stadium.

Sachin has hit it off the scoreboard.

After I read that passage for the first time—almost fifteen years ago—I wrote an email to Wright Thompson. I didn’t write another cold email for a decade. I just needed him to know: this made me want to be a writer.

Re-reading it today, I could feel myself again in my apartment in Beijing, chain-smoking cigarettes on the balcony, reading and re-reading this essay. My throat tightens, and my eyes water, and I want to do a happy cry. I don’t understand the emotions. Many years later in therapy, I’ll understand this is an awe response and it says something about my relationship to meaning-making and how important it is to me.

And it’s still important to me. What Thompson was able to do for me in that essay is what I want to do for people. To take them across contexts, to use the life experience I have to plug in gaps in my own curiosity, and then fit them into the broad context of human experience, to make things make sense, to make people feel things, to understand what things really mean to other people and then therefore slowly learn what things really mean to me–that’s why I started writing.

I was having such a good time reading, I kept going. The second essay I read is “Review: CK One” by

Sasha Chapin

. It was one of the first essays I remember being blown away by on Substack. It was a review of a unisex perfume by Sasha Chapin.

In just the first paragraph, it hits all of what I’ve come to see as Chapin’s trademark notes: a little provocative, very funny, memorable, insightful.

The 1990s perfume CK One is a masterpiece. Even calling it that, though, is a bit of a joke. It’s like calling a nice toaster a masterpiece. Yes, you might say: it makes very nice toast. It cooks the bread a second time. But, a masterpiece? A masterpiece is something intricate composed by a mentally ill person, which we hang on the wall of a wealthy person, to remind us that suffering can have interesting externalities.

He goes on to detail what makes CK One a good scent, writing about the sensory experience of it. But it is when he gets to the meat of the essay and talks about CK One as a signifier that something clicks in me. It was cool kids that wore CK One. Chapin, like me, was not cool.

When I grew up, I had a sense of Us and Them. Nobody had to tell me of this division. I didn’t think of it, in the same way that you don’t think of gravity. It was just there, the two tribes.

Over there, were the basically well-formed children, who were pliable material that the teachers could make sense of, who understood the social engagements. And then there were the others, who never had a sense of naturalness. We dressed in hand-me-downs, we picked our noses. We could never just stand there looking normal or execute unmarked human behavior. In lieu of the affirmation that others were offered for executing the gestures that came to them so easily, we maybe reached for mastery in some non-social domain we could grasp: video games, cumbersome string instruments, watercolor.

We couldn’t even band together, because we didn’t want to be seen with each other. I remember Matthew, another malformed child. What was his crime? I think it was his warbly voice, his fondness for turquoise. He was always a little accelerated, a little at the wrong tempo. He had too much joy and laughter. If I stood next to him, it would be clear that I was more like him than the anointed ones, who would go through a beautiful childhood, towards a beautiful life, with the comfortable capability for flock behavior that promised smooth integration with the institutions of modern life.

And the smell of Them was CK One. That was the pheromone of functional people. Or it was, at least, when I was just starting to achieve sentience, when I began to understand my place.

Reading this immediately after reading Wright Thompson’s essay was so powerful. It was like the yin and yang of why I was writing. Whereas Thompson’s piece had shown me how I might be bold when I articulate my curiosity, how I might map meaning across cultures and contexts, and the different questions life presents, Chapin’s essay showed me how I can make people feel less alone.

It wasn’t an essay about how many friends you can have or how lovely the world is that made me realize this. It was a funny, idiosyncratic review of a cheap unisex perfume that perfectly articulated the overbearing shame of being I felt for most of my preadolescence; that is what made me feel the power of writing to make people feel less alone.

Unfortunately, by the time I finished the short story and both essays, it was very late at night. I tried to read a poem, so I googled “Pablo Neruda,” because that was who came to mind for some reason, and I did read the poem, but it wasn’t very good–or at least, didn’t make sense, mostly because I was exhausted. So not every single thing you read trickles down into your base-level experience of life.

But reading three things in a row that had powerful throughlines for a problem at hand, a problem which had been pretty pernicious for a long time, was something I thought I needed to share with people. There are probably a lot of creative people out there who have work to share and are not sure where to draw the line between doing the work and thinking about the work, between making it and naming it.

One compliment I get with regularity, that’s kind of funny to think about now, is that I’m a good dancer. But if someone asked me what kind of dancing I could do, I don’t know how to answer. I just do it. I have learned some moves, and I have some rhythm, and I’m not entering a competition any time soon, but I can cut a rug. And I think that there’s a similar dynamic at play here with writing. I’ve had people say they love a given essay or my blog. I’ve had people tell me that I have great “screen presence.” But I still scramble to find a way to name what I’m doing, I still get lost trying to plan it out, actually losing sleep at night looking for a way to hold it all in my mind and hope it’s legible rather than jump in, get it done, and let it stand on its own.

I think it’s time to free myself of that. And so, I've decided to more or less abandon my attempt to "niche" or finesse a name for what I’m doing at all, and re-commit to being curious and bold, and writing the best stuff I can. Because if I’m being honest, I always wanted to write great stuff, but in my mind I did have this idea of the Platonic, perfect About page: something like Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase from Pulp Fiction, where everyone who lays eyes on it is transfixed, immediately convinced of its value.

In reality, investing excess time into planning and naming the work is a distraction. The way to create things that are true and funny and beautiful, and have them find an audience, is to invest your energy in creating them and then putting them in front of an audience. Almost everything else is busywork.

To be honest, part of me wants to end this with a momentous declaration. There are some changes. For example, I'm changing the name of the Substack to my name. While I'm fond of "Castles in the Sky," and it's vaguely evocative of what I write about, it's been a lot of pressure to "conform" to the vibe I imagine. And the numbered issues will stay, but they will be called CBL#, which–forgive me for being self-aggrandizing–stands for the "Chalie Becker Letter". But I’m not going to end here by saying, “and now I’m doing this: . . .” or, as I wanted to do earlier, “and thus commences the Bradbury Challenge!”

The truth is, I love to quote Marilynne Robinson, talking about how it’s hard to articulate what’s deepest within us, or Rilke about how important it is to live the questions. But I’ve felt like a secret hypocrite because I’ve been trying to take shortcuts! And I’m going to stop. So while I want to just tell you exactly what I’m going to do next, and lay out a very clear plan, and say something that feels good now but makes me nervous, I’d rather end with the truth, which is that I am more convinced of the vision for what I’m doing than ever, but more open to experimenting with the tactics. What I have now is mostly questions, grit, and hope. And I am going to try my best to make sure that comes through.

• In Tendulkar Country or OTL: Why You Should Care About Cricket by Wright Thompson — This is the first story I referenced. It’s amazing, but a long read. (It’s funny how old these links are and that they’re not updated.) Everything by Thompson is great. I’m reading through his first book now.

• Review: CK One by Sasha Chapin — This is the second story I referenced. I also reviewed his book, which was similarly excellent: Why Write Memoirs.

• Big changes coming — I know, I know, the last few issues have had a big tease but I promise I will actually write about this. I got the formal OK a couple of days ago, so expect a series of special posts over the next 2-3 weeks.

• CBL numbering — I do want to number all past issues sequentially, as I said I would here, but I will wait until I have less to write about. I feel like taking a bunch of time to do that goes directly against what I’m writing about here.

• Other stuff I enjoyed reading this week —

  • ...nostalgia doctors... — The inimitable

    CansaFis Foote
    writes about nostalgia and his old band in his signature kind of Hunter S. Thompson meets Ogden Nash flavor.

  • Backyard Culture — I found this while browsing random leaderboards on Substack. So many people are talking about moving away, being a nomad, the isolation of modern life, blah blah blah, that I found it very refreshing to read this essay by

    Trevor Cribben Merrill
    about how to create the culture that you want to find in your own backyard, literally.

• I’m looking for more good, unusual essays and short stories to read. Please feel free to send me a message/email or drop them as a comment.