The Year of Pioneer

norman lear did not in fact outlive the norman lear commissary.

Above is an excerpt from The Pioneer Newsletter’s first edition. Some have said it reads just like Nirvana’s debut album Bleach sounds…A raw and unfiltered work art, unleashed from the mind of a tortured poet. Others say it lacks proper sentence structure and is riddled with grammatical errors. But however you feel about my controversial debut newsletter, we can all agree that by the laws of time and space, The Pioneer Newsletter is officially a year old. Check the paper placemats at Zenbu, or whatever your local Chinese restaurant is named. It won’t tell you it has been the year of the duck, tiger, or dragon. Ladies and gentlemen…it has been the Year of The Pioneer™.

A year ago, I wrote a few brief words to 15 friends on a Monday morning. It felt good to get out there and finish something I was proud of. What made it all the better, was having a few co-conspirators as my audience. So I created a Substack, wrote another, and a few more friends joined in. One week after that, I struck a chord with my generation, globally, after lamenting the bar scene in the West Los Angeles area.

The beautiful and diverse population of young adults in this city, collected from every corner of this green earth (but mostly Seattle), seems dead set on spending their social lives in bars absent of any opportunity for social interaction. Bars that are divided and conquered by status rather than conversation

The Pioneer Newsletter #3

The newsletter quickly became a great source of confidence and motivation for a supposed writer who wasn’t doing much writing before. More so, it became an outlet to scream from the rooftops just how batshit crazy it is that Ryan Gosling wears a super off brand Clippers hat in Drive.

“Devin Hester on the runback in 2007. John Mayer 6 minutes into Slow Dancing in a Burning Room. The first 10 minutes of Drive. Some things in this world just fucking rip”

The Pioneer Newsletter #4

A vehicle to cry from the streets how cool it’d be to date the cool and famous daughter of an equally cool and famous father. Since my rankings last October, Father-In-Law Crush reigning champ, Gracie Abrams, has skyrocketed in popularity. She can now be seen opening for Taylor Swift and galavanting around the streets of London in Puma Speedcats, biting Paul Mescal’s hand off.

As the newsletter following grew, the pressure mounted. I began to realize just how much time each week this supposed creative escape would take. In turn, my free time became more limited. My bed was never made. The dishes were never done. My sleep schedule mirrored the syndication schedule of George Lopez - a measly 4 hours between 5 and 9 AM. But I still found time to mine the depths of my potential and newsletter where no newsletterer has dared newslettering before. Culture began changing. Thought leaders took notice. I declared breakfast the Pluto of meals and ignited the solo diner power breakfast revival.

“Shunned by both science and culture. A demilitarized wasteland, gutted by intermittent fasting and refrigerated oats”

The Pioneer Newsletter #6

I then pivoted my pen away from brick and mortar to the world wide web, where I proposed a happy medium between phone addiction and deference to the emerging world, reporting on the advent of fringe social media.

“I have a whopping 4 followers on Strava and unsurprisingly, I know each and every one of them personally. At a bar one Saturday night, I ran into 25% of my Strava audience. We hadn’t seen each other in months but he immediately shouted over the noisy crowd, “Great run today brother”. I then asked about his. Two pedestrian-level friends, connected through a shared hobby, and able to bond through the power of technology”

The Pioneer Newsletter #10

But it was around the new year that burnout finally hit. I realized that this was no hobby anymore. The newsletter came with expectations. And unfortunately, there were no signs that those expectations would turn into any form of revenue. I was beginning to reckon with a war on balance. How could I continue to work on this project that had brought me such confidence as a scribesman without fully losing my own capacities during the work day? While I’d like to credit my perseverance to a phone call from Will Welch at GQ, an espresso with Graydon Carter at the AirMail office, or a Manhattan Beach kettlebell session with Ryen Russillo, instead it was all of you. That’s right, fucking you! I was fueled by the knowledge that people were actually reading this. How lucky did I get for that to even happen?

“As this newsletter braves a new year, I cannot promise you on-time and typo-free newsletters. That would be far too reasonable. But I can promise you that I will continue attempting new types of pieces, nitpicking subjects previously thought unnitpickable, and most importantly reporting on the slivers of humanity that slip through the cracks of our self-checkout world”

The Pioneer Newsletter #14

The newsletter admittedly did become less frequent and my subscriber growth did very much plateau. Yet none of it seemed to matter. The newsletter was written and published when it was damn ready to be. I was proud of some pieces more than others. I pulled a few all nighters and called out sick when I needed to but didn’t stress when I couldn’t. The newsletter was no longer a new flame with rockin’ body paragraph. It was instead a part of my life that I knew did not have to be urgent yet would forever be constant. Personally, I think this is really when I unleashed some heat. Both on the streets with a short style diary - recounting the time I put on a tie like I even needed a fucking reason to…

“I had plans that night at the High Low Bar in Los Feliz and I knew how much the neighborhood of Los Feliz would appreciate A CHOICE. So I consulted with a trusted third party who endorsed said choice and for the first time in a long time - put on a tie. Just like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, I was met with widespread critical acclaim”

The Pioneer Newsletter #15

And in the google sheets as I wrote what I believe to be my most important piece of journalism - an in-depth analysis of what your work email sign-off says about your personality.

“Kindly, is a phenomenal way of conveying that you believe there’s far more beauty to this world outside of the inbox. I wholly agree with the sentiment and think it’s quite touching. And to show my appreciation, I’ll take twice as long to respond to you”

- The Pioneer Newsletter #18

I doubled down on monotonous computer tasks and spun a tale of two factor authentication.

“You [then] remember you’re signing in on a new iPad, your plastic work laptop, or your mom’s phone. So the inevitable happens. Two factor authentication. Please confirm with this device that you’re chill with that device. The name five brothers of cyber security”

- The Pioneer Newsletter #22

In that same goddamn newsletter, I banged out a summer cocktail guide that Bon Apatit absolutely begged to get their cooking mitts on.

“This summer, I’ll reserve my European indulgences for the cocktails. When it comes to beer, I’m going Texas sober… domestics only.”

- Also The Pioneer Newsletter #22

Truly though, the newsletter I’m most proud of, due to high performing web traffic metrics, is my far more serious self reflection piece, On Running. I recounted two whole years of my life jogging down pitch dark Los Angeles bike paths (real Looper energy) while listening exclusively to Jack Johnson.

“Running is literally all about not stopping. If you’re looking for the most binary way to learn about perseverance - try it sometime. You’re either running or you're not running. There’s literally no in-between. That would just be skipping”

- On Running

And now here we are, after 365 days (374 but who’s counting) of unadulterated newsletter. Viewer discretion has been advised. And while I feel quite proud of myself for sticking with it and continuing to provide the people with literature that matters, I also feel that this newsletter must evolve into something more in order to survive. A friend of mine asked me, a few weeks back, how I would describe the newsletter to someone I did not know. I couldn’t. This is a problem for a writer, especially one who literally co-hosts a podcast titled Elevator Pitch. My friend then asked how he could explain the newsletter to a stranger if even its own writer couldn’t. As a result, how could that stranger explain it to another stranger if a friend of mine couldn’t explain it to them? You get the point. Safe to say I was startled, scared, and just a tad randy. I rebutted, saying the unexplainability of the newsletter was truly what made it my own. My newsletter is jazz. A Jackson Pollock painting. The triangle offense. Either it clicks with you or it doesn’t.

Almost immediately, I realized how stupid that was. Because I’m very much aware the newsletter, in its current scattershot state, refuses to grow. And as much as I’d like to hold onto exactly what I love about it, I need to let it evolve into the growing little man it’s becoming. So therefore, you’ll be seeing some changes to the newsletter come Monday morning. Some changes, you might like. Other changes will possibly incite riots. But after all, this is The Pioneer Newsletter. True pioneers like us cannot simply be content with what has come before. We must continue to move forward and seek out greater opportunity. Never forgetting where we were, but instead using these experiences to arrive at where we’re going. I won’t announce the year two changes just yet. Because before I do, I’d like to extend one more thank you to anyone who’s ever read a word of this newsletter. It has been, without question, the hardest I’ve worked on anything in my life. And while I’m never quite finished, each week upon clicking publish - for just a moment I’m able to exhale, smile, and remind myself that I wrote that. I am a writer. And I’m doing exactly what I’ve always wanted to in a way I truly never expected to. So happy birthday, newsletter. Let us join digital hands in celebration. Hopefully, you’ll all be here for many more to come.

I saw my hero at the gym tonight. He was neither youthful nor in great shape. Was my hero looking to shed that extra weight on the treadmill? Nope. Was he converting that mass into muscle on the bench? Get out of here. My hero was staring into the mirror, holding a 20 pound medicine ball like it was the rock, and practicing his triple threat - over and over again. Wow. (Begin Chris Collinsworth voice) Now here’s a guy who’s locked in on what he wants to hone. Not because it’ll make him a fortune in the league and not because it’ll get him looking like Jeremy Allen White. It’s not about what everyone else thinks you should be working at - it’s about what you want to work at. You’ve just read a whole bunch of nothing that really entertains me. It’s my medicine ball and triple threat. I can’t imagine anyone has gotten this far but that’s okay. I’m writing because it’s what I’m looking to hone. So thank you for opening this up and I hope you’ve enjoyed. Please feel free to forward along to whoever. 

The Pioneer Newsletter #1

Fine. I will let you in on just one change. I’m taking a page out of the Sean Parker playbook. So long newsletter.