When the world is going crazy,

which is how it feels anytime 

I spend too much of my time

looking at the news slash social media

slash glowing screens slash information,

which I’ve been doing for the past week or so,

I go to the hardware store. 

Because at the hardware store,

I can feel, for a few minutes, that

maybe the world is not falling apart,

as much as these people screaming at each other

about “your side” and “our side” on TV news clips 

have very nearly led me to believe.

I walk in the sliding doors,

someone asks me if they can help, 

I admit that yes, I do need help, 

finding a metric tape measure,

or some 3-in-1 multi-purpose oil,

or some metal thing that I can hardly describe

but it attaches to another metal thing

which attaches to another metal thing,

and if I attach all those metal things together,

one small problem in my life will be solved,

and that’s not gonna save the world, 

what with all the people killing people,

and people trying to kill those people,

and people saying more people should be killed,

and maybe I can’t do much about that today,

but I can spend a little time of my day

and fix that thing in my house that needs fixing, 

with help from the folks at the hardware store,

and that will save a little part of my little world,

and tip my mental scale a tiny bit back 

towards something that feels like sanity.

—

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I don’t often re-publish stories I’ve written, but I remembered this one this past week when I was tagging along on a rock climbing trip in the desert with my mom and her friends. I think this essay, back when I wrote it in 2013, was a sort of expression of gratitude through a story about my grandma (my mom’s mom), who was in the last 14 months of her life at the time I published it. I hope it still resonates.

—

I flew to Iowa to visit my grandmother in the hospital a couple weeks ago. She’s been in and out of hospitals for the past few months, kind of one thing after another, the latest being a dental infection. I got off the plane in Des Moines, rented a car and drove straight to the hospital, where she was in bed, the right side of her face swollen up around the infection, IV drip in her arm.

I sat with her for three days, leaving when she went to sleep at night and took naps in the afternoon, but mostly we just sat and chatted like we always do. I ran across the street a couple times to get her milkshakes and real coffee from the coffee shop a block away. She only drank a few sips of it, but it didn’t matter. If it was between hospital coffee and espresso, I thought she should have espresso.

We went for short walks up and down the hallway, Grandma apologizing for how slow she was going, shuffling with her walker in front of her, and me telling her that she was the fastest 85-year-old lady I’d hung out with, plus I didn’t have anything else to do that day anyway. I have about a dozen deadlines and a million e-mails, but only one grandparent. Sitting there in the chair next to the hospital bed, helping her in and out of the chair, cutting up her food, I wondered how many more times I’d get to spend the whole day with my grandma, just me and her.

My grandma knows I live in a van and that I’m a writer, and I don’t think she cares what I do as long as I’m happy. She doesn’t read my blog, or care too much about rock climbing and mountains, and she knows I travel a lot, but I don’t think she cares where — I think she sees me in one of two locations: in person, and at the other end of the phone line wherever I call her from.

While I was visiting her in the hospital, I was supposed to talk her into moving into an assisted living home five minutes from my parents’ house, where she’d have her own apartment and her seven kids would be able to visit more frequently. I tried a little bit. Her other option was a nursing home in her hometown, and she liked that idea better, despite the wishes of all of her kids. She’s lived in the same town, Emmetsburg, Iowa, pop. 4,000, her entire life, and in the same house since 1956. She’s not going to be able to go back to her house, but she doesn’t want to leave Emmetsburg, where she raised seven children, and outlived almost every single one of her friends.

When we talked about the assisted living home, she said across the hospital table, “Brendan, I don’t want to go somewhere I don’t know anyone.”

I said Grandma, I go everywhere, and I don’t know anybody.

Which is a stupid thing to say to your grandmother when you’re a young guy who loves to travel, and she’s talking about leaving the same house she raised a family in for 30-plus years, and then lived in alone for 26 years. She said, I mean, Can you imagine me leaving the only place I’ve ever lived? and I understood how scared she is.

I’ve had something like 23 different addresses in my life, and every time I moved out of another apartment, I had a little twinge of nostalgia, a little sadness as I closed the door on all the emptied-out rooms I’d made memories in. My grandma had to multiply that feeling times 66 years. Driving away from the hospital, I realized Grandma and I were both talking about freedom, even though it looks wildly different to each of us. She doesn’t want to live anyplace where people tell her what to do, and I suppose I’m kind of doing the same right now.

I guess we like to point out the traits we get from the people who raised us, how we’re like our people — I was raised on spicy food; my family’s always been Cardinals fans; we never back down, et cetera. I’ve spent most of my life rebelling against everything I grew up with, but I get it. When you’re 85, like my grandma, people say you’re stubborn. I think I’m just like her, but I call it driven. I fancy myself to be pretty tough, able to get myself out of any jam in the mountains with sheer perseverance. My grandma doesn’t care if anybody thinks she’s tough, but she fell and broke her hip five years ago, and walked around her house for three days thinking it was just bruised before she went to get an x-ray. My family, both sides, has never been shy about busting people’s balls, no matter the situation. It’s a true art, and I have a hard time relating to people who don’t know how to do it. My Uncle Dan, on Grandma’s second day in the hospital, told her, “Mom, we’re so optimistic, we’re gonna buy you some green bananas.”

We walked down the hallway one evening, just me and Grandma, past a few open doors of hospital rooms, and she apologized again for being slow, and I just walked next to her with my hands in my pockets and assured her I wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere. She said Brendan, I bet you can walk anywhere you want, and I said Yeah Grandma, I guess I can. I thought about all the places I had walked, like the top of the Grand Teton and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and I don’t know why my grandma had to say something like that hunched over her walker and shuffling along in a hospital gown and why it made me so sad.

Last Christmas, after I hugged her goodbye, she grabbed my hand with both hands, taking one more second. That was the first time she’d ever done that, and I walked out the door of my parents’ house wondering if she did because she wasn’t sure if it was the last time she’d see me. It wasn’t, of course, but I guess you never know when you get to be 85.

Someday she’ll be gone, and then I’ll be a wreck for a while, but I suppose after that, I’ll find a few good places to think of her when I’m out there being stubborn and walking anywhere I want.

—

My grandma died in June 2014. Here’s the essay/obituary I wrote about her back then.

Every year, whenever the process of trying to find the perfect holiday gift for *everyone* at the exact same time hits its crescendo, I tell myself: One of these years, I’m just gonna do what Jeff Harris does. 

Every December for about a decade now, a Priority Mail Flat Rate box has arrived at my house, weighing approximately four and a half pounds. I open it, and if I don’t already have some softened butter, I grab a stick out of the refrigerator and command it to soften as fast as it can. 

Inside the box are two loaves of Harris Family Cranberry Bread, which stretch the definition of “bread” to the furthest extent of the laws of nature, and might even qualify as “cake,” depending on context or audience. Anyway: You are not making a BLT out of two slices of Harris Family Cranberry Bread. 

You just follow the directions on the label, which say: SLICE THICK > TOAST > BUTTER > REVEL

One loaf is approximately 10 slices of cranberry bread. In my house, since Hilary is much more of a disciplined/sensible eater than I am, I consume approximately 80 to 90 percent of our cranberry bread each holiday season. I am not at all mad or sad about this, and I would like to think everyone who is bestowed a loaf or two of Harris Family Cranberry Bread during the holidays appreciates it as much as I do. 

Jeff has been making cranberry bread since 2009—or, rather, 2009 is when he got serious about it, shipping loaves of it to family and friends. In peak years, he shipped about 80 loaves of cranberry bread, and baked another 70 or 80 loaves for friends and family in his hometown of Cincinnati, which added up to about 160 loaves total, baked four at a time for 50 to 60 minutes at 350 degrees. 

He’s dialed back production after back surgery a few years ago, so I am even more grateful when our box shows up. Especially because it’s always during the time when I start feeling the pressure to buy something for everyone in my family (even in a family that keeps the holiday gift-giving pretty minimal). 

I’m over here with 50 tabs open and a Note on my phone with a list of possible gift ideas for each person, trying to once again nail it, or at least not buy someone something that will leave them thinking, “Huh, that’s who you think I am?” Will they think this sweater is ugly, will they put this record on the turntable more than once ever, will they read past page 50 of this book, or should I just admit defeat and buy them a gift card? Argh. 

Gluten allergies and intolerances aside, the cranberry bread (or any mailable baked good, really) seems so … smart. No returns or exchanges, no gift receipts, no one having to hang a shirt in a closet for three years telling themselves they need to wear it more often/ever because someone who loves them bought it for them and their heart was in the right place. You just bake a shitton of delicious bread/cake, pack it up, and after it reaches its destination, it creates joy in all who are graced by its presence. 

And if it doesn’t create joy for its recipients, it’s at least biodegradable or compostable. Although if a retired man from Cincinnati is sending you loaves of cranberry bread every December and you’re not eating them, please contact me. I know someone who can get rid of them. 

—

If you are interested in the exact recipe for Harris Family Cranberry Bread, Jeff generously shared a PDF of it, and you can download it here. 

This time of year, many of us are looking back on the previous year, or looking forward to the next year, or both. When I am mulling over ideas to write about in late December, I often catch myself thinking too big, trying to solve all the world’s problems with an essay. So this year, I thought I’d re-publish a very brief piece I wrote a few years ago, because I still think about it often. And it’s based on something my friend Tom said to me in 2012, which was almost 14 years ago, so he really nailed it (in my opinion). Here it is: 

About five years ago, my friend Tom told me what I thought was an insignificant thing: that he’d taken a ceramic mug to his office and had started using that for his morning coffee instead of a travel mug. He said it made him feel less rushed.

In the span of those five years, Tom’s little seed of an idea stuck with me, and gradually and almost subconsciously grew into a full-blown life philosophy. I too tried to start drinking out of ceramic mugs when possible. I minimized drinking coffee in a car, preferring to schedule a few minutes for drinking coffee somewhere stationary, whether it was my apartment or a coffee shop. Every coffee shop I visited, I specified “for here” to avoid being served coffee in a paper cup. I noticed at hotels and sometimes airport coffee shops in Europe, coffee was served in ceramic mugs, and how much I liked it compared to a hotel breakfast in the U.S., served on all disposable dishes and cups. (Obviously it’s also better for the planet if we’re not creating a piece of trash every time we drink a cup of coffee, but I’m talking about something else here.)

I wouldn’t have expected that concept to change my life in a big way, but now I look at to-go cups and travel mugs like the equivalent of drinking wine out of a glass vs. straight out of the bottle. Or maybe more accurately, sitting down to eat a sandwich at an actual table vs. wolfing down a drive-through meal while navigating in freeway traffic. I’ve learned to like my coffee like I like my conversations with good friends: not rushed.

But we all feel rushed, don’t we? We live in a world that seems to get faster and faster every month. And how do we deal with it? Most of us try to adapt and keep up with it all, without even thinking about it. We have eight different methods people can use to contact us and we have to check them every 15 minutes just in case we missed something. We eat lunch at our desks, and drink our coffee out of non-spill vessels, often in our cars. And nobody just sits and drinks coffee anymore, except this legendary Starbucks customer spotted in 2015:

Yes, it’s great that we’ve been able to make lots of things portable, including drinking coffee. But while the actual coffee is portable, the experience of slowing down and taking a minute to be present is not so much.

Maybe my friend Tom is onto something with his ceramic coffee mug, and he knows something most of us should admit: that rushing the things we love isn’t making us any happier—even if it is making us able to scroll through 12 to 15 more meters of social media feeds every day. Maybe instead of trying so hard to keep up with everything, we should all take a small step in resisting the velocity of our discontent.

—

One of my newish favorite images of my kid, among the thousands, is him standing on the front of a lumber cart at a big-box home improvement store, holding his “sword” that his mom made for him out of parts from a toddler tool kit, wearing a dress that his mom also made him—really just kind of a skirt made out of a piece of fabric with beetles printed on it.

You could probably read a lot into his outfit, I suppose. But he has watched Frozen many, many times in the past few weeks, and I believe he likes to wear the dress because it makes him feel powerful. Elsa is the most powerful character in the movie, and she wears a dress. The sword, I’m not sure about, because Elsa never uses a sword, but lots of details about the movie are a little beyond him right now. But if you had sent me a photo of him with the sword and the dress on the front of the moving cart six years ago, and you had told me that I was the person pushing the cart, I’d have a lot of questions.

Our little guy turned three and a half last weekend. I don’t write much about him, or being a parent, and I always wondered if I could write something original about the experience of raising a kid. But it’s probably easier to just try to write the truth.

Years ago, back when I woke up to an alarm clock and not a child with immediate needs, I asked my friend Chris what he thought the biggest surprise about parenting was, and he said, “That the clichés are true.” Which I didn’t believe at the time, but he knew and I didn’t know anything.

Until 2021 or so, I did not think I’d ever become a parent, and I thought all parents said the same things about having kids: It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It goes by so fast. Et cetera, et cetera. And now I say all that cliché shit too, always reminding myself, dammit, Chris was right.

Here are a few things I’ve observed and thought about in the past 3.5 years:

Your kid is the cutest
Did you know that your kid is the cutest kid in the world, to you? It’s true. I imagine there’s some biological reason for this feeling among parents. Unless, of course, YOU think MY kid is the cutest kid in the world, in which case I would like to commend you on your impeccable taste and judgment.

Kids say the darndest things!
Or in our kid’s case, he said “Fucking Christ,” every once in a while, for several months when he was about two and a half. Hilary very politely tried to say that he could have picked it up from either of us, but I’m pretty fucking sure she was just trying to protect my feelings.

“Slow days, fast years”
I interviewed 40+ dads in the months leading up to Jay’s birth and the year after, and when I asked them what parenting forced them to improve about themselves, a great many of them said “patience.” This has never been more clear to me than when I ask Jay to wash his hands after using the toilet, or before eating. It is FUCKING ASTOUNDING how many things a three-year-old can find to distract himself from the one thing he is supposed to be doing. Look, I have 20 browser tabs open and can take an entire workday or two to write a 1,000-word essay, but six and a half minutes to wash your hands? Come on, man.

HOWEVER. Every bit of progress we mark as our little dude becomes more of kid and less of a baby means that part of his life—and our lives with him—is over. We have a shared Notes document where we type phonetic spellings of words Jay mispronounces as he learns to talk, because every time he figures out how to correctly pronounce a word, we lose his innocent, Beginning Talker words like “hollowcotter” and “dagedder.” [See Raymond Beisinger’s “The Affabet”]

Kids force you to be present.
Sure, playing with a toddler can sometimes feel tedious, especially when your presence is requested not to actually participate in the playing with, say, a train set, but to sit and watch your kid play with a train set. But when you pull out a smartphone and try to answer an email or check the weather and 15 seconds later you hear a tiny voice saying, “Dad,” as in, “Pay attention to me,” it’s really hard to not feel like a real asshole. Most dads I’ve talked to mentioned regretting that they had to work so much when their kids were young, and I get that, but at least work is earning money to provide food and shelter. There is literally almost nothing I can access on a smartphone that is worth ignoring my kid over. Even if he’s watching paint dry and asking me to watch him watch paint dry.

It’s gross
Previous to having a roommate who didn’t know how his butt worked, I thought I had a maybe slightly above-average comfort level with human feces. Like I feel like I have a Hirayama-in-Perfect Days level of comfort with cleaning toilets, don’t mind digging catholes or blue-bagging it in the backcountry, and have, since 2013, sold a “Grand Canyon Groover Calendar,” made up of photos I took while doing groover duty every day of a 28-day river trip. Well well well. Without getting into too much detail, the birth of my child marked a new epoch in my poop journey. This past December, we had a potty chair sitting next to our Christmas tree, long story, but that’s where we were. The irony of having a groover in my living room was not lost on me.

This is why we can’t have nice things.
Before I had a toddler, I had some stuff I cared about, and it was “nice.” Some of it’s still “nice.” Some of it has been dropped and/or broken and/or destroyed. Now that Jay has been our roommate for three and a half years, my possessions all probably fit into three categories:

1. Stuff that absolutely cannot get fucked up and needs to be hidden from child at all costs
2. Stuff that’s nice and that a toddler could maim themselves with, and therefore must be hidden from child
3. Stuff that’s nice, but let’s be honest, is less important than my kid’s experience of exploration and discovery, and therefor shareable, even if he breaks it, or that’s what I told myself after he broke it

It’s hard
People say raising a kid is hard. In my experience, they’re correct. I think what I didn’t expect was the diversity in types of “hard”: The interruptions of your own sleep that for the first three months or so feel like they’d be an effective interrogation tactic, the sudden disappearance of any time for yourself after decades of having what feels in retrospect like all the time in the world, trying to understand the psychology of a human being who is just discovering they have hands and that they act very irrationally when they are hungry or tired, the slowing down of literally everything you try to do as you chaperone an amateur human being through an airport or hardware store or the steps of putting on a sock—I could go on.

Am I complaining? I am not. Being a stupid idiot who believes that almost every meaningful thing in life requires difficulty or discomfort, I have realized that if I was forced to trade in all the hours it’s taken me to help raise this kid and do something else with them, I’d probably just pick another hard thing to do.

Also: I didn’t even do the physiological and psychological work of turning this dude from a zygote into a seven-pound human! Or the breastfeeding. As a dad, my body didn’t change in any noticeable way the entire time! I was just the assistant for all that stuff (maybe assistant manager?). And I still thought it was hard. Can you imagine if I had to be pregnant, give birth, and immediately feed and care for a thing that was a fetus 15 minutes ago?

“You’ll miss this”
There’s an old joke about mountaineering—or many jokes, probably, and the gist of them is basically: “That was miserable. I can’t wait to do it again.” It’s a joke, but it’s based on actual human psychology that we tend to forget the hard parts, and mountaineering, somewhat like child-rearing, has many hard parts.

“You asked for this”
I did. I asked for this. I consider myself privileged and lucky to be in a position to ask for this, and then receive it, and to have what has been a relatively smooth journey with it up until this point, all things considered. I would add the caveat, though, that maybe some of us weren’t super familiar with some of the specifics of the “this” that we were asking for, such as the amount of time I would spend using a Libman Easy Grip Scrub Brush to remove human feces from clothing, but also the feeling of reaching my hand down at a crosswalk and feeling a little hand reach up and grab my middle finger without ever taking my eyes off of vehicle traffic.

“You won’t understand until you have one for yourself”
See previous item. Also, to the extent that I understand raising a kid, I only understand my kid, not anyone else’s kid. Even if our kids are the exact same age, it’s not like we are comparing the same pair of running shoes or something— “Do you like the new cushioning in your Cascadia 19s? Me too.”

“They love to push your buttons”
I forget which parenting book I read this in, but yes, I too have felt that my kid has done a certain thing because he knows for sure that it will piss me off. Which is, of course, not true. Someone wrote somewhere that instead of imagining your two- or three-year-old is a smaller adult human who you can expect to act with some degree of rationality, it’s helpful to imagine they’re a raccoon, a creature you probably don’t think you can control.

“You get to see the world through a child’s eyes again”
Sure, this means watching some Daniel Tiger, or Bluey, or Frozen 25+ times or whatever. But it also means when I’m pedaling our cargo bike down the path to take Jay to preschool, trying to find things to talk to him about, and I see a three-quarter moon in the morning sky, and I realize this is a novel thing I can point out to my kid, and I say, “Jay, did you see the moon?” I am also telling myself to look at the moon, which is, compared to mentally cataloguing the dozen or so things I need to do today or stressing about an upcoming deadline, actually quite nice.

—

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Kevin and I were running on the trail, chugging along, talking about why people write. Because if you ask a writer, they’ll tell you it’s often essentially a form of self-torture. Yet, we—writers—are compelled to keep doing it. But why?

We were on the fire road that cuts across the face of Mt. Sentinel about 800 feet above town, a double-track of dirt that goes for almost two miles of wide-open views and is a fantastic place to go if you enjoy talking while you run, because you’re right next to each other the whole time, minus one or two spots where you might have to step aside for another runner/hiker/dog walker.

I had a couple things to say about why it’s hard for people to write, because I am technically a writer, which just means I have figured out ways to publish enough words and make enough money for the IRS to not contest it when I put “writer” in the appropriate box on my tax forms.

On the day that Kevin and I went on this trail run, I was about 60 percent finished building a set of shelves in my garage, mostly out of materials I’d salvaged from the old shelves someone had built in our garage a few decades ago and didn’t work for us anymore.

Kevin had recently finished building something very similar and had sent me a photo of it, so here we were, two runners, who were also amateur carpenters and people who want to write, talking about all that stuff as we jogged along.

I note all this because I said to Kevin something like,

Well, it can be hard to justify spending several hours trying to write something, because at the end of all those hours, you might not think what you wrote is any good. If you spent that same amount of time and a bit of money buying some wood and trying to build a table or a set of shelves, and you didn’t quite get it right and the table or the shelves wasn’t the greatest thing ever, it would probably still be usable in some way.

Maybe you mess it up somehow and have to start over once or twice. And if you cut a piece of wood an inch or two too short, you might have to go buy some more wood so you could try it again. Sure, you fuck up some wood, but you end up making something, in your hours as a novice woodworker.

And that’s considered a normal hobby—compared to writing—because at least you’re making something that has a purpose, if only for the people who live in your house. Very different from, say, writing poetry, or short fiction, which may never get published or even get read by anyone else.

But look: We both know that you can go to a home improvement store and buy a set of those wire rack shelves, or a set of plastic ones, and they’ll work just fine to hold your stuff.

But you didn’t do that. You took three or five or eight hours or whatever and penciled out a sketch and went and bought some wood and some screws or nails, and you measured the wood and cut it and clamped it together and tried to get all the angles right and cut more wood and drove in screws or nails and got some sawdust all over yourself and maybe a couple splinters in one or more fingers, and you made something yourself, and it maybe didn’t turn out exactly like you thought it would, and maybe you didn’t end up saving any money after all, but it works, and it fits in the space better than something from the store, and now you can say, Sure it’s not perfect, and sure, plenty of other people could do better, but I made this one.

I guess I think that’s why we write.

—

The early-registration discount for my Running To Stand Still writing + trail running workshop this June in Montana ends January 31. More information and an application link can be found here.

—

Here’s a video version of the above essay:

From my aisle seat on our two-hour flight, I glanced over occasionally at the passenger across the aisle as she went from texting on her phone, to flipping down the tray table and watching a news commentary show on her ipad, to switching to playing a game on her ipad, then finally folding up the tray table and texting on her phone for the final descent, landing, and taxiing to the gate, never spending more than a few seconds without interacting with a screen. 

“Wow,” I thought, “That’s probably what I look like too.” 

When we got home from the airport that evening, I checked the Screen Time app on my phone and realized I had, apparently, spent 2 hours and 27 minutes with my phone screen on that day. I had picked up my phone 70-plus times. 

Is that a lot? Not that much? Below or above average? I googled it, and then realized I actually don’t care how it compares to anyone else’s phone usage. When I think of the holiday cards we send each other at the end of the year and summarize what we’ve been up to, i.e. “Parent 1 started a new job and ran a marathon, Kid 2 is taking tae kwon do lessons and making friends at kindergarten, et cetera,” I don’t want mine to read, “Brendan continues to pursue his passion, which is apparently looking at his phone for a huge chunk of his waking hours and not knowing why he’s doing it.” 

Because yes, I use my phone for certain essential tasks, like maintaining a shared grocery list with Hilary, texting friends and family, taking photos, checking the weather forecast before I get dressed for my run, a few work things. But I am also aware—and have been aware for years now—that a lot of that screen time is spent on total bullshit: I pick up my phone to check the weather, and then I only half-consciously decide to watch three to 17 minutes of standup comedy video reels on Instagram, or get sucked into reading a news story and then another one and then another one. 

Sure, I could download an app to help me spend less time on my phone. I could buy a product that promises to help me limit my distraction. I could get rid of my phone and get a “dumb phone.” Or, hear me out: I could just recognize that every time I pull my phone out of my pocket, it’s a conscious choice, and a choice that often results in me being a) not fully present or b) wasting several minutes of my life or c) both. 

I have been through this before, as a person with a tendency toward addiction. I used to smoke, which, as you might know, has been proven to be dumb as shit, but also very addictive. And as a person who smoked 20 cigarettes every day for years, I’ll tell you: One of the worst things about it (besides all the obvious health stuff) was how often I thought about the next cigarette. Sure, smoking one of them took five minutes, but I probably started thinking about the next one 10 or 15 minutes after I finished the last one. Even if you don’t do the math, that’s a lot of thinking about something. 

When I was in treatment for addiction 150 years ago, there was a saying that went something like, “First it’s just fun, then you have fun with problems, and then you just have problems.” A line graph of that might look like this: 

I’m not going to compare smartphones to cigarettes or other addictive substances/habits (although I wouldn’t be the first person to do so). And I’m not saying my phone has caused the same problems I’d have with, say, heroin or alcohol. But maybe it’s worth asking: How much fun am I having? 

Or: How much fun am I missing out on when I’m on my phone? Maybe you can multitask (even though the data says you probably can’t), but I know this about myself: Every minute I’m looking at my phone is one minute I’m not fully present doing something else: having a conversation, playing with my kid, listening to a song, watching a movie, enjoying a cup of coffee. 

I have drunk thousands of cups of coffee in my life and hopefully will be able to drink thousands more, so I’m not that bothered by being a little distracted when I do that, but my kid is only going to be three years old once, and even the most boring thing he does is worth being there for. 

So the day after that flight, I decided to try to keep my screen time under one hour per day—an arbitrary number, but one that seemed prudent enough. Could I fit in all the weather forecasts, texting, photos, grocery listing, social media, banking, and other essential phone tasks I needed in 59 minutes a day? 

Well, I did. Every day for two months, I kept my phone screen time under an hour (except for two days when I went over by four minutes). I did not feel a significant transformation, write a novel, get shredded, learn a new language, or start playing the piano. I don’t even know what I spent that extra time doing. I just felt a little bit … more sane? Better? 

When I sat in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, I just stared at the clock for seven minutes. I went out to dinner with a friend, and when he went to the restroom, I just sat there with my phone in my pocket. I have tried to embrace what it feels like to just sit there, instead of checking the little slot machine in my pocket whenever I’m the least bit bored. 

I have quit many addictive things over the years, and in every case, I have found it much easier to completely eliminate whatever it is from my life instead of trying to moderate my usage of it. I am aware that people can drink just one beer or one glass of wine, or smoke a cigarette now and then, but I am not one of those people. The hard thing with a phone is that you can’t just get rid of it—or at least I can’t, at this point in my life. So I have to figure out a way to moderate it. Which I honestly kind of hate. But maybe this is a little bit of progress. 

—

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As we announced and TechCrunch covered, my.wordpress.net has soft-launched.

What this means is you need to fundamentally shift how you think about WordPress.

From the beginning, WordPress has always been open source, giving you freedom, liberty, autonomy, and digital sovereignty. Open source is the most powerful idea of our generation.

For the past few decades, WordPress was software you got from a cloud provider or web host, such as WordPress.com, Bluehost, Hostinger, or Pressable (the currently recommended WordPress hosts). You could self-host it on a Raspberry Pi or home server, but few people did.

The experience of downloading WordPress, as my Mom did, is that it unzips a bunch of PHP and various code files onto your desktop. Very confusing!

But now, thanks to incredible advances in WebAssembly (WASM), we can spin up a web server, a database (SQLite or MariaDB), and a full WordPress installation inside your browser in about 30 seconds. Instantly. No server needed. I introduced Playground at State of the Word in 2022.

You can even use it to cross-publish apps to the web, desktop, and iOS, like Blocknotes did in 2023. You can get the latest Blocknotes at Blocknotes.org. One codebase, multiple platforms.

These WordPress Playground containers are fully composable and atomic. You can track and roll back any change. Undo for everything. Stop thinking of WordPress as just on a web host and worrying about maintenance and management, and more as a self-contained unit of open source goodness, a fun little package where you own and control the code and data and can run it however you like.

How perfect is that for AI to work with? Playground makes WordPress local, fast, and trivial to spin up multiple instances, test code changes, and save them.

Next up, we’re going to add peer-to-peer sync, version control integration, and cloud publishing so other people can access it.

I believe this will take us from millions of WordPresses in the world to billions. Hosting isn’t going away; in fact, I think demand for cloud syncing will increase drastically as we radically open up what people can build on top of WordPress.

In an AI age where it’s trivial to spin up software from scratch, consumers will have to give much more thought to brands they trust to be in it for the long term. We’ve been relentlessly iterating on WordPress since 2003. I plan to work on it the rest of my life, and there’s a broad community of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who make their living on top of WordPress.

On WordPress.com we offer 100-year plans and 100-year domains, and I believe we’re one of the few companies where that’s credible. It’s led by Zander Rose, who ran the Long Now Foundation (one of my favorite non-profits) from 1997 to 2023, a quarter century.

In core WordPress, we are obsessed with backwards compatibility. You can run plugins and themes written 20 years ago on today’s WordPress. I’ve stumbled on decade-old installs, and the built-in auto-upgrade took everything to the newest version.

At Automattic, for better and worse, unlike Google, we almost never shut things down. We obsess about maintaining or redirecting permalinks. We make it easy not just to get your data in, but take it out too. We build businesses that lower churn not by locking you in (Wix famously has no export) but by making it easy for you to leave. If you love somebody, set them free.

In the next few years, there will be a Cambrian explosion of software and services. You’re going to have a lot of choices about where to put your most precious data and software. You should demand open source and bet on those who are clearly in it for the long-term.

Today, everyone gets a phone number and email when they grow up. That will expand in the future, everyone will have a domain and a WordPress. A part of the internet that you own.

Technology is best when it brings people together. Technology is best when it puts you in control, gives you ownership, digital autonomy, freedom, and liberty. That’s open source. It’s so exciting to see how AI is supercharging open source.

Join the WordPress community. It’s fun! We have cookies that don’t track you.

I would like to offer some free business advice to people who are considering selling something they’ve created.

First, if the buyer insists you don’t talk to any other bidders, you are being screwed. They only do this because they don’t want you to find the market-clearing price.

Do you think when Microsoft called LinkedIn and said, “We want to buy you for $26B,” they just replied, “Sure! That sounds good.”

If you’re very lucky, you get to work with a bank like Qatalyst, which says, “That’s a lovely offer, let’s see who else would be interested.”

Ask yourself why someone wants to buy you? Who else might have the same motivations? That begins a process in which a wide array of parties review the deal.

If you don’t have the connections or a bank to help you, just email the CEOs of other companies that might be interested. Say: “XYZ wants to buy me for $Y dollars. Is that something you’d also be interested in?”

Now you’re creating a market.

Remember that you’re doing this for the first time, and on the other side of the table, they’ve done dozens of deals.

It really pains me to see WordPress-adjacent companies get taken advantage of by sophisticated financial and corpdev players who strong-arm them into not shopping their deal.

A confident buyer doesn’t care if you talk to others because they know they can offer you the best deal, which usually combines money with what happens to the business after it’s sold. This is the magic of Berkshire Hathaway.

Warren Buffett doesn’t care if you talk to other bidders; in fact, he wants you to, so you see why he’s the better outcome for your business if you want to sell it.

It’s tempting to want to celebrate every time a creator sells something. Say it’s good for the community. But if they didn’t sell it through a fair process, it’s more likely they were taken advantage of, and that saddens me.

For public companies, failing to follow the process I describe above can constitute a breach of your fiduciary duty to shareholders and expose you to legal action. But there aren’t any such rules for private entities, which is why they get rolled over so often.

“There’s a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency: we know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations but not at others, creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? There is even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors.”

— Patrick Collison, CEO, Stripe

When I read that, I said to myself, you gotta be kidding me. I mean, palace intrigue has been part of our world. From ancient Egyptians to Romans to the English monarchy, it is way older than the social media and modern internet media machine. Anyway, it got me thinking about Collison’s tweet. I have come to a conclusion. Sometimes a tweet is not just a tweet. Sometimes it is a subliminal confession of symbolic capitalism.

“Symbolic capital is nothing but economic or cultural capital as soon as they are known and recognized, when they are known according to the perception categories they impose, the symbolic strength relations tend to reproduce and reinforce the strength relations which constitute the structure of the social space.”

— French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, 1987

If you apply Bourdieu’s proposed idea to the 21st century, you are left with two kinds of capital. The financial capital is obvious. The second kind, the one that really matters, is symbolic capital. Symbolic capital is reputation, prestige, the accumulated weight of being someone worth listening to. That is even more important in our hyper-connected attention-first society. Symbolic capital is what converts better, faster. Whether it is fundraising, or attracting talent, or presenting yourself as the soothsayer sage of the future bedazzled with implied wisdom.

And there is a lot of symbolic capitalism to be earned these days, thanks to our social media infrastructure. And how easy it is to earn, given how much of our modern media infrastructure has changed, thanks to the hyperinflation of the “sources go direct” concept first proposed by tech inventor Dave Winer.

Financial capital has always been there, from monarchs to robber barons to billionaires, they are a constant. However, the ones who stand above and accumulate more and more of that are the ones that have symbolic capital. JP Morgan was a rich guy, but he made sure that most of the world knew he was the guy who saved the US Government. There is a reason why rich guys buy newspapers and media companies. There is a reason why Rupert Murdoch is richer than the dollars in his bank.

A hundred years later, we have Elon Musk, who was a rich guy, but became the richest guy after everyone believed he was Tony Stark, and he saw the future better than others. He didn’t need the media. He did it his way. And then bought his own machine to make sure he had infinite symbolic capital. Even more financial capital is just a cherry on top of an ever increasing cake.

Musk is the master. He executed a perfect plan for creating a perpetual machine for symbolic capital.

And the whole Valley took notes.

Everyone worth their opinion is now on social media, pontificating and offering wisdom. That is not an accident. Since Patrick’s tweet inspired this piece, let’s take the Collison brothers, arguably the greatest entrepreneurs out of Ireland, as a case study. Their creation Stripe is worth almost $159 billion. Is that enough?

Not really!

Given every startup and every company is in competition with each other now, you need to keep your company as the center of attention. Like everyone else, the Collisons need to keep the mythology of Stripe going. They need to keep earning that all important symbolic capital. If not, they will be lost in the fumes of the daily minutiae of OpenAI and Anthropic as “news.” Of course, the brothers are way too thoughtful to play the leaks-are-the-news game that is so openly played now.

I have seen the Stripe mythology come together literally and figuratively. The obsessive craft, the decade-long patient building of a financial behemoth. The establishing of Stripe Press to celebrate entrepreneurial pursuits. Aligning with the right kind of intelligentsia to earn the right kind of hype. And more lately, podcasts. This is symbolic capital earned and compounded over a decade. That capital is why hundreds of thousands of people follow Patrick. It is why this tweet got the response it did.

As I said, sometimes a tweet is not a tweet. Sometimes it is subliminal thinking about your own approach to doing things and how the world works.

How does the world work?

Today’s world of media and information is not about facts, or fiction. It is a blend of all that, whipped and thrown into the ether of the network at neck-snapping velocity, to overwhelm the moment, till the next moment arrives. The tweet describes the modern attention machine, the same pervasive dynamic that I have described in my previous essays about velocity as the new authority and how the modern internet media machine works. I am pretty sure everyone who matters around these parts is all too familiar with the modern media dynamic. And if they are not, their ultra-well paid media managers make sure they are.

The podcast ecosystem didn’t happen by accident either. Podcasts exist to provide clips and quips that get shared on social to get attention. Better the clip, the more the likelihood of attention. And the faster it is shared, the more you accumulate symbolic capital. It is like the coins you collected when pretending to be Luigi in Nintendo’s Super Mario. The network does not reward what is true or what is deep. It rewards what moves. Speed is the signal.

Since we in Silicon Valley architected this new dynamic, away from the pearl-clutching East Coast temples of orthodoxy, we know that platforms decide what spreads. This is the game, played at Formula One speeds.

There is a reason why “palace intrigue as role model for media” works, especially in our present. Every stumble, every pivot, every hire and firing gets compressed into a shareable unit of meaning and fired into the feed. The PR machine does not fight this. It feeds it. Carefully timed leaks. Coordinated podcast appearances. Engineered moments of apparent candor. The palace intrigue that reaches reporters is not the unfiltered reality. It is the selected version, packaged to keep the company au courant, in the story, in the feed. As I have said before, the meme is the metastory. It is the headline. And that is the point.

Which is why Twitter, now X, feels unbeatable despite everything. It is not because the product is superior. It is because the people with the most power and the most to gain have turned it into a gaming platform for symbolic capital. They are not users. They are players. And the game is very, very good to them.

We are all playing the same game. Patrick is smart enough to see and tweet about it.

March 13, 2025. San Francisco

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I just completed a major update to my website. Two things at once. I’ve moved my site from blog.andrewshell.org to andrewshell.org (dropping the subdomain) and migrated it from 11ty to WordPress.

I put a lot of effort into setting up redirects, so everything should keep working (I hate broken links). If you find I missed something, please contact me.

I have a few reasons for doing this:

First, I’m very excited about adding ActivityPub support (you can follow @andrew@andrewshell.org on Mastodon), so anything I post will hopefully show up in AP easily.

Second, I manage several WordPress sites for friends and realized I was getting rusty on my day-to-day WordPress skills.

The theme I created is still a “classic theme,” which isn’t what I initially planned, but good enough for now. I do a lot of microformats/indieweb stuff, and I’m not sure how much control I have over this with the block editor.

So for now, everything looks like it’s in a good place while I figure out what I want to keep or change. I’m happy to be back in the WordPress ecosystem.

One of the reasons I migrated my site to WordPress was all of Dave Winer's evangelism. One of the things Dave has done is an external editor for WordPress called WordLand. I had tested it out briefly with a test site on WordPress.com, but now that my main site is on WordPress, I'll see how it works. This post, was written with WordLand. I wasn't sure if it worked with self-hosted apps, but I guess because my site is linked up with WordPress.com via Jetpack, it just works.

I’ve been out of the WordPress plugin game for a while now. I closed my Nofollow Links plugin back in 2021 and haven’t kept up since then.

However, now I’m running WordPress again and looking to get back up to speed.

Since I built and maintain the RssCloud Server and wanted to make sure my blog supports RssCloud, I installed the RSS Cloud plugin, which seems to work, despite not having been updated since December, 2022.

I decided to put a copy of the plugin on GitHub so I can work on it and share it with the plugin maintainer. Boy, plugin development has changed a lot since 2021.

It took a lot of effort to pull together a coherent view of all the new tooling, so I wanted to jot it all down here, not only for myself, but also for anyone else interested in plugin development. Once I have my head wrapped around it, I’ll start trying to see if I can contribute changes to the official documentation to bring it up to date.

Plugin Integration Tests and WP-CLI Scaffolding

I started reading the Plugin Integration Tests documentation in the WP-CLI Handbook. Despite saying it was updated on July 1, 2025, it has signs of being out of date. For instance, it talks about Travis CI, but the default CI included by wp scaffold plugin-tests my-plugin is CircleCI. Travis CI no longer seems to be available.

This page also directs you to look at sample-plugin, which hasn’t been updated in 9 years and isn’t what WP-CLI generates. Those files are defined in scaffold-command/templates.

Since I’ll be hosting this plugin on GitHub, I needed to run wp scaffold plugin-tests rsscloud --ci=github to generate the correct files for GitHub Actions.

Testing With Different Versions

Initially, I was going to configure Docker so I could run the plugin in different versions of WordPress and PHP. I already have WordPress Studio to run a local copy of WordPress on my Mac mini, but I discovered that for development it’s easier to use wp-env, which is a command-line tool that spins up Docker environments.

I was struggling to figure out how to use wp-env with the flow from the previous documentation. I couldn’t run any of the scripts locally (needs Apache and MySQL installed locally), and running wp-env cli phpunit wasn’t working either.

What connected the dots for me was looking at the source for the Gutenberg plugin.

Now, Gutenberg is a massively complex plugin, and its tooling seems overkill for the RSS Cloud plugin. But I was able to start pulling pieces over. In particular, I needed to set up package.json and composer.json files with appropriate scripts. I won’t replicate them all here, but this is a taste of what needed to be added:

"scripts": {
    "test:unit:php:setup": "wp-env --config .wp-env.test.json start",
    "test:unit:php:base": "wp-env --config .wp-env.test.json run --env-cwd='wp-content/plugins/rsscloud' wordpress vendor/bin/phpunit -c phpunit.xml.dist --verbose",
    "test:unit:php": "npm-run-all test:unit:php:setup test:unit:php:base"
}

As you can see, they use wp-env along with a custom .wp-env-test.json file, and it specifies the --env-cwd to point at the plugin directory.

Now, in my terminal, I can just call npm run test:unit:php and have it work properly in the test environment.

I also found I can update .wp-env.test.json to specify the specific version of WordPress and PHP I want to use. This will make it very easy to run tests in various environments.

Missing Subversion

After getting this all working locally, I created a few simple tests and created a pull request on my repo. This should trigger the GitHub Action workflow to run the unit tests in three different PHP versions (7.4, 8.0, and 8.2), which seemed reasonable.

First, the tests failed because the setup script (from the scaffolding) required Subversion to be installed. This should have been included in the .github/workflows/testing.yml file, but it wasn’t. I just had to add an additional step, “Install SVN” and everything worked.

Final Touches

I’m now mostly experimenting with this setup. I’ve added new scripts to generate test coverage reports so I can look for cases that I still need to write tests for. The existing plugin doesn’t seem to have any existing unit tests, so I’m starting from scratch.

I also have linting configured so I can make sure the code follows WordPress Coding Standards.

The first time I remember ever hearing the phrase “trust the process,” I was interviewing my friend Mick about the house he’d built. It had taken him eight years of evenings and weekends, and started, kind of ironically, with him spending an entire weekend peeling three 20-foot logs before he realized he’d had the draw knife backward the whole time.

He stuck with it, of course, and built a house so beautiful you’d never guess he had no idea what he was doing when he started. The house was wonderful to spend time in, but I really loved the story of him creating it with his own hands, without ever taking out a loan or putting anything on a credit card. 

People still use the phrase “trust the process” nowadays, and it always makes me think of Mick, who died in 2012. If he were still around, I might press him to elaborate about his relationship with the process, since he was also a passionate photographer, business owner, writer, and runner. I wish I could ask him, “Mick, is ‘trust’ really the right word for what we do?” 

–

There’s a clip of a 2016 postgame interview that bubbles up during college basketball season every year, after senior Dennis Clifford’s last game with Boston College, a program that had had losing seasons every year of Clifford’s career. They had just lost in the ACC Tournament to Florida State, to go 0-18 in conference play. In the clip a reporter asks Clifford, “Cliff, what are you going to take away as your best memory from playing basketball at Boston College?” 

Dennis Clifford: “Probably just … 

[pauses for 19 seconds to try to compose himself] 

… going out to eat.” 

There are a number of ways people interpret this clip—including that when you’re playing on a losing team, the basketball isn’t the best part and you have to find something else to focus on. But a lot of other people have commented about the profundity of Clifford’s words and sentiment, saying that it’s not about winning, it’s about all the time you spent with your friends doing something together, and I think they get it. 

–

This past week, I chatted with my friend Mario Fraioli, who is a running coach, writer, and podcaster. As always, our conversation bounced back and forth between running and creativity, and big goals like “running X race” and “writing a book.” I was running my mouth about how long it takes to write a book, and how the writing is really the best part, and how much time runners spend training for races (versus actually racing), and I said something along the lines of “like 99 percent of my running is ‘training,’ so I better enjoy at least some of it, right?” 

And then after we hung up, since I am a nerd, I went ahead and looked it up, a process that I must sheepishly admit involved downloading a spreadsheet, sorting that spreadsheet, and doing a not-small amount of mathematics. I looked at a year where I entered two races (pretty typical for me) and did a lot of running, and calculated that I spend 95.4 percent of my running time that year “training,” and 4.6 percent of my running time racing. This is pretty much in line with a lot of online marathon training programs: 16 weeks of training, a few hours of racing, 95ish percent of that time spent on “the process,” which you are trusting to deliver “the result.” 

But the process also—hopefully—delivers some nice views, a few really red-letter-day runs, some human moments you witness while you’re out there getting your heart rate up, a boost in your overall well-being several days per week, some good conversations with a friend who runs with you, and maybe a few moments of blissful gratitude that you can run at all. 

Writing a book—as much as writers complain about the actual act of writing—is, to me, the best part. Better than holding the first copy in my hands, better or the day it goes on sale, or seeing a copy on a shelf in a bookstore somewhere. When you’re doing the actual writing part, you’re still dreaming, experimenting, working things out, discovering the path it’s going to take, imagining it one day being an actual concrete thing that someone might hold in their hands, read, and maybe even dogear a page or two because you wrote something that feels true to them too. 

And maybe it’s the same with making your own pesto, or growing a decent tomato, or building a bicycle, or raising a child, or hiking uphill for hours just to stand on top of something for a handful of minutes: You give a chunk of the precious few hours of your life to something, imagining a great moment someday when it will all come together, and then when it does, you turn around and realize how many other great moments made up what you thought was “the process.”

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