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I saw a little video this week of Zach Cregger describing the dumb elf strategy of writing. Essentially it’s a motivating principle to help you get the first draft done no matter how terrible it is, because if you have any doubt or criticism, you remind yourself that you’re paying a dumb elf $10 to write you a first draft, so of course it’s bad. In the process you will hopefully find a few things that work, know what is not working, and in the balance you will have the momentum of your thing.

This past week or two has felt like a transformation. The time leapt forward, the sun came out and made the place unnaturally warm. The sheets of snow turned to blankets of rain. And my two month headache and I wonder if it’s illness put me in the most intensive cocoon of it’s gestation so far. What is it about the seasons that allows for the shifting of the interior?

Listing off my accomplishments from 2025 in my last newsletter certainly gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling, reveling in the doing I had done. But as I think about what the year to come will look like, I have some new thoughts on how to plan. Firstly, that a year is entirely too long of a time period to set a resolution( a month is more appropriate), but also that resolutions tend to come in the form of outcome. Move apartments. Take a pottery class, etc, so on. But when those outcomes are accomplished, the payoff doesn’t always feel proportional to the achievement. Dominating your resolution checklist isn’t going to feel bad, but it also may not change your life much either.

When I lived in New York I made a new friend through an old friend I outgrew, in a very synchronous passing of the baton. This new friend so effortlessly embodied what the old struggled to provide. He was present, he was honest, and he was warm. My old friend was a blast, he was someone you loved to bring to a party. He was smart, funny, charming, but also unreliable, one foot out the door, and a bit of a lighthouse. Filling whatever he looked on with light, but never able to focus on anything for very long, a beacon and a warning both.

I was at a party the other night and I was talking to someone about zoning out. How I love to do it, especially out a window—was once called a bit of a house cat, a comparison I wear proudly. I desperately need a window, some sight line to the outside, and if I don’t have one, I’ll bore through the walls now and again with my attention.

At one point in my time in New York I made a particularly fun friendship. It was very charged and dazzling in its difficulty to describe at the time. One where the boundaries were amoeba like, and honesty was just a game we played like so many others. A truth or dare without ever naming it. And in this friendship I was seen as a straight shooter—something I had never been dubbed in my life till that point. It felt like a role I was offered to try on. Maybe I am a plainly honest person. Maybe I have shed my people pleasing, warm with shame, hide when you hear the keys in the door DNA. New York was all about trying on costumes and so I put on the chaps.

I’m in my slightly darker than sky blue room in Richmond Virginia (having painted it my then favorite color, as bold a shade as my parents could stomach), it is probably a Saturday, and I am safe and probably bored, and I decide to make a series of slides out of cardboard that will make it so that I don’t have to reach around to the side of my desk to throw away trash. Instead, I can put it on the slide where it will fall to a second slide making a tight “L” and into the wastebasket (swoosh).

The plum trees have begun to blossom on my street, just as the mat of cherry petals—worn to threads by the spring breeze—snake between my steps on the sidewalk to the studio. The buds have become leaves, the petals are making dirt, the rain running in between everything having plumped the pulse of 49th st. And I’m thinking about what propels me.

As Spring is almost upon us I’ve been thinking about the idea of turning a new leaf. Of new chapters and new beginnings and how important it can be to update the scriptwriters in our heads. I think a lot about change, the ways in which we all change physically (my knee makes an insane noise when I do squats now), with our time (where does it go?), and energy (the way men sometimes soften in their old age). But also more active change, the change of confrontation, of squaring up to the things that scare you. Confronting your fear of flying to see your grandkids. Confronting the things that are keeping you stuck. The thoughts that don’t offering anything. That fight to keep you off-rhythm and to one side.