The never-ending hassle of keeping oneself alive
Pinch of Dirt might be a little more sporadic for a bit
Dear readers,
I have many more thoughts on Big Sur, fast travel, car camping, our disconcerting journey through California’s endless almond groves, Yosemite, and the legendary Camp Four. I hope to share those with you all soon enough.
But of late, I’ve been finding it difficult to make time to write this newsletter on top of my full-time job and the never-ending hassle of keeping oneself alive. I also have a good bit of travel coming up and it would be ludicrously optimistic of me to assume I could get the newsletter out while on-the-go when I can’t always get her done when I’m home in Brooklyn.
All this means is that I’m pausing paid subscriptions for a bit and you might be hearing from me less often in the coming months. That’s it!
I’m a little sad to have to admit that I don’t have the mental energy and fortitude for a job-and-a-quarter right now, but it is what it is.
In any case, this isn’t a full stop. Pinch of Dirt will just be a bit more sporadic for a while. If you support the newsletter financially (thank you! you’re all my heroes and I’m so very grateful), you won’t be billed during this slowdown.
Thanks for sticking with me and with Pinch of Dirt through all our seasons. I’ll leave you with some of the tabs that have been piling up for the past two months…
Reading list
If you read last week’s essay about the Big Sur marathon and thought ‘hmm, I want to read another essay about that same race, but with different details and photos,’ well, you’re in luck because I wrote two essays and snuck the link to the second in at the very end of the first one. Maybe you missed it?
Why didn’t I write just one essay like a normal person? I really do not know and that question has been bothering me for the past two weeks, because it really doesn’t show my best editorial instincts. Hence, perhaps, this pause? Anyway:
There were a few things I knew I would miss about our Fort Greene apartment: proximity to the Saturday greenmarket and the beloved Ronnybrook milk tent; easy access to the Q train; and, of course, my perpetual Outside magazine subscription, which continued to show up long after my trial membership to Outside+ lapsed.
For years, Outside was like the holy grail for this aspiring writer, the kind of place I knew I would jump through any number of hoops to write for, even after their shameful habit of not paying freelancers was exposed. (I’m not perfect!) It never happened, and it likely never will now that Outside is a hollowed out husk of its former self, and even if it did, it wouldn’t be the same as the Old Outside.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about—or if you do, but you want to wallow in a sad tale about journalism (are there any other kinds right now?)—then you should read Rachel Monroe’s recent-ish “Letter from the Southwest” for The New Yorker.
Aaron Gell covers the liberal and leftist prepping movements for The Guardian.
Schools of herring are getting lost along their migration routes, and it’s likely because the overfishing of larger, older individuals is preventing the elder fish from guiding them. “When you remove a lot of old fish, and you know that the herring acts as a collective, then you actually remove the collective memory of the population,” Aril Slotte, a fisheries biologist at Norway’s Institute for Marine Research, explained to Katarina Zimmer. I know there’s a lot to be sad, angry, or upset about right now, but this really got to me…
I don’t know how to feel. On one hand, yes, slay, eat, urban nature (like all nature) is for everyone. But why is it so hard to not roll my eyes at the idea of “the scenesters of the world” turning up for a nature walk?? Is this bad of me? Am I jealous? Or is it fair to be annoyed by the exclusive cool-kid vibes? Is this the Dimes Squarification of trees? (Krista Schlueter and Miya Lee for the New York Times)
Maybe this is off topic, but while scrolling my now go-to website for buying pre-owned items (Noihsaf Bazaar) I noticed a lot of pieces from a brand called Rudy Jude. It seems to be a coveted and pricey sustainable clothing line—even secondhand!—and I wanted to know why so many people were reselling their stuff. So I did some digging and according to reddit the sizing has been a bit off (seems everything has been running very small, of late) and their customer service is poor, according to dissatisfied customers, but I also came across this interesting dissection of the woman/brand behind the label, Julie O’Rourke, by Kathryn Jezer-Morton in her newsletter, Mothers Under the Influence, which I recommend if you like reading about a certain type of aspirational crunchy-outdoorsy-sustainable dream-world influencer? (Worth noting that internet chatter also says O’Rourke follows RFK Jr. on Instagram and rode on his float in a parade and the father of her children maybe voted for Trump and there’s a Ballerina Farm crossover and I was pretty disappointed that the Strategist writer who interviewed O’Rourke this March um, made it really easy for her to avoid answering any direct questions about all that by not asking her any direct questions. But influencer discourse/drama is a neverending pit and I’m having second thoughts about even dipping my toes in so I’m going to cut myself off here.)
I’ll miss your writing! But look forward to reading whatever you find time to write.