Riders Wanted!

Welcome to Pony Express

I went camping last week. Not really, but I did spend a night without my phone which is pretty close. I’d left it on the counter at my friend Sara’s house and didn’t realize it was gone until I was almost home, bored in the backseat of a black Toyota Corolla, like always, scrounging around in my shoulder bag for something digital between my journal and my new historical fiction. But just gum wrappers. My heart sank. 

I sent Sara a message from my laptop with the same urgency of one stranded and trying to set off an emergency flare. With the same desperation of an ex who writes “pls unblock me I just want to talk” as the memo of their 1-cent Venmo requests. I would get my phone tomorrow. “I’m camping!!!” I told my roommates. The ceiling of my bedroom looked like open sky. 

The next morning, after waking with the sun, I used my credit card to tap to pay (retro!) and I sat down in the subway car feeling like I had a big secret. All of these people have no idea I didn’t do the Wordle this morning! They’re all doing the Wordle and I can’t, but I don't even want to. I just want to notice my surroundings. You see, I don’t have a phone.

I walked from 2nd Avenue to Sara’s apartment in Alphabet City with a Buddhist-like sense of enlightenment. It was comically beautiful outside, the East Village aglow with trees tailor-made for sun-dappled sidewalks, and I was taking the first phone-less New York walk I ever had. My head was up, on a constant swivel, and I looked with great pity at everyone I passed, thumb on screen. “I remember being that way,” I thought. “How sad for them.” And then Sara gave me my phone back and I dug through every single app with manic rigor. Like a vindictive dentist with a tartar scraper. 

The period of forced isolation was blissful, while it lasted. I’m becoming more and more allergic to my phone, turning it off from 7PM ‘til sunrise, leaving it at home for trips to the grocery store. For every span of time I’m without my phantom limb, I feel a proportionate rehabilitation to my own sense of self. 

But distance from the world that lives inside my phone is not without its negative externalities. The more I imagine, practically, a reality where I’m somewhere between on and off the grid, the more I question how much of my life as I know it I'd lose. What would become of the relationships that rely on quarterly texts like “I miss you please tell me how you are?” Who would still think of me if I weren’t posting a robust Instagram story once a week? If I lived in any other time, when talking wasn’t so easy, who would I still talk to? And what would I still say? 

A time like 1860. Post-gold rush. Half a million people had moved out to California, but the railroads stopped at the Mississippi. It took more than a month for any news to reach the coast. Los Angeles found out they’d been admitted to the Union six weeks after the fact. 

The solution? Four hundred ponies, eighty riders, and $1 per half-ounce of anything you wanted to send (that’s over $70 for a letter). For eighteen glorious months, the fastest way to get a message across 2,000 miles of fly-over states was to have it carried only pony-back by little men named things like “Pony Bob” and “Buffalo Bill.” They called it the Pony Express!*

The route was drawn through the desert and over the Sierra Nevadas. The riders weathered blizzards and war. Pony Bob once rode 380 miles non-stop in what would be the fastest delivery ever made by the Pony Express. He was carrying Lincoln’s inaugural address. 

Letters with this level of import were typical to the operation. Because of course they were. If sending a note cost as much as a steak dinner and getting it to Missouri meant risking the lives of twenty-odd men and just as many ponies, you’d make sure whatever you’d written was worth it, wouldn’t you? 

Conversely, I am saying shit literally all the time. I am texting you while I am DMing you. I am posting to the grid and I am reposting that content in a Substack note. I am talking your ear off if you’re close enough to hear. I am on Discord, I am in the comments. It is a miracle that I am not yet on goodreads but that day is still young! 

I have so many opportunities to spew whatever I am thinking at any given moment, because the platforms through which I might spew them are oriented for exactly that — compulsive, constant expression of “oh and ANOTHER thing!” Almost nothing is crafted with forethought. Definitely nothing is worth a steak dinner.  

But not here. Here is different. In the sacred nook that is my newsletter, I share only what I’ve composed with careful intention. The things I send here have marinated, ruminated, deliberated for weeks before I call them final. This is my Pony Express, with letters, if certainly not worth dying for, at least, I hope, worth reading. 

About The Rebrand

I started writing on Substack on January 1st, 2021 and I can still smell the reek of New Year’s resolution. It was high p*ndemic, I was living with my parents, I was so racked with anxiety and depression that I’d land in the hospital four months later. And everything was, definitively, Boring. Thus the Boring Twenties was born. 

Then I moved here, and now, three years later, the craziest things happen every day, and some of it’s annoying and some of it’s wonderful but none of it is ever Boring. I feel on the very verge of being exactly who I am, and I don’t feel Boring anymore. 

My aversion to Boring has lain dormant for months and months, but an overwhelming itch to formally change this newsletter just infected me in June. I realized how much I value it, how every time I share a new note, I hear from someone I haven’t spoken to since high school or I go for coffee with someone I’ve always thought was so cool. I get to talk to people about the things with which I’m most urgently obsessed, and that’s the thing I love almost most in this world apart from Band Of Brothers and Bruce Springsteen right now.

So I’m considering this more than a rebrand; it’s a commitment. Letters on fashion, personal essays, things that make my mom say “you have to write that down” (specifically she really likes the story of this one time I dated a birder). Twice monthly, god willing, and always written with care. Welcome to Pony Express.

*I got all of these facts from Wikipedia and one podcast I listened to.