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January 3rd. Who is with me? #inboxzero #email December 27, 2023 at 01:09PM via Instagram https://instagr.am/reel/C1XbD9bLFRn/

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Should fired myself. I owe myself better. I owe you better. #smallbusinessowner #creativecoach December 22, 2023 at 02:32PM via Instagram https://instagr.am/reel/C1Ksg-OOLSC/

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How often do you give your brain time to do nothing at all? Let it wander, see where it goes. There's little point to harnessing a wild beast - let it do what it was meant to do, gurus be damned. #creativity #focus #writing #Outword December 15, 2023 at 09:18AM via Instagram https://instagr.am/reel/C04HK_BMPfJ/

[dtpennington]

Trying to double down on Substack. Join me there?

By my estimation, he has consumed more booze than soup, and more soup than anything else. Since this morning's borscht, the only solid food he talks about is "one from the corner store." I'm imagining the week-old, packaged 7-11 sandwiches that are made, purchased, and eaten entirely on a dare. A few blocks on, he points through a doorway - "there, that's what I want."

This is when I realize there is no word in the Texan dialect for bodega. All along, he has been after a bodega sandwich.

Without a hitch he is at the counter, telling the guy on the grill exactly what he wants. He orders with perfect Spanish. At least, I think it's perfect or as close as you can get when ordering a pastrami on pumpernickel with a bit of Swiss. The guy on the grill gives him a thumbs up and gets to work. By now Barrett has started a conversation with one of the two women waiting to place their order.

"What do you do with that tennis racquet?" he asks the brunette. She's about our age and wearing a backpack with a racquet compartment.

"Play tennis," she says, dryly at first. Then, "I also coach and teach classes at the rec center, just got done for the night." Barrett engages as a Southern Gentleman would, saying how he's not from around these parts and can't believe there is a whole rec center hiding among all of these buildings.

"Can't imagine where you'd park," he says even though he's been on the subway all damn day.

"Most people around here don't have to walk too far to get what they need," the woman says.

"Jesus," Barrett says. "Look at her." He points - all manners of a gentleman vanish in an instant. "That girl is high as fuck."

He says this loud. Really loud. As though he wanted to let someone know that she was on fire or strangling a puppy.

"You said that out loud, dude," I tell him. But, to his credit, the other woman did look beyond stoned. She was younger with a haircut that is only fashionable among very small circles of DIY barbers. She wore an oversized hoodie and had what must have been a pound of stainless steel pierced into her ears.

"Fuck off, man," the stoner says. "I don't need your little comments."

Barrett puts up both of his hands, ok, I surrender.

The tennis instructor doesn't cede. Instead, she champions. "You know, this is your generation's problem, you take it all so seriously."

[dtpennington]

Marshall, NC

[dtpennington]

Marshall, NC

[dtpennington]

Game day at Olde London Road

[dtpennington]

Game day at Olde London Road

[dtpennington]

Asheville. West side. September 30, 2023

[dtpennington]

Asheville. West side. September 30, 2023

[dtpennington]

The rhetoric around housing and equality always seems to peak in the early days of fall. Maybe it is our learned history, but everyone fears the insecurity of an uncertain winter. Will the work hold out? Will I get to keep my bed? Will I survive yet another lonely night, the next longer than the last? When does the season of giving start? And why does it have to end?

When the tourists arrive, and they will, the roads will choke with their SUVs. They will want downtown parking in overstuffed garages so they can eat dinner while watching in disgust as the unhoused make their beds in the doorways and vestibules of shuttered businesses. During the day they will drive the narrow mountain roads and parkways to admire the colors of the trees while not paying quite enough attention to the road ahead of them. It will be an endless caravan of strangers trying to pull off to the side of the road to take in the lookout vista of the rolling red hills.

I’ve seen it on a Wednesday afternoon. I get it. It’s nice.

[dtpennington]

What If This Were Magick?

From This Week's OutWord dispatch:

" I bring it up because I want you to start thinking magickally. It is, after all, the season of the witch. Samhain is right around the corner.

I promise I won't make you eat any potions. Hell, you wouldn't want to eat anything I cook.

But I'll ask you to imagine what it would mean if all of this were a spell.

Writing, messaging, influence, sales, whatever - what if you likened it to casting a magickall spell?

What would that look like?

Energy moves everything in the universe. On a purely scientific level, everything that happens on our planet is a result of thermodynamic energy from our sun. At some level, you can start to harness this energy. Solar panels, planting a garden, burning gasoline, running a mile - all ways for you to focus energy in one direction.

Is it so much of a leap to also say that writing is another way to channel this energy? Take what you notice in the world, filter it through your experience, focus it through the tip of a pen." Subscribe for all the updates

[dtpennington]

"The instructions are simple, but the work is difficult. I could give it all away in quick, digestible content that has a nifty hook and is over in 15-seconds — but I would be lying to you. I don’t want the kind of audience who gets wrapped up in how clever it all seems, because those aren’t my people. My people are the ones who see the endless task in front of them and are willing to jump in.

And I think you need the same. You, your brand, your coaching or mentoring service, your consulting, whatever — the content you make for your audience needs to be difficult. Easy content brings in the easy views. This is the stuff that gins up your metrics and tickles the taint of your ego. It’s positive pixels, none of it really exists."

[dtpennington]

Go in late September, it'll be like you're walking out into a Woody Allen movie. This isn't a bad thing. All of the problems are still here. The headlines aren't telling the whole story. Cities are still very much here and very much alive and very much standing in honor of who we are.

We're in the lower east side for a few days, staying ten floors above Bowery which feels like a quick fall from our window but the noise reminds you everything is still very much right there. The heat was here last week, that's what the locals will tell you. They remember all too well the sufferable air that packs the tubes and tunnels running under the city.

The other thing they will tell you: "it's hard to find someone who still lives on Manhattan." That doesn't stop people from drinking until four in the morning. This is the difference between the city you want and the city that wants to be. I think about all of the nights in Denver, late, when it was me and an ocean of concrete - alone beneath the towers of windows lit by lonely television screens.

I only want to visit cities. Last month I was in Oxford, Mississippi for a week - not a city. Not a city within hours of the place. It was hell. New York is close enough I can visit whenever I like. I need to get to know some people here. Everyone I knew has since left or died. This weekend we're here with our friends from Houston - also not a city - who pronounce "Houston Street" like Houston.

In the graveyard, the museum, the "area for reflection." There are kids here who weren't even born when it happened. There is a generation coming up behind me with a totally different take on fear. No one is happy, but at least we're all unhappy for our own reasons.

This continues into the next night. We're drinking and catching up in the way that two tired married men are known to do. Face the bar, order the drink, make conversation with the baseball game on the TV. drink enough where you need to stop in and get one of those bodega sandwiches at eleven in the evening. It is a novelty for the Texan who has been craving pastrami since he arrived. He orders from the guy behind the counter in perfect Spanish - which is how I know he's totally hammered.

Waiting, he turns to the woman next to him. She has a tennis racket hanging from her shoulder. "You play?" He asks, stupidly. "Yeah, I just taught a lesson." They get to talking about how no one lives on the island anymore and that she was heading back to Brooklyn once she got her dinner. The Texan looks to the girl standing off to the side - bleached hair, oversized hoodie and a face full of piercings.

"My god," he says, "that girl is high as fuck."

His sandwich is ready.

"I don't need your little comments, dude," says the clearly high-as-fuck girl.

The tennis woman gets in her face. "Jesus, this is just what it is with your generation, isn't it? You take it all so seriously."

They get into it.

We pay for our sandwiches and leave, the argument swelling behind us.

[dtpennington]

Janessa

[dtpennington]

From way back. 2017? 2018? The muse @janessalynnho and Sarah, a bright morning at Red Rocks, a handful of lenses I had on loan.