Elephemera #1: February 2023

Strictly inessential.

Mar 04, 2023

This is the first of what I intend to be a regular digest/post-mortem of White Elephant’s month-in-review. I’ll use it to address you directly, solicit feedback, reflect on what the process was like for me, and include links and short summaries to the month’s writings in case you missed something.

First order of business: a sincere and big “thank you” to everyone who has subscribed so far.

I’m not going to say that the initial response to White Elephant has surpassed my wildest dreams. It would be untrue: White Elephant has not, in its first month, caught the attention of Hamish McKenzie, the creator of Substack, and in the process netted me a six-figure cash advance. Nor are Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, so far as I know, engaged in a frenzied bidding war for the rights to my as-yet-unwritten guide to fatherhood. Surprisingly, I haven’t even received sponsorship offers from Amazon or Simple Human.

Luckily, neither has it been as bad as I predicted during my most self-indulgent dim nights of the soul. Nothing I’ve written has, as of yet, cost me friendships or employment; my long-suffering partner, Hannah, is still a subscriber and still my wife. My decision to appropriate the likeness of Rich Uncle Pennybags for the artwork accompanying “The $400 Question” has resulted in no cease-and-desist orders from its copyright owner, the notoriously litigious Hasbro.

As is almost always the case, the reality of it has been somewhere right in the middle. There’s still plenty of time for the other shoe to drop—on either side—but the already-low probability of the best- or worst-case scenarios obtaining seems more fanciful or more neurotic, respectively, by the day.

In the meantime, you’ve given me an audience and a reason to write. This project is filling a void that for the past year—though I’ve been vaguely aware that something was missing—I hadn’t identified as creative in nature, nor was I cognizant of its sheer scale. Thank you.

This Month’s Posts

A few of the better-organized newsletters I follow do something like this every month (or, for the more prolific, every week). I’m not sure if it will prove necessary or even useful, but for the time being I’m going to act under the assumption that it will provide some organizational value at a later date.

January 31 - Coming and Becoming

Technically from last month. Reflections on the very beginning of Hannah’s pregnancy and tongue-in-cheek conceptual analyses of “wanting” kids and “trying” to have kids.

February 7 - The Ordering of Things, Vol. 1

Musings on the merits and perils of listmaking. My thoughts on becoming a father and getting COVID, written from the conceit of a best-of-2022 list.

February 13 - The Ordering of Things, Vol. 2: The Creek Drank the Cradle

A paean to one of my favorite albums of all time; reflections on how my musical tastes developed, and how this particular album played a fortuitous role in Graham’s first few months of life.

February 14 - The $400 Question

My thoughts on paying for online content generally; a justification of the $400 price tag for the “Benefactor” annual subscription.

February 24 - The Ordering of Things, Vol. 3: Simple Human

My experience with nesting during the last trimester. Making our home more livable by reducing friction in high-traffic places. Some Alexa hijinks, and thoughts on the excellent bedtime story Goodnight Moon.

February 28 - 1992

An essay about my first experience with death, and the (what I take to be) paradoxical consolation inherent in the belief in heaven.

Special thank you (and apology) to paid subscribers.

When I was doing the preliminary setup for White Elephant, I didn’t intend to offer a paid subscription. Substack recommends building a free audience first and—after it’s of sufficient size—“going paid.” The idea is to get people hooked on your content before the upsell.

Frankly, I don’t have the confidence in my ability to create something that’s “worth” paying for; I’m a professional waiter/prep cook and an amateur writer. But at the last minute, I decided to offer the paid subscription because, what the hell? It’s not as if I couldn’t use the money, and it would strictly exist for people who wanted to support me in a more tangible way. I didn’t expect anyone to purchase what they could have for free.

But some of you did buy subscriptions. In addition to feeling intensely grateful, I was mortified to realize that I had forgotten something: Substack sends different welcome letters to paid and free subscribers. The letter that’s gone out to paid subscribers—which I wrote back in January before launching White Elephant—is a rough draft of “The $400 Question.” I know that it’s not a big deal, but I regret it nevertheless. I intended for the welcome letter to be a special “thank you” for donating to a project that you could already access, in its entirety, for free. Instead, you got recycled content. Sorry.

Special thank you (and apology) to Hannah.

Over the past month or two, I’ve spent quite a few hours in front of the computer, writing about my experience with parenting. My son, Graham, is eleven months old; at this stage, he needs actual parenting, 24/7. He needs a guardian either physically present with him or watching him on the baby monitor. While I’m writing, that guardian is my wife, Hannah.

Don’t get me wrong: we love spending time with Graham. Most of the time, it feels like a privilege rather than a burden. But the fact of the matter is, we don’t have enough free time between the two of us for us both to write and maintain a newsletter. Hannah has (very graciously) given me the opportunity to pursue my hobby; she’s even allowed me to pretend that—maybe someday—it will turn into more than a hobby.

Thank you, Hannah. All of the great joys in my life I owe to you, as well as many of the small ones.

Discussion

If you have the time and feel so inclined, I’d love to get any general feedback you’re willing to provide, as well as answers to a couple of more specific questions:

If you’ve read a few of the pieces I published over the last month, did you have a favorite and/or a least favorite? What worked for you and what didn’t? For example, here’s a piece of real feedback I received on “Coming and Becoming”:
when I looked back at the papaya realizing what the metaphor of the image was I felt sick to my stomach.
I get some analytics from Substack about each post. One thing I’ve noticed is that people rarely click on hyperlinks. Although I’ve tried to be judicious about what I link to, it’s looking like I could have erred even further toward frugality vis-à-vis hyperlinks. Mostly, I link to something if I think it adds context—that it is useful or entertaining, but outside the scope of the writing. Below, I’m including a poll regarding how you feel about hyperlinks.
- A. Doesn’t matter. If I want to click on them, I will; if I don’t, I won’t.
- B. They are distracting/break up the flow of the writing.
- C. I like the additional context.
- D. If they’re valuable, add them at the end, like an appendix.
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