Breakfast for 150

Thank you for reading, writing, and filling this place up

Photo by David Karimzadeh on Unsplash

This week, I woke up realizing I was somehow making breakfast for 150 people.

This was a problem for a few reasons. First, I was still in bed. Second, I hadn’t agreed to host anything. And third, while my kitchen is a decent size, I don’t think I can cram 150 in it, and I certainly don’t own 150 coffee mugs.

But, before I could worry about any of that, I had the normal morning obstacles to manage.

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Every morning, I roll over and turn off my alarm, which is also my phone, because apparently I have learned nothing.

That means the first thing I see most days is whatever came in while I was asleep. Usually it’s work email. Sometimes a text from a late night friend with a musing about drink recipes. Then there are the apps pretending they have urgent business. Credit Karma’s certain I need to apply for a new loan. Uber’s in a panic that I haven’t taken five trips to trigger their new 30% discount. But we all know there is no urgent app business. Especially at 6:00 a.m.

Lately, though, there has been something closer to urgent business. Or at least like business I want to be bothered by. I’ve been seeing the little orange Substack bookmark more often. And I wish I could say I am above caring about that.

I am not.

There’s a little hit when I see it. A new post. A reply. A new subscriber. Somebody read something, said something back, or posted an article I want to read. Maybe somebody I don’t know wrote something, and now it’s about to feel like part of my morning.

Most days, I don’t open it right away. Partly because I’m still half-asleep and I don’t trust my brain to work yet. If somebody left a thoughtful comment or sent me something interesting, I don’t want to read it with one eye open only to have the thought disappear between brushing my teeth and feeding the dogs.

So I get up. Or I start the process of getting up, which is not really the same thing.

First I pull myself out of bed, groggy and irritated by the existence of morning light and my inexplicable lack of blinds. Then the pugs begin to emerge from somewhere under the covers. They spend the night buried in the blankets, radiating heat like two small, snoring furnaces, and then, once I move, they start tunneling toward daylight.

Eventually they make it out, shake back into dog shape, and launch themselves off the bed. At their size, and from the height of our bed, this is not nothing. These are not elegant animals. They hit the floor with authority. Or maybe it’s more of a plop. Either way, gravity has clearly woken up as well.

Then they follow me into the bathroom and gather on the tiny bath mat in front of the sink. The mat barely fits me, but somehow, every morning, it becomes me and two twenty-something-pound pugs standing in a space designed for one set of feet.

So I brush my teeth without moving too much. I take my medicine without stepping backward. I drink some water. I splash my face. I try to wake up while also trying not to trip over Parker or Tito and crack my head on the tile before 6:15 a.m., which feels like an undignified way to go.

Then I go into the closet and turn on the light. They follow me there too, and by then they are fully awake, propellers for tails, looking up at me as if the next thing I do will be fascinating or at the very least involve food. And apparently, pulling on a pair of pants satisfies the first hope. They immediately decide the legs are theirs and we begin a tug-of-war. Every morning. I pull them back. They pull harder.

It’s not convenient. It’s certainly not great for my pants. But it’s also pretty great.

Eventually I wrestle the pants free and get my feet into them without losing a toe. Then I sit down to put on socks and shoes, which takes longer than it should, because by then both dogs are jumping into my lap, licking my face, pawing at me, and acting like the whole point of me being on the floor is to make sure I understand I have been missed during the eight seconds since I last touched them.

It’s a hell of a way to start the day. I mean that sincerely. If you have something like that in your life, you know. If you don’t, I hope you find it. And if you can’t imagine wanting it, maybe that’s worth thinking about too. Because there are a few good ways to begin a morning. Two overexcited pugs trying to steal your pants, it’s one of them.

My morning crew: Tito and Parker

Eventually, I make my way to the kitchen, where I remember the problem: Breakfast for 150. But I’m distracted by the pugs, because by then the morning has reached its only truly non-negotiable and sacred stage: breakfast for the dogs.

I pull out their food. I make their meal. They supervise each step with the intensity of growling little auditors who are certain the cats have mishandled their funds. And frankly, one of the cats is usually eating part of their food on the counter at that point, so I get it.

I brush the cat away, put the dogs outside to eat, make coffee, plod down the hall to my office, close the door and sit down at my computer. I reach for my mouse, wake the screen, pop open a browser, and the welcome little orange bookmark is waiting for me here too.

For the past month or so, this has become one of the best parts of my morning.

That feels a little ridiculous to say. It’s a website. It’s a feed. It’s another thing on the internet, and God knows I don’t need more reasons to be on the internet. But it has made me a reader again. And a writer again.

I don’t mean that in some grand artistic way. I mean it in the most basic possible way. I wake up and there are things to read. There are people thinking out loud. There are essays and notes and comments and arguments and jokes and little pieces of someone else’s life that I would not have found otherwise. And it makes me want to write something back.

But this week, somewhere in the middle of that morning routine, I saw that 150 people had subscribed to this thing. That was the breakfast. Or at least, that was the moment I realized there were more people at the table than I understood or thought would ever show.

I’ve been trying to not care about that number. I really have. I know myself. I can get weird about numbers. Views. Opens. Reads. Restacks. Subscribers. All the little measurements and bits of information that turn a fun hobby into a side-hustle.

I don’t want this to become that. But 150 got me.

It’s such a round number. Such a good number. Not big in any internet sense, obviously. It’s not going to put me on any leaderboards, and it’s not going prompt agents to line up at my door asking to sift through my pile of unsubmitted manuscripts.

But 150 people is still a lot of people.

It’s too many people to fit comfortably in my house. It’s enough people that I can’t pretend I’m only talking to myself. And that feels good.

I don’t know exactly why each of you came here. Maybe you came for the hockey essay. Maybe you came for the piece about misogyny and immediately regretted wandering into that comments section with me. Maybe you came for a discussion about AI and selfhood and the way modern systems keep shaving us down until we start mistaking efficiency for a personality. Maybe you came for cocktails. Maybe you came for Record Store Day. Maybe you came because somebody else restacked something and you clicked without knowing what you were getting into.

That would be fair. I don’t exactly have a lane here, so maybe its hard to tell. Maybe you don’t even know. I sure as hell don’t. So far, this place has included grief, hockey, feminism, AI, productivity, cocktails, old records, fairy doors, poems, and the possibility that I might start putting fiction here because apparently I cannot leave well enough alone.

That’s probably bad branding. It’s also accurate.

I’m not writing from a plan. I’m writing from whatever feels hot enough in my head long enough that I need to put it someplace else. Some of it is serious. A little is angry. There’s an abundance of sentimental feeling, and the nagging need to work through how to pay attention to it all, and to myself. And some if it is far less interior. Like me making a drink on a Friday, posting my recipe, and imagining one of you pouring yourself the same.

But the best part has not been watching the number go up. It’s been finding that some people write back. One person leaves a comment or links to an article. Another says, “This made me think of something.” Someone disagrees, and another tells me about a film their wife made that circled the same issues in my essay. And a good number of you have written sentences that follow me around for the rest of the day.

That’s what I wanted more than I knew.

I don’t really want an audience in the performative sense. Who am I to say what people should read or think about? I want a conversation. I want the thing I wrote to bump into the thing somebody else is thinking. I want to know what other people are reading, what they’re chewing on, what they’re upset or passionate about, what they remember while walking the dog or making coffee or sitting alone with their own phone in the morning.

One of the best parts of Substack has been discovering people through other people. The essay restacks and referral comments. Where someone mentions a writer I’ve never read, or says something smart under somebody else’s post. And suddenly I’m following that thread too. It starts to feel less like a feed and more like walking into a room full of conversations, where every discussion leads to another room.

There are people here whose work I look for now. I wake up and read them right away. Some of them I knew about before I got here. Some I found in Notes or as a mention in another post. And there are people here who have not written much yet, or have not commented much yet, or are maybe just reading for now.

I get that too.

But I hope they do write and I hope they comment. I want them to post the idea sitting in their drafts, or the rejected line banished to a purge file, or maybe even just an idea rattling free inside their head, because one of the strangest pleasures of this place is realizing that everybody is working on or through something. It’s all of us trying to make sense of a memory or work out an argument. Land a few jokes, or maybe offer a recipe—I already made one I found on here. Grief. It’s all over the place and people are figuring it out, or at least on their way. And then there are the notes, often full of half-formed and fledgling ideas, with the writer testing how much pressure they’ll take once stacked inside the feed.

I want to read those too.

The quick microwave omelet I made from @chefterrancebrennan’s page.

That may be the thing I’m most grateful for. Not just that people are reading me, although I am grateful for that. More than I expected. But that I have been reading you. Or finding my way toward you. Or waiting for you to finally put your fingers on the keyboard and say whatever it is you’ve been carrying around.

And I mean it when I say I want the conversation.

If I’ve ever shown up in the comments on your own Substack page, you probably already know this. I am rarely a one-sentence guy. I tend to arrive with a paragraph, a tangent, a question, a second tangent, and half an idea I probably should have let cool for another ten minutes before pressing send.

Tina Lance learned this the hard way. She made the mistake of DMing me one day, and now, apparently, I’ve decided she needs a steady supply of stray thoughts, essay ideas, and whatever else has fallen out of my head that morning.

Tina, if you need me to stop, you can tell me. I will understand. I’m trying!

Probably.

But that is the kind of place I want this to be. I don’t want comments to feel like applause at the end of a performance. I want them to feel like someone pulling up a chair. And I get the self-consciousness of it.

I have gone back and edited comments because I thought maybe I said too much, or said it badly, or walked into somebody else’s house with muddy shoes. I’ve done the same thing with Notes. I’ll post something, then look at it later and think, that was too much, or too sharp, or too loose, or maybe just not quite what I meant.

That’s part of this too, I think. You’re not only writing. You’re learning the edges of your own voice in public. So when I say I want the comments, I don’t mean I expect everyone to show up perfectly formed.

I don’t.

I want the paragraph you almost deleted. I want the “this made me think of…” post. I want the rough ideas, the links, the poems, the pictures, the thing you’re still trying to say but exists just beyond the end or your words.

I should also say that I don’t have paid subscriptions turned on. I don’t know if I ever will. I’ve thought about it, but mostly because I don’t understand how any of this works and part of me wonders whether Substack rewards you for flipping the paid switch. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the algorithm is just a manic squirrel in a server room knocking over levers at random.

In any event, I do not expect anyone to pay for this. And yet two people have pledged.

This is astonishing, and also funny, because I know both of them. One was my best man. The other is someone I used to sit with in a basement playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was in middle school.

So I messaged both of them privately and said, more or less: hey, you may want to take that back, because if I ever turn paid subscriptions on, I think your credit card gets charged. Neither responded. I’m choosing to interpret that as support from people who know how hard it is to put your mind in public.

Maybe that’s another version of what I mean. Some of you are strangers. Some of you are old friends. Most of you are people I will probably never meet. But somehow you’re all here now, at least for the moment, inside this odd little room where I keep putting things and hoping someone answers.

So here is the part where I want to pull out a few more chairs.

If you read this, and you feel like it, bring something to the table. Put the piece you’re most proud of here or anywhere on my page. Put a poem or a photograph. Drop a note. Comment an idea you keep nearly writing but are never sure where it goes. Put the thing you wish more people would read. Put the thing you’re not sure anybody wants to hear.

I know people sometimes frown on self-promotion. I get why. Nobody likes walking into a party and finding someone standing on a table telling everyone about the bar down the street. But that’s not what this is.

There is no thread to hijack here, because there is no agenda here beyond gratitude. This post is not trying to prove anything. It’s not trying to sell anything. It’s not even trying to be especially useful. I just want it to be a space for us. That’s the whole meal, as far as I’m concerned. That’s the breakfast.

I’m just happy this place exists. I’m happy you’re here. I’m happy some of you occasionally want to read something I wrote. And I would love to read something back.

It may take me some time. Like many of us, I have a day job. I have emails and clients and errands and dogs whose desire for food is far greater than their concern for my writing or reading aspirations. But I am making my way through so many interesting things. And the more interesting things I find, the more ideas I have. The more ideas I have, the more I want to write. The more I write, the more I want to know what everyone else is carrying around too.

So thank you.

Thank you for reading and subscribing. Thank you for the comments and the articles and the arguments and the jokes and the recommendations and the weird little moments of recognition. Thank you for giving me something to read in the morning. Thank you for making me want to write back.

And if we’re all here anyway, pull up a chair. I’d love to see what you brought.