Talk about the passion

Many months ago I posed a question to my mother and wife. My mother thought it was a terrific question. My wife acted like I was a lunatic for asking such a thing:

What am I interested in?

My thought at the time was that the things that pass for our “interests” might or might not be things that actually interest us. Maybe they’re just things we’ve fallen into, and we keep with them out of habit, inertia, or even a misplaced sense of responsibility. Maybe the stuff I was “interested” in was… somehow wrong?

My wife’s contention was that a person shouldn’t really need to think very much about such a question; the answers should be evident. I’m into baseball; I’m not into hockey. I’m into geography; I’m not into geology. And so on.

You know the Pet Shop Boys song “Paninaro”, right? Many of the vocals are just clips of Chris Lowe talking. In one clip from an interview, he ticks off things he doesn’t like, and concludes with this:

I don't like much, really, do I? But what I do like, I love passionately.

See, I often like the opposite. I might feel like I like a whole lot of things, but then I feel like any given thing, I’m just not as passionate about it as someone else. I used to feel otherwise, that I was especially passionate about baseball, especially passionate about numbers, especially passionate about indie-rock. But now? I’m into these things but are they really driving me? And that, I suppose, is really why I floated that question at the top. I know my interests. But where are my passions?

If you’re somehow reading this and you’re not familiar with Substack, well, you’re familiar now. It’s a hybrid newsletter / blog platform. If you got this email, just imagine getting 3-4 similar emails a day from different people. Or go crazy, and imagine getting 37 similar emails a day.

Myself, I subscribe to 5 Substacks. (I’m not sure that’s the correct term, maybe it should be “5 Substack newsletters”, but whatever, this is the Internet age, people make up compound nouns all the time.) The subject matter varies: baseball, economics, politics. The writers are all intelligent and engaging. The formats aren’t all the same, but in my opinion, they all translate well to email.

For a couple of years, I’ve been looking for a better writing outlet. I’d found a good one with Gapers Block, a Chicago-centric blog site where I could write about city and state politics and dabble in other things, but alas, the site is on indefinite hiatus, and lives on primarily in a 16” softball team which plays in the Chicago media Kup Softball League. (We’ll talk about 16” softball some other time.)

What I’ve come to realize is, the kind of writing I’ve been wanting to do, I think it will fit in really well with what many of these people are doing on Substack. Length, tone, subject matter, even delivery mechanism, it all seems like a good fit to me.

The person I’m really taking inspiration from here is Joe Posnanski, who writes JoeBlogs. I’ve read Joe on and off for many years before finding he had a Substack. He writes mostly about baseball, some about tennis, and somehow has a book coming out about Houdini. His interests are broad. His passion is in the writing.

I never considered a career as a “writer”. I may as well have considered a career as a “walker” or a “carrier”. Columnist? Technical writer? Journalist? Sure. Author? Well… maybe? But just “writer”? For years my outlet had been writing overly long emails. Was it really, though, that I should simply have been writing?

And that’s why we’re here now. My intention, up front, is to write maybe 2-3 times a week, but we’ll see how it goes. Topics I hope to write about include explaining the origin of the name META-SPIEL; what I think people ought to understand about the structure of America’s political parties; my lifelong fascination with highway numbering; the weirdness of consciously trying to fall back in love with baseball (we were on a break?); signing on to be an assistant coach for a soccer team of 8 5-6 year olds; the unfortunate lack of love Illinoisans have for Illinois; and much more.

If all this sounds like a good time to you, by all means, spread the word. If it sounds like a slow train wreck, well, I guess you can spread the word about that too.

Welcome to META-SPIEL.