Dear Friends:
A week ago today I ended my newsletter See You Next Tue! (SYNT) after 11 years, so forgive me for feeling a bit at sea today. Putting together SYNT was a ritual I came to alternately love and loathe. Sometimes I had plenty to say, sometimes nothing… but needed to say something anyway. The discipline was good for me. Why did I give SYNT up? The reasons are spelled out in the final edition.
Don’t ask me if SYNT is permanently gone: I killed it once before and brought it back six months later. Never say never. But producing SYNT and NIHILISTIC got to be a bit much. I’m sticking with NIHILISTIC because Substack is a better platform for writers (SYNT was hosted on MailChimp, which is built for e-commerce). Rather than serve exclusively as a venue for discussing my old band (and the book I’m working on about same), NIHILISTIC will be about WHATEVER I WANT IT TO BE ABOUT. How punk rock is THAT?
In my final SYNT I mentioned that NIHILISTIC would drop on Fridays but I’ve rethought that. I’m so used to sitting down on a Tuesday and putting together a newsletter I might as well keep the ritual intact. So let me get into some actual news in this newsletter:
I BOUGHT A FUCKING CAR.
If you read the previous NIHILISTIC installment and the penultimate SYNT you know I decided to go electric and narrowed my choice down to two vehicles:
Drumroll, please…
The winner… MINI Cooper SE!
I went with my heart and not my brain, deciding it was time to inject some fun into driving again. Besides the standard momentary freak-out the other night – hell, I’ve never bought a new car (and still haven’t – this is a 2023) – I feel it’s time to move on from my 1994 Mercedes-Benz E320. I’ve driven it 7 years and it’s now up to someone else to enjoy it (look for it soon on carsandbids.com). I’ll get it detailed and take some pictures in the next week or two.
But today I’m taking a spin in the MINI…