Captain Chaos

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

There are the Facebook games that must be visited every 23 hours … or else! … and the world headlines to catch up on and oh! Twitter, of course …

My day does not unfold like Ben Franklin’s typical day, depicted in the image at the top. It is more of a stumble and flow. Rinse and repeat.

A writer and editor named Mason Currey started a blog almost a decade ago with the intent of compiling the habits and day-to-day minutiae of famous and successful individuals. The web site was titled Daily Routines and several years later he had compiled so many entries that a book was published, called “Daily Rituals.” It is a fun website and an interesting book, and they are both great to get lost in and waste time reading, which may not have been Currey’s intention.

That was probably a fun meeting, the one in which they decided to change the name from “routines” to “rituals.” Being that I have named approximately zero things that have become successful, I am not going to second-guess the decision. “Rituals” certainly does sound more interesting—and purchasable—than “routines,” because routines are something we are told we must get out of.
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Today in History: May 9

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The story of the publication of the novel Watership Down is almost as beloved as the novel itself: Richard Adams, part of the U.K. Ministry of Housing and Local Government throughout the 1950s and ’60s (he rose to the rank of Assistant Secretary), began composing a story to tell his two daughters for each day’s drive to school.

Richard Adams is 96 today. He told the Telegraph in 2014, “The stories I told in the car had nearly always been shaped and cut and edited by myself for oral narration. When I was lying down to go to sleep in the evening I would think out the bit of story I was going to tell the girls the next day.” In 1972, at the age of 52, he typed up the story that he had been telling his daughters and sent it to literary agents and publishers. Four publishers rejected it, as did three agencies.
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A Stroll into the Past

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The child has few memories, so those he has are detailed.

We were in my hometown for some reason one summer Sunday afternoon a couple years ago and I said to my girlfriend that I wanted to show her where I grew up. (As if I have grown up.) We drove down roads I used to bike on, walk on.

I grew up in the suburbs, in upstate New York, in the 1970s and ’80s, a neighborhood without sidewalks, with kids biking across their neighbors’ lawns (well, I did) without fear of criticism. I remembered knowing which houses had dogs that were poorly restrained (avoid those lawns or else find a new speed in my pumping little legs) and which houses were simply scary for reasons no one could explain but everyone knew which houses simply seemed scary.

(Years later, in high school, I was fundraising or campaigning for something and I dared, out of my OCD-ish sense/need to knock on every single door in the neighborhood, I knocked on the door of one of the houses that I always thought was scary. The owner was as friendly and nice as could be. I felt like I had discovered something.)
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