Mom, I’m not dead. Stop sending me e-mail. You have my phone number. Just call me.
About once a week, someone sends me an e-mail with the subject heading, “Are you dead?”
No.
As summer drew to a close, I got sick. My blog did, too. A nasty virus left by a fake commenter. With erectile dysfunction. The problem’s been fixed, though I’m sure the commenter remains flaccid. After recovering from my illness, I’ve been playing catch-up with work, trying to make ends meet. These are excuses, and they’re not very good ones. Forgive me.
This post is meant to act as an update of sorts.
Over the course of the next few months, All Plaidout’s going to receive a face lift. It will have many different incarnations as I reconstruct it to best suit my aesthetic. I will be introducing my first full-time employee. I’ll act as Editor-in-Chief, and I’ll still control Twitter and facebook. He’ll be paid, as I am, in the satisfaction of hitting the “publish” button. It’s my hope that as a blog with two contributors, it will improve as we compete with one another to post new and better stories of our discoveries on the highways of life.
Please update your links. http://allplaidout.wordpress.com is no longer.
And don’t forget: in addition to Twitter, and facebook, I have an inspiration page on tumblr where I destroy any and all belief that I have good taste – particularly in music.
Thanks for your patience while I regain my footing, make some much-needed updates and changes, and introduce new content and projects to this plaid, plaid world.
- Max Wastler
In November, it was announced that my dear friend, one time plaidy, Porter won a walk-on role on the TV show Mad Men. Well, the hour of Hovey is finally upon us. Her episode airs this Sunday. Look for her!
Joe Gannon is great. The way he encourages me to post more often, the way he’ll whisper a story idea in my ear and beg for none of the credit when the story’s well-received, or the way he’s introduced me to a great many ridiculously out-of-this-world cool things, at times our relationship feels more like that of a father and son than of two friends with similar interests and a similar disposition.
Then, I remember he’s actually a dad, and from the sound of things, a pretty great one. The other day, he called me, “Quade’s going through one of those ‘Exactly like dad things.’” He went on to break it down, head-to-toe, from bikes to button downs, the kid is his father’s son. Joe wrote a letter to Quade for Father’s Day. He was kind enough to share it here.
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Sam Parker shoots from the hip. Sounds like the title for a Western, better yet, a song title. Short and sweet. That’s how Sam likes things. Make the trip to Context in Madison. Get Sam to show you around his shop. You won’t regret it. You’ll come away with more than an appreciation for fourteen ounce denim and grilled sirloin steaks the size of your skull. You’ll come away with a friend. Sam Parker, friend to all. You heard it here first. I’m posting his response as is, because it’s just that great.
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Reassured.
After returning from lunch with Unabashedly Prep’s Fred, someone in my office asked me how I felt each time I made a new friend thanks to All Plaidout. The kindred spirits that exist, that feeling of familiarity that happens in spite of having never met, it lets me know that I’m not alone. I always worry that marching to my own drum means that I’m doing something wrong. And then someone like Fred comes along, and we speak the same language, and we share a common bond — granted it may have begun as something superficial like a love of oxford cloth button downs — we quickly realize, our bond is formed in something deeper, more meaningful. After listening to Fred talk about leaving a life in banking to follow his passion for photography, I felt better about the path I’ve taken. Fred wrote the following letter to his boys, and in it offers some advice we could all use.
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On a chilly December morning, walking around the hip Columbus, Ohio neighborhood known as the Short North, I stumbled into a new flower shop, Rose Bredl, and suddenly, amidst the fresh topiary, luscious orchids, and hand-spun pottery, it was Spring.
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I have a peculiar sense of direction. No one would describe it as “good,” though many have noted I always get where I’m supposed to go, and occasionally, in taking an indirect route, the road less traveled if you will, I uncover something miraculous along the way. On a recent trip to Nashville with my good friend Joe Gannon, if not for a wrong turn on our way to breakfast at Marché, we would have never known that a store called Nashville Sporting Goods existed.
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Florida-based designer, Michael Saiger’s take on the Sailor’s Knot.
For the first time in five years, I did not spend Memorial Day dolphin diving with friends at the beach. By happenstance, each year on Memorial Day, at the surf shop pit stop, in addition to picking up a bottle of NO-AD SPF15 and a six of Bud Light, I made a tradition of buying a Sailor’s Knot bracelet, also referred to as a Nantucket Bracelet. And I’d wear the thing until it fell off, or until Labor Day reared its narsty head.
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I didn’t discover Dennis Wilson’s solo album Pacific Ocean Blue until it was re-released in 2008. I was floored by its lush arrangements, by its bare bones lyrical narrative, and most of all by some serious introspection from the Beach Boy I’d come to know as the party boy, the one who actually surfed. Drummer Dennis had some soul.
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Playing on the subtitle of one of Cameron Crowe’s better movies, To Know Joe Gannon is to Love Joe Gannon. The man is the rock star of Capital G Generosity, he’s a loving husband and father, and he exaggerates when he speaks of his shortcomings. On top of all this, from a small town in Delaware, he’s able to reflect more of the pure and genuine style I so admire than the majority of the Brooklynites, Los Angelenos, or Chicagoans I know. Joe and I met a little over a year ago, through mutual friends, and we’ve maintained contact, talking almost every day. In the last year, I’ve come to know him to be, as mentioned, extremely kind; he’s the most knowledgeable guy in the room on a myriad of subjects (Just drive around with him for a day, and watch as he pinpoints year, make, and model of every classic car he passes), and he’s really funny. He’s the Ari Fleischer of Twitter politics. All this is to say, he’s way ahead of the game. Comparing his Father’s Day post with this one for Mother’s Day, it’s clear he’s as much his mother’s son as he is his father’s. A more well-rounded man, I’ve yet to meet. Thank you, Joe, for your friendship.
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Mom, I’m not dead. Stop sending me e-mail. You have my phone number. Just call me.
