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Nov 2
Initial Reflections on Better Call Saul

I just finished the series finale of Better Call Saul, and it could not have been better. The episode wouldn’t have much emotional punch or intrigue if someone were to watch it without the six seasons of context that came before it (plus some knowledge about the events of Breaking Bad), but given that context, “Saul Gone” is one of the best episodes of TV I have ever seen, if not the best. It is both a flourish of writing, cashing in on character arcs that have been winding across two shows for years, and it’s also a platonic resolution to the internal conflict of Saul’s character.

I ought to reflect and write more about why Saul is such a compelling and interesting character, but here are the high-level notes:

• Saul possesses a set of skills that absolutely no one values, so he gets stuck in this cycle of trying to impress everyone (or trying to get one over on everyone) and then having no one appreciate his talents. That’s one of the things that’s underscored in the finale (especially with the flashback-conversation with Chuck): Jimmy didn’t do it for the money; he did it for the respect, to show people that he can face anything, anyone, and still come out on top.
• Saul does care deeply about people, and probably my favorite anecdote from the show that demonstrates this is how he advocates for the shoplifting high-schooler to win the scholarship from HHM. He especially cares about people who are seen as lesser-than because of their actions/pasts. He sees the good in everyone, and he can manipulate and appease people (even Lalo and Tuco) because he speaks to their humanity, to a deep part of them.
• Another reason you want to root for Saul is because of how much he loves Kim, even though their love is toxic and co-dependent and destructive for the people around them. You want them both to “get clean” (to ween off their addiction to the elaborate schemes) and to rebuild their relationship on the grounds of doing good together.

The finale deals with regret (using Jimmy’s Time Machine thought-experiment). Throughout the episode, from his flashback-conversations with Walter and Mike, you see Saul as someone incapable of remorse, someone who has “always been this way” (just like Chuck always said). And it seems that he’s so devoid of remorse that he would even endanger Kim to get his weekly pint of Blue Bell ice cream throughout his 7-year prison sentence. And since he is such a deeply flawed character, it actually seems like he’s going to go through with it all and pull one over on the feds and throw Kim under the bus. But the surprising yet inevitable payoff is that he confesses. He finally grows out of being “Slippin’ Jimmy”; he finally takes a different path. It is so totally satisfying and cathartic, and it’s believable, given his character. He even confesses to the “crime” of cancelling Chuck’s malpractice insurance (since he had been harboring guilt for that being the final straw before Chuck killed himself).

During Saul’s confession, however, you learn that he did it all because he just can’t help himself, because he knew he could do it and get away with it. He made sure that everyone knew that Walter White couldn’t have done it without him, the same way Chuck couldn’t have done it without him, the same way Kim couldn’t have done it without him. He wants to be needed by people; that’s the closest thing he has to love.

Nov 5
Site Revamp/Reclamation

I’ve been satisfied with Super.so + Notion for my website. I’ve added custom CSS and templated blocks to make my essay pages look exactly like I want them, but the problem is that I don’t own any of it. I feel like there’s a duplicate of everything I do. There’s the Notion page that is also the site page, but there’s also the .md file in which I drafted the thing.

I think it’s time to revamp my website my going full indie, full local, fully autonomous. Right now, I’m shopping around for options. 11ty and Blot.im stand out at the moment.

With 11ty, I could have my site map locally as a folder of .md files and then have a lean system that converts that file tree to a website, converting the Markdown to HTML, applying custom CSS. It seems like I would have the most flexibility, professionalism, and customization with this option, but I’d also have to become a pseudo-webDev.

Some 11ty sites I like:

• Organ Symphony
• Every Layout (CSS templates that could actually help me build this site)

With Blot.im (or similar), I would literally have a local folder that is my website—1 to 1. That’s the upside: lean as can be. The downside is that the sites I’ve seen look sparse and are little too text-heavy, not designed enough. The blog archives, for instance, are lines of hypertext, not blocks with preview images and preview text. There is very little customization but also no maintenance and what seems like a crazy-easy set-up.

Some Blot sites I like:

• Discombobulated – Jessica Nickelsen
• I Love Waisting Ink – Peter Orosz

I can’t shake this idyllic vision of me having a local folder full of .md files (including images and links and tables and blockquotes, etc.) that is converted into a web of beautifully-rendered pages on a public site that readers want to tell their friends about, each aspect of which I have designed myself.

This isn’t procrastination. I think this would give me energy to take the writing side of my career more seriously. I’ll work on it slowly, and some version of this will happen. I will reclaim my site and become autonomous.

The trees that line the streets of New York are set into a coarse carpet of dirt atop an exposed concrete-bedrock, yet the roots wind their way downwards and radially outwards, weaving themselves into the rectangular swatches of grass-fabric that line the curbs, which swatches are set within tiny rod-iron garden fences so that they won’t be confused for trash come the pre-dawn garbage-run.

[[Material for “Community of KC” V2]]

Nov 7
Inspo for my personal website and business landing page, pulled from Kadlac’s Design Vault:

• Alice Lemée’s business landing page
• Andrew Wilkinson’s book landing page
• Honey Copy landing page
• Joe Coleman, copywriter (maybe my favorite home page of any personal site ever)
• Maggie Appleton’s personal site (such incredible details, layouts, and typography)

Let’s see. . . what do I like about these?

• Typography-heavy, (often no-scroll) homepages that give you a rough sense of the sitemap from a glance
• Large, beautiful typography for full-sentences that span the page with minimal padding
• Centered, justified block of text for essay pages but footnotes in the right margins on desktop (maybe anchor links or expander-blocks on mobile)

Nov 9
Ravenous, revolting vulture

(Taylor said that vulture is such an apt word for those creatures, and the above adjectives are the words I believe are energetically related to vulture, which account for our feelings toward the giant, flying scavengers.)

Nov 10
The editor’s job is not to suggest a better word; the editor’s job is to intuit the word that the author intends but has yet to find.

Nov 11
We went on a tour of a wedding venue, and this as one of the first lines uttered by the tour guide—said in complete earnest—which just about sums up how I felt about the place:

“These are the best faux arrangements money can buy.”

The following aphorism is the fruit of today’s therapy session:

No one is at fault for my emotions, and no one but I am responsible for regulating my emotions.

// No one is responsible for regulating my emotions, and no one is at fault for my emotions.

// No one is responsible for changing their behavior to regulate my emotions, and no one is at fault for my emotional response to their behavior.

Nov 12
It is true that what happens to me is out of my control. But, since it is also true that I am in control of how I respond to what happens to me, I am at some level in control of what happens to me next.

(This is a nuanced and delicate point that hopefully I can speak to at some point. But it risks sounding apathetic and out of touch with the suffering people face. I don’t mean to diminish but rather to empower us to exercise agency over circumstances.)

[[Transformation Without Trauma]]

Nov 13
One rule of my personal style guide that differs from most:

Err toward hyphenation. When in doubt about a compound noun, verb, or adjective, hyphenate it.

Nov 14
A candidate for what I think is the current unifying value of American culture: Expedient Excess

Nov 15
I love my work. It brings me joy and gratitude.

I am good at what I do, and people benefit from it.

(My first attempt at an affirmation-style daily mantra, as a method for dissolving self-doubt.)

There are only so many hands that can hold me: / Two hands, my hands./ Not so many hands / But enough.

Male circumcision is an elective cosmetic procedure, which has implications that no one seems grasp. The primary reason for male circumcision is purported to be in the name of either “cleanliness,” aesthetic preference, and “safety” (to lower the risk of STDs and UTIs). Saying that we should circumcise all infant boys because women prefer circumcised penises is exactly analogous to saying that all women should get breast enhancements because men prefer bigger boobs.

There is a cultural and societal standard of beauty that conflicts with the way we naturally are—the way we were made by Nature. Somehow, we have deluded ourselves into thinking that the cock is the thing that needs to change, the thing that is perverted, instead of realizing that it is our aesthetic tastes that should change, that are perverted.

How did it become normal and acceptable for newborn males to be immediately and irreparably dis-membered?

Nov 16
So far this season, I’ve probably spent four hours listening to Christmas music. At first, I selected Bublé’s “Santa Baby” and then Sinatra’s version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” but for the entire remainder of that duration, I’ve been listening to The Carpenters’ album Christmas Portrait on repeat. It’s simply the best.

Revising “Unnerving, Unweaving, Understanding” for the Essay Architecture Contest

• Can’t end on the trite and snappy dialogue, need to work in the part about seeing the empty crab shell on the beach, since that is higher-stakes and emblematic of my transformation from fear and apprehension to admiration
• My shift from fear to compassion and personification of the crab is to abrupt; it’s opaque and needs to be made clear, embodied. The reader needs to experience that part of the ride, even if it is as simple as some brief inner monologue about how ridiculous it is to be cowering from the crab.
• I need to linger on the uncomfortable moments and spin them around so that the reader can sense it from every angle. How did my body and mind react when I decided I should help the crab? What made me decide to stop at all to examine it? Example: I was definitely worried about the CAT driver judging me for being squeamish about a crab in the sand.
• To raise the stakes, I should share my insecurity about never really interfacing well with animals. I was never a kid that would pick up worms or run after birds or lizards, trying to pin them to the ground. Taylor was that kind of kid, and that made me feel less like a man. If Taylor had joined me for the sunrise walk, I know she would have already been holding then crab, or would have already put it back in the water and would have been walking on down the beach. But I was paralyzed. (Part of why I chose to hike and camp in Iceland for a whole summer is because it has so little wildlife. I’ve always felt much more comfortable touching dirt and granite and bark.)
• I should weave the romanticism/Keats piece throughout, rather than introducing it in the middle. I need to signal early on that this is not just a story about seeing a crab but an argument about how to bring more wonder into daily life.
• I need more figurative and inventive language in the “research-y” parts, when I’m not on the beach. I don’t want my reader at any point to lose the sense of place.
• The dialogue is monotonous and lacks rhythm or emotional weight
• Consider making the rainbow motif more explicit, or more central to the conceptual/experiential threads of the essay.
• The title doesn’t reveal enough or generate specific questions. All it indicates is a journey toward understanding. But understanding of what? Why is it worth the journey? The tile would benefit from some paradoxical language that evokes imagery that is both terrifying and wondrous.

Nov 18
I’ve known about Derek Sivers’s Now Movement for a while now, but I revisited the archive today and discovered this link at the bottom of the page: https://nownownow.com/random. I just spent fifteen minutes or more (I have no idea) flitting through those pages, and it’s one of the more intimate, comforting, and inspiring experiences I’ve had on the internet this year. You see all these real people posting updates to probably no one about what’s happening in their real and important and singular lives. You get a glimpse into a stranger that you never get on social media or even when you talk to someone at a coffee shop. This is the good stuff, and it makes me want to focus more on what I love. (It also makes me want to publish a /now page.) Here are some stand-outs from my random jaunt today:

• Minsuk Kang: Short, frequent essays that are published in Korean and translated to English; shares a beautiful sentence (a quote) every day
• Joshua Johnson: Tattoo artist living in Kentucky; his /now page demonstrates his writing chops, which are impressive; has an /instructions page that he wrote (and updates regularly) for his kids
• Benjamin Parzybok: An author of novels and sci-fi short stories, game developer, and traveler; his site itself has a built-in game that’s like a scavenger hunt

Nov 20
I’ve been dancing to Olivia Dean all morning.

It was my first time listening to The Art of Falling in Love. If you haven’t listened to her yet, treat yourself, especially to (in order of priority):

• “Nice to Each Other”
• “Dive” (from Messy)
• “Man I Need”
• “Let Alone the One You Love”
• “So Easy (To Fall in Love)”

To be clear, the above is a re-play list only for after you have listened to her latest album in its entirety.

First Announcement of My Coaching Landing Page (Substack Notes)

This month marks my first year being self-employed as an editor and writing coach. And behind the scenes, I’ve been working on a free offering. This week, I finally shipped it.

I’ve put together a free Mini-Course on Essay Structure. It’s a multimedia deep dive into the framework I use to re-structure drafts into compelling pieces of nonfiction.

This free mini-course includes:

• A 2,500-word article on essay structure
• Two top-notch sample essays with a corresponding exercise doc, to help you develop X-ray vision
• And three short video-lectures (30 mins total) on the structural elements of essays, arguments, and stories.

To access it, just visit my website and enter your email. Happy revising!

https://garrettkincaid.com/coaching/

Nov 28
TikTok should, instead, be called Kuntak, which is the Tibetan word to describe the “frog mind” that leaps around; it means “random fixation.”

(Source Ch. 5 of Awakening from the Daydream: “The Human Realm”)