On Taming My Squirrel-Chasing Brain and Being Easy to Find Online
AKA why you are reading this even if you didn't subscribe to this particular newsletter
TL;DR
Starting today, this is the only site/blog/newsletter where I’ll publish my own writing. True crime, music, weird news, rants, personal navel-gazing, all of it. Only here on @huff. (The writing I do for others will be linked to as necessary.) Maybe forever, I don’t know.
And Now, The Long-Windedness
If you are a subscriber to my True Crime or “Obsessions” newsletters and wonder why you are seeing this in your inbox, keep reading for illustrations and explanations. It’s about focus, integration, and how I’m hammering away at my lifelong struggle to (not literally) chase squirrels (okay, sometimes literally, depending on the squirrel and whether he shoots off his smart mouth or not) and carve out something meaningful to put out into the world. You’ve received this because I’m in the process of integrating many things I used to think belonged in separate buckets.
I got up this hot, bright New England morning and put on workout clothes—muscle tee (go ahead and roll your eyes, I sometimes think I’m ridiculous too), lightweight running pants, and my cool little Nike slip-on running shoes. I got my iPad and Pencil and drove down the hill to Emanuel Lutheran Church, where I parked in the shade of the towering evergreens in the church parking lot to warm up my voice a bit before having a coaching session inside the church with my friend Leonardo Ciampa, a coach accompanist, composer, writer, and organist.
In the church’s empty, echoing sanctuary, we discussed and sang Italian art songs and a couple of arias. Even when he was being persistent with a musical coaching point I wasn’t getting, a situation that can be very frustrating for all involved, I enjoyed the whole process.
Now I’m home, wearing the same workout clothes, and arguing with myself about when to go to the gym and what sort of exercise scheme I’ll follow this week. The PHUL workout protocol? Power, Hypertrophy, Upper, Lower? Maybe even PPLUL, or Push, Pull, Legs, Upper, Lower (body)? Of course, there’s also always the chance I’ll try NEFB, or Not Even Fucking Bothering.
Not that you need to know any of the preceding, but I’m illustrating an internal paradox of the kind I’ve long struggled with. Intellectual versus physical. Romantic versus erotic. Focused versus scattered. They are paradoxes for me, anyway. That’s always been a problem. Because, as a kid, I decided that, at some point, such dichotomies presented binary choices. I had to choose one or the other.
This thinking persisted well into adulthood. My parents, particularly Dad, reinforced it. Looking back, it’s telling that Dad believed so fiercely in picking one thing and being locked in on it to the exclusion of anything else that interested him. I think Dad interpreted being scattered as weakness—which he despised—and he was an intensely focused man.
People with a certain kind of fierce and creative intellect often tend to have that level of concentration—a level of intellectual focus that I admire and want to emulate.
I’m doing my best to keep buzzwords like “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent” out of this, but some will certainly draw conclusions involving these terms about how my brain works.
See, focus is hard for me, on a subjective, immediate, internal level, and it always has been. It’s also difficult for me to put into effect in life, in the long run. I was diagnosed by my therapist and her consulting psychiatrist with ADHD at 33 and found the meds for it—particularly Adderall XR, a timed-release version of the most common stimulant used for the disorder—really did help. Like, a lot. They also spiked my blood pressure. My BP is under control now, but I don’t want to give my cardiovascular system any more trouble than I already do, so the ADHD is untreated.
I can illustrate the subjective, momentary focus problem by pointing out that while I can sight-sing music, it has never been easy because my eyes and mind are so easily and rapidly pulled away. Putting on mental blinders to keep my eyes on the work has always been a huge challenge. When I succeed at it, I often do far better than I could’ve anticipated, showing me the value of being in the moment and all about that piece of music or writing in front of me. But I’ve also occasionally embarrassed myself as a musician by being completely distracted and scattered in a way I can rarely control—and the problem there is that the people I work for in those situations sometimes interpret that as disrespecting them or the music—or both (for what it’s worth, and I’m not sure that’s much, because I do think we tend to pathologize too many things as a society, a little research brought me to this article published in The Conversation — “How the brain reads music: the evidence for musical dyslexia,” AKA “Dysmusia”).
As a writer, I have occasionally embarrassed myself by being too impatient to publish and not checking all my editorial boxes first. I’ve been lucky to have fewer snafus there than I could’ve predicted, but that’s only because I’m often quick to address big goofs and mistakes. At the same time, I can be a very slow writer in a digital publishing world that demands speed plus accuracy, and that’s often entirely due to my losing focus and wandering off into the wilds of the web.
Then there’s the long game. When my writing “took off”—I can’t think of a better phrase at the moment—in 2005, leading to full-time writing and later editing work, I had no expectation that it would and no plan for how to handle it. I spent the first several years of my writing career feeling a bit like the dog who caught the car he was chasing, and that showed in my peripatetic blogging. I’d think of a cool name or approach for a new crime blog, and rather than change the name of one I already had, start a whole-ass new site.
This happened a lot (outside the work I was contracted to do for others). I was constantly shotgunning ideas out to the web and rarely keeping them on track, much less keeping track of them. My wife Dana, a quiet, intense, and, yes, very focused person who deeply values coherence and consistency, often teased me about this. Dana was never mean, but I was sensitive about it anyway because she had a point. She’s started and ended or just stopped blogs and websites, too, but she could probably count those on one hand. She still updates at least two sites that have archives going back to the early 00s. She has a clear legacy of thoughtful writing in those same spots going back many years.
I was aware of the risk of seeming flighty to potential professional contacts because of my noodling around, not to mention the risk of losing track of work I cared about. My true crime writing had also drawn a fairly consistent body of readers—I cannot bring myself to use the word “fans,” though some creators would—some of whom are still online friends and regular readers to this day, so I was also keenly aware of the possibility of disappointing them.
I carried over this wandering spirit (a phrase that seems right but also more self-flattering than intended) into starting my Substacks.
The thing that’s worked for me, because I have a knack for understanding and writing about it that’s hard to explain (given my lack of a criminal record), has been true crime. So, naturally, my first Substack was True Crime Report.
That said, I hate being put into slots, and I’m compulsively curious about the world, especially things that are hard for anyone to explain, and I do develop various, sometimes deep obsessions that I research in any spare moment I have. (This is where some will think of one of those buzzwords I mentioned.) So naturally, I started Obsessions & Digressions.
Then, as my parents’ health failed and it became clear I’d lose them sooner rather than later, I started to think a lot about my childhood and family, so I set up this newsletter.
What occurred to me recently is that I have an only slightly uncommon but short and punchy surname, and I managed to snag @huff on this platform before anyone else did. I’ve only grabbed my last name as a screen name a few times in the past, and the one that still annoys me to this day is when I copped [at]huff on Instagram only to promptly abandon that account, forget I had it, then start another one. I was even able to get back in later, and then I was thoroughly pissed off by DMs from strangers who wanted the Insta screen name, seeing it had value (this was obviously after the Meta photo-sharing site exploded in popularity), and were cussing me out for what they saw as “squatting” on it.
Not sure how one can “squat” on their own damn name, but okay. In a fit of pique, I deleted what I now see could’ve been an incredibly useful social media account for me. The way Instagram worked then, my deletion supposedly removed my screen name from reuse forever. I’m not sure if that’s still the case, but I found it satisfying at the time and really irritating later when I realized my hair-trigger temper, impulsiveness, and impatience had led to a minor form of self-sabotage. Again.
There’s no telling how Substack will compare to Instagram as far as further expansion goes, and the platform has lots of issues regarding what kind of content seems to get promoted, etc., but friends I respect who would have some of the same qualms I do about Substack’s choices in promoting writers are sticking with it, and Substack keeps adding interesting features. So I’ve decided to go all in again, for the first time since I started a blog you updated and coded by hand (no online WYSIWYG editor at the time) over 25 years ago. One source, one place for the writing I choose to do, as well as writing I want to present as an example of what I can do.
I’ve lost my fear of seeming “all over the place” and thinking everything had to be in its own neat little lane to be coherent. You will still find all sorts of advice online about the value of specializing in one thing, but this is writing, not watchmaking. I’m not daily focused with my loupe and tiny instruments on delicate little wheels and screws to the exclusion of everything else.
When it comes to my longer writing, I’m ready to present one portrait in one place of one man with a lot going on inside his head. Is it a low-key way to demand the reader take me exactly as I am? Maybe. I know for sure that it is a reflection of me finally, at nearly sixty fucking years old, being truly comfortable with myself.
I don’t want to say this is a positive outcome of losing my parents, but in a way, it is. I had a great relationship with them, and for whatever flaws they had as parents, they weren’t bad people. They gave a damn, loved their kids, and did the best they knew how with what they had. With old age, they both became a little warmer, if a lot sadder, and much more open-minded, accepting my daughter coming out as gay in her teens with a shockingly small number of embarrassing Southern blue-collar Silent Generation questions. My father, who’d once written in Lyndon LaRouche on the ballot in a presidential election, died a member of the Democratic Socialist Party. My folks evolved. I was proud of them.
That didn’t stop me from living in my unconscious fear of their judgment, like I did as a kid. With terrible clarity, I always knew my parents felt I was the cuckoo egg in the nest. I’m not using the word as a slur for someone who is mentally unwell (which I sometimes have been), but to refer to the cuckoo bird’s actual practice of laying its eggs in another bird’s nest, tricking the other bird into raising its offspring.
They couldn’t really deny me because I’m the one kid of the four of us who ended up looking like a perfect 50/50 mix of my folks. But I always felt that with their love, there was also a reflexive judgment, perhaps worry, about their weird youngest child. Nothing I loved or wanted to do made sense to them, and my resolute stubbornness about pursuing my own lights really frustrated my folks. I could still hear it in conversations with Dad in the last six months of his life.
I made efforts to connect with them. My interest in true crime as a genre was in great part due to Mom’s love for it and her collection of true crime paperbacks scattered about the house. She loved it that I became known for it, appearing on cable TV talking about serial killers. I talked with Dad for hours about his military career, which on paper looked humdrum but in actuality was kind of epic. And I’ll eventually write about what he told me when I noticed his first top secret clearance while helping sort his military papers, which continues to blow my mind.
Yes, the true crime will be here too. And whatever else has a grip on me, including current events aside from criminal shenanigans. This newsletter is a one-stop, no-AI-slop shop for my strangeness.
I’ll also write shorter newsletter entries, especially when they’re about me and how my brain works, because this felt necessary but also tiring.
Still, I felt I owed an explanation to anyone who unexpectedly received this, clarifying why they got it. I also needed to organize my thoughts on what I’m doing, and this was very helpful.
My other newsletters aren’t going anywhere; they’ll remain as-is, and I’m not going to consolidate all three by moving those posts over here, either. I have several things I need to do to ensure people who subscribed to any of my sites get what they expected, and I will be working on that as I learn how Substack works under the hood, something I was hesitant to do for a long time.
If you’ve come this far, thank you for reading. Stick around. There’ll be more.