Top 10: Houston edition
+ New Modest Mouse, golf trip tips, &c.
Ed. note: I’m switching this Friday newsletter to a classic Top 10-style feature, similar to several writers I admire (Austin Kleon, Wally Holland). On Tuesdays I send out a longer essay or reported feature that involves a bit more legwork; I’m taking a shot at a new paid subscription model to support those stories.
Thanks for reading.
Also, happy birthday to my sweet daughter, who turns 4 today.
I was in Houston this week for an energy industry trade show. It was fairly eye-opening; I wrote about the actual industry content in this week’s earlier newsletter, but the main takeaway from the city was just how cosmopolitan and global it was. I had all sorts of Houstonian images in my head. Now, I’ll admit I stayed mostly in the downtown business district and the EaDo neighborhood, so YMMV, but the city struck me as a very 21st-c. hub. We hit up the Pirates-Astros game Wednesday night and got to see Paul Skenes pitch a decent start to a game that ultimately gave way to a late-inning Astros rally.
Daikin Park is the sixth MLB stadium I’ve visited. I’ve got a casual lifetime goal of catching a game in all 30.
Lately, I’ve developed a habit of running 5k events as part of these trade shows I attend for work. It’s much easier to get out to a race when I’m just traveling for a gig as opposed to trying to hit, say, something in the Metroparks back home on a Saturday morning. There’s nothing like the 5:30 a.m. alarm in a comfortable hotel bed with the promise only of humid city parkland running to make you truly feel life’s morbid and delicious glories.
My airplane book this week was Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter, long on my to-be-read list. It’s a grim and delirious prison novel, I guess you could say, about a down-and-out character drifting through the 1940s and ‘50s. The writing is clear-eyed and brutal about the reality of getting by in a world that’s out to get you.
Throw this book in with Fat City by Leonard Gardner, Angels by Denis Johnson, and A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley as a quatrain of beautifully written American novels about the degenerate set. I’d put any four of those in my all-time favorites list, and in fact A Fan’s Notes does sit in my somewhat informal published list of faves. Anyone trying to write fiction could do a hell of a lot worse than reading those books for inspiration on the page.
My Uber driver from my hotel to the airport asked where home was; I said Cleveland, and he said, Oh, thank you! Guy was a Rams fan, so he was over the moon about the Myles Garrett trade. Thus began a half-hour of bleary-eyed football talk; it was like 4:45 a.m., and I had to attune myself to the disorienting posture of the Browns front office. There are far worse ways to pass a ride to the airport, and the driver was a nice guy, but the last thing I need at that hour is to try and talk through Andrew Berry and Jimmy Haslam’s decision-making. For the record, I’m not even all that opposed to the trade, though they should have tried to ship Garrett a year ago. He’s an all-time defensive legend, obviously, but he wore on me these past few years, sack record aside. His greed, his aloofness, his ego, these things don’t jibe with Cleveland as I understand the city. He’s not the first talented Browns player to feel out of place in our city, and he won’t be the last, but on some small level I’m happy to see him go. Welcome to Cleveland, Jared Verse.
Writing this from Texas, I don’t have much to say about the arrest of D.J. Byrnes in Columbus, but it’s a case I’ll be watching closely—or rather the fallout of the case, which is purportedly about telecommunications harrassment and a few texts that were sent. Very little has been shared publicly so far, but any crackdown on independent journalism and the people enacting it is something that the general public should take very seriously.
Modest Mouse’s new album is out today. While the post-2004 stuff doesn’t grab me nearly as much as the early albums, I still have a special place in my heart for this band (even if it’s basically the Isaac Brock show at this point). Early Modest Mouse remains some of my favorite music of all time. The wide-ranging angst of Isaac’s guitar, his cynical/hopeful lyrics about an older America, the octopus-armed drumming of Jeremiah Green (RIP), the spacey bass lines of Eric Judy, it all fit together perfectly. What the band has embarked on since they hit it big with “Float On” has been less clear, though each album has a handful of gems. My initial read of the new one is that it might be a slightly more focused version of what they’ve been doing for the past few.
Austin Kleon is speaking at the Parma-Snow library on Monday. He’s a huge inspiration for me, especially lately, and a major mentor-from-afar on this particular Substack project. Because I’m in the midst of what is maybe the busiest 30-day stretch of my adult life (more on that in various notes later this month), I have to miss this one… I saw him speak in Cleveland for his last book tour in 2019, and he was fantastic. Highly recommended!
I’m packing for a golf trip next week, and maybe I’ll make next Friday’s newsletter more golf-focused (so, either good news or bad news for most of my readership). I believe in many keys to a good golf trip, learned through jokes and laughs over the years, and I’d like to think my group and I have developed some strong traditions that make this annual trip something truly special. One of my roles is to put together the playlist, so here’s what I’ve learned:
We play at least three 36-hole days usually, so ideally the playlist can stretch for eight hours (covering two rounds). I aim for nine to be safe. Only run the playlist on the course; play the Beatles or something at night on the deck.
Lean on the local flavor of the place you’re visiting, though you don’t need to go nuts with it. We’re going to West Virginia for this one, so the 2026 playlist has a lot of good Appalachian roots and bluegrass music, though it’s not overwhelming. Tyler Childers, too, of course.
Start with the same song on the first tee of every round. A golf trip can send the individual and the group on many highs and lows, on waves of both transcendent and poor performance; you need a tether to tie the nearly infinite holes together. This also serves as a sonic stamp on the trip, one can you can return to many years in the future when you want to feel the particular groove of that trip to Grand Rapids back in the halcyon days of your younger life.
Most golf books, the good ones at least, double as books of life advice. The Inner Game of Golf, Ben Hogan’s iconic book, Harvey Penick’s stuff, it all boils down to mindfulness on the course and, naturally, in the rest of your life. My favorite is Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect by Dr. Bob Rotella, which is a book-length reminder that we cannot expect perfection: When you chip onto the green and roll past the hole, that should not be taken as a disappointment. Very little in golf should be taken as a disappointment, as it’s simply a long process of engaging with the present moment again and again and again. This is easier said than done.
“A golfer has to learn to enjoy the process of striving to improve. That process, not the end result, enriches life.”
Treat yourself to the Cleveland Bonsai Club’s Spring Show this weekend if you can.