The State of the Bent Union

I suppose every once in a while I should probably tell you all what the hell is going on around here. Especially since Bent But True has been a little all over the place lately. Which, if you’ve been here for any length of time, probably isn’t exactly breaking news.

But before I get into what’s coming next, I want to start with something I probably don’t say nearly enough. Thank you. Seriously.

Some of you have been hanging around this strange little corner of the internet for a long time now. Some of you found me more recently. Some comment, some send me notes, some restack things, some participate in After Hours, and some of you just quietly read whatever happens to show up in your inbox. I see the numbers. I know you’re still there, even when I’m not particularly good at being here. And that means a lot to me.

The last couple of years have been...a lot. And really, the story didn’t start with buying a house. It started long before that.

A couple of years ago, Tracy and I packed up our lives and moved to St. Louis to help care for her mom. At the time, we didn’t know exactly how long we would be there or what life would look like afterward. We just knew where we needed to be, so that’s where we went.

Then last December, we lost her.

There are moments in life when one season doesn’t gently turn into another. It just ends. Suddenly the thing that has shaped your days, your decisions and even where you live isn’t there anymore, and you’re left standing there trying to figure out what comes next.

For us, what came next eventually pointed west.

Tracy got the opportunity to come to the Olympic Peninsula and return to social work, doing the kind of work she had wanted to get back to for a long time. So once again we packed everything up, loaded the animals, pointed ourselves toward a place we barely knew and started over.

We came here without some grand master plan. We rented a place. Tracy started working. I kept writing. We explored when we could and slowly started learning where we had landed. Somewhere along the way, this stopped feeling quite so much like the place we’d moved to and started feeling like the place we wanted to stay.

Then came the house.

If you’ve been following along, you know that part of the story. We started wondering if buying something here was even possible. Wondering turned into looking. Looking turned into paperwork, inspections, appraisals and approximately seventeen thousand opportunities for me to convince myself the entire thing was about to fall apart.

And then, somehow, they handed us the keys.

Now we have a house.

Not a perfect house. Not even particularly close to a perfect house. We have a house with weird noises, rotten boards, questionable repairs and things somebody decided were “good enough” sometime around 1987. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks moving our lives into it, and we’re still nowhere close to settled.

But we’re here.

And maybe that’s why Second Growth suddenly makes more sense to me than it did when I first started writing it. Because I don’t think this story was ever really about buying a house.

It’s about what comes after one season of your life ends and you realize you still get to decide what you’re going to do with the next one.

When I first started writing Second Growth, I thought it was going to be a series about starting over. About buying this house, building a garden, trying to create some kind of little backyard business and figuring out what Tracy and I wanted the next chapter of our lives to look like. And it still is all of those things.

But I think I had it backwards.

I kept thinking Second Growth was something I needed to sit down and write. I’m starting to realize Second Growth is something we need to go live. Then I can write about it.

That probably sounds like a small distinction, but for me it isn’t. For a while now, writing has been almost everything I do creatively. I love writing. I don’t see that changing. But somewhere along the way I started spending so much time trying to create things to write about that I wasn’t actually doing very much worth writing about. Writing started becoming the thing instead of the way I told you about the thing.

Eventually it started feeling like work. Not the good kind of work, either. The kind where you sit down because Tuesday is coming and apparently Tuesday expects words.

I don’t want that.

I want to build something. I want to grow something. I want to try turning part of an old garage into a grow room even though I’m currently still figuring out how half the stuff in the garage works. I want to grow microgreens and vegetables and see if we can actually turn some of this ridiculousness into a little business. I want to work on this house, make mistakes, meet people around here and take you along when things work and, probably more importantly, when they go completely sideways. Then I want to come back here and tell you what I learned.

That’s what Second Growth is becoming.

Starting next week, the written Second Growth will be joined by the video version. They’re not going to be the same thing. I’m not going to read the essay into a camera and call it a video. The writing will still be the writing. It’s where I can wander off into my head and try to figure out why any of this matters. The video gets to show you what actually happened.

Which seems mildly dangerous.

You are going to discover very quickly that there is a fairly substantial gap between “Victor has an idea” and “Victor knows how to do the thing Victor just had an idea about.” I’m okay with that. Actually, I think that’s kind of the point.

Second Growth isn’t going to be HGTV. Nobody should be taking construction advice from me unless the advice is “maybe we should Google this first.” It isn’t really a gardening show, either. It’s not a business channel. It’s all of those things and none of them.

It’s two people in their fifties looking around at the life they have, instead of the one they thought they were going to have thirty years ago, and saying, Okay. What can we build from here?

That’s the experiment. And I want to document it while we’re finding out.

But Bent But True isn’t becoming the Second Growth channel, because apparently one giant project wasn’t enough. The Halls is coming back too.

I’ve missed those people, which is a slightly strange thing to say about people who don’t actually exist, but writers are weird and we’ve already established what kind of place this is. So Fridays are going to belong to The Halls again.

After Hours isn’t going anywhere either. Neither are the essays, political pieces, satire, fiction or whatever other strange thing gets stuck in my head and refuses to leave until I put it somewhere. I’m just trying to find a better balance between living and writing about living.

So here’s the State of the Union, such as it is. Tuesdays will mostly belong to Second Growth, with a written episode and the main video. Fridays we’ll go back to The Halls. There will be shorter Second Growth videos scattered through the week, After Hours will keep doing its thing, and occasionally I’ll probably throw something completely unrelated into your inbox because I apparently have no ability whatsoever to stay in one lane.

I’m also deliberately not turning that into some giant sacred publishing schedule. I’ve done that before. Then I miss something, get behind, convince myself I’ve failed at the whole thing and turn something I enjoy into another obligation.

I’m trying something different this time. We’re going to make things, put them out into the world and then make the next thing.

Revolutionary concept, I know.

So that’s where we are. Bent But True is still here. The Halls are reopening. Second Growth is finally becoming something I can see instead of just something I’ve been trying to explain. And Tracy and I are standing in the middle of a house full of boxes, surrounded by projects, with considerably more ideas than money and absolutely no idea what most of this is going to look like a year from now.

Which, strangely enough, feels pretty damn good.

But mostly I wanted to write this because through all of the starts and stops and experiments and disappearing acts, you kept reading. Some of you comment on everything. Some of you have never said a word. Some have been here almost from the beginning, and some of you probably opened your first Bent But True email five minutes ago and are already reconsidering several life choices.

Whoever you are, I’m glad you’re here. Every time you open one of these emails, read a story, watch one of the videos, leave a comment, restack something or decide that something I made is worth a few minutes of your day, you’re helping this strange little place keep going.

I don’t take that for granted.

So thank you. Really.

We’ve got some things to build.