March 31, 2026

Well, hello there.

I’m creating a new “driving around LA in the summertime” Apple Music playlist. This is at the very top.

“Why put so much pressure on something that you are choosing to do?”

Kara is right. I recently did a newsletter purge, yet I remain a Brass Ring subscriber. I sense that Kara actually enjoys doing her own thing on her own terms with the newsletter, and I’m always happy to see it in my inbox. It’s a feeling I don’t get from most newsletters anymore. I highly recommend subscribing.

This past week, I updated my “How do I define success?” notecard.

For newer subscribers: On my writing desk, I have a notecard in which I write out all my definitions of what “success” means to me as a writer and creative person. I got this idea from an old Frank Ocean interview back when he did more interviews (I can’t seem to find a working link to the interview). Ocean talked about how the most important thing you can do for yourself is to define success for yourself, and let that guide your work and your expectations. It’s a cheat code for beating the bad days: If I ever feel like I’m failing in my writing life or my career and keep comparing myself to others, I review my notecard to remember that, actually, I’m doing OK, and I just have to redirect my energy towards one of my definitions. The point is to also keep refining your notecard as you get older, because priorities, goals, and expectations are always changing.

Here are my definitions of writing “success” (not ranked):

• Writing + reading every day

• Financial independence

• Being a part of a community or group and actively participating

• Having a growing body of work

• Being findable

• Having a mentor, and being a mentor

• Celebrating the highs, giving space to the lows, and enjoying all the middles

So this newsletter fills a few roles here. It’s an excuse to write on the mornings when I don’t have as much time to write before I have to drive into the office for work, so I’m still writing every day. Each week’s newsletter slowly adds to my growing body of work. It’s a way for me to update and keep in touch with my friends, family, and followers, so it helps me be “findable.” And it’s where I can think about and share the highs, vent about the lows, and enjoy all the middles.

Of all of these, “being findable” feels the hardest for me right now. This was easier back when I was a full-time freelance music journalist and consistently publishing work through my usual outlets. Sadly, those outlets have shrunk or are no longer in business. I no longer really engage with social media outside of Instagram either, even if to be a modern “creative” is to be as findable as possible, to the point of saturation. I ain’t got time for saturation. But I don’t want to shut out the world either. It’s a tricky balance I’ve always tried to navigate. That’s why I admire my friends who are so good at self-promotion, even if they create “stuff” I would never want or need to do. That’s also where I see my peers fall into the trap of only focusing on being findable, and they forget to do good work. But to those people, maybe findability is success.

What are your definitions of success? Probably different from mine. Maybe not.

Note that I didn’t put “Make more than a million dollars per year after tax” as one of my definitions. You can get that specific and put a number on it, if you want. A former definition of mine was “Send out 100 rejections a year.” But the point of the exercise is to figure out what you actually want or need. It’s not a list of goals to cross off. It’s a reminder that you’re doing OK, even if you don’t feel like it.

A friend of mine said that the best way to talk to and about the Internet is to treat it like an unemployed bisexual. I now can’t unhear that.

NYC: A sinking ship

LA: A black hole

If you’re choosing to live in either city, on your worst days, which would you prefer to live in?

It’s funny. I’ve lately felt some nostalgia for NYC. It’s exaggerated to say that everyone has left LA, but the city has felt quieter in recent years. (I think any place feels quieter as you enter your 30s, but anyway.)

I also remember that, really, I don’t miss NYC as much as I miss being in my 20s in NYC. I’m thankful for my time there. I worked my ass off and met a lot of great people, many of whom I still call friends. I’m also thankful for the ability to leave and still feel like a person.

Would I go back? If I could afford to live along Central Park, maybe.

That may sound cold. But that’s the thing about NYC: It’s the ideal American city for people who don’t care about money. This manifests at two extremes:

#1: If you have no money and you’re pursuing a dream, an art, a career, an education, etc., and you don’t mind having no space and overpaying for everything and having everything smell like shit, then it’s a great place to meet people and absorb the energy of millions of people doing, as poeiticly as I can put it, cool shit.

#2: If you have so much money that you can spend it on the few bits of actual (nice) space and live well, then it’s a great place to feel like the king of the world.

For everyone else, especially if you’re not originally from NYC and don’t have any family in the area, that’s where that sinking ship feeling comes in.

By comparison, LA on my worst days feels like staring into a black hole. Instead of feeling stuck on an overpopulated island, it’s feeling isolated within a vast desert trapped between the ocean and a place literally called “Death Valley.” After living here for almost three years, I think I’m still trying to articulate how uniquely lonely this city feels. Part of it is obvious: This is a metropolis of homebodies. But there’s more to it. To unpack it all, I need a whole other newsletter. Maybe you can guess what I mean.

But then I remember what Eno said about the void—I wrote about it here—and it gets me by.

With love and all the good things,

-b