Tropical Depression field guide
Department of navel gazing
Tropical Depression has gotten an influx of new subscribers lately, so I thought it would be nice to give a little tour of the place. Feel free to queue up the spooky tunes as we wander through the creaks and corners.
Our two entries before the Halloween mixtape were both a little unusual: an excerpt from a delightful new novel from (loyal TD reader) Mike Powell and the first in a three-part series on the Phipps Family (based in grant-funded research I conducted at the Berea College Sound Archives), which was a bit more academic (or focused?) than the usual Tropical Depression fare.
But I hope every entry is unusual in its own way, so maybe that’s just par for the course. My very first post was an anti-manifesto, I suppose:
A writer pal of mine tried Substack and found that it was a hard platform because she didn’t have an obvious beat. “Like the best Substacks have a clear and consistent focus,” she said.
She’s right, of course. But I am satisfied with making one of the worst Substacks instead. No hook or theme. Just writing about whatever I feel like is a bad idea, I realize, but it’s what I want to do anyway. Why lie? I am a boggy and bloggy boy, for better or worse.
Another friend wrote me to recently to say she was digging the Phipps piece—not the one I would have expected to attract her notice.
“I always find myself wanting to be your PR manager,” she texted me. “Like—do THIS, or do THIS. But you do a little of this and a little of that.”
And so it will be. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. A little bit country, a little bit rock & roll. Holy fools, tropical depressions, cosmic yips, interesting sandwiches. Wild as a mink and sweet as soda pop. Poking around, falling into holes, pointing at patterns where none are to be found. Songs behind curtains. Blood harmonies, Jimmy Butler, baby blabber. Farts and angels. Suchlike.
Here are the ten best pieces I published in the first year of Tropical Depression, or at least what I thought were the best at the time. Of those, I think people most often mention this one and this one as their all-time favorites.
That first year was probably the best overall for Tropical Depression, which is now approaching its third birthday. I look back at the volume of words I typed that year, and I just don’t know how I did it. But there it is.
Among more recent entries, I’ll recommend this August post on Willie Nelson (and Noah’s Ark, chilling, suffering, Rumi, Thích Nhất Hạnh, Robert Alter, the early Christians, the Redneck Hippie ethos, kindness, my daughter, Mike Tyson, the body and the bodies, the flood and the drowned, self-help, Qoheleth, and so on). The remarkable photographs are by Anastasia Samoylova. They add to the piece more than I can say. Here’s one just on its own, so good:
Other recent faves: Anne Frank and unbosomings; snow crystals and technology; Merle Haggard and miracles and making it through the year.
Meantime, I don’t think readers peruse the Archives very often, but there’s a lot of stuff there. If you enjoy reading Tropical Depression and find yourself needing a fix during one of the lulls in my shambolic publishing schedule, go digging and you will find the country side of Tina Turner, the country side of the Pointer Sisters, my favorite line in the Gospels, the best children’s book ever, the worst children’s book ever, Psalm 9 in times of trouble, “Who Let the Dogs Out?,” the fantastic orgies of Little Richard, notes on David Berman, notes on Townes Van Zandt, Jimmy Butler and the dog in us all, the best Wikipedia sentence ever, people who died, and so on.
And there are more mixtapes.
And periodic digests. Originally, the idea with the digests was that it would be an alternative way for people to follow Tropical Depression if they didn’t want to receive a bunch of emails.
This was based on a series of misunderstandings on my part.
First, I thought that people would prefer to go to a website and read stuff like a blog rather than receive posts in their email inbox. This turns out to be totally wrong. I may be the only one who goes and visits the home websites for Substack “newsletters” like this one (I wish people would—the design looks better on the site than it does in your inbox, in my opinion). In practice, nearly everyone who reads Tropical Depression reads it via email. The reader I was imagining—wants to read TD, but doesn’t want emails with TD content—doesn’t exist.
Second, at that time, I thought I would be posting two to three times a week. Would that be too many intrusions into the inbox? Well. In retrospect, this fear was strictly aspirational. Sometimes, early on, I really did post two times a week, but I’ve never been able to keep up that pace. There’s always a reason. In a hypothetical world without such reasons, I could post 100 times a year or more. But that’s the thing about a life. Reasons keep coming.
But I still do the periodic digests, even though they take more time than you might think. Just because I like them. In addition to the rundown of recent posts, it’s become my spot for odds and ends, recommendations or stray thoughts or asides that don’t fit anywhere else. Before writing this post, I went back and read through them and they were much better than I had remembered or imagined. Sometimes I’m burying stuff that should be its own post. But that’s okay. Treasures for the odd obsessive.
Every single digest I’ve published has featured a strange old song from behind the Iron Curtain, an ongoing series. I mentioned to a Tropical Depression reader that I was wasting way too much time finding the perfect song each time. “Not a waste!” she responded. I could only thank her, for reminding me. If there is an ethos to this project, it’s something like that.
Tip jar: My strong preference is to provide all content without paywall. This is costing me a little money, I gather, but it still feels right. If you are able to contribute, you are allowing me more time to spend on Tropical Depression. And you are spotting other readers who can’t afford it. It’s $5 a month or $50 a year. I am so thankful.
Coming soon: Part 2 in the Phipps Family series; names so that names are not forgotten; the Wikipedia random-article generator as assignment editor; certain sounds in country music 1970-1973. And then also whatever comes to mind, whatever comes to pass.
See you in not too long. Solidarity with Wednesday.
There’s a real confidence in refusing coherence as a selling point. The admission that this is a bad idea, followed by doing it anyway, feels honest in a way most newsletters are not. The field guide reads less like orientation and more like consent: this is the weather system, these are the habits, come back when you want, wander if you feel like it.
I like how the digests get defended simply because you enjoy making them. That choice runs through the whole piece, from the archives to the Iron Curtain songs to the willingness to bury something good in an odd corner. It treats curiosity as sufficient justification. The result feels durable, not because it is organized, but because it is allowed to be irregular without apology.