Maybe more of a possibility to ponder than a question to answer.

The Minimum Viable Question

And finally the first issue of The Pie and Crew Monthly

I just realized again how much that question matters, not that “what matters” is an easy concept either. But What If We’re Wrong? was a 2016 book by Chuck Klosterman, and I did not expect to mention it as I sat down to write today. I was just going to announce the debut, a “Minimum Viable Issue” of an ezine I’ve been thinking about and around for a few years.

I also wasn’t thinking about how Motivate the Mind was a British publication here, but since a few readers there have liked a few lines of some poetry I wrote (those last three words still seem weird to me), or something, I thought I’d post a bit more now — after several months of absence. Oh, and there’s this very old talking beetle involved, really the inspiration for this whole thing, and he happens to be from East Sussex, way back when. His name is Stu, aka Bug Stu.

Here’s supporting evidence for the claimed U.K. connection. It’s an excerpt of a poem in the Minimum Viable Issue of the ezine, launched yesterday in coordination with the expected launch of Artemis I here in The States. Long story behind that connection, but I guess now we are just a little bit ahead of NASA, I guess you could say. I like that.

Excerpted from Minimum Viable Bug Stu

Then in 2018, after thinking a while,
at The Shed, and in bed, and trips, mile after mile,
I had realized his name was probably Stu,
he could probably talk, and he wasn’t just blue.

And there was another that cared, way up high,
a small owl, very special, and those two would try
to fathom our depths and our steps, asking “Why?”
But one day in the shire, as Stu likes to say,
with prophetic desire, see, he’s from the U.K.,
he and the owl, sitting at the café,
realized something was missing, or had got in the way.

Anyway, the Klosterman book doesn’t really answer the question in his title. I’ve seen some reviews that indicate disappointment in the lack of a general conclusion or answer to the question “But what if we’re wrong?” Those disappointed people were looking for the wrong thing. And they probably would be disappointed in the “lack of a general conclusion(s)” in my own stuff, and Bug Stu’s.

Actually though, I’m not sure books with “general conclusions” or “specific conclusions” are what we benefit from the most. It seems like “what’s along the way” has more value than a conclusion that we’re all going to fight about, and then fight about fighting about.

I’ve been feelng like posting on Medium again, and maybe I should post here. I’ve got my own Medium publication here called The Pie, and now this ezine called The Pie and Crew Monthly, and here’s how you get to the first issue, Issue Zero, but I think I’ll resume my writing here if this gets accepted.

Thanks for reading : )

Tim