State of the Onion

200 pieces in six months, and the buffet is still open. Because onions, like Ogres, have layers.

XIV. The Personal Memoir Vein

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Wednesday morning, first cup of coffee. I open the reading queue and find two Substack pieces, one from Parkrose Permaculture and the other from a writer I’ve never read before. The permaculturist in Portland is writing about Tom Dundon and the Portland Trail Blazers. The other is from a Toronto music-industry guy writing about Jimmy Iovine’s prediction that streaming services are minutes away from obsolete.

The two pieces share no audience, no vocabulary, no industry. They were written ten weeks apart by people who almost certainly don’t know each other exists.

Yet, in the judgement of the Mongoose, they are saying the same thing.

Both describe a parasitic intermediary that has captured the relationship between a producer and a consumer, prevents them from connecting directly, and extracts at every transaction.

The permaculturist names the pattern through biology: Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating amoeba, versus the mitochondrion, the captured organelle that became the cell’s energy engine. Two ways of being a smaller organism inside a larger one. One drains. One powers.

The music-industry guy doesn’t reach for the metaphor, but he’s writing the same diagnosis. Spotify standing between artist and fan. A layer of extraction sold as connection.

Other examples come to mind. Health insurance adjustors between patient and doctor. Private prison contractors between the judicial state and individual American persons. Different uniforms, same parasitism.

I sat with my coffee for a minute and felt the lens click into focus. “I can build a story around that.”

This is, give or take, the 201st time this has happened to me in six months.

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I started Frog and Mongoose six months ago. Somewhere not long ago, I crossed 200 pieces, which works out to a piece every 27 hours, which is not a pace any sane person sustains and which I am, in fact, slowing down from. Slightly. Going forward I’m aiming for roughly one a day, with the understanding that some days the universe doesn’t actually offer one and some days it hands me two. The hard target breaks. The soft rhythm holds.

I want to spend a moment on why the rhythm has been what it has been, because I think the answer is both deeper and stranger than “I’m a wordy bastard.”

The engine has three intake valves. The first is synchrony — this morning’s amoeba moment, two writers handing me the same diagnosis at nine in the morning without coordinating. The second is joy: the thing that made me happy yesterday that I couldn’t not write down. The third is update: an existing thread from last week that gained a new angle, a new piece of evidence, a new comment that suggests a new wrinkle that turns what I thought was a sentence into a paragraph, or a paragraph into a whole article.

And there’s a mutation pattern that compounds all three. Occasionally a piece I started thinking would be a clean thousand words turns out to be a four-part series, because the first piece reveals a structure I hadn’t seen and the structure has extra rooms in it.

I didn’t design any of this. I didn’t plan it. I just noticed, six months in, that this is what was happening.

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When I was finishing my B.S. in English forty-some years ago, I finally took my transcript to a counselor. 196 undergraduate credits, or thereabouts. He looked at the spread of classes I’d accumulated across at least four departments, none of them strategic, all of them interesting, and shook his head with the affectionate sigh of a man whose job was helping students fill in the blanks. “Take five more credits of anything,” he said, “and I’ll sign off.”

(Lest you doubt my memory TOO much, I must stress that these were quarter credits, not semester credits. And forty of them were CLEP credits. So, it was crazy … but not utterly insane.)

I hadn’t been undisciplined, exactly. I had treated the university course catalog as an all-you-can-eat buffet.

I didn’t know it, but I was already a mongoose. Run and find out.

What I would not have been able to say at twenty-two is that this is an operating system, not a phase. Some people run on depth. Some run on breadth. Some run on a strategic plan and a five-year goal. I run on curiosity, and the curiosity routes itself by following senses I was barely aware of perceiving. The transcript looked like a liberal-arts museum because I kept walking down hallways that seemed interesting. The Substack is running past 200 pieces in six months for the same reason. I have grey hair and a few aches now, but I’m that same kid, same firmware, with a whole bunch more pattern-recognition cycles logged on the odometer.

The world is a 400-level seminar if you show up for it. The course catalog is bigger now — the catalog is the world — but the buffet table is just as welcoming.

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Six months in, I have to tell you something I’m still slightly stunned by.

David Brin subscribed to this Substack a while back. David. Brin. I’ve been carrying his books around in my head since I was a teenager. Startide Rising and The Postman and Earth and the Uplift books and The Practice Effect and Existence. Among others.

Recently Brin said he wished he had the copy tech from Kiln People so he could read my total output with the care it deserves. Kiln People is the one where Brin's characters make clay duplicates of themselves — dittos, with a 24-hour lifespan — to handle the day's tasks. You send the ditto to do the thing you don't have time for, and at the end of the day you recover its memories.

I want you to understand what that compliment is, mechanically, because it’s not just praise. He didn’t just say “great work.” He reached into his own canon for the metaphor, pulled out the exact technology his own characters use when the day isn’t long enough, and applied it to me, as a writer he reads. That is a master craftsman saying this body of work warrants an imaginary technology I invented to handle it. Nobody outside this particular tradition could have given me that compliment in that shape. He knew exactly what he was doing. So did I, when I read it.

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I wish I could tell my mom.

She is the reason I read Brin in the first place. Not just Brin of course, her shelves were a wonderland of science fiction and fantasy. But the Brin stories were something we shared. A lot of the second copies of David’s books on my shelves came from her home, the paperbacks she’d collected over decades, some of them with her handwriting in the margins. When she died, her books came home with me, and a meaningful percentage turned out to be duplicates of books I already owned. Sometimes because she was the one who’d handed me the originals, sometimes just because we loved the same writers.

The line of transmission goes: Brin to my mom, my mom to me, me to this Substack, this Substack back to Brin. The loop closes, and Mom is not in the room when it closes. But she would have understood exactly what that loop is in a way that very few of the people in my daily life do. She would have laughed. She would have wanted to know what I said back to him.

I didn’t say much back. I didn’t know what to say.

I’m saying it now. Mom — David Brin reads your kid’s work. He used a Kiln People metaphor to compliment it. The quiet bookish kid you raised, who couldn’t hardly be talked into a major or a plan, ended up writing 200 pieces in six months because the world is full of interesting thoughts and you taught me how to follow them.

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So that’s the State of the Onion. Six months, 200 pieces, three intake valves, one mutation pattern, one infinitely long buffet table, one mongoose. One first reader, dearly missed. One stunned acknowledgment that David Freaking Brin is on my subscriber list.

And so is Elisabeth Vonarburg. I don’t have the same early literary engagement with her work that I did with David’s, although I’m pretty sure I read at least the first part of The Silent City. I’m re-reading it now, and it speaks to me in a way it didn’t when I was barely twenty. Either the story got better, or the reader got deeper, I’ll let you guess which seems most likely.

The engine is still running. This morning two writers, one of whom I’d never read, collided into the same diagnosis from different directions. Lady T asked if we could drunk-dial King Charles, and maybe see about getting back together for tea and socialized medicine. A comment thread on someone else’s Substack handed me back a Heinlein password I’d half-forgotten — the Howard Families call-and-response from Methuselah’s Children, which turns out to be exactly the password I need for an entirely different conversation today.

Life is short.

But the years are long.

Not while the evil days come not.

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It’s Wednesday. Join me. The buffet is open.

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Consider sharing with someone who needs the buffet today.