one year of huffing glue!

thank you thank you

briffin glue huffer is a year old today! it’s been one year since the first post landed here — and what a year it’s been! what started off as a way for me to publish my journal entries has grown into this great big thing and it’s been very baffling to have readers so soon. there are 7 thousand of you? how did that happen? who let this happen?

there’s been lots of ups and downs and this ways and that ways but this little substack that could wouldn’t be what it is today, after only a year (i still can’t believe it’s only been a year), without you! thank you for reading these aimless tirades i post on here, and thanks for liking, commenting, sticking around as long as you had while i figure out what i’m doing here.

running a newsletter like this has been such a blessing (seriously!) and my thoughts about it have changed back and forth for most of the last year — am i doing fiction here? am i writing personal essays? am i posting thinkpieces? — (i’m not convinced that i’m doing any of them well, per se, and the subscriber count doesn’t convince me as much as one would hope), but being now a little more settled into the newsletter world, i’ve started seeing the glue huffer as primarily a work-in-progress. and it’ll stay that way for likely the next five years. it’ll remain my little laboratory. this is where i prefer to keep it.

the way i see it, anyone putting out creative work spends their twenties trying to figure out what the hell they do. it does take the better part of a decade to feel less aimless after the absolute collapse of personal aspirations at 22 or so.

i didn’t feel much like an adult until i turned 24, if we’re being honest here, and i turn 26 next month. so it’s not like i’ve felt like an adult for all that long — but any adult needs to be doing something, work towards something.

it seems to me that most people working in media put their best work out, on average, in their thirties, so for me, this blog is me practicing writing for an audience, throwing whatever i have in my pockets against the wall and seeing what sticks. the substack blogs i enjoy the most here approach the same design, as do the classic blogs like mark fisher’s k-punk. the best work to be done right now, i think, is to experiment with the new forms the internet has unleashed.

there are so many worthwhile projects on substack that to participate in this ecosystem feels tenuous and anxiety-inducing, especially coming with no qualifications except the rote skill of being quick with a keyboard, but by keeping myself in the mode of “becoming” has allowed me chill out a small bit and just try putting out work regularly, whatever that means. treating this place as a work-in-progress has allowed me to be able to sit back and figure out what a productive daily practice could be, to set the foundations for bigger and better writing going forward, hopefully to be able to put out some actually “good” work in ten years’ time, whatever that might mean.

that’s all to say, i’m very excited for what the future of the glue huffer holds, and we’ll get more into what that means in terms of the short-term further down in this post, but i want to emphasize that none of this would be possible without you, the reader. so thank you again for your time! thank you for your eyes! and thank you for your support! the fact that some of you are paying me to do this is ridiculous ngl.

So… um… what’s new? Any changes to the glue huffer in its second year?

yeah, of course — I’m glad you asked. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the newsletter form recently and I think it’s high time i lean into some of its merits here on the glue huffer.

Thinking back on the first newsletters that I became emotionally invested in, mainly of Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day, which I would read twice a week in the backroom of a brunch place in my college town where i would work slinging eggs and toast to tables four mornings a week, there’s something to be said for link roundups and curations.

The best newsletters currently on air have their readership and their regularity, sure, but moreso they have their own thought processes. Their structures, by including mostly link roundups, take together the many threads of an overwhelming internet and place them, hopefully, into a coherent voice interpreting them and developing a proper worldview that is not only a little bit addictive but also beneficial in terms of how they walk through this increasingly manic world, week by week.

a good newsletter is a quiet consideration of noise. that’s the goal here, too.

so here’s the plan: starting next week, every thursday, I’m going to curate for you 4-5 links with little mini essays attached to each. i’m calling them Link Lunchboxes. once this summer’s season of Htgtny is finished, around the first week of September (but who knows, really), i’m going to start putting out a Link Lunchbox on Wednesday and Friday while keeping Mondays open for the little essays that got me this subscriber count in the first place.

now, some quick shoutouts now to some of the writers and bloggers along the way who’ve believed in me and inspired me, those whose support has kept me plugging along at this odd little project of nonsense.

i want to thank, first of all,

Elle

, one of my best friends in the world — and we met through this annoyingly orange app! of all places! we’ve been through so much together since we met in october and she’s been a wonderful confidant and friend in so many ways.

and i want to thank

AMANDA

too, probably the first friend i made on this platform back in the dog days of summer last year. and i want to thank the group of writers last summer who inspired me so much to keep going: talking here about

sarah cucchiara

,

Valerie

,

eve

,

F.D.

and

esje

, all of whom are amazing writers with wonderful work coming out weekly that you should absolutely check out.

quick shoutout too to all of you i’ve met on through notes and your wonderful writing, including but not limited to (these are just off the cuff)

Inigo Laguda

,

Billie

,

Katherine Dee

,

ayan artan

,

Prester John Andrews

,

philomena marie

,

evanie laurent

,

nadav

,

riley-scarlett

,

Drew

, and

Sudana Krasniqi

. and there’s so many more of you that i can’t thank enough for inspiring the process of writing these posts, helping me get up the gumption to post weekly — or at least attempt to post weekly, at any rate. thank you so much to all of you. what a wonderful little community of pretentious over-writers we have here on this app.

and with all that said, cheers! tap your heavy flagons to mine! let’s drink down the summer and try and make sense of this perpetual heat wave around us, squiggling the distant asphalt, making scary faces over the dashboard. i don’t know about you but I’m looking forward to the future. here’s to glue huffing for the next five or so years until I get driven off the internet like an ogre from a medieval town, pitchforks and torches blazing, to go hide in a van somewhere in the mountains colorado without wifi or a cell phone but a lot of magazine clippings where i’ll live off of the fish i catch in the river and the rain i catch in a bucket.

xoxo

briffin