Welcome: Part I
Dear Reader,
Welcome to Dear Stu, a place to reflect on life’s deepest questions with the facilitation of a man named Stu. That is me.
Creating a Substack has been a dream of mine since I was 38, maybe 39. Now at my advanced age I see there is more to explore here than I could have imagined.
The whole process of setting this up has been fun, but it has also made me a little nostalgic for the online publishing world of yesteryear. Things used to be so…weird. And, complicated. But there was a warmth to it. Nostalgia, you see, is often at war with convenience.
I offer a very brief trip down memory lane. But for tl;dr scroll down to Welcome Part II.
It’s been almost 20 years since I put together my first website, hoping to share my thoughts on topics as diverse as fishing (specific to my 5km radius), and the 1980s courtroom drama, Matlock.
To create these early websites I, like many, used the free version of the template-based site builder, Tripod (which to my great surprise is still in operation). Was it intuitive? No. It took me hours to learn and was often buggy. Did I at least get a cool domain name? No. Our domain names back then were not snappy. If your custom built webpage ended in greenday82 you were doing well.
Many of the colour schemes in the mid-late 90s were absolutely wild. The closest samples still around are informational ghost, alien, or bigfoot sites.
Perhaps the idea was to introduce a complexity to the site, by way of illegibility. Why have a plain white background when it can be black, or red, or perhaps a loud, full blown radiation green? I want something a young person would look at and say “It’s giving Chicago hot dog relish.”
The font should not pair well. Yes, even though we want people to read all this. That Chicago relish background is asking for light purple text. Should it be 8pt, 10pt, or 12pt font? Yes to all, and I’ll have that at random, please.
Now I enter a new frontier. Something post-Tripod, even post-Wordpress. Heavens to Betsy, look at us.
This format is still new to me, and it feels that way. If I want to insert vertical and horizontal FRAMES onto my page I need remember to keep that desire to myself.
It’s all so much tidier now, isn’t it? The way we can share our thoughts on the worldwide internet database. Pristine. The way we do things is much more sensible and convenient.
But can I recover the warmth, the ineffable something special about the way things used to be? or is that a fantasy in the first place?
There we are again. Nostalgia fighting convenience, the former arguably less interested in productivity than the latter.
I think that may describe me, too.
***
Welcome: Part II
I want to welcome you, to thank you, to ask you to walk with me on this new Substack adventure.
For the most part, you will be reading the thoughts of a 40-year-old man who has stayed current in many ways, but whose soul and temperament is old. A wise friend observes that this, along with my Canadian-ness, informs much of my writing and speaking. We will see.
Here are some introductory points that I hope will help you form a decision on whether to subscribe or to watch from afar. I am ignorant of other options.
* I have called this publication “Dear Stu” because I would love for your questions and comments to be the primary driver of what I post, ideally in letter form.
* I am especially interested in grappling with deep questions: the meaning of life, faith and spirituality, and all things existential. We are not necessarily productive here, in the sense of attaining one thing in order to gain another.
* You can submit your questions or topic discussion requests to: dearstu@protonmail.com.
* Anything I post here that is addressed as “Dear Fergus” arises from the ether (i.e. I formed the question or brought up the topic unsolicited).
And so, dear reader, let us now begin our work of unravelling life’s greatest mysteries.
Peace and Gratitude,
Stu
Thanks for reading Dear Stu! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
