Greek Cynics, Farting Actors, and Marked-Up Roma Tomatoes

Letter #2 in 2024.

Hi there everybody, back at it again. Four things today:

💨 1. Gassy Gary Oldman: I didn’t have “laugh hysterically at Gary Oldman’s farts” on my 2024 bingo card. Bet you didn’t either, yeah? Well, I encourage you to fire up a show called Slow Horses on Apple TV+. This show crushes it. I can’t remember the last time I was this riveted, this glued to my seat, for a show. I’m a sucker for British espionage, I feel the Brits do a nice job of incorporating a little bit of cheery nihilism in their protagonists and it just clicks for me. It’s super cool, I flew through three seasons with my girlfriend in the last month and can’t wait to see the next one. Fabulous TV.

🧵2. Patagonia Worn Wear: Check this out, I find it to be quite gangster that Patagonia runs their own entire resale site called Worn Wear. They’re actively trying to get people to buy secondhand. I see two great use cases for this:

1. The easy one: It’s a nice way to give garments a second life.

2. The sneaky one: It’s also a nice way to find hard-to-find older colorways.

Patagonia seems to release a small handful of annual colors in their most popular lines, along with the basic black, navy, charcoal, etc that they’ll do every year. But for some of us, we’ve got something specific we’re looking for. And Worn Wear’s got a great feature where you can set up email alerts anytime they get a certain style in your size in a color you like. For awhile there, it was emailing me anytime something in green or yellow came up. Eventually, I found a beautiful straw gold color jacket Patagonia hadn’t made in a few years. One turned up, and I pounced on it. Who knows how long until they’ll reproduce that color, you know? Here’s a picture of me, in said jacket, at a beautiful beach for sunrise. That’s my dog whose posture in this situation can best be described as “unhelpful sack of potatoes.”

🍵 3. Diogenes’ cup: Diogenes was a Greek philosopher back in 400BC, and from what I can tell, he was pretty controversial. He was one of the central figures in the cynicism movement, and I read something he reportedly said in a book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell:

“While many philosophers were ascetic, Diogenes made a show of even that. Once, seeing a child drinking from his hands, Diogenes threw away his cup and said ‘a Child has beaten me in plainness of living.’”

What a wild view, right? Imagine feeling like a kid beat you at your own game because they were willing to use their own hands to drink water instead of a cup. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a better example of the “Do less” ethos than this right here.

🛒 4. Grocery Delivery: I really like going to the supermarket. I have since I was a kid, I look really fondly back at trips to the Albertsons’ in Cody, Wyoming with my mom. When I’m in a new city (often) or a new country (occasionally), I love spending 30 minutes looking around at a grocery store. Did you know that black currant is a popular cough medicine flavor in Europe, and there’s a fragrance called frangipani that is well liked in Australian air fresheners, or the sandwiches at the Publix deli counter are really quite good? All these little, unnecessary details stick with me on and after trips to new places.

Now: I’m still at a stage in my economic curve that I feel having things delivered to me is frivolous and I don’t yet deserve it. The idea of room service in a hotel feels like I’m cheating future me. So does having food delivered to me, I’ve got two good legs - I could just go get it myself. So it feels the most wasteful, to get my groceries delivered to me. Why pay somebody to do something I like doing? I did it the other day, just because I was having a busy week and I wanted to give it a go. And it dawned on me: I have spent the first ten, twelve years of my adult life contorting myself into uncomfortable Uber pools and public transit in order to save on airport rides, I’ve avoided room service because I feel like the prices are ludicrous, and I’ve done my own grocery shopping because I can’t bear the thought of spending a buck fifty a pound on Roma tomatoes when I know I could’ve walked down the block and gotten them for $1.25. Sometimes, that behavior is a good thing, spending less than you make is a good thing.

The thing that hit me, though, was: Think about how much time you just saved yourself by getting this delivered. What might you do with that space in your day? I found an hour, maybe ninety minutes, and used it to knock something out that would’ve otherwise caused me to work late that night. The delivery fee and tip came out to about twenty bucks. It wasn’t always this way, but now? I can survive that expense from time to time, it’s okay.

This reminds me that I’m aging. Feels fast these days. I’m thirty five, and I often make financial choices that I would if I was 16 again, as if I’m folding t-shirts at the Nike Outlet or cleaning spaghetti 5-Way off my apron at Steak n’ Shake. How often, in an attempt to save money, do I waste my own precious time? Perhaps this was a learning moment for me, maybe it could be for you too - anything you spend time on that you really don’t need to?

Take care of business,

Garrett