Follow Your Dreams, Mystique

The other day I listened to a Longform interview with Jonah Weiner in which Weiner mentions “mystique” as one of the core ingredients of his newsletter Blackbird Spyplane’s “special sauce”/success. I was listening while walking up a steep old road in a snowy pine forest that falls apart every time there’s a heavy rain. I crunched through the snow and considered my relationship to mystique. I came to the conclusion that while some people have “no chill,” I have “no mystique” or at least, no mystique when it comes to the production of this newsletter.

Then, I had a night of bad dreams, the kind of night where you go through bad dream Level 1, solve it, get up to go to the bathroom, return to bed thinking everything is fine, and then another terrorist appears. The only thing that allowed me to move out of the Level 2 dream is that I made a plan to escape by crossing the Penobscot River in Bucksport, right where the river narrows. The air was mild, the water might follow, I figured. I allowed myself to fall asleep in the dream because I had a solid plan for the early morning hours when I would make my escape.

Between the dream and where I stood blinded by the afternoon sun, was a map.1

When I woke up (the version of me that is writing this now, not my dream self), I dropped my car off at the shop and spend the morning digging into stories. Sometimes thinking through stories requires maps. I wanted to know elevation levels, shapes, geological formations, the puzzles of land and sea, what if there were no bridges, etc. The location of the story I was thinking about is Verona Island (panáwahpskek - where the rocks spread out). Then I looked north to the place where I planned to cross the river in my dream, and saw that the Penobscot name for it is “place where one crosses.”