Pour Me A Story, Vol. 3
feat. Mike D. Sykes, II
hello pals, welcome back to Pour Me A Story! it’s been…quite a week since we last saw each other, and I’m sure you need no further reminder.
at the time of writing, some things are still hanging in the balance, which means we’re pretty much all still waiting with bated breath to see How It All Shakes Out. assuming these things don’t shake themselves out in the next 12 hours before this arrives in your inboxes, hopefully this will be a brief reprieve from the constant timeline-refreshing and peering at your cable news channel of choice.
amid all the anxiety — and there’s been plenty of it for your boy — there have been some nice moments this week too, which I’m glad to share.
I had a real good therapy session Thursday, with conversation ranging from phantom injuries to Cincinnati chili, and much in between. honestly I can’t advocate strongly enough for the benefits of therapy.
the baby has been practicing her sitting-up skills this week and my mind is honestly blown. I don’t know where the little peanut we brought home from hospital in the first week of May went, but this “watching a young human figure out how to make their body work the way they want” thing is incredible.
Halloween, which I’ll come back to in a minute. but first…
Anyway, We Have Company
this week’s guest was one of several pals whose own Substack newsletters served as inspiration and motivation for me to start this one. Mike Sykes writes The Kicks You Wear, a thoughtful and well-informed twice-weekly newsletter reporting on the sneaker industry and everything in its orbit. anyway Mike announced some really good news on Twitter around the same time as the first edition dropped so I just knew I had to have him stop by (so to speak) on Wednesday afternoon and talk about it.
AC: what's up Mike? super excited to have you on board. how are you holding up right now?
MS: What up bud! Thanks so much for having me on. I am...doing surprisingly well, honestly? Relatively speaking, anyway hahaha. How are you?
AC: I'm glad to hear that! I'm...deeply unproductive for the second day in a row, but I feel like my bosses anticipated that for all of us. anyway. I *know* you've had some good news in your life recently, lemme hear all about it!
MS: So your boy just got engaged!!!! It's been so wild and I've never been more nervous to do a thing in my life. But here we are, she said yes after crying for about an hour. She definitely had me worried for a sec. Shouts to you, boo, I know you're reading this. She is a fan of yours btw Adrian. She says hey. (Editor’s note: Hey!)
AC: ah man that gave me goosebumps. super happy for you both! it feels like proposing is one of those things where you already have an idea of how it's gonna go, but that doesn't make it any easier. did it unfold the way you had envisioned?
MS: Absolutely not. There was all times of crap that threw everything off. What actually happened was the back-up plan to the back-up plan.
So the ring had come a week later than it was supposed to. I had a set up to do it the week before and involve our parents, but the ring coming late completely threw that off. Ultimately, I decided that it would just be us. And I tricked her into doing our new favorite quarantine activity (HIKING!!!) one last time before it got cold. Took her to an empty park pretty close to home, found the perfect spot and then just went for it.
AC: that's some slick last-minute pivoting, I gotta say. the great outdoors is a great spot for it too, especially if it's somewhere y'all can visit again and relive those memories. you're in Maryland right? how's the hiking out your way?
MS: Yup! It was pretty great, though I didn't expect it to be. The place where we hiked is called Jug Bay. It's a park/nature conservation area and we live about 30 minutes away from it so it wasn't a terrible drive. The thing about it is it's surrounded by swampland. So I figured hiking through there might be kind of garbage. Turns out, thankfully, I was pretty wrong. The area was beautiful. We had a view right over the Patuxent River and it made for a great picture. Highly recommended for anyone who lives in the DC/Southern Maryland area.
Oh, and shouts to my Mom for recommending it in the first place lmao.
AC: moms always know best, no question. some of the best lessons I've had (especially since I moved out here) have been from my mom. and as far as quarantine hobbies go, hiking is a great option. which begs the question: what does esteemed sneaker journalist Mike D. Sykes II wear on his feet on the trails?
MS: I wore the PG4 "PCG" joints that are supposed to look like ACG boots. And, as it turns out, they're pretty great for hiking, too! Haha. I had been wanting to hit a trail in these for a while to see how they'd run.
I guess Paul George technically helped somebody get a ring this year. HEYOOOOO 😂
AC: I'd say that this would really hurt my standing with the Clipper fans in my subscriber list, but I think it's safe to say those folks wouldn't have signed up since they don't know what "good news" is. speaking of the kicks you wear, congrats on the continued success of The Kicks You Wear! you're doing a great job and it's a must-read. how's everything going on that front?
MS: Everything is good, man! It's honestly been a joy seeing the community coalesce the way it has over the last few months in the middle of, well, *gestures at everything*. We're almost at 2,000 subs — at 1,956 to be exact. So it's growing slowly but steadily, which is great.
But that's whatever. My favorite part is just connecting with the people — or actually connecting people with others! It's dope seeing people become internet pals because of my words. It's also dope when people hit me and thank me for pointing them to Black-owned sneaker businesses or different resources that allow them to make better, more informed purchases. I really appreciate that kind of stuff now more than ever. It's kept me on balance throughout all of this madness.
AC: the community aspect has definitely been amazing to watch grow from an outsider’s perspective too. I’ve been on board since Vol. 6 and seeing it become this THING that folks are tagging you in all over the timeline all week is so, so cool. proud of you man and I’m sure it’s destined for even bigger things in the future.
alright one last one then I’ll leave you alone. do you have anything you’d like to gratuitously plug? the microphone is yours!
MS: I guess people can just subscribe to KYW for sneaker content if they want (Editor’s note: You want.)
But instead of plugging something, I'd like to leave the people with more positivity if that's alright? So I'll give it a shot. It's alright to unplug for a day or two from all this. It's alright to be unproductive for a minute. The world won't end because you took an hour to decompress. Make sure you breathe. Take some time, drink some water, eat some good food and clear your mind. Thank yourself for it later.
AC: the more positivity around here, the better. love your work, love the newsletter, glad to call you a friend. thanks so much for sharing some of your time and good news with me man!
MS: You already know, brodie! Thanks again for taking the time.
Trick Or Treat
two weeks out of the past three, as I’ve battled performance anxiety as I mentally prepared topics for this newsletter, someone else with a terrific Substack publication has swooped in and covered them extremely well before I could manage to. that someone is Scott Hines from The Action Cookbook Newsletter, and he wrote on what’s actually good right now and the success of a pandemic-lessened Halloween better than I could hope for. but I’m still gonna talk about the latter.
being a native of Australia, Halloween isn’t a holiday that comes naturally to me. it’s not formally celebrated Down Under, thus I’m terrible at organizing costumes and I’m too old to be trick-or-treating. it’s always been an afterthought until this year, which obviously is baby’s first Halloween.
I was still woefully inadequate at assisting Alex in picking out costumes for us, and at the very last minute she decided we’d go as “triplets.” it was a blast because I got to dress up as me (which is fairly easy even if I’ve spent the past eight months wearing nothing but sweatpants), and she and the baby followed suit with matching plaid shirts and sneakers. we wandered around a friend’s neighborhood, sipping some beers and stopping at a couple of houses for socially distanced candy pick-ups.
as we were driving home, the neighborhood began to come alive with costumed local kids and their parents zig-zagging the streets hitting houses with treats set up outside. that’s when I was struck, for the first time in a long time, by a very basic realization: “oh yeah. I kinda forgot I live in the U.S.!” this probably sounds weird (given the current state of everything), but in the seven years I’ve been here, life has become less a day-to-day fascination with everything that’s different from home and more…we,, just home. I “go to” work, I “come home,” I make dinner, I work out. life has a similar rhythm to when I lived in Australia, but every now and then something reminds me that I’m somewhere very different. and it’s a nice surprise when it comes along.
It’s All Good
earlier this week Minda, one of my long-time mutual Twitter followers, wondered aloud what kind of news qualified as “good enough” to be shared in this weekly dispatch.
it brings me great pleasure to report that this is welcome good news! as the old saying (well, marketing slogan) goes, America runs on Dunkin’, and to get your Dunkies for FREE is a great start to any day, much less the day after the GODDAMN ELECTION. I’m all about celebrating big and small wins, especially this week, so hell yes: we should all be so lucky as to get a free Dunkie.
while we’re doing good news, this one from Chuck is worth mentioning.
a constant theme in my professional and personal lives has been “the first step is always the hardest to take” (see: spending two months procrastinating about writing the first edition of this newsletter) but once the first step is out of the way, it’s all downhill from there. anyway I’m also a big proponent of therapy, and if there’s ever a time for mindfulness or relaxation techniques, it’s now. way to go pal!
Worthy Consumables
in this segment, I figure I’ll just share some things that I enjoyed watching or listening to or eating or drinking over the past week? I dunno man I’m kinda making this up as I go along.
we decided we weren’t going to cook on Tuesday for election night, but we made a last-minute pivot on where we were going to order from. we put the fantastic Welton Street Cafe on the backburner and opted for Blue Pan Pizza instead.
Denverites: if you haven’t had Blue Pan yet, you’re missing out. they serve Detroit-style pies and when I tell you there wasn’t a scrap left by noon the next day, I’m probably being generous because I finished it right after breakfast. can you blame me?
no regrets, baby. calories don’t count during election week.
Parting Note
since this edition has already been super-long, I’ll wrap it up right here with something that feels like it suits the mood, at least in my rattletrap brain. Rage Against The Machine maybe is overdone in this current climate, but that’s because everyone keeps playing Killing In The Name. this one captures the nervous energy as we sit on the brink of (or perhaps in the immediate aftermath of, by the time you read this!) a change of direction.
until next week, friends. thanks again for giving me some of your day, it’s good to know we’re chipping away at it all together. keep your heads up.
— adrian ✊🏻