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- 🗞️ TSAR: LEGO:Ɔ
Pretty good, not bad, I can't complain.
Good morning gang ⛅
Welcome to the second edition of The Sunday Andrew Review ("TSAR"), our new Sunday newsletter. They come out on, well, Sundays. What's the point? Choose one topic and go a bit deeper. I hope you like it.
In classic AA🍎 form, this still should only take a minute or six to read. Kind of depends on how many stimulants you're on right now and, like, how good your parents were at parenting.
On with the show...
LEGO:Ɔ 🧱
Idk about you, but these days I'm pretty tired. Overwhelmed by the constant flood of information and underwhelmed by how little of it is any good. Sure, I get 'entertained' for mere minutes by a meme of, say, our new currency mint or the ex Fed chairwoman, but at what cost? Is being micro-entertained materially any different than watching porn? You get up, you get off, you get on, and at the end of it you're a little gassed - like a dead insect on its back, legs erect in the air. Whatever. This is not about the hellscape of social media (already crossed the Rubicon almost 20y ago) nor about the seeming meaningless of everything (life is pretty pretty and pretty good, methinks!). This is about joining Isis. Just kidding, this is about Legos.
When you're a kid, you play with toys. Not because it was a productivity hack or some woo-woo way to silence your stress... but because it was fun and required imagination, which I'm sure chemically on some level kept us from bouncing off the walls and driving our parents to drink. Call it a 'meditation retreat' in your very own playroom (at my house, we had a room literally called the "playroom"; maybe a Midwest thing idk, but it was tight and friends had this too). As a 29 year old big boy, I still cannot think of a better thing to do with your time than to play with toys: it's physical, intellectual, imaginative, solo or collaborative, done indoors or out, the characters have cute small square yellow heads (before emojis became a thing). Most of all, you are building a world, literally. Another way of world-building is devising a philosophy for yourself by which to live. In the spirit of the inspired Danish toy company, mine, as of today, can be written as LEGO:Ɔ.
While it feels weird and cocky to share this philosophical acronym I came up with, I only do it because it has worked for me and I am wagering it will help at least one other punk out there. Maybe (or maybe not) this punk, like me, does not follow an organized religion nor claim to be an atheist, but too feels that somewhat randomly collecting inspiring bits and pieces from books, shows, movies, and podcasts and smooshing them together like play-doh isn't really working. So, I came up with a simple framework that a kid could wrap his little head around. No fancy shit. It could be a wrist tattoo. Six characters, that's it. Basically, it reminds me what I need reminding every day. It gets me through the bad days and the sick days, and it boosts my good days without fooling me to think they'll stick around forever. LEGO:Ɔ works on several levels, which I will briefly unpack below.
LEGO:Ɔ
LEGO is the famous Danish toy company. It serves as the foundation of this pocket philosophy because it reminds me that (a) the little boy is still in me (b) I must play and goof around and be silly and (c) I should seldom if ever say "I am too old for that shit". I have covered this in previous Apples, but research has shown that the people who live the longest and healthiest lives are the ones who maintain the spirit and practice of their youth. This means sex, movement, fucking around, good music and better movies, dancing late, smiling so much that onlookers might call the cops, and in general not getting sucked into the all-too-common mundane and depressing "adult" opinions on how life is and should be after graduation. Most of these people are just retrofitting their viewpoint to fit their boring lives. Yeaaaaaaaaaah, no. When toying with colored blocks, I would invent voices and situations, build practical living spaces, everything could fly lol. It reminds me a lot of the all-timer track from English rock band Supertramp: The Logical Song. In essence, the song is about the end of innocence in childhood and the beginning of experience (or, being logical) in young adulthood. The murder of magic and the birth of reason. There is a reason why adults love watching the perennial high school dramedy: it brings them back to simpler times when toys and toying still ruled.
LET'S GO is a refrain from my competitive tennis days, dating back to 1999. This of course evolved to 'let's fucking go' in high school when I dabbled in chewing tobacco and getting a trashy stud earring in my left ear (it made dem panties rise into them butt-cracks, I'll tell ya that much). Tennis, even doubles, is a pretty lonely sport, so you need positive mantras for yourself at the ready. I think I heard the term "mental toughness" about six million times in my years of summer tennis academy. In a word, mental toughness was just: LETSGO. And when you say LETSGO really fast, it just sounds like LEGO.
LET GO comes from my yoga practice and from reading the Bill Hicks book. Learning to let go of outcomes is one of the hardest things we'll ever do. The bull and bear markets of your mind are pre-baked into your future, so the sooner you can let go of what happens, re-gear, 'get back in the gym,' and move back toward the stars the better. This applies to breakups, firings, business failure, rejection, death, things taking longer than you want them to. Similar to LETSGO, LETGO is really just LEGO.
LET GOD is the spiritual piece. It's knowing that many things are out of your control. Although a good economics professor will teach you that people are impossible irrational, when something bad happens to us, we tend to rationalize why it went wrong. This is simply a way to coping with the pain and is fairly natural. But the reality is that you will never truly know why someone acted the way they did: it could have been a grand master plan or it could have been a weekend whim. An even harder pill to swallow: it's actually none of your business. People are fucking nuts, driven by profound and sometimes profoundly petty emotions that many cannot even articulate themselves. I chalk this up to God. Where people let you down (or vice versa) devoid of any explanation is when one must let god take the wheel. This is not a religious point (but it can be if you want - idc IT is all good!). Similar to LET GO, the :Ɔ forms a capital-D, so LEGO:Ɔ means LET GOD.
:Ɔ is a smiley face emoticon. This one is the most practical of the heretofore pillars. John Prine, on his 1971 debut record, has a song called Illegal Smile. He died in 2020 and was known as a cross of Dylan's folk and Cash's country, but funnier than both combined. RIP. In the song, he sings: "And you may see me tonight with an illegal smile / It don't cost very much, but it lasts a long while". It's a deadly weapon, especially in these mean streets.
The world is not slowing down. Media machines are, well, machines, and machines do not tire. Get used to it. I encourage y'all to come up with your own pocket philosophies. Do whatever you need to piece them together: theft, violence, go to a Pizza Hut salad bar, play Lego Indiana Jones on Gamecube... it's your world to build.
LMK what you think and I'll see you Monday.
Your friend,
Andrew
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