yellowcarding.substack.com

a Substack newsletter inspired by obsession

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tools/skills used: creative writing, weird brain

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Yellowcarding was a Substack I started back in September of 2022. I had moved to Minneapolis from Chicago less than a year prior and I was still trying to find my footing and figure out my next moves (one could argue that’s an ongoing project). I’ve always enjoyed writing—especially when I get the spark to do so—but I never really know when the inspiration will hit. I created the Substack and wrote my first post after a Shins concert I’d attended with some friends that had gotten me thinking about an obsessive period I’d had with one of their songs almost a decade earlier.

The term “yellowcarding” was born out of a goof a couple months prior in the car ride to a wedding weekend in Wisconsin with those same friends. At some point “Ocean Avenue” by Yellowcard popped up in the playlist, and all three of us realized that we’d never really learned the words. We decided to turn it into a bit, leaving “Ocean Avenue” on repeat in the car the entire weekend, only allowing ourselves to move past it once we could sing along to the song word-for-word and subjecting anyone who carpooled with us from each of the events to the violence. It took the whole weekend. It was a lot of Yellowcard.

“Yellowcarding” is when you can’t stop fixating on something—willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously. Each post for the Substack was the result of or focused on something that I had to get down on paper because it wouldn’t stop kicking around in my head.

The posts aren’t done, but I decided to migrate the Substack over to this site in an effort to consolidate and have a little more control over my work.