5 minute read
Letter from the Editor
Letter from the Editor
THE SALT IN OUR STARS
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By Brock Wilbur
I used to kickstart the New year by burying myself under resolutions. Too many, in fact—a guaranteed crash and burn. I tripped out of the gate so many times, my internal process became that all New Year’s resolutions needed to actually truly really be in effect by Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the middle of the month. This was by necessity as I managed to fuck up many of my better intentions by the end of the first week, and required some leniency to get back in the saddle.
That kind of staunch adherence to an overly complicated plan always failed for me by the end of February (at best), and in recent years I’ve made a pivot. “Optimism” is, to me, at least, the most powerful energy to harness at this early point in January. Here’s why:
Back in 2020, I interviewed local astrologist Julia Purdy around the release of her book The Jupiter Advantage. As an almost crippling cynic, even taking the meeting was the kind of thing I’d not have usually set aside time for. Fortunately, Pitch staffer Kelcie McKenney had recently forced me to install the Co-Star astrology app to compare our ~vibes~ in the office. I was on a bit of a kick in opening myself to, at the very least, filling in a blindspot of knowledge regarding what anyone on this end of the wellness spectrum believed.
Over a two-hour conversation (which you can hear in edited form on The Pitch’s Streetwise podcast), Julia’s scientific approach to the history and mathematics of charting the stars may have fried my brain ever so slightly. While not a believer, I was floored by the intricate nature of how she processed my information. Included on this page is merely one example of work she pulled from my life, and, while I’m not totally sure what any of it means, it does generate a Huge Mood.
And “mood” remains my big takeaway from the experience. While I associate star reading and fortune telling and all associated practices with a long history of rubes being taken advantage of, there was a practical and trackable result of the time we spent together. This had been a discussion about the future; time set aside to just think about possibilities. A little personal pocket of expressing out loud what my dreams and aspirations could manifest as, and which among those corresponded to my personality type, skill sets, and personal history.
I was, as ever, dear reader, my same salty self about all of it. But I did leave the experience with a spring in my step that day. It carried through for several weeks, and it did weasel its way into my subconscious, giving me a bit of internal slack on my otherwise strenuous ties around needing to white-knuckle my days and future into submission.
It’s soooo Virgo of me to write the whole thing off as bunk. It’s perhaps a bit wiser for me to interrogate how much a slight shift in my aspirations and self-examination changed me for the better. In short, simply bringing optimism to a vocal discussion of the future yielded a few benefits that I cannot write off.
And that’s what we’re doing, now on a citywide scale, in this month’s issue.
We’ve been reading the tea leaves on what we’re most excited for in 2023—the people and places whose fingers are on the pulse of our immediate future—and this is a look at some of their stories.
KC has an esports team that’s competing on an international scale in the cutthroat video game world, bolstered by support from big Chiefs players, and our first major foray into a new kind of sport entirely is so goddamned sick. We’ve got artists locally who are expanding what we think of when we conceive identity and our place on the world stage. Equally, we’re searching for heroes to help us grapple with the mistakes in our history and mend wounds with wronged communities, while local business people are using their spaces to create sustainable—and delicious—options for sustenance. Control of our bodies and our reproductive futures are the focus of huge questions that we need to be discussing in a public space. And finally, we’ve got a swath of upstart organizations and creators that are putting KC on the map in, of all things, the non-alcoholic booze space.
Placing the tarot cards on the table before us, a clear pattern of hope, excitement, and adventure shows itself. Even if the idea of interpreting cups tracks like bullshit to you, we think any member of the metro would find it hard not to share in our collective exhilaration with the possibilities presented. Maybe that little extra spark of optimism is all it takes to light the fire.
Pitch in and we’ll make it through,
