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Letter from the Editor
Letter from the Editor
A FEVER YOU CAN’T SWEAT OUT
By Brock Wilbur
Hello, dearest readers, and welcome to the September issue of The Pitch.
In an issue full of oversharing, I’ll go first: One of my most perverse traits—real sicko hours—is that ever since I was a little boy, I’ve been convinced that the 24-hour day is a personal slight against me.
As a baby, it was impossible to get me to sleep. I did not nap. I would never, in the totality of my life, become a being that napped. This was waste. This was wasting precious time.
I was the only child at Meadowlark Ridge Elementary in Salina, KS, who was furious that there were simply not enough hours in the day. One of the first “projects” I can remember completing in second grade was an attempt to get my classmates and teachers to move to a 48-hour system, whereby I would come to school less, and we would all stay up all night… every other night. Which would, I suppose, technically, just now be called one “night.” I didn’t have many of the details worked out, but I was certainly sure of my correctness on the matter.
Unfortunately, nothing about this is cute. There’s no epiphany at the end where I make peace with the limitations of life.
As late as middle school, my family was having difficulty getting me to shower daily because I didn’t think it was a good use of my time. Personal hygiene for a teenage boy, in retrospect, was not robbing me of the hours I needed each day to accomplish the massive creative endeavors that I planned out in endless, manic To Do lists. Being the smelly kid was not the trade-off enabling me to write the Great American Novel, but I was convinced that it was all going to work out that way.
And that’s all I wanted the time for: making. There were so many ideas—good and bad ideas—that lived inside of me, that needed to exist in the world, and this whole kerfuffle with going to sleep at night and eating three meals a day… those were preventing me from making all the things that needed to be made.
It’s perverse that this belief still lives in me today. Not that there weren’t decades of proof that perhaps being healthy and living a normal human way was a better route for all of this, but recent events put a cartoonish topper on a lifelong low-level mental illness. That topper was COVID. There was a voice inside of me on the day I first tested positive that was a little excited—a little thrilled that there was a designated two weeks where the world would have to leave me alone, and I would have time to do nothing but make things. I would like to blame the fever for all of this, to claim that only a melting brain would convince itself that a pandemic infection was the only path to creative freedom, but I can’t give the fever that much credit.
When I had COVID, I watched four seasons of Married at First Sight and I ate a lot of frozen BBQ chicken pizza. I was forced to nap. No Great American Novel.
Truly, the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone.
I thought, in the wake of that, perhaps this was the end of that part of my brain— that channel that constantly beeped in the night to say, “No, you could be using this time! For art and such!” I’d seen the proof now that the only art waiting on the other end of misused time was finding out too much information about a Subway franchise owner who should have never agreed to appear on television. Perhaps I could willingly one day become the kind of guy who just accepted naps.
Then we found Rachel Hughes. She’s on the cover of this issue of The Pitch because, during the pandemic, she watched some YouTube videos and taught herself how to crochet. Now she makes high-end fashion that doesn’t just turn heads—it snaps necks. It turns out that some of us just needed a little break from the normal cycle of days, and we’d produce the kind of art that changes the world.
Goddammit.
Hughes is one of a dozen creators/creatives we’ve profiled in this month’s magazine, which is all about those people who figured out how to make capital “a” Art and also get sleep at night. Here’s hoping you feel as inspired by supporting these makers as we felt learning about their craft.
Pitch in, and we’ll make it through,
