Signal One: The First Transmission

I’m writing this from a small table inside my Airstream. The morning is quiet except for the hum of the fridge, the click of the keys, and the faint whistle of wind moving across the Texas Hill Country. On mornings like this, I sometimes imagine the trailer as a capsule—something closer to a spacecraft than a home. Its thin walls and aluminum skin remind me of how close the world really is, how quickly life can shift from silence to noise.

That’s part of why I’ve decided to start sending out these Signals.

Music has always been my first language. I think in melody. I remember life in verses. But music, by its nature, can be opaque. A song hints, it suggests, it creates an atmosphere. Writing is different. Writing lets me pin something down, at least for a moment, and say: This is what it looked like on the inside.

So here’s what you can expect. Sometimes these Signals will be short—a passing thought, the kind of thing you might scribble on a napkin. Other times they’ll be longer—closer to an essay or a letter. They’ll be fragments from the road, transmissions from the middle of my wandering. They’ll be about art, travel, business, love, the places where these things overlap. There aren’t any rules except that I’ll keep showing up to send them.

One of the reasons I admire aviators and explorers is because they lived in the space between certainty and risk. You lift off the ground not knowing exactly what the weather will do, or if the coordinates will hold, or if the machine beneath you is as sturdy as you hope. That’s what writing feels like to me. Every morning you step into the cockpit. You don’t know if the words will hold. You don’t know if they’ll carry you across the ocean. You just start the engine, push the throttle forward, and lift.

That’s what this first transmission is. It’s the moment of leaving the runway.

There’s something electric about beginnings. They don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be honest. A Signal, after all, is only useful if it can be received. So if you’re reading this, it means the message got through. It means the system works.

Where this goes from here—I don’t fully know. Maybe at the end of a year there will be a book, a stack of these pages bound together, a kind of flight log. Maybe it will remain a daily ritual, small messages sent out into the static. Maybe both.

But for now, all I want to say is: welcome. You’re tuned in. You’ve found the channel.

This is Signal One.