This is Estro Junkie, what I intend to develop this into a bi-monthly newsletter about The intersection of sports, theory, and probably other things as I flesh the project out. It is born out of my desire to write about stuff and realization that Instagram captions are not the place for thinking out loud. Below is what I want to do here and why.
Before I raced bikes I read books and read theory with the same stupid competitive spirit that fuels my relationship to cycling. I spent a couple years at a college with about 30 other thoughtful kids who fell through the cracks. It was an island of misfit toys and it changed my life. We sat at circular tables and tried to understand Hegel. In many ways it was more like a salon than a university. It was the only school environment I found success in and, unsurprising in hindsight, it closed my sophomore year. Enriching learning environments are a small piece of the puzzle for being in the business of higher ed I guess.
So I never earned a degree, didn’t even manage to graduate highschool thanks to a multi year experiment in unschooling. But I left with a bookshelf filled with texts that I still grab and reference to this day and what feels like many tools for being curious and critically engaged.
This is all a drawn out way of trying justify why I’m doing this and why I’m using this lens. I’m not a philosopher by trade, I’m miles away from the knowledge production corner of the economy sitting comfortably in the content production sector. Nevertheless I still read and think about theory, it’s how I try to make sense of the world. And as the imperative of content looms as an athlete in the modern era I figured that putting thoughts into words on a page instead if an Instagram caption could be a productive exercise.
My goal is not to publish the college essays I was denied the chance to write but to talk about cycling and sports from an angle that I feel is underutilized. Deleuze and Guattari’s malfunctioning machines inform injury and recovery. Paul Preciado’s pharmacopornographic capitalism helps decode discourses on hormones. Guy Debord’s spectacle makes sense of the imperative of content in sport. I could go on!
If the above sounds remotely interesting and you would like to read my occasional ramblings about sport in your email inbox I’d ask you to subscribe and help me realize a form of content production that is, hopefully, thoughtful and not cynical.