Howdy! [Read This First] (V.1.0)

An introduction to the mind of a Dime Store Cowboy

Howdy!

I’m glad that you’re here and I hope that you’re doing well!

Honestly, I’ve been putting off writing and posting this first piece for a while.

I’ve had the idea for this project as a whole for just under a year now, and over the last few months I’ve slowly been getting it all put together. The website, emails, logos, social media—everything was relatively straightforward in terms of actually making the components of this thing that will host my ideas. So when the time came to actually start writing the first entry, I assumed that it would be straightforward as well... and, technically, it is.

All I have to do is write something and put it online.

So why am I being so protective and particular about this first go-around?

Everyone says that the first addition to a website or social media page is one of the hardest and the worst written things you’ll produce, but—as I’ll explain later—one of the main goals of this endeavor is to be imperfect, to learn, to grow, and to do so in public.

So here we go. Welcome to the mind of a Dime Store Cowboy.

Who Am I?

I am Canyon.
Canyon I am.

I can hear you thinking, “Okay... but what’s with the name?”

Ohhh, you mean that name.

I came up with the persona of a “Dime Store Cowboy” about a year ago as I was thinking about musicians that I admired and how they were able to create heightened versions of themselves within their art as a way to blur the lines between their real lives and how they wished to present themselves to the public.

As a child of small town America, I have always been surrounded by real cowboys and cowgirls who do the tangible, day to day work of agricultural and physical labor. But when I first went to places that didn’t understand that culture, folks in those areas thought that I was the cowboy.

I liked that caricature of myself, but I always knew in the back of my head that I wasn’t a real cowboy... I was kind of a dime store version.

However, “dime store” doesn’t mean bad or fake. Just different. (As Kacey Musgraves said... “Just ‘cause it don’t cost a lot don’t mean it’s cheap.”)

Why Am I Doing This?

I think a lot.

Too much, really.

For a while now I’ve become hyper-aware of just how much is going through my head at all times. Ideas appear and disappear as random constants—and due to the nature of how my brain works, I write them down as quickly as I can so that I can go back over them later.

Most of these ideas suck.

They are either not fleshed out or they are easily dismissible as concept slop that my head secretes as a way to make sense of the world around me.

Sometimes, though, the ideas stick around without having to be written down.

Sometimes the ideas that do get written are good enough that I feel compelled to write about them even more.

Folks unlucky enough to be part of my personal life are often the unwanted recipients of unnecessarily long texts that operate as my current mode of fleshing out these ideas. So as a way of removing my friends from the implicit social responsibility of reading messages so long that you have to click on them to see the whole thing, I’ve decided to start expanding my ideas in this space, instead.

The other part of this is a feeling of an incessant need to contribute.

I see conversations that are happening—or not happening—both online and in real life, and I can’t help but feel this pull to engage with them: to get into the weeds of what is being discussed and to not be afraid to plant myself within the dialogue. Or perhaps to plant the seed of a conversation that grows into something bigger than myself.

Basically, I’m enamored with humanity and the individuals within it; our complexity, our nuance, and what makes us tick.

I want to contribute not for the sake of contribution (as it can sometimes feel we are encouraged to do online), but for the sake of filling in the gaps.

I have no interest, really, in the quick hits of inserting myself into online “discourse.” Instead, I hope to make slow but meaningful additions to this never ending timeline of human culture and conversation.

As I do with interactions in real life, I pride myself on the viewpoint I take which sees every conversation as an opportunity to learn. By extension, I also see this project as an opportunity to learn, but to do so in public.

When I first to work through finding the language for this goal, I began to ask myself why I felt the need to learn in public at all. Shouldn’t learning be something that is done in private, followed by a public declaration of knowledge or demonstration of proficiency? Do declarations of knowledge or of proficiency need to be publicized at all?

I guess my response to those questions is to give my (much shortened) perspective on the nature of legacy and what I feel is lacking in modern cultural parlance.

To the former point: My life’s purpose to serve people and to, in doing so, leave the world with parts of me that continue to do that work when I am gone. The simplest and most accessible way I can think of to do that is to write.

So I write.

To the latter: few people leave the world in the way that I would like to without putting themselves in positions to be heard, and even fewer people set themselves up to have forced humility in the way they speak about topics on which they lack expertise. Learning in public and showing my work(tm) forces me to admit to anyone who will listen that I don’t know things. Rather than shying away from that, I feel great excitement when I don’t have all the answers. It means that there is still knowledge for me to go and find.

Now I will admit that I am a bit of a stubborn sonofabitch. I’m told it runs in my family.

But my stubbornness comes with a caveat.

When I believe something, I will defend that perspective until the day I die.

Unless I am convinced otherwise… at which point I always try to be the first person to adjust their mindset.

But I have to be convinced.

I have to be shown new information in a way that makes my brain say, “That makes sense. Let’s change our opinion.” We’ll get to this in a bit more detail later, but I am very much looking forward to the opportunities to change my mind that y’all will (hopefully) afford me.

What Am I doing?

In the brainstorming process for this project, I sat down and wrote out the values that I want to imbue into the work that I’m doing here. I settled on three so that the list wouldn’t be several pages long: servant leadership, prioritization of multiple perspectives, and a genuine presentation.

Servant leadership is the first value because it is my life’s purpose. I’ve known this since I was fifteen years old.

I’ve long held the belief that I cannot do what I want to in this life without the ability to lead, and I cannot lead in the way that I want to without a servant-heartedness. To me, service and leadership are one in the same; they inextricably linked. I hope to be able to advance my own purpose in some small way through this endeavor.

In prioritizing multiple perspectives, I do not mean that I will be elevating certain perspectives over others at all times, nor do I mean that perspectives will remain equal to one another in all my analyses.

The purpose of valuing viewpoints from all different positions is to get closest to the truth, full stop.

In the messiness of the world, it is often extremely difficult to understand objective reality. Humanity isn’t as simple as one plus one equaling two. At the same time, working towards truth as an ideal is an important “north star” if you will, with the value of each individual’s contribution being derived from its positioning to that celestial entity.

Genuine presentation, to me, is one of the most important elements of how I envision learning in public. Sincerity is something that can feel constantly in retreat these days as profit incentives that inform the architecture of digital public squares force what is said within them to bend to the contours of the structures themselves.

In everything that I encounter, I do my best to internalize the good-faith and bad-faith readings of what I am presented with. Like most things, these good and bad-faith readings exist on a spectrum, but the exercise itself is a useful form of mental stretching. If people do this exercise with the things that I put out into the world, it is my desire that they see me as erring on the side of good-faith. And so, I will continue to stress the importance of genuine presentation.

At the same time, I do want to make a short footnote about how I perceive the difference between being genuine and being authentic.

To me, while I can learn and be imperfect in public, I can never truly be authentic to the masses.

Because of the nature of how people will interact with my public existence—that is, in short bursts, snippets, and forms that I engineer specifically for lots of people to be able to engage with—no matter how hard I try to demonstrate complexity, people simply cannot spend enough time with me to know my authentic self. That self is for my private life.

Of course, this is not a bad thing. One of my favorite sentiments I’ve read recently comes from the actress Bryce Dallas Howard when she says that a rich private life is the only thing that makes a public life worth living.

To the extent that people see what I put out public, I think it is important for folks to know that they do not truly know me, and likely never will.

That is okay. In no way does it make the value we bring to one another any less important.

It is simply a different form of relationship. One that I hope improves authentic connections in your day-to-day life as much as it does mine.

I also hope to be deliberate in my contributions.

Like I said before, I’m not really interested in being a part of online “discourse” on topics. Of course, I am still human, so the discourse that I see will likely impact what I am thinking about at any given moment, and by extension what I decide to create.

Again, if I’m thinking about leaving things behind when I am gone, it’s likely best that folks are able to engage with what I’m producing without immediately being able to place it within a timeline. As such, I am treating this project as a purposefully slow thought-exercise when it comes to the conversations I engage with.

Such conversations will have a wide wingspan that engulf lots of different topics. Mostly, they’ll fall under the domains of human culture, psychology, and a little bit of popular media. But I’m purposefully leaving those categories broad, as I want to be able to contribute to what I feel called to at the time, no matter how far apart things may seem.

This mindset was a difficult one to work through as I began to think about how I would be able to get started having these conversations in an online world whose silos are build from seemingly impenetrable materials. Everyone likes to talk about niche and area of expertise and authority when discussing how to be seen online, but I have none of those things. I’m a kid with lots of different interests and no semblance of in-depth knowledge about any of them.

So what is a boy to do?

The answer that I’ve settled on is that I’m going to have to ask you to join me on this journey because you take an interest in what I—Canyon—have to say, rather than whether or not I am in the “right” place to say it.

You can also expect to know from where I am getting information.

A large flaw that I see in the way the internet operates as a place for ideas is that (especially on social or news media) finding where people get the information from which they make their claims is a lot of work.

Unlike in most other forms of knowledge contribution, online conversations do not have a culture of citation. Not only is this unfair to the people who produce the stuff that forms the bedrock of particular dialogue, it also does a disservice to you, the community, because you are forced to place your trust in the single person that sits on the opposite side of your screen.

I don’t want to be that guy.

I want you to be able to see the lineage that I place my ideas within; the family tree of knowledge that will inevitably have both good and bad apples, but that is proof of engagement nonetheless.

Speaking of which, I also want to say unequivocally here that citation does not equal endorsement. The only words and ideas that I endorse verbatim are my own and the ones that I quote.

I’m already on thin ice asking for grace when it comes to being incorrect or narrow-sighted myself. I just can’t also be responsible for defending all the thoughts of everyone else that I draw from.

Oh, and one final note on what to expect from my end: expect me not to take myself to seriously and to have fun while I’m doing all this.

The greatest beauty of showing your work (tm) is that you get to do so with other people. People are the beings that make life worth living, and so the great privilege of a project like this is that the perspectives, feelings, and humor of folks that engage with my work are the elements that I get to take with me after every thing I release out into the world.

How Am I Going to Do This? (For Now)

We all have to start somewhere, so here’s how I envision my beginning (which I hear is a very good place to start).

When I first had the idea for this project, I saw three main components to what I would offer folks who stumbled upon what I put out here.

The first of these components shares a name with the project itself. ‘The Mind of a Dime Store Cowboy’ will house my main contributions to the thought-work and conversations that I’m attempting to contribute to here. I plan to separate the pieces included as a part of this component into two main sections: ‘Thoughts’ and ‘Perspectives.

‘Thoughts’ will tackle an aspect of non-fiction that I feel is severely lacking in modern authorship. Because we are trained from grade school to view writing as something that is done to make a point, online conversations are structured around one side being “correct.”

As such, ‘Thoughts’ will be spitefully expository.

Each piece in this section will operate as a place for me to simply lay out my thoughts, what I am learning, and how I am processing it all, without making a particular argument.

The titles for these pieces will all have the structure of ‘Thoughts On [Blank],’ and will serve as an exercise in intellectual humility. The goal is to be forced to read widely on subjects, so that the perspectives I form for myself will be more well-rounded and comprehensive.

Speaking of which, ‘Perspectives’ will be the place that houses more traditional—meaning argumentative—work.

I phrase these pieces as “perspectives” rather than something like “arguments” because I am not claiming authority within this writing. Rather, I see it as an opportunity to do that task of planting myself in a dialogue while acknowledging that my perspective can be changed. As one of the goals of this project is to imperfect in public, I anticipate that these pieces will be the ones that provide the greatest opportunity for that goal to be achieved.

I’m not going to commit to a schedule for these contributions for now, because I want to allow my brain to get it “right” rather than be “on time.”

The second component of this project is ‘The Voice of a Dime Store Cowboy.’

Because, of course, what we really need right now is another bro talking into a microphone for hours at a time.

While ‘The Mind of a Dime Store Cowboy’ is more structured and analytical, ‘The Voice of a Dime Store Cowboy’ will cover the same topics from a more stream-of-consciousness or behind the scenes perspective.

A podcast, the point of this component will be for me to become more comfortable speaking in public to people that I cannot see in the moment.

I have been blessed with the lack of a fear of public speaking, but I often require the feedback of my audience to know if I am doing a good job. A podcast is not so immediate, so if my goal is to contribute to culture and conversations, I will need to become comfortable with my words being read, heard, and reacted to after the fact.

The final component of the project is a weekly newsletter that is the least formal of the three elements that make up the endeavor. ‘Letters From a Dime Store Cowboy’ will be a scheduled time for me to pop up in your inboxes with recommendations of what I’ve been enjoying and what’s been on my mind each week. Really, more than anything, I’m viewing it as an opportunity to replicate broadly a practice that I view with great favor: the practice of letter writing.

Perhaps over time (if all goes well), these will expand into new or other endeavors. But this is where we begin for now.

When you enter your email into the website welcome page or subscribe button in the top right corner at canyonblue.org, you’ll be automatically signed up for each of these three components.

By no means do you have to stay subscribed to all of them.

If there is an aspect of the project that you don’t feel serves you, unsubscribe and don’t look back.

I want this to be a place on the internet that returns the autonomy of what you engage with back to you, rather than to an algorithm.

What I Hope for Y’all

I hope this is a place on the internet that serves you—through a focus on complexity and joy.

I hope that you grant me and those around you the permission to be wrong, to contradict ourselves, and to grow.

I hope that you engage with the things I place here, and with others who do the same, in a way that fills your bucket rather than draining it.

I hope you provide feedback that is as brutal as it can be, in the nicest words possible.

I hope that this work inspires you to get it from the source; “it” being all the information that you take in throughout your day. So much of what we consume is filtered through others when it reaches our plate, when what we really need is to choose how we filter what we take in by ourselves.

By extension, I hope that this space inspires you to pride yourself on opinions that you form before others can tell you what to think.

More than anything, though, I hope this project encourages you to take care of each other—both online and in the real world. ‘Cause Lord knows we all need it.

Wrapping Up

Thanks for reading this if you’ve gotten this far. I’m really glad that you’re here and that you stuck with me for this long.

I know it’s a lot and there’s not much—visually—to break it up.

That’s kind of by design though.

I would really like to be a force for change in the way we engage with long-form media. A force that pushes us towards deriving value from the media itself, rather than the catchiness of its presentation (though some would argue that the presentation is the media, but that’s a piece for another day).

(That’s probably giving myself too much credit though lol. No one’s ever going to read this.)

Every piece or podcast will have a corresponding thread in the “Chat” tab on the website for people to share their thoughts and engage with each other and me. Please be brutally honest in the nicest way you can. I’ll probably post questions I’d love to hear y’all answer in those chats as well.

Anyway, I also suck at self promotion like real bad, so I’ll save the shameful plugs for the end of each entry.

Feel free to drop your email in the subscription box if you got some value from this and want to go on this journey with me. It’s my most direct form of communication to ya so you’re getting it from the source (see what I did there). If you think other folks you know could also gain some value from this project, there’s a share button at the bottom of this entry. Also feel free to add me on the socials listed in the tab of the same name on the website.

That’s canyonblue.org btw.

Thanks again for being here today. It really does mean the world.

Take care of each other.

- Canyon