Busy Little Bee

Me In My Other Garden

Hello all you beautiful, thoughtful consumers of the written word.

My hunch is that the majority of you follow me on social media which is how you ended up subscribing to this wonderful “news” letter. If so, you may have noticed that I have been posting prolifically the past few months.

I have always enjoyed posting online. I used to write odd little stories on Facebook and I remember bumping into a guy I was acquainted with while at UVA and he said that he enjoyed what I wrote about helping a lady lifting her bag up into an overhead bin and hoping that the people behind me glimpsed my biceps as I did so. “I…do that too,” he confessed with a chuckle.

That kind of interaction is the nuclear core of why I like doing this (I think). When I joined Facebook in 2007 and Twitter a bit later, I treated posting primarily as a journal of sorts. Not necessarily the place where I poured out my strongest yearnings and darkest confessions (though I did have a couple of meltdowns), but a place where I could log my thoughts and musings that would otherwise disappear from my brain forever never to be seen again. I’ve cringed at plenty that have popped up in those “Check out what you posted 12 years ago!” but I’ve also seen plenty that make me go - “Hey, yeah, I remember when I was the guy who wrote that specific thing.”

In March of 2025, I attended one of my brother Lars’ boilerplate gigs in Plymouth. I intensely recall a moment years ago when I was at some divey bar in Boston on a Wednesday night and Lars was playing and the place was packed with the kind of crowd that gets hammered on a Wednesday night. He began playing a guitar solo and as it continued I watched a blanket of quiet slowly but assertively spread over the crowd and they all just stopped their conversations and stared at Lars shredding. I had full body chills. And when the song ended, there wasn’t an uproar. Everyone was just wondering what the hell they had just witnessed. And the hubbub picked up again.

So, at this Plymouth gig, Lars and the Mini Yellow Witches were playing Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd. And the extended guitar solo began and I felt that same effect taking place in the room. I didn’t want to spoil my own enjoyment of the moment but I knew I was deft enough to pull up my phone camera without having to fiddle too much with it. I held the phone in front of my chest without looking at it.

When I got back to my grandparents’ house (where I was visiting) that night, I watched the video with headphones. I expected it had not translated. But I watched it again, and then again. Lars showed up a bit later after grabbing a bite to eat. I passed him the headphones and played the video. “Lars…what do you think of what you did here?” He let out a very humble chuckle. “Kinda sick, actually.”

I kept returning to the video. I’d tried posting Lars content on Instagram before but my audience there is 80% women who are into fashion and they’ve never quite taken hold enough to catch the algorithm’s attention. So I uploaded the video to my largely inactive and entirely unfollowed TikTok account. I wrote, “Am I biased or did my brother just summon the most transcendent guitar solo directly from the heavens for 25 people in a bar in Plymouth MA?” in bold text over the first ten seconds of the video.

24 hours later it had amassed 800,000 views. It is currently sitting at 5.8 million. The comments section is the most wholesome corner of the internet I’ve ever experienced. It was harvested and reposted on Twitter and Reddit multiple times where it received millions more views. I still get notifications that someone has commented something like, “I come back to this every now and again when I want to feel something.” I’ve even gotten comments from cynics accusing me of stealing the video from someone else.

Anyway. My point is, it awakened me to the power of TikTok, a platform I had shrugged off until then. I found myself giving advice to my actor and musician friends: “Just post. There’s no downside. If you post something and people don’t like it, then it won’t show it to anyone else.” A short while later I realized I was not following my own advice.

I cut off my emotional and psychological sandbags and decided to start posting because, as a wise man said, there is no downside. I feel more free to experiment on TikTok, where there seems to be no risk of over posting. I don’t want to annoy my Instagram audience. What if Allison Janney doesn’t like something and unfollows me? I would be devastated.

But if I posted something and then felt good about, I would upload that same video to Instagram.

I’ve posted storytelling videos, singing videos, cat videos, or some combo of all three. Shared little fleeting thoughts, put on and improved my Aussie accent…and I gotta say, my screentime is definitely up, but when something takes off, it is actually fun. I’m also proud of the fact that I’m not trend chasing. I managed to start a trend, in fact! It didn’t really catch on that much, but I sang Christmas carols while being “conducted” by our cat Batty’s flicking tail. That one got 8.6 million views on Instagram and 5 million on TikTok.

In 2025, I garnered over 42 million views on my Instagram reels and TikToks. I had fun doing and I am continuing to do it. I have an “If I build it, they will come” attitude. When I have made something that people can buy (cough cough a children’s book cough cough), I have the marketing tools to sell it.

I am sharing this because I’m proud and also because it explains why I have not posted here on Substack in a while. I wrote this post in 17 minutes. So please know that I will find my way back to contributing here. And if you’re a paid subscriber, thank you, I do appreciate it and it means a lot to me and also helps keep my eye on the ball, but I will not be at all emotionally stung if you decide to “downgrade” (I don’t paywall anything) to free. But please stick around!

Post on my good brothers and sisters. And be excellent to each other.