The Scratching Post: The Joy Is in the Doing

This past weekend reminded me why I build any of this in the first place. It was the kind of weekend where there were never enough hours in the day, but somehow that did not feel exhausting. It felt energizing. I bounced from football to old friends, from Across Pittsburgh to Scratch Writing, from tinkering with editorial workflows to sitting down behind a microphone and reading another chapter of The Midas Protocol. None of those things, taken by themselves, qualifies as some monumental life event. Put them together, though, and they reminded me of something I have probably known for a long time and occasionally forget: the joy is in the doing.

One moment that stood out was Friday night. My alma mater, the North Hills Indians, rekindled its rivalry with North Allegheny, and I got to experience it with some old teammates. If you grew up around Pittsburgh high school football, you know those rivalries never really go away. Back in the early 1990s, North Hills was one of the premier programs around. The last several years have been more of a climb, so watching the Indians knock off one of the area's top teams felt like more than just another win. It felt like a reminder that traditions have a way of finding new life.

There was another layer to it for me, too. Standing around a football field again with guys I had once practiced, sweated and competed beside made the years collapse a little. We are all older now. Life scattered us in different directions, as life tends to do. But there is something about seeing people from an earlier chapter of your life that reconnects you not only with them, but with the person you were when you knew them. For a few hours, the old stories were still funny, the rivalry still mattered, and Friday night football still felt like Friday night football.

That night also nudged another project back into view. I did a few social posts for Across Pittsburgh, which has been on the back burner while I have been deep in The Midas Files and Scratch Magazine. It was a good reminder that I love telling stories about this region and the people who call it home. Across Pittsburgh started as one thing, changed into another, went quiet for stretches and somehow never completely left me. Maybe that is because Pittsburgh itself is endlessly interesting to me. There is always another neighborhood, ball field, oddity, piece of history, local character or wonderfully Pittsburgh thing worth talking about.

For a while I have thought about all of these projects as separate boxes. The books are over here. Scratch Magazine is over there. Across Pittsburgh sits somewhere else. YouTube is another thing entirely. But the more I work on them, the less separate they feel. They are all different ways of telling stories. One may be about Hank Raglan and Caroline Friday. Another may be about a high school football rivalry. Another may be me writing about the strange process of trying to build all of this in the first place. The subject changes, but the impulse behind it does not.

That is also why I have been spending so much time building what I jokingly think of as my editorial machine. I have been experimenting with AI-assisted workflows, content folders, recurring article formats and a more deliberate system for moving an idea from a passing thought into something that can actually be published. The goal is not to automate creativity out of the process. Quite the opposite. I want to remove some of the friction around the creative work so I can spend more time actually doing it.

There is a peculiar satisfaction in building the machine itself. I enjoy figuring out where an article should live, how one piece of content can feed another, how a YouTube reading can become a website post, how a social post can point somebody back toward a book, or how an old project like Across Pittsburgh can suddenly fit into a larger ecosystem. It is part writing, part editing, part web development, part publishing and part mad-scientist tinkering. I realize that for some people this would sound suspiciously like work. For me, at least when everything is clicking, it feels like play. 

Then Sunday night I sat down and recorded Chapter 4 of The Midas Protocol, “Auspicious Occasions.” That was another small milestone in a project that has slowly become much more meaningful to me than simply reading an old book into a microphone. Every chapter brings me back into the story from a different angle. I hear sentences differently than I did when I wrote them. I rediscover characters. I notice things I had forgotten. And, maybe most importantly, I am actively spending time inside this fictional universe again instead of merely thinking about all the things I might someday do with it.

That distinction matters. It is easy to become fascinated with outcomes. How many people watched? How many people clicked? Did the article perform? Did the book sell? Did the post reach anyone? Those questions are not meaningless, especially if you are trying to build an audience. But they can become a miserable way to measure a creative life if they are the only questions that count. Most worthwhile things spend a long time being small. Sometimes they stay small. The work still has value because of what happens while you are doing it.

Maybe that is what the football game brought into focus for me. Nobody on that North Hills field Friday night was thinking about the games I played decades ago. Those kids were playing their game, in their time. My old teammates and I were there because once upon a time we had done the same thing. The memories did not come from talking about playing football. They came from showing up to practice, getting hit, getting tired, getting better, winning some, losing some and doing it together.

Creative work is not so different. You can spend years thinking about the perfect website, the perfect publishing strategy, the perfect book launch, the perfect video series or the perfect moment to begin the next project. Or you can write the article. Record the chapter. Post the story. Reconnect with an old friend. Reopen the project you put on the shelf. Build the strange little machine that helps you make the next thing.

This weekend, I did a lot of that. And as I looked back on it, I realized the real accomplishment was not that any single piece of it was finished. It was that I was in motion. I was participating in things I care about instead of standing outside them and thinking about where they might eventually lead.

There will always be another metric, another milestone and another destination. I hope some of these projects grow. I hope more readers discover The Midas Files. I hope the editorial machine starts humming and Scratch Writing becomes the strange, lively little universe I can see taking shape in my head. I hope Across Pittsburgh finds another gear, too. But those are outcomes, and outcomes have a stubborn habit of arriving on their own schedule.

The part I can control is whether I keep showing up.

And increasingly, I think that may be enough. Because the joy was never waiting at the finish line. It was on the football field, in the conversation with an old teammate, inside the article, behind the microphone, somewhere between a half-built workflow and the next ridiculous idea. The joy is in the doing.