Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday.
I've always wanted a signature move.
This started when I was in middle school and susceptible to
ludicrously oversimplified ideas about social status, on account of not having any
and desperately wanting some.
Anyway, some guru of that era wrote in some guide to being cool that one of the keys was
nodding upward whenever you encountered someone in a hallway or whatever, rather than nodding downward which was a sign of, like, subservience.
So I tried to make the up nod my signature move to tell my peers that I was confident and powerful.
Which, you know, went about as well as you would expect.
Later, I developed a new and much worse signature move, which I hesitate to even tell you about,
but, uh, it was this as a form of greeting. [*snaps*]
Like, I would be like,
[*snaps*] "Hello there!" And that one also surprisingly did not become for me
what the moonwalk was for Michael Jackson or heel clicking is for the Lucky Charms leprechaun.
And so I trudged through life as a person without a signature move.
Hank, I've been thinking about this recently because you're currently signing
40,000 sheets of paper that will be bound into your forthcoming first novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing,
which comes out September 25th and is available for pre-order now.
And you sent me 2,000 copies of these signed sheets for me to add something to,
the way that you have added your signature move, the Hanklerfish, to many copies of my books.
Which I'm happy to do, except I don't have a s... hold on.
Okay, late-breaking news, the first review of Hank's book has just come out, like literally minutes ago, and it's SO GREAT.
It's a starred review from Kirkus and it calls An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
"A fun contemporary adventure that cares about who we are as humans
especially when faced with remarkable events"
"Green is clearly interested in how social media moves the needle on our culture
and he uses April's fame, choices, and moral quandaries to reflect on the rending of social fabric." Hank! That is so good!
I am so excited. Your book is so brilliant. I cannot wait for people to read it
Okay back to the regularly scheduled video.
Right, so I have these two thousand sheets of paper from a book that just got a really good review
But I don't have a signature move
I mean even my eight-year-old son has a signature move, the pokeball, which he's put on several of these sheets
So first I thought that since you have the Hanklerfish, an organism might be appropriate
But I figured, you know, for me it should probably be something microscopic
So I tried to make like, uh, I don't really know what that is
it's a little bit like the Sun but also a little bit like a bacterium.
Then I thought: I love Hank's book so much, maybe I'll give it five stars.
Only to learn that I can't draw stars. Then I thought well, I'm better with words
so maybe I'll make a stick figure with the speech bubble that says "Hank's book is great"
But that looks like it was made by a five-year-old
In the end, here is what I've settled on: On about half the copies
I'm drawing what I see when I think of spirals. which is to say as close as I can get to
this Raymond Pettibon painting which I wrote about in Turtles All The Way Down.
I figure that spirals, even if I don't want them to be my signature move, sort of are
so that's about half of them and then on the other half
I'm writing DFTBA in the infinite shadow created by the Carl
By the way, that strikes me as an extremely metaphorically resonant infinite shadow
I know that neither of these moves is Hanklerfish level quality
But it's the best I've got and if you preorder a signed copy of Hank's book
You have a five percent chance of getting one of those things
and also a 1 in 40,000 chance of getting this one sheet that Hank forgot to sign, so I wrote a note and tried to recreate Hank's signature on it
Hank, congratulations on your book and that amazing review.
Months after first reading it I still think about it all the time. And I really think it's a book that might change the world for the better
There are links in the doobly-doo below to order signed copies of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
I am gonna go watch the World Cup and make some spirals.
Hank, I will see you on Friday.