Dos & Donts of a Mach 3+ Lifestyle
How to move through this nutty, nasty world with your dignity intact
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Now let’s get to it —
Manners… Talking about them can feel prim & scoldy… like a dusty & crusty relic of bygone times…. But when you get beneath the “gentlemen and gentlewomen never wear a timepiece to a party”-type inanities, manners discourse at its best is about a vital question: How to interact with fellow beautiful humans in such blessed and considerate ways that your happiness increases in direct proportion to the increased happiness of others?
Put another way, no one in Spy Nation wants to be a damn jerk. But achieving this ambition in truly Mach 3+ ways requires profound, unorthodox contemplation. And we here at Blackbird Spyplane are proven masters of profound, unorthodox contemplation. So today we’re dropping a Menschly Dos & Donts Manners Litany, across a range of contexts and scenarios.
Some of these are hard-and-fast rules, compelling but uncontroversial if you are a non-psychopath. Others are admirable-if-challenging goals worth continually striving for, even if you sometimes fall short. Others may vex you and possibly even strike you as wrong, until you think about them for a minute and realize that Blackbird Spyplane crunched the f**king numbers, covered all the angles, and remains infallible.
I. MANNERS FOR COPPING & ROCKING CLOTHES BLESSEDLY
• “Showrooming” from small independent stores is wack. Let’s start with a big fat softball: If you go to a local bookstore or clothing shop and find something you like, buy it there. Don’t go online to seek out a “better deal.” Support the place and the people who work there. Compensate them for having dope taste, finding something ill, and putting you on to it. They have to pay rent, utilities, salaries, taxes, and make a living, so yes, they might charge more than, some cursed online behemoth. But we want these small independent places to exist — we don’t want the Am*zons and Ss*nses of the world to steamroll them into extinction — and the least we can do on that score is “take the hit,” spend an extra few bucks, and cop the thing there.
• Buy clothes I.R.L. only, and when you do cop online, don’t buy four things just to try them on and ship the rejects back. Returns routinely get trashed or set on fire; you’re wasting people’s time; shipping all that s**t back and forth across the planet is grody, even (especially!) when it’s “free.” What’s more, you are taking your relationship with clothes and threatening to vacate it of all meaning and enchantment as your home transforms into a lil logistics center. If you’re unsure about something, hit up the shop for intel before copping. If they are real ones, they will thank you for the “bother,” and gladly send you measurements, detail pics, etc.
• Don’t wear “no-show” socks if literally anyone can see a WHISPER of sock peeking out of the footwear. The moment anyone spies a micron of sock? You’ve flubbed that s**t, broken the contract you made with the Devil of Swaglessness, and added rank ugliness to your environs. A classic Spyplane Holy Decree worth reiterating. Similarly,
• Don’t wear heather-gray tees in public, except at the gym.
• And don’t wear clothes with designer logos on them. You are better than that. They are cheesy. Even the “tasteful” ones.
• Don’t message a seller on Grailed / eBay / Poshmark / whatever saying, “what’s the lowest you can do.” You are not being a hardnosed negotiating master. You are debasing yourself by engaging in annoying “broke boi” / “broke b*tch” behavior. Make your best offer, and if it’s not high enough to seal the deal, that’s OK, put away your phone and go birdwatching or repot some plants.
• Don’t even sell clothes online at all, if you can avoid it. Have a stoop sale, or even better yet trade clothes with — or straight up give clothes to — your friends.
• Don’t ask strangers for the “ID on the pants” on IG. Especially not a 🧑🎨 Pants Artist 🧑🎨 like Blackbird Spyplane:
Classified-Tier Subscribers can, of course, always ask me or Erin for IDs on anything because you are patrons of the arts. But there’s a new kind of online relationship forming that unfolds exclusively along an axis of ID thirst. The entire stupid “gatekeeping” debate grew out of this. We have so much more to offer each other!
• DO compliment strangers on their clothes in person and ask for the ID on a piece you’re feeling right then and there. They’ll be flattered, you’ve spread kindness, and now you know which Asics Kikos those are and you don’t need to drive yourself crazy trying to image-search them later.
• Do not compliment anyone on the street, or ask them what they’re wearing, what they pay in rent, what they do for a living, or interact with them in any other way if you have your phone out and you are recording them in the name of “content.” The screen has eaten into your brain and taken control of your body, undead-algorithm-puppet style, and you need to expel it.
Which brings us to…
II. MANNERS FOR MOVING THROUGH THE WORLD MENSCHILY
• Stand to the right on moving walkways and escalators. We’d have thought this was obvious, except for the counterevidence of 99.9% of times we’ve ever been on moving walkways and escalators. When you encounter these modes of conveyance, you’re typically in a place where mad people are in a rush. At airports, they’re often running late because of TSA security-theater bulls**t and airline cost-cutting, i.e. understaffed baggage-check counters, etc. If you are not in a rush, consider getting some steps and flights and taking the stairs. If that’s not in the cards, stand to the side to let people WHOOSH past you. However —
• If you’re in a rush and someone’s blocking the way like an oblivious dumb*ss, take a deep breath, empty all traces of irritation and passive-aggressiveness from your voice, and hit them with a breezy, “Pardon me on your left” type greeting. Because otherwise you’re just spiking your own cortisol for no reason, and you’re ceding all high ground to this oblivious dumb*ss … by acting like a bigger b*tch*ss 😜!
• Also, if you’re “in a rush,” pause and think about it — are you really? Where are you going that’s so urgent, playboy? Hurrying for a flight is a rare case. What’s up with these itchy souls deboarding planes who try to Frogger their way past the people many rows ahead of them? It can’t all be about tight connections — some of them are just impatient! Similarly, what’s up with our hustle-mode brothers & sisters in NYC who stand 3 feet off every curb up against traffic, waiting for the lights to change, trying to shave milliseconds en route to places that, real talk, do not matter that much? I used to be one of these people. I needed to chill. This is the core of what we call Give the Light a Miss (G.L.A.M.) Mode, and it’s extrapolatable to all sorts of scenarios.
• Wear headphones in public when you’re on a phone call or watching video. That s**t sounds horrible and is of negative value to literally everyone in earshot. I know it, you know it, and yet it’s a growing plague on society, so don’t give an inch.
• You DO NOT have to wear headphones in public when you’re listening to music. I didn’t come to this one intuitively. It required soul-searching and craggy-brained calisthenics. But I credit Spyfriend Malcolm Harris with opening my “third ear” on this score:
To be clear, chunes sound much better coming from car speakers and Bluetooth speakers than tinny, trebly smartphone speakers. And yes, there are exceptions — you probably shouldn’t play music in a library, in a café, in an idyllic nature preserve, etc. But out on the sidewalk, or at the park, or <deep breath> even in a subway car? You are contributing to the beautifully unruly sonic landscape — the fecund cacophony! — of a city. Malcolm is especially spitting in the last tweet above: In our heart of hearts, we want cities to sound like a million melodies bouncing off each other. And anyone who feels irritation at this is justified in feeling it momentarily but then needs to get over that irritation and treat it, ultimately, as the temporary side effect of beneficial, pro-social inoculation.
Finally…
III. PRACTICES FOR NOURISHING THE SOUL SCRUMPTIOUSLY
• Feed crows who live in your neighborhood peanuts. I started doing this after I read Jenny Odell write about doing it in How to Do Nothing. Crows love peanuts in the shell, you can buy them in bulk, the crows will remember you and very likely start reacting to you in familiar ways, i.e. “talking” to you, etc. It’s therefore a great way to get out of your own head by inscribing yourself as a kindvibed character in another living creature’s putatively but not actually “unknowable” subjectivity.
• Don’t kill bugs at the crib — patiently & gently escort them outside. Or, as we call it, practice S.A.C.R.E.D. (Save Annoying Creatures, Respect Earthly Divinity) Mindset.
• Learn something by heart — could be a song, a poem, a passage from a book, could be a recipe. Carry your love for the thing around with you, let it shape you, let it get into your blood. You could have a private, interior relationship with this thing. Even better, you could recite it when, for example, chill friends come over for dinner and you’ve eaten and moved to the living room having a nightcap or drinking chamomile tea. Back in the day, people used to gather in the damn parlor and entertain each other by, like, playing sheet music and reciting verse. It sounds archaic but that s**t was so much doper than just hitting the groupchat with “that hilarious TikTok I told you about.” Try it and tell us we’re wrong!
That’s a good Spyplane Dos & Donts baseline, but this is far from an exhaustive list. We’ll revisit the topic as time goes on — and we of course invite Spy Nation to weigh in with your own blessed policies.
Disagree about sharing music publicly, but agree with the ‘sletter’s other pleas for civility. Def going to buy peanuts in shells for the crows to keep the yard’s vibes high.
Hard no to sharing your music and phone conversations, especially on the subway. It's beyond selfish. Start a conversation with a stranger if you want a bit of contact. Game noise too. Nope.