You’ve found Signal Chain, an occasional newsletter. Email newsletters are more successful when they have a clear, narrow topic so readers know what to expect.
Signal Chain doesn’t have a specific topic. It’s all the ideas in my head that I want to express so they can live on, or so they can die off. I could express these privately, but by sharing them in the form of a public newsletter, I’m challenging myself to share more openly. While that’s scary, it also makes the ideas feel more real.
In the context of audio production, a “signal chain” is the order of devices between an instrument (such as a guitar) and its ultimate output (such as an amp). The sound is affected by the number, order, and quality of these devices. Signals can be purposely clarified or distorted as part of the signal chain, and they can also be inadvertently impacted by any link in the chain.
While a signal chain doesn’t define the type of music, it does influence how that music is created and perceived. In the signal chain of thoughts, meaning can be purposely or accidentally changed from the time it starts in the head to when it is written, published, and then read, especially when influenced by time and memory.
As an 80’s kid and a member of the Gen X / elder millennial collective, I’m in middle age now. I’m young enough to still have days where I feel 19 and old enough to have days when I can’t even grasp the memory of that age.
So Signal Chain is about anything, but everything will be filtered through the chain of time and memory from youth to middle age. In a world that has gone from analog to digital and from prosperity to listlessness.
In that sense, this newsletter is probably more about me than my potential readers. However, in this collaboration of sharing ideas and reading them, I hope you find something you recognize.
Your author & friend
I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and I’ve always considered myself a writer. This is technically justifiable in that my livelihood depends on me persuading people via writing (though Hemingway probably wouldn’t consider composing business emails the height of writerly romanticism).
This is romantically justifiable in that saying you are a writer doesn’t really need to be qualified with any specific credentials. If you wistfully tell people you’re a doctor, but you have no training, your announcement will likely be met more with concern than appreciation.
Sure, some people will ask “What have you written?”, as a way to deflate your pronouncement, and they will have their own internal judgement system to apply. Luckily for me, I do have some answers for those pedants. For example, as a senior in highs school, I paid $50 to a publisher to include one of my poems in an anthology. When the book arrived it was over 200 pages of poems from other kind naïve souls in a tragically tiny font printed on cheap paper.
Signal Chain is my self-imposed opportunity to write things other than business emails to empty my brain and to challenge myself into doing it in a way that is higher stakes than just sending myself a letter. If I have even one other subscriber, that’s enough for me.
Some of the content you might see in future editions:
What’s up with Acid rain, one of the threats that terrified 80’s kids
Why I don’t love the idea that “you shouldn’t criticize this [podcast, blog, etc.] because it’s free”
How understanding glaciers helped me not get lost while hiking one time
An exact formula for knowing when you will start being aware of your impending death
and more!
✌
Jason Clarke
Orono, Maine
October 17, 2025
