My friend Nate and I have been meeting for Old Man Breakfast for years. It's a ritual I inherited from my dad, who used to meet his friends for coffee at Booche's in Columbia, Missouri before the bar opened for the day. We liked the idea enough to steal it.
A few years ago we started meeting on Tuesday nights for something we eventually called Useless. The idea was to turn our philosophical conversations into actual projects: deliberate, planned, committed, and of no practical use to anyone.
Projects
Published 2025 by Puzzlegrass Press. Nate wrote it. I'm in it as Fox. It documents seven Useless projects: part philosophical dialogue, part Victorian naturalist expedition to an imaginary continent, part creation myth. We started it in 2019 and worked on it for six years.
Nate and I were both in bands for a long time. We both know what it feels like when someone in the crowd already knows your song, not just humming along but actually knowing it. It's the best feeling you can have on a stage. We wanted to give that to somebody.
We spent months finding the right band. Local, small, a song we could actually learn. When we found them and found the song "Feel It," we memorized every word. We recruited our friend Seth. We made t-shirts out of white tees and black electrical tape: the song title, not the band name. Wore them under overshirts.
When they started playing, we tore the overshirts off and screamed every word along with the singer, line by line, for the whole song.
Then we left.