HeyJaredMatthew R Kenney
FREE Substack about learning bike design and welding from scratch—plus a little on night photography. All photographs are mine. Substack requires a minimum charge—but I’m not comfortable monetizing hobbies.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 5
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- Sep 6, 2026
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- Aug 6, 2026
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Not a Torque Wrench in That Country (opens the original)
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I have an advanced bicycle mechanic certification. Twenty hours of instruction, and I loved every one of them. The man who taught me was a retired mechanical engineer, and I mean an actual engineer, not the kind who puts it in a LinkedIn headline. He invented the missile rack that hangs on every F-16. Had his own company. Worked directly with Lockheed. Ran a firearms company for a while as CEO. Now he runs a bicycle nonprofit, because apparently when you’ve spent a career hanging ordnance on fig
Fatigue Life (opens the original)
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[A note on process, because this form of expression is a little different for me. It starts with pen and paper. I bullet out the theme and the hooks rattling around in my head, then I read the page back and connect them out loud, dictating the essay into the plain text editor I use for work, which is Sublime Text (shout out to Sublime Text. I've been using you for eighteen years, and I've never paid for you). I move that into Microsoft Word, and then I type more and edit what I spoke. Finally I
Two Books (opens the original)
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Years ago I ran into a line of Eric Hoffer’s: every great cause begins as a movement, turns into a business, and ends up a racket. I went and read everything the man ever wrote. Around the same time I learned that Christopher Hitchens reread Darkness at Noon once a year, without fail, the way other men change the oil. I’m forty-six now, and those two books have done more to shape how I see the world than anything else on the shelf.Every few years, someone you respect goes under. Smart, funny, re
Who Pays the Bill (opens the original)
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We put my father-in-law to rest yesterday at St. John’s Cemetery in Queens. He lies in a mausoleum, which is a classy way to go. It was cold, climate-controlled, spotless marble. I had never been inside one, and I appreciated the chill. The chapel mausoleum looked like something out of Star Trek. A passageway, a portal. Then the priest came out, and his name was Michael Sebastian. That made two Sebastians. Sebastian was a huge science fiction fan, and this felt like the best way to walk through
Sebastian Sora: The Wake (opens the original)
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Today we say goodbye to Sebastian. My father-in-law. A man who was impossible to sum up on a page, but I’m going to try. I know you liked constraints. They make you think harder. They make you think sharper. So I think you might appreciate this, in an odd way.He was a generous man. The most generous I’ve ever met. A father of four, married twice. His first wife died of breast cancer, and he kept going, and he kept his family together.Four kids, eleven grandkids, and he showed up for every one of
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