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  • 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.

Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday.

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