Insights from Nebo

In 2011, I tried stand-up comedy for the first time. I heard that everyone bombs the first time on stage, and I was no exception.

It was at a place called The Five Spot in Little Five Points. I wore a bright tank top, a crystal necklace for good chi and copper bracelets that supposedly promoted good circulation. Since losing interest in astrology, my wardrobe choices have changed considerably. I performed at an open mic night with an audience of bitter comedians, angry that NBC didn’t cast them in a sitcom half a year into their careers. It wasn’t an easy crowd.

People rush off to meaningless jobs day after day, you see them coughing in the subways at dawn. They squander their souls on things like rent, decent clothes, gas and electricity, insurance, behaving like peasants who have come out of the fields and are so dreadful tickled because they can buy baubles and doodads in stores.

 -Jack Kerouac, 1948, age 26, author of On The Road

Today is a great day. I woke up to a steady, beating rain outside. I love a rainy Sunday. Uh oh, gotta go to the bathroom.

-Drew Grossman, 2015, age 26, author of Pumpkin Drewskis: Drew’s Take on Pumpkin Brewskis

The sentences above are taken from the journals of two writers. One is a Nebo copywriter and the other is a 26-year-old who, up to this point in his life, hasn’t published much and lives with his parents.

To use the word “writer” to describe us both may be overly generous to my case, but that’s not all we have in common. We also both journal (or journaled). Most good writers journal, from Hemingway to Kerouac to Kafka to David Foster Wallace.

2015 was an incredible year for us here at Nebo. We welcomed Big Drum into the Nebo family, helped launch phase two of the Choose ATL campaign, stood up to factory farms with ASPCA, cheered to #LoveWins, and celebrated the holidays with an incredibly adorable group of shelter animals.

We also ate a lot of birthday cake, played a lot of ping-pong, and debated important matters such as the proper time to drink rosé and pumpkin beer. In between all of this, we managed to capture a lot of our shenanigans and serious musings on the blog.

As we say goodbye to a year that was great to us, we take a few moments to reflect back on our top posts of 2015. Thank you for enjoying the wild ride with us this year. We look forward to what the future holds.

Happy New Year!

My name is Oreo, and I’m a lucky dog. I live in a doggie apartment complex with my best friends and some of the most loving people in the world.

Each day, I get to leave my little home for about 30 minutes. I get to go outside, play with my doggie friends, and stretch my legs! They get stiff from my doggie cage.

I’ve been here several years, but it’s not so bad. I know a lot of nice humans who take care of me. I meet a lot of nice humans, too! They come in and pet me, talk to me, and some even play with my friends and me. Sometimes, they take my friends home with them.

I’m not sad, but I do miss my friends. And I don’t understand why no one ever takes me home.

Regardless of religion, for many of us the holidays mean time with family. If your family is like mine...actually, no. Scratch that. If your family is real, not pretend and not a Norman Rockwell painting, you probably have a few personalities. Or eccentrics. Or weirdos. Lord knows I got ‘em.

These are the uncles who take family gatherings as an opportunity to pitch their newest, most exciting business idea. “It’s like Uber but for air conditioning repair. Get it? It’s an app. Boom! Right?” Or it’s the cousin who’s been working the campaign of a Republican presidential candidate no one has heard of. “CNN won’t let us debate—not even the undercard. You know why, right? You know why? (You don’t ever answer because you don’t want to encourage him.) They’re scared of the truth telling. It’s a revolution, man.” Maybe it’s not your side. Maybe it’s your partner’s aunt. The one who shows up to every family gathering sporting a new husband (“He’s your uncle now!”) and a smattering of children between the ages of four and 16.

Nerve damage is a recurring story in my life. I injured my lower back playing baseball in high school, coped with nerve pain on and off throughout my running career and, more recently, temporarily paralyzed my foot after what I’ll pretend was an epic and daring feat (it wasn't).

So when this past July rolled around and I found out about another case of nerve damage, the news wasn’t too hard to stomach. I’d been in the situation before. I knew the best- and worst-case scenarios. What was hard to stomach, however, was how it all began.

I took a nap.