The Lash

It’s a strange thing. This I mean. Writing these things and sending them out to you and, hopefully, others.

Sometimes I have a plan and know exactly what I’m going to say. Other times? Not so much. The world is spinning too fast for me to have a handle on things all the time, and I do get tired of finding new ways to call the President an idiot. I mean, there are only so many synonyms.

Often these things come off as sort of a running commentary on the day to day dumb fuckery that surrounds us, and by the time I’ve completed documenting the outrage du jour, something even more egregious has already taken its place. It’s like being a war correspondent and, due to budget cuts, being forced to cover multiple conflicts at the same time.

So I try to break things up. I’ll write about this or that song, because it is music that gets me out of bed in the morning, and rocks me gently to sleep each night. Rock and roll. The blues. Pop. Soul. Funk. Folk. Mozart and Motorhead. Brahms, Beethoven, and the B-52s. And why Love Shack is just as badass as Für Elise. Ok, I never wrote about that specifically, but just thinking on it now I could write a doctoral thesis on why it’s true. I don’t think it’s incongruous to consider Back in Black to be in the same league as Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. If you feel the same way, you are the person I write for. We are weirdos on the same weirdo plane.

But I’ll also use this space to offer paeans for lost friends. I’ve written about my own dark nights of the soul. I’ve written extensively about my Father. My times growing up. I’ve written about the act of writing itself, which can make about as much sense as singing about architecture, as the saying goes. But still.

So yea. I write about pretty much anything and everything, which is exactly the wrong approach in the current Substack environment, where the top pages find a niche like cooking or Bob Dylan concerts and burrow into it like a vole. In other words, if I had focused my page here specifically on the similarities between Beethoven and the B-52s I’d have a lot more subscribers than I do now. But who knew?

I started this page back in February of 2021. Substack was relatively new then. Nobody I knew had ever heard of it. Four years on no-names like me have pretty much been elbowed out of the way by media stars and the like. It’s turned into a less-dumb Facebook/Twitter, which is good, but still has the “Facebook/Twitter” aspect to it, which is not. Just yesterday the Foo Fighters joined. I don’t know what I was expecting but it sure wasn’t sharing a space with Dave Grohl. Whatever. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to attempt to get paid for your work. I’m grateful to the subscribers I have, and do my best to beg for more, but I had hoped my work would finance more than my bar tab. I had done all sorts of math in my head….figuring that this many thousand subscribers was the “I can quit my day job” sweet spot. At the time the nation was obsessed with “The Tiger King”. The bar was low. I dared to dream.

It didn’t quite work out. But here I am, still here and still never missing a deadline, despite the fact that deadlines only exists in my head. For a while it was three full columns a week. These days it’s two. Other than ingrained Catholic guilt, I can’t really say why I’ve never missed a week in five years. Some weeks the words flow, and others they dribble. But I am always prepared to lash myself until they do come. Which is kinda what I’m doing right now.

I suspect I’ll keep doing this until I either run out of things to say, or lose the physical ability to tap these things into coherence. Despite feeling like I’m groping in the dark much of the time, there’s plenty out there to write about. I’m sometimes tempted to focus on one specific thing, but then my OCD kicks in and I get distracted by the piece of lint on the floor and decide to write about how a piece of lint on the floor can distract a writer, and everything just goes all to hell. So, Bits and Pieces it will remain.

And this post will be free, because why not? Paywalls suck. But still. For some of us, paywalls are the difference between paying the bills and not paying the bills. They are the difference between becoming a Wal-Mart greeter, and waxing poetic about Van Morrison’s Moondance record.

I’m better at one than I am at the other. Trust me. So you’ll come?

In a bit…

—tf