Life is a balance between really dumb, ill-advised shit and hoping people will laugh

Has Jack finally found his calling...or is he just kidding himself again?

Probably satirical, but IDGAF….

A note from NS&CB Intergalactic HQ in Uranium City, Saskatchewan….

A belated but hearty “thank you” to my new subscribers, especially my newest paid subscribers (You like me!! You really like me!!) The cool thing about Substack is the opportunity to be rewarded for good writing, and it’s beginning to feel as if my devotion to my craft might be starting to pay off.

Unlike

Heather Cox Richardson

, I’ve yet to make Substack my bitch. I’ve been told she’s pulling in something like $5,000,000 annually. Good on her if that’s the case; it’s something we can all aspire to, right? My annualized income from Substack has fewer zeroes, but all things in good time.

That said, it’s good to know I have readers, and I appreciate all of you for reading my work, whether you’re sending dinero my way or not. It’s good to know I’m not screaming into the void. I’m making decent progress on my goal of monetizing being a smartass. I’ve been told that’s WAY easier than trying to do the same with being a dumbass.

Stay tuned. Y’all can say you witnessed the silliness when I was just a minor embarrassment.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I thought it would be cool to be a stand-up comedian. Then I watched what they do and realized I’d probably soil my shorts if I ever stood in front of a crowd of more than two bipeds and tried to be funny. ‘Cuz, like Steve Martin once said, comedy isn’t pretty.

Humor is hard. It hits differently for all of us, and what I might find uproariously funny (and I do have a decidedly twisted sense of humor) might deeply offend someone who’s rational and has their head on straight. I’ve learned the hard way, more times than I care to remember, that humor isn’t humor for everyone.

Yes, I’ve offended, pissed off, angered, and alienated more than my fair share of folks with my attempts at humor in my younger days. Now that I’m older and allegedly more mature, I’m more cautious about whom I subject to what types of humor.

Usually.

(Hey, gurrrl….)

And sometimes, I talk a walk of the dumb end and prove that experience, at least in my case, is worth precisely nothing. Still, ‘tis better to be a smartass than a dumbass, no?

Of course, the great thing about trying to monetize being a smartass on Substack is that I can dump whatever silliness I have in mind here, publish it, and then forget about it until someone asks, “You didn’t REALLY mean that…did you?”

By then, I’ve usually long since forgotten about whatever my interlocutor is inquiring about. That’s the great thing about having ADD and zero short-term memory; I’m not burdened by having to store a lot of stuff I may have previously written about in my memory bank.

Out of sight, out of mind—which isn’t always a good thing.

(Do we get kneepads and lipstick issued to us, or must we supply our own?)

It’s like Stephen Colbert used to tell his guests before taping his old show, The Colbert Report- “You know I play an idiot, right?” That’s about the way I play this. Most of the time, my inner 12-year-old sits at my MacBook’s keyboard. He’s notorious for lacking a filter or internal editor. Sometimes, when I go back later to edit a newsletter, I’ll read a section and think, “He said WHAT?? Man, you can’t say that around a bunch of adults. They’ll have you for lunch.”

Of course, my reader doesn’t know that. They think an actual, honest-to-God, sentient adult wrote whatever appears on their screen…and most of the time, they’re almost right.

You know I play an idiot, right??

Yeah, sometimes it does, but that’s the nature of the beast, ya know? Sometimes it’s a ‘24 Lamborghini Countach that goes from 0-60 in the time it takes you to fart. Or it could be an ‘83 Yugo with three bald tires and a clutch that sticks because—well, because it’s a Yugo and no car ever built in Serbia was worth shit, knowhutimean?

More often than not, I think I make my point, if perhaps not always in quite the way I’d probably intended. That’s the beauty of this, though. It’s like a cooking show where you get five ingredients and have to figure out what you can make of it. Depending on your ingredients, your final product might be brilliant—or it might turn out to be an unmitigated disaster and a poison illegal in 47 countries.

Somedays, I’ll sit down at my laptop, and it feels like my five ingredients are “Donald Trump,” “peanut butter,” “election interference,” “wet dogs,” and “butt plugs.” Somehow, I have to find a way to weave all that together in a way that makes sense. Sometimes, the ingredients don’t make even that much sense. Still, when you do what I do, you come up with something because—well, when you have paying subscribers, suddenly you’re a professional idiot, and people expect to be entertained. Or at least informed.

And you think I make this shit up? Meh, who knows? It’s possible. Maybe that IS how the sausage gets made ‘round here. I’m not giving away the family secrets. At least not yet.

When I start a newsletter, I often don’t know how it will end, only that it will be at least 1000 words and will somehow make sense and hang together. Beyond that, I’m flying blind. Fortunately, I’ve gotten pretty good at pulling arguments out of something close to nothing and making it sound like I know what I’m talking about. Maybe I should’ve been a speech writer or a comedy writer. Then again, perhaps there’s not much difference between the two.

I think I have something to add to the public discourse. Sometimes, I’m not sure what that might be, but I keep searching for it, and I think that, more often than not, the end product is pretty good. No, I will never win a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize, but that’s OK. I’ll have my sanity, and I get to write—AND I have people who read my work and a few who even send me money.

Damn, am I a lucky boy or what?? Yes, I most certainly am.

Thanks for tagging along.

All of my posts are public at this time. Any reader financial support will be greatly appreciated. There’s no paywall blocking access to my work (except for a few newsletters). I’ll trust my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their financial support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.