Hey there. Been a while. Hope you’re doing well, though who are we kidding? Everything’s fucking horrible and you, like me, are either barely holding it together or deluding yourself that you aren’t. You know about what’s causing the national/global agita, and I’m not about to add to the infernal discourse surrounding it all, except to grumble that, after decades of developing a gourmet’s palate for the absurd, the ridiculous and the risible, we’ve been gifted with perhaps the deepest bench of utterly bonkers public figures in our history and they’re too dangerous to laugh at. (Well, no, that’s not true, I laugh plenty at them - the laughs just wind up sticking in my throat often as not.)
As far as matters closer to home go, well, it’s been little better. This past summer was practically Bananaramian in its cruelty, and the autumn hasn’t been much of an improvement. Grief, loss, sadness, pain. Yay. Add in your classic duo - Fear and Loathing, back, stronger than ever and ready to give Bob Dylan a run for his money on a Never-Ending Tour of their own! - and ‘24 is looking to make ‘20 look like, I dunno, ‘97 or whenever we had it so much better and neither realized nor appreciated it. I’d share the details, but I haven’t the words (you wanna know how long it’s taken me to grunt out these two, not especially good paragraphs? Not telling you that either, mostly because it’s utterly pathetic), and besides, y’all are suffering too (and if you aren’t, the fuck is wrong with you?) and don’t need the pile-on.
The one thing all this is bringing starkly home to me is that time is short, and if I have stuff I want to accomplish, I’d best get the fuck to work. Only problem is, I only seem to have the energy and resolve to make that particular empathic exortation to myself, after which I’m so spent I wind up downgrading my ambition level to “sitting up on the couch to watch the last forty minutes of Branded to Kill on Criterion 24/7 instead of lying down” (and not quite hitting my goals there either). Got books and limited-print-run periodicals stacked in a series of neglected totebags strewn about house and vehicle and workplace I’ve yet to peruse, notions spinning around in the conceptual centrifuge needing to be plucked out and developed into concepts, existing projects moldering while I dither and flinch at the amount of finessing and editing required to make them presentable (I haven’t forgotten you, Dennis, I swear), and goddamn I want to take a nap rather than finish this ungainly sentence because that’s how bad it’s gotten.
But I’ve got old stuff I can share, still, even if that, too, only reminds me of my chronic lack of followthrough. So here’s a bonus episode of Laughing at Others, which is not really that at all but somehow that’s what Substack insists it be filed under for some reason I don’t have the energy to check. What this is is the first and only episode of my first attempt at a comedy/interview podcast, To Be Announced, from a dozen years ago. Put a fair amount of time and effort into the thing, and I believe it shows, but as so often happens, I found myself unable to muster a comparable amount of either to put together a second installment. But I think it’s pretty good as a standalone piece of podcastular self-indulgence and worth sharing, particularly since much of it is taken up with my conversation with one of my favorite humor scribes, the great Ellis Weiner (who contributes to a ‘stack of his own, which I recommend you follow, until it ends next week after which you should follow whatever it is he does after that), and the self-penned and -performed comedy that takes up the rest of the show is mostly not as embarrassing as it might be. (The very last bit in the show, possibly the best-written part of the whole mishegas, requires a bit of explanation to make any sense at all: basically, you have to bear in mind that the great comedian/writer Paul F. Tompkins seemed to appear on just about every comedy-based podcast of note back in 2012 and thereabouts. A line or two of exposition probably would have helped there, but why make it easy/comprehensible for anyone?)
So check this out if you care to. And I actually may have something else for you as soon as tomorrow. Do try and restrain yourselves.
LAUGHING AT OTHERS presents Podcast Your (Stale) Bread Upon The Water: TO BE ANNOUNCED, episode 1 of 1