8/1/2023 0 Comments Slack tide matt labashI did, after all, watch all six seasons of Girls. Nor can I lodge convincing complaints against gender fluidity. Not that I don’t have utmost sympathy for endangered species – I was a print journalist. The kind of lengths most modern editors would no longer stand for unless it was a very important three-part series on how the endangered Sumatran orangutan is showing signs of gender fluidity. My generous, long-suffering editors allowed me to roam the land on their tab, unearthing what they used to call “characters” (shorthand for people with personality in a town that often had none), and to write them up at ungodly lengths. (The two are frequently indistinguishable.) My beat was the human comedy, which often passes for the human tragedy. For those who don’t know me (can any of us really know each other?), I spent two-and-a-half decades as a magazine journalist, eschewing the dreary sausage-making of Washington life to write about everything from chicken-wire circuit Christian wrestlers to diabolical dirty tricksters, from crack-smoking mayors to tangelo-colored real estate developers. With the doubters now silenced, let’s proceed. So it’s best not to get too wrapped around the axle of being an original. Roughly 7.7 billion of those people walk the earth right now (nearly six percent of the total). According to the Population Reference Bureau, 117 billion people have been born since the dawn of time. Remember when they said the internet would serve as illuminative lamplight on the higher path to enlightenment? It was supposed to unify us, making us wiser, better informed, more empathetic. Don’t ever believe anything the techno-utopians tell you. Who knows what to call this vehicle? Let’s go with “strategically arranged nouns and verbs” as a placeholder.ģ. It conjures images of my Aunt Georgia knocking out a Christmas form letter, updating us on the status of Uncle Phil’s plaque psoriasis. I’ve never liked the word “blog,” which sounds like something you cough up rather than write. Didn’t the techno-utopians tell us information wanted to be free?”ġ. Another journalism industry refugee seeking his fortune – or subsistence living – trying to charge us for his blog or ‘newsletter’ or whatever they’re calling these things. And so, I can almost hear the naysayers naysaying: “Great, just what the world needs. I keep meaning to ask if he’d like to trade lives.īut the starting my own Substack bit is akin to saying “welcome to my kimchi-taco truck” three years ago, or to my froufrou cupcakery a decade prior. The only other one who shows up in my Google alerts is a star college lacrosse player. Just saying those words makes me feel like a honking cliché. Or as my English-speaking readers prefer, “hello.” I’m Matt Labash, and welcome to Slack Tide, my brand spanking-new Substack.
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