TIME FOR SOMETHING NEW

Dear subscriber,

Let’s have the conversation that’s been sitting in the hopper for a minute. And really it’s not “let us” it’s “I’m going to.” And it’s not a conversation, it’s more of a paragraph. But, either way, it’s clear to me and you that the original plan for this site did not work. And by that I mean two things:

1 - Full-time writing is great; making time to full-time write while having another career and several children was a hurdle.

2 - Without the benefit of a room of comedy writers to talk to / befriend / commiserate with, I could not ingest the full firehose of news without going what doctors refer to as “batshit insane.” I didn’t realize this until my wife found me on the living room floor, muttering about how crosstabs in red-state polls overindex manual labor jobs vs retail.

3 - (I’m adding a thing) Part of what made #1 difficult is that I am a serial reviser. Not a perfectionist, but a “let’s do one more draft” ist. That leads to good stuff. But it also takes a lot of time. Any speech you’ve heard me give or script I’ve put out, people said that it was good 3 revisions before I saved it as FINAL. Which truly turned even short pieces into long processes.

Anyway. What now? Well, as I’ve churned ways to make this thing actually good, I keep coming back to the original idea — breaking down what’s going on with unique ideas and a bunch of jokes. But over the decade-plus I’ve done that, it almost always happens with a microphone, whether I’m saying it or I’ve handed it to a famous dark-haired man in a suit to say it.

So I’m gonna send that out, through this blog. Why? Because it is eminently more produceable with the same information, POV, and Classic Greg Vibes. It’s not the only thing (it’s still a blog, still for writing) but it’s the fastest way to respond to whatever fire is burning brightest. It can hopefully provide a nice roux base layer for whatever this gumbo of a blog will be.

First one’s recorded and it drops tomorrow morning. It’s about the shutdown, and Schumer, and where the hell we go from here. Talk to you then.

— Greg