My Substack Summer
"and now for something completely different"
Editor’s Note
Please don’t take any of the following seriously. My client was in a period of wistful introspection when cooking a rather delicious looking full English breakfast this afternoon (mushrooms, beans, sausages, bacon, a few more mushrooms, a couple more rashers of bacon…) and all I could make out were fragments of sentences, half words and phrases and, to the best of my ability, I’ve reproduced what I could remember as the sweet smells of cooked bacon wafted from the kitchen as he screamed, and believe me, you’d remember this as well as I do if you’d been here, he screamed “My Substack Summer - I’ll tell you about my Substack Summer”, over and over, and over again. It reminded me of the John Goodman character in the Coen Brothers film Barton Fink, but that’s not important right now. What is rather more important is the tracking down of my client as the last time I saw him, or rather, heard him, was an hour or so ago. He was on his knees if I recall, shaking his fists, screaming and pointing at the full moon above. I wouldn’t describe him wailing or pleading or even gently sobbing. It was a full on primal scream and “I’ll tell you about my Substack Summer” when I last saw him and he seemed so inconsolable I thought twice before mentioning the moon wasn’t full. There wasn’t a moon at all if I’m being completely honest.
Just a dark void of blackness. Much like my client.
I’ll let you know if I find him.
Hello folks! Well it would appear to be that time of year again and “My Substack Summer” has rolled around once more. Was it here last year? I’m so blinded by the science here I don’t recall or remember. Will there be another one next year? One can but hope an EMP strike has finally taken down the internet by then. Who knows? We could be in the middle of a nuclear winter come this time next year and again, hope springs eternal.
We could all do with the entertainment.
I’m guessing and shooting in the dark here but I presume we’re supposed to publish our respective SSS’s (Substack Summer Statistics) but who needs that kind of embarrassment and shame that will haunt my family for generations to come? Not me Jack. And I have no-one to blame aside from myself for the abject facts and figures I won’t be publishing for I simply don’t read enough here and so no-one knows I’m even here and not surprisingly, my whopping subscriber count of 23 (TWENTY THREE!) became 21 (TWENTY ONE!) in the blink of an eye over the weekend and this is all a complete and utter waste of my fucking time and I hate social media and I hate myself even more than I usually do for hating something that isn’t real but has to be real otherwise I’ll never sell any books and as that’s vitally important for my financial survival I’ll keep going, promoting my work and books to next to fucking no-one and having a subscriber count and reader count that would shame a nursery school child.
21 subscribers eh? Brilliant, isn’t it? Hundreds of articles. Heart and Soul in every one. Most “likes” I ever get on an article? 2 (TWO!). A Re-Stack? The rarity causes me to come out in hives all over my body and I begin feeling the affects of the bends and I have to go to Barbados and sit and stare at the sun from a sandy beach for 2 weeks just to recover. Apart from Barbados, sandy beaches and staring at the sun for 2 weeks, the rest of this paragraph is 100% true.
Shameful isn’t it?
It’s all about getting an audience I hear you cry and in response I’ll say I’ve tried, fuck me have I tried, here, that sick and twisted mental asylum that is Medium, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram. Hundreds of articles equates to hundreds of tweets, hundreds of videos, FaceBook and Twitter posts and articles that are far too good for the pond life that exist on Medium, yet I lose an audience, not increase it.
“Nobody Knows me
Even though I'm always there
A statistic, a reminder
Of a world that doesn't care”
and so much for all that. I was planning on having a laugh a minute back and forth between myself and my fictional editor rather than the balderdash above, but I can’t be fucked with it any more. Who needs this kind of hassle when I can just go back to staring at the kitchen wall or writing stuff on the internet that my own personal pride should prevent, such as how much I hate myself for hating myself even more because of my shameful desperation to be even marginally successful on the internet and that since publishing my books I hate myself even more because I talk about and promote the fucking things endlessly, at every opportunity, to the entirety of The Matrix in a land of make believe, and that land of honey and milk has told me, in no uncertain terms, that I might as well go to my local beach and try and stop the tide from coming in.
I don’t even know what that last sentence even means and I think I need another cup of tea. It’s not a Substack thing. Some of you lovely people get staggering amounts of likes and re-stacks and I don’t know how you deal with the acclaim! All power to you.
I’m so fucked off I can’t even be bothered with an ending. I need a cup of tea.
And an exorcist.
🤪🤣🤷🏼 Loved it, because we all go a little crazy here.