A half decade of Worcester Sucks

Some will hate hearing this: we're doing better than ever

In the words of Marty Whelan, host of the Irish morning music program Katie and I listen to every morning because they still have those over there and they’re freakin good, today was the day to break out the man-kinis. I sure did. I hope you did too. Hoooowee what a scorcher.

In classic Worcester Sucks fashion I am getting out the five-year anniversary post much later than I’d have liked, with seventeen minutes to spare on this, the anniversary—the day it simply has to run.

A lot of you who have been with me since the beginning will be getting renewal notices soon or you already have. Things have been going better than ever for this outlet of late as I’ll explain in the State of the Newsletter section further down. But for now, just take a gander at this deal...

...and think to yourself has this outlet’s coverage of this city been worth $34 to you?

Since I’m getting this out late, I’ll be extending the deadline of the pre-order for the Bad Brains shirts to tomorrow at 5 p.m. Get your order in now I may never order these again. The custom four-color screen print is a little pricey on my end, and yours too, but I think you’ll find it’s well worth it.

Happy Juneteenth as well, to everyone but the fucks at city hall who decided now was the time to start enforcing some sort of flag policy. This line from the Telegram write-up…

"After we submitted our request to raise the Juneteenth flag on Thursday, June 19th, have it stay up over the weekend and taken down Monday, June 23rd, folks from the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion reached out to our committee saying that this would not be possible," the post (from the Black Heritage Committee) continued.

You can’t make this stuff up man...

And to everyone not celebrating Juneteenth, pointedly or due to ignorance, we actually have a neat new holiday to catch every single one of you: Happy Karen Read Day!

If you don’t know what I’m talking about God Bless You. If you do, and you think the above assertion—that Karen Read Trial Watchers and Juneteenth Celebrators are mutually exclusive categories of people—is a little racist toward white people... yes it for sure is. But prove me wrong. And try not to be all woke about it in the process you fuckin’ little snowflake.

The bulk of this post is already written but I like to save the intro for last usually. I just got back from a pretty interesting meeting of the local media minds at a local bar to discuss something I’m not really involved in planning and shouldn’t jump the gun in talking about.

I will say however that being called a “citizen journalist” by someone who’s been doing this for less time than me and makes less money is more insulting than I thought it would be. I would like to remind the person that said that and the rest of you that I worked at ~real papers~ for almost a decade and I have bylines in The Intercept, The Columbia Journalism Review, Teen Vogue and Mother Jones, among other outlets of national stature that don’t bite on any old pitch from any old journalist, citizen or otherwise. If I am a citizen journalist every working journalist in this city is a citizen journalist. What does that term even mean? Pretty annoying! But whatever.

Today’s post covers some stock standard bologna from the city council then a customary State of The Newsletter Address in which I spill my beans.

First though, a much-too-nice testimonial sent in from Greg Opperman, one of the talented local writers I’ve had the great pleasure of publishing, editing and co-writing with. Our last joint venture, “The Red Scare never went away, it just briefly turned green,” was one of the best pieces Worcester Sucks put out this year. Not bad for a couple of citizen journalists, right Greg?

Hey readers, Greg here.

I remember, way back when I was working at the Boston Globe, watching Worcester Magazine being stripped for parts. Working in a declining industry was a huge bummer—and I loosely followed the decline in local news coverage as people around Bill were laid off at WoMag. I was acutely aware of the limits of legacy media, how established editors held back young journalists, and how coverage always steered away from telling the truth in favor of the “objective view from nowhere” we’re so used to in the mainstream press. When Bill launched Worcester Sucks, I slammed the subscribe button harder than I’ve ever clicked a button in my life. I’m not lying when I say that this newsletter is probably the best money I’ve ever spent in my life. Bill has expertly captured the current political moment in Worcester, where everything simultaneously feels hopeless, and yet, real change has never felt more possible. I’m so proud to be able to support the work he has done, and it’s been a privilege to be able to write a piece every so often. Bill’s not only made a name for himself, but has empowered so many others, like me, to have a voice and an audience. As hard as I’ve worked on the few things I’ve written, I can’t imagine the fortitude it takes for Bill to consistently put out quality local journalism week after week. This newsletter has made a real difference in this city, and it’s making a bigger impact every week. Cheers to Bill, for the last five years, and hopefully for 500 more. Thanks for everything. Send him all of your money, or at least a few bucks every month.

You heard the man!

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Merch Store / Bandcamp

Here’s a recent testimonials from a subscriber signing up for paid that I found edifying.

"I supported your work because you are doing courageous, on-the-ground journalism as few others will. Your voice is so compelling because it combines real-world toughness with humanity and heart. Much like Worcester does. "

Thank you Anne!

A lot of self centered bullshit today but what is an anniversary if not an exercise in such? You gotta do it. It means a lot that this outlet means a lot to so many people. It means a lot that there are a lot of people here trying to build a better community, that they’re succeeding against a completely stacked deck, and that this newsletter has played some part in the endeavor.

Now to some council notes. Then, after that, a look at the health and well being of this publication. Good news on all fronts... except the council, of course.

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Council write up

The day-after headline of Tuesday’s meeting was the proposal to limit comment from the public—the split vote and the argument over it. I won't spend any space on that. GBH’s Sam Turken does a good job here. There are worse versions in all the other outlets.

I’ll just say that the vote fell along the same old 6-5 axis: Joe & Co (Petty, Colorio, Mero-Carlson, Toomey, Bergman, Russell) on one side (guess which) and the younger, more progressive and only non-white councilors on the other (Haxhiaj, King, Ojeda, Pacillo, and, in spirit, Nguyen). This is the same six vote crank majority supporting the security clampdown of city hall. The instinct in both cases is to inoculate themselves from the public, whose very real anger at the state of things they intuit as disrespect for the sake of it. They look out at the citizenry and see rabble rousers and outside agitators and the Antifa of the Fox News imagination. Their response has been indignant, like they’d been made to share a crowded bus with lepers. Bubble boys & girls, each of them. They just want to put on their reality show in peace and not have it be sullied by any “politics” happening. They do not want their fiction about what this city tainted by the introduction of any reality.

The more interesting bit came a few moments later, when they discussed an item (12m) requesting guidance on what to do when a threat is made against an elected official. District 5 Councilor Etel Haxhiaj, the recipient of more threats in recent memory than one person should have to bear in a lifetime, stood up and let it rip. She said she’d like to amend it to “reflect the reality that a lot of elected officials are facing these days, including being murdered for their political views.”

Political violence is widespread. I have some concerns about the different interpretations people have about political violence. Violence means violence. It means physical harm. It means harassment. It means violence, physical harm against people, against their families, something that we've seen nationally, and a tone and tenor that is being replicated here in Worcester.

She said she’s made at least 10 such threats public in recent months. “Messages that say that ICE agents should have bashed my brains on the ground, that if this person was a police officer, that they would have wanted me to be dead. People who have wished myself and my children, people who have called city hall, have called our council aides, warning me that I should be careful about my boys, my babies.” I’ve seen a good number of these myself. They are fuckin’ nasty. Evidence that the sickos live among us.

People who have walked to my house, slowly driving and looking at my house. And people who have simply wished that I would be raped, that my children would be raped. People who have accosted me at memorial events and have called me a “scumbag fucking piece of shit,” have followed me, urged me to call them the same, but I'm not them. I'm not any of these people who use political harassment and intimidation tactics against a woman, a mother, a public official, because simply they do not like my stances. They do not like my protecting my constituents.

Some of her colleagues on the city council, she said, have insinuated that she’s made stuff up, have refused to denounce any of it, have turned the other way, have themselves contributed, have changed the definition of violence so they can also claim victim. Remember when Candy Mero-Carlson was running around, talking about how Etel wasn’t a real refugee? Stuff like that. Like what Kate Toomey did right after Etel was finished. But before we get to that...

There was a bomb threat, a bomb threat, specific to my house. The only person I called was Councilor King because that's the only person I trust. That's the only person I trust. I didn't call the police. I didn't call the city manager. I didn't call you.

She scanned the room as she said that last bit, looking out at all the people who’ve given her no reason whatsoever to trust them, and plenty to not.

Haxhiaj was frustrated—you could see it, her body language suggested she was on the brink of exploding. And really, how could you not be? I often marvel at Etel’s ability to endure the absolute punishment that having convictions and a modicum of power will bring on a woman in this city, especially one who was born elsewhere. But it should be stressed: just because she can doesn’t mean she should. None of this is normal. None of this is fair. If Etel resigned tomorrow she’d have every right and would owe us nothing. She continued:

Why? Why? Why is it that it's permissible in this time and place that someone like me or anyone, anyone who has a difference of opinion, who holds values that are so dear to our community, gets to be attacked, smeared, accused, lied about with impunity, and not a single member of this body publicly denounces those.

Just a week prior, two city councilors publicly (and, I imagine, another four privately) pinned Haxhiaj as the shadow mastermind behind an anti-ICE protest that shut down the meeting. Kate Toomey and Candy Mero Carlson both, in public statements, named Etel as well as King and Nguyen, as the source of what they called a “riot.” (An insult to riots everywhere, including those put on by the police.)

Not only was this unfair, untrue, and completely besides the point of both the protest and the reasons for it, these messages went out to a crank base that’s getting whipped every day into a more insane frenzy.

On Saturday, Minnesota State Rep Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot dead by a man who had a hitlist of some 45 other left-of-center politicians and a few abortion clinics. The man dressed like a cop, drove an SUV designed to look like a police car, the lights were flashing. He had a Taser. A tactical vest. A badge. He shot the dog. He looked so much like a cop he fooled a real one. After he was apprehended the right wing media machine flooded the zone with a dense web of misinformation, making it near impossible for a layperson to distinguish fact from fiction. These same people at one point convinced Kate Toomey there’s a secret war on Christians afoot. The shadowy conspiracy you’ll sometimes catch her posting about in the twilight hours where she does her best work.

Toomey rose to speak a few minutes after Etel, and of course, narcissist that she is, took no temperature of the moment, nor any responsibility in creating unsafe conditions for Haxhiaj. Instead, she conflated mean posts on the internet with bomb threats. It was as if she hadn’t listened at all. In real time, she proved the point Haxhiaj was making.

“Within the past several years, I've had absolutely disgusting, vile lies and mistruths said about me.”

She said she, too, has gotten death threats, as recently as last year, but “I didn't have real substantial proof for anybody to do an investigation.” A weird thing to say when you’ve set out to engage in a game of one-upsmanship. Haxhiaj has shared at least 10 emails publicly. She said so. I find it hard to believe that Toomey wouldn’t share such evidence if she had it, and she hasn’t. It’s giving ‘I have a girlfriend she just lives in Canada.’ She went on to say this order should be expanded to include “our municipal brothers and sisters” by which she obviously means police.

All of it was an act of poopooing, in the vaguest terms, Haxhiaj’s safety concerns. She said nothing at all in sympathy or support. She just said “yeah but what about me.” Exhibiting the narcissist’s unending impulse to say um actually I’m the victim. To be the person around whom the story must revolve. To put another woman back in her place. Nothing but a middle schooler setting out to prove his dad’s cooler than your dad. He has, like, 500 skateboards. And a jetski. And he gives me his credit card to go to Hollister whenever I want. And your dad’s poor. You don’t even live on a cul-de-sac like I do.

Toomey and this middleschooler everyone my age either knows or was both evincing a uniquely American brand of social Darwinism that Trump uniquely embodies, that accounts for his meteoric rise to power, as explained in a great essay by ERik Baker in the latest Harpers.

“I happen to be a person that knows how life works,” Trump remarked in 2017, explaining why he trusts his instincts. This is the fatalistic kernel within all instantiations of social Darwinism: everything you see around you—­all the irrationality, all the hierarchy, all the pain—­is just the way of the world.

Ojeda followed Toomey and chastised her for putting out the statement she did.

“We have to take a stand and say hey we may not agree with each other but I'm not going to put that information out there because they're the ones that got to live with it and that's not right. That's not what I signed up for and I know that's not what we all signed up for but we can't let frustration take us away from our job. It's what we signed up for. We signed up to take the heat but not put heat on our Councillors, on our colleagues. It's not what we're here for to put heat on the Mayor and the City Manager. They have enough heat already. Why are we going to do that?

All the while throwing side eyes at Toomey, two chairs down from him in the same row. I’ve had my doubts in the past but must conclude Ojeda’s a standup dude and an asset on the city council. He might not be leading the charge but he’s not getting in the way of it either.

A few others speak. Moe Bergman and George Russell offer self-centered, unhelpful comments, akin to Toomey’s but less interesting.

At the end of the conversation King said he’d be releasing a video of an incident at a Memorial Day event in which Haxhiaj was confronted, harassed and intimidated by a psycho (my words). He said it’s important that “we're standing up for other folks in the moment and we're not looking the other way.”

King released it yesterday. It shows the psycho being a psycho. Off screen, the mayor is looking the other way, ignoring it.

In a statement accompanying the video he said Petty witnessed the confrontation and chose not to intervene. This jives with what I knew about the incident.

Consider that Petty did nothing in the moment depicted when you read the following quote from Tuesday’s meeting: “I guess all we have is each other at the end of the day and it can't just be selective outrage it's got to be outrage every time one of us gets attacked.”

Hmmmmm ok Joe. Sure.

— The budget got approved, not that there was any risk of it not happening. Of note: King made a stink about $2.5 million for the memorial auditorium project that may or may not ever come to pass, a massive pit, making consultants a lot of money on the city’s dime, leading to nothing but the promise of some future dubious urban renewal scheme. But at the same time, King pointed out, the city balked at spending considerably less acquiring former Becker College buildings on Sever Street that could have been incorporated into the public school system.

If we can borrow $2.5 million for the auditorium, we may or may not need it. But we have perfectly good facilities available for kids and youth and students. And we're not willing to access that same sort of funding.

And George Russell, bless his heart, made his final stink about the $500,000 annual we light on fire by handing over to Discover Central Mass (in the hopes we one day find it).

Russell asked a very good question: why isn’t the money coming out of the DCU Center’s special tax district? Discover Central Mass basically only promotes DCU center events. So, he said, why aren’t they paying it out of the DIF we set up for the DCU? Batista says the DCU isn’t making enough money, what with all the needed repairs.

Apparently at the last Finance Committee, the city’s CFO, Tim McGourthy, said Polar Park is going to cost us another $700,000 from the tax rolls this year, not-paying-for-itself twice in a row! Russell said if the DCU isn’t making money we have to start talking about getting rid of it. “I know the management company has probably an ironclad contract, but the conversations need to be had if they're not being had already. Is there enough revenue being generated here?”

You don’t need to read me write this for the one-thousand-and-first time but the DCU Center and Polar Park are both worthy of significant placements in the National Museum of Terrible Urban Renewal Schemes.

— Last council note: a good quote from This Week In Worcester’s Tom Marino, who took the mic at public comment to lambast the council about the city’s handling of the Natale Cosenza case, one of the worst abuses of police power in recent memory, for which there were of course no repercussions. Marino said:

If folks are putting their personal political ambitions ahead of public safety, again, ahead of having a police department that the city deserves, there's a word for that in the English language, it's called corruption, and we should stop it and get to work.

We won’t though, Tom. You might call it corruption but it’s also the way things work around here. So how could it be corrupt? How could the baseline operation of this city going back decades also be textbook corruption?

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State of the Newsletter

Five years, baby. Crazy to think about. On this day in June 2020 I said fuck it and started writing what I wanted to write. It landed, and continues to land, I’m proud to say!

By every metric that matters, this newsletter is doing better than ever. We’re quickly approaching the 5,000 overall subscriber mark...

Same goes for the smaller-seeming but actually much more difficult landmark of 800 paid subscribers...

You’ll notice one line has more squiggles than the other. While the free count goes up on a steady trajectory, the paid number waivers. There are good months and bad months. But we’re doing better than we were last June and that’s all that matters!

In past States of the Newsletter, I’ve anticipated a “plateau” where paid subscriptions level off and then start to dip. Grateful to say at the five year mark, that hasn’t happened yet.

Money-wise we’re also doing better than ever, sitting at an annual estimate of $52,000 more or less in gross income.

On top of that, we have our merch operation, which I decided last September or so to take much more seriously.

In the past year, we’ve done about $8,000 in merch sales. Using a rough 30 percent profit margin, we’ll call it $2,400 in my pocket, which is then spread into the pockets of those who write for me.

The Instagram too had a banner year, thanks in large part to the work of our new admin, Kelly Cashman, who consistently and reliably pulls out the key takeaways of a given post for an audience unlikely to ever read the full thing. At 5,450, we have more Instagram followers than subscribers, which is weird but cool.

I will for sure take it. She also makes the posts look badass.

worcester_sucks

A post shared by @worcester_sucks

********************BACKGROUND PHOTO CREDIT DAVID WEBB*************************

Since this time last year we produced 194 pieces of local journalism—averaging a piece up just about every other day—between my work, the podcast, Aislinn’s school coverage, Shaun’s Bad Advice column and Liz’s monthly Q&A series, Worcester Speaks. Substack does a bad job of measuring views analytics so I can’t get into the nitty gritty without running a separate program and that’s opening a whole can of worms I don’t have time to open.

We racked up at least 700,000 reads from at least 369,000 (nice) unique readers.

Our peak days for traffic were in the 20,000 range. This is immensely better than years past.

I don’t know what these metrics look like for other local outlets in the city but I don’t think they’re all that much better. And if they are that’s cool of course. But. You know…

Especially with the addition of Aislinn’s WPS In Brief column—allowing her and I to take on a city-side, school-side split, we’re no longer the scrappy upstart nipping at the bigger outlet’s ankles. We’re competing. And none of those outlets could operate on a $50,000 a year budget. So imagine what we could do with $100,000!

What metrics won’t—can’t—show is impact. And on that front I think we really thrive.

For one, Aislinn’s two-part series on literacy moved an important and little-discussed issue safely into the limelight.

Our coverage of the Gaza demonstrations last fall was easily the best available.

And then there’s Eureka Street, which we were all over. My reporting on that got picked up by Mother Jones and in front of me on my desk is a $500 check for that. Not bad for a citizen journalist.

If you have a favorite I’d love to hear it.

All of our work is due to the fact we have the time, energy and support from the community to do it. In that way, the direct reader contribution model is the only tried and true way of sustaining a small leftist operation such as this. It allows us to approach the work with no need for access, no advertisers to cater to, and no administrative overhead. There is no vulture capital firm leeching us to death—a long slow blood transfusion, as is the case with the Telegram and Gannett.

We just have Substack taking its 10 percent. And one of the goals for the next year is to move this newsletter to a different platform. The trouble is I don’t find the other platforms particularly appealing. Ghost is consistently annoying from my perspective as a reader. Beehiiv is the same. I’m not naive enough to believe their owners have distinguishable intentions from the Substack people. In an ideal world I contract someone to build a custom job. This outlet’s audience isn’t dependent on any platform. It’s here, in real life, within the boundaries of this city. And the techno-utopist in me thinks the idea of a homegrown open source build is neat. But there’s no rush. Substack is goofy the way that every silicon valley company ios goofy (hilarious typo, leaving it). They’ve allowed a goofy culture to foster among the writers on teh platform. But we don’t work for or with substack in any way. It is just a service, same as your Gmail is just a service.

So, please, consider helping us grow. It’s a direct investment in your community, really.

To prepare this post I took a trip down memory lane, revisiting the anniversary retrospective I wrote each year as this thing inched into maturity. An aside: It’s wild and a little embarrassing to read old work. But you can’t afford to have shame nor modesty in this industry. So walk with me through the years real quick.

June 19, 2020: Goodbye, Worcester Magazine and say hello to "Worcester Sucks and I Love It"

Local journalism institutions across the country are being systematically destroyed by hedge funds which see a profit to be made in managing and accelerating decline. Every year, there are fewer and fewer reporters covering Worcester. The people left are scrambling to fill pages or meet social media quotas. They’re doing the work of two or three people, at least, and they have no time to substantively dig into issues. What we’re left with is, at best, middling surface coverage of issues that deserve serious interrogation.

June 17, 2021: It’s been a whole freakin’ year

When I launched this newsletter, the intention was to make more money off my craft than I had a chance to at media outlets in this city while freeing myself from editorial control I profoundly disagreed with. And I have succeeded in that, if only marginally. But this whole Worcester Sucks project also serves at once as a critique and a possible way out of the dismal situation local journalism finds itself in.

June 17, 2022: Happy Birthday Worcester Sucks! Two whole years!

Looking back on the past year, I think the best way to view this newsletter is within the context of a general ascendence of a new progressive political project. There’s a through line in much of my writing since the election last November of a new political vision for the city rubbing up against the old guard. Fighting for space. The debate over the drone purchase which has been the key issue for the past few weeks — we don’t even have that conversation without this new progressive bloc.

June 18, 2023: If the cops weren’t there, something bad could have happened: A moment of anniversary reflection on the inciting event of this newsletter

As I reflect on three years of doing this thing, I know for certain I have gotten immensely better at both the craft and the art of writing about a city and a city’s politics. I know for a certain that people find my work valuable. I know I’ve made a contribution to the form of local journalism, so badly needing to adapt and evolve with such little resources to do so. My best work is still within me somewhere, waiting to be written. I know that. With any luck, my work will inspire someone more talented than me to do it better than I can. The day I pass that torch will be a happy one.

Over these three years that Worcester Sucks has existed there has been an undeniable leftward swing in Worcester politics—a genuine and brewing movement. This newsletter is a contributing factor. I know that too.

If today was the last day of Worcester Sucks’ life I’d be content with what I was able to achieve with it. But it’s not the last day. Not even close. Game on.

June 19, 2024: Worcester Sucks turns four! A state of the newsletter address

The goal is to build the alt weekly of the future. I’m entirely agnostic about how we get there so long as we do. The state of local journalism is so perilous we need to be pursuing anything that might work.

The success so far of this newsletter is a gift. It afforded me a rare opportunity and I don’t take it lightly. I want to make sure I do as much as I can with it. I want to build a real institution of independent journalism in this city—however it ends up looking and however long it takes. I want it to be something that exists without me. Outlives me, even.

So here’s to another four years of Worcester Sucks! It’s been the pride of my life doing this thing. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do.

A year later it remains the pride of my life doing this thing. Worcester Sucks is more of an institution than it was last year, and that’s because we’ve kept plugging away at it, and subscribers have kept contributing the small individual sums that allow us to.

I do not feel hopeful, the way I have in years past, that there’s some progressive change around the corner if just we keep pushing. I do not think we will take over city hall the way I once did—the way I would talk about it in 2021, 2022, those naive years when such a hope felt real. To be honest with you I am increasingly skeptical the City Council is a vehicle for any change whatsoever. That the municipality is somehow more attainable due to its size than the Statehouse or Congress. I once would write often about how Worcester could be used as a testing ground for progressive change—because it’s so small, so out of the way, so poorly run by its power elite. I don’t have that faith anymore, at least it doesn’t burn true. Not the way it did. But that doesn’t mean I find the municipality, or a city like Worcester, any less interesting. The opposite.

Now, I think a municipality like Worcester isn’t so much the testing ground for change as a petri dish for the truly immovable. The enclosures we haven’t yet defined as such are most visible in a place like this. Here it is so small and so literal and the corruption so above board you can see clearly the unstated relationships of power that make everywhere so awful. You can see how the police unions control the police department—tail wags the dog!—and the police department controls the city manager, and the city manager controls the council... and all of these practical machinations work in complete contradiction to the theory of it. The Democracy of it. In a place like Worcester you can get a good read on which side is winning the contest between the security state and the democratic state. (Folks I regret to inform you it’s not going well.)

Pointing out the contradictions, we can see here, does nothing to move the needle. The people willing to see the contradictions have no power. Powerful people ignore the contradictions with impunity. Most people hear “contradiction” and shut down. The gears remain greased. The power relationships are maintained. The class war continues off screen. The ribbon cuttings are tremendous and the pictures appear in the paper despite the rest of it getting thinner and thinner.

Meanwhile the new surveillance capitalists have become bored with marketing and targeted advertisements and they’re starting to see how their machines can compel behavior as much as predict it. They think about all those government contracts in the Defense Sector. They think about all the sucker cities like Worcester who can’t in a practical sense tell their police department “no.” They think about the toys these departments would be eager to have.

In a place so small as Worcester you can see the limit of argument. You can see the sharp line of horizon between the democratic subject you believe yourself to be and the one that you are...

The task at hand is to get enough people asking the right questions, chipping off the thick paint neoliberalism has thrown over the municipality, seeing the rot underneath. You can use Worcester more than you can use most places to really look at that rot, that paint, because no one here with any power is competent enough to obscure it. So in year five, that’s what I intend to do. Chip away at it. Week in and week out. That is, fundamentally, what I am doing here. With any luck, we’ll be able to build an institution around that core principle, and Worcester Sucks can outlast my direct involvement in it. We shall see. In the meantime, I’ll be in your inbox, as will Shaun, Aislinn, Liz, Chris and Greg and all the rest. We’ll just keep doing the damn thing.

Thank you to everyone who supports this newsletter. One more pitch for the road!

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Merch Store / Bandcamp

And that’ll be all folks. Til next week.

Also couldn’t arrange a copy edit for this one so if you caught any typos that’s nice good for you!