fawny.org

Drunk-posting

I know I’m too maudlin for this to be a smart idea. I’m shitfaced on onion pakora and dal rice from Udupi Palace and of course I had to top it off with a full blue-glass mug of Red Rose. This is as close to drunk as I get.

I’ve been dicking around with my RSS feeds all night but it the back of my mind I was trying to figure out ways to make les Tea Makers better. I feel like I have to add “Yeah, I worry about that.” I do, though.

I self-shitcanned months ago but I came back. Whoever made the comment that I’m better now that I’m not doing it as much was right. Though I wrote a lot more of my other stuff when I was also writing Tea Makers most days. I can barely get a book proposal out the door now.

Me in an electronic-mail message: “I want to improve TM somehow. I’m not really clear how. The post-lockout period has been like all unhappy families – unhappy in different ways.”

Part of the response: “Their barbs are always the same.”

Well, yeah.

We’ve changed. I keep telling you this because I think it’s true and important and I think some of you are just living in the past. We – yes, we – survived the lockout. We got through the lockout. It’s well in the past. The Tea Makers was a lifesaver during that era and, years before it ever occurred to me to write for it, I was checking the damned thing three times a day. We don’t live there anymore. The Tea Makers will not be the same everywhere or, to use the old sf term, “everywhen.”

We’ve got only a couple of writers and we are doing what we can. Even my captioning piece the other day is structurally indistinguishable from a vintage Ouimet critique from ’06. We can handle it if you think we’ve faceplanted on our new posts, but I don’t know what it’s going to take to get you to stop comparing us to the good old days, the salad days, the halcyon days.

CBC Television is just a TV station now and not a lot is going on that’s radically different from post-lockout. CBC Radio (anglo) is a couple of podcasts as far as a lot of listeners are concerned. The Web site is a success in many ways other than money. What this means is nobody’s picketing Fort Dork and we’ve got only so much matériel to work with.

I know I’m being maudlin but I’m sorry if we – yes, we – are letting you down. But we aren’t going to pack it in no matter how mean you people feel like being. Anyway, I tried that once already.

And seriously, if you want to make it better, you can. I – yes, I – warmly welcome any submissions and guest posts. But they happen less often than Christmas.