I Don't Even Really Work Here

Just a writer, standing in front of an inbox, asking it to love him.

If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you are a normal, well-adjusted human who, unlike me, does not awaken every morning with a differently shitty earworm in their head (today I’m looking in the direction of that sexy bastard Ricky Martin).

Therefore, you also might not see the world through the same lens as a 51-year-old bald man whose brain is perpetually trapped in 1995. While I’m not sure if that is a result of kick-out blocks, Natty Light, or the traumatic emotional repression brought on by the Catholic religion, I have chosen not to seek treatment.

One of the side effects of my condition is seeing pretty much every life situation through the lens of the show Seinfeld. Walk nine miles on a torn meniscus and broken leg? Yes Henny, it is certainly coherent to compare yourself to George saving the beached whale.

The sea was angry that day my friends.

Shopping for potato chips at the grocery store? Absolutely, there is totally shrinkage.

Or, how about eating a yummy peach, and all day long walking around with the words “MACKINAW PEACHES JERRY!!” and “they’re real, and they’re Spectacular!” bouncing¹ around your damaged but still mildly functional brainal capacitor.

Because goddammit that peach was real AND spectacular. Whether or not it was from Mackinaw is irrelevant to my condition.

Anywho, you’ve been warned. Keep reading this wildly unhinged rant at your own peril.

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A few years ago I started writing again. I won’t bore you with those details, but I will tell you that I imagined myself as Kramer - basically, working for free.

I would just start acting like a writer and see what happened. It was my very own version of ‘fake it till you make it’.

Demented and Sad?

Maybe.

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And if you got that last reference without the spoiler, you’re my people.

Now that we’re friends, I need you to do the thing that friends do: help me move.

Relax. Your lower back is safe.

Help me move from being Kramer to being Jerry’s friend Seth. If you don’t remember who Seth was - congratulations!!! You still have a fully functioning pre-frontal cortex!

Seth was Jerry’s old friend, who Jerry convinced to skip a very important meeting at his job to join him for lunch. When Seth is subsequently fired for missing the meeting, he winds up working at Kenny Rogers Roasters.

The thing is, Seth likes working at Kenny Rogers Roasters. Not because he was making a shit ton of money. But because he was working at a happy, fulfilling job. He wasn’t making fast food, he was making good food quickly.

“That’s not gonna be good for anybody.”

I’m not writing War and Peace. Hell, I’m not even writing one of those smooshy gooshy girly books with Fabio on the cover. Although I personally know several housewives in Wisconsin who would devour that shit.

For the record, my wife is not one of those housewives. She’s a boss-ass bitch who has somehow remained ensconced in marital bliss with the man responsible for the previous paragraph.

Can you read that word and not think of George?

Anyway, no disrespect to housewives, romance novels, or Fabio’s magnificent sternum. Every book deserves a reader. Even, theoretically, mine.

Which is where YOU come in. If you subscribe to SilentPunt because you like my writing, or because you like my podcasting, I’m cordially inviting you to forward this email - or better yet, TEXT it! - to one other like-minded human. There has to be more than two of us, right???

Ok, just checked…Substack currently says there are about 570 of us. But apparently like only 43% of you open my emails. To the other 67% I say:

Whhhyyy am I asking you this? Simple really:

No no no, I kid, I kid.

Anyone else miss Triumph the insult comic dog??

Seriously though, I’m asking you this because I am currently looking for an agent to help me sell my book. And agents look at things like how many people subscribe to you as a gauge of whether or not whatever you produce might be sellable.

All this talk of subscribers, agents, and sellability suddenly has me feeling like Nicolas Cage in The Family Man: “I’m going into arbitrage, Kate. Turns out, I have a knack for it.”

Twenty-six years later, I finally googled what the hell arbitrage was.

Shout-out to all of my peeps on here who have already lent me a helping hand, it means more than you realize. And an extra-special shout-out to the three of you who read and provided feedback on a sample of my book. I’m not naming names here so your inbox isn’t inundated with assholes asking for help (like me).

In summary (see what a great writer I am? I’m using a phrase we all learned in 9th grade NOT to begin a summary with), I was debating how to close this. Then I realized there was only one appropriate ending for this dumpster fire of a newsletter: one last image.

So, here’s what I - and Kenny Banya - think of all of you:

“Compelling. Thought-provoking. Is that chicken?” - Maverick

I read David Epstein’s Inside The Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, in its entirety on one transatlantic flight…which is either a strong endorsement or proof that being trapped inside a metal tube with nowhere else to go is an excellent literary constraint.

I was drawn to this book for two reasons: First, Epstein’s first book, Range, is one of my all-time favorites. And second, constraints (and the ability to overcome them) were a major factor in my career as a football coach.

This book landed at a particularly useful moment for me, as I try to write a book while also writing a newsletter, recording a podcast, coaching football, and apparently holding an unpaid position in the Seinfeld Reference Department. Not to mention being a dad and husband - the two most important jobs, which I naturally left out of the first draft of this paragraph. I’m sure many of you can relate.

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You’re still here???

1. Get it?