February 1, 2003
Dancing As Fast As I Can

THIS web site and its associated zine probably seems like an easy thing to do. How hard can it be, I can hear you asking, to steal a few sitcom jokes, mention how drunk I am all the time, and then sum up every sophomoric and ignorant ‘point' I have in three bullet points or less? Damn hard, let me tell you, especially when you're as drunk as I am all the time. Besides, there's a lot of shit I gotta do around here. I'm the Editor, you know? I write most of this web site and the zine, I keep everything updated, I manufacture and mail the issues–and, most distressingly, I send out the update emails. The update emails are probably going to kill me.

People have told me that when I've worked through a bottle of Early Times and somehow lost my pants, and am stumbling around a public place having a conversation with myself until the police arrive, call me by name, and take me in, I'm usually quite amusing.

Maybe you all don't realize it, but I send out emails to people who sign up for them. These emails are called "TIS Annoyingly Random Email Updates" and are sent out whenever I have something to announce, or whenever I feel like it's been too long since the last one. A simple concept, and you can sign up for them if you so desire by going here. How can simple emails like that kill me? Simple: nothing ever happens to me. It's really hard to send out update emails when nothing is happening. I get a little desperate.

Of course, I make myself crazy, because I like to send out a lot of these updates, and when too much time stretches out between them because a cold and heartless world has forgotten about me yet again, I start scraping the bottom of that barrell for ‘news' to tell you all. Sometimes, as many of you know, this ‘news' isn't really news at all. Sometimes it's just nonsensical ‘humor', soemtimes it's just web site updates (often leading the reader on a wondrous journey to determine, what, exactly, has been subtly ‘updated'). I've toyed with the idea of sending out an email in which no news at all is mentioned, but that seemed to invite all sorts of trouble, not to mention requiring me to write 200-300 words announcing absolutely nothing, and those words are precious.

The point is, I'm afraid if I stop jumping up and down, waving my arms, some of you, maybe all of you, are going to get bored and walk away.

The fact that anyone reads this zine or this web site amazes me. I am simply not all that entertaining, although people have told me that when I've worked through a bottle of Early Times and somehow lost my pants, and am stumbling around a public place having a conversation with myself until the police arrive, call me by name, and take me in, I'm usually quite amusing. If I could somehow bottle that kind of magic, I'd be set. Sadly, all we have to work with is the randomly jotted notes of the evening, written on damp cocktail napkins in felt tip pens in increasingly bad penmanship–most of these napkins eventually evolve into these columns and the articles in the zine, but then I'm sure you knew that.

The Internet has really exacerbated this. Back in the glory days of 1995 and 1996, before this web site went up (on AOL, of all places–ah, those carefree, innocent days) I was only doing three issues a year, and that was how often I had to worry about getting any attention. Once you have a web site, you become obsessed with the traffic it gets, because there's nothing sadder than a web site no one visits. Now, you might get some random hits from people searching around, or maybe your friends link to your page and click on it now and then, but you start to realize that if you want people to come back to your web site, you've got to give them a reason. The same static stuff won't inspire any return business, natch. Hell, that's where these web columns came from: a need to give you hooligans a reason to come back once in a while. And you know what that is?

Right: more shit I gotta do.

I wish I had the kind of Jim-Jones charisma that would get people to pay attention to me no matter what I did. Plus get them to send me money while they were paying attention to me. Plus get them to build a city for me in some South American Hellhole, with the Kool Aid in the fridge and all the free labor I can deal with. Sadly, I have Jerry Jones charisma, which is to say: none. I'll just keep hoofing it here for the pennies people sometimes throw me, and that'll just have to be good enough.

Wanna taunt me about my lack of wealth, power, and fame? Go ahead. All this negative energy just makes me stronger.

Jeff