What’s Moronitude? For starters, it’s a word I made up just the other day to describe the idiotic things my friends and I engaged in during our 20s. I tossed the word out there and as the discussion continued it snowballed into an idea for matching tattoos (I say knuckle tats since it’s two too many letters, thus, perfect). But since that talk the “word” has refused to leave my skull. It’s just sitting in there begging to be let out. So, when I sat down to launch this silly thing I’ve been thinking about for a while, well, it seemed a perfect moniker.
I used to (and still do, I guess) have a blog called Irrational Anger. It was a fun place to rant about whatever completely banal subject was infuriating me at the time. But I felt limited by it. Look, I’m a very angry man, but sometimes, not often, but sometimes I actually like things and want to write about those experiences also. Plus, again this may come as a surprise, I have a whole variety of other emotions towards life. And theories. And takes. Glorious takes. So that’s what I’m doing here.
Moronitude is going to come out once a week. It’s going to contain one larger essay, a collection of links to other enjoyable things I read, the occasional link to something I wrote for my real job, a favorite historical figure of the week, a weekly check in on my sports related mood and a song that I’ve been rocking out to.
About half of the posts are going to be free, but two posts a month are going to be subscribers only. Is it weird to ask people I know to throw money my direction to read nonsense I write? YES. It is extremely weird and I feel like a total grifter here. But my thinking on this aspect is twofold. 1. It would be rad to have a tiny bit of supplemental income for something I’m going to be working pretty hard on. 2. It holds me accountable to make sure I don’t give up on this project. I let the blog rot because there was no incentive to maintain it, I don’t want to do that here.
I also want to keep things cheap. I remember the shows my ska band would put together all over the south suburbs of Chicago. For $5 you could get a couple hours of entertainment watching some weirdo kids playing music relatively well. Now as an old man I’m asking you to dig deep in your pockets to find $5 for a (slightly) more grown-up form of entertainment—a newsletter! Substack doesn’t yet allow me to throw in a dollar discount if you include a can of food, but I’ve come up with a substitute. A yearly subscription to this bad boy is going to be $30, the least amount of money the overlords at Substack will let me charge. I’m horrible at math, but even I know that’s a killer deal.
Let’s get weird.
Welcome to Moronitude.
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In the meantime, tell your friends!