Reflections

When I first launched this Substack, I called it “Sorry I Haven’t Posted
In A While.” It was a joke about early 2000s blogs, and how that was the most common way that posts started as people’s lives got busy and the deadline grindstone of their blog wore away at their joy of writing.

I changed it to, “Write, Liam!”, because I decided to use it as a tool to hold myself accountable for sticking to a deadline and producing pretty much anything. Good, bad, serious, funny, it hasn’t mattered as long as it’s finished.

When art becomes a job, the relationship to it changes. And when there’s little or no pay, there tends to be a degree of resentment or cynicism around it. There’s a tendency among comedians who achieve a degree of success to deprecate the work. I’ve certainly been guilty of falling into that trap. I don’t want to make that mistake with this blog.

All of this is a way of prefacing this statement: Sorry I missed my Monday post. Although my Substack has a smaller readership than most, I take my relationship with those of you who subscribe just as seriously.

I’m turning 50 next week, and I’ve been undergoing the big assessment men my age go through. What did I do right? What mistakes do I regret? What happened to the big dreams and goals of my youth? What are these smaller pleasures that have gradually replaced them?

This year I got my bachelor’s degree – meaning that I now have a piece of paper that says that I am officially a bachelor of the arts, which I believe is how newspaper columnists of the 1950s referred to Liberace.

The irony is, I actually worked my way through school as a freelance comedy writer, and now that I’ve graduated and am ready for a full-time gig – there are none. So I’m producing spec work a handful of people will read — working twice as hard as I would at any actual job — to prove that I can do the work that no one’s currently offering.

This year also marked my 30^th anniversary of doing standup comedy, and my 29^th doing it professionally. The story of being 20 years old and bombing all over the East Coast and Midwest as part of the You Laugh You Lose Comedy Game Show Tour is one for a different post, but needless to say that my life has consistently been an adventure and I’m grateful for every day.

So, what is the point? I am exhausted dear reader, and I am introspective, and I am frankly overwhelmed at the amount of work ahead of me. I am at an age where my peers are winding down their careers, and I am just ramping up.

There’s a famous F. Scott Fitzgerald saying about there being no second acts in American lives. I have found that not only is this not true, but like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I am now entering my fifth act. And like the melancholy Dane, I’ve had a long and bloody journey to this, the point where the action really starts. Hopefully it ends with fewer bodies on the floor.

So I must ask you to forgive me if this summer there are weeks when this Substack feels a little more low-effort than usual. I promise to be back to my usual no-effort writing schedule soon.