I’m Sick Of Watching The Things I Love Die

On our first anniversary, I look at the reasons I wanted to be a part of Another Jane Pratt Thing

This is me in my happy place — eating my weight in crabs in a friend’s backyard. It’s a good example of how I feel when I think about everything we’ve done with AJPT in the past year. Photo credit: Kim Nowacki, my impossibly patient wife, who never flinches when I send a text freaking out that I have no photos of me looking “like a cool writer guy” or when I drag her out of bed at 7am because “the light is really good for a picture of me wearing at hat.”

When I first watched the movie “Office Space” back in 1999, my resume had such notable highlights as “gas station clerk” and “MLM knife salesman” on it, with nary an office job to be found. Despite my lack of personal experience with the drudgeries of white collar pen-pushing, a lot of Peter’s struggles resonated with me. One scene that really stuck with me (so much so that I used a recording of it as my answering machine message) was when they discussed a guidance counselor asking what they would do with a million dollars.

Of course, as a teenager, I loved the scene mostly because of Lawrence’s deadpan response, particularly the explanation as to how a million dollars would lead to this particular dream coming true. But it also made me ponder the point of the question — whatever your answer is, that’s where you should focus your career aspirations.

And while I admire Lawrence’s romantic intentions, my answer to the question has always been nebulous and ever-changing, but the gist is that I would tell stories. Storytelling is in my blood — both of my parents are excellent, although not always concise, storytellers — and it is what drove me to go off to college and study history. I mean, what is history if not a bunch of stories about the past? Sure, there are dates and places and people to remember, but nobody actually cares that the False Dmitrys were around in the early 17th century. What they care about is the bonkers tale of three or four¹ Russian peasants who pretended they were Ivan the Terrible’s dead son in an effort to become tsar. One was even successful², but all met grisly ends, with the final False Dmitry being drawn and quartered before having each of the four chunks of his corpse shot out of cannons in the four directions to ensure there would never be another False Dmitry. And there wasn’t. Fuckin’ metal, right? And it’s that way because of the storytelling.

Little did I know that there wasn’t a history factory handing out history jobs waiting for me when I finished school. So I spent a few years in a weird, listless daze, working at a porn shop, becoming a connoisseur of Chicago dive bars, and carrying around a cloud of depression. Not exactly my best period. Then my friend Rocky, who is famously not a “girl dad,”³ gave me the opportunity to write some things for Inked, and everything finally came into place.

I attended the Gathering of the Juggalos and wrote about it. A few months later, I was holding a glossy magazine with my story referenced on the cover, with a six-page feature inside. A feature that had my name on it. Holy shit. I was in big love with print media. And like most love affairs, this one has been filled with heartbreak.

My very first cover mention! My picture (also taken by Kim) inside a magazine! Even a cold-hearted bozo like me was bound to fall in love with magazines

Unless you’ve been living in a fallout shelter for the past decade⁴, you’ve probably noticed that the industry isn’t exactly thriving. Job security is pretty much a myth these days; we’ve all felt the sword upon our necks for years, and most of us, myself included, have felt its wrath at least once. But the extra shitty thing about getting sacked in media is that the brand just keeps on going without you, forcing you to watch a thing you once loved get picked to pieces by vultures.

Thirteen years = five days of severance

There’s a line in “Fight Club” that I think perfectly describes what it’s like to work in media: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” As such, I wasn’t remotely surprised when I got laid off/fired (they were very ambiguous about it!) from Inked. A more apt description would be along the lines of “blindingly furious.”

It wasn’t getting shitcanned by a bozo from Arizona who looks like he reads with his finger that made me so irate. Nor was it the “generous” offer of five days' worth of “severance” that could be more accurately described as “we fired you on the 10th and don’t know how to end the pay period until the 15th” or our owner’s cowardice in never speaking to me directly. It wasn’t even the incredibly weird priorities of making sure to change the editor in chief on our Wikipedia page (to the owner’s wife, no less) before turning off my email or shutting me out of certain accounts (some of which I still have access to today). No, it was the fact that I came in early to do back-to-back video shoots, and once they had wrung out every last drop of my labor, I became expendable.

A week later, I managed to ratchet up that anger another notch when my creative director texted to tell me he really needed that interview I was working on. But instead of getting angry, I put on my most professional tone and quoted my current rate for finishing the story. Needless to say, they weren’t interested. Fuck ‘em.

The heartbreak didn’t hit until about a month later. I’d worked for this company in one way or another for 13 years. In that time, I’d written hundreds of stories, created roughly a bazillion listicles, edited hundreds more stories, produced/wrote/interviewed dozens of videos, wrote/edited the bulk of our sister magazine (Freshly Inked) for a spell, copyedited some issues as a freelancer, posted thousands of Instagram/Facebook/Twitter posts, interviewed a Guardian of Galaxy, Kid Dynamite, and the Prince of Darkness⁵, and did one stupid prank that I really, really, REALLY wish I could take back.

Magazines are designed to be thrown away, so it was always difficult for me to attach too much importance to the work I did at Inked. It all felt ephemeral, even the pieces I loved, which led me to distance myself from a lot of it. I had done that cool guy thing where you pretend that the things that mean the world to you don’t really matter at all, and I did it so well that I genuinely convinced myself.

It wasn’t until I was on the sidelines that I realized there was a lot to be proud of from my extended tenure as the World’s Foremost Tattoo Journalist™. The tattoo community is not known for its inclusiveness, to put it lightly. A lot of the work we did at Inked pushed back against this, especially on the video side (hat tip to Devon, Sammy, Sarah, Julia, and the rest of the video/social team). Sometimes this meant posting tattoos on non-white skin despite the racist bullshit we’d have to delete from the comments section, and others it meant putting out an entire issue featuring only women tattooers. We certainly weren’t curing cancer or saving lives, but I think we did make at least a little difference.

Do you doubt my claim as the World’s Foremost Tattoo Journalist™? Take it up with the folks over at ABC 7 who clearly knew the score

New ownership had some, let’s say, different ideas on these matters, and it led to a lot of prolonged arguments. They made us take the most anodyne Pride month post down because they didn’t want to get “Bud Lighted.”⁶ They refused to let us do any profiles on people without their approval, and I’m pretty sure you can infer how that went, so we’ll leave it at that. Eventually, I was frozen out of meetings completely because they didn’t want to hear anything but “yes, sir.” It sucked and I could see that what Inked had been, the version of the magazine that I was proud of, was slowly dying, even before I was sacked. And once I was gone, it was gone.

Inked is no longer available on newsstands. It’s down to four issues a year. There is practically zero web presence. The very few videos they release seem like a copy of a copy of a copy of what we did five years ago. The people they’ve put on the cover are boring and irrelevant to the readers at best, downright disgusting human beings at worst. Two of their first three covers after I left went to people I vehemently fought against featuring, which felt like a twist of the knife. But, more than anything, the writing quality went to absolute shit. Everything now reads like a bunch of publicist-approved talking points were fed into AI, unseen by humans, and then sent to the printer.

During my time there, I poured a tremendous amount of energy, labor, and some pretty large chunks of my soul into making it a success, both monetarily and culturally. I’d like to think I was relatively successful in that effort. Thus, despite my animosity towards ownership and some desire to watch it all go up in flames, I can’t help but feel like I wasted a pretty large chunk of my life.

Getting shitcanned was something I could handle; it wasn’t the first time, and given my industry of choice, it certainly will happen again. But I was (and still am) sick and fucking tired of watching the things I love die. So I fired off a text to Jane about trying to revive the project I’d been ready to join a few months before everything went to shit at Inked…

The only good boss is a boss that’s dead

With apologies to Woody Guthrie, I don’t know if anybody writes about class more poignantly and straightforwardly than Dillinger Four. The Minneapolis-based band was a fixture in the midwest punk scene I grew up in, and while I screamed along with the band a lot during the ‘90s, it wasn’t until recently that the band’s lyrics truly resonated with me. I needed years of beating my head against a wall as I tried to carve out a career in an industry being choked to death by assholes with MBAs who never understood, let alone cared about, the art being made. With all of that heartbreak and experience under my belt, their album “Midwestern Songs of the Americas” hits much harder. There’s a frustration that lyrics written in 1998 sound exactly like they’re about today’s economy, but also comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one struggling.

So when I got let go, that album went into heavy rotation. The messages seeped even further into my soul, and it was somewhere around the 87th time I listened to “Super Powers Enable Me To Blend In With Machinery” that something clicked. This wasn’t just a song to scream along to — it was the kick in the ass I needed to make something new.

The whole tune is great, but it’s this section that I keep coming back to:

She keeps the Variety section and then gives the rest to me
She says she remembers when buses were nicer, "no dignity in plastic seats"
But there's something about the way she said, "the only good boss is one that's dead"
Broad shoulders giggled all over the bus and work ethics crumbled into "them and us"
Fuck ‘em all

The song became a bit of a mantra for me. Every media job I had eventually bit the dust thanks to some incompetence up top. Whether it was pivoting to video, alienating audiences with tone-deaf sponsored content, or determining an entire editorial calendar based on Instagram follower counts, it was always the bosses setting forth a short-sighted agenda with an absolute refusal to consider any rebuttals that led things to ruin. So who even needs bosses?

It was shortsighted bosses who derailed the first attempt at this site [It’s Jane’s story to tell, not mine, so I’ll leave it at that], but who was going to stop us from just doing the damn thing on our own? It wasn’t like they were going to be actually doing any of the writing, editing, or creating of the site, which led me to ask again, who needs bosses?

After Inked, I couldn’t imagine pouring my heart and soul into another project where the whim of some rich buffoon could end my job and destroy all of my hard work. I wasn’t going to be forced into artistic and ethical compromises every single day, just to earn enough goodwill to (hopefully) make it to the next paycheck. If the quality of my next venture was going to go to shit, I was going to be the one making the horrible, shortsighted decisions that led us there, dammit. Fuck the bosses. Fuck ‘em all. We’ll do it ourselves.

Two years later, Another Jane Pratt Thing is turning one, and…

We’re still here. Hell yeah. I don’t mean to be self-deprecating here, but every morning I’m surprised I still get to do this. I mean, I’ll always be posting screeds and rants somewhere, even if I have to grab a megaphone and scream into it from a street corner. No, the surprise is that people are taking the time to read my writing. And commenting on it. And talking about it with their friends. And, most surprising of all, people actually pay money to do so. Thank you.

Shockingly, this may be the only photo of Jane and I together. At least, it’s the only one I could find. Here we are with reader and contributor Jennifer Dines at Open Secrets Live. The only picture I took on the day the whole AJPT team met before launch is of a red solo cup filled with cheese that I grabbed for the walk home. I am not a serious person.

I know that often the stuff I write can be a bit odd and pretty damn angry (especially when it’s about nonsense). But I’ve also had the chance to expose my soft underbelly (sometimes a little too literally!) and write about issues I think need way more coverage, as well as share my fears and concerns about the current moment in America. I’ve even had the opportunity to eulogize the Oakland Coliseum and mythologize the Chicago dive bar — two of the formative institutions making me who I am today. I can assure you that there isn’t a boss left in this industry who would look at that mishmash of different topics and allow the same writer to cover all of them.

Another joy that I’ve had over the last year is being able to publish some great stories by folks who all share one particularly admirable quality — the good sense to be my friends. Seriously though, this is the best part of the job. Working with Jesse on his story about his dog getting stolen (and returned!) will forever be a career highlight. Sarah and I had bonded at Inked over our shared membership in the Dead Moms Club, so naturally I coerced her into sharing her story (don’t worry, it’s never too difficult to convince an Irish woman to tell a beautiful story). Julia is the coolest witch I know, and I’m so glad she shared the experience on the other side of a tarot card reading. And I will always consider getting Jeremy (a Yankees fan) to write a story about how people should hate Yankees fans to be a stroke of genius.

I’m incredibly proud of all of the writing we’ve put out this year, this is just a small sliver of pieces that I had a hand in producing. I guarantee Jane, Corynne, and every other member of the team have even longer lists. We’re publishing some fantastic stories nearly every single day, which is all I’ve ever wanted to do.

I’ve been jaded in the past — perhaps that’s what happens when you’re working for someone else — but I refuse to become that way with Another Jane Pratt Thing. It’s an honor to be part of this community and to share my stories with you. We’re building something pretty cool here and I look forward to doing this thing for as many years as we possibly can. So, please allow me one last moment of sincerity before I slink back to my comfort zone of sarcasm and self-deprecation — Thank you for supporting Another Jane Pratt Thing.

1. One may have been counted twice, record keeping wasn’t exactly a science back then.

2. The successful Dmitry spent his short time as tsar settling scores, enriching himself, and hosting opulent orgies. Sound like anybody we know?

3. Thanks? Yeah, thanks.

4. If you are reading this from your fallout shelter, I highly suggest you stay put. It ain’t great up here, might want to wait out the next decade or so and then check back with the surface world. On second thought, do you have room for a couple more?

5. It’s really weird to link back to pieces on a website that I hope gets a negative number of views each day. But, that being said, I did do some cool shit there, so I feel compelled to link to it.

6. These chuds were referring to when Bud Light worked with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney and conservative pricks lost their minds over it.