The Best, Worst Place We've Got

I’m gonna be straight up and say that if you don’t care about the Substack discourse, you should go ahead and hit that little ‘X’ in the browser tab right now and reclaim an estimated 4 minutes of reading time. This is just something that I was thinking about over the last 24 hours as I try to remain curious about why I have certain reactions to certain things. Very much a bloggy blog! (Also if you went to BU, you’ll probably want to read just for the memz.)

At my last year of college in Boston, there was an awful bar my friends and I would go to almost every Friday and Saturday night. It was the kind of place where they served a mixture of grain alcohol and sprite in a plastic fish bowl and dumped a bunch of little glowing fish-shaped plastic toys and crazy straws into it for some pizazz. There was a dance floor in one room. As far as I remember the nachos were really good, at least by Boston standards. It was called Tavern in the Square, but we all called it TITS.

TITS was where everyone I knew hung out. The guys in my frat, the art kids who liked to party, the girls we tried to flirt with in class, the people who graduated a year earlier but decided to stay in Boston for some godforsaken reason. It was trashy and random fights would break out and you would inevitably start the dumbest arguments of all time there, but it ended up being the default hang because we didn’t really have an alternative. We had a lot of fun there, but it wasn’t the kind of place that made real lasting memories. It was a lot ‘remember when’ kind of stuff: random make outs, tabs you didn’t have the money to pay, etc.

That’s kind of how I feel about Substack. It’s the only game in town for most of the people I know and want to spend internet time around. A lot of my editors¹ are on here, and a lot of writing colleagues I love and respect either have their own newsletters or actively use this site as a preferred social medium platform. I’m fine with that setup. Twitter is a ghost ship that I missed the boat on anyway, BlueSky is cringe as hell, I don’t know how to navigate Instagram beyond people I know in real life (which is good probably.) For better or worse, Substack seems to be where writers hang out because it’s a writing platform. It sucks for the most part, but what else are you gonna do? Logoff? I will never logoff.

Some people love it here, which is fine. A lot of people loved TITS too. In fact some people were TITS evangelists, as if going to a specific bar that was a lot like other bars was a replacement for having a personality. My attitude towards Substack is a lot like my attitude towards TITS: I will begrudgingly hang out here because that’s what the plan is right now, and as soon as a better bar/platform opens up, I’ll probably start spending time over there and it’ll also, probably, suck just as much as this place does.

But here’s the thing: I’m glad Substack exists in the same way that I’m glad TITS existed. I never wanted the bar to be wiped off the map because if it was gone, we wouldn’t have had a place to talk shit and hook up and shout at one another. It’s also where a lot of my cool, talented friends and acquaintances choose to hang out. But it was just another bar, the kind of place that I’m sure every college town had but has no defining characteristics beyond familiarity and proximity². This isn’t to begrudge people’s love of a given place, but this is just another platform in the same way that Medium or Blogspot was a platform. One of the only things that i notice is different with Substack is that you can send people DMs. Thankfully, for posterity’s sake, you can’t unsend them.

Next up, I’ll be publishing a hater’s manifesto. I feel like that will be my life’s work on here, in the same way that finishing an entire fishbowl to myself at TITS one night was a highlight of my college experience.

1. Though, notably and understandably, basically no one from the NYT.

2. Shout out Bourbon Street in Athens, GA which might be the worst college bar I’ve ever been to. Within 5 minutes of being there I saw an extremely drunk girl fall off a table, land on her head, and get up like nothing happened. I was horrified and worried, but her friends looked about as concerned as they would be if she had stubbed her toe.