A Sunday Surprise

Instead of Many Such Takes, a surprise for free subscribers

Normally, every Sunday, I release my weekly issue of Many Such Takes, a free round up of the funniest Twitter discourse and drama. I aim for MST to be lighthearted, which is why I do my best to cover drama without instigating pile-ons. I also generally try not to cover topics that veer into dangerous territory. For this reason, I won’t be doing MST this week, but I will do something different, so stay tuned.

To be clear, this is not a “flags at half mast for Charlie Kirk” thing. But if you’ve been on Twitter this week, Charlie Kirk is really the only topic on the TL, so if I were to do a MST, it would be all about that, and while some takes have been funny (like those poking fun at the FBI for their abysmal fumbles) I just don’t see how I can put out an issue like that without inadvertently mocking the murder itself. No matter your views on Charlie Kirk, I don’t want to make fun of someone who was killed, especially not when they are survived by a widow and young children.

Instead, I’m going to do something else. I have a feeling that most of you reading this are unfamiliar with the book I wrote and published on Substack as a series of standalone “chapters.” It’s called Will There Be Free Food? and it’s a collection of true comedic short stories about the time I spent working in tech in San Francisco, in my twenties. I made a big mistake when I chose to release the chapters this way, though. Because I included “Chapter (number)” before each one, I think a lot of people dropped off and didn’t read them because they assumed they needed to read all the previous chapters to understand. This actually wasn’t the case—the stories are standalone personal essays that don’t really build off each other.

Two of the stories are already free: The Sublet Caper, which is about our desperate attempts to find affordable housing in San Francisco, culminating in various ruses and schemes that blew up in our faces, and The Work Wife, about my quest to find a work BFF, and how I got more than I bargained for. If you are a free subscriber, these two chapters have been available for a year. However, I wanted to release one more free chapter: The Best It Gets, which is one of my longer stories (and my personal favorite) about a bizarre relationship I had with a mentor while working in the borderline-fraudulent mobile app advertising industry in the early 2010s.

But that’s not all! I am also announcing that I am restarting the series of personal essays! Since I “finished” writing Will There Be Free Food? I wound up writing a few other personal essays about life in childhood, or in my thirties. I was planning on saving more of those up for two new books and potentially self-publish, but I’m realizing Substack is a better platform for personal essays, and they’re better off as standalone stories instead of chapters. So now, the Will There Be Free Food? tab will be renamed to “Personal Essays & True Stories” and will include other stories that weren’t from the original book but have the same basic tone and voice.

Enjoy the newest released free chapter below: