Unfortunately, the plan to make Davey G and the Keyboard a household name hadn’t gone as well as I thought. But I see the posts from January 2008 and I just wonder how the hell I ever got this angry. It wasn’t all about the City Paper. I had other things. The Parochialist morphed into more of a general complaints and grievances space, while still providing links to all the usual things. Then I began work on the story that killed the Davezine…which was (no small coincidence) all about a fictionalized version of the City Paper…Davezine 13….
Davezine 13 was a zine that contained Low Level Bureaucrats 3: the Rise of the Collective, which combined two of my axes to grind into one book. I was making fun of a local group that was popular at the time and popular with the City Paper. While it might have been a well written story, I don’t know what the hell my marketing plan was. I didn’t have a release party or any huge push beyond what I posted to my blogs. It didn’t receive the wide release of some of my other things. I have no explanation for that. You might be able to find one in a store in the area. I certainly have plenty left over.
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As it turned out, I never hit the high level I was aiming for. You could certainly suggest that I could have tried plying my trade in a better market. I could have gone to New York or LA or something and just gone for broke as a performer, far away from the parochial concerns of a lowly alternative weekly. But it’s not what I wanted, it was never what I wanted. In one of the last posts, I (ironically) tried to get people to vote for The Parochialist for best blog in the City Paper. This time I wasn’t serious. I knew there was no chance of this, and the readers obliged by not voting for me.
The last post of The Parochialist was on December 31, 2008. All in all, it had about 31 posts, a fairly meager output considering. Still, it gave me something to focus on from week to week, and provided a small outlet for at least a handful of dedicated readers. But I just didn’t have it in me anymore, and New Years’ Eve of 2008 seemed as good a time as any to say goodbye, which I did with this post:
Wednesday, December 31, 2008 2008... It's over. Thank God. Parochialist out...for now.
Aftermath.
The City Paper ended its run just this past year after a 40 year run. As much as I goofed on it and hated it at times, the fact that it is gone has made a huge hole in this city.
I was already on to the next thing after I finished with The Parochialist. I started up with the National Novel Writing Month, writing 50 thousand novels in a month. Writing like this for one month a year has made me more prolific than I had ever been before. Starting with The Best of Thunder Johnson and then most recently with Pain Center: the Novel, NaNoWriMo has stretched my writing muscles in a way that nothing else ever had, and given me raw material to work with for the rest of the year. To date, I have 10 of these novels in one form or another, plus a memoir and a novella.
And about a year and a half after The Parochialist folded, I quietly put down my keyboard and walked off the stage.
Check out my latest zine. Davezine Number Fourteen: the Bad Roommates Issue!
