The Loaf

An Introduction

Fascinating story behind the title of this substack: a couple of friends thought it up and told me it was perfect, I was like ehh, I dunno but then I couldn’t think up anything better. So here we all are, at The Loaf. The title illustration is the first half of a cartoon by the great B. Kliban titled “How to Tell a Cat from Meatloaf” (original version below).

“The Loaf” actually isn’t an entirely inappropriate title; these will be thoughts mostly written in idleness, the kind you get to think when the clamor of quotidian bullshit quiets long enough, the sort of conversations you never quite get to finish before last call.

Within a few days—or, with the frenetically accelerated pace of Facebook/ twitter/ insta/ etc., a few hours—of any breaking event or issue there will appear reactions consisting of 1.) the obvious response 2.) a counterintuitive backlash against the obvious response and 3.) a thoughtful or snarky meta-commentary on both those responses. I’ve never been a quick enough thinker to produce any one of these same-day “hot takes,” and anyway they’re all pretty predictable and uninteresting to me, even if some of them still need to be said. So I’ve tried to make my own niche in taking the long view, looking at the big picture. Late-night thoughts.

I’ll try to post a complete essay here once every other week or so, and in between I’ll post in-between thoughts—fragments of future essays that may never get written, notes and stray observations, the kinds of odd thoughts, dumb ideas, or funny stories you’d send a friend ‘cause they reminded you of them. (I’ve lately been wanting to talk to someone I love about the people we couldn’t save.) I sometimes write criticism, so you might get to hear odd thoughts on the last few things I read or watched. (I have some coalescing ideas about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid, and threesome fantasies.) I was a cartoonist for a decade, too, so you may even see the occasional drawing or doodle.

So tell you what: just hang out a little longer, we’ll get one more round, finish this conversation and that will be it. Or possibly one very last round after that, just a quick one, before closing time.