Hello, reader. My name is Sean, and this is Trash Skunk. Let me get something out of the way right up top - I am not the Trash Skunk. It's not a nickname for myself, I don't moonlight as a Soundcloud rapper by that name, and I don't have an unsightly tattoo over my pelvic area that says "Trash Skunk" for the purpose of intimidating sexual partners. In reality, mine only says "If You Can Read This Tattoo You're Probably A Urinal".
Trash Skunk is just a nickname I have for my dog: a long-haired, underbite-blessed creature who is so permanently disheveled-looking that my wife and I often call him a "trash skunk" for want of a better description. At any given moment, this dog looks as though he crawled out of a dumpster after defending a bucket of chicken bones from the neighborhood's meanest raccoon. It is an amusing and adorable look for a dog. And if he were a person, the closest analogue I can conjure is Nick Nolte's DUI mugshot.
"Trash Skunk" struck me as a fun and catchy name for a website, unique and easy to remember. Sure, it doesn't exactly give any clue as to what this site actually is (a repository for my writing), but goddamn if it isn't funny. And if you question my judgement on this matter, please have faith that I made the right decision - my dog's other nickname is "shit badger".
Okay, with that important business out of the way, I want to acknowledge that having a blog is about as revelatory and interesting as starting a Facebook account, or discovering sushi. This sort of thing would be more at home in 2004 than in 2021, it's not lost on me. And yet here we are. For the record, I cringe at the idea of calling this site a "blog". It makes me feel like a heavyset teenager whirling around from his computer to scold his mother - "it's a writing website, not a blog! God!".
Yet I admit, of course, that this "writing website" is basically just a blog. But let's make a pact never to call it that, okay? This is a high-minded, intelligent place where I post my deepest and most profound thoughts, like in the opening paragraph where I invited the reader to imagine I have a tattoo on my pelvic area for toilets to read. Thank you for extending me this courtesy.
Why am I doing this? Because I feel like writing. I have always wanted to write. I read a lot, and it honestly feels like I'm just taking at this point, so it's time to give back. This isn't the first time I've been struck by this feeling - I have penned three novels, all of them shit and none of them published, thank god. But they are complete, which is a feat in and of itself, and they were wonderful practice.
But now, as I grow older and busier, I've realized that I don't want to write a 90,000 word novel every time I get the urge to express myself. I want the freedom to write short stories, political manifestos, comments on culture, or erotic fan fiction about the two elderly cowboys from Lonesome Dove. These are my innermost wants, wishes, and thoughts, and they must find sanctuary on some page, somewhere, somehow.
I've tried peddling these wares before. I had a website from 2005-2006, where I wrote about the sorts of things a 20-year-old imbecile would, all with the grace and lucidity of a non-native English speaker encountering a keyboard for the first time. I would write scathing hit pieces on such worthy targets as "The Bloomin' Onion" appetizer from Outback Steakhouse, or the Ben Stiller movie A Night at the Museum. No foe large or small was safe from my wicked pen.
I dabbled in fiction back then, too. I remember a short story I wrote called "Goddammit You Brought Home A Pregnant Rottweiler". A funny title, I still believe, but that was really all there was to it. The Onion, an amazing humor publication I love dearly, often has this problem in their own work. The joke is the headline, and the article is 500 words that just dance around or otherwise restate it. In my case, I really believed that the visual of someone bringing home a pregnant Rottweiler and being scolded for it was so good that it could support several pages of text and demand the attention of a reader whom I imagined also couldn't get enough.
I've since learned that this is a masturbatory and highly embarrassing way to write. Write for yourself - yes - but if you intend on having a reader, maybe come up with something more engaging than a bloated dog grunting as two people fight about whether to keep it. Although I must confess that as I write this, I still can't shake the feeling that there's something there...
Just yesterday I was leafing through a book whose general purpose was to market some pseudo-scientific pop-pscyhology to millennials. The author was a woman in her thirties who writes for several legitimate publications, some of which you have probably read. And yet the style of the book was like reading snarky tweets for 300 pages. I got the distinct impression that both the author and publisher of this monstrosity felt no "millennial" would read their book unless every other sentence had the word "fuck" in it, because that is like, totally fuckin' hysterical, apparently. You know us millennials, we just love cussin'.
Curse these people back to the rank and sulfurous tunnel to hell they crawled from. I love the word "fuck" as much as anyone else does, but it doesn't make a piece of writing any edgier or funnier than it could be without it. It's lazy, it talks down to me, and by the way - millennials are nearing 40 years old. We don't need to be spoken to like teenagers who just snuck into their first bar to see how grownups behave in privacy.
But I digress. The point is this: as I stood holding that offensive blight on the publishing industry, I knew immediately that the world needed my services once again. And this time, 15 years after my first writing site (it's not a blog, okay?) I would be doing more than reviewing chain restaurant appetizers or penning fiction about pregnant dogs. I will be tackling important real-world issues, expressing myself more maturely, and writing nuanced fiction. All on a site called Trash Skunk.
Jesus Christ, what have I done.
-Sean
I love your sense of humor and look forward to reading more.