At Least I'll Get My Monday Nights Back

I've been thinking a lot over the past couple of weeks and have decided that it's time, after 3 1/2 years, to stop doing the Toxic Pop Newsletter. I started it when I was totally flat-ass broke and doing freelance PR for various underground performance artists, musicians, etc. to keep myself fed. The idea was to have a built-in promo vehicle for the artists I was repping, and it just kind of took off. Today I've got thousands of subscribers, more and more each week... but it's become a chore. It's just not fun anymore. I don't necessarily advocate dropping anything and everything when the fun goes out of it - everything goes through un-fun stages, slumps. But with this one I've been trying to make it work for months. I dunno. Maybe the newsletter and I need couples therapy, but I think that my life needs changes and I can feel those changes gathering around, waiting to be let in. I guess to make room for new stuff sometimes we have to let the old stuff go.

I've never let go of things easily. I've also been thinking recently about this: why I'm 41 and single. Before I was 40, I never even thought about the "why"... I just was. Now I think that maybe the reason that I've had a habit of persuing unavailable women is that I'm afraid of ultimately letting them go. I'm the worst at goodbyes... I get sad at saying goodbye to someone I met during a 90-minute layover in an airport because I like them and I know I'll never see them again. As some of you know, this can have (and has had) disasterous results. Anyway. Now I have to say goodbye to 3,000 people I've never met, but for whom I still feel a great affection because they're the ones that saw why this list was important, why it was needed beyond my selfish self-promotional motivations, why we still have to struggle for art to live in NYC.

There it is. There better be something *really* good to take its place. Just saying.

Acres of diamonds, baby.

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