Life Sucks
Salutations, my dearest digital friends.
I am so excited to announce that I have partnered with my friends at Fictional Café Press to release my first book of satirical essays:
Life Sucks: Memories and Introspections During the Great Covid Lockdown
Our release date on Amazon is TBD. Estimate early-2025.
In the Beginning: pre-2020
As many of you know, my writing obsession was rekindled in January 2020. Right before the Covid lockdown commenced.
I had not written for fun in over 25 years. At the end of college, circa 1992, my wife (then girlfriend) and I moved cross country to Boulder, Colorado. We planned to work for a year, gain state residence, and both get our PhDs at University of Colorado Boulder.
She worked at the mall. I competed with Mormons for porch space, selling encyclopedias door-to-door, up-and-down the spine of the Rockies. We were poor, miserable, and homesick. Within 6 months, we bailed on that dream and moved back to Upstate NY, to the capital district near Albany.
My wife ended up getting into an MSW program at SUNY Albany, and I became a sales rep for a copier company. We got married and then pregnant a few weeks after our honeymoon in Ireland.
We were young (arguably naive) and healthy. Never thought about adding her to my health insurance that quickly. But once pregnant, in those days, pregnancies were considered pre-existing conditions and not covered by insurance.
And, of course, she had preeclampsia, required intensive medical care, and we were paying 100% out of pocket. Needless to say, my writing was severely deprioritized in favor of financial survival. And I did not look back for many years.
In Times of Plague: 2020
Fast-forward 1995 to 2020 – – 25 years had passed in a blink. Such is life, eh?
And no complaints. I have been blessed with a wonderfully successful career in sales, management, senior leadership, as well as owning my own business for a number of years.
I have had a very full life. A wife of nearly 30 years (this October), two amazingly talented daughters, and an awesome dog named Hairy Kerry Conway… Truly blessed.
But something was always missing – my writing. An undefined ache that I could never quite quell. A soul pain that is impossible to describe.
Although Covid lockdown did not kick into overdrive until March 2020, the writing was on the wall in January (pun intended), as I had to regularly fly around the US for work; and people were getting sicker and sicker.
So I started a website in late January 2020. It was called Life Sucks Laugh Here, and it was created to help distract people with laughter from the horrors of Covid-19 in the news, which ultimately led to lockdown.
Each week, for 40 weeks, I would release a humorous – often bitingly satirical – essay for my readership. I was gobsmacked by the positive reaction it received!
And my Muses, now freed from their 25-year cage of repression, overtook my newly-found freetime created by lockdown… and the words flowed once again.
At first, the weekly readership was only a few hundred friends-and-family readers. By the the end? I had almost 5,000 readers every week. What? What? What? 🤯
In Times of Trump
While many of the original essays were on fun topics about clowns, useless pets, and colonoscopies, as time progressed, my writing became more and more socially and politically satirical.
The 2020 US Presidential Election was off to its absolute shit show trajectory. And people were dying from Covid-19 at ever-increasing, nightmarish rates.
You remember those days, don’t you? The worst.
Now you must know, I lean politically right of center. I am neither MAGA-fascist nor am I an aspiring Communist. I am socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
In other words, a unicorn.
But the one thing this unicorn knew? Donald Trump sucked. Not as a matter of policy. Some of what he did economically I liked. No, he sucked as a human. And still does.
I saw his reckless, feckless amorality and narcissism as representing an existential threat to our American expreriment. He warped the Republican party into something unrecognizably sycophantic. And I left it in 2020 to register Independent.
Also actively joined The Lincoln Project.
So, if you are too fragile or delicate to see Trump satirically lampooned? Please do not buy this book when it is released. Use that money to buy more guns.
But for the 80% of the USA and 99% of the world that doesn’t live on a compound awaiting Trump’s command to overthrow democracy? You’ll love it.
In Times of Trump (Part II)
WOW. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Is anyone else feeling an existential déjà vu as we once again ride a runaway train toward the 2024 Presidential Election? I sure do.
I am so tired of hearing everyone kissing Biden’s ass for bowing out of the race. He was an utterly inconsequential, useless President whose one great contribution to the history books will be defeating Trump in 2020.
Being nice and affable? Never should this be criteria for leading one of the most powerful nations in the world. But still… better than Trump.
Now Trump II is back in the theater of the absurd. Spouting his 4th grade vocabulary, riddled with the same rambling conspiracies and lies, full of grievance and revenge and anger… who wouldn’t want him for president again?
Which gets to why I am releasing these essays from 2020 as a book.
When I re-read them, first of all? I laughed. It’s good writing. Perhaps you might cringe at times; but the ideas are always delivered with a sense of purpose.
And it reminded me of the importance of humor and satire. Hopefully it makes us think a little while we are laughing. Because if all we do is join our field of Sames, lowing in the meadow of conformity? We are screwed.
Stay tuned for more info in the coming weeks.
-PS Conway ☘️ ☘️ ☘️