An Introduction the Museums

I was laid off for the second time, roughly two weeks before Christmas.

I don’t celebrate Christmas, so that part was moot. But it seems to get a sympathetic look from strangers. On the other hand, I think it also distracts from the “second time” aspect, which to me was the important bit.

Getting laid off even from a job you dislike is nothing like quitting, so I had to find a way to quit something to make up for it. We (my partner M and myself) already had promised to be back on the East Coast for various family/holiday things, so we re-oriented our plans, argued on the phone with airlines, and drove across the continent. We called it the Minor American Cities Tour. We often give trips little names like that. To pretend they are more planned than they are, I suppose. We did the family stuff, and then we drove back to the West Coast.

In all of that driving, there was a lot of time to think. I had a big plan, in the weeks after being laid off. The plan was to write a series of ten intelligent, thought-provoking, wide-ranging essays, showcasing my skills as a writer. I would front the series with my resume and a thoughtful and honest cover letter asking for writing work, put it out there on the Internet, and then use the essays as the force to back it up. The punch behind the fist, so to speak. Except—more of a friendly, firm, “hire me please” handshake, I suppose. The plan had all the hallmarks of a New York Times article, and therefore, couldn’t fail.

Since that hour in the dark and snow on the freeway somewhere in the middle of the country when I came up with that plan, I’ve read two different resume/blogposts that had the same general idea, both of them written by people with a much fucking better resume than mine, getting way more retweet coverage than I could possible hope for. So I trashed that plan, deleted the cover letter I had already wrote, and in the remaining essays, started using the word “fuck” more often.

But the essays came out great.

I’m calling this series, The Museum of Small American Museums. I explain the concept in detail in the titular essay (I believe it’s number four), but basically, each essay is a “museum”, styled after the minor museums you see advertised along the highway in overly exuberant attempts to get you to stop and spend money in small American town X. Like anyone would ever stop their car for a museum!

Well, we did, and maybe you will too. Not for camp value, but to see what the hell an American citizen fills a museum with, given the chance. They aren’t handed the keys to the Met, for goodness sake. But they get a piece of donated property, a handful of volunteers, and a sign. If they’re really pushy with the change jar, maybe even some brochures.

These are not those museums. You will have to get out there on the roads between some of America’s lesser cities, if you want to see what it is that America wants to show you. I’m not doing your work for you. Like the kid in elementary school who wants to show you something behind the gym, what he wants to show you is not the same thing he would want to show you in front of the flagpole. If you want to see what he wants to show, you have to go behind the fucking gym.

These are my museums. These are ten small museums of America that I want you to see, for which I am making the fliers. We don’t have to go behind anything, you just have to come to my website. The first museum explains why the second occasion of being laid off really got to me. And the subject matter generally gets worse from there. But the writing gets better each time. With each essay, I get deeper into the really fucking weird shit that is going on around in this country, masquerading as “the unimportant”. In each new subject, I find more evidence that points to what is commonly referred to as the coming of the end of the world. It is not the end of the world, obviously. The common referrals are totally wrong. But it is evidence of something so different than what we know as normal, that if it ever got here all at once, it would seem just like the end of the world would, if it ever got here. My goal is to distribute this evidence, this difference, in a nice, thick, trickle. That way, we can release the pressure a bit, and maybe stop a massive American Seminal Emission Weirdness Event. No promises, though. I’m not a professional.

We’re going to do two of these museums a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays. That will give us five weeks of essays. You can find them here on POSZU, or if you’d like an RSS feed of only this series and nothing else that will die when the series is over, you can use this one here. Well, that’s enough bullshitting. Let’s get started.

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