The Third Year's A Charm

Reflections on Slack Tide at three

Credit: Charlotte Austin

For many, the date of October 7 will forever be synonymous with Hamas’s senseless and brutal attack on Israeli citizens. Prior to this, the rest of the world used to celebrate October 7 as the date upon which Slack Tide was launched in 2021. I have a nephew who was born on September 11, 1999. Two years later, his birthday would be hijacked forever. I’ve often sent him 9/11 messages, saying something along the lines of “Never Forget!.....Wait, today’s also your birthday? Sorry, I forgot.”  We’d all get a good chuckle out of that. Or at least I would. But who’s laughing now? The Hamas terrorists, that’s who.

On that chipper note, this is my annual birthday post. It’s Slack Tide’s third one, in case you’re not into math. I don’t wish to go all Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself on you. But if I hold off for you to sing it, we could be waiting another couple decades, and I’m not getting any younger. Substack’s marketing gurus recommend doing look-back-on-your-launch-date posts in order to up your paid subscriptions, as well as to keep existing subscribers on the hook. Probably so that the ten percent they skim off my gross grows ever larger, the proceeds inevitably going straight up their noses. So I wasn’t going to bother this year, me being anti-drug and all. But then I found the above dog photo, and the decision was taken out of my hands.

I’m also feeling a tad nostalgic, anyway. Three years went by in a blink, but that was now about a half a million published words ago. (Might feel like more to you.)  And I’ve recently been reminded how fast it all goes by, anyway.  Last week, The Reaper took two of my longtime heroes, Kris Kristofferson and John Gierach. Any lover of great songwriting and/or fishing writing understands the enormity of that sentence.  (More on them in the bonus section at the end of this piece.) The upside of getting older is that the days feel compressed, and the bad things don’t seem to last as long as they used to. The downside is that the good things don’t either.

We’ve had a lot of new people come through the Slack Tide turnstile in the last year. Lately, we’ve been pulling around 5,000 new free subscribers per month — not too shabby for a one-man-band essay platform, whose host refuses to do podcasts.  Maybe some thought they were signing up for updates from Slack Tide, the Cape May, New Jersey brewery whose swag I have given away since I’m too unmotivated to start my own merch store. But who am I to disabuse them? People need good beer, and good words. In my experience, the former tends to enhance the latter.

While steep inflation has soaked us all since I started this thing of ours, I’ve kept prices exactly the same since our debut, which were pretty much rock-bottom on Substack’s scale to start with: five dollars per month, or fifty dollars a year (which saves you ten bucks, annually, over the monthly subscription rate – coming out to a mere $4.16 per month). And some of the fewer-and-prouder have joined the founding member $250 tier. All of you have my enduring thanks, even if the $250-subscribers have roughly five times more of it. I should probably offer them free cheesecake shots from my OnlyFans or something. But instead, if you’ve been generous enough to once again let your $250 subscription auto-renew this year (you can always change your pay plan if so inclined, I won’t hold it against you), or if you sign up anew for the $250 founders’ tier, I will throw in a copy of my book of long-form magazine profiles, Fly Fishing With Darth Vader: And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, And Jewish Cowboys. Which was perhaps the longest subtitle in Simon & Schuster history. I will also inscribe it however and to whomever you wish. And if you already have the book, but want to give one as a gift to someone else, we can inscribe/send it to them, instead.  Just drop me a line if either of those aforementioned founders tier conditions apply to you (and if you want a book), at askmattlabash@gmail.com.

But whether you’re a newbie, find yourself on the wrong side of the paywall, or are just too lazy to open your emails, I like to take these occasions to offer a tasting menu of what you might have missed over the last year.  (You’ve missed so much over the last three years, that I wouldn’t know where to start, but our archive keeps that straight, which you have unobstructed access to as a paid subscriber.) The tagline of this site is “Taking life as it comes, not necessarily in that order.”  Which was inserted as a mere placeholder during start-up, but which I let stand, since the description very much applies to what we do here. There’s no grand plan to what I write about week-to-week, other than tackling whatever moves or agitates me. I don’t believe in subject segregation. Life is large, so why fit it with a straitjacket?

Which is why everything’s covered here from politics to general life concerns to music to nature/fishing to matters God-related — sometimes, all in the same piece.  Though I only write about faith sporadically, we’re actually on Substack’s Faith & Spirituality leaderboard, even if we’re currently getting spanked by Astrology With Alice and Christian Warrior Training, the latter of which sounds straight out of Righteous Gemstones. But you can’t be all things to all people, even if I knew a lot of kids in church youth group back in the day who broke boards for the Lord in a program called “Karate for Christ.” (As all New Testament scholars know, The Prince of Peace famously traipsed around Nazareth, roundhouse-kicking people in the head.)

When Slack Tide was born, we were still shaking off our PTSD from January 6 and the pandemic and all the sociopolitical division. In other words, not much has changed. I haven’t counted up the pieces, but I probably wrote more about politics in the last year, proportionately, than I have in years past. But then, it is an election year — possibly the most pivotal one of our lifetime — and I tend to get cranky when a pumpkin-colored, serially-indicted, twice-impeached real-estate hustler not only tries to overthrow my country when he clearly lost an election, but is standing for election again, with even odds of winning. (A reality-acknowledgment I make not as a liberal, but as a lifelong conservative — though I’m not really sure what “conservative” even means these days. And in fairness to me, neither does most of conservatism, which has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of MAGA Inc.)

Therefore, over the last year, I regularly took a bat to Trump like he was a spray-tanned piñata. But perhaps in no piece, so harshly as in an Easter column gutting him for hawking $60 Trump Bibles, much as he has everything from gold sneakers to NFT trading cards. This is from “God To Trump: Stop Pimping My Word And Start Reading It”:

Still, in the Trump/{Lee} Greenwood Bible’s website FAQ, the question is asked: “Is this Bible officially endorsed by President Trump?” The answer? (Even God himself must be waiting with bated breath.):  “Yes, this is the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!”  Sweet Jesus, what a bargain! Sorry, Gideons, but your Bibles just aren’t MAGA enough. Trump goes on in his infomercial to say that the Bible is “my favorite book.” It’s right up there, apparently, with The Art Of The Deal and Hitler’s collected speeches.  Though some sources close to Trump doubt he’s ever read a book, even the ones he’s “written.”

Still, despite my many entries in the Trump-bashing category, I often left my Trump Derangement Syndrome behind (TDS being most succinctly defined as Trump disciples getting mad at you for criticizing the guy that they keep relevant), in order to tackle other subjects. Which I won’t belabor with long setups. I’ll just dole them out in bullet-point fashion.

On dogs, from a piece titled “If Petting Others’ Dogs Is Wrong, I Don’t Want To Be Right: If You Have A Dog, I Will Pet It, With Or Without Your Permission”:

There won’t be a next time, of course. Not with his dog, anyway. I will sadly never see that dog again. But there will be lots more similar moments with other dogs. Because when you stand next to perfection — something so beautiful and true, quadruped poetry in motion — it’s often not enough just to see it. You have to reach out and make sure it’s really there. To hold out hope that on our best days, we’re not just giving the dog a satisfying rub. But that this creature that so elevates our spirits with its grace and beauty and constancy will maybe rub off on us as well.

Credit: R A Kearton, Getty Images

On trees, from the piece “Trees of Life: The Trees Have Us Surrounded, Thank God”:

One day, without telling anyone he was going to do so — perhaps no longer willing to watch the tree’s accelerating death — he took his front-end loader to it, knocked it down, and pushed it off into the marsh. It seemed an abrupt move, but maybe a necessary one. We thought that was the end of the tree. And then a strange thing happened. And has kept happening since. Its top, poking out over the marsh, is still sprouting. Every spring, its leaves come back, and it blooms more brilliantly than before.  I don’t know how or why. The undergrowth it sits in is so thick, I can’t make out if it’s still rooted, or what’s going on. I suppose with enough determined shoveling, and marsh-plant clearing, I could figure it out. And yet, I don’t want to. The way you’re never quite sure about looking behind the curtain whenever a minor miracle decides to present itself. I don’t want the magician to show me his trick. I just want to believe in magic.

On criticism, from “In Defense of Taking Offense”:

When I started out in journalism, I wanted to be a film critic, which I served as at my college paper. It was a dream I let go of rather quickly once graduating to the real world. Not only because there were about three jobs available in the entire industry. (Less, since then.) But because I decided it would be better to write about life than to paint moustaches on other people’s depictions of it. They were doing the real work. I was just putting passive-aggressive, and sometimes outright aggressive, cherries on top. This doesn’t mean I won’t ransack some future misbegotten work of art in these pages/pixels. As one of my few remaining heroes, Emerson, put it while Oscar Wilde was busy: “A foolish consistency is the hogboglin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.” So I reserve the right to reverse myself, possibly in the very next piece. But seeing artists bite back – even ones I don’t care for like Billie Eilish –  is a reminder that it is easy to destroy things, much harder to make them. And we should cherish makers over destroyers nine out of ten times.

On writing, from “On Writing: Part Deux”:

Too many writers are forever in motion. Thinking they need to react to every cultural hiccup, burp, and fart, and therefore, don’t sit still long enough with their thoughts to have any thoughts worth having, let alone expressing. It’s not a crime to sit still for days or weeks or months, thinking about a subject, letting your mind butt up against it, unwinding its complexities and paradoxes, so that when you do say something, you’re worth listening to. The internet has sped up all of our metabolisms, fooling us into believing that he who clocks in most regularly is worth hearing out, often due to the quantity of their pronouncements rather than the quality of them. Writing for a living involves balancing these two things. Because if you don’t write often enough, you’re not going to make any kind of living. But if you write too much, you risk saying things when you have nothing to say. This is a tension you will forever feel. The faster you recognize and embrace that tension, the easier it is to live with. Remember, always, that words should bring pleasure of some sort. Even if you’re describing painful things or events. Words are like musical notes at our disposal which contain within them damn near every possibility, to help us sing every song in the songbook. As well as songs that have not yet been sung. (Hopefully, your future tunes.) I’ve been doing this professionally for three decades, and have yet to exhaust words, even if I overuse plenty of them. I’m particularly partial to “Slapnuts,” a name I first heard my wife’s country uncle call me — affectionately, I choose to believe.

On reading, from “Is Reading Passé?: A Friend Loses His Books Mojo”:

It doesn't have to be as difficult as people make it. As English majors used to try to make it, God love 'em. Which I say because I liked that they cared enough to try to wall off the quality old stuff in the Literature Garden. But sometimes, pulling weeds in that garden can be fun, too. And they’re likely to spring up from anywhere. Rewards you didn’t see coming often pay off twice as sweetly.

On God and doubt, from “Is God Laughing At Us: A Half-Assed Christian’s Inquiry By Way Of A Randy Newman Song”:

But though I don’t possess enough vanity to even pretend like I can explain it all, I’ll tell you what I do believe without hard proof. I believe in a God who makes allowances for the questioning of Randy Newman. Because if God can’t withstand biting lyrics from singer-songwriters with bad posture and Coke-bottle glasses, then he’s not the omnipotent force for whom we build cathedrals. He’s just another insecure dictator, like Vladimir Putin, or a wannabe one, like our favorite gold-sneaker salesman. And I believe that if God is as smart as we believers claim he is, then maybe blind obeisance isn’t as interesting to him as adversarial inquiry. Which suggests you care enough, perhaps even in your unbelief, to ask demanding questions. If there is a God, he has clearly cloaked so much in mystery. So why would a good and loving God hold it against people for trying to solve those mysteries? To get at a truth, if it is one, that obscures itself. Even for believers, that’s not blasphemy. That’s common sense: wanting to understand the thing you believe in.

On fishing, from “Take A Breath: During Insane Times, It’s Your Duty To Stay Sane”:

Just a few days ago, I was growing agitated and irritable about all the god-awful news, since I’m a big believer in truth, and it doesn’t seem to be getting told much lately. So I did something very simple. I took medicine that after years of usage, I already know works. (No, not alcohol.) Though I didn’t feel like it, I forced myself outside with my fly rod. Not to some glamorous locale, but to a nearby layup pond. I caught a mess of largemouth bass and crappie, kissing every one before I set them loose. (Platonically, like you’d kiss your aunt, not your hot fourth cousin.) And not because I’m some fish pervert. But because they aren’t just fish to me, but prompts. Slime-covered slivers of grace that remind me that there is a world beyond my fleeting concerns, and it is often a more beautiful one than the world my mind spends the bulk of its time choosing to inhabit.

On picking up a drunk out of a ditch on the side of the road, from “A Strange Encounter With A Stranger”:

Another 30 seconds of silence go by, and Roy reiterates that he’s lived around here for nearly 50 years, and that his wife died of cancer two years ago. Two facts he repeats at least once more. At first, I think he might be suffering from dementia, in addition to inebriation. But then I realize that Roy is essentially talking to himself, not me. He’s a man trying to reclaim a life that is mostly lost, a life now defined more by what’s gone than by what’s still here.

On bluebirds, from “A Minor Bluebird Parable, And The Importance of Beauty Offsets”:

I check on them every morning, making sure the sparrows haven’t destroyed this thing I love. And nearly every morning, Mama Bluebird is sitting on that nest. She has her head tucked low, and her eyes peer up at me, trustingly, just like my dog does when I sneak him his eighth or ninth snack of the day, against my wife’s orders. She probably should be alarmed, just by animal instinct. But she doesn’t fly off. She stays on the nest, as I coo softly at her, telling her I’ll see her tomorrow, while gently closing the box flap. Maybe I’ve imprinted myself on these birds after years of feeding and caring for them, as some say happens. Or maybe I’m just a very weird-looking overgrown sparrow, here to do her harm. She can’t know for sure. But she seems to trust me, and to trust in goodness, generally. That there are forces out there who love life, as with the life she is protecting. Who prize creation over destruction. And she’s right. I want so badly to pet her on the head, but I resist. Not wishing to give her one more thing to worry about. To cause her further stress. Because she has enough on her already. Even though she’s free as a bird, she has to carry the sky on her back.

Credit: Alana Labash

On being American, from “Who Is ‘The’ American?: What Being A True American Looks Like, By Way of Mark Twain”:

Our forefathers wrote some of the wisest, most beautiful founding documents of any age. Yet plenty of them were slaveholders, unable to see their own hypocrisy and moral shortcomings — even the greatest moral failure one could commit aside maybe from murder: holding another human being captive against their will. A spiritual murder, of sorts. They gave wing to freedom, articulating it as clearly as freedom had ever been articulated before. Yet some, simultaneously, were still capable of regarding their fellow man as sub-human. Proving, once again, that human beings — even, often, the “good” ones — are effed-up hypocrites, blind to their own blindness. Even Twain didn’t always live up to his own eventual ideals. But generally, Twain understood this, and didn’t hold his fire. To me, that is the best and most truly American of impulses: not holding your fire when you know that your own can do better. Because if you want to hear the music that can be played by our better angels, you have to first snuff your own demons, or at least tell them to hold down the racket.

There was much more this year, of course. But I’ve already gone on long enough. The above is a pretty fair representation of Slack Tide’s worldview. To those of you have been here from the beginning, or have jumped on as paid subscribers along the way, I can’t thank you enough. You’ve not only convinced me I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, but have spared me from having to get a real job. To those of you who are free subscribers contemplating jumping on, what are you waiting for? Come on in, the water’s fine. And we chlorinate it semi-regularly.

Bonus RIPs: It was a real gut-punch for me and many others when Kris Kristofferson shuffled off this mortal coil last week, gone too soon for my taste at age 88. Because I kind of wanted him to live forever. As Andy Ferguson, an old buddy of mine — who happens to be one of America’s best writers — wrote in an email after the news broke: “He wrote two of the top ten greatest American songs.......I think ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ qualifies as one of the great American works of art -- up there with John Ford's Grapes of Wrath or Nighthawks or Huck Finn or Porgy and Bess."Why Me" is pretty mind-blowing too. Also in his favor is the fact that he got more tail in the 1970s than any other man of the era.”

Andy, as is often the case, is pretty spot-on, even on the tail-front. But Kristofferson was much more than a great songwriter/tail-chaser. What a life he led. He was a Golden Gloves boxer, a helicopter pilot who once landed his chopper on Johnny Cash’s lawn to drop off his demo tape, a William Blake aficionado, a Rhodes Scholar, an accomplished actor, a “walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,” a spiritual seeker. They won’t make his like again.

And though I have played the songs Andy cites and others in these pages before, here’s one of my Kristofferson favorites, from one of his under-appreciated later albums, 2006’s This Old Road.  A profound, quiet beauty of a tune called “Holy Creation,” croaked out in his older-man voice, which I often thought fit his songs better than his younger voice did. You’ll want to sit with this one a while, as I have many nights.

John Gierach: If you’re not a fly fisherperson, as I am, there’s a pretty decent chance you don’t know who Gierach is. Though you probably should, even if you don’t love fishing, but just love good writing. Gierach, though I never met him, was an important person to me and many others. He was a backbeat to our fishing lives. I’ve read a good 11 of his 20-plus books, everything from Still Life With Brook Trout to Trout Bum to his most recent and ironically-named, All The Time In The World, which it turns out, he didn’t have, expiring at the age of 78. It makes me glad I read slowly, and still have plenty of Gierach writing in front of me, since he won’t be making any more of it. It’s hard to think of him gone.

Whenever I can’t go fishing — due to weather or work obligations —  Gierach is the man who fished for me by proxy. He invites us to stand in the river with him, putting you right on his elbow, with his funny, wise, conversational way of laying it all in the groove. He made even a disastrous day of fishing sound like a better alternative than whatever other activity you had on the books. Because he was wholly committed, even while keeping just enough ironic distance, outlining the absurdity of standing up to your nuts in moving water, waving an overpriced graphite stick, trying to trick fish with a pea-brain, only to let them go. That’s a routine that not just any writer can keep interesting. But Gierach did it in book after book. Open any of his books to any page, and find passages like this:

They say you forget your troubles on a trout stream, but that’s not quite it. What happens is that you begin to see where your troubles fit into the grand scheme of things, and suddenly they’re just not such a big deal anymore.

Or:

I think I fish, in part, because it's an anti-social, bohemian business that, when gone about properly, puts you forever outside the mainstream culture without actually landing you in an institution.

Here’s a Gierach interview snippet which is worth watching — an outtake from a fly fishing documentary called Turning Tail — on how to live a life. (Hat tip to MidCurrent for turning me onto it.)