Every writer dreams of a room of their own.
Even better, a room with a view…
That’s why God created Dumpster Fires…
an EXCITING, NEW window onto the utterly calamitous and mismanaged situation that is my life. And more specifically…
The disaster of my current book project.
And more importantly… THE ALLEY outside my window.
As a FREE subscriber, you will get FLAMING hot GARBAGE delivered straight to your JUNKMAIL folder bi-weekly-ish.
Learn, laugh, and lament my life in Los Angeles, the City of Shattered Dreams.
1. Why is Barret doing this?
I want to entertain you with essays and stories that I know only I can write, and I want to write them in my natural voice, in a form that speaks to the type of people I want to write for—my intelligent, skeptical, and irreverent peers who are terrified about the future, terribly alive in the present, and by turns curious and apathetic about the past.
I’m going to harness my considerable and unique research skills to occasionally deliver you essays and stories about things you’ve never heard of or thought about before that are true and thought provoking, many of which may or may not pertain to the environment, archaeology and aerospace, homelessness, and the history of the American west.
The ambitious and ambidextrous approach to nonfiction outlined above appears to dazzling and hilarious effect in my first book China Lake.
2. Why did he send me this email?
You are someone I know or have been in contact with previously who I think might derive casual entertainment or perhaps considerable laughter, or, dare I say it, even intellectual succor from following the strange and improbable research dives my mind thrills to attempt.
There is also a chance you won’t delete me when I fail to bring you sunny news or teach you nothing you didn’t know already but do make you spit kombucha all over your iPhone as you continue scrolling my latest post in some grocery store parking lot in open defiance of your stated arrival time at your boss’s personal storage unit.
3. But doesn’t the world have enough trash?
Absolutely.
We are all overly-familiar with and fatigued by the deafening clamor of content. I won’t contact you but to toss out two or three pieces of writing per month for free. Paid subscribers, however, will receive additional bonus content (read: NUDES) as the blog inevitably grows into a multi-national media conglomerate.
On that note: I didn’t start Dumpster Fires as a way to grub after your dogecoins, but if you do want to throw down for someone whose literary efforts have on the whole never amounted to more than a dime, I won’t despise you. On the contrary, at night as I sob myself to sleep listening to Creed’s “Can You Take Me Higher” set to repeat on YouTube, I’ll think of you.
4. Should I share this sad corner of the internet with others?
Absolutely.
The world is powered by solar radiation and schadenfreude. Let others take heart in knowing that the dismal day has finally dawned—Barret Baumgart has run out of hope and begun a blog!