Twerking in the Kitchen

Something my wife definitely does not do.

A couple of days after I wrote about the screwworm caravan headed toward our southern border from Central and South America, my wife noticed screwworm stories popping up on all her apps and newsfeeds.

“I never heard of screwworms until you wrote about them,” she said one day as we took a coffee break in the kitchen, “and now they’re everywhere, like cats on the internet.” My wife’s similes always compare things to cats.

“That’s because I’m an influencer,” I said.

“Like Kylie Jenner?”

“No, more like the Shuffle Mamas.”

“The Shuffle Mamas?”

“Yeah, they dance in their garage on TikTok,” I said. “Hashtag: shufflemamas. Hashtag: momswhodance.” (I am semi-fluent in hashtag-speak.)

“I thought your TikTok was just Poppy the Prairie Dog, owls, and that donkey with the squeak toys,” my wife said. “I didn’t know you were watching women dance.”

“You forgot Chester, the chipmunk; Merv, the cat; and that guy who fixes hooves.”

My wife had pulled up the Shuffle Mamas on her TikTok, and I could see her already fighting the urge to do the Running Man right there in the kitchen, where she normally only twerks. “Well, they’re not quite what I expected,” she said, feigning indifference but still fighting the urge to dance.

I told her I was going to the garage to watch some Shuffle Mamas tutorial videos and practice my moves for the TikTok dance videos that would up my influencer cred, but she suggested that I sit down and write newsletters to up my bank-balance cred. The screwworm piece was fine, she said, but it would take ten like it every week to pay the bills and keep the cats fed. Heather Cox Richardson published a lot more frequently than me, so maybe I ought to study her instead of the Shuffle Mamas. Also, our garage didn’t have a nice, even surface like the Shuffle Mamas’ garage. I might trip and break my neck, and then guess who would be stuck cleaning the litter boxes?

Bank-balance cred has been on my wife’s mind for a while, especially as established media figures have moved into the Substack space and made it harder to attract new paid subscribers. The most frequent complaint I have heard from readers, especially those who have decided to end a paid subscription, is that they just can’t afford to subscribe to so many individual newsletters. Their messages are apologetic and complimentary, and I respond that I totally understand: I want to support more writers with paid subscriptions, but I can’t afford it either.

I am not abandoning this endeavor, though I am delaying the rollout of my shuffle-dance TikTok videos. I am also going to change my newsletter’s title. Believe it or not, Trygve’s Substack was not poll tested or focus grouped or thought about for more than ten seconds. Gulf of Trygve hints at my content but is disapproved by one out of one women who twerk in their kitchen. Heather Cox Richardson met with similar disapproval. I knew better than to even suggest Shuffle Daddy: It sounds a bit pervy.

In any case, the name change, or rebrand, if you will, should be seamless to readers. It is part of a whole business plan, which is something I should have thought about sooner. In my defense, we were surprised when readers stayed on board after the campaign. It was like we had stumbled over a tiny pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Since my audience has other newsletters to read, I will tighten these posts up to 600-900 words instead of the 1200 they sometimes run to. That way, people will also have time to read Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter and watch owl videos or the Shuffle Mamas on TikTok. In the spirit of “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” I will be providing summaries, main takeaways, and links to posts I have found useful. These will probably be at the end of each newsletter so readers will have to endure some commentary on Kristi Noem’s hair extensions or Pete Hegseth’s incompetence before they find out what smart thing Kathryn Anne Edwards has to say about the economy.

I am approaching 700 words. The editor doing the Running Man in our kitchen will want this wrapped up soon.

I am not trying to be Heather Cox Richardson or Paul Krugman or Robert Reich. I am not expecting a Nobel Prize in literature, though if I were to win one, I would find a way to remind Donald Trump of it daily. I hope Paul Krugman is doing this.

I am trying to balance things, not be balanced. You don’t tip an unbalanced scale by standing at the fulcrum. Where I live, it is not uncommon to find Fox News, Newsmax, or OANN playing on waiting-room televisions. Nutjobs approach the podium at my town’s city council meetings and talk about “constitutional” sheriffs, Dominion voting machine conspiracies, and Ivermectin as a cure for everything. One of my state legislators said, in session, that the only reason American women need IVF is because God has closed their wombs as a selective punishment for the collective sin of abortion. Another said that he was introducing a piece of legislation because of something he read on Facebook.

These people deserve to be made fun of, as I did in “Witchy Womb-an.” Someone has to counterpunch against the projection of right-wing sins, as I did in “Red-o Pedos.” If a politician claims, as Mike Johnson did, that God told him he was his party’s new Moses, then he deserves to be slapped around with the Book of Exodus, as in “Wholly Not Moses.”

So, that’s my niche: political counterpunching—with cats and literary references and occasional humor, though my wife says Heather Cox Richardson is funnier.