The Halfway Café Introduction!
The latest platform for the mind behind The Halfway Post
Hey, everyone, thanks for checking out my Substack I’m calling The Halfway Café. I’ve had a pop-up link on my Halfway Post site for a long time collecting an email list, but I haven’t been very creative in terms of figuring out how to utilize it in ways that don’t seem spammy or annoyingly self-promotional to me so I haven’t really used it much at all.
But finally I think a weekly Substack newsletter to share more of my thoughts and literary artistry beyond my political satire would be a good way to stretch my creativity.
The Halfway Post has been my beloved baby for the last four years, and served as much-needed catharsis over the last four absurdist years of the Donald Trump presidency, and, now that adults are in charge of the US government again, my satirical ire is provoked less. So my writing focus has been changing a bit in recent months, and I’m taking a bit of a break from satirical news articles to recharge… at least until the midterms start ramping up with fresh GOP nonsense!
As a result, I’ve been more focused on writing shorter, more topical jokes on Twitter since this last fall, and building up my follower list there. I’ve been very happy with my Twitter growth, and since transitioning my primary social media presence from Facebook (whose evil algorithm has wildly changed for the worse by demanding money to show creators’ posts to more than 5% of their audiences they’ve spent years diligently growing) I’ve gained 12,000 Twitter followers! So give me a follow on there if you haven’t already!
Because Trump’s conspicuous absence from Twitter has ended his oppressive hourly onslaught of impulsive cluster-fucks threatening our sanity, I’m working on expanding my comedic portfolio to non-political subjects and themes I’m submitting to various comedy websites to get my name out there beyond the political sphere.
So far I’ve gotten two works published I invite you to check out, and enjoy these website’s collections of other funny writers:
Noah Says He’s Sorry For Bringing Chlamydia Along On The Ark published by Points In Case
https://www.pointsincase.com/articles/noah-says-hes-sorry-for-bringing-chlamydia-on-the-ark
The Office: Coronavirus Edition Published by The Daily Drink
https://dailydrunkmag.com/2020/12/11/the-office-coronavirus-special
I also have a third article going to be published soon at https://littleoldladycomedy.com!
Going forward with this newsletter, I will publish on a weekly basis original material and ideas like flushing out serious ideas I have about liberal politics and Democratic political strategy, discussing my thoughts on Republicans’ exhausting “culture war” battles, and making fun of conservatives and Republicans. Beyond politics, I’ve been writing prose poetry for years on all kinds of subjects ranging from serious to silly to blasphemous, and never really published them anywhere, so each newsletter will feature some like these two:
Modern Jesus
the modern jesus confesses
to all the crimes of the year
at the reception desk of the police station
but the prison wardens want their bonuses
and have state reservations full in the books
so they tell jesus to go but he won’t
and they arrest him for not resisting arrest.
Legacy
I like to think of myself as a civil war portrait
a striking face with piercing eyes
in black and white
lying in a field in the mud
dead and sacrificed for the cause
and inserted into a historical documentary film
ignored by texting high school students
in apathetic classrooms
of underfunded public schools
in a redlined neighborhood district.
(It is my style of poetry to leave all letters lowercase except “I” for aesthetic reasons due to the sometimes distracting nature of deciding which nouns should be proper nouns.)
So thanks for being a fan of The Halfway Post. If you haven’t already checked out my book Satire In The Trump Years: The Best Of The Halfway Post, I have a FREE PDF download on my site here:
I spent my COVID quarantine compiling it and editing it every day for months, jam-packing it with just about as many jokes as could typographically fit on the print pages! It also makes a great coffee table book if you’d like to buy it in paperback!
So stay tuned, and I promise to be entertaining! If you like my political musings and graffiti news, you’ll like the other ways in which my mind works as well!
Thanks for your continued interest, attention, laughs, likes, and shares!
—Dash MacIntyre