spinachdip nyc: Don't tell Suke the babysitter's drunk

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Don't tell Suke the babysitter's drunk

Normally I write at this classy little blog called The Daily Dump. But then Suke fell gravely ill or went on vacation or something and asked me to step in for a day. Like a good friend who has met him once (and didn’t even know he was Asian), I said yes. But wow, writing someone else’s blog is a lot harder than I thought it would be. Because really what you’re doing is babysitting. You’re taking care of someone else’s readers, their children. Children you can’t see and who are old and probably self-reflective enough to be judgmental of you and unsatisfied with their lives. And while, metaphorically, I may think it perfectly acceptable to say to a child, “Stop crying, God doesn’t love you when you cry,” maybe Suke doesn’t think that’s the best way to deal with diaper rash. I don’t know.

And that’s the problem. I really don’t know anything about his readers. Hell, all I really know about him is that he loves spinach dip so much he named his blog after it. On the contrary, after ten months, I feel like I know my readers like the back of my hand. My readers skew to the debased. They enjoy Scrabble, but still try to sneak in words like “poop” and “chode” from time to time. They’ll turn on softcore porn when they get drunk. They’re largely atheistic and find humor in people injuring themselves. My readers would probably get drunk at a funeral. (I love you guys.) Most importantly, my readers can appreciate my sincerity when I write “So I took a crap yesterday and I don’t know what it was but I feel like I really understand my purpose today.” No questions asked, just an intrinsic understanding that I may be exaggerating, maybe not – but none of that matters because that’s just Dan being hilarious.

But I know nothing about Suke’s readers. Is he big with the scholastics? The ex-cons? The Jesuits? Maybe his readers can’t even appreciate a good racist joke. I mean these are the things a writer needs to know going into a blog. Otherwise I’m stuck with tapioca topics like “Boy, scientology is crazy!” or “Haha, game shows from the 80’s were funny!” And no one wants that. They want edgy material with jokes just off color enough where they can laugh without guilt. And frankly, under these circumstances I just don’t think I can provide that. So I did what every good writer does when he can’t cope with a situation: I photoshopped Suke’s head onto my pictures and added captions.