The Truth Was Out There Part I
And I mean really out there
It was a week until Christmas, 2017, and I was in Las Vegas, Nevada, with my cat Marie Claire, doing a free month at writer’s residency in a small studio apartment off the Fremont Street Experience. I was there to work and on a tight budget, Vegas is a fun town when you got money to burn and a bad town to be in when it’s burning you. I was there to work, to finally get this book through the goal posts, so I wasn’t exactly fear and loathing it, although by that point some part of me was genuinely loathing it.
At night, the giant statue of a preying mantis that shot fire out of its mouth was pretty close, i passed container park on my nightly walk down the Fremont Street Experience. At random times in the night, that preying mantis, blowing fire out its mouth, reminded my PTSD brain of the decompression thump from a mortar, I never got used to it. During the day, I would walk down to the Writer’s Block—an excellent bookstore that has since relocated—and work on the endless revisions to a book I was working on (that you really should read).
I was also, as is my custom, a bit strapped for cash at that point; the book revisions had gone on for so long that money was gone, spent—at least with that first chunk, the book got paid out in four chunks, enough to hook you at the front and keep you going for the back end, a real vice—and looking for work; always looking for extra work.
The freelance game was a grind, man, and I was a bit obsessive about what I would or would not work on, who I would or would not work for, what I would or would not write about. I’ve found that you’ve got to be a little bit picky in this business, even if it bites you sometimes.
I’d pitched six outlets before Playboy bit off on my last published piece up to that point. It was a fun story that took a week and required the rental of a cruise America RV, which was driven to an eclipse in Idaho in the same town Television was invented by me, my older brother Robert, and my friend Doug, who at that point was in his second or third year out of the shadows as a former CIA spy, and I think still reckoning with the adjustment to civilian life. The trip got weird; as we passed Yale Road in Denver I swear, I have video of this, the odometer recorded 6666.66 miles, right about the time the edible I’d bought at a dispensary that used to be a bar that still had a bullet hole from a Bat Masterson gunshot, so I thought it was pretty significant.
Anyway the point is, that story took some emotional energy, some financial resources, I was deficit spending other people’s money at that point, the business model was…not sustainable. They took it only for the web section and I think were going broke by that point, so the pay really sucked—their print edition paid pretty well, to be fair, but I knew Ben Smith at Buzzfeed from back in the day, and he was always pretty nice to me, so I opened up my web-browser and began to type an email to Ben.
I thought Buzzfeed would have some money and I could do a quick hit piece on UFOs. Easy, right? Just weird enough, but there was an article in the New York Times about them, and if there’s an article in The New York Times about something, you can generally get another outlet to take it seriously.
28 December, 2017
1337 MST
Email To: Ben Smith, Buzzfeed
Email From: Matt Farwell, Noted Lunatic
Subject: 👽