Why I Feel Lucky That I Get to Write About Shasta McNasty

Writing, editing and publicizing an entire website like Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place by yourself is a time and labor-intensive endeavor but when you add writing and editing three books (The Joy of Trash, The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored In Version) to the mix it becomes damn near impossibly demanding. 

I’ve been trying to work diligently on the twelve original articles I will be writing for The Joy of Trash, with some success, but when you factor in the work I’m doing for Travolta/Cage and the Happy Place it can be hard to carve out time. 

At the end of a long day of working and self-promotion and parenting it’s tough to find the energy for a final burst of furious labor. At eleven o’clock, when the kids are put to bed and the wife is asleep and the world is at rest, it’s tough to muster up the excitement to experience the terrible, terrible entertainment that I must experience and write about for my book. 

Yet the success of The Joy of Trash is dependent on me doing just that. Thanks to the seventeen thousand dollars I raised in the book’s Kickstarter campaign, it’s already a big success that has helped pull me out of a vast ocean of credit card debt but there’s also a sizable reward, financial and otherwise, waiting for me when the book is actually published. 

So I recently decided to throw myself into watching every episode of Shasta McNasty I could get my grubby mitts on. Thankfully some lunatic uploaded twenty of Shasta McNasty’s twenty-two episodes to Youtube and I am obsessive enough to be vaguely annoyed that there are two entire episodes of Shasta McNasty that I wasn’t able to watch and write about. 

I’m thankfully pragmatic enough to realize that on a fundamental level that those two episodes wouldn’t change my feelings about the show a bit and that it is entirely possible to get a sense of Shasta McNasty in its entirety from watching 93 percent of the episodes.

They’re actually talking about sex, specifically blow jobs!

When I sat down to research my Shasta McNasty article the thought, “Why am I doing this to myself?” floated through my head more than once. Or twice. Or three times. On the most literal level, I was watching Shasta McNasty because I’m professionally obligated to write a dozen new pieces for an upcoming book about things that are terrible and the new entries have to measure up to the very best writing that has appeared in The Happy Place. 

On a less practical level, I was binge-watching Shasta McNasty because I wanted to, because I was genuinely curious as to just how bad a show that has become snarky short-hand for tacky TV opportunism could be. 

I wanted to immerse myself in Shasta McNasty’s weird world for a day or two and then be done with it for eternity, with a spiffy new The Joy of Trash article as my enduring reward for willfully subjecting myself to something I knew going in would be egregiously awful, that I was only writing about because it was so notoriously shitty.

I’m calling the Happy Place’s second book The Joy of Trash because I genuinely derive joy from doing deep dives into dumpster fires like Shasta McNasty.

I may not know how to drive a car or tie a tie or interact with other human beings on a social level without excruciating self-consciousness but for the last twenty-four years I have been training my brain the way an Olympics athlete would train their body, to be able to write the best, most informed article on Shasta McNasty possible. 

I was born to suffer through Shasta McNasty so that I might spare readers the same torment but I’m built for it as well. And there’s some weird part of me that gets off on the idea that when I was watching Shasta McNasty and thinking way too hard about Shasta McNasty and writing thousands of words about the show I could very well have been the only person in the world doing so at that time. Or even that year. Or decade. 

You can read about the hot new movie or TV show anywhere. You can read about the big old movie enjoying its 25th anniversary anywhere. You can read hot takes anywhere. But if you want to read about Shasta McNasty or the lesser films of Tawny Kitaen or Rebecca Gayheart, I’m the only game in town. 

So I’ll keep on watching and writing about the Shasta McNastys of the world, and feeling damn grateful that I’m able to support myself and my family through such exquisitely strange, bizarrely personal labor.

Pre-order The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything and get access to original articles AS I write them (including articles about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Adrien Brody on SNL, Shasta McNasty and Baywatch Nights) and plenty more bonus stuff like exclusive cards featuring Felipe Sobreiro’s amazing artwork for the book at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/cart

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