You'll Be Seeing a Lot More Reruns Here at the Happy Place in the Near Future! — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Like many creative people, I think about the poorly received Harold Ramis film Multiplicity on a regular basis. I constantly find myself thinking, “I wish that I lived in the world of Multiplicity because I sure could use clones to handle all of the crap that I have to do.”

Now you could argue, legitimately, that one Nathan Rabin is more than enough but when I think about everything that I need to get done I am overwhelmed with a desire more for more of me to handle the impossible amount of work I have to do every day.

I run a fairly ambitious, constantly updated website more or less by myself. I likewise have an involved and labor-intensive Substack newsletter that I am very proud of and excited about, even as I have not been able to find the time to do some of the stuff that I want to do for it.

I’m behind on Travolta/Cage and The Travolta/Cage Project for reasons that go beyond not being able to co-host the podcast for a solid month after I had my my teeth removed and dentures made because it took me at least that long to learn how to talk again without feeling like I sound like Sylvester the Cat, but with less dignity.

I’m also writing a six or seven hundred page book that involves watching and writing about something in the area of four hundred and twenty movies that’s due out in a matter of months.

I’m also trying to do more freelancing and get a salaried position in my field after eight long, hard years as a total independent.

How the hell am I going to get all this shit done? I’d have a hard time getting around to it all if I worked sixty hours a week and had privacy and space to concentrate. But I’m essentially a house husband who makes about a third of what my wife makes so I work far fewer hours so that I can be home with our two neuro-divergent sons while she works very long hours at her higher paying jobs.

Also, I just got out of one of the longest, most intense depressions of my adult life so I did not have as much energy or focus as I usually do.

I do not, unfortunately, live in the world of Multiplicity. I can’t create a second Nathan Rabin to work on The Fractured Mirror full-time even though that is an enormous undertaking in terms of time and work even as it’s only about twenty percent of what Donald Trump would refer, not inaccurately, to as my failing career.

I can’t create a second clone to do justice to Travolta/Cage or a third one to devote all of his time and energy to finding a staff position in pop culture media.

All I have is my broken brain, my bone-deep existential exhaustion and nowhere near enough time for everything that I have to do professionally as well as personally.

So I make concessions. I try not to be too hard on myself when I miss a self-imposed deadline and I miss a lot because my career involves a LOT of work and a LOT of moving parts and too little money, stability, security and time.

I’ve also been fortunate in that when TCM Backlot went out of business my wonderful editor there gave me permission to run all of the articles I had written for them on my site.

They also very graciously agreed to letting me turn my TCM Backlot column The Fractured Mirror into my ninth book.

I had something like seventy or eighty pieces to re-run on my site. That meant that I could run a Fractured Mirror or First and Last article on my site every week for two solid years.

That was huge. Thank you, Yacov. I owe the world to you.

TCM Backlot gave me a lot of pieces to re-run on my site but I have ran out of TCM Backlot pieces to re-run.

That’s terrifying! My career is so precarious and fragile. It takes very little to rock it to its core.

This is a very longwinded way of explaining why there will be more re-runs of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s immediate future.

The great thing about having a voluminous archive of articles is that it gives me the power to hand off a considerable amount of work to the Old Me.

After all, it was the Old Me who wrote all of those articles. At the risk of being immodest, I think he did a very good job, all things considered!

The Old Me has done a LOT of work in the six years that Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place has existed. That means that there are a lot of pieces for me to re-run.

One of the many reasons I don’t feel bad about running what SCTV referred to as “Golden Classics” is because I know that I personally do not have a great memory.

It’s very common for me to rerun a major piece from this site’s first two or three years and have, at best, an INCREDIBLY vague, faint memory of what the piece contains.

If I do not remember pieces that I wrote and published four years ago then I think it’s safe to say that even die-hard fans of this site—and at this point the site seems to have only rabid fans and people who’ve never heard of it—won’t remember them either.

So get ready for more golden classics in the upcoming months, particularly when I’m putting the finishing touches on The Fractured Mirror book in August or September so that I can publish it in October as planned.

Like The Weird Accordion to Al and The Joy of Trash, The Fractured Mirror will contain a fair amount of content that previously ran on Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place.

Ironically, The Weird Accordion to Al, the least popular column in the history of this site, spawned my best-selling book since my Scribner days while The Joy of Trash, which collected the site’s most popular pieces, has sold a fraction of what The Weird Accordion to Al did. And it is a REALLY good book.

Fractured Mirror articles are not particularly popular either but I suspect that when people see The Fractured Mirror in its mammoth entirety they’ll understand and appreciate it in a way that’s impossible to do now.

I’m proud of the work that I have done in the past and very much hope that the future is kind to it.

Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, my next book, a massive, 600 page exploration of the long and distinguished history of American movies about the film industry at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Check out The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity 3: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 50) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!

I’ve also written multiple versions of my many books about “Weird Al” Yankovic that you can buy here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that?

Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/

And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace