An addendum meant only for paying subs (but obviously sent to others as well)

Wry, pithy, trite attempt at a pun or a dunk goes here

I wrote this post specifically and only for readers who were paying subscribers at the time I announced I would no longer be adding new material to Beck of the Pack. But because I turned off paying subscriptions, I can no longer limit posts to my paying subscribers, because these no longer exist. Because Substack (an operation I have grown to detest) has informed me I need to wait a few hours before I can reverse this, I decided to send this to the whole list instead and—to ensure that I have the final word—disallow comments.

Some of these erstwhile supporters may never see the post, because they followed the suggestion in my Monday “resignation letter” and unsubscribed from the site and its antics posthaste. I suspect most of you took no action, perhaps anticipating a quick or eventual retraction of my retirement announcement (i.e., were awaiting a ranting relapse). But given that only 44 percent of all newsletter subscribers (including free sign-ups) even opened the “no mas” email, the world can clearly live without this project, just as I can live without the external world’s increasingly unwelcome contributions to me.

I wanted to wait a few days and take stock of my decision—which I doubt came as a genuine surprise to a single person—before putting this note together and sending it out to subs. But I’ve gotten a lot of direct responses to Monday’s post, and at some point, I’d like to read and reply to these, something I thought best to delay until this colossally useless project is finally and officially dead. I also see that the post drew some comments, but I haven’t read these either and probably never will. On the other hand, I want this to be over for real, so I can stop paying attention to the world at large and its wearying barrage of cackling and hollow-headed deceiver-and-hoarder-monkeys, and I didn’t want to be thinking about it over the weekend. In fact, finding myself even thinking about this virtual toilet when I wasn’t actually shoveling more crap into it is one of the reasons I grew to detest its existence.

Over the past four years, I’ve realized that I don’t enjoy writing for an audience. In fact, I don’t even like imagining having an audience. Substack was designed primarily for writers to make money, so it’s loaded with metrics and suggestions on how to accumulate more readers. I rarely looked at these from the outset and quit looking at them altogether over a year ago, because, strange as it may seem, I never wanted to make money or actively attract readers. I kind of liked the idea of a few hundred dissidents or realists or fans of unbridled, unapologetic misanthropy following along, but I dislike imagining myself as the center of even a modest amount of attention, especially within distance running—always a weird “place,” but now a wasteland of unusually addled, dishonest, corrupt, craven undesirables.

One thing I have refused to fully accept is that the average person has no trouble at all going through life going along with or even consciously spewing nonsense as long as this earns them the kind of material possessions they feel entitled to and can ensure a steady supply of nourishment for their cross-eyed, drool-bib-ready children. And this doesn’t just apply to the sport’s army of cheating or otherwise sincerity-starved influencers, from the face-gorging widebodies with too many sour-funk-stinking flab-canyons to chart to the beaming, ass-waggling, fake-titted joggers—mostly from the Dallas-Fort Worth area—peppering Instagram with their banal needy-hotwife vibes (and to my many middle-aged male peers keeping these virtual whores afloat with encouraging comments, consider your wank-happy role in this, too). Old-timers who plainly know better, but are apparently too stupid to make a living outside of running and therefore insist on polluting it with their post-retirement inanities, have also completely sold out just to retain a courtside seat at a game no one with taste could be interested in.

Kara Goucher, who really is a ridiculous idiot and probably lied about Al Sal getting a stinky-finger on a massage table at her whiny expense, is perhaps the best example of someone who runs her mouth when she should shut it instead, and anyone who defends her expulsions is engaging in special pleading. And the phenomenon of running’s online-pundit class considering chiefly of dolts is actually nothing new. It did not start with Citius Mag or any of the sites currently operated by resentful, unbangable white harridans (including Trail Runner. Runner’s World, and Women’s Running). The two twins who operate Letsrun are keening, oblivious waterheads (try listening to their podcast sometime) who had no business getting accepted to Ivy League schools, but their daddy worked for George W. Bush when that beaming halfwit was the governor of Texas, currently governed by an anti-speech, wheelchair-bound inbred yokel so profoundly stupid he has to consciously think to keep his own breathing going, a task he shouldn’t be bothering with anyway.

Running is not an activity for loserly morons, but it is certainly a sport or sport-like commercial enterprise full of assholes, imbeciles, pussies, liars, “transgender” “women” (i.e., castoff-class dudes who need to be knocked on their asses a few times until they get the deal), and piss-slicked, jizzotropic perverts who make the whole shooting match impossible to root for and easy to root against with every chamber of my blackened heart.

I also remarked to a friend the other day how much I despised writing itself. This one may seem farfetched, although I know a few of you get it. I can explain.

When I was writing one or two articles a year for running magazines, that was sorely misguided and—like organized running itself—is something I never should have started. But that stuff was vastly different from the stuff I was writing here. Any controversy in its content was tied solely to training theory. And most importantly, anyone's name could have been attached to any of that anodyne slag.

When I was making what for me was a great deal of money writing articles for Sciencing.com, I liked that. Who wouldn’t enjoy being able to lie in bed spitting out stuff about physics, biochemistry, and other things I was always deeply interested in? And without the work of an extra click, it’s impossible to see the name of the person who produced these 600 or so pieces.

But I really don't like the writing I've done since 2020. Not primarily because it’s so often purely mean, but because I despise the entire creative, typing, and thinking process and inevitably littering already superfluous and flawed drivel with typos. I hate making what I consider needless mistakes, which I will always make. More than that, I hate the things I write about. I hate everyone in the corporate media, I hate doctors for being lying cocksuckers and cowards as well as ignorant pissants, I hate the person claiming to be my mother (it’s a two-way pipeline, one I didn’t build), and I hate this generation of incompetent, unsightly, puke-splattered, neurotic, doped-up, anti-science, dickless or dick-wilting, ineducable, yet somehow arrogant trail runners.

And the running media became 100 percent pro-doping at the moment they all rallied around Shelby Houlihan’s obviously ludicrous burrito story in 2021, so a pox on the pussies of everyone involved, even the previously reliable Jon Gault. These are raw denialists and pro-cheating slimeballs, and I believe that in spite of their cognitive infelicities they all know as much. I’m sorry I ever knew a single one of these mouth-breathing sellouts and I hope their websites all tank (and the smoldering remnants of pro running with it).

I could keep going, but that’s the whole problem. Almost everyone who has been reading my complaints for almost four years and nodding along to most of them has done absolutely nothing to oppose any of the madness. Everyone has an excuse for this, some of these valid. But it no longer matters because I’m done with the whole mess.

I plan to use the momentum I have gained to continue ignoring as much of the human dungmonkey’s rank output and the imperatives of its alleged leaders. At the start of the week, I turned off all Substack notifications and newsletter deliveries. I zapped my minimally used Instagram account, leaving me with zero social-media accounts. I haven’t looked at “news” all week, either, although if I had to pick a city in desperate need of wholesale fiery destruction—and I am staunchly anti-death, even if most people are either useless or deleterious to me personally—it would unquestionably be Tel Aviv. And anyone who whines about that can suck on an Israel-shaped mini-pecker and slap a beanie on it, because I am not a dunce or a cuck and am thus not having any of these people’s jabber any more than I paid heed to racist Black Lives Matter goons or the bellowing-yet-broken chicks-with-dicks types. All are insane, and all are disgusting. I don’t need to know what the rest of the world’s dungmonkeys are up to as I already know which of the order-givers’ instructions I will follow in my blissfully parochial future dealing with others and which of these “mandates” I will ignore.

Every day, soon after awakening, I decide how I can spend some of that day’s time running in addition to performing the inelegant but valued tasks that assure me and my dog enough food and shelter to make it to the next day. Running is and will always be the first thing I think about, and that would be true even if everyone else quit. And just as I don’t take advice from Afrogluttons, harridans, or self-mutilating gender-benders on the “left,” I don’t take orders from Zionist anti-speech war pigs or child-bunghole-hungry Christian dingbats on the “right.” To me, such rules, like deities, exist only in other people’s own minds and up their stinking assholes.

That’s about it. No surprises, I’m sure. And I’ll continue to be in touch with many of you after this. After all, I don’t hate most people, I just hate everything they say, think, and do.