Gangletown
Gangletown is a newsletter written by me - David Kimple - and contains personal essays, fiction, scripts, and low-brow expressions of thirst. Subscribers will receive updates directly in their e-mail.
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WTF is a ‘gangletown’?
I don’t want to wait for our lives to be over
I want to know right now
What will it be…
Okay pause. I know we just started, but…pause. Perhaps quoting lyrics from a song that rose to popularity because of a seminal 90’s teen drama called Dawson's Creek isn't the best way to open a description of what one should expect from this newsletter.
…or...actually yeah, that was 100% a lie. It’s exactly the thing. Unpause.
I Don’t Want to Wait by Paula Cole peaked at number 3 on the Billboard charts in November of 1997, and so did I!
I’m probably joking. Hopefully, the second part of that is only true if you’re speaking to my fifth-grade teacher, whose name rhymes with Mr. Sherlinger. He was an asshole. But the song, despite the implication of its “peak” chart history, actually lives on to this day. It’s not living in the top 100 anymore, but it lives in you like Mufasa in Simba. I’d bet Monopoly money that if it were playing right now, damn near anyone reading this would find themself transported to...a place. A place full of unusually specific details, enormous questions, intoxicating whimsy, and the cringiest of cringey faux pas. A place that smells like the food court of your hometown mall and your ex’s shampoo. It’s the stupidest place you’ve ever been, and also, it somehow made you the person you are today. Just as it happens with I Don’t Want to Wait, it’s where you end up when earnestness & absurdity, romance & nostalgia, and queerness & farce are mixed into one big bowl. That place is somewhere. I like to call it “Gangletown.”
Much like Dawson’s Creek, Gangletown is a desperate and overdrawn caricature of middle-American mediocrity. It is the confusing intersection of all the different versions of oneself that try to gain attention and control over the present. It’s the difficulty of deciding who you are and who you want to be because there are just so many options.
In truth, Gangletown is not just one thing but, rather, it is all of the things at once.
Let’s be honest, that last line doesn’t make a ton of sense, but also, it’s seemingly insightful, so I hope when you read it, you softly vocalized an affirmative “mmm” to yourself. Yes, self, mmm indeed.
Welcome to Gangletown. It’s full of contradictions.
-David
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