What I Want Go Gonzo Journal to Do for Me in 2023

Hey there! Long time! How’ve you been? I’m feeling rather fulfilled this Friday. I know it’s been too long since you’ve heard from me here at Go Gonzo Journal, but I’m looking to change that.

I have been more active over at Foul Play-by-play, where my friends and I provide colorful commentary on Minnesota sports and foul play in sports. You can follow us on YouTube and TikTok, or find our podcast on Apple, Spotify, and Substack. It’s just been an easier means for me to produce content for you. I get to talk about sports with my friends, which is about as easy as it gets for me. As a result, my mood has improved, and I’ve been more willing to put myself out there. I’m even dating again.

Going forward, Go Gonzo Journal will exist to serve me and my contributing writers Klair Cooper, Henry Peterson, and Leland Locke. This is now a space for us to come to terms with ourselves and our feelings – a true journal.

There will still be fake news with a spin of Truth. We will never abandon our Gonzo roots. We will always be the heroes of our stories, which will always be inspired by the crazy events happening around us. And we’ll always find Truth in our journaling of those events, however embellished or opinionated that journaling might be.

What I want Go Gonzo Journal to do for me in 2023 is help me, and hopefully you, work through the issues we all deal with on a daily basis. You might have noticed that I’m publishing under my real name instead of my pen name these days. Thompson is dead; long live Anthony Varriano (well, not too long). That is progress. I’m no longer worried about these Gonzo stories effecting my ability to get a job, and frankly, if they do, I don’t want that job.

While I won’t likely be able to write for myself and for all of you on a daily basis, this is what I hope to do each day I do write:

• Malfunction Monday will be for identifying my malfunctions, like why I can’t seem to make myself a morning person, or how I flee from situations that make me feel vulnerable even though I’d be better if I stayed.
• Two-faced Tuesday will be for identifying and coming to terms with the many sides to my personality. It’ll be a removing of the mask, if you will. For instance, did you know I’ve been preparing a drag performance for a weekly competition at the Gay ’90s here in Minneapolis? Probably not, huh. I’ve been thinking about it since a trip to Miami last December. More on that some Tuesday in the future.
• Wrestling Wednesday will use professional wrestling as an analogy for life itself and investigate how we wrestle with our public and private personas, and why, like wrestling, that’s inherently silly and unnecessarily dramatic. I’ll also celebrate All Elite Wrestling, its wrestlers, and the stories they tell.
• Thirsty Thursday is for revealing my thirsts, or vices. It’s a confession of sorts, so I can recognize the triggers that make me thirsty and avoid satisfying those thirsts so often. I’ve successfully avoided McDonald’s cheeseburgers thus far this year, so that’s good.
• Fulfilling Friday is for using what I’ve learned from the week’s work to fulfill the self I want to put into the world.

If this works, it’ll mean I’m writing more often and, hopefully, writing better. I’ve often written about how much I hate writing. Most writers do. That link I just shared was written almost three years ago and was about how Andre Agassi’s book “opened me up to the world” and made me want to turn Go Gonzo Journal into a literal journal. Well, better late than never.

If you’d like to subscribe to everything I’m doing, I have a personal Substack now. Use the form below to receive all my work from Go Gonzo Journal and Foul Play-by-play in your inbox. Thanks as always for your support of me, the other outlaw journalists writing here, and Gonzo journalism in general. I’ll write to you soon. I promise.