Fare Thee Well, Y'all

Today is my last day at Gawker Media/Gizmodo Media/G/O/M/e/d/i/a. I am not typically one to be at a loss for words, but in attempting to compose this post, I found it difficult to adequately sum up what my time at this company has meant and will mean to me in a way that is not 1) supremely cheesy and 2) wholly inclusive of all the people and stories and reasons why I’ve stuck around for three-plus years now.

So, rather than go through all my favorite blogs or reminisce about that time I had to transcribe one of Dan Arkin’s IRL wild screeds to Deadspin’s remotes as a wee intern, I just want to say thank you, to everyone: Marchman, Greenwell, Billy, Samer, Diana—okay, literally everyone at Deadspin, which was my real first newsroom family—Aleks, Jack, Jack, Jack (just kidding, only two Jacks), Katherine, Rafi, Sam, Libby, Paul, Caitlin, Tay, my parents, my brother, all the Deadspin commenters, and the five, err, four good Splinter commenters. There are a million reasons to be thankful to all these people. The main reason is that everyone here believed in and supported me and put up with, or at least occasionally edited, my incessant four-thousand word rants about Marvel and North Carolina politics and tribal sovereignty.

I am supremely lucky, which is not something I consider enough but am trying to improve upon. As someone who interned at what was then Gawker Media and took a job at Gizmodo Media (Univision Version) the following spring and has stuck around for three years to see it pass to gestures around vaguely whatever it is that Great Hills/nu-Forbes has planned, I have been ridiculously fortunate in that the entire time I have been allowed to write about my random-ass interests for a wide audience—as my editor at a major sports site, Marchman literally approved a series that had me take a month off of blogging to read through old Jesse Helms clips; Roth accepted a pitch on pickle farms. None of it makes any sense to me either. I have at least a dozen stories where I have no clue how they even made it past the first inquiry in Slack (which is probably why I started just doing them sans assignment and dumping them on my editor’s desk and fleeing). But, somehow, all these people liked the words I wrote and semicolons I abused and kept on letting me write them at the best possible media company for me to write them at.

I am not retiring or switching fields or going out to pasture, though that sounds pleasant. I took a job somewhere else (I can’t say where until next week) to continue writing about Indigenous issues and Southern politics, because, for some reason, the Lord is very kind to me and somehow people keep wanting to pay me money and give me healthcare to be able do so.

I don’t know how to end this post, much less my time at GMG; the best I can hope is that I find that answer at the bottom of my fifth frozen margarita later on tonight. Until then, let me just say thank you for reading this, and anything else I’ve ever written. I’ll have some more words for y’all to read soon, don’t you worry.