My Kingdom for a Garage! — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Garages occupy a romantic place in business mythology as the modest yet nurturing homes of a million businesses that would go on to change the world and the way we all live but were so tiny and precarious at the beginning that they could fit inside a space designed for the family car.

The garage will always be synonymous with capitalism at its most ingratiatingly relatable, with dreams and dreamers with the guts and ambition to pursue their aspirations even when it means turning part of their home into a makeshift workspace.

Apple, we are told, was once a struggling business operating out of somebody’s mom’s garage. The same is true of Amazon and Microsoft. Now look at them! They’re worth millions.

I never set out to become a small businessman. But after becoming somehow unemployable after sixteen years at the top of my field as a pop culture writer and a major label author whose books did not turn a profit I had no choice really but to get into business for myself as a pop culture website proprietor, podcaster and self-publisher just barely making a living through crowd-funding and book sales.

And you know what? It’s not so bad. I mean, sure, it’s an insane amount of work for a modest, uncertain amount of money but the complete creative freedom is great and I wake up every morning excited to write for y’all and see what y’all have to say about it.

The primary feedback I’ve received, beyond readers wanting me to write more extensively about the life and career of troubled hair metal vixen Tawny Kitaen, which, honestly, I don’t know is either possible or advisable, is that y’all hate it when I address y’all as y’all.

Y’all apparently find it an obnoxious affectation from someone who spent his first 38 years as a Midwesterner but what can I say? I am a Southerner now, and y’all will just have to accept it.

Declan Haven Books, the literary arm of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place Incorporated is currently a size now where I desperately wish that I had the money and resources to operate out of a garage.

How awesome would that be? I’d have so much space to put the hundreds upon hundreds (about 500 at last count) of copies of The Joy of Trash I have pre-sold to folks who pre-ordered them via Kickstarter and now Backerkit I’d have a whole spot just for copies of The Weird Accordion to Al and Postal.

Heck, maybe I could even put a desk and a TV and Blu-Ray player in my fantasy garage. While I’m day-dreaming, my garage, or “man-cave” could also have an arcade version of NBA Jam and a bunch of girly pin-up posters of Kathy Ireland and Elle McPherson.

Instead of a roomy garage, Declan Haven books currently operates out a closet in my younger son’s nursery. I don’t even have the whole closet to myself. Most of it is taken up by my two year olds clothing but what’s free I use to house all of the copies of the books that I have sold through my website, Backerkit and Kickstarter.

The closet where I store my books isn’t even a particularly big closet but it’s big enough to suit my needs. For now,

I hope that’s not the case forever. I desperately want my small business to succeed or rather I desperately need for my small business to succeed because there’s no plan B, no other real options.

Will my business ever reach garage level? Probably not but it’s good to have a goal to work towards and growing to garage-business size seems like a good place to start.

Pre-order The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything and get access to original articles AS I write them and plenty more bonus stuff like exclusive cards featuring Felipe Sobreiro’s amazing artwork for the book at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/cart

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang!

Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here