Idk how we got into this state, or if it's environment-dependent or
MySQL-version-dependent or what, but setting up the dev environment on
my macOS machine is complaining that `TEXT` columns can't have default
values.
Well, in that case, let's just have it be a non-nullable field, and add
a note to our code that missing fields *can* cause item saving to fail!
(This was always true, but I'm just extra-noting it because it's
becoming *more* true.)