I suppose I should be raving about what’s happening to The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and just about every other newspaper or magazine in this misbegotten country.
But hey, if we’re going to be dumb enough to elect a venomous orange man-baby as the Pestilence of the Benighted Snakes — twice! — I guess we deserve to be pig-ign’ant of what he’s doing, too.
Anyway, the only thing raving about shitty newspapers ever got me was an invitation — more than one, actually — to leave the one I was raving about and drag my surly ass off to some other shitty newspaper, posthaste, s’il vous plaît, don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya, etc. I managed my final escape from The New Mexican in 1991, one step ahead of the publisher’s spike heel, and that was that.
You regulars know the story. I had joined that paper in 1988 as a copy editor, then cycled (har de har har) through a number of gigs — assistant sports editor, assistant features editor, and finally features editor, doing a little cartooning and cycling reportage on the side — before taking it on the Jesse Owens in ‘91 to do as a freelancer what pretty much every Damon Runyon character did on Broadway, to wit: “the best he can, which is an occupation that is greatly overcrowded at all times. …”
Boy howdy.
Still, 15 years of newspapering set me up pretty well for freelancing, because while I wasn’t exactly great at anything, I had learned to be OK at a number of things: writing hard news, soft features, and commentary (and fast, too); editing other people’s work and proofing pages; drawing cartoons and taking photos. I would try just about any old thing for any old crook who could spell my name right on a check and remember to mail it while I could still remember what I did to earn it.
So there I was, just doing the best I could and plenty of it, because freelancing paid less than newspaper work, and the kind of newspapers that would hire a hairy pain in the ass like Your Humble Narrator didn’t pay shit. If you wanted to get a raise, you had to move to another newspaper, and without being kicked, too.
Or maybe that was just me.
Happily, freelancers basically pioneered the concept of “remote work,” which kept my pain from manifesting itself daily in various editors’ asses. For a while, anyway. I developed a long reach. Nevertheless, I managed to log 30 years as a freelancer, twice the time I spent raving my way through a half-dozen Western dailies and one weekly outfit, and only had to move four times.
And newspapers taught me how.
I liked newspaper work, when I wasn’t hating it. The people were smart, except for the ones who weren’t, and you could try your hand at damn near anything unless you wanted to get paid more for it, in which case nix. The shift was basically hours of fuck-all peppered with seconds of cardiac arrest and/or stroke and we had to remake the entire fucking product every fucking day.
And no do-overs. Once your mistakes were off the press and soiling the readers’ greedy little paws they were yours forever, like misspelled tattoos.
God, it was fun. Except when it wasn’t. But sometimes even then, too. Plus it fed and housed me for 15 years, and set me up for the next three decades.
So fuck Jeff Bezos anyway.
Mad Blog Media 
I was in Bellows Falls Vt last night, skiing a hill serviced by a 50 year old rope tow. No corporate b.s. Just some folks having fun. In the dark, with a few lights.
Thanks for your thoughts. You help me stay in touch.
Sounds like a great way to keep your mind in order. We all have to find our happy places for a while yet.
I’m just glad I quit drinking before this pendejo started tipping over the national furniture and spraying everything with a rattle-can of Krylon Gold. Ninety minutes on the bike per diem is better for me than 90 shots of Chamucos.
I hope you had your old leather mitts on and not the fancy pair of ski gloves that rope tows like to eat up. It sounds like a great time. I went to a college that for a while had a ski hill and an operating rope tow. It was cool to throw the skis on across the road from my dorm and schuss over to the hill and get a few quick brisk runs in. Unfortunately later, there were a couple of injuries that occurred, lawyers were involved and ipso facto the rope tow was gone and a fence was erected half way down the slope. It’s a shame that not all of us assume the risk we bring upon ourselves.
Thank you for the grace of your maunderings. A shaft of light into the swamp.
Dee-lighted to add my teensy candle to the darkness, sir. Truth be told, I just can’t help myself. “Here’s your fingers, there’s the keyboard, what’s your hurry?” That sort of thing.
Oh, hell yes: Fuck Jeff Bezos. I hope his lips get frozen to Orange Hitler’s ass some cold day in DC.
Newspapering WAS fun, and I’ll never regret the 30! years I put into them. They taught me a lot, basically by repeatedly reminding me you can’t learn anything without an open mind. And – unlike advanced degrees (which it turns out my mother told anyone who would listen that she was sure I felt badly given all my siblings and all my children had earned one while I struggled with a mere BA), the education was free. They actually paid me to ask impudent questions to people in power – the kind of shit that sent me to detention in high school.
Jesus wept. Where will that kid go to make a living now?
Well, you could go to DC. Unfortunately, you might have to fly into trump airport. You open his mind, and you won’t find nothing but him.
Chris, Merrill and I may have caught the last train out of the station, newspaperwise.
Well, I did, anyway. Those two had skills and work ethics. All I had was pure dumb luck and the right friends at the right time.
Today? The 19-year-old me couldn’t get a job cleaning terlets at a newspaper. And I had already had that job once — at a couple of banks, not a newspaper — and was looking to upgrade my employment/social status.
Waddn’t it something? A couple of times I got to interview people I really wanted to meet, too. Dick Gregory. Pat Oliphant. Etc.
Of course, there was that one time I got sent to a water-board meeting and came back “reporting” …
“I got nothin’. Didn’t understand a word.”
That may have been how I wound up covering school boards. Lord, did a gig on the copy desk ever look sweet after that.
Oy, the water-boarding. A bad assignment, for sure. Left me breathless.