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.
Old Kinco work gloves and an old Carhart work jacket.
I knew what I was in for.
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.
So who were they waterboarding, anyway? I never knew you covered the CIA…..
I know one thing for sure: The editor who sent me there wanted to waterboard me when I came back with bupkis.
Chris: I just returned from the DC area and frozen lips were the order of the day! 23F highs and -5F lows with windchill! 15″ of hard as a brick snow on the ground.
As to advanced degrees (full transparency, I have an MBA that took 6 years because I moved 3 times getting it while serving in the USAF), I’m a big believer in the “Osmosis Degree”. You get it by spending time in the trenches of life with good and not-so-good examples/experiences/leaders/non-leaders, as you and our Humble Narrator have done. Hopefully you internalize and ACT upon the positive traits!
Nowadays (or a while ago) we call(ed) that “intellectual rigor” or “academic freedom”. 🙂
As Albert Einstein said: “The important thing is NOT to stop questioning.”
So …. here ya go …. “What is the meaning of life?” 🙂
“…while I wasn’t exactly great at anything, I had learned to be OK at a number of things…”
Jeebus. 1991 was quite the year. You went freelancing and I got the faculty gig at the U of Hawaii for basically the same reason: I was OK enough at a lot of things, so I could keep the lights on in the laboratories and keep the graduate students from hurting themselves. That freed up the Brains of the Outfit to hide out in their offices writing papers and begging for money. Was a good job while it lasted. Fortunately, when the fun part started getting less fun (I was fool enough to accept what in retrospect was a raw deal, and that got locked in even as the cost of living…didn’t), I sold my ass for a better, perhaps less honorable gig at Ye Olde Bombe Factory.
And here we are.
Here we are indeed. Managed to survive to retirement.
Newspaper editors, and publishers, loved a sucker who could/would do a number of different things for one salary and the piss-poor bennies that went with. Saved on headcount and thus payroll.
It wasn’t uncommon for me as an assistant news editor in Oregon to lay out a national/international page, select and edit the copy for it, design and create a piece of art to anchor the page, and write the headlines and captions. When covering bike races for The New Mex I often wrote the story and shot a few pix because the sports editor wasn’t about to waste a good shooter on a damn bike race. Occasionally I drew a cartoon to go with something I’d written.
It only got worse when I went freelance. I could hear a dollar bill fall onto a shag carpet two time zones away and be there to snatch it up before someone else could get to it. “Gimme that, I’ll do anything for it. …”
Boy, was I ever a cheap date. Except for the whole giant-pain-in-the-ass thing. …
That looks like it was a good rumble strip article. Reminds me of the century ride return leg up US 285 with those big ass rumble strips.
Speaking of New Mex articles, I see you weighed in on the giant Marriott planned for the corner of Death and Dismemberment in The City Difficult. That should be … fun, especially during the construction phase. Maybe not.
I avoid that intersection if I can. Unfortunately, I often can’t. The Rail Trail and Acequia Trail tunnel is right there, the Rail Trail glides just behind what will be that behemoth, and just up the street is the Trader Joe’s, Natural Grocers, etc. That is going to be an interesting experience. Between the construction and the perpetual drought, North Carolina is looking better. At least there the Demoncratic Party doesn’t consider me to be an evil bastard. They out there need all the help they can get.
Well for some of us POG’s (Escape/withdrawal/propulsion) from the paid journalism path was a plus. Used to have to wait a month for high quality snark and comedy and great cartoons to appear – first in print form, and in later years creaking out to our often woeful dialup modems. And now, there is NO muzzle or leash and his observations are digital gold. But I suspect Herself has considered a shock collar at times. But then again…sometimes POG will lay low on posting for a few consecutive days so maybe he did get some voltage messages and is toeing the line. I know my neck burns take weeks to heal…..
Whah, shuckens, Herbalicious ol’ buddy, you done rose a blush on this ol’ houn’ dawg.
Now and again I miss the paychecks from the Glory Daze. More often I miss the deadlines. Ain’t nothin’ better than a deadline bearing down on you like a texting teen knee-steering daddy’s Escalade when it comes to focusing those creative energies.
I’m like the fool that Sherlock Holmes described to John Watson when they were first getting acquainted in “A Study in Scarlet.” Explained Holmes:
That’s me to a T. I have a lot of interests, both casual and serious, and I collect them the way some geezers do stamps, coins, or (ahem) bicycles.
Come time to write about one thing or another I get to stumbling around the dusty ol’ brain-attic, tripping over this and barking shins on that, and after I’ve done myself a series of injuries looking for facts, fantasies, and/or arguments to assemble into something like a blog post, why … I may just limp off some’eres to lick my wounds for a spell.
That’s where the deadline comes in. Anyone who has to write on time for moneys is going to pull something together out of that yard sale in his cranium, come hell or high water. Why, many’s the time that I’ve written 1,500 words about not having anything to write about. The fabled “Column About Nothing.” Sort of a Zen koan, but with more word count, especially if I was being paid by the word.
Now that’s what I call desperation. Also, salable copy.
I know it got old for you, but I miss those old Friday’s Foaming Rants. And as far as classics, Pelkey’s (it was Pelkey, wasn’t it?) story about the real reason behind those fields of sunflowers in France.
O, yeah. My man Charles has a highly developed sense of humor. He came up with many of our best April Fool gags. I was the designated funnyman, but CP could step up to the plate whenever and smack one right over the left-field wall.
One of my favorite Pelkey stories stems from the blanket coverage VeloNews used to give to the old Cactus Cup, back when it was more or less the kickoff to the season that Sea Otter is now. Talk about flooding the zone — VN would basically empty the office of writing/editing staff and send them west, supported by a small army of freelancers, Your Humble Narrator among them.
So one year co-owner/editor John Wilcockson and I are sweating buckets at the Cactus Cup expo, in the scorching Arizona desert, talking about this, that, and the other, when up strolls Charles. He points at me, then at Wilcockson, and finally skyward, saying:
“Mad Dog. Englishman. Noonday sun.”
True story. Another one going, going, gone, right over the wall. The crowd roars.
Jeeze, I even remember that story.
Golden! That would make me slap myself on the forehead and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Yeah, Charles is quick on the draw. He had to spend a lot of time dealing with the serious side of the sport — governance and doping — and I expect some folks thought he was all business, all the time. But there was a lot of monkey business in there too.
The Live Update Guy thing was all Charles. He made that dog hunt. I enjoyed being Ed to his Johnny, but dreaded the occasional shift when I had to fly solo because he had lawyering or whatever to do. That was his audience, not mine, and all of us knew it. I was a green substitute teacher in a schoolroom full of hooligans.
Smart with a work ethic is the thing to be. You didn’t see me graduating from law school and passing the bar at 50. I never passed a bar when I was 50. I walked right in and ordered a Jameson with a Guinness back. Many, many of them.
Los Pendejos y “Mad Dog” aficionados: Whilst we commiserate the ever-shrinking presence of printed journalism, might I suggest, as a guy with no commercial/political/or other connections to “The Mountain Gazette” …. but as a long time reader … you consider looking into their “Print Ain’t Dead” anthology of the best articles they’ve produced over now some close to 60 years (Hunter Thompson, Edward Abbey, Jeremy Jones, Sadie Stein, et al). Long reads …. great insights …. print ain’t dead!
https://mountaingazette.com/products/print-aint-dead-a-mountain-gazette-anthology
Best to you all … “When in doubt, go higher!”
Ah, Mountain Gazette. Now that was a magazine worth reading.
M. John Fayhee was the sparkplug, but he’s gone on to other chores and someone else has the property now. He lives here in New Mexico, last I heard, and he’s still cranking out the copy. I found a long-form piece he wrote for the Aspen Daily News about this time last year. His most recent book, as near as I can determine, is “A Long Tangent,” the “musings by an old man and his young dog hiking every day for a year.”
I used to pick up a copy of Mountain Gazette on road trips, to Interbike or wherever, often in Flagstaff. I may have subscribed for a spell, but can’t recall for certain. Fayhee and another regional legend — Ed Quillen, Denver Post columnist and founder of Colorado Central magazine — were always worth your attention. Some of Quillen’s columns were collected in a book, “Deep in the Heart of the Rockies,” and they stand as a stark reminder of what we’ve lost as once-great newspapers became bungfodder for vulture capitalists. A posthumous followup, “Deeper into the Heart of the Rockies,” remains in print, at Barnes & Noble, anyway.
High Country News was another must-read, though it’s been off my radar for some time now. My pal Hal Walter contributed to the magazine and its Writers on the Range sideline for a spell and then wandered off to tackle other chores.
Magazines have suffered alongside newspapers, some of them even more so. It’s still possible to find some top-shelf scribes out there, but the hunt burns more daylight. I expect that a lot of folks have gone the Substack route or gotten themselves straight jobs with regular paychecks and bennies.
As for the late, great Cactus Ed Abbey, meanwhile, my man the Desert Oracle’s latest podcast is about that very gent, who would’ve turned 99 this year were he still with us.