This being May Day, I should be writing some commie claptrap to show my solidarity with the downtrodden, but I’m just too goddamned tired. I swapped shifts in the velo-barrel with a comrade who was backed up against the wall of higher education and as things turned out there was a pile of pixels that needed pushing. The luck of the draw. I even had to speak to people on the phone and write down what they said for publication. Oh, the humanity. Making stuff up is ever so much easier.
At least we don’t have the swine flu. Not yet, anyway. The wine flu is a possibility come tomorrow morning, but we are spared the Revenge of the Pigs for now.
Meanwhile, Herself has returned from yet another road trip in the service of library science. This most recent excursion took her to the Stanley Hotel — yes, that Stanley Hotel, the one immortalized as the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s famous spine-tingler “The Shining.” The boogers didn’t get her, happily, but they did mess with her sleep by banging on the heater until she had to change rooms at (gasp) midnight.
We’ve enjoyed a couple days of rain here in Bibleburg. It’s a nice change from precip’ you have to shovel, but it makes the trails awful gooey, especially in Palmer Park, where most of the nifty single-track has a clay base that holds onto tire tracks the way a bog-trotter does grudges.
No matter. I haven’t had a chance to get out anyway. Too busy serving up news nuggets out of the old velo-barrel. I don’t work much or very hard, not compared to most folks, but the chores do tend to bunch up every other week, making Sunday through Wednesday feel like Bizarro Santa’s workshop on Dec. 24, with platoons of red-eyed elves scurrying around like roaches and the fat man barking orders. Fill the bag, bitches, time’s a-wastin’. Places to go, people to see.
Some light work for VeloNews.com drifted over from Monday into this morning. That done, it’s time to crank up the laugh factory for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, which requires a distinct shifting of mental gears. Grinding and clashing noises ensue.
During my 11 years as a newspaper copy editor I rarely wrote anything under my own byline. Something about banging away on other people’s stories dulls the desire to tell any of your own; for me, at least. Writing comes mores easily now that I’m not a full-time rim rat, but occasionally it still feels like trying to start the White Tornado on a winter morning. Floor it three or four times, twist the key, hear her crank, c’mon you sonofabitch … errr rrr rrr … stomp stomp … errr rrr rrr … stomp stomp stomp … errr rrr rrr. …
Chairman Meow's tomb is a colorful sight come springtime.
Chasing typos around the Intertubes instead of wheels along the trail. Feh. Sunday is no-fun day if you happen to be an editor for a cycling website, even a part-time one.
Each writer presents a different editorial challenge (some understand deadlines and English, others not so much); each promoter supplies results in a different fashion (HTML, Excel, PDF or not at all); each photographer has his own little quirks (giant jpgs with incomprehensible filenames, teensy jpgs with no captions). I, of course, bring my own peculiar habits (surly bibulousness) to the project.
Back in the day, when I was still a newspaperman instead of whatever it is that I am now, all these disparate personalities congregated under one roof, where we could all shout at each other over not much and then go get convivially shitfaced once the presses started rumbling.
Now we’re in Spain, Belgium, Wyoming, Boulder, Georgia, California and Bibleburg, and shouting over IM or via e-mail just isn’t the same. Plus a guy in León can hardly buy a round for another guy in Bibleburg, and vice versa.
We had more hands back in the day, too. We’re always undermanned at VeloNews.com, but this weekend the herd is especially thin for a number of perfectly defensible reasons. So instead of doing a little leisurely swashbuckling through a couple of short stories, I found myself pretty much glued to the office chair from 6:30 a.m. to late afternoon, hacking at this and that, frantically twisting my Strunk & White Secret Decoder Ring and muttering dire imprecations that would land you a chat with Human Resources in one of today’s newsrooms. And it ain’t over yet. California and Georgia have yet to check in. And they wonder why I drink.
I did get out to snap a couple pix of Chairman Meow’s tomb, though. She has a colorful honor guard again this spring, and if it ever rains, they should get plenty of reinforcements.
From our When Drowning, Grasp the Anvil Firmly Department comes the news that the Bibleburg Gaslight is taking another stab at offering a free paper with a blend of wire-service news, staff reports and dispatches from “citizen journalists,” which is to say anyone with a PC and a craving to see his or her name in print. Oboy, can’t wait.
Sweetheart, gimme rewrite ... no, on second thought, make that the promotions department!
Astoundingly, this thing, dubbed Ink, will be targeted at a trio of areas I would consider either blue or independent — downtown, the west side and Manitou Springs — where the Gaslight‘s deranged, fire-engine-red, wingnut-libertarian fan base mostly isn’t. We’re all commies and queers and atheists in these parts. Some of us are all three.
The Gaslight‘s previous attempt to masquerade as a zoned collection of “neighborhood papers,” an embarrassing throwaway bumwad called The Slice, died unmourned a couple years ago, if memory serves. It made those god-awful holiday letters you get from acquaintances look like the “Essays of E.B. White.” But it arrived on the doorstep once weekly, packaged in a nifty plastic bag suitable for picking up dog shit, so it wasn’t entirely useless. For those with hamsters or parakeets it was a two-fer.
I suppose I should be gratified that the Gaslight is trying to pay some attention to “downtown” Bibleburg and other pockets of local weirdness. I like to go out for breakfast now and then, and breakfast out means reading the newspaper, but I haven’t seen a copy of the Gaslight in a box downtown for the better part of quite some time. They’ve either cut way back on the press run or abandoned single-copy sales altogether. Either way, I could care less. More trees will grow in the wild wood.
The Colorado Springs Independent seems to be hanging on despite the sagging economy, but two other throwaways with less baggage have fallen upon hard times recently — Newspeak, which has moved online, and Springs Magazine, which has simply gone away. Ink seems destined to follow them down the drain. Remember your Humphrey Bogart, as crusading editor Ed Hutcheson in “Deadline U.S.A.” — “Stupidity isn’t hereditary, you acquire it by yourself.”
Busy, busy, busy. It’s Cobbles Week over at VeloNews.com, and today that means the Tour of Flanders. You want to find out who won, drop on by. They sell ads and stuff and need the eyeballs.
Editor in chief Ben Delaney is laboring across the pond, as is editor at large John Wilcockson. Euro’ correspondent Andrew Hood is pretty much always there, as is ace shooter Graham Watson, and so we do not lack for postable news nuggets as the hard men bang bars in the sleet and cowshit.
On days like this I drag ass out of bed far too early, grab a cup of mud and plunk down in the office chair to play editor from a distance, fielding e-mails and instant messages from the far-flung VeloGang, which operates in press rooms, pubs and home offices in Europe, Colorado and Wyoming, where longtime web geek Charles Pelkey hangs his ten-gallon hat.
It’s hard to believe that when I first started working with VeloNews back in 1989, a Mac SE with a 1200-baud Hayes modem hooked to a BBS constituted the pinnacle of journalistic technology. I was still FedExing original black-and-white cartoons and faxing stories from Santa Fe to the mothership in Boulder.
There are downsides to a smaller world, of course. Today, colleagues can poke their long, snoopy noses over your shoulder via AIM, iChat or Skype. It’s almost like having them right there in the office with you. Happily, you can always unplug the sonsabitches like Dave Bowman did the HAL 9000, another digital presence famous for erratic backseat driving, and go back about your business.
