Help!

April 30, 2026May 2, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

“Won’t you please, please, help me?”

Is the pen the writer? The brush the painter? The motor the cyclist?

Grumbling over coffee about the lack of interesting reading material online — just about any old thing that wasn’t about fascists, eejits, or fascist eejits— I stumbled first across a piece about artificial intelligence worming its way into the handmade world of ’zines, and then another about bearing your own burdens from the deep, deep well that is Mike Ferrentino.

I appreciate ’zines, with their homemade artsy feel. In January our friend Lo sent us a tiny one she’d made, about the size of a hang tag, that was miles above the tired old “What we’ve been up to” family newsletter.

The niche seems to share some DNA with the underground newspapers I enjoyed Back in the Day®. I did a little cartooning for a few of those, and even helped start a short-lived one while wrapping up that B.A. in journalism from the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.

This may have followed my ouster as cartoonist for the college newspaper following a series of mildly vile attempts to bring Bay Area Rip Off Press-style hijinks to Weld County. My derivative bullshit failed to dollar up on the hoof in cattle country.

And the new venture somehow managed in short order to crawl right up the arse of some student-government numbnuts who threatened a lawsuit over a bit of unpleasantness we’d published.

“Good luck with that,” I said, referring him to our paper’s masthead, in which my dog Jojo was listed as editor. “Not only are you a public figure for the purposes of this story, but my dog is the editor. You’re the only person I can think of who is taking us seriously.”

Still, one longs to be taken seriously. Or at least laughed at for the right reasons. Also, paid. The Revolution was not only untelevised, it was underfunded.

So I left handmade hellraising for “straight” journalism, overstayed my welcome there, and now, here I am, a half century later, comfortably underground again and still waiting on the Revolution.

• • •

Blogging the way I do it has some ’zine-like qualities, I think. But what once was called a “weblog” actually has its roots in “journaling,” another handmade, offline sort of pasatiempo that’s enjoying a comeback of sorts. Though like everything else you can take it digital if you must — your iPhone has had a “Journal” app since 2023.

George suggested I start keeping a journal, and Lord, have I ever kept ’em.

I started keeping a journal in 1974, at the urging of George Gladney, then a reporter at the Colorado Springs Sun. In the Year of Our Lard 2026 I have 15 pounds of them, a cardboard box overflowing with old-school composition books defaced with ballpoint graffiti. And what a ’zine they would make, if anyone could decipher my scribbling (cursive early on, block lettering afterward).

The cops could clear many a cold case on the evidence therein.

“Honey, you’re making a scene!” Herself would exclaim as the John Laws burst through the door.

“No, I’m making a ’zine,” I would quip as the cuffs went on and the flashbulbs popped.

Those bracelets would come off again, and quickly, too, thanks to various statutes of limitations and a general unavailability of surviving/credible witnesses.

And then I could forget about ’zines and get back to the blogging, which I’ve been beavering away at since the Nineties, shortly after I abandoned newspapers for freelancing — basically trading one boss and regular paychecks for several bosses and “It’s in the mail. …” — and thought it might be fun to be my own underground, unpaid, hands-on publisher again, if only as a sideline.

Sadly, my editor Jojo was long gone, and his daughter Fuerte had no interest in journalism.

• • •

In the Nineties scribblers didn’t have to worry about A.I., unless they’d read a lot of science fiction. Some of us were short on intelligence of any sort, artificial or innate. My comp books and Bics got demoted from deep thought to training logs as I acquired a series of Macs, modems, and text editors. I taught myself some basic HTML, paid a rural hosting outfit to house my monstrosity in one of their cages from which it could screech and throw shit at passers-by, and hey presto! A blog.

The rest, as they say, is history, and quite a bit of it. My earliest efforts are lost in cyberspace, but the Archives contain about a quarter-century’s worth of bloggery in various states of decomposition.

What I brought to my little peepshow in the virtual carnival was decades of experience in newspapers and magazines as a reporter, editor, and cartoonist. I turned pro in the journalism racket just as newspapers were stumbling through the transition from hot type — for-reals hot, lines cast in lead by a clanking Linotype machine — to cold type, which meant computers. The times they were a-changin’.

Your Humble Narrator in the Mitchell High School *Echelon*‘s newsroom, circa 1971.

And once the Internet became A Thing, and those computers evolved from rumbling gods behind locked doors to perky little desktop numbers that anyone could own for the price of a decent used car, they were a-changin’ again. If you wanted to keep your head above water you had to go with the flow.

Which brings us back to the process of creation, and how — for me, at least — it’s changed since I submitted that first cartoon to the Mitchell High School Echelon back in 1971.

• • •

I had only ever been a cartoonist.

Self-taught, of course. A comics junkie from jump. Superman and Batman, Mad magazine, Bill Mauldin, Herblock. I learned that you draw in pencil so you can erase your mistakes, and then try very very hard not to make more mistakes when you finally ink the penciled sketch because then you have to start over. Add ink washes or sticky halftone film to achieve shades of gray; use watercolors or colored pencils to go full Disney.

But mostly I stuck to pencil, eraser, and black ink on paper because (a) I fucked up a ton, and (2) anything that got published was going to be in black and white anyway. Simple.

So I was I. Lord, was I ever.

And one day I found myself hired as a copy boy at the Sun, stripping wire-service copy from the teletypes, walking photos to engraving and page proofs to the copy desk, and waiting to be recognized as the next Pat Oliphant, who was then at The Denver Post.

Shortly after I’d proved competent at the basics the city editor handed me a press release to rewrite.

“But I don’t know how to type.” I said.

“Better learn,” he replied while walking away.

So I learned. My typing style remains unique, three fingers on the left hand and two on the right. Oddly fast, but a thing of beauty it is not; “touch typing” in the sense that each of those five fingers will eventually touch a key. The endless rewrites ordered by the city and/or copy desks were heavy lifting for a rookie scribe who couldn’t even fucking type, pounding away at the keys of a manual typewriter that was probably past retirement age when Damon Runyon was learning the newspaper racket down south at the Pueblo Star.

Nevertheless, I persisted. Learned. And adapted.

• • •

A few years and one B.A. in journalism later I was at the other newspaper in town — not as a cartoonist, but as a reporter — and I was delighted to see computerization finally rear its ugly head. Instead of going 10 rounds with that typewriter I could do a brain-dump into the terminal, then root through the pile and pick out a few shiny objects that might amuse an assistant city editor. If they didn’t, the rewrite would be a lot faster. And they couldn’t wad up my copy and throw it at me anymore.

Some of the veteranos in the Gazette Telegraph newsroom were less gung-ho. They would pound out their reports as per usual, on their ancient typewriters, and then with hard copy in hand retype them into their computer terminals as smoke billowed from ears at the city desk. Eventually the typewriters were removed. Some of the typists, too.

Forty-nine years, five newspapers, and countless magazines later I have written and/or drawn on just about everything using whatever was handy: pencils, pens, crayons, and keyboards; comp books, reporter’s notepads, bar napkins, and hotel stationery; manual and electric typewriters, dumb terminals hooked to mainframes, Macs connected to the Internet, and iPhones. Even shithouse walls.

Writing is never easy, because I have read so much of it, by more talented people. But it has become easier, with the advent of computers, and especially the laptop, which liberates you from the desk. Tip over the cranium wherever you are, let its contents spill out onto that solid-state floor, then root around in the pile until you find what you need.

A 14-year-old hammer and chisel: My 2012 MacBook Air.

It should still feel a lot like work. Sweaty, irksome, a daylight-burning, down-the-rabbit-hole time-suck, just one goddamn thing after another. Michelangelo looked at a block of marble and saw David within. But he needed a hammer and chisel to get to him. Got his hands dirty.

I’m no Michelangelo. Just some fool with the brain farts in search of a few perverts who like the smell. Pull my finger! And I’ve tried to choose my tools wisely.

For instance, while I love me some laptop and text editor, I hate spellcheckers and grammar widgets. If I want something looking over my shoulder I’ll get a parrot. I do my own stunts, bub, and I work without a net. Now stand back and watch. Gimme room!

The cartooning got a little involved there for a while, once color became available. I needed a flatbed scanner and a lot of pig-ign’ant careening around in Adobe Photoshop to deliver 300-dpi CMYK images to the masses. But the ideas all came from the same old place (behind the increasingly powerful spectacles), and first sprang to hideous life using the same old tools (paper, pencil, pen, and ink).

Between you and me, I think the march of progress developed a hitch in its gitalong a few years back. I work on a 14-inch 2024 M4 MacBook Pro now, but it’s no great improvement over my 11-inch MacBook Air, which dates to 2012. Better display, faster processor, yadda yadda yadda. I write a blog using a browser. I could do it with an iPhone from a tent. And I have.

So, if I ever run out of things worth saying, and interesting ways to say them, I won’t acquire some RoombaRite 9000® to hoover up all the words on the Internet and empty its bag into this blog. A.I.? N.O. It’d be like bolting a motor onto one of my Steelman Eurocrosses. Ferrentino and his father got it right: If you can’t lift it, don’t drive it.

No creative sort ever goes it completely alone, of course, unless they have a paper ranch, an ink well, a canvas farm, and a paint horse (har de har har). Find the lever and fulcrum that suit your needs and see if you can move the world. Without breaking it, if you please.

It doesn’t matter how you do the work as long as you do the work.

Sallying Fourth

July 4, 2024July 4, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Five-thirty in the morning. Doors and windows open to a cooling breeze. Birds and crickets singing up the sun.

An old analog clock ticks off the seconds. The clock is the front wheel of a bicycle. I don’t think of this as time rolling away from me, because this tiny bicycle’s wheels do not move. But the hands of its clock do — tick, tock; tick, tock — so maybe I’m mistaken. I’m a scribbler, not a theoretical physicist.

As dawn unfolds the lawn looks good from my perch on the couch. After yesterday’s ride on an actual bicycle I watered, mowed, raked, and just sort of generally tidied up back there. This morning I’ve set aside my traditional practice of washing down the news of the day — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexican, et al. — with the first cup of coffee. I’ve had enough of their squawking for the moment — call it a declaration of independence — so this limited reconnaissance from the couch will have to serve as my newsgathering as the sun comes up on this Fourth of July.

My first post this morning, like the ticking bicycle clock, was analog. I stepped outside and stuck our two cheapo plastic flags into the dirt at either side of the front walkway. Right side up, too.

I was thinking of our old Bibleburg friend and neighbor, Marv Berkman, who when asked why a freethinking old saloon picker like himself would fly the Stars and Stripes every morning replied, “I don’t want those people to think they’re the only ones who can do it.”

Ups and downs

May 15, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

Wind and other things that blow kept my bike mileage in the double digits last week, which would not be such a bad thing if it weren’t for my addiction to the news.

After spending too much time in front of the monitor and not enough behind the handlebar I came this close (finger and thumb so close together that you couldn’t slip the homepage of the Albuquerque Journal between them) to canceling all my subscriptions. Bad news, badly written, barely edited, and poorly presented.

The motto of The New York Times used to be “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” At lesser journals wiseguys often revised it to “All the News That Fits, We Print.” In the Age of the Bottomless Internet it might be “All the News We Print Gives You Fits.”

Practically nobody needs to know most of this stuff, much less write about it.

“The rise of executive butlers.”

“At-home IV drips are the latest luxury building amenity.”

“We tried to pet all 200 dogs at the [Westminster Dog Show]. Here’s what it all felt like.”

Newspapers have always provided a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, of course. But once the sheer volume of treacle was limited by the traditional 60/40 ratio of ads to news, which constrained page count; editors’ desire to focus on what was actually important, like, uh, the fucking news; and publishers’ insistence that the final package turn a profit.

There is no bottom to the Internet, no satisfying its endless appetite. Ever fed a baby bird? Imagine one the size of NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, but with a basement that extends all the way to Hell.

Whew. Now. All this being said, I have stumbled across two items you might enjoy reading over your morning coffee, shot of whiskey, or morning coffee with a shot of whiskey in it. And surprise, surprise: They both come from the godsend that rescued me from pulling an oar in the sinking longboat of daily newspapering, the wonderful world of bicycling.

First: The Washington Post presents a fabulous report by Peter W. Stevenson on Indiana University’s annual Little 500 bicycle race, made famous by the only cycling movie worth the price of a frame pump to put it into the ditch, “Breaking Away.”

It’s not clear who shot all the video and photos — Stevenson, a video producer, is credited on some, but not all — but they really help tell the story. And I love the still of the Kappa Alpha Theta rider hovering in midair over her saddle during a remount.

Second, The Cycling Independent gives us an essay by Laura Killingbeck, “A Good Time at the Dollar Store.” Killingbeck, free to explore after three months of housesitting, sings a soggy hosanna to the joys of the open road, a song I’m always eager to hear.

I’m supposed to do a short ride in the foothills with my fellow geezers this morning, but Killingbeck makes me want to strap some camping gear to a Soma and wobble off on a skull-flushing tour of wherever. Shucks, it’s not even sleeting here.

Road work

December 31, 2023December 31, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

On Christmas Day Herself and I were chatting on the phone with my sister and her husband when the topic of New Year travel plans arose.

“Now, I know he never wants to go anywhere, but how about you?” my sis asked Herself.

Well. Sheeyit. It’s a true fact that I hate to fly, because air travel combines the joie de vivre of the DMV, the ER, and the county lockup with the airborne equivalent of a midsummer greydog ride from Bakersfield to North Las Vegas in the company of refugees from dentistry, flat-assed hookers, and a shoeless, flatulent freegan with facial tats, fresh from a FoodMaxx Dumpster.

But there’s more than one way to travel. And somebody sure put a ton of hard miles on the eight motor vehicles I’ve owned since 1977.

That was the year I drove from Greeley, Colo., to Burlington, Vt., and back again, mostly because I could. I had a used Datsun pickup, a friend who needed a lift to Wellsville, N.Y., and the promise of a couch to crash on in Burlington (Winooski, actually, but Burlington sounds hipper, though no hipsters ever proposed building a dome enclosing Burlington).

While I was in the neighborhood I took a spin up to Montreal to collect another friend at the Dorval airport, and landed a job as a dishwasher who also delivered pizzas to the local college kids. Or a delivery guy who also washed dishes. There was free beer and the kids tipped in weed; the memories fade.

Despite these perks it wasn’t long before I found myself light in the wallet pocket and motoring back to Greeley for a third friend’s wedding. I didn’t expect the marriage to last (it didn’t), but I’d already had a taste of what Burlington called “weather,” a “living wage,” and “Mexican food,” and it was either learn to like them or be elsewhere pronto.

See the USA in your Chevrolet (or Datsun, Toyota or Ford)

Maybe the Great American Road Trip appealed to me because I was late to the whole driving scene (no license until the end of my first year of college in 1972, lost it almost immediately, and didn’t slide back behind the wheel until I graduated in ’77). Or maybe it was that when I was a sprat my family nearly always took its vacations by automobile, to Montreal, Toronto, the Redneck Riviera, Iowa, Arizona, and the like.

Whatever. Turned out I liked driving places. I would drive somewhere at the drop of a hat and drop the hat myself.

After leaving Greeley for good I drove that Datsun to my second, third, and fourth newspaper jobs, in Bibleburg, Tucson, and Corvallis, Ore. In between relocations there were local digressions and adventures further afield, to Phoenix, Nogales, Riverside, San Diego, Flagstaff, Eugene, Portland, Ashland, Spokane, and Seattle. In California and Oregon I drove haplessly up and down the coast, mesmerized by the Pacific but unable to land a job of work within eyesight of it. Corvallis, a speed bump with a college on the wrong side of the Coast Range, was as close as I ever got.

A brand-new Toyota pickup took me away from Oregon and back to Colorado — another daily in Pueblo, then a chain of weeklies in Denver — and fueled by unemployment insurance from the latter I made one last run at California, annoying friends with couches in Santa Rosa and Ventura and mooning at the goddamn ocean like a fish who wished he’d never learned to walk, or drive. Still no sale. Back to Denver where a buddy had an extra room in a ramshackle house on the site of a former plant nursery.

With the unemployment insurance knocking up against the E on my fiscal fuel gauge, I coasted to a stop in Española, N.M. — and California finally gave me that long-awaited come-hither look. The Ventura paper, which had snubbed me some months earlier, decided I might do after all and offered me a job. Sorry, already got one, in Santa Fe, I replied.

Driving to ride

And thus the Great Bicycle Racing Travel Era commenced. From first Española and then Santa Fe I drove the Toyota to races in Los Alamos, Albuquerque, Los Lunas, Ruidoso, Moriarty, Las Cruces, Grants, Durango, Glenwood Springs, and Bibleburg. When Herself and I quit our jobs (mine in Santa Fe, hers in Los Alamos) and moved to Bibleburg the races were up and down the Front Range, from Pueblo to Fort Collins and all points in between, with occasional detours to outliers like Pagosa, Durango, Gunnison, and Salida.

Outdoor Demo 2005 — Working Outdoor Demo at Interbike.

By this time I was getting paid to watch other people race bikes, or make them, or sell them, so I was off to Boulder, Scottsdale, Monterey, Laguna Seca, Laguna Hills, Anaheim, Las Vegas, Casper, Seattle, Breckenridge, Bellingham, Bisbee, Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Prescott. I drove when I could and flew when I had to.

Some events, like Cactus Cup, Sea Otter, and the North American Handmade Bike Show, I visited more than once. Interbike I attended — was it really 19 times? — in two different cities (Anaheim and Las Vegas), for three different publications (VeloNews, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, and Adventure Cyclist), from three different hometowns (Bibleburg, Weirdcliffe, and The Duck! City), driving six different vehicles (three Toyotas, two Subarus, and one Ford F-150).

Come to think of it, when we closed on El Rancho Pendejo in The Duck! City back in 2014 I had to drive here from Bibleburg, scrawl my Juan O’Hancock on the paperwork, and before the ink dried scamper off to Vegas for that year’s Interbike. Afterward I roared back to spend the night in ’Burque before returning to Bibleburg — a 2,138-mile dash, all in all — to continue the back-breaking process of what I hope will be my last move ever, barring that final trip to the camposanto. Which will be someone else’s problem.

Sue Baroo and Steelman at McDowell Mountain.

I did skip five Interbikes — the 2007-10 editions in Sin City and 2018’s Grand Finale in Reno — the first because Bicycle Retailer and Industry News grew weary of paying me to remind the industry that its annual “Gathering of the Tribes” was primarily a vector for upper-respiratory ailments, cirrhosis, and other bad ideas, many of them involving bicycles, and the latter because not even Adventure Cyclist, which treated me to Interbikes 2011-17, would spend good money to have me perch upon a bust of Pat Hus at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, croaking, “Nevermore!” I wouldn’t pay my own way to Reno even if God promised to meet me at the Silver Legacy Resort Casino, forgive all my sins, and let me win a couple-three mil’ at blackjack.

Whenever I wasn’t motoring for money I would drive for free — to Wyoming to see Charles Pelkey get his head shaved; to Santa Rosa, Moab, or Truckee to ride bikes with Chris Coursey and Merrill Oliver; to Fountain Hills to pitch a tent and shred the gnar at McDowell Mountain Regional Park; or to Tucson, to ride the Adventure Cycling Association’s Southern Arizona Road Adventure.

For one 2012 outing I did without the automobile entirely, taking a leisurely three-day bicycle tour that started right at our front door in Bibleburg and looped through Penrose, Cañon City and Pueblo before heading back to B-burg.

There were occasional bouts of air travel, too, to Tennessee, Maryland, North Carolina, and Hawaii. Plus one daylong clusterfuck of a preposterously buggered U-turn from Bibleburg to DIA and back again (I was supposed to be flying to Sacramento for the 2012 NAHBS) that set me to hating on United Airlines via social media for months until the sons of bitches finally refunded my money. I spent about 40 minutes in the air and the rest of what turned out to be a very long 12-hour day split between two Colorado airports only to wind up right back where I started. Shortly thereafter I abandoned both air travel and social media.

Don’t Bug me

I’ll confess that my wanderings shrank dramatically in scope starting in 2018. We lost Mister Boo, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein, some equally dear two-legged friends, and Herself the Elder over the next few years. I broke an ankle but survived, though with the Bug in full swing I decided against physical therapy and out-of-town travel, even by car. Entrusting one’s health to the whims of strangers suddenly seemed unwise, especially considering what they’d done to the government in 2016.

My income dwindled from marginal to laughable, so I sat up, let capitalism roll on up the road, unpinned my number, and climbed into Uncle Sammy’s socialist broom wagon. I was expecting a Coupe deVille with color TV but it looks a lot more like Ghost Dancing, the 1975 half-ton Ford Econoline with the bald tires and bum water pump that William Least Heat-Moon herded around America’s blue highways in 1978: “It came equipped with power nothing and drove like what it was: a truck. Your basic plumber’s model.”

In 2022 I attended two celebrations of lives, but wasn’t paying much attention to my own. Suddenly 2023 was hitting the door running and I wasn’t going anywhere. So I suppose I can see how someone might get the idea I didn’t want to.

But I do. As it happens I have a new Nemo Dagger Osmo tent that’s only been pitched once, in the back yard. A copy of AAA Explorer landed in our mailbox yesterday. And Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster is going in for her 150,000-mile checkup on Jan. 4, 2024.

Eight automobiles down the long and winding road I’ve lost track of my own mileage, but I’m not worried about either of us. I don’t know where we’re headed next, but I refuse to believe it’s the junkyard.

For sure it’s not the airport.

Labor Day in the rear view

September 5, 2023September 5, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

Your Humble Narrator in the salad days, covering a race in Bibleburg.

“Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.” — Anatole France, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.”

Whenever I think of myself as a “worker” I have to smile.

Oh, sure, I have worked, for short stretches, whenever there was no suitable alternative available. Drug dealer. Janitor. Installer of storm windows and patio covers. Appliance deliveryman. Dishwasher. Schlepper of pizzas and sandwiches.

But I spent the bulk of my worklife scribbling silly-ass pictures and/or arranging words in some particular order with malicious intent, to wit, attempting to convey an idea to an invisible audience.

This is right up there with tagging freeway overpasses and howling at the moon. But it pays slightly better, and mostly you can do it in the shade, sitting down.

There is a game-show quality to journalism. Your team has to collect, confirm, compose, and condense a mind-boggling overabundance of information, then stuff as much of it as possible into a sack that keeps changing size until the buzzer sounds, heralding the start of that night’s press run.

If you beat the clock, you “win” and get to come back tomorrow to play another round.

The word “play” is used deliberately. There were some long hours spent shoveling, to be sure, but they were easy on the lower back and the calluses formed mostly on the mind.

If journalism truly was a game, for me it was the only one in whichever town I was inhabiting at the moment. Composing the first draft of history day in and out in the company of (mostly) like-minded maniacs.

On my third daily and already thinking about jumping ship, arr.

The U.S. Navy used to sell itself by crooning, “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.” Journalism’s pitch was that it wasn’t just a job, or even a game, but a Calling — to preach the Gospel daily in the Church of What’s Happening Now (tip of the stingy-brim to Flip Wilson and the Rev. Leroy).

Now, if you think you are Called to preach, you are easy to exploit. And the gods could be unimpressed and indifferent.

“Fine sermon, Reverend. But that was yesterday. What have you done for Me lately?”

So, yeah. Long hours, and you frequently took the Work home with you. Sometimes it dragged you in early, or on a day off. Often it took you someplace you didn’t want to go, not even for money. Especially when you considered the paucity of coins in your collection plate.

But the Work found me when I was teetering along one of those ragged edges that beckon to oddballs like me. And it kept me in bacon, beans, and beer for nearly 15 years, though I backslid to the edge from time to time.

Finally I decided I liked the edge and set up shop nearby. A small chapel, nothing serious. My sermons were unorthodox, but so was the congregation. Same old gods, but hey, whaddaya gonna do? I dodged their lightning and kept that shtick up for 30 years.

Fortune eluded me, but I got all the low-rent fame I could handle, more than I deserved. God’s honest truth? I got lucky. In the right place at the right time, with friends in high places, and more than once, too.

Could a 20-year-old stoner with zero skills wander into the smaller of two daily papers in a medium-size city today and set his wandering feet upon a path that kept him out of jail for nearly a half-century?

Never fucking happen, to coin a phrase. There are no more two-newspaper towns, and damn few newspapers, period. Most are the journalistic equivalent of dollar stores, all owned by the same two or three outfits, all selling the same two-bit expired horseshit. And magazines are following them down the Highway to Hell, which is no longer paved with good intentions.

In 2023 the 20-year-old me couldn’t even go back to selling weed, because that’s just another job now. And you know how I feel about jobs.

I once was lost, but I was found. Can I get a hallelujah?