What appealed, then as now, was the solo effort, the sense of mission, the romance of it all. Typing late at night, radio or records playing low, the fireplace roaring, coyotes singing out beyond the back fence.
This is all I ever wanted. I launched independent web titles, too, either alone or with the rare partner who shared the compulsion: L. Examiner and Tabloid. But as the digital world consumed ever more of the real world, I dreamed of making something tangible again, something you could hold. Something that would still be there when the computer died, when the network went down, when the inevitable solar storm erased all the hard drives in the world.
The hero is sent to a foreign land to retrieve a prize from a great serpent and deliver it unto God. But this protagonist is led astray and falls into the common life of the population around him, a life of eating and arguing and getting through the day. These are epic stories, but they have lessons for mortals, too. A decade ago, writing for a now dead blog called the Awl , I remembered my mission. On publication days, I delivered the newspapers to a dozen little towns and outposts along the mountainous eastern edge of San Diego County.
This article appears in Issue 22 of Alta Journal. His coffee cup was filled with Bushmills Irish whiskey, the bottle close at hand. The typesetter and paste-up person was long gone by this hour, so the hole on the page flats would need to be filled by me, before I left for the night.
Another week, another small but satisfying victory. It was my first wife who had the job as the sole reporter there. Once Glenn figured out I could type and do layout, he put me to work. The reward, beyond the sheer enjoyment of the effort, was the close-up look at a way of life nobody told you about in school. Glenn Hayes had been running small-town newspapers here and there for many years at that pointβthis one was financed by an ex-girlfriend who was a local real estate agent.
