Know what I miss about newspapers? It’s not that I’ve read or seen most of the coverage on the net or on T.V before it gets to the paper….although it seems a waste of trees to cover it all again. Newspapers are all about the local advertising business…always have been, apart from the odd iconoclast who has a message retrieved from outer space or a deep voice heard in the bathroom in the tiny hours of the night. And newspapers have always been organs of political info,mis-info,dis-info and outright bullshit. So it’s none of those things that I miss. I read newspapers only on weekends now…hoping for those analysis pieces that review the week’s news in maybe a little more depth. No…what I miss is the fillers. Fillers are those little two column inches that editors throw in to make all of the content fit a page. They made my day, those fillers. A story about a woman in Florida who got so tired of a hang nail on her toe that she propped her foot up on a chair, took careful aim with her pistol and shot off the toe…and blew a hole in the refrigerator door. “I didn’t think it could hurt anymore than that hangnail” she told the sheriff. I love the little stories of guys who stop their cars on highways to let a family of turtles cross the road…and backs up traffic for a mile of honking horns and flashing headlights. There’s always a baby somewhere that climbs out a window and drops five stories into the waiting arms of a passing stranger. Occasionally a true tabloid nugget will slip into a filler…”Man bites dog” stories they’re called. O.K. so a family in Boston moves to San Francisco along with the family cat. You already know what happens don’t you? That brave kitty makes it through hail and sleet and floods and battles with other wild animals and avoids cars and trucks and somehow….brings a tear to my eye…somehow the brave little scrawny bugger makes it back to Boston…only to find the house has been demolished to build a high-rise condominium that doesn’t allow pets…I always thought there ought to be a magazine of fillers from all over the world. It would be great…who cares about these idiot politicians who have nothing to say and insist on repeating it for weeks leading up to elections. Or the latest terrifying disaster…a brand new disease that will wipe us off the planet…or space junk..you know that stuff has to land somewhere…could come right through your roof. Don’t laugh…I was living in Vancouver years ago when a chunk of blue ice came through the roof of an apartment building in Kitsilano. It ploughed through three floors and ended up blinking coldly at some freaked out dude relaxing on his couch. Blue ice from outer space!!! Enough to make you swear off the weed. But no…no no..maybe worse than that…You know that blue stuff they use in the toilets of airliners…disinfectant…goes into a holding tank…and it’s cold up there at twenty thousand feet…Global warming…that’s good for twenty blood pressure points on the right day. And where is there not a war? It’s not that I don’t want to hear about anymore wars but …really I don’t. What I don’t is…want to hear that any more wars have started. I’m tired of hearing about stupid urban murders over some bullshit that nobody will remember in two weeks.Tired of dipshit gangbangers who are ready to shoot up somebody’s house full of kids over ‘Their Turf”. What the fuck is “Their Turf”? In twenty years these assholes will be in jail or working wage slaves, living in a tract house suburb with kids of their own and weekends filled with renovations…and heads full of regrets….nowhere near their “Turf” anymore. So it would be nice to read a magazine filled with stupid little stories of people being human…crazy maybe…dumb as doorknobs, often… doing things that make you shake your head and smile. I’ll leave you with the guy who robs a small town bank in northern Ontario…grabs the loot and runs outside to jump in a cab that’s conveniently parked at the curb…”Drive” he says in his best tough guy voice and he’s thinking “damn…I got the money” and “damn…this cab was right here waiting”
“Where to?” says the cop behind the wheel of the this-is-not-a-cab-stupid.
Damn.
Chagal4's Blog 