As an antidote to the slavish literal-mindedness that any career reporter is bound to develop over time, may I suggest the digital camera? Specifically, one on which you can disable the flash, allowing for longer shutter speeds, and which you can then take cruising around the old Route 66 in Flagstaff at sundown? Because it's amazing how the world looks to a malleable but still highly literal machine.


Flagstaff, Arizona: Night of Aug. 11, 2010

Santa Fe Bridge: The walk to Mexico, Aug. 9, 2010
A reporter friend of mine and I had this exchange a couple of days ago at a little burrito joint in downtown Juarez just after I'd walked over from El Paso:

Me: I turned 30 last week.
Robert: I heard. With all the hand-wringing that brings?
Me: I realized that if my thirties are like my twenties, my forties are going to suck.
Robert: I'm living it.

Existential bellyaching is luxury in a war zone such as Juarez. I don't pretend to understand it, having visited for only a couple of hours, especially on a day when the headlines on the local paper announced that four federales had been assassinated in the previous 48 hours. All's I know is what my friend told me, that the city, tired of the murders and arson in the bars and clubs downtown, was paying owners to abandon the buildings, which were then razed. The vibrant tourism area was being hollowed out murder by murder, demolition by demolition. But there's almost nothing but turnstiles stopping an American citizen from paying 50 cents to walk across the bridge to ol' Mexico, to see the bar stoop where a dead body had lain (and been photographed by the local paper) the day before -- and to get a beer there, as the bar's open. Taxi drivers clamor for business in pristine English. A very friendly fellow approached and offered to escort me to a massage parlor -- "beautiful girls!" -- which I'm sure would do wonders for this roadtrip crick in my neck. (When solicited for prostitution, or its near-equivalents, I often wonder whether these nets are cast indiscriminately or whether I radiate affluence, deviance or both. In this case, given my current sporting of what is clearly a sex-tourist mustache, I'm going to speculate that it's the latter.) In Mexico, trucks full of masked and armed military police zip through the streets -- but no one even checks your passport as you wander into the country. Of course, the walk back across the river by a Mexican citizen is a sonofabitch, and some people spend their whole lives wishing they could visit El Paso, a pisshole by almost any American standards. What can you do to help Mexico? Starve the beast: Smoke only locally grown pot and stop snorting coke. (That shit'll fry your dopamine receptors anyhow.) Boycott violence. Or just legalize/regulate dope already.

Texas highway 67 looking south, just south of I-10. Aug. 7, 2010
If you've never made the drive from Austin to Marfa, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's mountains, hills, mesas, orchards, scrublands, pastures, cattle, "showgoats," copious roadkill. You can't drive as fast as you want, exactly, but the speed limit tops out at 80 ... which means 88 is pretty much de rigeur ... and if you're daydreaming to TV on the Radio or to the Radiolab podcast in your CD player, you might glance down and see the world whirring past at 95 mph. This video is from some speed south of that, but you get the idea.

Texas is a sumbitch to drive. If the heat don't get you in the summer, the ragweed'll eat your ass in the wintertime. This week triple digits is just a down payment on the sort of August hot that's sapping your pores. Those aren't tears of pain, pilgrim, them's just your eyeballs sweating.

No stunner that when I rolled into Austin last night for dinner with a couple of ex-pat Arkansans I ordered a beer. Picked it off a menu, sight unseen. I knew only its place of origin (Austin) and its name: Freestyle Wheat Beer.

The bottle arrived, and I felt I'd entered the Twilight Zone. At top left is the brew's logo, depicting a dark-haired dude in red trunks launching himself into a swimming hole while a couple of sunbathing beauties watch from afar.

Coincidentally I'd spent the afternoon trying to snap the perfect self-photo of a dark-haired dude in swimtrunks launching himself into a concrete pond. No diving board, no sunbathing dames and no scraggly hair ... but otherwise, well, you be the judge. I'm not living a beer commercial, exactly, but a beer label? Just maybe.

Greetings from Texas: Aug. 5, 2010

Definitely in the upper tier of fan letters

This morning we drive a big silver stake through the concept of fun birthdays. There’s no more 16. Eighteen’s dust. Twenty-one, and getting carded at the Delano on Miami Beach, is misty watercolored. We’re down to round decades. When I say I’m in my 30s now I’ll get lumped in with the 44-year-olds who claim to be 38, but at least I’m no longer trapped in the same conversation with kids who were born in the early ‘90s, who should get off my lawn already.

The notion of aging shifts as a person plows through his or her 20s. When I was 23, I dared not imagine life as a rickety 26-year-old. Now the years have leveled off into something akin to the Amazon River basin, in which the earth tilts only slightly, and 30 looks like 40 is a sneeze away from 50 and so on. “When I was your age,” my father told me yesterday, “you were 5.” I told him my children, hypothetical as they remain, are simply late bloomers. But if you wait later than your parents did to start cranking out a litter, your folks become much more sympathetic characters. When their parents die, as my grandparents nearly all did during my 20s, they become closer still. We all get leveled off, and as such, we see that, as Kurt Vonnegut’s son once wrote to him, We’re all in this thing together, whatever it is.

I’m also moving this week, cross-continent, and have been dredging my possessions for days. When a box of letters popped open, I noticed some long-forgotten handwriting. At my first full-time newspaper job, writing for the features section of Florida Today, the big daily for the Cape Canaveral area, we writers would occasionally receive feedback in the form of handwritten letters. (My favorite was one that, apropos of nothing I’d written, extolled the virtues of bathtub Dr. Pepper … cause, you know, why buy it at the store when you can make it at home?) No reader of ours was more prolific than Rev. Bill Dickgraber (pronounced Duh-GRAY-bur), known in the office for writing over-friendly if entertaining notes. My first Dickgraber letter arrived after to a story I’d written about a “prom” at a nursing home, wherein the grown children of a very old man surprised him by bringing over his nearly as old girlfriend from a nearby nursing home. When the couple saw each other, they kissed passionately, oblivious to the party watching them, seeing only one another, fending off death for another day, or perhaps just another hour, with a life-affirming bit of suckface. The story’s kicker came via the employee who quipped that chaperoning this prom was cake, because you knew afterwards everyone would just fall asleep.

Rev. Bill picked up on this scene, and took the opportunity to offer one of the most optimistic forecasts of ageing that I’ve ever read. “I have always … uneasily … wondered what went on within the minds of centurions,” he wrote, ellipses his. “But then again at one time being 60 seemed somewhere … far … VERY far away. I’m happy to report that (with 60 being one month away) the older me gets the more women become BEAUTIFUL. Incredibly … I can remember when 24 yr. old ladies seemed like old hags.”

This seems like a non-dirtbag corollary to the “Dazed and Confused” line delivered by Matthew McConaughey: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older; they stay the same age.” The older you get, you realize how many people actually are the same age, or thereabouts.

The winters are like a preview of the center of hell. The newspapers are in straits. The average person on the street is just 85 percent as attractive as the average New Yorker. It's a sprawling spill of a grid, with nothing resembling a hill or mountain to keep it from tumbling out, out, ever outward. But oh, Chicago is still one bumpin' little cow town, and without peer as a summer city. And the folks I know here are some solid sonsabitches.
Red Line: the Harrison stop, July 10, 2010

On Tuesday a journalism instructor friend of mine asked me to address a class of graduate students in the magazine program at Medill. This was funny, actually, because while I knew he wanted me to say a few words to the group at some point, I didn't know until I arrived at the office fresh off a Blue Line trip from O'Hare that he expected me to speak, uh, right then. With enough prep time to print out a few stories (on a South Florida one-time gambling wheeler-dealer, on a dark documentarian of the club-kid thug life, and on a self-immolating father of a slain Marine) from which to quote, I managed to fill about an hour of their time.
Boston Library: shot June 24, 2010The topic was the fate of alt-weeklies at a time when weeklies and dailies alike are shrinking, fading and getting gutted. Chicago has seen this like few other cities: The third-largest city in the United States now has two daily papers that you could finish reading between the “ah” and the “choo” in your average sneeze. The students are charged with re-imagining the Reader, a free weekly that 10 years ago was a four-section broadsheet, chockablock with listings and classifieds, thick enough any given week to choke a camel; these days, it's a slender tabloid hoping just to keep its tiny head above water.

To summarize my ramblings from Tuesday, I believe I said now would be a great time to be a journalist, especially a quote-unquote alternative reporter (which is really nothing less than a locally focused magazine writer), if we didn't have bills to pay. So anemic now are the dailies that they can't help but default on their Fourth Estate duties; I was told Tuesday that the Chicago Tribune, the World's Greatest Newspaper of WGN fame, does not have a full-time reporter covering Chicago public schools. That's a district of 400,000 students and a $5.3 billion budget, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Niger. There simply are not enough hands on deck. Anyone aspiring to find a great story could do worse than stake out a department in your average major metropolitan or state government and simply go spelunking. You're bound to find something.

Another point: The writing in a weekly shouldn't sound like a daily. A daily that fashions itself a “family paper” will necessarily write to adults as though they are children. This analogy came to mind: Be the HBO to their ABC or CBS. Begin with astonishing reportage, then write it as though writing is an ongoing experiment (which it is, blessedly). Undertake in your writing the mission of literature, which poet Donald Hall described this way:

When we read great literature, something changes in us that stays changed. … If literature is nebulous or inexact; if it is impossible to determine, with scientific precision, the value or the meaning of a work of art, this inexactness is the price literature pays for representing humanity. Human beings themselves, in their feelings and thoughts, in the wanderings of their short lives, are ambiguous, ambivalent, shifting mixtures of permanence and change, direction and disorder. Because literature is true to the complexities of human feeling, different people will read the same work with different responses. Literary art will sometimes affirm that opposite things are true because they are. (Emphasis the author's.)

That said, now, don't be afraid to bring the fuckin' hammer down, unambiguously, when a story warrants.

Everyone's concerned, and rightly, that jobs will be hard to come by. (The anxiety of a journalism student these days mirrors that of your average 14-year-old virgin, who can see his peers caught up in this strange yet consuming activity (earning money, to uphold the journo's side of this metaphor) and yet can easily imagine himself dying poor, overeducated and thoroughly unlaid.) My advice was to follow a topic of consuming passion, write about it until everyone knows the territory you've staked out, and then get paid to cover it. That, and get paid. Get paid. Get paid. If someone else is making a dollar off your written word, then they ought to give you a couple of dimes. Get paid. Get paid to stay solvent, and to keep from depressing any further this already-depressed writers' and photographers' market. Get paid. When one writer gets paid, we all get paid. When one works for free, we all do.

As for getting jobs, my suggestion was to get in front of the hiring editor. Like, physically get in front of them. Send your stuff, know the job you're applying for, and make it incredibly easy for the editor to hire you. I've never hired anyone, but I've been close to the process a couple of times, and I've been hired myself. My experience, for what it's worth, is that editors hate hiring. They'd rather do just about anything else. They don't want to compare people's clips, or their resumes, or take time to show someone the ropes. It's just not an activity built into most editors' schedules; they'd rather run the publication. Do what you can to make an editor's life easy in the hiring process, and I'd wager that your odds shoot way, way up.

Midtown Manhattan at sundown, June 20Several soldiers were among the standbys for a mid-morning flight from Dallas to Little Rock on Thursday, and a tall, broad young National Guard call-up wound up sitting next to me in the ninth row.

“Sir, I just want to apologize upfront,” he told me. “I haven’t had a shower in four days, and I smell.”

I told him I’d been traveling myself, and that I hadn’t had a shower in a couple of days either: “Between us, we’ve got almost a week’s worth of stink.” I asked him where he was coming from and where he was headed. Afghanistan was the point of origin, and Little Rock, home, was the destination. Seven months he’d been gone. “I can’t wait to get laid,” he said.

He turned up his iPod, and all I could hear of the music was a rolling-thunder drum attack that sounded like Scandinavian death metal on meth. I pulled my hat down over my eyes and was asleep at the window before we even left the ground. A few minutes before we landed, I came to, slid up the shade and watched us soar low over the Arkansas River and then touch down. As much as Little Rock lacks, home remains home, and I thought how fine it must feel for my fellow flyer after having been at war for the better part of a year.

The flight attendant took to the intercom, reminding everyone that we were now free to use our cell phones, and thanking us for flying American Airlines, “part of the Oneworld alliance.”

The solider stiffened. “One World Alliance?” he said. “What’s that?”

I explained that it’s a consortium that lets people use their frequent flyer miles among different airlines. “I admit, it does sound kind of ominous,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied. “‘One World Alliance.’ Like someone else I’ll have to fight.”

Town Pump

Dear Town Pump: In the future, please do not display a marquee as amazing as this and then follow through with such wedding reception hits as TLC's "Waterfalls" and the "American Idol"-ravaged "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours." The hard-drinking dirtbag regulars who come in to slide your shuffleboard pucks and sit on your porch and lay waste to your Jell-o shots on karaoke night are expecting, if nothing else, a musical selection that moves their sneakers and doesn't banish them to the tiki bar out back. Seriously, some of us like to dance, in public and embarrassing fashion, and all it takes is a real melody, the sort of bass line that shatters your fillings or the sort of song crassly engineered solely to move your ass, and it doesn't take a whole lot to inspire us. Our bodies want to become the music. Just not worn-out or flaccid music.

Thank you.

Pre-tornado: May 1, 2010, in northeast-central Arkansas
I snapped this shot a little north of Judsonia around 7:30, about one minute before this gap in the clouds sealed itself up, zipper-like, with clouds closing in from either direction. Then an assault of raindrops, bumblebee-fat and cold, came cascading down.

I'm not sure which exit we took, but if you know the area you'll know it as the Highway Church of Christ exit off 67/167. (If you don't know the area, you'll be amused to learn there's a Highway Church of Christ.)

Apparently Little Rock is in the path of a storm cell that has thrown 1,500 lightning bolts in the past hour and has churned up tennis-ball sized hail in downtown Malvern. Thus just in: There is a downtown Malvern.

Of course, this shit could always be worse. The news could be telling you to flee your home for the safety of a shallow hole.

Stay safe tonight, gentle Arkies.