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Posts Tagged ‘ranting and raving’

Let’s get crazy!!

Posted in Poking the Canucks, Ranting and Raving, tagged , , on May 15, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Yep...

Yep…

Two weeks from Saturday, I leave my day-to-day job. It’s time.

My fingers, which are essential to doing the one thing I do well — craft words — have taken a beating, first on this job and at a previous one.

Physically and mentally, I need a break.

So, I’m taking my two bucks and change and walking away and I plan to spend the summer being a beach bum on the rocky, mussel-encrusted shores of Penn Cove and writing.

In 21 months of doing Coupeville Sports, on the side and around a “real” job, I have produced 2,045 articles.

That’s 97.3 articles a month, more than three a day.

I cover varsity. I cover JV. I cover middle school. I cover little kids. I even toss in some drama, a little science and a smidge of band, just to keep you guessing.

If you’re a star, I put your name in bold. If you’re a bench warmer, I write a feature about you … with your name in bold and a couple of exclamation points in the headline.

The Canadian-owned papers are the dad in the easy chair, comfortable and half-asleep.

I’m the (sometimes) annoying little kid who has crawled up the back fence and is screaming out all the gossip to anyone with two ears in the neighborhood.

And guess what, Canucks?

I’m going to have a lot more free time on my hands and those hands are firmly grasped around the paddle headed for your over-privileged fanny.

My hope is, if I can make the few bucks I need to cover my minimal bills (frugal is replacing Alan as my middle name), that I go forward 100% with Coupeville Sports from this moment.

No more conflicts, no more other job.

So, readers, what is this worth to you?

Do you want an independent voice on the Island, a guy who has not only lived here for 25 years but actually swims in Penn Cove daily, or are you content to bow to a corporation owned by a kajillionaire up in Moosejaw who, if he thinks of our town, thinks of our town only as a dot on a spread sheet?

Do you want to support a company that took the vending machines out of the Whidbey News-Times’ office (is this Russia?!?!) or support the guy who successfully pulled off Cookie Wars 2014?

Is it worth $5 to you to keep the dream alive? $10? More?

Unlike the Canadian-owned rags, I won’t charge you to read anything on this blog and won’t put pop-up ads on here to annoy the livin’ Hell out of you.

Ever.

If 2,045 articles and 783,087 photos in 21 months is not worth a penny to you, feel free to keep reading for free. You don’t even have to feel bad about it.

But, if you do feel like fueling the rebellion, and choose to click on the donation button on the top right hand side of the main page, your $1 or $5 or whatever you feel OK about parting with, will do one huge thing.

It will make it more likely that, when the fall rolls around, I am doing this 100% of the time.

That I am attending every home game, and not just the ones I can get to around a “real” job.

That my turn-around time for getting stories written and posted (already pretty darn quick) is never compromised because The Man requests my presence at work 10 minutes after a game is done.

That I continue to show Canada how Coupeville should be covered.

So, think about it. I’ll be over here, soaking my fingers in Penn Cove.

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They’re killin’ me, Smalls!!

Posted in Poking the Canucks, Ranting and Raving, tagged , , , , on April 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »

The middle finger will join us later...

The middle finger will join us later…

I have one talent, and it is being chipped away.

I write. I write well. I can flat out write most people under the table, out of the room and into traffic, where they will be dodging semi trucks for the next several hours.

If I am confident about anything, it is this — I can beat you in a war of words.

You may get confused halfway through reading what I wrote — how exactly did we end up in traffic in the first place? — but I will carry you someplace special.

Most times. Not every time. Michael Jordan missed a basket or two.

Which is fine, cause Larry Bird never, ever missed a shot when he had to make one. Ever. And I’ve always been more of a Bird man than a Jordan guy.

Call it cockiness. Call it confidence. I have skills.

Of course, I have spent the last 24 years refusing to listen to editors, jousting with those who would tweak my words and basically telling anyone who doubts that it goes from God’s lips to my fingertips to suck eggs.

Which, surprisingly, hasn’t always gone over well.

So, now, instead of making a comfortable living writing pap for The (Canadian) Man, I pound out my prose in a way that makes me happy.

Coupeville Sports has been more, much more, than I anticipated.

It has given me freedom, a chance to continue to fight for independent journalism after The Whidbey Examiner committed ritual suicide and was forever branded as just another punk sell-out.

It has given me a chance to make direct contact with my audience in a way that never existed before.

To build the legend of Cow Town in a way frowned on by the snot-nosed blue bloods who sneer that their papers are superior, while secretly sweating bullets because they’ve lost their readers and they’re not coming back.

But, while I get all hopped up on (probably misguided) moral outrage and fire exclamation points all over the joint (at least two guaranteed in every story!!), the reality is, I still have to do stuff to pay the bills.

And that stuff is killing me, day by day. Or, my fingers, at least.

The fingers that are my one gift are being abused and used, torn apart, ground down, mashed, cut, shredded and beaten to the point where they are a mix of pain, stiffness and soreness filled with an aching buzz.

Being in the dish pit at 18 wasn’t great. Being a few years further down the road now, it’s a lot less enticing to have made a return trip.

I look at my fingers, the things that allow me to tell my stories, and I see a open, puffy slash down one of them, in a place where the water and the steel wool abuses it further with each dish.

I see nicks, bumps and bruises. They stretch across all ten fingers, the cuticles hammered and chipped.

There are mornings when I flex my hands and the middle finger on one hand stays locked down, refusing to pop back up and join its brothers without some real coaxing.

Excedrin is my travelin’ companion in the morning, and the day job is killing me. Physically, and, far more often, mentally and emotionally.

Maybe I should have just shut up and let them mangle my words in the early days, so I wouldn’t be getting my fingers mangled today. Taken the 401K and sold my soul…

Nah.

Better to go into that good night forever flippin’ the middle digits at The Man, even if you sometimes have to smack one of them to get it to stand up at full attention.

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Digital sub? Go stick it up North, boys!!

Posted in Poking the Canucks, Ranting and Raving, tagged , , , on April 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Yes, I will publish a story at 2 AM, so you can be th efirst to read it. And no, I won't charge you ... EVER.

Yes, I will publish a story at 2 AM, so you can be the first to read it. And no, I won’t charge you … EVER. For I fight for truth, justice and a truly free press.

The kajillionaire who owns The Whidbey Examiner would like you to pay for his yacht to be vacuumed.

Seriously.

The Examiner, like the Whidbey News-Times and South Whidbey Record, for all their protests of being local, are owned by Sound Publishing, which is an arm of Black Press Group Ltd., a Canadian-based company that owns more than 200 papers in two countries.

When you spend your money with the “local” papers, a sizable portion goes North, and I’m not talking about Bellingham.

And now the Examiner, which, for many years, was the one true independent paper in this area, the last paper fighting the good fight, is a shell of its former self.

Canada stripped away the Examiner’s history, erasing years worth of stories off the paper’s web site in a day.

I wrote hundreds of stories for the paper when we were “fighting the good fight” under a publisher/editor, who, while we cheesed each other off frequently, was deeply committed to keeping independent journalism alive.

Good luck finding a single one of those stories now that the Tim Horton fanatics own the joint.

The Examiner does not have a stand-alone staff, as its reporters are News-Times employees and much of what is printed in the Examiner is a mirror image of what is printed in the News-Times, albeit with slightly altered headlines.

The Examiner rarely, if ever, breaks news. It frequently fails to cover “local” events the way a “local” paper would, and should, be expected to.

When Coupeville High School had its Homecoming parade and football game this year, not a SINGLE Examiner photo appeared online for a full week.

I ran more than 50 in the first 48 hours.

But starting next week, the Examiner (and the bean counters back in Moosejaw) wants you to pay for their paltry online offerings.

The News-Times and Record will follow shortly thereafter, unless this is merely cover to shut the Examiner down after the subscriptions fail to meet expectations.

As newspapers everywhere flounder, some are desperately grabbing on to digital subscriptions in an effort to find more money.

The Examiner cites a rise in the number of papers that are following this trend as their primary reason for making you pay to read their three-days-late, inch-thin coverage.

Except, they quickly ignore the other info readily available which shows newspapers are having a terrible time actually making any money off of digital subs. Because few people are actually willing to pay.

You can try and charge all you want. If no one is willing to pay, what’s the point, other than alienating the three people still reading your rag?

Times have changed. We live in an age where the internet has taken the power away from the media corporations who once controlled the flow of news.

A generation expects to receive their news for free, quickly. When a paper like the Record outright refuses to post stories to the internet until the print edition hits the streets, resulting in week-long waits, it’s beyond embarrassing.

It’s dereliction of duty.

Those clinging to the past can sneer all they want as they try and claim a high moral ground as “professionals.”

The reality is when major newspapers have crashed and burned and influential writers such as Art Thiel are writing for blogs, the folks running the blogs are often just as experienced, professional and creative, if not more so, than those hanging on in corporate land.

The biggest different is those of us out here on the “outside” are working for the people, while those of you on the “inside” are working for The Man.

Freedom of the press means many things, and one huge part of that is the ability of people to have free, easy access to the news.

I don’t have medical insurance, a 401K, paid vacation or doughnuts in the break room (well, actually I do, but they were gifts from local parents) like the Canuck-financed reporters do.

What I do have is the knowledge that you will never, ever have to pay a subscription to read Coupeville Sports.

Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

It’s not the American way. But, then again, they do a lot of things differently in Canada…

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The devil’s greatest trick? Convincing people to eat mussels!!

Posted in Ranting and Raving, tagged , , , on February 27, 2013| Leave a Comment »

It's a trap.

It’s a trap.

Mussels are the single most disgusting food on the planet and the people who slurp them down are idiots.

They look gross, they taste gross (you can pour all the butter and cream you want on them, you’re still chowing down on little blubbery bits of gunk no self-respecting seagull would look twice at) and the smell when they’re being sucked up from the briny depths? Good frickin’ lord.

Having made the mistake of abruptly leaving newspaper life at 23, I compounded my problems by winding up on a mussel-processing boat owned by a tightwad, two-bit lawyer who staffed his operation with the absolute cream of the work force.

Since we were working for a rinky-dink operation which went belly-up not too far down the road, instead of the other highly-successful company in the area, which is owned by solid citizens, we were in deep from the start.

Instead of the successful, smart, career-minded people I had rubbed elbows with at the Whidbey News-Times, these were the people who couldn’t get hired for fast food. The mentally scarred. The indifferent. And the guy we later discovered was hiding out from twenty-plus warrants out for his arrest.

Of course, that was the guy who I gave a ride to work every day.

Thirteen brave, lost souls, who started with a gut-churning ride through the waves out to the company’s run-down boat, where we then put in a welcome-to-hell 12-hour shift.

By the time I left — or rather, dumped my gear on the dock and fled in the middle of the night never to be seen again — several months later, we were down to just two from that group.

And why not? Even at its best, mussel processing hits you with long hours, you’re constantly cold and wet, the boat rocks like a mother in the slightest breeze and the stench is remarkable.

If I didn’t mention it before, this was not mussel processing at its best.

Mussels grow on knotted ropes put down in the water, but when it came time to harvest them, we on the S.S. Have No Clue would pull up everything.

Long, centipede-type sea worms with no eyes, which would run up the ropes, where we would stab them and flick them into each others faces, trying to make the guy next to us fall into the water.

Then there were mysterious round bubbles of fleshy material which were like gold to us.

That was only because we could pop them, shooting out an oily, not-very-tasty liquid. If you hit them right, bang, gut-like material all over the guy next to you. Do it wrong, bam, all over your face.

We spent most of our day covered in half-dried, gut-like material.

Which wasn’t so bad, compared to the muscle-bound woman in charge, who had a cold seemingly for the entire time we worked out there. Snot covered her face all day, long strands of half-dried mucus, and she’d entertain us all by blowing wads at anyone who walked past her.

The walls were gummy and seemed to be alive.

Mussels are sold two different ways, either as is or with their “beards” removed. That costs more, but gives the guys in the kitchen less work to do once the disgusting food stuff arrives to be served to moronic dining room guests.

To remove the beards you can either stand there and rip them off one by one, usually cutting yourself on the sharp edges of the mussel several times.

Or, in our case, you could try to operate The Machine ‘O Death — a grim-looking steel contraption on which you poured a bag of mussels, then ran around and watched as they moved down towards you, navigating a series of sharp metal pieces which would rip the beards out.

Of course, those metal pieces would also rip your hands up if you touched the thing. Being the only person trustworthy enough — or stupid enough — to operate the bearding machine, I was given a 25 cents per hour raise, which mainly went for bandages.

The worst part was the smell, a constant, choking vileness unmatched this side of a particularly unsanitary slaughter house. Your nose would shut down while out on the boat, but ten minutes after returning to shore you would be gagging.

Pity the sister who picked you up to give you a ride.

She shed tears that day, but I don’t think they were for me. She kept moaning, “My baby, my baby…” and she set her car on fire when we got home.

Said it was the only merciful thing to do.

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