I wrote this column at 4 AM the night before the paper you are holding right now was put together.
There. I said it. My first column, my big introduction to my readers (reader? person who skimmed it for the sole purpose of looking for typos? Mom?) and I in fact forgot it was even due. To be honest, given the hour of the writing, we are both lucky that anything on this page even resembles readable English.
You might be wondering why I bothered with telling you when I wrote the column, or that I forgot it was due. The short answer is, because it’s honest.
Is it right? No. It’s not. I have done myself a disservice by not presenting the best column I could. I have done my editor a disservice by not giving her time to make sure this piece matched her standards. Have I done you, the reader, a disservice? That is a harder question, and I am not sure of the answer.
Edward R. Murrow once said, “Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.” What you will be reading in this column are my ideas, unpolished, unedited, and often incorrect. They are not going to be no more intelligent or coherent simply because I have been given this space to air them.
Do I think they are coherent? Certainly. Just as much as I am convinced my jokes are funny, or that what I am writing now is interesting. I could be wrong. In fact, I will be wrong. You might come to disagree with what I have to say. You might feel angry, or offended. In the weeks to come I will be writing about things as diverse in subject and tone as the price of intellectual dishonesty, terrorism, Batman and various Things That Piss Me Off.
(Like election signs. I swear to God I was in Saint John the other day, and one candidate had eight fucking signs along the road, that could not have been more than six feet apart. I get it. You’re running in an election. You have that creepy smile that is supposed to say “trust me” but is really much closer to “I have masks made of human faces”. The kicker? I cannot for the life of me remember your damn name. But yeah, those eight signs? TOTALLY money well spent. But I digress…)
I know it seems like I don’t want to nail down my subject, or worse, that I simply don’t know what it is. But that is not it, precisely. If I, as a journalist, am to describe the real world, I think I would be doing the truth a disservice by choosing a tack and sticking to it slavishly.
Because the real world is not always funny, and it is not always serious. Sometimes it is one, sometimes it is the other, but mostly it is a terrible, fantastic combination of the two. This will be my attempt to muddle through, and reconcile the reality of a world I do not fully understand, with ideas I have not fully developed.
I hope you’ll stick around next week, when I look at the real consequences of intellectual dishonesty in the media. Please don’t all die of excitement at the prospect as you wait in what I am sure will be breathless anticipation.
