rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

I ate at Baja Bean today during my lunchbreak. I think it’s a chain.
the tacos weren’t bad.

I feel very full when I return from dinner. that’s two tacos, refried beans, rice. half a pitcher of beer. I slump into my chair and prepare to start cranking out news pages.
boss walks in. “there’s a whole wall of green on the radar screen coming this way.” so I go outside and roll up the truck’s windows.

it rains, very hard, for about 25 minutes. torrential downpour kind of rain. rain in sheets, swirls, nearly nonstop thunder. lightning nearby – like, when everything shocks white for a split second and you know it hit somewhere close.
when thunderstorms hit the newspaper, beware. it’s a very fragile electrical and computer system we run on, and as soon as this motherfucker pulled into town, the lights started flickering.
and then off. and then on. and then off. then, still off. it is 7:30 pm.
there’s a backup generator that’s supposed to kick in in the event of emergencies, but that fails, too. all of the little backup drives underneath all the little computers in all of the little cubicles start chirping, like in some Radio Shack-inspired zoo. and even after the storm has gone, dusk settles in, and eventually, it’s pitch black in the newsroom. can’t see the person in front of you. so I drag a chair out to the sidewalk, and everyone follows suit. someone volunteers to go to Wendy’s. we all have Frostees.

editors and ad people and publishers and the crazy survivalist IT guy all show up, and he gets to running around the office in the dark in a military vest with two giant Maglites attached to him, looking menacing. great debate ensues about what is to be done. not only do we, but a smaller affiliated newspaper publishes from our press. but the press has no power. so the big press in Richmond will have to publish all of ours, and ship them back to us. but we can’t build the newspaper – all of the computers are down. nothing is working. the building is completely dark.

slowly, the lights come on in all of the establishments surrounding the newspaper. the bicycle store. the rug emporium. Domino’s. the newspaper remains off. it is finally decided that we’re gonna caravan to Waynesboro, our smaller affiliate, and use their computers and programs to layout a barebones edition of our own newspaper, and send it to Richmond electronically to be printed there. I don’t know how to get to Waynesboro. I’ve never been. so I hitch a ride with the managing editor and one of my co-workers. we talk about Weezer, and Virginia. we get to Waynesboro at 11:30 pm, four hours after the storm knocked the electricity out at our own newspaper.

all eight of us get out of the three cars we took and mass at the door of the Waynesboro paper. no one seems to be there. so we start knocking, and knocking. a Civic hatchback bumping gangsta rap from bass-heavy speakers pulls up to the blinking red light on the corner, and my boss yells to it, “yeeeah, East Side!” and flashes what he assumes is a gang symbol to the driver. he then laughs at his joke, while everyone comments on how he’s gonna unintentionally get us all killed. the managing editor leans into me and says, “I’m OK with that, because I know I can outrun him.” see, my boss weighs about 300 lbs.
a Waynesboro newspaper person comes to the door and lets us in. he’s not especially friendly, and when we all file into their newsroom, there isn’t a whole lot of talking between the two groups. as Waynesboro prints on our press, has a smaller circulation and (as it’s a smaller paper with a less accredited staff) is a little more poorly put together, we tend to gather round and ridicule their design choices every night. now, these people are standing in front of us. do they know what we say about them?

while our boss talks with ad types a half hour east in Charlottesville, the Waynesboro editor strikes up small talk with, yep, with me. “so we’ve got a Pirates fan,” nodding toward the baseball hat I’m wearing. “that must be tough.”
“yeah, it isn’t easy.” I try to leave it at that. but then he asks, “how is it that you’re a Pirates fan?”
and then, well, no. I’m not from Pittsburgh. and I explain to him that it’s just a hat that I happen to have that fits on my giant melon, which is exceptionally large even when I don’t have a ridiculous mess of hair growing on top of it.
the Waynesboro editor just looks at me, until our sports editor jumps in and starts talking about the Michigan State penant he sees on someone’s desk.

at 12:15 AM, after floundering about with Waynesboro’s design templates for half an hour, we’re alerted that the power is back on in Charlottesville. as we’ve gotten absolutely nothing done in Waynesboro, the decision is made to take everyone back home to just crank the paper out there. at this point, the entire Entertainment section, the business page, comics, horiscopes, and about a dozen other “unnecessaries” have been killed out of the paper. we will drive back to Charlottesville and just rip out a barebones necessity paper.
so we all get back in the cars, and we drive back.

we get back to the newspaper at 12:50 AM. all of the lights are on, and all computer systems are running. the entire copy desk is there, as well as the managing editor and two city editors. we rework the page flow sheets, split the pages up between the four of us, and go to work.

printed the paper at 3:15 AM. I arrived at work at 4 PM. seven of those hours, approximately, I did absoutely nothing.

and, I managed to write a headline for a feature story about organ donation: ‘What’s an extra kidney between good friends?’

the end.