This is the only way I can make myself heard over the loudmouth at the next desk.

A blog, dammit. A BLOG.

I've been threatening to do one for months. Years. Ever since the last contract negotiations. I've already SET the table, damn it. Now it's time to sit down and EAT.

I'm the graphics editor of a small newspaper in north central Tennessee. I've worked my way through the guts of the newspaper business, man and boy these past 25 years, starting out cleaning the toilets and the ashtrays and finally ending up here with my own office, where someone ELSE damn well cleans out my toilet and my ashtray and sometimes, frankly, I envy the guy.

I work with the collection of malcontent dead-enders you'd expect to find in a newsroom this size -- I tell you, the only glimmer of life that ever finds its way into this newsroom is every three or four years when we actually have an intern. The last one we had, those goats on the Sports desk eyed her up and down the way a schnauser ogles a fire hydrant until that poor little girl couldn't run out of here fast enough. And what the hell am I talking about "little girls" for when this monster rolled in at 300 lbs. with a moustache! I should've let those Sports mongoloids at her. Would've served 'em right.

Yeah, this rag reads like we recruit our copy editors from a Down Syndrome ward, but it's all about the graphics, damn it. The graphics. Not the photography -- our photography department is captained by a bipolar bozo named Ed Pimlott who's too busy working through his personality issues to bother bringing any decent work to the news meetings, which is just as well since his staff consists of one talented shooter and a collection of winos straight out of the parking lot -- they know who they are. I know who they are. The EDITOR knows who they are -- or did, before the poor old bitch died in her office, which I'm assuming she did since we haven't seen hide nor hair of her since the last United Way soaker.