Sometimes my sci fi brain gets me in trouble.

My first job writing for a newspaper was just a way to make extra cash in between night shifts at the motel.

You could actually make a few bucks using those college essay skills. Who knew?

This was what they called stringer work. You’d get assignments and got paid by the column inch.

I covered high school sports and wrote a few features. Kinda fun. At first…

I interviewed a retired sheriff, one of those “back in my day” stories. I thought I did a pretty good write-up. A few days later I was sleeping it off after a shift at the motel.

My uncle came in and asked, “Lose a notebook?” and handed me a legal pad I didn’t even know was missing. I had left it at the old sheriff’s house. My blood ran cold. I’d been using it as a diary.

The newspaper folks had questions. The old sheriff saw “disturbing things” in my notebook. AKA, me talking about the time I smoked too much weed in college and some “Satanic” doodles of some alien monster I’d made up.

This was probably around 1990, right at the tail end of the Satanic Panic. Not so close to the tail in rural West Texas.

I promised myself I would never work for another newspaper. Ended up working in newspapers for 20 years.

I did keep another promise: Keep your work shit and personal shit separate!

#Newspapers, #Journalism, #Satanic Panic, #Marijuana, #Texas