Future kill

It’s Thursday. Actually, it’s last Thursday or the Thursday before. If you let this issue get shuffled under other magazines or under the stack of mail in the kitchen, it could be Thursday a month ago. I don’t know why I find the pretense of writing in present tense so funny, but as the computer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress used to say, it’s a “funny always.”

I think it would be difficult for anyone but the spouse of an editor to understand how Thursdays feel to someone who helps put out a newspaper. I can quite honestly tell you that editors who publish on Thursdays never sleep well on Wednesdays. This week, I lay awake wondering whether the right version of the Pulse story made it to the printer. Don’t ask me why I hyper-focused on that. I also

It’s now Tuesday. As you can see from the incomplete sentence, I was interrupted in my pursuit of getting the Editor’s note finished early this issue. I can’t tell you how I was going to finish that sentence in the last paragraph. I can tell you what it wasn’t going to be, though. It wasn’t going to be, “I also lay awake worrying whether Michael Grimm’s cartoon, “The Last Days of Roland and Cid,” would exhibit some really bad timing.” Man, I hope everybody caught the date on that one.

And now, I’ll make a prediction for the future, which will be the past before you read this. Tomorrow night, I’m going to lie awake and think about Peter Thompson’s cover story, “Scenes from the underground.” I’ve got a fair idea some people who won’t like this story; people who think that it is better not to know that the world has changed while they were raising their families, bringing home the bacon and watching Joe Millionaire. It’s not a pretty picture that Peter paints, but I, for one, feel like it’s one of the truest portraits of the changing drug culture that I’ve seen.

I’m open to other interpretations. If you’ll look two pages into the future, you’ll know what to do.