If You Love Sausage, Never Watch It Being Made. Popcorn by The Colonel #33

Cub reporter for The Eye -- not a diversity

An insignificant Middletown Eye staffer, actually a known scoundrel, has passed along the following piece for publication under The Colonel's august aegis, but The Colonel decided to publish it in February.



People ask me what it’s like to work cheek by jowl with the titans of The Middletown Eye, people like Ed McKeon, Stephen Devoto, Karen Swartz, and others less known but still out standing in the field.

The truth is that I don't know them well, because we are seldom together except for infrequent staff meetings, where opinions and other aids to thought flow freely.

Even for those I am usually tardy, detained by rescuing kittens, donating organs, things of that sort. So by the time I get there, the drinking has often been underway for a while, and a few of the titans and even some of us minor staffers are already “faced,” as in “facedown” on the floor.

That's why all I know about a lot of my esteemed colleagues is how the backs of their heads look when they’re prone. Some have nice hair.

As for details like who snores the loudest, I feel strongly that disclosing that sort of thing would be disloyal, petty, and just plain low if I did it for free. My lips are sealed but open for offers, if that's possible.

But I must say that one titan tends to scream in his or her sleep things like, “Get away from me, get away,  you g----------- c--------------ing sons of b-----------------!”

“Cheese and rice,” I once exclaimed to another minor staffer who, like me, drinks only warm clam juice, “What can [he or she] be dreaming about that upsets [him or her] like that?”

“Hard to say for sure,” my minor colleague replied, “but at a guess, I’d say g----------- c------------ing sons of b----------.”

Some of the insignificant people at The Eye are droll that way, but not the titans. They only “get” humor when it’s explained to them. Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. The innards are discouraging, and the frog is never the same afterwards.

While the titans sleep it off, we minor staffers, like little elves, take care of the unglamorous tasks vital to putting The Eye out.

These tasks consist mainly of running with scissors, which, as our parents taught us, is practically guaranteed to put The Eye out.

So you see there isn’t much to tell, with one exception.

Ed (“My name’s Ed. What’s yours?”) McKeon, who insists that we all call him “Magoon, sounds like Moon,” is a giant among titans.

Despite his eminence, he sometimes gives strangers the misleading impression that he is (in alphabetical order) aggressive, bullying, cursive, denunciatory, dismissive, hard-to-please, intimidating, intolerant, irritable, opinionated, pugnacious, and zygotic (sp?).

What strangers don't know is that if you can just get a few drinks into the big lug, a whole different side blossoms -- he turns really nasty. One time he beat the crap out of some cowardly minor staffers just for not having names.

That phase lasts until he falls down in the gutter next to his pig and they sing awful, awful songs until Magoon at last drops off to sleep, and the pig can slip away.

We’re all embarrassed for the pig, of course, but we’re afraid to say anything. You see, we need our volunteer jobs, or it’s right back into the slammer we go, to serve out our full sentences. A full sentence is a hard thing to serve out, as many faithful Eye readers know from bitter experience.

I'm in that boat myself. I don't want to go back to being some bad man’s prison girl friend. I’d rather work for The Eye, not that you’ll see that as a featured testimonial anytime soon.

So that’s all the “inside scoop” you’ll get from me. I must be off.