Who even reads these anymore?
Damn it. DAMN IT! I was having such a chill Friday night. I spent all of Thursday running around like a maniac, and then I finish my classes the next day, get back from my clubs, and I remember — I’ve got to write another one of these stupid articles.
Another article. Ugh. “Make more wordslop for the zeitgeist, Aiden! The swine need their weekly feed of moderately entertaining fake news!” At least the benefit of a tasteless audience is that I don’t need to worry about throwing them my pearls — I went for glory when I was a younger man, but my unc years (5 months of being 20) have made me a jaded, bitter bastard indeed. The other day someone said they liked one of the articles, asked me if I’d written it.
Nope. It was one of my writers.
They didn’t think my article for that week was the best one. That would’ve killed me as a freshman, torn me up inside, made me run out for second opinions and spend hours studying old issues and reading The Onion for inspiration. Now I just let it happen to me. I get my $13 dollars just the same, whether it’s for my magnum opus or 500 phoned-in words on the dot.
Not like it means anything anyways.
I mean let’s not pretend that this crap is the high point of anyone’s day. You probably feel like you’re doing me some big favor by even hopping on the website — I would bet that, deep down, you consider reading all the way to the bottom of one of these things a great act of charity! Maybe two eggheads are out there reading my work out of anything more than pity for the newspaper team. So what’s the point of this charade, then? Me suffering over the keyboard just to make you suffer over the screen, week after week, month after month, and to what end? I never wanted to be this, an object of pity, some charity case for attention. Great scott I’m pathetic.
But this is my job; I chose this. I am your monkey at the typewriter, the managing editor and editor-in-chief patiently waiting for me to bang out something they can prune into the incomplete works of someone who’s heard of Shakespeare. What a joke. Speaking of jokes, when’s the last time you laughed at one of mine? I’d bet my mountain of back pay that no one’s so much as exhaled through their nose over my work in weeks. I used to be funny, you know; I used to be a real riot. I never realized how hard it would be to stay that way, how finite my creativity was. Hell, you try writing twelve horoscopes a week, all original jokes, every week for four semesters.
Photo by Aiden Hoogstra.
How long would it be before you ran out of ideas? Five issues? Ten? I’ve lost count, and I don’t even think anyone’s reading them. Just throwing what remains of my pathetic chud soul into a blank screen for the website to proudly display: this buffoon made up the same number of bad jokes this week as he did last week! Are they any good? How should we know, nobody’s read one of these since 2024!
I hate my job. I chose my job. I guess I probably hate myself.
So this is what I’m reduced to. I can’t believe I let it get this bad… ah: the word count’s in the green. One more perk of this shitty tenure, I get as much of the surplus Tulsa Golden Lager as I need to forget what a useless chud I am. The 18-pack that doubles as my nightstand is calling my name; tastes like so much horse urine, but it’ll do the job. If I can see straight by Monday, I can replace this pity party with something decent, but if not — if someone’s reading this? Well, take it all in, kids. This is what a broken man looks like.
