Good Times

You’d never believe this, but there was once a time when my town’s local paper was a must-read publication and not just a showcase for photographs of face-painted children attending generic, seemingly weekly, community events. I don’t want to trash The Langley Times too much since when I was just starting out with my writing they did gainfully employ me (as a delivery boy), but I do sincerely believe that the paper was at its most interesting during the brief period that it was fraught with confusion due to a tenuous grasp of basic formatting skills.

I can’t say for certain how long it lasted, but there was a glorious run of Langley Times issues during mid-2006 in which the front page was laid out so haphazardly that the front page headline and photo — although intended to be separate articles — appeared at first glance to be related. More often than not the combination would be nonsensical, such as it is here:

Um.. watch out for this guy, I guess?

Other times it seemed like there was a vague connection:

There is no need to call Hazina’s (admittedly doughy) friend a “hippo.”

But the absolute best were those moments when the stars would align and both the seemingly unrelated headline and photo would come together in a beautiful synergy, creating a single and immensely more interesting story:

Truly her Sgt. Pepper’s.

In retrospect, I find it somewhat troubling on a personal level that this period of — let’s face it — journalistic failure was, bar none, the only time in my life in which I was genuinely excited to read my local paper. It wasn’t the news stories I liked — it was the illusion that something greater was happening, something more offbeat than anything that actually happened in my town. Wouldn’t McCotter want to dress less conspicuously if he’s out there committing those murders? What’s with the Times staff editorializing about fat people? And where’s that little girl (Ambrosimo?) getting all of those drugs from, anyway? The idea that my town’s writers were either sly comic geniuses having a laugh or completely inept at their jobs was more appealing to me than whatever the real explanation for this muddled front page layout was. Who knows? Maybe this was designed to be the first series of clues in an elaborate Davinci Code-esque trail of municipal mystery that everyone missed?

The front page has long since been restructured into something far more readable, and good for them I guess, but I can’t help but recall how much fun it was to have a local publication that did precisely what a newspaper shouldn’t and propel one into a world of fiction. Journalistic failure begets civic pride, I suppose.