Christmas was better this year than I have any reason to think it should have been. December and January will never be celebratory months for the obvious reason that my son was killed in January, his birthday is the week prior to Christmas, and it’s hard to be “happy for the holidays” when such a significant person in your life is stolen away.
I’ve been a fan of Maine’s alt-weeklies dating back to my teenage years when finding a copy of Sweet Potato was always a priority when journeying to Lewiston (or Portland) so I could read the latest Jim Sullivan feature, something that along with slinging fastballs by mystified high school opponents, signified a rite of passage for me. My own formative attempts to “do journalism” graced the pages of a former Portland monthly, the late, great Portland Pigeon, back in the mid-aughts, right around the time my first book hit the streets.
If anyone pays attention to these kinds of things, the state of Portland’s alternative press ain’t what it used to be. It was actually still pretty damn solid as late as 2014 and possibly a little after that. Then, two jackasses from Massachusetts knew better: they decided that our local alternative journalism landscape needed more competition—totally unaware that the city’s limited number of businesses weren’t likely to be able to keep two weeklies afloat—not to mention that there aren’t enough eyeballs to warrant spreading out their advertising dollars between competitors. What had been a really solid weekly, the Portland Phoenix, has never been the same, since. I was reminded of this debacle yet again when I grabbed their year-end “best of” issue at Shaw’s in Freeport. I don’t know why, because it’s been months since I last bothered to pull an issue off the rack, the few times I’ve been able to find it in my travels.
How not to write about food. (Portland Phoenix)