This year, I reached a professional milestone. I’ve spent half my career working for the Pacific Sun, investing two decades and writing more than a million words at the longest running alt-weekly newspaper in America.
The paper has been in existence for 62 trips around the sun, and I’m happy to have shared stories in it for almost a third of that time.
When I started in the summer of 2005, I authored a first-person column, “Single in the Suburbs,” a humorous perspective on my angst-filled love life. I wrote about it in what I now look back on as an almost embarrassingly detailed fashion.
Since I’m old and no longer give a hoot, what the hell; I’ll briefly relive it. There were stories about the size of my boyfriend’s penis, kissing a woman and becoming romantically entangled with a sort-of-known Jewish stand-up comedian. Internet dating, speed dating and silent dating. I got dumped frequently and scurried away on a few occasions myself, once just in the nick of time before planned nuptials.
“Single in the Suburbs” crashed after 10 years because I finally settled down with that nearly perfect guy I waxed on about. For anyone wondering, our relationship recently ended, but we remain close and co-parent the chiweenie, making it worth the colossal effort of trying to connect with another human being.
By 2010, I had also begun writing the occasional news story and telling “Hero & Zero” tales from around the county, which was pretty much what it sounds like—celebrating Marinites who did good deeds and chastising those who deserved it. I inherited the column from several people who penned it before me and think I did it justice every week for the decade it was in my hands.
The paper has had five owners since its 1963 launch, and I’ve worked for three of them. After one experienced financial issues, the Pacific Sun’s website content disappeared. Although most of my life’s work went offline forever, I kind of felt relieved that someone pulled the plug on a decade of my dating debacles.
Our current owner got us up and running again, but we had that Covid hiccup five years later. The world became more serious. “Hero & Zero” suffered an unceremonious death when, like millions of other workers across America, I was laid off during the initial shutdown.
I spent five months on the sidelines watching the headlines until I was asked to come back. In August 2020, I started covering the Marin news that was fit to print and some that probably wasn’t. From homelessness to police use of force to the incredible wealth disparity in our county, I’ve had the opportunity to sound off about it.
For the most part, I feel fine about the 1,100 or so articles that I’ve drafted. My mail runs half hot and half ice cold, a pretty decent indicator that I’m landing somewhere in the middle. If they let me, I’d like to stay at the Pacific Sun for another 20 years. There are still a few more people that I need to piss off.
