Quickies: A Memory

     After seeing Sarah Hoyt’s latest Facebook post, I was inexplicably yet irresistibly reminded of a whimsy of years past. It was a time in which we saw many “parody” magazines and newspapers that were formatted to look like their "real"-media targets but carried...strange contents. I have no doubt there are still a few like that, though the depths of absurdity to which the media titans of old have sunk have largely rendered the pastime unnecessary.

     At that time, inspired by the occupation of my lovely wife, who was at that time a foreclosure agent for a regional bank (“I throw widows and orphans into the gutter, preferably one that’s full of snow,” she liked to say), I came up with a “parody” publication of my own:

AMERICAN HARDASS:
The Magazine for the Professionally Unpleasant.

     After having some fun with the concept for a while, it occurred to me that a *real* publication of that sort might actually find a market. Surely it would be a hit with process servers, collection agents, repo men, dental hygienists, directors of human resources departments, IRS, EPA, and OSHA employees, proctologists, and the subspecies of government scientists that specialize in making chemical and biological weapons nastier. (I looked into whether to market it to TV wrestling villains, and discovered to my considerable surprise that most of them were mild-mannered family men when off-camera.) The idea seemed rich with possibilities.

     A buddy was equally taken by the notion, and we went some distance toward reifying it, but ran out of gas when it began to take a serious toll on our wallets. Yet thirty years later, every now and then the concept rises afresh in the musty reaches of my subconscious, and I find myself wondering...

     Don’t mind me, Gentle Reader. These little fugues come sporadically and without warning. I am getting old, you know.