NO REST FOR THE WICKED

posted by James Reel

    The last word in the title of this post should be pronounced “wick’d.” As in someone affected by Wick Communications, the owner of, among other things, the Tucson Weekly. As in someone like me. When Weekly editor Jimmy Boegle sails off on one of his cruises, he talks me into going back to take over for him, sitting at my old desk (now somewhat worse for wear) and making sure there’s still a Weekly when Jimmy gets back from sipping margaritas and gazing at whales, or whatever he’s doing off the coast of Mexico.
    Because Jimmy lines up everything before he goes, I have no control over the issue’s content. I merely process copy and seeing that the page layouts conform to good practices; basically, I spend my time making sure the writers who end sentences with parenthetical insertions place the period where it belongs, outside the parentheses (like this). (Why are freelancers suddenly getting this wrong? It’s bad enough that they didn’t learn the proper American sequence of periods and quotation marks in elementary school, but putting the period inside the parentheses violates common sense and is a mark of utter proofreading incompetence, except when the parenthetical remark is a self-contained sentence, like this one.)
    Can you tell that I’m already getting surly at the thought of two very long days, 5-11 a.m. here at KUAT and then straight over to the Weekly until 5 p.m. today and 7 tomorrow?
    What I dislike about going back to the Weekly is not fixing other people’s sloppy writing, which is one thing I do for a living, but making the trek out to that soulless office in a business park near the airport. It’s difficult to get into the alt-weekly mindset in a facility that looks so much like an insurance office. Things were much better and more freewheeling in the dark, labyrinthine old building across from the Cushing Street Bar where the paper was based when I was lured to the editor’s job five years ago. I hated that facility at first, but I gradually came to appreciate its character, not to mention its downtown location.
    Anyway, I’d better think about writing my review of Fuddy Meers, which I saw very late Saturday night at Live Theatre Workshop. If I don’t get it done soon, my editor will yell at me.