El Periodico

They say a watched pot never boils. As well, a watched porch stoop never produces the morning paper. I have pathetic weekend habit. I get up out of bed, and instead of dragging a comb across my head, I peek out the front door in hope of seeing a freshly folded, entombed in clear plastic, morning paper. It never happens. I usually repeat the ritual every 3 minutes, 42 seconds until the paper finally appears, albiet too late for me to read over a cup of coffee as I have already had three cups and am about to leave on a pickled mission of some sort. By then it technically isn't the morning paper, anyway. It is the mid-morning paper. Or the late morning paper. Or news that is so late that it is not news anymore; it is history. I'd complain to the good folks at the Pepinoville Press ("We give you an objective perspective of a slanted point of view. Every day," boasts the masthead), but that would compromise my already distant relationship with the paperboy, Melonhead. He is one of those sweet, quiet adolescents who could just be on the eve of blossoming into a huge, angry teenager. I want to stay on the distant side of him. So my weekend paper comes belatedly each weekend morning, and I continue to pace back and forth from the kitchen table to the front door, like a dog in some sick psycologist's experiment. Like the wacky doctor's canine, I had been programmed for this behavior since I was a child in midievel Detroit. You see, the paper in those dark ages would come in the wee hours of the morning; a 6 a.m. arrival was late, kids. Yea, you could begin reading the Detroit Free Press while it was still dark out! Imagine... And get this: there were two local papers in those ancient times. And they were independent as well. Yep, two different owners and two different editorials. So you read the morning paper in the morning, then you came home from work, school, or gangland activity and read the evening paper, the Detroit News, in the evening! Hey, the fudal Detroit of my youth may not have offered much more than a corrupt, race-baiting mayor, thrillingly unsafe streets, and a court-mandated bus ride to a school on the far side of town, but atleast you could read about it first thing in the morning. And then again before you went to bed...

Desesperando,

Pepino Lector