I should have taken my sick days last week as time to read, ponder and reflect. Instead, I hunched over my laptop wasting countless of hazy hours on the interwebs like a fiend as I coughed up phlegm from my dirty bedroom. It was as vile as it sounds and I hope to never mention it again.

Two separate (but equal?) projects at work have all but removed me from the daily newspaper grind. I’ve relegated myself to rambling video interviews with Robertson Field House subjects and to hitting the blacktop visiting downtrodden single-screen theaters that still somehow exist in central Illinois. I’ll speak more on this later; just know that next-day satisfaction is a hard drug to give up, rolled up at the front door each morning. As far as Peoria is concerned, this man has disappeared.

Let us close with a tidbit on journalism in 1973; things have been on the decline ever since:

There was not a hell of a lot of room for a Gonzo journalist to operate in that high-tuned atmosphere. For the first time in memory, the Washington press corps was working very close to the peak of its awesome but normally dormant potential. The Washington Post has a half-dozen of the best reporters in America working every tangent of the Watergate story like wild-eyed junkies set adrift, with no warning, to find their next connection. The New York Times, badly blitzed on the story at first, called in hotrods from its bureaus all over the country to overcome the Post’s early lead. Both Time’s and Newsweek’s Washington bureaus began scrambling feverishly to find new angles, new connections, new leaks and leads in this story that was unraveling so fast that nobody could stay on top of it…

– Hunter S. Thompson, “The Great Shark Hunt”