When I was a kid, I’d save up any money that came my way or any change that I’d find. I wasn’t very good at it, and oftentimes I’d blow my little pocket fortune on Dollar General brand candy bars (much cheaper than the luxurious brand-name stuff) or cans of Big Red cream soda. When I had enough self-control to save, or I found enough money all at once, I’d run across the street to the local grocery store and pick up an issue of the Weekly World News. This was the god-king of tabloids, printed on the cheapest newspaper you could imagine. The pictures and text were blurry, the magazine felt like it was going to fall apart at the lightest touch, but the stories were incredible and wild. “Noah’s Ark Discovered on Martian Mountain!” “I Married Elvis…And He’s an Alien!” Flipping through the pages you’d see stories about schools teaching deaf children to read minds, women giving birth to angels, and the ever-present adventures of Bat Boy. To this day, it’s a source of delight that I followed that whole saga through my childhood; I kept the issues where he appeared and thought of them as treasures, an 11-year-old’s white-trash heirlooms. When Bat Boy got his own stage production it was like watching my kid graduate high school.
Looking back, I think those ratty old magazines might be the biggest creative influence on me out of all the art I love and treasure. Sure, Terry Pratchett brought me into Discworld to show me that among the hilarity of it all was a sharp eye watching the world around us. Stephen King taught me how people work, and how deep down we’re all scared shitless of the things we don’t understand. Star Trek reminded me that the fantastic wasn’t just possible, it might work out in our favor. Weekly World News was there first, though, peppering my young brain with the absurd and the weird, giving me a deep love for surreal delightful pulpy trash. It taught me that the stranger the imagining, the more joy it had the potential to bring. It was also comforting to know that I could Go Somewhere Else and maybe pull a little wisdom from the odd places.
I’m plugged into Twitter these days. I primarily follow writers, politicians, and practitioners of magick. And among massive thrumming creative energy and shouts of ‘fake news’, I find myself missing the feel of a copy of WWN in my hand with its cheap-paper smell, absorbing the bizarre articles, the curmudgeony advice columnists, the ads for X-ray glasses…the prophetic pulp rag that showed the young me that the world was Weird, and that this was okay.
I’ve started paying close attention to coincidences. I notice patterns more frequently, and I’m quick to mentally label things as omens and signs and portents. I might be finally going full and proper mad and will wind up watching The Number 23 until my brainstem atrophies. I might just be expressing post-election doomlust in a slightly different way. I may just be Odd. All the same, I learned today that Weekly World News was based out of Boca Raton when it was still being printed, and that the old printing press was on Broken Sound Boulevard, not ten minutes away from where I live. Eleven-year-old me would be over the moon. Twenty-six-year old me still is.
Stay strange. Keep sharp.
Happy New Year.
