it's over

Everything comes to an end. Everything. I know everything comes to an end, yet, it seems impossible to accept when something I am attached to does disappear into the ether. There's been other endings this summer, but this one I didn't see coming at all. I thought it would outlast me, that it would remain a staple of my life. It's something that has never failed me. But then, it has billed itself as "the world's only reliable newspaper". And rely on it, I have. I love the Weekly World News. I will miss it beyond reason.

I'm not sure when I started reading it, but it was over a decade or so ago. I'd pick it up in the supermarket line and find myself laughing and end up buying it. Unlike the Onion, which is outright satire, The Weekly World News lies somewhere between, invoking a kind of magical realism that plays to me as more realistic than many major newspapers. I've longed for a Shamanic Times, a newspaper that reports on the happenings that really seem to matter, like when the bald eagle at the National Zoo got mysteriously eviscerated on July 4th. Or when the guy playing Jesus for Mel Gibson's movie got hit by lightening, proving that the sky god was not pleased at all by this particular telling of the tale of his son. Mel Gibson blamed it on Satan. Satan would have gotten Jesus drunk and sleeping with someone inappropriate. Lightening bolts, that's God's weapon.

These are the kind of important stories that the Weekly World News has covered; the horsemen of the apocalypse getting lost, Rumsfeld having a heart three sizes too small, and of course, all the places Elvis has been sighted and what he's up to. The Weekly World News is the closest thing to a Shamanic Times we have had. When they started to cover Bat Boy's assistance in looking for Osama Bin Laden in the caves of Afghanistan, I became a subscriber. These years of the Bush regime I've needed a newspaper that gave it to me straight, and more importantly, that made me laugh.

But, it's over. The last issue came yesterday in my mailbox. I actually cried, much to the utter disgust of my teenage son. Soon, he too will feel the loss. The newest issue always goes straight into it's special place in the bathroom. At least once a week somebody brings up an article they've enjoyed. My son has liked the coverage of the world's fattest cat and the gay time traveler, Miss Adventure.

Everything comes to an end. Soon, the subject of the latest great article in the Weekly World News will be a thing of the past. I'll have to decide whether to keep the stack I have left or to put them in the recycling. I guess like all things that still have a material body, but no real life left in them, they will be "collector's items".

I am so sad.