"Instead of taking the teenager home, the Arlington man drove to an abandoned house in Fort Worth, beat his stepson with a baseball bat and sodomized him with a metal tool, police said."

This is an actual quote from an AP news story.

It is also the kind of sentence every journalist dreams of writing.

This must mean at least two things:

1.) The world, especially Texas, is fucked up; and,
2.) Journalists can be sick fucks.

To give this quote a little more context, The Arlington Man is the stepfather of an 18-year-old who allegedly sodomized his stepfather's biological 8-year-old daughter.

I might be wrong on this, but I also think Arlington, Texas is the setting of the animated FOX series King of the Hill. While I'm sure this is purely coincidental, I am also not surprised to hear this this bizarre act of sodomy occurred by the hand (?) of a man from such a place.

(EDIT: I just Wikipediaed King of the Hill, which is set in the fictional town of Arlen, Texas. Not Arlington. But that doesn't matter. My position still stands.)

During the the relatively brief time I was employed as a professional journalist, I got to see and do a number of ridiculous things in the name of good journalism.

Sneaking around the scene of a murder looking for a witness of sorts to give me a quote, waiting in suspense for a bank to blow-up by the hand of an deranged methhead hunting for cash, sitting next to real journalists who cover important national issues, such as the time when the President made a stop in KC to tout his new health care plan (which, uh, I'm still waiting to see, Bushy), these things made my job interesting. It was without doubt the most interesting job I ever had.

But it was also one of the most boring. When you're covering an area like Eastern Jackson County, Mo., there's honestly not a lot of excitement. There were days where I'd be begging for a fire or a robbery or something, anything to get me out of my desk and away from the hopeless and/or pointless story I was chasing only because I had run out of options and I had to file something for the next day.

It's a sick, sick thing to actually be happy when there's a fire or a bank robbery. And whenever there was and it was my job to cover it, I couldn't help but feel a little happy. An important assignment, a story that will be on the front page, that everyone will read, something to do at 2:30 on a Wednesday, a reason to quit making calls to the city waterworks department to find out if Mrs. Robinson really did step on a manhole cover and fall through, or if that woman was just fat and crazy.

I've just gone through the archives of the old newspaper, looking for sentences I wrote that could compete with the likes of the aforementioned metal tool sodomy, this is the best thing I could dig up in about five minutes of searching:

"A house party in unincorporated Jackson County went awry early Sunday morning when a man shot his brother in the face."

Nowhere near as good as metal tool sodomy. But still. I remember when I wrote this, I was working the weekend shift and I was the only one in the newsroom and I got a press release from the sheriff's department and jumped on it. I think we even joked about it over coffee the next morning.

That's sick.

Also sick: The Dead List that circulated throughout the newsroom; A list of names of newsworthy people that were to believed to be dead within the year. The person with the most correct names on the Dead List was to win some sort of cash prize. And of course notoriety.

I can only imagine the sick shit that goes on in a newsroom in Arlington, Texas.

so it's tomorrow and i call you to discuss Everything and you don't answer and not just that but the skype tells me that the Call Is Refused and i don't know what that means other than that you don't want to talk to me because it's nearly one in the am but you should be awake right now because it's a good time for the conversation and when i speak with you i undoubtedly have the Good conversation and that's what i need about right now and everybody is gone and the songs are sad and the sunshine is far far away and i am here in this cold and smokey place with the whisky and the empty wine bottle and the half smoked joint and i'm looking for some person to speak with because i am rather frustrated and behooved with most things at the moment and i think everyone has to be working tomorrow and i do too but i'm far, far beyond caring about that at this point and i think it would be good to talk about how your new year was and what you did for christmas in the american wasteland. i think tomorrow there is a primary election in new hampshire and i hope that barack obama does well and that mike huckabee is destroyed and put back in his place at the bottom of the food chain. maybe a week ago i returned from thailand. i was in bangkok for a few days and also on these islands off the coast of the gulf of thailand. on christmas eve it was a monday and some time in evening as the sun was sinking down somewhere below the ocean i was on a boat filled with hundreds of people from all over the world and we were all dancing and drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and waiting for the full moon to show itself and when it did it was massive and scary and bigger than i have ever seen it before in my entire life because i was so close to the equator. and this boat was taking us to The Full Moon Party, but this wasn't just any full moon party it was The Full Moon Party, the biggest in the world. they all started on this small island called Ko Phang Nang and when i turned up when the moon was bright and high in the warm winter sky; and there were thousands and thousands and thousands of people roaming and dancing and crawling all over the place like freaks and drunken monsters. this dirty place was covered by scourges of boozed-out freaks sketchy transvestites and drug dealers and firedancers and zombies and ridiculous people fucking in the sand and pissing in the ocean and passed out and robbed on the beach. i was there high of cheap marijuana, talking with Randal and this stark raving man comes up to us and he says, "hey man, have you had the Mushroom Shakes?" and i tell him that it's imperative that he tell me were to get one and he points somewhere far far down the beach and says go towards the red lights, and pull him close to me and tell him to not lie and say the truth and this man is fucked up and i can tell it from his wild eyes and he says to go towards the red lights and so i tell Randall that we're going and we trek down the beach towards this psychedelic zombie factory and and there are signs on the way up the stone steps that read MUSHROOM SHAKEs and i that is exactly what needs to happen and so i go into this discotech and the lights are swirling everywhere and everything is fabulous and i ask the seedy Thaiman to give me what i'm looking for and he looks around with an eye of caution and then gives me the plastic cup of this thick black liquid and i carry it away down to the shore and sit on a rock and drink it quickly and start walking and maybe 15 minutes later i can feel something different and i have this urgent and compelling urge to get rid of this horrible plastic cup and i see this place where many others have put their cups to rest and so i do the same and join the rest of the zombies and i wander all night long looking for nothing and searching for everything and i meet people who are lairs and i meet people who are true and there are others who don't know what's happening and there are more who are just there to rob me but i am able to swim through all of this madness and enjoy the lights and the firedancers and the glowsticks and the heavy dance music and i smoke a lot of cigarettes and i started conversations with random folks from all over this rock and some of them are normal and some are too fucked to comprehend, like the fat guy from the UK who kept raving in my ears about Cambodia. this man who would never blink kept looking at me like i was his only friend, and say, " the Killing fields, man. the Killing fields. you have to go and see the Killing fields. it will Change you. and i heard him but at that point i could do nothing. i could barely understand this crazy person and so i escaped and went back to that party and by this point i had lost Randall in the fray. and i felt a little bad about it because i had encouraged him to drink one of these psychedelic cocktails and then left him alone because he was starting to Make Me Crazy and i had to get out of this horrible place and so I left the man raving about Cambodia and went and pissed in the ocean and when i was looking at what all was around me there were lifeless bodies and people naked and sandy and full of ecstasy and fucking on the shores and there was trash and discarded clothing and all kinds of unwanted shit and dregs and so i had to get away from this place and went towards the fire and this skinny thai man pulled me on to the ground and stuck his nasty beard in my face and asked me what kind of pills i wanted to buy and i didn't know how to answer this freak so i said i needed to have a cigarette and we smoked one and he kept trying to sell me drugs and i really wanted to have The Drugs but i didn't' trust this lunatic man, because i thought he would sell me over priced goods and then turn around and sell me to the cops to make another buck and so i smoked with this seedy man and then i left and and wandered down some alley and met these old people who must have been at least 45 and i asked them were they were from and they said, "We're European," and I asked them What The Hell that meant and they said they wanted to buy me a drink because i had a cute face and so i let them and eventually I found out they were Germans and we had some cocktails and then i told them i had to leave and I started looking for my friend Randall but in the horrid mix of transvestites and zombies and dead bodies it was too hard to find him and by then i was in need of some company and so i pretended to lose my cigarette lighter and sat down next to these people form Australia asked for a light and this guy said they didn't' have one but that he was Really Good at finding lighters and so I sat there and waited and he came back with a lighter that i really didn't' need and it came along with this schizophrenic man from Scotland who had a gigantic talking lizard and this crazy fucker talked with me and these Aussie girls until at somepoint they left to use the bathroom and they never came back because I think they realized there was more than just one crazy fucker talking to them in the middle of the night on christmas day.