"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.