Paul F. Olson

A Journal of Miscellany and Disorder

If I asked you to guess my favorite kind of store in the world, you’d probably say, “a bookstore,” right? You’d be close, but wrong. My favorite kind of store is actually the kind that sells office supplies. It doesn’t matter much if it’s a little mom-and-pop (not that there are many of those left anymore) or one of the Officestaplesdepotmax superstores. Big or small, I just love ‘em. In the same way I could spend hours and hours browsing a wonderful bookstore — my second favorite kind of store in the world — I can lose myself in the aisles of an office supply store, wandering dumb and happy among the boxes of pens and reams of paper, the rulers and paper clips and notebooks and markers and binders and printer cartridges and wastebaskets and desks and chairs and copy machines and stickers and folders and tape and … well, you get the idea. Aside from pens and paper once in a while, I seldom need any of it. Nor do I usually have the money to make more than a small purchase or two. But that doesn’t matter. It’s the looking, not the buying. It’s just being there. That’s enough.

I feel comfortable confessing this rather unusual love affair because I’ve talked to so many other people in my life who feel the same way. We may be strange, but we are many.

What is it about office supplies that attracts us? Is it a memory thing? A throwback to that day each summer when we had to get ready for the start of the new school year and mom would take us to the dime store to get supplies? Maybe so. Maybe, as we browse along the hundred-yard aisles full of pens or compare prices on 5,000-sheet cartons of paper, we’re actually remembering the joy of a new pair of scissors and a shiny plastic pencil box.

My own best memory doesn’t go back all the way to my school days. It goes back only about 22 years, to those heady days when I was getting ready to launch the magazine Horrorstruck and needed to set up my home office. Armed with a five-page shopping list and a pocket full of money, my wife and I visited several wonderful office supply stores and ultimately loaded up the car with absolutely everything that I would need. To be brutally honest, it was probably more than I would need. It was certainly more than I needed to run a small magazine out of a small apartment in suburban Chicago. It was most likely enough to outfit an office at a Fortune 500 company. It was overkill, but what a way to go. And it was a pleasure that kept on giving, because after we got the stuff home and lugged it up three flights of stairs and stuffed it into the corner of the living room that was going to be the Horrorstruck World Headquarters, I got to unwrap everything and find a niche for it and organize it and then stare at it happily for a while, fully satisfied.

That wasn’t the beginning of my love affair with office supplies, just another stop along the way. I should probably be a little concerned that I can remember that day so clearly, but I’m not; I’ve long ago surrendered to the fact that I’m helplessly, hopelessly hypnotized by this stuff, that the thrill other guys get from power tools and fast cars, I get from a new pen, a pretty pencil cup and an unopened spiral notebook.

I’m thinking about all this today because my wife and I are going to the office supply store a little later. Given where we live these days, that’s quite a commitment — a drive of 50 miles each way. And we’re not going to buy a lot. We’re actually just looking for a little bit of cheap paper, some bargain stuff made from recycled sugarcane waste that comes highly recommended for fountain pen users. But of course buying the paper will be only one small part of the experience. The greater part will be getting lost in those marvelous aisles, exploring, navigating those narrow passes winding between  mountains of things I don’t need, can’t afford, and don’t even really want, but which I find wonderful and absolutely beautiful all the same.

Because of what I got to do last weekend, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about expectations. What I got to do was run lights for the Missoula Children’s Theatre, one of my favorite annual activities. This was the fourth year in a row that our local Kiwanis Club hosted a visit from MCT, although my experience with the company dates back much farther, to the days in the early 1990s when I worked at a performing arts center in Illinois.

If you’re not familiar with MCT, you can learn a lot more by going to their Web site, but in a nutshell, here’s how it works: On Sunday night, a two-person MCT team arrives in your town with a complete children’s show — sets, makeup, costumes, scripts and scores — loaded into the back of a ridiculously small pickup truck. On Monday, they hold auditions for local kids, casting up to sixty or so of them in a musical production. The kids rehearse all week long, and on Saturday they put on two performances for the public. On Saturday night, after the second show, everything goes back into the pickup and the team is back on the road to the next town. No, the shows are not Shakespeare. They may not even qualify as truly top-notch children’s theatre. But they’re fun, cute, quick, entertaining little musicals. They are, in short, what they are: decent material produced decently, a blast for the cast, enjoyable for the audience, nice to see in any community and especially important in areas like ours, which are, to put it nicely, starving for the arts, theatre in particular.

The reason all of this makes me think of expectations is because of the reactions MCT invariably gets from the parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts of the cast members — and a few of the cast members themselves, come to think of it. They’re understandably skeptical about the whole approach. They look at this mob of five dozen unruly kids, ages six to eighteen, and think to themselves, “There is no way in the world they’ll be able to do it. Learn an entire show in a week? Dialogue? Songs? Dances? Entrances and exits? My kid’s never even been in a play before. He doesn’t know backstage from a back door. He’s going to learn all of this in five days? Uh-uh. No way. Not happening.” And then, the next thing you know, it’s Saturday afternoon at three o’ clock, the house lights dim, the music starts, and everything falls magically into place.

Kids are good at an awful lot of things, and above all, they’re amazingly good at meeting the expectations set for them. They have an uncanny, sometimes unsettling ability to rise or fall depending on just where we decide to set the bar. Set it low, and they’ll invariably sink to meet it. Set it high, and they’ll clear it just about every time.

Yes, I know that’s all a bit simplistic. We’re all familiar with the kids who melt down under the pressure of expectations raised too high, and those on the other end of the spectrum, the ones who inexplicably never reach the goals we’d like to see them achieve. But those extremes don’t change the fact that most kids, most of the time, will do exactly what we expect them to do, what we challenge them to do, no matter how difficult or even impossible it might look at the outset.

Inside that overloaded MCT pickup, along with all the sets and costumes, are a couple of things you can’t see: high expectations and confidence. MCT says to kids, “You can do this. You will do this. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t. You’ll work hard and we’ll help you and you’ll be great.”

And then, quite naturally, they are.

A proud Rumpelstiltskin cast after last Saturday’s shows. (Photo by Christi Ryan)

A few links to repair, a missing file or two to find, and we’ll be able to call the restoration of this site complete. Normality, so to speak, is just around the corner.

Thanks again for your patience.

This site is undergoing some changes … well, okay, lots of changes. The biggest change is that we’ve moved to a new hosting company, which accounts for the fact that there is nothing very little lots of stuff but not everything here at the moment. That situation should be recitifed soon, but there are always a few snags in a project like this, so please be patient. Some rational order should be restored to this tiny corner of the universe soon.

Because I work for a newspaper, I’m often asked the question. You know the question: What’s going to happen to the newspaper industry? As if I know. As if, at this point, anybody knows. Really, I’m no different than anyone else. I read the stories. I watch the news clips. I hear about the cutbacks and closures. And I wonder where it’s going to end.

This week’s national news coverage of the situation — the death of the Rocky Mountain News and the possibly terminal condition of the San Francisco Chronicle, along with some other depressing tidbits — seemed to bring the discussion to a whole new level, but did nothing to resolve the muddy picture of the future.

My own speculative opinions are barely worth the pixels used to display them, and they might very well change, just as they have already changed a dozen or two times, but as of today, here’s what I think: A year or two ago, even six months ago, a future without newspapers would have been a laughable concept, impossible to contemplate. Now it seems increasingly likely that we’re headed rather swiftly in that direction. That’s not to say all of the organizations behind today’s print media will cease to exist. In fact, I think many will survive and even thrive in some intriguing new ways. But it does seem that the papers we all grew up with, the traditional black-and-white-and-red-all-over printed newspaper, is racing irreversibly toward oblivion.

I can see the signs even from where I sit, in my office at a weekly newspaper that services a town of 3,800 people in a county of barely 9,000. I’m not the publisher. I’m not the money person or the circulation person or the advertising person. I’m just the news guy. But I see it. I see our community’s advertising base shrinking. I see our own column inches of ads drying up. I see our newsstand sales faltering and our subscriber base dwindling at a frightening rate. In fact, I see our subscriber base literally dying. We actually print the proof of it every week. It’s called our obituary page. Each week, we might have anywhere from one to ten obituaries in our paper. I used to tell people that every obituary they saw represented a canceled subscription, but in fact, it’s even worse than that, because many of those grandmas and grandpas purchased gift subscriptions for all of their kids and grandkids. When you do the math, every old-timer who dies might translate to two or three dead subscriptions. Last year, there was a woman who passed away who actually paid for seven subscriptions each year. After the dust had settled, six of those subscriptions were canceled and only one was renewed. Old people die. Young people are rejecting print media at a record rate. How long can you keep going like that?

It’s not as if my bosses have a lot of options, either.

We’ve all heard about the tremendous cuts in the newspaper industry, thousands and thousands of reporting jobs eliminated in the past twelve months. By one estimate, the American newspaper reporting force shrank by a whopping fifteen percent last year. We’ve also heard about other cost-saving measures, including the huge one taken in Detroit, where the Free Press and News have eliminated four days of home delivery. Our paper can’t make those kinds of choices. How do you reduce a staff of four people, two of whom are the owners themselves? How do you cut a newsroom that consists of one person? You can’t trim back on technology when you’re still generating type on ten-year-old computers and literally cutting-and-pasting it onto the page. And you can’t eliminate home delivery when you never had home delivery in the first place.

Looking at the industry as a whole, the most troubling thing I’ve read in the past few months was the summary of a study about where America gets its news. It seems the vast majority of news coverage in this country still originates in newspapers — the papers that nobody is reading or advertising in anymore. We’ve all heard so much about the growing blogosphere and how most people are getting their news online these days. But the information that we’re all reading online tends to be abridged versions of newspaper stories or commentary on those stories. Ditto cable TV news. How many reports on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News still begin with the words, “According to a story in today’s Washington Post (Or New York Times or Chicago Tribune or San Francisco Chronicle)?” It seems, then, that our society still demands that the print media provide its news, even as we’ve taken away the very tools they need to do it.

I really did not intend for this to be so gloomy, but it’s a fairly gloomy situation.

As anyone who has poked around this site at all can tell, I’m a fairly tech-savvy person. I embrace new technology. I use it and get enthused about it. But I also worry about the things we lose along the way.

In the end, I don’t think I really care if America reads the New York Times on newsprint or on their cell phones. If, as I suspect, we’re heading for a day when the dead-tree news media is dead and gone itself, and if those organizations are vibrantly and effectively covering the news online instead, so be it. My fear is for the media outlets that won’t survive that transition, that are being so hamstrung, so crippled, that they cannot make the shift. Some of these organizations are among the very best we have when it comes to deep, detailed, background-based, objective, enterprising, investigative reporting, and I see no good alternatives to having them around and healthy, no blog or news site or cable channel or Twitter poster or anything else coming up behind to take their place.

That is what scares me. It scares me a lot.

Coraline is now in theaters — okay, not in my faraway neck of the woods, but in most places. If you haven’t been convinced to see it by the great story or the pedigree of the creators, by the amazing reviews or the remarkable marketing campaign that’s played out across the airwaves and the Internet for the past several months, if you aren’t even convinced by the idea that you can go to the film’s website and do fun stuff like this

… if none of that has yet convinced you, maybe this will:

Talented people on the brink.

If I was the kind of guy who believed in spending $320 on a fountain pen, or if I was even the kind of guy who had $320 to spend on a fountain pen, this would be the one I’d buy today.

Poseidon Magnum

The one they call Duofold Red, of course.

Even sitting there on my computer monitor, rendered in cold and unfeeling pixels, looking incredibly aloof and distant, a museum display under glass, I can tell there’s something about this pen. I can feel the warmth radiating from it. I can sense it wanting to be in my hand. I can hear it trying to call out to me, almost singing with promises of the stories it holds within, the stories it wants more than anything to tell.

Or maybe it’s just the allure of a fine-looking pen from a trusted dealer.

Either way, it’s a good thing I’m not one of those guys who believes in spending $320 on a fountain pen.