During my 18 months as a staff writer at the Weekly Planet — and it will always be the Weekly Planet to me — I was fat, drunk, overwhelmed and underpaid. It’s the best job I’ll ever have.
That’s thanks to the names all over these anniversary pages. (I always liked that, writing “these pages” — it made me proud as a young writer.) David Warner, Eric Snider, Joe Bardi, Kelli K, Scott Harrell, Wayne Garcia, Ham Gravy — these people were friends and mentors and enablers and funny. So fucking funny. My office now is a library-quiet world of headphones and Gchat, and I miss how loud and rambunctuous and totally un-zen that Howard Ave. office was. I once broke an overhead light with an errant toss of a bagel — it was intended for a sales guy’s head — and a VP who was walking by critiqued my throwing motion. The place was fun.
But it was also relaxed. Too relaxed. My stint at the Planet overlapped with the final gasping glory days of print, though we couldn’t see it at the time. Instead, I caught a glimpse of an era that now feels very far away, when newspapers were a solid business and young writers had the space to get better, and the paper, these pages, was the only thing to worry about.
When we did well with the right amount, not more with less, and had no idea how good we had it.
Max was a staff writer at the Weekly Planet from 2004-2006, and editor of Creative Loafing Sarasota till 2008. He lives in New York and is the co-founder of Longform.
This article appears in Apr 18-24, 2013.