The rains are coming. Up the coast from Florida, where the two storms, Bonnie and Charley, will wreak havoc with the lives and well beings of odd shaped state in the US. I welcome it, to be honest, here that is, not the wind damage that will occur down there. Perhaps I just welcome the rain.

Normally New York is not the place to be in a storm. The concrete becomes tiny rivers; you end up slopping home with the water mark high up mid-thigh. Water tracks around your apartment till you remove your saturated threads.
But this weekend I don’t expect to do much. I’ll go for a run tomorrow morning, raining or not, Friday, end the week by sweating out the past 5 days (I worked Sunday as well), and then head into the office. Saturday, if it’s nice, I might slip on my blades and head around the city, but Sunday I’m going to lock myself inside. Do a little cleaning, pay my bills, open my GRE book, perhaps do some writing. Coffee and egg sandwiches and that should take me through the day. So let the rain come, I’ll hole myself up and wait for the clouds to part.

Today was one of those brilliant days at work, I felt a rush of adrenaline walking out of the office tonight, just past 10:15, even had a smile on my face. We’d been building from behind on this issue for quite some time, and today it caught up. So we locked ourselves in, 5 of us in one room. Production and design were an office away, and we argued text and lineup and DEKs and what word best described what and how can we lose 50 words from this piece and not remove its heart, and man did the writer flub the description here, how can we rewrite it. We’d walk over to where the production staff was huddled and would match our text with their layout, clop off words and fill in space, and then back to our cubby, watching the issue take shape the whole time. We laughed a lot, knocked each other’s ideas around, and the whole thing began to take shape as the day rolled on. This doesn’t happen too often in magazines, we normally work so far ahead of ourselves, generally only one or two editors come together for this type of pow-wow. But it’s exhilarating when it happens, and we plowed through work. I remember looking up at the clock and thinking, “Wow. 6:30P.M. When did that happen?”

Early in the evening I stepped outside with two co-workers, joking all the way down the elevator at what we’d been doing in that room. We smoked cigarettes and just exhaled.

Finally I asked, “What’s the biggest issue either of you have been involved with? Does it compare to this?” I’ve only really been in magazines for a few years.

They both thought about it for a few seconds, then one of them answered. “No. Nothing like it. I don’t think others have, not thismuch editorial content.”

“I don’t think any of us will do a single issue this big again. Not with this much content,” the other added.
And that’s where we are. Next week will be brutal, but not as hard as this. Not mapping out and piecemealing together on the fly as we unite what, at one point just a week ago, seemed like disparate, disjointed, and disconnected ideas. Today we gave them shape, and I’m geeked out for the final results. Next week will be fact checking and headlines and page numbers and credits and captions and all the rest. Today we made an issue. It reminded me that I can not only love what I do in theory, but in practice as well. The potential is there for it to be like this always, or most of the time, but it just isn’t. Today was a day where you take the smartest and best you have and put them in a room, tell them to get it done. What a rush.

Let the rain come, if it has to. I’ll be detoxing from this week, secretly dreading next. We’re almost done. Stay dry and stay safe, if where you are will be hit by these twin bitches roiling up the coast. Go easy this weekend, or maybe that’ll just be me.

Peace.