a placeless world

OK, so according to the old blog-o-clock I haven't punched in for work in about seven months. In the real world, that would get me fired. But we're not in the real world, are we?

So let me get y'all caught up, super quick like.

NOVEMBER:
I break a story that three rapes from the early 1990s has been solved. I fail to check our archives to learn that the attacks were part of a series of more than a dozen such crimes perpetuated by a man known as "The Parkway Rapist." Media members here longer than I pick up on the connection. I'm an idiot.

DECEMBER:
I arrive in the tiny village of Puca Cruz, in the Azualian Highlands of Ecuador's Andes Mountains, a day before the group of Americans I'm meeting for a story. I spend the evening playing soccer with the village children and the night alone in my small tent. I wake up, wash up with some handi-wipes (there is no running water here) and chew on a granola bar and watch the clouds float by in the valley below. Marco, a boy who I met playing soccer, walks up behind me. He's holding a large, steel plate of rice, undercooked eggs and what appears to be tuna (though, with the ocean many hours away, it's doubtful that it is tuna.) "My mother made this for you," he tells me in Spanish, handing me a dirty fork. There are three eggs in the tray. Having visited Marco's home the evening before, I know this is his family's entire collection. Oh Cipro, don't fail me now.

JANUARY:
Happy New Year. We ring it in with pots and pans, marching around the neighborhood in pajamas on an unseasonably warm night. Utah goes to the Fiesta Bowl. All I can think of is how much better The Beavers were when they went to the Fiesta Bowl. I and a fellow reporter publish the findings of a three-month investigation into how police officers and fire fighters are compensated, winning us the hearts and minds of public safety workers across the states -- and making us public enemy number one for police and city administrators.

FEBRUARY:
"Pay Day Blues" earns us more cred with the street beaters — and more notoriety with police administrators — than we've ever had. Informants are coming out of the woodwork. And with that, Matt leaves the cops beat. I become the desk's "senior" reporter. I break a story about Utah photography studios that lure pre-teen girls, some as young as four or five, into making "glamour" portfolios (soaked white panties, body paint, legs spread apart in "come hither" poses, yeah this stuff is seriously sick -- but not, the Attorney General's office tells me, illegal.) The story prompts the studios to flee the state.

MARCH:
I redeem myself for The Parkway Rapist flop by getting the first and only prison interview with Rudy Michael Romero. In one of the most personally fulfilling moments of my career, I make a serial rapist cry. Here's part of the story:

Family members on the outside kept his "book" loaded. Inmates with cash flow can buy better clothing, novels, televisions for their cells — even better shoes to wear in the rec yard.
Rudy Michael Romero used to have all those things.
And he had something even more important: In a dangerous world where status often dictates safety, Romero was safe.
"I may have been a piece of shit outside these walls, but in here people knew who I was," Romero told The Salt Lake Tribune in a recent interview. "I was somebody in here. People revered me."
But that was before they came to draw his blood.
"That," says Romero, pausing to stare down at his prison-issued slippers, "was before I was the Parkway Rapist."

APRIL:
The paper asks me to be the new military beat reporter. I ask for homeland security too. They consent. All of the sudden, I'm significant.

MAY:
Into the fryer. The federal Base Realignment and Closure commission is about to make its announcement about which bases to shut down and I get it in my head that I can prognosticate how Utah's largest facility, Hill Air Force Base, will be affected. I travel to two air logistics centers in two other states. A week before the list is announced I conclude, in print, that "Hill is safe." A week later I learn that I was right. Phew.

JUNE:
The bosses clear a trip to Iraq. I've got two months to bring it all together. I start looking at flak jackets and kevlar helmets.
It's what I've been hoping for -- one of the most important stories in the world.
So what's this feeling in the pit of my stomach?