Today is Friday, the thirteenth of June.
They say it’s an unlucky day. For me, it was never a matter of luck, good or bad. It was just… specific. On this exact date several years ago, my estranged father, a man who believed that ‘high stakes’ meant betting something you couldn’t afford to lose, played a game of liar’s dice with a newspaper baron in a dimly lit bar that has long since been condemned. My father, being a man of profound and unwarranted confidence, won. His prize was the deed to this very publication.
A week later, he was gone again, and the deed was left on my doorstep, tucked inside a stained manila envelope with a note that simply read, “Your problem now.”
And so, on a Friday the 13th, The Post Meridiem Post was born. Or, more accurately, it was foisted upon me.
I named it that because ‘Post Meridiem’ means afternoon. This is not a morning paper. Morning is for ambition and optimism. This is an afternoon paper, a publication for that time of day when the promise of the morning has curdled, the coffee has worn off, and one is beginning to seriously contemplate their first drink. It is a paper for the weary.
Our mission was never to “speak truth to power.” That sounds exhausting. Our mission, as I saw it, was to hold up a cracked, funhouse mirror to a world that was already absurd. We don’t expose lies; we simply document the quiet, polite insanity of it all with the seriousness it ironically deserves. We chronicle the unhinged opinions of squirrel-whisperers, the existential despair of furniture, and the statistical anomalies of a mascot’s head-spin.
I looked around and found others who saw the world through a similarly smudged cocktail glass. A man like Nigel Featherstonehaugh-Smythe, who can describe utter chaos with the detached calm of a butterfly collector. A woman like Veranda, who understands that the most honest voices in Washington are made of mahogany and leather.
So, yes. It’s our anniversary. I will not celebrate it. I will, however, acknowledge it, as one acknowledges a persistent, low-grade headache. My daughter, Esmeralda, our entire Art Department, has drawn me a picture to commemorate the occasion. It appears to be a stick figure (me) being chased by a large, angry-looking roll of newsprint. Her eye for metaphor is becoming unnervingly sharp.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s post meridiem. The name of this paper is not just a title; it is a suggestion. I intend to follow it.
