Fremont News

The only news stand in Fremont is going out of business - my favorite one, on Fremont Avenue. It's a hole-in-the-wall kind of place. Usually, a cashier with multiple piercings sits at the front counter, bent over some magazine or another. Further in, the rabbit hole seems to burrow into its space among the shops. Magazines crowd the stands, turning their colorful faces outward. I usually haunt the poetry journal section, but nearer the front, newspapers also breath their papery gray scent into the air. At the back, a cheerful scatter of postcards, greeting cards, journals and other miscellaneous paraphenalia decorates the walls.

It is typically anachronistic of me to be entering print journalism now, when all of print media seems at the edge of total collapse, like a tired, wan old giant out of some fairy story. I told the cashier how sorry I was to learn they're going out of business. He, a sharp-faced, tall gnome with a bristly blond beard and spikey blond hair, looked at me with brilliant blue eyes and said, "Me too!"

We talked awhile. The internet, he said. Competition, he said. 100 foreign-language newspapers we used to carry, he said, down to eight, now. They're one of the last news stands in Seattle, with one surviving shop on Broadway; Bulldog, the University news stand, once had a Broadway branch, but they closed that, and now only have their little shop on University Ave - the Ave, as students say.

I don't know how people can give up the scent, the feel, of a solid book or newspaper or magazine in their hands. There's such spectacular romance to print. The internet sucks the life out of literature, consumes the reality of it, and turns its texture to a sort of evanescent pillar of air, substanceless.

"For me, it's heartbreaking," said my thin-faced elf, leaning down to me where I stood a step lower than him.

Me too.