I won’t rule it out, but this is still Sane Magazine Dot NET, not it’s old self of .com, which is now owned by some Japanese company for some reason.

You *may* want to check out WombatsDigIt.com, where the founder, Head Editor, and chief horoscope writer of the old Sane Magazine post articles, now.

Because when/if Sane Magazine ever returns, that’ll be the place you’ll find out.

Is this the return of Sane Magazine?

If there was an answer, an honest to goodness answer, he didn’t know what it was. 42, maybe.

disclaimer

a triumphant (?) return?

SPONSOR MESSAGES:

Support Sane:
Our Founder’s RedRoom.com page: Matthew Michael Hanlon @ RedRoom.com
Tshirts & clothing: The Sane Magazine formational Shop at Cafe Press

A Book: Fenway Fiction
A Second Book: Further Fenway Fiction
For you writerly types: Download Writer.app (now at version 1.4.1! Skippy!)

Or, visit our store at Amazon… check out some of the books that inspire or otherwise provoke the Sane Magazine writers.

Your weekly horoscopes.

The fish in question, well, it was a fish. It was just… dead. Making an educated guess that the fish didn’t die in transit from the water to the edge of the blanket, both I and my wife congratulated our son, took the fish gratefully (and with delicate fingers), and deposited it in the trash when we weren’t being observed. This was shortly after receiving the fish, as this son of ours bolted back to the water in search of more fish. I think he fancied himself a bear, swiping salmon from the river …

…

…

Authorial intrusion… For a second, imagine yourself on a lake, in a canoe… the waves lap gently… hang on, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. No. I wanted to talk to you about the future. Picture me by a fireside, in a wheelchair, having a chat with you. If you like, picture me looking a lot like FDR. I don’t look like FDR in real life, but on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog, as they say. I’m not a dog, either. You’re just going to have to take my word for it. If you dopicture me as FDR, please picture me as him with his glasses on. I don’t know why I’d like that, it’s just a gut feeling I have.

So I’m sitting here, with a flannel blanket in my imaginary lap, typing to you, Dear Reader. And what I’m typing is this: In the future, the near future, I, one of the main writers of Sane Magazine, and, frankly, the only one doing any writing these days for the magazine what with the new Nintendo Wii and iPhones and everything.

Besides the Horoscope Writer. Who gets paid far more than I do. So. So what’s going to happen here, in this space, in the future, is that there are going to be less issue-like missives and more like progress reports. You see, I, the main writer for Ye Olde Sane Magazine, I will be working on a new project. And I will be commenting on it, about it, around it, whatever it may be, you can bet it’ll be related, if only tangentially, to this new project.

As for the horoscopes, by far the more popular part of Sane Magazine, they will be getting a little treat for you Mac nuts to follow along when each week’s horoscopes are published, but that, too, is not ready.

Author out.

…

…

Which was the first hint they should have taken that he’d go off to live with the bears when he reached the ripe age of eighteen.

disclaimer

So there’s that little thing, then.

Oh, and we’ll also not be mailing you when there are new issues out, because we figure that’s annoying for all involved.

SPONSOR MESSAGES:

Support Sane:
Our Founder’s RedRoom.com page: Matthew Michael Hanlon @ RedRoom.com
Tshirts & clothing: The Sane Magazine formational Shop at Cafe Press

A Book: Fenway Fiction
A Second Book: Further Fenway Fiction
For you writerly types: Download Writer.app (now at version 1.4.1! Skippy!)

Or, visit our store at Amazon… check out some of the books that inspire or otherwise provoke the Sane Magazine writers.

Your weekly horoscopes.

VOICE: This will be my last will and testament.

VOICE: The sound you hear in the background is the hiss of the tape recorder wheels, which is quite old by now, nearly as old as myself. Wait, no. That’s not the tape recorder wheels. It’s Kylie Minogue, who has just come on the radio. My apologies. Let me go turn it off.

[Sound of feet clumping across the room. A satisfying plastic *clack* from across the room.]

VOICE: Right. Done. No, no, it’s still playing. Oh, right. Sorry. Here it is.

[The sound of fumbling ensues. The sound of a space bar being pushed and Kylie is silenced.]

VOICE: Where was I? Right. My last will and testament. But first, a little recap. I have lead a full life. I know you may not believe this. Wait? Is that Kylie back on? Hold on… I swear I can hear Kylie. Is it just me? Future people, can you hear it, too?

[Do not nod your head. Unless, of course, you canhear Kylie Minogue's dulcet tones wafting through the air.]

VOICE: Listen, I just can’t keep going with this with that music playing in the background. I’m going out to get some more cigarettes.

TAPE RECORDER: *click*

ANOTHER VOICE, THIS ONE NOT FROM THE AUDIO RECORDING BUT FROM FRIGHTENINGLY CLOSE TO YOUR EAR, WHICH CAUSES YOU TO JUMP AND NEARLY FALL OUT OF YOUR CHAIR: And that is why, kids, we have no money for Christmas presents this year, because your great-great-grandfather never got around to recording his last will and testament and the government, as they did in those days, assumed he meant to give them all his earthly possessions, and we got nothing, down the line at all.

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And we keep plugging on. For whatever reason.

SPONSOR MESSAGES:

Support Sane:
Our Founder’s RedRoom.com page: Matthew Michael Hanlon @ RedRoom.com
Tshirts & clothing: The Sane Magazine formational Shop at Cafe Press

A Book: Fenway Fiction
A Second Book: Further Fenway Fiction
For you writerly types: Download Writer.app (now at version 1.4.1! Skippy!)

Or, visit our store at Amazon… check out some of the books that inspire or otherwise provoke the Sane Magazine writers.

Your weekly horoscopes.

I could see him futzing around with something in the kitchen through my office door. I was meant to be working on… something. Some thing or other for a client, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, wrestle that gigantic thing into a more manageable one thing on which I could focus. I had the brief thought that I could write about what he was doing in there. But the client, a technology company specializing in mass media storage and some sort of social networking component, didn’t have much to do with the kitchen. Or much of anything I could figure, really. Each meeting I had with their brass seemed to result in a lot of doublespeak which wouldn’t seem to duplicitous while I was there, but as I left the conference room in which we’d meet I’d slowly feel the ‘gotta have’ fog begin to lift, and I could sense a growing unease with what, exactly, they were selling by the time I got to the reception desk. By the time I got into the elevator it was completely gone, and I was in another anonymous elevator in the city, exiting any other building in the city, in which various people of various talent levels worked and slaved to some end each day. By the time I hit the street, if I’d been asked by a passerby where I’d just been I’d have a hard time answering, which wasn’t helpful at all when I was sitting down an hour later in my office, trying to write something compelling about what it is they provided.

So maybe what he was doing in the kitchen was applicable. Because I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, either.

So I was following him intently, failing to write a single thing, when he turned, and I could see the breakfast tray in his hands, a mug front and center in the middle of it. I followed him as he crossed the kitchen floor, onto the carpet of the living room, and up to my door. I loved the flow of our house, how open, how connected it all seemed.

And I also saw him hit the wood floor of my office and slip and slide in his sock feet, wobble mightily with his tray rattling and quaking against the mug before he managed, somehow, to regain his balance.

He laid the tray on my desk, and, without a word, left me. With my sunset in a cup glowing faintly next to my laptop keyboard.

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The founding father of Sane Magazine will be making a special appearance at the Charlton Public Library on October 18th at 1pm, that’s this Saturday, for a reading from Fenway Fiction and Further Fenway Fiction, with the editor of the collections, Adam Pacther.

Adam Pacther and Matthew Hanlon will be reading and signing copies of Fenway Fiction and Further Fenway Fiction Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 1pm at the Charlton Public Library.

Bring your copies of either Fenway Fiction, maybe get a sneak peek of the third installment of the series, and maybe even win a haddock if you can sing along with more than half the words of any given story I decide to read! What more could you ask for?

Please, please, please show up. Even if the Red Sox don’t. Please? We don’t want to beg, but we will. Otherwise I’ll be reading to the crickets again…

SPONSOR MESSAGES:

Support Sane:
Our Founder’s RedRoom.com page: Matthew Michael Hanlon @ RedRoom.com
Tshirts & clothing: The Sane Magazine formational Shop at Cafe Press

A Book: Fenway Fiction
A Second Book: Further Fenway Fiction
For you writerly types: Download Writer.app (now at version 1.4.1! Skippy!)

Or, visit our store at Amazon… check out some of the books that inspire or otherwise provoke the Sane Magazine writers.

Your weekly horoscopes.

The toothy grin (he’d apparently eaten corn on the cob that morning for breakfast, or perhaps the evening before for dinner and simply hadn’t brushed his teeth well). The coifed hair. The slightly cakey makeup. He’d been tapping on the window for some time. For the longest time, I lay in bed, unwilling and unable to move, my arm pinned beneath my wife’s head. It’s not that she’s heavy, she isn’t. I just didn’t want to disturb her sleep. Also, I can’t move my arm because it’s fallen asleep, and there is simply no gentle way to extract the dead thing from her head without starting off the morning in a very, very bad way.

So it’s she who comments on it, first: “What is that? Is someone tapping at the window?” She rotated on her head to look back at the curtains behind the headboard. My reaction to the sharp pain sprinting down my arm towards the rest of my body was to jerk my slightly less-deadened arm out of the path to try and throw the pain off the scent of the rest of me, which resulted in my wife hitting the floor in an unceremonious pile (as opposed to the usual ceremonious exit she made from the bed). Arm free, I threw back the curtain, after tossing a glance towards the floor and its occupants. Only to see Gerard Flynn, standing out there, as previously described. He started, as if he’d given up getting a response from this window. After a pause, he reached down below the windowsill, produced a baby in cloth diaper and nothing else, held it up, as for inspection by ourselves, in our bedroom, behind this window pane, and proceeded to kiss it in a, I imagine, loud and slurpy manner.

Then he tossed the baby to an aide standing nearby, or it might have been a secret service agent, gave us both a thumbs up, and ran off down the street.

“I hate that guy,” said my wife, from the floor, where she’d been able to see the baby kiss, at the very least.

disclaimer

Keep your noses clean this week, kids.

SPONSOR MESSAGES:

Support Sane:
Our Founder’s RedRoom.com page: Matthew Michael Hanlon @ RedRoom.com
Tshirts & clothing: The Sane Magazine formational Shop at Cafe Press

A Book: Fenway Fiction
A Second Book: Further Fenway Fiction
For you writerly types: Download Writer.app (now at version 1.4.1! Skippy!)

Or, visit our store at Amazon… check out some of the books that inspire or otherwise provoke the Sane Magazine writers.

Your weekly horoscopes.

But here’s what happened:

• The boss got us all iPhones in the office. Then the App Store launched, and we just spend all our days and weekly expense allowance in the hope that we might review the products we expense in the magazine some day, downloading vast amounts of flashlights for the iPhone, Zen pond-like things, and to-do managers (on which the first thing we mark as a to-do is to write a review of the application for Sane Magazine). The sheer amount of bandwidth we’re consuming on the office’s poor little Wi-Fi network (SSID: wombatsdigit) has made it nearly impossible to do any research on the upcoming week’s issue and, once we’ve failed to do research and have simply written something regardless of fact(s), it has prevented us from actually uploading the thing. Really.

• Then the boss got a Wii for the office. Frankly, possibly the stupidest move in a long history of stupid moves. We’ve been playing Active Life Outdoor Adventure and begun talking around the water cooler about going kayaking at the weekend, though none of us have ever actually seen a kayak in the water before, nor would we know where a pond exists, nearby, where you’re allowed to put in with a kayak. Also, most of us probably realize, in our heart of hearts, that our skills in paddling with a Wii Remote probably won’t translate to a hard wooden paddle in a boat that rocks significantly more than a plastic mat laid out on the floor in front of the breakroom television.

• Then the boss found this nice babysitter who was willing to babysit for the entire office. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. No, what she does is she babysits our children, while we go out, and you know, stare at all the people out and about who are taller than 3 foot 4 because we haven’t seen many people of that size in some time. It’s unsettling. The amount of tall people, not the woman watching our kids, or our own staring (though that may very well be the case for the people at which we’re staring). And when we’re staring, wide eyed and startled in the bright lights of a life outside the office and home, both, we’re not writing, suffice it to say.

But all of those are just excuses. What we really came here for today is to apologize.

You see, since Sane Magazine has gone on largely unannounced and unnoticed hiatus, well, the global economy has pretty much gone into the toilet.

So we’re making a major effort, turning off our fledgling 8 and 1 Boston Bruins Season mode in NHL 2K9, shutting down our iPhones, and having the babysitter arrested on suspicion of intent to commit insurrection. And we’re finally, finally sitting down to work on some more content for you guys. But we wanted to start off with this apology, first. So here it is: We’re sorry.

Also, our electricity has been turned off, since Sane Magazine has been largely funded on stocks and betting on mortgages, most of which have gone bad, and we’re going to post this issue from the Starbucks’ Wi-Fi down the street while our laptop batteries have a few hours life left in them.

disclaimer

Sane Magazine has not actually, so far as we know, caused the huge economic meltdown. We will not be held responsible for bailing out anyone, lest the be playing Active Life Outdoor Adventure and fall out of the kayak and begin to drown. In this case, and this case alone, we will bail someone out. By throwing them the Active Life Outdoor Adventure Life Vest.

Also, no horoscopes in September, to mark the occasion. Check back in NaHoWriMo, which, for the lay person, is National Horoscope Writing Month, also known as “October.”

The rumor that this issue has been written under threat is also not true.

If you want to support Sane in these dire times (or simply make a pithy statement about the Economic Collapse ™), you can now buy the t-shirt! Tell your grandkids that you were there, and this ratty old t-shirt is the proof! Or buy the military cap, because we could well be on the verge of anarchy and all-out war! Yahoo! Fight for the Sane Magazine side… as we said, we have a Wii, and all employees have an iPhone…

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We’re back from vacation, and yes, indeedy, we took one.

Sane is out this week, in horoscope format only. Which is not particularly exciting and one needs to ask if it’s worth it. We’ll see.

SPONSOR MESSAGES:

Support Sane:
Our Founder’s RedRoom.com page: Matthew Michael Hanlon @ RedRoom.com
Tshirts & clothing: The Sane Magazine formational Shop at Cafe Press

A Book: Fenway Fiction
A Second Book: Further Fenway Fiction
For you writerly types: Download Writer.app (now at version 1.4.1! Skippy!)

Or, visit our store at Amazon… check out some of the books that inspire or otherwise provoke the Sane Magazine writers.

Your weekly horoscopes.