The Red Herring (Patreon)

Met up with an old buddy from high school last night who reminded me of one of the most exciting chapters of my life: The making of The Red Herring.

After having our student-run high school newspaper rejected by the principal, some friends and I decided to publish the newspaper on our own. It was a labor of love (and ego) that took over the entirety of my free time from Junior year until graduation.

Because we were not allowed to distribute the paper in school, we ceremoniously distributed hundreds of copies of the newspaper to students and community members just off of school grounds. Parents and students alike pulled over in their cars to snag a copy. Each photo-copied issue that left our hands felt like contraband shared among prisoners. The grimaces of school officials supercharged our operation. Surely it wasn’t a desire to report the news itself. We only occasionally weighed in on important issues in a post-Columbine 90’s.

The Red Herring was more of a mishmash of naughty puzzles, unscientific data, interviews, and inside jokes, which I was entrusted to edit (and sprinkle drawings throughout).

We even had a section of explicitly fake news which was barely distinguishable from everything else.

In the internet age, it’s easy to see it as a conflagration of privacy and decency. Or maybe it was just a kind of analog Twitter, no worse than what surrounds us online these days.

At its best, it was a source of memes and artwork, and student-relevant information.

We made twenty issues in total. And even branched our mischief into a subversive cable access show.

I can’t quite wrap my head around the youthful urge to be so creative, mischievous, and offensive all at once. In retrospect, the entire operation might have been something like a Red Herring itself: A distraction.