A Day In The Life - Sammy Loren

This month we asked Sammy Loren, the founding editor of On The Rag (America's Greatest Tabloid).

9:47AM - I wake up. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Seriously? The much feared and loathed editor of America’s GREATEST Tabloid wakes up at 9:45AM? Pacific Time?! The day is over in NYC, and in LonDUMB they’re already blacking out at the local pub. But here’s my little secret: I go to bed at midnight, then am WIDE AWAKE from 2:30AM-6:30AM and use the witching hours to shitpost, doom scroll and fish for hot goss. At OTR, we work while the LAMEstream media sleeps!

11AM - I walk through the sunny, charming, historic, filthy, revolting streets of helLA to get to OTR HQ. This town’s gone straight to hell! While crossing Figueroa Street I make my first business call of the day, to art gallerist Tif Sigfrids, publisher of America’s LAST alt-weekly Umm… We get right into the most pressing issues facing a pair of print media pups like us: distribution, competitors, and, most importantly of all, how to stay hot and skinny. 

11:30AM - At OTR HQ my twink secretary welcomes me with a mug of piping hot joe. “Cream?” he asks. Sweet kid, still acting formal after all these years in the tabloid trenches. He pours in a couple of inches of cold and fresh American cream, half and half baby, which does NOT even exist in the so called “civilised world” of PATHETIC Europe. 

11:45-2:30PM - These are PRIME working hours ladies and germs. And don’t worry folx, I spend them reporting on a MAJOR scandal: Scouring Venmo, I uncover how friends, rivals and former flames charge—get this—husbands, wives and most controversial of all, paramours, for coffee, pizza, a bite of a taco. It doesn’t get much juicier than this! Follow the money, man…cui bono? As SLOBBERING Seneca liked to say. 

3PM - I spark up a Capri as my twink secretary starts ranting about how we need to lawyer up, that some enraged oligarch ‘poet’ is threatening to sue On The Rag. Kicking my feet up on my desk, I pour myself a tequila and wonder where in the hell the day has gone. The nature of time is so slippery and what’s the point? It’s not like we can escape death, can we? All these battles, struggling to keep the KROOKED literary and artworld establishment honest, and what do we get in return?

5PM - The work day is coming to a close. I change into sportswear and walk back through the collapsing city to my gym. If I’m lucky, I might cross paths with novelist Chris Kraus, who is a regular on those ellipticals. Now there’s a GREAT artist! When I arrive at the gym I spot Chris dabbing her forehead with a towel. She winks at me as I rack up the bench press. Running America’s GREATEST tabloid ain’t easy, especially in helLA, a dirty, tough, thankless kind of town, but if you look hard enough, and stick around long enough, you too can find the diamonds glittering in the concrete.