Entry hallway.

Dining room.

Office.

Bedroom

Living room.

Fireplace.

Hildy says hi.

Bathroom.

Melissa was in here painting and cleaning every day for the past four weeks; I expect she’ll be sleeping for a week.

I’ll gab more about what’s happening in our lives later; just wanted to satisfy the curiosity of anybody who wanted to know what the inside of the place looks like.

You’ll be pleased to know I’m as sick of kicking the corpse of my newspaper career as you are. This morning I awoke from a dream in which my editor in San Jose was instructing me to redo a page for the paper in Tampa. Enough, geeze.

I’ve always liked the South, though I confess I’ve read none of Faulkner’s novels (did enjoy “All the King’s Men,” a great Southern novel if there ever was one, however). North Carolina has become so prosperous and populous (10th most people in the U.S. now) that it’s unfair to think of it as one of those Old South states like Mississippi or Alabama. The state parks have no entry fees, the recreational opportunities are just about endless, the scenery is breathtaking if you know where to look. The tallest mountain in the East is here (but you knew that if you’ve been reading my hiking blog).

Now that we’ve decided to kick back here for awhile, I’ll have to start visiting some of the locales that don’t entail walking on dirt. The triad has museums, musicians and movie houses like any other place. History’s a big deal, seeing as how the region’s most compelling stories predate the Civil War by over 100 years (when the original settlers came here from Pennsylvania and set up shop in an abandon trapper’s cabin — see my hike at Historic Bethabara if you missed it). A man credited with inspiring the beliefs of Salem’s settlers was among the world’s first Protestants; naturally the pope ordered him burned at the stake. We’re talking early 1400s here, so yeah, the stories go way back.

More to come. Here’s hoping it’s interesting in a good way.

“… And I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole…”

It was their song, Merle Haggard’s classic account of an angelic mother and her demonic son who rewarded her goodness with shame and scandal. Neighbors of a shabby studio apartment on the seedy edge of Hickory, North Carolina, knew every syllable by heart. The guy in 228-J played it at 10:13 every Thursday night for the past 13 years, four months and 21 days.

“… no one could turn me right but Mama tried…” she heard through the apartment’s thin door. A wave of warmth pushed back the Christmas Eve chill.

She was the Rolling Pin Killer, and she was on the lam. She was right where the authorities would look for her first, the filthy warren of her soulmate, a failed newspaperman who devoted his every waking hour to securing her release from the Joliet Prison for Women.

She couldn’t remember ever being this excited as she began to rap upon the door, but remembered to pause till 15 seconds after the last guitar chord faded. The time he threw the landlord’s puppy through a plate-glass window for interrupting their song became the stuff of legend once the tabloids got ahold of it.

It took two sets of hard knocks before she heard him picking his way through his personal junkyard on the way to the door. She stepped aside as a plume of dust poured from the opening apartment door. He didn’t get out much.

“Honey, it’s me!” she cried, jumping toward the doorway and crashing into his sunken chest.

Can’t be a dream, he thought. I haven’t slept in five days. CNN was running updates on her cunning jailbreak every 12 minutes. He’d watched it all. They knew about as much as he did, but unlike him they had 24 hours of airtime to fill.

“Wow, she’s really bulked up inside,” he thought as her muscled arms nearly squeezed his breath away. Reflexively, he threw a hand between their lips, knowing her reunion kiss would drain his last ounce of sanity.

“Aggie, what are you doing here?” he demanded with his first strong breath. “For God’s sake, the Supreme Court is hearing your case on Tuesday.”

Agnes Butterfly was the name on her birth certificate, but everybody knew her as Aggie. Her conviction in the diabolical slayings of 17 corporate executives (each one felled by a fatally impacted bowel) had transfixed the nation.

Two trials and four appeals could not sway the U.S. justice system from its insistence that she was the Rolling Pin Killer. As far as he was concerned, though, the case was all circumstantial and ripe for appeals. After all, the one person she did vow to violate with a rolling pin was very much alive.

He updated his blog, AggieWasFramed.com, 17 times a day with fresh allegations of judicial missteps and police wrongdoing. He threw all the revenue from the site’s 17 million hits a day into Aggie’s defense fund, but $314.42 a week didn’t buy much legal advice.

But in classic Hollywood style, a determined gaggle of law students took on her case and smothered the justice system with every imaginable legal ploy, and many previously unimagined. It all paid off six weeks ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take on her case. What on earth, could have pushed her to this, he wondered as his breathing returned.

“It’s Mom,” Aggie blurted. “She knows everything and we have to stop her.”

(To be continued if I get inspired… suggestions for further chapters welcome.)

Mainly I learned that time punishes the dawdler, but luck can rescue the patient.

I gave 22 years of my working life to a doomed industry. I had an excuse for the first few years before the Web exploded on the scene, but everything after that came down to my natural attraction to the path of least resistance. Plain old greed played a role, too: Sure, I’d have loved to have taken a job working on somebody’s Web site, but they all seemed to require huge pay cuts that didn’t interest me.

So I talked myself into believing it was OK to stick it out with my reliable union job with its reliable 2% pay raises and better-than average health benefits. I had a job which came so naturally to me that I could’ve kept at it every day till I drew my last breath or they dragged me away from the computer screen, whichever came first. I had my 37.5 hours a week, five weeks paid vacation, and days off on my birthday and anniversary of hire. It seemed like plenty.

Only one problem with plenty: it never lasts.

Signs that the pool of plenty was drying up started emerging about five years ago, when they stopped replacing my copy desk co-workers after they moved on. By the summer of ‘09, the last of the pool could fill a teaspoon.

What happened next has already been told here, but to summarize: I learned in August that the paycut I had long avoided was going to happen after all, and that I was on the list of newsroom expendables. Learning I wasn’t the go-to guy I had imagined myself to be was one part sucker punch, one part wake-up call. Hurt at first, but when my breath returned I knew that in hard times, the expendable go first. With newspapers facing nothing but hard times in the years ahead, I knew that even if I kept my job this time, I’d lose it the next.

So I bailed. I had no prospects beyond a cash cushion, good credit and a few connections. Melissa and I moved across the continent, rented a cheap two-bedroom apartment down the road from her mom’s place, and dug in for a long stretch of austerity that seemed certain in light of how everybody else was faring in this economy.

Fortune smiled within weeks, it turned out. There were two reasons why I lucked out: a) somebody I knew needed to hire somebody, and I was in no position to get picky; and b) while I was lazy all those years, I was not blind.

I started my hiking blog to prove I could build a niche Web site that might attract people interested in my skills. When the job offers did not start pouring in, I started looking for ways to make the site pay.

One of the things I learned along the way was that a site called Trailspace.com was offering this nifty gear-comparison feature and using affiliate marketing links to pay the freight. I tried adding affiliate marketing links to my hiking blog and barely made a dime. Every time I turned around, I was seeing evidence that everybody in the affiliate game in the outdoor world was in line behind Trailspace.

In the past year or so I calculated that I could starve for the next 10 years trying to catch up with Trailspace, or simplify things by getting hired there. What I’m doing is a lot like copy editing — making sure certain rules of usage are applied uniformly and accurately across a publication — but there’s one essential difference: the most important part of my job is not just burnishing my boss’s prospects for respectability. It’s putting money in his pockets.

So what’s this got to do with Christmas? Well, yesterday I learned I’m getting my first holiday bonus since 1992. The bump in my bank account is nice, but the real bonus is knowing that the folks who pay my salary appreciate my work. I never had this in 22 years of newspapering. The work was fun and interesting, but we were interchangeable cogs in a vast news mechanism. They cut our staff by 75 percent and the paper still came out. We were not worthless, but we were not worth replacing, either.

That’s no kind of business for any Bob Cratchit to be in; none the Scrooges who own newspapers will ever wake up on Christmas morning determined to rescue Tiny Tim. They’ll be lucky to be able to keep the lights on.

My Christmas wish for 2009 is that all my old pals in the newspaper game find the will and the means to contribute their work to companies that deserve it, wherever that work may be. I’m proof that it can be done.

My last day at the Mercury News concluded much like the first — same job, same desk, same daily dose of depravity. In the good old days of, say, 2004, a job at the Merc was resume gold; folks were always leaving for sexier gigs at the L.A. and New York Times. Five years later everybody I knew at every talent level was in the same bind: eminently qualified for a job at at somebody else’s dying newspaper. Heck, I got passed over for a job at a paper I’d have never considered applying to except as an alternative to unemployment (I gave this away when I got the paper’s name wrong during a conversation with an editor; I think it was my future talking).

I don’t have any regrets for my lost decade at the Merc. It was a good job; we had more joy than grief. For the last couple years I felt like Rhett Butler finally reporting for duty after the war was lost. I tried my damnedest to suck it up and take one for the team, doing work somebody had to do even when it was doing nothing to freshen up my moldy CV.

Didn’t matter, in the end: I was “on the bubble” to be bounced in the latest reduction in force. Ten years without a merit raise (much less a promotion) should’ve clued me in as to where I stood with my so-called superiors, but I was having such a fine time with my non-working life that it didn’t really matter.

What did matter was filling the hours of my non-working life with stuff I enjoyed doing. I was never a shirker at the Merc, but I made no sacrifices to get ahead in the newspaper biz. Turns out it was wiser to twin up my obsessions with hiking and blogging.

My new job is still a job — I wouldn’t do it for free, any more than I would slap headlines on stories about dead babies for free — but it has a future, unlike my previous one. We live in an unremarkable apartment complex in an unremarkable mid-size U.S. metropolitan area, but it’s cheap to live here and we’re near Melissa’s family and only a day’s drive from mine.

If you’ve been reading along at my hiking blog, you’ll have noticed the remarkable natural beauty in the state of North Carolina. It not a 365-day vacation like living in the Bay Area; weekends are fine, though.

For now I’m liking the way things have shaped up. My Mercury News years were were good while they lasted, and things got better after they were over. Hard to get too worked up over that.

I was born with a bleak outlook — I’m never surprised when stock markets or airliners crash — so I had prepared myself, financially and mentally, for six months to a year of idling and fretting till I found another job. Well, get this: I qualified for exactly one week of unemployment benefits; the rest of the time I had free-lance projects lined up. So much for the blissful freedom of being out of work.

One of the first things I did after arriving in North Carolina was interview for a newspaper job 120 miles up the road in Roanoke, Virginia. I spent a whole day trying to convince the good folks up there that I really had this one thing I needed to accomplish in the newspaper biz. Good thing I’m such a terrible liar.

When I got home, I had an e-mail in my in-box asking if I’d like to help out with a slightly technical free-lance job at a website that promised a fair amount of drudgery in the short run but held a world of promise and full-time potential in the long run. Then I asked myself: do I really even want to work at newspapers anymore? I knew the answer, and that’s the moment I knew my newspaper life was over.

At some point I may assemble a post-mortem on my newspaper career, but there’s no way it can be written without kicking my long-suffering brethren still working in newsrooms. All the people who mattered in my newspaper life — the grunts within earshot of my F-bomb explosions — were good to me for every day of the 20-plus years I worked on sending pages to the pressroom. As Dylan said in one of his songs, “I have nothing but good thoughts of those who sailed with me.”

The thing was: I was hired on at my first paper in 1987 to copy edit and lay out pages. In 2009 I was still copy editing and laying out pages. Newspapers that did everything right still lost readers. Didn’t seem to matter what we did, the answer was always the same: fewer readers this year than last.

After 22 years of things never getting better, the prospect of six months to a year of sloth and worry seemed like a step up.

So maybe it’s true what they say about luck being where planning and opportunity collide. Five years ago I did a presentation for copy editors called “The Future Doesn’t Need us Anymore.” In the next three years our copy desk staff shrank from 40 to 15. In the final indignity, it got shifted to a lower-cost locale 60 miles up the road, with a 20 percent pay cut as thanks for everybody’s hard work in these trying times. I had plenty of time to figure out how it was going to shake out, and I did do something about it.

The oddest consequence of all this is that my path into the future ran through the woods. People often heard me say a hiking blog was a contradiction in terms: bloggers don’t hike, hikers don’t blog. I never had more than 500 people a day stop by; most days it’s around 250. But enough of them saw something in my online musings to take a chance on me.

Right now I owe it all to a hiking blog. Who’d a thunk?

I suppose I should have a lot more to say about the place, but I’ve spent most of the past 42 days right here, tapping into my keyboard. Went on a few hikes, dutifully recounted on my hiking blog. We moved out of Melissa’s mom’s living room after a month. We like having our own four walls, even if it means having a landlord.

So what do I think of North Carolina? Liking it so far, mainly because it appears to be turning into California. It already has mountains on one end and an ocean on the other (while the mountains are smaller, the beaches are more welcoming than the bone-chilling shores of Northern California — fair trade-off, I’d say). It has a burgeoning high-tech sector and a growing population that’s getting more diverse every day.

Truth is, there’s nothing I could say about this place right now that wouldn’t come across as a caricature — either of me, the stranger in the new place, or the place itself, whose strangeness lies entirely in the eyes of the beholder. I still feel like a guest in somebody else’s state, so hatin’ on the hosts is not high on my to-do list.

Melissa and I have had 14 address changes in the past 20 years — from Tampa, to Peoria, to San Jose, to Winston-Salem. Seems like we’re always someplace new, so I’ve learned to distrust first impressions. We have all the Taco Bells and Outback Steakhouses and Targets and Office Maxes that everybody else has. The terrain here is rolling, green and generally pleasing to the eye. Are there hellholes? Sure. Is there crime, bigotry and unnecessary unpleasantness afoot? Yeah. Our suburban sprawl looks just like your suburban sprawl.

Nothing has influenced my conclusion that there is very little true diversity within our species. Biologically we’re almost identical. People in this part of the United States have digestive tracts optimized for hunting and gathering on the plains of Africa, just like folks in every other nook and cranny of our planet.

So right now my life doesn’t feel all that much different. I’m getting freelance work that requires me to move words around on a computer screen, just like my old job. I am thankful that I’m no longer obliged to chronicle the daily depravity we have come to think of as “news.” I think I earned a vacation after 20 years.

I figure no matter what zip code you live in, you’ve only got one true address: the corpus carrying your brain and bodily organs. It contains all the tools you need to survive no matter where you live, so long as you have access to water, shelter and warmth. We’ve got all that stuff.

Bev Gibbs, Sept. 2006

Bev should’ve been a journalist — she loved to write, loved to spout on politics, and had a human touch that would’ve invited people to tell her their stories. Well, at least one of us Mangans got into the news biz.

Speaking of stories, my Uncle Mike recounted a gem: Back in the late 1950s, he hitchhiked all over the West; I think he knew every pothole in Route 66. One time he caught a ride to Sacramento and got dropped off on Interstate 5 in a boiling stretch of the Central Valley.

After a good bake in the sun, he finally got a ride from a guy heading southbound. On the way south toward L.A. the guy asked Mike where he was from.

“Peoria, Illinois.”

“Really? I spent some time there myself. What’s your name?”

“Mike Mangan.”

“You know a Bev Mangan? I used to date her.”

“Sure I know her, she’s my sister.”

(This is my all-time favorite “small world” story).

Anyway, about a decade ago I interviewed Bev for a web project called SevenQuestions. These are her Q’s and A’s.

ONE

What happened to you as a a teen-ager in the 1940s that convinces you teens haven’t changed much in the past 50 years?

The biggest thing that hasn’t changed much is that every teen wants to be popular in school, no matter how far back you go. We would all like to be the cheerleaders, the jocks, prettiest or handsomest or popular with the other sex in the “in”crowd.

The biggest difference is in the ’40s, nobody shot you for it.

TWO

Another Tom Mangan — your father (my grandfather) — was a traveling salesman always strapped for a buck. What was something he did to economize that makes you laugh when you think about it today?

In 1937, I was seven years old and an only child. My Dad was making about $15 a week selling refrigerators. The only economy he practiced that I can remember is that whenever we ran up too many bills at one address, we would move so that the bill collectors would have to search for us, slowing them down a bit.

We always lived in apartments and many times just moved next door or around the corner. I must have driven the school record keepers crazy!

THREE

What you were doing when you heard Roosevelt had died?

It was a pretty day in April 1945. I had just gotten home from school in my freshman year and was talking to some friends. A man came by shouting “Extra, Extra” selling papers from the Journal. We bought one and read the news.

Everybody was devastated. I remembered the last newsreel in which I had seen him, he looked ill. I took the paper to my parents. My father cried.

FOUR

Tell a story from your first days as a new mother with Randy, your oldest son, that made you wonder if you were cut out for the mommy business.

As Ran is now 47 years old, it has been a while.

As a lot of new mothers find out after all the embarrassing stuff is over at the hospital, they are frazzled and nervous and now must take this little package home and take care of it. Their nervous reaction is passed right on to the baby and the result is “nervous tummy” which translates into lots of screaming, which can go on for days.

I for one would have gladly returned him, but there are no exchanges! Oh, the first day I knew, about 24 hours after we brought him in the door!

FIVE

What did you think of television when you saw it the first time?

It was at a neighbor’s home and I remember wondering how on earth they got those pictures to travel through the air.

I knew it would be a long time before we had one. A little later on, my husband’s uncle got one and we would go to their house after work on Wednesdays to watch “Dragnet” and have a few beers.

SIX

Who killed JFK?

I believe Oswald was a patsy, but he was there. However, he was not alone.; the mafia, the U.S. government (CIA) and the hatred of so many important people had a lot to do with it.

It was a major conspiracy. The movie “JFK” with Kevin Costner comes closest to the truth.

SEVEN

Describe something you learned late in life that you wish to heck you’d known all along.

For all the young people contemplating matrimony, remember this. What you see is what you get. Don’t go into marriage expecting the things you don’t like about him or her to change. They won’t.

For those wondering about the difference in rent between the Bay Area and the middle of North Carolina, it’s about like this: twice the space for half the money. Groceries, however, are no cheaper.

I’m hoping to find more time for updates here … we’ll see.

“No, I’m just looking for Hanging Rock State Park.”

Seems there’s a bridge out on the road to Hanging Rock, a state park highly recommended by local hikers. The guy standing by the road has been redirecting folks all morning. They’re all going to a wedding. Except me.

Well, that’s what I thought anyway.

So I take the detour, find my way to the park, get myself parked and all my gear strapped on, and set out in search of the nearest point of interest, Upper Cascades Falls. I figure the light might be good first thing in the morning and what the heck, it’s only .3 mile from the parking lot.

Then I wander down this wide gravel road, round a bend and see a large gathering of folks dressed oddly office-casual for a state park on Labor Day weekend. Of course by now I’ve completely forgotten about the guy on the road and all the folks looking for the nuptials.

So I blunder right up to the rail, look down at what everybody else is looking down at, and the first thing I hear is a male voice down there saying “now, let us pray.” On one side, a woman clad in white. On the other, a guy clad in black. Nearby, a bearded guy with a guitar.

My rule is, when the man says pray, you pray. In my case, I pray that these good folks don’t toss me down the ravine for crashing their wedding. Last I knew the preacher, bride and groom were breaking bread and getting ready for a Communion. I sorta slinked away.

As I’m making my way back up the trail, two women in heels are picking their way down the gravel trail, asking me how much further to the waterfall. “Don’t worry, it’s just around the bend,” I reassure them. They’re wishing somebody had told them to wear hiking boots.

The waterfall was lovely, by the way.

(More on the hike at Two-Heel Drive, if you’re curious).