The punchline basically wrote itself this afternoon. When madison.com ran a story announcing, “As many as 15 newsroom jobs will be eliminated at the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times in a cost-cutting move,” I pointed it out to my co-newsie Erik Greenfield.

Then, after a beat, we spewed in near-perfect unison, “They’ve got 15 jobs left to cut?”

Nobody else in our news room laughed, and the wise crack hung uncomfortably in the air. Whereas the place might have been occupied by two or even three more people as recently as a year and a half ago, at the afternoon’s peak, Erik and I are now the only denizens of the news room.

And neither of us actually found it all that funny.

I’ve said before that black humor is a crucial defense mechanism of mine, but to be perfectly honest, I’ve had quite enough crappy news this past couple of weeks to overwhelm that first line. I’m thirsting, almost desperate, for some kind of good news — something just the least bit positive. A lot of folks are. My psyche needed to hear that the local media’s in for another round of “re-birth pangs” like Glen Beck’s grasp on reality needs a couple tabs of ecstasy and a hit of acid.

I’m not the only one whose sense of humor is being tested by the continued decline in the state of journalism. Jack Craver, a young UW J-School grad working to make a name for himself as the fly-by-night blogger “The Sconz,” recently called it “sad and pathetic [that] a politician’s spokesman celebrates the decline of the press by highlighting its inability to investigate his boss’s malfeasance.”

Craver was referring to an editorial by Cap Times editor emeritus Dave Zweifel, who first laid into Governor Jim Doyle’s staff for their evasiveness on a recent open records suit and a few rather flip remarks that accompanied it. Zweifel notes, “Doyle spokesperson Lee Sensenbrenner sarcastically remarked he was “surprised” that The Capital Times had the ‘resources’ to file a lawsuit.”

Perhaps just a little too close to home for comfort, Mr. Sensenbrenner.

In the fight for truth, the journalistic ideal has always climbed into the ring with one hand tied behind its back. Now more than ever, truth is a business proposition that just doesn’t pay out. When someone cuts you a check, they want to buy your loyalty, not to the truth, but to them.

Needless to say, there’s not a lot of pay in my line of work. The real money’s in spinning the truth, or manipulating it, or trying to make it up entirely. As the number of working reporters in this country wanes, we’re finding ourselves at a greater and greater strategic disadvantage based on numbers alone.

Most reporters don’t get into it for the weird hours, either. Nor do they enjoy the high stress levels and the constant deadlines. Some of us enjoy the omnipresent outrage and criticism our work can generate, but we’re the exception, not the rule.

Most do it because they’re in love with the ideal, but when an ideal’s all you’ve got , you can burn out quickly. That’s where grizzled veterans are crucial in a news room — editors, news directors, colleagues that have been doing the job for decades and have the war scars to prove it.

A real veteran is almost impossible to miss if you’re paying attention. They’ve got an answer for every question, a contact for every agency and a story to defuse any situation. While a rookie has to rely mostly on cunning, education and gut instinct, good news vets have a seemingly depth-less body of experience and a nigh infallible bullshit detector to add to any news room’s arsenal. They’re walking proof that no disaster is the end of the world.

Except in today’s Modern American Mediascape, grizzled veterans are going the way of the dinosaurs in most news rooms. The blessing of their experience bears the curse of their pay grade, marking them with bulls-eyes for the paper pushers in charge of pulling the trigger.

It’s easy to draw a direct link from the distressing decline of the media to the growing instability of the health care debate our nation is deadlocked in right now. So I will. Time and time again, town hall meetings on the issue — intended as a respectful forums to promote a healthy public discourse for the benefit of us all — have been overrun by screaming, incoherent yahoos intent on winning their arguments, not through rational argument, but by out-shouting the opposition. Most of the time these people are pumped so full of misinformation and cliches and catchphrases, they have a hard time even grasping the issue at hand.

One has to wonder whether that woman would have made her remark about how the government needs to keep its hands off her medicare if she’d read a newspaper in the last couple decades.

Just the other week, Wisconsin’s largest newspaper cut more than 70 employees from its news room. Among those who departed the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel against their will was Steve Walters, the paper’s Madison Bureau Chief for more than a decade and my “Intermediate Reporting” teacher at the UW Journalism School.

The penultimate news veteran, Steve is legendary for his ability to identify any of the hundreds of people who inhabit the state capitol by their first name on sight. I learned more from him than I did in entire semesters of college, and I consider him a mentor or sorts, though I’m sure I’m not the only one.

The name of my blog even stems from a favorite saying of his. Amid endless lessons and brutal writing critiques in the bowels of Vilas Hall at eight in the morning, Steve’s passion for his line of work was plainly evident to his students as he recounted old tales from the field. Eyes shining, he would tell us, “Everybody’s got a story they’re just waiting to tell. Your job is all about finding it.”

To hear that this colossus of journalism had been unceremoniously kicked to the curb was like taking a physical blow to the chest. If there’s a positive side to be found, it’s that he was (not surprisingly) able to land on his feet with a gig as a senior producer for Wisconsin’s public affairs television station. Knowing Steve Walters is still up in the state capitol comes as a relief of sorts.

But with yet another round of buyouts, then layoffs, on the way to Madison’s newspapers, I’m left wondering which pillar(s) of the journalism community we stand to lose next. I’m grateful for the occasional exposure I’ve had to these pillars and the lessons I’ve learned, but in no way do I presume to have absorbed all they have to impart.

I think I share a sense of alarm with many of the other reporters in my generation. While there will almost certainly be young reporters whittled away in the ensuing layoffs, it’s the older generation that’s going to grow thinner with every cut.

If the torch must be passed between generations, we’ll take it, reluctantly, and continue the march to the best of our abilities. But there’s no denying that the fight for truth will be hampered as more of our number fall.

Oh dear God, here we go. I guess we’ll address tales from vacation another time, because there’s a whole mess about to blow up.

Seems Madison police got a call this weekend from a concerned Sconnie in the vicinity of State Street. What had this intrepid Madisonian so frazzled was that he or she had witnessed a young man out for a stroll sporting a holstered handgun hanging at his side.

This isn’t a regular sight in any city, especially in Madison, but in recent months it has become more common. You see, while Wisconsin is one of two states that bans its residents from carrying concealed weapons, there’s no law on the books barring residents from strapping some iron to their hip and openly flaunting it for all the world to see, as long as they don’t use it to raise a ruckus. 

Last April, his honor the Attorney General, JB Van Hollen, inexplicably released a memo stating that it is, in fact, legal to wear an openly visible firearm. Uh, thanks, we knew that.

Now, that right to carry a sidearm in plain view isn’t bulletproof. There are plenty of places where both the law and common sense dictate it would be inadvisable to allow just anyone to pack heat. Schools, taverns and a handful of public buildings are all off limits. Wearing a gun is an automatic grounds for police to stop you and ask you what you’re up to, though they can’t haul you away without further cause. And if you’ve tired yourself out after an afternoon of hefting that .357 all up and down State Street, you’ve got to take the bullets out and put the gun in a case before you get into your car and drive home.

But while AG JB’s memo that the sky was blue shouldn’t have turned a lot of heads, it somehow became a rallying cry for Wisconsin’s pro-gun crowd. Over the course of the summer, open carry advocates started getting giddy with the sheer number of options they had at their disposal to celebrate Van Hollen’s opinion. Some have even gone so far as to host open-carry picnics, which my old WSUM buddy Lou Hillman had a chance to document in Green Bay this weekend.

I’ll tell you one thing. While I’d have been inclined to check out the grub and meet the folk, you couldn’t have paid me to be the poor sap that tried to start a friendly game of Frisbee at that picnic.

As with any sort of activists, what these open carry folks are really gunning for is attention. For frig’s sake, they have a web forum dedicated to discussing their experiences carrying firearms openly.

And now, you can probably expect to read 28-year-old Travis Yates’s account there, about how he was out for a stroll on a fine Saturday evening, sporting his sidearm, when he was accosted by Madison’s finest, detained and written up for disorderly conduct.

Yes, when police responded to the concerned citizen’s call in the State Street area Saturday, they found Yates proudly “celebrating” Van Hollen’s memo just a few short blocks away from where most of our state’s elected and appointed leaders make their living. Instead of asking Yates a few questions, hearing he was “making a political point” and letting him go on his merry way, the officer loaded the nutter into his car and drove Yates to his own house, where he was instructed to put the gun away.

And then the officer damned us all by writing Yates a disorderly conduct ticket because “his actions disturbed other citizens.”

If I may: Madison General Ordinances 24.02: Disorderly Conduct. (1) (applies to anyone who) “In a public or private place, engages in violent, abusive, indecent, profane, boisterous, unreasonably loud or otherwise disorderly conduct under circumstances in which such conduct tends to cause or provoke a disturbance.”

While it’s a broad definition, trying to make the argument that Yates commited disorderly conduct by “disturbing” passersby on the street would never stand up in court. I see more disturbing things than a guy with a holstered gun almost every time I walk down State Street. It’s why I keep coming back.

The city needs to drop the municipal ticket immediately, or they’re giving Yates exactly what he wants. They’re making him a “martyr of the movement,” a moth crushed against the wheel of the liberal machine, Madison.  

Full disclosure: I’m a gun owner (and a decent shot), I sit the fence on concealed carry and hesitantly support open carry. I look at a gun as a tool, and as a former boy scout, it’s my duty to “be prepared” for anything. When it comes to carrying in public, I figure if somebody’s really interested in self-protection and not secretly hoping they get mugged so they can pull their piece and gak the bad guy, they’ll be tough enough to wear the weapon where it’s obvious. After all, when it comes to protecting one’s self from violence, what’s more likely to scare off the bad guys: a tool that’s plainly visible, or one that’s tucked into a shoulder holster?

I’ve certainly never felt the need to carry a firearm in Madison.

So if dopes like Yates want to tote their rods about town in some imagined act of defiance, why do people like the initial complainant and the police officer give them just what they want — someone to defy? What would have just been one harmless nutter on the street who thought he was making some sort of point will now be a crowd of armed, angry people with a legitimate grievance.

If you don’t think it will happen, it’s already started. The readers of that very forum I linked to are already discussing an open-carry rally to protest Yates’s ticket. ”Persecute” one of their herd, and the pro-gun crowd will show up in force.

And much to my chagrin, in this case they’ll be in the right.

I find it a little disheartening when Madison lives up to its supposed “reputation” – ”Madistan” and “eighty square miles surrounded by reality” and ” the People’s Republic of Madison” and all the other spiteful cliches we hear the city called.

Because of this event, which is likely to escalate, those of us who just want to call Madison “home” — who don’t like it when peaceable citizens doing nothing illegal are detained and don’t care for armed angry mobs with a point to prove — we’ll never hear the end of it.

The last couple of weeks have been tough. You’ve heard of writer’s block: a creative drought brought on by any number of factors, but inevitably leading to long hours staring at a blank page and willing something, anything to appear there.

Well, I’ve been suffering from quite the opposite: a deluge of inspiration restrained by a variety of factors that have combined to squelch my writing for a couple of weeks. I’ve got a hearty ideas list sitting right here next to my keyboard, and it continued to grow throughout the duration of my writer’s obstruction, but whenever I thought I was nearing the point where I would be able to overcome one distraction and scratch an idea off the list, another half dozen problems would crop up.

But I’m off the zombie shift at work, I have a new (functioning) modem, my landlord’s allowed me to set my computer back up in my office, I’ve returned from vacation and hacked my way through to a reasonable stopping point on a handful of other intimidating troubles. It’s time to write.

I’ve alluded a couple times recently to a vacation I planned to take with my buddy Cam, which we embarked on a little more than a week ago today. Ever since I bought my first motorcycle following college graduation, I’ve yearned to take a road trip on two wheels. It’s tough to explain that desire. I suspect it was fueled partly by stereotype and partly by a suspicion that it would yield some sort of deep, spiritual gratification.

Turns out, I wasn’t disappointed on either front.

So I talked Cam, a long term bro-mantic partner of more than a decade, into riding out with me. One of the trip’s conditions, in keeping with stereotype, was that we really wouldn’t have any clue where we were going until we got there. When we left Friday morning, it was with a hastily-researched, loosely-defined set of objectives and ideas, but we really ended up making it up as we went along.

So westbound it was. And no interstates allowed.

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As you can see from the map, westbound it did not remain. While we gave brief consideration to shooting for the Badlands in South Dakota, a couple factors made us abandon the idea after the first day. For starters, riding naked-frame bikes cross-country is just plum exhausting. While a rider can easily let half a continent roll past under his pipes on a touring (old man) bike, our cruisers offer none of the windshields, the fairings, the floorboards or the cupholders that protect motorcyclists who choose them from the wind, the road grit and the riding fatigue.

The machines Cam and I ride aren’t the massive two-wheeled, open-air cars you see rolling down the interstate with antenna towers sticking up on back and chrome testicles hanging off a trailer hitch. Nor are they the plastic-encased speed machines that force you to ride in an awkward, hunched-over position that’s not sustainable for more than a couple hours. We ride cruisers: engines, wheels, handlebars and a little bit of chrome, with nothing wasted on luxury and just enough comfort to allow us to cover more than a thousand miles in four days.

It’s that simplicity I first found attractive about owning a bike. But without the full set of riding accoutrements, we figured it would be best to stay within a day’s ride of home at all times during our inaugural motorcycle road trip.

Also, the weekend of our trip coincided with THE rally in Sturgis. I was fairly gung-ho about taking part in this time-honored motorcycling tradition, but Cam was fairly convinced if we showed up at the infamous Harley festival, a couple “college boys” on Suzukis, we’d end up face-down in a gutter somewhere. I’ve since been told this likely would not have been the case, and there’s always next year.

So we left Madison on Friday, southwest-bound on 151, then veered off the main road at Platteville, weaving our way through the bluffs to Potosi. We stopped off at the Potosi Brewery (as far as I can tell, the village’s only attraction on its only main road) for some eats and a pint served to us by none other than Cam’s little brother. Through the course of the meal, we made two decisions — it would be hilarious for us to travel to Waterloo, Iowa and be the only Madisonians watching the Mallards play an away game, but first, we had to go to the dog track in Dubuque and bet on some races.

I’m not sure what the allure of watching the “little ponies” run is, but something about being 24, out on an open road with nowhere in particular to go made it seem like a natural step. Alas, it was not to be. When we arrived at what used to be known as the Dubuque Greyhound Park and Casino, we were told the races didn’t start until 7:00 — the same time we hoped to be 90 miles away watching the first pitch of the baseball game.

Not to be deterred, we made the only natural move for a couple of guys clad in road armor in a casino full of senior citizens on a Friday afternoon — we had a seat at the blackjack table.

I don’t consider myself a “gambler” per say. When my old man taught me to play blackjack, the first rule I learned was that you don’t gamble with money you can’t afford to lose completely. When I change out money at the table, I do so with the mindset that my money is being spent on a very expensive, enjoyable form of recreation. Anything I walk away from the table with is just an added bonus, though I try not to play like a fool.

The beauty of blackjack is that it can be as simple or as complex as you make it. Cam had never played the game before, but with a little help, he picked up on the core rules after five minutes of watching me. His next task was to get a feel for how to operate as a player within that framework — when to hit, when to stand, when to split and when to double — so as to maximize the number of hands he wins against the dealer, which he did well enough to break even on the day.

But the game is much more complex still, because on a hand-to-hand basis, the dealer is going to beat you more often than you beat him. There wouldn’t be much profit in running a game if this weren’t the case. So in order to walk away with more money than you started with, you need to try and arrange it so you’ve got the minimum bet on the table when the dealer beats you, but you bet big when the dealer ends up paying out.

That’s where the real fun of blackjack starts, for me anyway. Some people try to count cards as a means of sensing when a deck is “hot,” which is a good way to go if you’re in it for the long haul, you’ve got a large starting stake and you want to concentrate so hard on the game that you don’t have any fun at all.

My style of play is a little more free-wheeling than that. While the odds certainly play into it, you can still get burned playing them, because in the end it’s a game of chance. Luck is a streaky thing. It can evade you for hours, which is how my afternoon at the table started out. It can come evenly distributed across a stretch of hands, which is perhaps the most frustrating and most common situation of all as you try to pick the winners to bet big on and the losers to steer clear of. Or, luck can happen all at once, and my key to playing blackjack is recognizing these instances early, getting my money on the table and watching it grow.

The whole process reminds me of surfing, which I’ve only tried once and am not any good at. I paddle out into the water and lie there, getting a feel for the environment and placing just enough minimum bets to stay afloat. Occasionally, when the situation feels right, I’ll try to catch a wave of luck by floating a bigger bet on the table. Sometimes I’ll stay up for a while, and sometimes I’ll fall off hard.

Friday, I spent more time falling off than I did surfing. While Cam walked away relatively unscathed placing minimum bets, every time I tried to ride a wave, the dealer would catch 21 or some other ridiculous stroke of bad luck would crop up, and down I would go. I struggled along, catching no breaks and hemorrhaging chips until I was down to a quarter of my starting stake. I caught what I thought was a streak and rode it back to 50 percent of my stake before the bottom dropped out of my luck and I fell to 15 percent.

I piddled around with minimum bets for a while as Cam went to cash out. He returned just as I felt what I hoped was a big wave of luck swelling up behind me. Do or die. I threw the rest of my stake out and hit up to an ugly 17. The dealer busted, I held my breath and let my stake ride.

It was the kind of streak blackjack players have on their minds every time they sit down at a table. I wasn’t bulletproof, but I was close. I bet aggressively, but just tentatively enough to keep from self-destructing. In the span of five minutes, I rode my wave from 15 percent of my stake to 140. I probably could have ridden it a little further, but I didn’t want to get greedy and I could tell I was getting cocky. Sweating, pulse pounding, I tipped the dealer, thanked him and stood up to cash out. Dad also taught me to know when to quit. Even an afternoon of crappy luck at the table is bound to contain one good streak. I was lucky to have been able to end with it, and play it right.

We left Dubuque on what was hands-down the most boring leg of the entire trip, made interesting only by the fact that Cameron, riding point, missed the turnoff for Highway 20 westbound and we had to navigate our way back to it. 20 itself was monotonously flat and straight, and we opened the throttles up and tried to make the godforsaken state of Iowa roll under our bikes as quickly as possible.

Turns out, our expectations that we would be the only Sconnies at the baseball game were very misplaced. The first person we met in the beer line was a young woman from Madison, in Waterloo for the express purpose of seeing the Mallards play away. That didn’t stop us from being the loudest fans in our section, even though the Mallards never really had a chance after the third inning in the 6-3 trouncing we witnessed. The Iowans, for their part, were friendly enough folks. They razzed us a little, and then tolerantly pointed us in the direction of a downtown Waterloo hotel. We barhopped a little before calling it a night, and surprised ourselves by finding what I’m convinced is the only hockey bar in the entire state.

We set out on Saturday with the idea being that we’d end up somewhere in the vicinity of of the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewery in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, but the main objective was to get to some scenic riding. THAT meant getting the hell out of Iowa as quickly as possible, so we set out northeast-bound for Prairie du Chien and the legendary Great River Road, Highway 35, that runs along the Mississippi. The first hundred miles of the day were tedious and boring, but as we neared the northeast corner of Iowa, we got back into the rolling bluffs that make southwest Wisconsin such a destination for motorcycle enthusiasts. I’ll be speaking with my elected representative about annexing that part of Iowa (including Clermont, Postville, McGregor and Marquette) into Wisconsin, which I think is only right.

Coming next: the Zen of Motorcycling, where I’ll explain the appeal of sitting in a perpetual gale, clinging for dear life to a 600-pound machine balanced on two wheels and being pelted with bugs and debris while the pavement whizzes underneath you like a massive belt sander, inches from your extremities. Stay tuned.