Being Hacked to death

By Seymour Cumming

Last month I announced I was running for president of the United ex-pat States, well, all my friends and fiends and fans I regret to say the campaign hasn't gotten off to a god start. See, the editors did such a through job of editing out all the juicy bits from last months column that the impact was lost. Crikey they're a useless bunch. No prizes for guessing who's political camp they're in. Man they really screwed that one up, bastards butchered my masterpiece so brutally I had trouble recognising my own work.

Bloody hell what does an artist have to do these days to get respect, I mean, a brilliant, thoroughly witty, massively gifted columnist like me shouldn't have to deal with such amateurs. I guess that's Chiang Mai for you huh. Full of second rate writers - lifestylers like myself who all think their stuff is brilliant. Heck, I spend hours agonising over each word to bring my fans quality wit, chosing each word for maximum shock value, mulling over each sentence to ensure it doesn't sound like some beginner ranting away. And what do these buggers do? They come along with their big old red pen and chop it to pieces. Holy Schmoly was I peeved. For goodness sake, it's like a hippie going into a hairdresser and coming out looking like a monk or Arnold Swarznegger hitting the Atkins diet (erm… no pun intended ed) or the Pyongyang daily newspaper's report on corruption.

You want something to edit! Hell, edit this! Blah blah blah, blahdi, blahdi, Blahdi Blah, and while we're about it we'll thrown in a few 'shits' and fucks' for good measure, keep you on your toes, 'fuck, fuckity fuck!' (there you go, now you can get out your red pen!).

Talk about lazy, these morons just hacked out whole paragraphs, must've taken them a minute or two, I mean, I know I tend to go on a bit but that's what columnist do don't they, I'm a creative genius, it's not my job to push commas and colons around the page. Crikey, even Microsoft spell checker could've done a better job.

Can you imagine what a blow it was to my ego to see my column slimmed down to make way for a poncy cross-word puzzle! Beginning of every month I rush to the newstands to pick up a copy of Citylife simply to admire handy work. I don't care much for the other stories but I do get a good chuckle re-reading my own piece over and over.

It was a big enough relief no longer sharing the page with that insect who writes all the drivel on the sports page, Jeepers creepers, I mean, never before has so much nonsense been written about so little in order to take up so much space. Good god! Standards dear boys, what on earth is happening to this quality full-colour, cutting edge, hip and trendy Chiang Mai monthly. You're short-changing the readers by slimming down Seymour. Heck, if I had paid money for the thing I would've written to the editor to ask for my money back. Strewth!

And how about splashing my handsome face all over the articles holding polo sticks or bungy jumping or playing Elvis and other utterly silly self indulgent things like that. I'll write you a whole lot of twaddle and you can just use a bunch of psyuedonyms like 'poledancer' and 'dumb dawg' and things like that.

Good grief it's tough when you have to dumb yourself down for these magazine people, perhaps I'll just start one of those internet blog things so I can write as much garbage as I like and not have to worry about these 'editors'. They'll be sorry I bet ya!

Investigative-journalist-at-large, Seymour Cumming has previously been a used car salesman, fruit picker, 'shock jock' and newsroom war correspondent. He has written for Farmer's Weekly, Nyet!, Chessworld and Cross-stitching Magazine.

He's been to more than 50 countries, some for less than a day, and is currently working on a travel novel, but he's written the author's biog, and not progressed much beyond that. His controversial commentary on ex-pat life in Thailand appears in Chiang Mai City Life Magazine.