Jason's career as a journalist was showing breadth, if not momentum. Since his staff jobs - one at Gun Fancier, one at Buddhism Today, one at Young Miss - had proven short-lived, he'd gone into freelance journalism, a kind of constant bicycle to find any idea anyone might pay him to write about. He had written about weather forecasting equipment for a Japanese company's corporate newsletter; about snow tires for Tire Monthly, and about trends in socks for a men's fashion magazine that collapsed before it could run his piece. That still galled him.

"Magazines are going to hell, anyway," he said, adding a new topic to a conversation already in progress. "They're all going to be put out of business by the Internet."