aylord Robinson’s fate was already written and printed in the pages of this issue of RED Magazine. When Robinson arrived at the University of Utah this morning, the RED No. 162 had two surprises in store for him.

The first was the intimidating new size of the magazine, which wasn’t a magazine-type size at all. This made Robinson fear that RED had transformed itself overnight into The New York Times. But all was well, he thought, when he saw that the RED Herring column still existed and that this was indeed still his beloved magazine.

“Hehe, this guy has the same name as me,” said Robinson, according to witnesses at the Marriott Library courtyard, until he got to the third paragraph and came to the realization that something was terribly, terribly wrong. (Reading the words “terribly, terribly wrong” tipped him off.) “It isn’t just the broadsheet,” he shouted at confused onlookers. “The entire magazine has gone insane!”

Robinson tried to take his mind off things by looking at the overlooked albums story, but as he opened up the paper, it kept unfolding and unfolding and unfolding until it was a giant, untamable monster. Issue 162 knocked Robinson over and wrapped around him. Insiders say that on that day, today, he decided that he must read the end of the Herring to figure out how to avoid his fate.

He instead found a bunch of nonsense referring to a canceled TV show.
Onlookers described a paper and ink cocoon of a man rolling around on the grass, warning people away from free weekly A&E magazines with past-tense retellings of present events. A survey made shortly after, however, suggests that few to none of them paid heed to these warnings.

Robinson had gone back to the top of the story to see if there were any clues of escape there, but instead found himself wondering where the term “to pay heed” came from. He was happy to learn in the next paragraph that its roots are in Middle English (“heden”) and that heed simply means “close attention,” with no sort of cultural significance like other old expressions.

This appreciation soon turned to pain, as it felt like 2,000 industrial power vacuum cleaners with 1-mm diameter tubes were all sucking on his skin. Robinson reveled in this reporter’s strikingly descriptive and accurate prose as the magazine closed in and assimilated his remains into its giant, growing mass of pulp.

Just as the last bit of skin and tissue had absorbed into the monster of a magazine, a man who magically gets his newspaper early every day arrived to change the future and save Robinson. But he was too late, just as he had read he would be in the article. All he found on the ground was a stray issue of RED, a bit bigger, but innocent-looking enough.

Against his better judgment, he decided to read the magazine again, thinking, “Maybe it was just a satirical article.” The article was the same, but the name had changed to his own. Fortunately, no one missed him because his show had been canceled several seasons ago.
Jeremy@red-mag.com