I had a chance to chat with an old friend of mine earlier this week, one of those who “got away,” if you know what I mean, now residing on the west coast, married, and living the American dream, San Francisco-style.

The first words out of his mouth, once the small talk had wrapped up?

“What the hell is going on in Norwich?”

You see, thanks to The Evening Sun website (evesun.com for those of you still living in the stone age), my friend is able to keep abreast of all things Chenango County, the good and the bad, for better or for worse. In his opinion (he was never one to gloss things over, let me tell you), things are leaning more toward the bad side.

Who am I to argue?

“Golden, what’s the deal with the news, lately? Seems like things have really changed out that way over the past ten years or so.”

Honesty being the best policy, I had to admit he was probably right. All the same, I asked him what, exactly, he was referring to (although I was fairly certain where this was going).

“Drugs, shootings, murder trials, overdoses, burglaries, assaults, fires, death threats, so on, so forth. Don’t you write anything happy any more?”

Which, of course, I do, as I proceeded to relay the news of yet another successful Chenango Blues Fest, last weekend’s Colorscape Chenango, the Norwich Theater Company’s most recent production, “Godspell,” my new beat out New Berlin way (a.k.a. The Gazette), not to mention last month’s Chenango County Fair (OK, maybe I could’ve left that one out) and the start of a new school year.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t impressed.

“Dude, are you near a computer,” he asked.

“Sure, hold on ... laptop’s right here.”

“Do me a favor. Go to the newspaper’s website; scroll down to the bottom of the page. You there? Good. Now, do you see your name down there? Right underneath it, it says ‘story archive.’ Click on it and tell me what you see.”