Back in the day, I had a lot of flashes of bril­liance for mag­a­zines that I could start. One night, per­haps aided by a case of beer or well vodka, Boris and I founded Weak magazine–for the neb­bish and mal­nour­ished. Because I’m crazy and take notes even in altered states, I still have a pretty good out­line of the mag­a­zine: we envi­sioned it as an anti-lad’s mag, sort of the response to Maxim and the like (remem­ber, this was the late nineties), but the title was also a nod (or maybe a chin thrust, who knows?) to Dave Eggers’ Might. All of this, in the spirit of our proud lack of self-esteem, added up to a mag­a­zine that stood up for the lit­tle guy, with a healthy dose of intel­lec­tu­al­ism and the lit­er­ary spirit that had made Esquire and the like hot spots for fic­tion in the fifties and sixties.

We came up with slugs: the FOB would be So Low. There’d be a Cook­ing for One recipe. Sports cov­er­age would go under Los­ing Streak. Enter­tain­ment Cov­er­age? Entertainment–Weakly. We envi­sioned a crush page on some­one almost-attainable that we’d call Weak-Kneed. We actu­ally had too many great names for a porn roundup: Hand Solo? Talk to the Hand? Aloha, Mr. Hand? The back­page, we thought, should focus on good moments for the weak, ergo: The Weak Shall Inherit the Earth.

We had a run­ning list of “weak peo­ple” to inter­view, though look­ing over that list now, some of them are dis­qual­i­fied, like, um, Screech.

Any­way. I won­der if maybe we’d been just a few years younger, with blog­ging tem­plates made read­ily avail­able, would we have gone home that night and thrown our ideas up online instead of talk­ing about them? Or would Weak still exist as an imag­i­nary mag­a­zine, one com­plete with t-shirts and poten­tial writ­ers, never to take shape?