Welcome Back
It’s been a week. Lots of family time for me. Good times with both of my kids. A successful surprise for my wife’s birthday. A few items lined-out on the To-Do List. And I lost almost ten pounds. Almost.
I’m glad to be coming back to work. Unplugging is essential, even if after a while it starts to feel like burying my head in the sand. But if I’m being totally honest, when I leave this job (by their choice or mine) I don’t think I’ll do any more talk radio.
The job looks to be Herculean from the outside. The reality, in my opinion, is Sisyphean once you understand what we’re supposed to do. And social media is only making the job less pleasant. Entitled, spoiled children screeching for attention and taking shots at anything that moves.
For all the folks with whom I’ve had pleasant engagement in the past: This isn’t about you, but I think you already knew that.
I’ve come to understand that there is nothing about the social platforms that improves my real life. It’s sometimes a useful vehicle for folks otherwise unable to contribute to have a voice in the show, but outside the hours of 2-6PM it’s mostly a toilet for the stupid and heartless to evacuate what passes for their brains into the eyes of people better served by literally any other activity outside of domestic abuse or ritual animal sacrifice.
This isn’t one of those obnoxious “I’m Quitting” letters, to be clear. This is more of a reminder to myself to simply stop once I’ve posted the podcast around 6:30PM on a given night. Moderation in all things might be the real path to the kind of balance we all claim to want.
In '87, Huey [Lewis & The News] released this; Fore!, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip To Be Square". A song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends. It's also a personal statement about the band itself.
- Patrick Bateman, “American Psycho”
It’s one of many apparently rote recitations of consumer-culture paycopy…which makes the kernel of truth all the more subversive. It’s not that Huey Lewis was gunning for the job of America’s Conscience, so much as he was tapping some common sense…which in Bateman’s world (and now online) is the most alien thing about the exchange.
I'm working out 'most everyday and watching what I eat
They tell me that it's good for me, but I don't even care
I know that it's crazy, I know that it's nowhere
But there is no denying that It's hip to be square
It's not too hard to figure out, you see it everyday
And those that were the farthest out have gone the other way
- Huey Lewis and the News, “Hip to Be Square”
It’s a man who lived a little convincing himself that going with the flow isn’t self-betrayal, it’s evolution. It’s also a rejection of the call of excess.
That’s something my people don’t do well. Excess has been everything in my world. Bigger, louder, bombastic and unsatisfied. Very few of my people die quietly in old age. We usually burn out or self-destruct relatively young. I think that if I had waited to have kids or if I had let the woman I’m married to slip away I might have gone down that path without much hesitation.
But I’m here, buoyed by love and contentment. A mostly normal life with people who make me happy and give me hope.
I guess if there’s a point of any sort here it’s my last thoughts on a piece of the job that I dislike but will continue to treat as the useful tool it CAN be. I’d rather just connect the old-fashioned ways, but if I have to be on social media, I want to set a few healthy boundaries to save you and I some time:
I worked hard to get where I am professionally. I don’t owe social media trolls airtime or column inches. You can take your demands for “debate” to the phones or move along.
You can take shots at me all you want, but I’m probably going to block you after one or two because the nice people who sign my paychecks have asked me not to tell strangers on the internet to eat a bag of freeze-dried dicks every time I get annoyed. And I have to admit my patience isn’t great when some anonymous coward or Keyboard Kommando thinks they’re Winning The Interwebz by wasting my time.
I keep getting called a Right-Wing Fascist by lefties and a Bleeding-Heart Libtard by righties. You’re both wrong. I’m an actual, real-life freethinker. I don’t have loyalty to political parties, although I’m close enough to small-L libertarian to appropriate that label when the long answer isn’t called for. If you come at me with party-line demands you’re going to have a bad time.
I’m not going to meet you for a fistfight, bar bet, or other in-person confrontation. As with #1: You can take your demands for “debate” to the phones or move along. Also, as with #2: Because the nice people who sign my paychecks have asked me not to.
Tomorrow we’re back in the saddle. Join us starting at 2PM on News/Talk 580 & 105.9 KMJ or on the go HERE…
Stay Weird