Since I know how much you hate your life, I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about someone who won't be emulating you, complaining about the great life he used to be living, anymore.
Shortly after moving, err, driving as fast as my four hundred dollar 1980 Pontiac Bonneville that I am pretty sure I bought from a friend who is now a lawyer in his dad's law firm would take me away from the palatial waste-land that is Melbourne, Florida I became pretty well hooked on listening to NPR. In hindsight, I can only presume this was due to emulating a gentleman by the name of C_ _ _ _ C_ _ _ _ _ _. You see, C_ _ _ _ C_ _ _ _ _ _ was a counselor to a friend of mine and since I was so impressionable and looked up to my friend so much, C_ _ _ _ C_ _ _ _ _ _ was the person in my young male adulthood I chose to try and replace my dad with because I didn't think that he was superman anymore. In short, C_ _ _ _ C_ _ _ _ _ _ would sit contemplatively listening to NPR on sunny afternoons in sunny Tallahassee, FL and soon thereafter, so did I. Funny enough, I eventually came to realize that my dad was a pretty freakin' cool dude, even if he did make us move to stupid Florida. And another funny enough is that even after C_ _ _ _ C_ _ _ _ _ _ and I didn't see each other so much anymore, I developed an appreciation for NPR that one might accurately describe as genuine. To this day I find a kind of comfort whenever I hear the pinko-commie ramblings of the left wing NPR conspiracy coming through the radio. Just like I did when at the age of eighteen, I had a job making $4.68 per hour washing moving trucks. That was back when the greatest president I ever voted for was trying to get his wife to spearhead something called Universal Healthcare. And yes, even though I have listened to NPR through iTunes for about the last 4 years, I still call it the radio. Even though it doesn't sound as good and sometimes I miss part of a story because I have to restart my modem.
(Editor's Note: You can find information about Father/Son relationships by clicking on this sentence.)
Anyway, since you're so self absorbed, you probably need me to tell you more about how a person can start to have a kind of relationship with the disembodied voices coming through the radio year after year. But I'm not gonna tell you about all the times I found comfort from a small cadre of familiar voices because they are, quite frankly, none of your damn business.
Like the time when I was nineteen and the dad I took so long to realize was such a cool guy died all of a sudden and I just kind of sat around in a daze for seven months listening to NPR for five hours a day. I'm not gonna tell you about that.
Or the time when I was twenty five and driving around Los Angeles all the time, listening to NPR for five hours a day, because I had a new dead end job as a messenger and spent a lot of time wondering just what in the hell I was doing with my life and why in the hell some dudes would want to start shooting their fellow classmates and when is my stupid band gonna get a record deal and not knowing what to say to the LAPD when I got pulled over and they asked me why doesn't my 1988 Nissan pick-up truck have a front bumper? I'm not gonna tell you about that either.
Or the time when I was thirty years old and I had to move back to LA for a job at a recording studio that I hated almost as much as I hated pretty much everything about the life that I had not lived to it's potential, and I would pretend that I had some important errand to run so that I could drive around aimlessly listening to NPR while getting paid less than I thought I was worth but more than could be amortized. That's just, as I said, none of your business so don't even ask.
(Editor's Note: As a matter of clarification, no one with the author's socioeconomic background ever really "had" to take that job in a Los Angeles recording studio. In fact, the studio was in Santa Monica. Which is technically a city all it's own. Which isn't even a technicality. It's just a fact. Anyway, for more information about taking responsibility for your own life and successfully navigating the many and varied choices you'll be making along the way, you can click on the convenient link to amazon.com in the bottom right margin of this page and when you get to the amazon.com home page, type in the words "the power of now", "the road less traveled" and "who moved my cheese" into the search field and buy all the books related to said queries. Not only will you soon be on your way to annoying the crap out of your friends at some quaint East Village cafe with stories of how you've learned to have compassion for the little boy inside you, but you will also be contributing a little something I like to call: My Income.)
Anyway, on Friday July 23rd, 2010, the last living of "Murrow's Boys", Daniel Shorr died. Since he was 93 years old, I can't really say "that really sucks" or anything. But still. It made me pause. And it also made me listen to a 54 minute memorial/collection of interviews on NPR that you're not even gonna listen to so I don't really know why I thought about giving you a link to it. So I won't.
In unrelated news, here's the link to the Daniel Shorr memorial thing that you were asking about: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128565997
In related news, I have updated the "Some Places You'll Find Less Interesting" section of the greatest website in the history of websites that your hot mom reads.
And speaking of the retiring Tony Hayward, it appears that The Rolling Stones will retire in 2012. You can read about that and autographed latrines at a website called Music Television.
In unrelated opinions, Mick Jagger is the best singer in rock and if you don't agree I will meet you on the playground at 3:15 and beat the crap out of you and who's army.
Finally, since you've been wondering, there's a variety show called The Old Fashioned Ladies Club starting up on August 18th. I'll be bombarding the world with information filled html bombs starting on August 1st. In the meantime, you can ask me about it and how you can be involved. Because, you can be involved. Provided you want to be. And provided I want you to be involved. Kind of like the new, and first, OFLC sponsor. We just sealed the deal last night. They wanted to be involved. And we wanted them to be involved. So now The OFLC has a presenting sponsor. Sometimes life is so good I feel like I have air conditioning even though I don't.
I'm gonna go eat now because I am getting cross-eyed.
Mwah!
M
