God Help Me

by The Cranky Media Guy

Pray for my wretched soul, will ya?  No, I haven't decided to vote for George W. Bush.  Come on, give me some credit, please.  It's just that, well, it looks as if I'm about to step back into the Lion's Den once again.

Unless something goes horribly wrong, it appears that I will soon once again be employed in the World O' Showbiz.  Well, radio, which is the closest thing to show business without the danger that anyone will regard you as a star or that you'll make a lot of money.  Yup, for someone who fears success as much as I do, it's the perfect job. 

It's a long story, but the Reader's Digest version is that a guy who was a disc jockey on the FM station while I was doing my fun house mirror version of a talk show on the AM side of the same building about eight years ago in Allentown, PA needs someone to work with.  Although he appears in all other respects to be intelligent, for some reason he thinks that I have some talent and actually wants to work with me.  He is clearly in need of intensive therapy; over the past two years, I have had some of the biggest names in radio programming tell me that they would hire me right around the same time that Hell acquired an NHL franchise.

My friend has gone through on-air partners like Spinal Tap went through drummers.  Three or four have self-destructed thanks to recreational chemicals (both legal and illegal) in the past few years.  Now, I'm a lot of things, both good and bad, but whatever I am isn't attributable to Peruvian marching powder or anything the Jack Daniels company produces.  I guess after you have to bail out a few dipsos, even I start looking good.

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned my friend's name or the market I may soon be working in.  Very perceptive of you!  Believe it or not, this web site is actually read by a fair number of people in the "biz" and I figure there's nothing to be gained by tipping them off to where I'm going to be showing up soon (assuming the whole deal doesn't blow up in my face at the last minute, like what happened two years ago at a certain station in New Hampshire...not that I'm bitter, mind you).

I swear, if I had any talents in life other than the ability to run my mouth for extended periods of time and occasionally be amusing while doing so, I'd run, not walk, away from the bitch named "Radio" and never look back.  To say that that God-forsaken business eats its young is to pay it a compliment.  The streets of the big cities of America are littered with the prone bodies of men who once toiled in the vineyards of radio.  Do not look directly into their hollow eyes or their gaze will haunt your dreams for the rest of your life. 

I've been run out of towns both big and small by the snarling wolf pack that calls itself radio management.  Why then, am I walking back with eyes open into the belly of the beast?  I dunno.  Maybe I'm like Ahab chasing that white whale, even after it chewed his leg off. (It did, right?  I never actually read Moby Dick.)  Maybe radio is like the high school girlfriend who broke up with me over the phone and kept my senior ring, anyway. (not that I'm bitter, mind you.)  Maybe I'm like the guy in the Springsteen song Glory Days who can't let go of his past.

No, none of those are the reason I keep answering the siren call of radio.  It's that I'm a lazy fat bastard who wants a job with no heavy lifting where I get paid to sit on my ass and talk for four hours.  Yeah, that's it.  That and maybe I am a little bitter about the senior ring thing.

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