At 5:30 this morning, I stood outside on Indianapolis Boulevard and started talking on the radio. For whatever reason, I talked about when I worked at WJOB in the 1980s. I covered a story about Stauffer Chemical. They wanted to burn hazardous waste at their facility on Indianapolis Boulevard. Whole sections of Hammond and East Chicago came out to protest. Some of the most vocal were members of my own family.
The Board of Trade really messed up a lot of people. It’s difficult to understand unless you were there, but the combination of high stress and action with easy riches and the constant risk of losing it all can mess with your mind. Your expectations of what you can get out of life become skewed. It’s not that you expect to make a lot of money for the rest of your life. Not at all. It’s that you expect life to give you thrills, which is far worse. Much of life is plain old hard work, and that is not exciting at all.
There’s no real easy way to explain why a radio host has to make him or herself stay away from the microphone once in a while.
It’s more than burnout, which I certainly had when I walked out of the studio on Friday, June 28. It’s now Sunday, July 8, and I haven’t talked on the radio that whole time. We are trapped in the now
of wow and holy cow. We want, crave, hunger for Action. |
I run radio stations and a streaming video network in Hammond, Ind., and write this blog.
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