It's a Friday morning. Kusiak does my morning show on Fridays and I go to yoga. I did that at 6am. Then I came home to coffee that Alexis made. She makes dark coffee... and she still has a tan from when we went to Florida. In days gone by, I would make this joke: "I like my women dark... but not my coffee." I won't make that joke. It's inappropriate. Don Rickles or Richard Pryor could make that joke. I cannot. I own radio stations and a streaming video network and, soon, a podcast network. It may sound like I'm a media mogul... but really I just own a media molehill. I could make that silly joke. But I cannot compare women's skin to coffee and back again. |
"Um, can you possibly, ah, add hot water to these cups?"
I buy a medium roast... but it's not really medium roast at all, is it? Starbucks earned its reputation as "Charbucks" for over-roasting coffee and serving it really dark and caffeinated. Any cup of black coffee you buy at Starbucks is that way - dark, strong and jammed with caffeine.
I do not believe that coffee should be drank that way. I order a cup of medium roast and ask for an extra cup. I pour half of the overly roasted, way-too-strong coffee into the extra cup. Then I ask a barista to fill both cups with hot water. Then and only then can you get a decent cup of hot black coffee at Starbucks... two of them, actually.
Let me rephrase it - "I do not like dark coffee. But I like dark women."
That won't work either. I don't want to get canceled, so I'll sum up - My wife makes really strong, dark coffee - just like Starbucks. I like light, watery hot black coffee, just like nowhere in America. And I love my wife, who is still holding a tan from south Florida.
How's that?
1. go to yoga
2. have a cup of coffee with the wife
3. say bye to the wife
4. watch a video on how to multitrack in Adobe Audition
5. take a shower
6. sit on the bed naked under covers
7. write a blog to the three or four of you
There's a black cat sleeping at the foot of the bed. I read a Penthouse Forum once in high school about a guy who made whoopie (that's what Nipsey Russel would call it) to a woman and then went for a shower in her bathroom. As he was stepping over the rim of the tub, her cat jumped up and attached to his testicles. It was a bloody, painful affair... but not an altogether unfunny one. It was meant to be a funny ending to a detailed description of making whoopie. I laughed then... as a high schooler... but I don't laugh now. Ever since, I have looked at cats as lurking to pounce on my juevos. When we're babysitting Luna the cat, I don't walk around naked. When we're not babysitting Luna the cat, you better call or text before you come over.
The rhythm is this: four days a week, I do a morning show on radio and TV, a couple podcasts, a few TV shows, etc. That's mostly in the mornings. After lunch, I turn my attention to running my media molehill. Both making the content and managing my media are full-time jobs. Each gets half of me - for four days. On Friday. I can once again blog to the three or four of you.
4 days media
3 days me
I never realized it, but in the silence of a naked Friday morning - towel, blanket on my lap... remember Penthouse Forum - but cats snore. This beautiful black cat lays at the bottom of the bed snoring like Ralph Cramden after a bender. I have now made several references to really old stuff. Ralph Cramden, better known as Jackie Gleason, rose to glory in the 50s. Don Rickles, Nipsey Russel and Richard Pryor are more 60s and 70s. If you're under 50, you have no idea who these people are and you're tempted to not read the rest of this blog.
But you stay. Why? I am a burnt out media guy with a hairy back trying to regain my soul on a Friday morning. I have given everything I have to building a local media that northwest Indiana and Chicago's southland can be proud of - for four days. Today is mine. I plan to spend several hours improving the sound of all 13 episodes of the Building Trades Stories podcast. And I plan to have lunch with Beau Bartlett of USA Insulation at Bridges Scoreboard Lounge in Griffith (two clients with one order of potato skins)... and then I'm gonna come back and watch the Masters. Don't bother me. Tiger Woods is not gonna win. Neither is Brooks Koepka or Justin Thomas. It's gonna be someone relatively unknown. I can feel it.
I also feel a bad wind. We all know that if a person is on the other side of the political fence you're supposed to hate him or her. That's a given. But perhaps the bad wind is deeper than that. The bad wind is often a fairly accurate precursor to something bad about to happen. Sorry about that. Outside of being able to stumble through a morning show and talk backwards, I can sometimes get quiet enough to sense a wind that only Quagga can understand. It's my own wind. I sometimes picture the harbinger as a tiny yellow bird tapping me on the shoulder to tell me a secret in a long-forgotten language. It's known as speaking in bird tongues... or mixing a zebra and horse to get zebra-horse sense. Either way, on the eighth day of the fourth month of the 2022nd year After the Death of Christ, I feel a bad wind.
Lo, hark, be still... It may not be all that bad. Yes, Vladimir Putin could push a button and we could all be dead. He holds that kind of power... and so do an increasing number of relatively unstable dictators around the world. And yes... there is massive, horrible death going on in Ukraine. And Beijing's all locked down again with another brand of Covid... which could come here, as we all know. There's elections coming up in which the two sides hate each other... and there's a ton of crime in Chicago. Guns and shootings and smash and grabs. All you have to do is watch the 4am news, as I do. That'll get you going.
But now that I think about it... or, better yet, now that I let thought wash over my naked body (covered by blankets and a towel)... maybe it's not the world at all. It's simply the weather.
"Look at that forecast.... in the next nine out of 10 days, there's rain," Alexis said this morning in between sips of really dark coffee. No more jokes about dark skin. That's not fair.
I, pale white guy, looked at our back yard. Yes, it's wet. And yes, the sky is gray. It could rain any moment and probably will. I have been wearing a raincoat for a month. And so have you. When the sun comes out, which it does surreptitiously every fourth day, you remember that there really is cold orange juice to drink. That is a cryptic reference to Anita Bryant, who used to do a commercial pushing Florida orange juice. She equated it with sunshine. Even old people aren't gonna get that one.
I am tired
of living in
a cloud. My socks are wet
and so is my soul. Give
me a towel.
The weather itself is the bad wind... at least I hope so. Here at the bottom of the big Lake, the only Lake, it has been wispy rainy cold for weeks. A little snow here and there, like yesterday, but mostly windy, rainy, gray yuck. That'll seep into your soul and make you remember long-forgotten stars from the 60s. I want to go back to Berkeley for about 10 minutes and lay on the roof of Barrington Hall - naked - in a warm, hazy sunshine. If you sit up, you can watch trucks and cars cross the Bay Bridge. And if you point your nose to the gods, you can feel sun on your face. That's what I want. I want to feel sun on my face like two or three weeks ago in Florida. Close your eyes and dream. I'll do it with you.