Nov 26 - Thanksgiving

7am

Since I haven't done a radio show in nearly a week, you get a lot of blogging. I somehow feel as if I have to apologize for this... as if you're only supposed to blog so much and do it on a regular basis. So there it is - sorry.

I haven't turned on the radio yet. I'm guessing we're on the air since nobody texted me except Paul from Hasse, one of my first listeners and callers to the show a zillion years ago. 

Good morning, Sir. Just wanted to say Happy Thanksgiving to you and all of your Family today. Hope you all have a most joyful holiday.

Now I don't know if Paul sent that to me directly, or it was part of a mass text to all the men he's got in his contacts list. Either way I like it, so here's my response.

Sleep in one day... Happy Thanksgiving.

Paul works construction, and I know from him calling in to the show and seeing him at high school football games that he wakes up real freaking early. I too wake up real freaking early. That's how I do radio. Wake up around 4:30 without an alarm, even though I set it every day just in case. Once in a while I'll drink a couple Diet Pepsis at bowling and then I need the alarm. As a matter of fact, I come to hate the alarm on Wednesdays after bowling.

Okay, here it goes. Turn on the radio to see if we're on the air... or have we lost connection between our new studios and our transmitter site? 

There it is. We are on the air. It's a commercial for Edwardo's Pizza at 7920 Calumet Avenue. I know the address because my daughter Jeanie, who is in New York City right now... maybe even at Penn Station... just told me. She recorded that Edwardo's commercial a couple years ago and we still use it every day. That means daily I have to be reminded, and my wife has to be reminded, and my sister and brother and my dad and my uncle Danny and everyone else has to be reminded that little Jeanie has grown up and moved to New York City. Imagine that. She starts working at WJOB when she was what, 12 years old? I thought she might go into radio since it's so beautiful in its own right... but she wants to be a nurse practitioner now, not have a media molehill. Today she's set to take her friend Amanda to my sister's house in Northport, Long Island, to eat Thanksgiving dinner. They're set to take a train to Penn Station and transfer, and all week long my wife's been fretting about that because of all the terrorism in the world. There is fear these days, in the world and in my home.

President Obama came on the TV yesterday and tried to reassure America that we are safe. He said that his anti-terrorism authorities know of no credible threat for the Thanksgiving weekend and that they'll all be working overtime through the holiday. Us, Americans, we should go about our business with our families and loved ones. I thought it was a pretty good speech. Obama has gotten a lot grayer in the past couple of years, but in many ways he's become a decent leader. I didn't think so his first few years. He didn't know how to lead, really, but he does now and that gets a lot of people mad. 

Me? Almost always I could give a rat's ass who is president. I don't know if that's by design so that I can sit in the host chair and analyze the president and most everything else as objectively as possible. Or that politics bores me. Probably a little bit of both.

I'd blog to the three or four of you for a couple thousand more words right now, except that every Thanksgiving my neighbor Pete and I meet in the cut-de-sac and walk to Commander restaurant for breakfast. 

"You and your boyfriend going for breakfast?" That's the first thing my smartass wife said to me this morning as I walked downstairs. She was making stuffing, swirling it around in a big bowl. 

"Of course."

Of course me and my boyfriend are going to breakfast. Pete's a client of WJOB. He buys advertising. And we're walking to a restaurant where Danny and Bobby buy advertising also. It's not why I do it but at least I can give that back to my wife when she snickers at me.