Melania talks to a reporter.
A hurricane rages Georgia,
doesn’t stop a retort, her.
DJT,
Nobody cares
but you and me.
Fall brings nipply winds,
the yard is full of leaves.
Mars around the corner,
the economy overachieves.
Ooops, too early,
stocks drop like an anchor.
Interest rates rise,
the Fed should spank her.
On the way to a farm
tariffs trip a sharecropper.
He’s fixes his gold,
a lackluster wood chipper.
Football rules the roost,
as long as helmets protect.
Soccer’s just as bad.
Lacrosse don’t disrespect.
Baseball starts back up,
why they wait so long?
Demi’s getting old
but still can wear a thong.
Let’s do a radio show
that’s also on TV.
Pretend that all is good
for God and you and me.
I sat down to write up some news for today’s show and a poem came out, if that’s what you call it. The problem is that once I start thinking in poems, I get stuck.
It’s 4am exactly. I’d like to go back to sleep for the last 30 minutes, but the seven moons of Capricorn aren’t lined up. I gotta do a radio show that’s also on TV in 90 minutes. I don’t worry anymore about what I’ll talk about. I strap on a wireless mic, walk outside and start talking. For whatever reason, words spew from my mouth. I want to fight to stay independent, but how long can that last?
Yesterday on the show, Zubay came in and brought stuffed peppers. I have no idea how such a forkdriving meathead could have such a dexterous touch in the kitchen. It’s like an offensive lineman who knits, a backhoe operator who plays classical music on an upright piano.
Strumming
guitar
pain slipping away
strips of sun
on carpet
through dusty windows.
You told me it would
turn out all right
if I just remained
true to me.
Now I gotta pee
and I am old.
This is gonna take a while.
I just wish I could
walk by the mirror
and say hi
to a man I respect.
Hi, man who deserves
respect, you get a
good piss once in a while.
Later, crocodile.
You’ll never know if
you did what you
were supposed to.
Your mom made
kapoosta and you
never ate it.
There’s a lot of things
you never did,
right or wrong.
It’s so confusing.
Bubble gum or
Juicy Fruit.
Choose one,
you can’t the other.
By the time you
get to checkout,
you forgot why you
were there in the
first place.
There’s an understanding
that you’d really not
like to spend eternity
looking up
skirts.
But for all the sins
you’ve enjoyed,
that’s probably what’s
gonna happen.
When the piss is through,
it’s just me and you
at the mirror
shaking hands.
Once in a while I walk
by the sink,
no wash,
just to be naughty.
If there is a curse
for everything,
then not washing
your hands is a lie.
Not that this is a poem. It’s just morning meandering on the way to more morning meandering. One of the things we don’t do, the three or four of you and me, is talk about the future of radio. We do a lot of feeling sorry for ourselves about radio dying and the struggles of talking over airwaves. Sometimes, we reminisce about how radio used to be.
But what about the future? Is there one?
Okay, so I talk tongue as meek that radio is dying. But is it really? Certainly, younger folk don’t strap transistors to their belts. Nowadays, they do that with their phones… which they can listen to anytime they want to. Do they want to?
A little. Podcasting’s taking off. Sometimes they’ll stream a live talk show, listen to Pandora for music. Here I am trying to turn meek and mild WJOB into something that can last, mobile video. Maybe there’s another route – acceptable audio.
But what would that be? No doubt we will want to take in audio in the future, but in what form?
I have no idea. I made the HeyJED app. I figure that instead of stopping to do a Facebook or Instagram post, people could just pick up their phones and say something to me. I’ll listen.
But past that, I just want to crawl out of the guest bedroom and go eat a couple eggs and say something meaningful on a curb on Indianapolis Boulevard. There is beauty in doing this. I will miss it someday.
Hammond mayor Tom McDermott had them put in a new curb, by the way, in front of the Purdue Northwest Commercialization and Manufacturing Center. I’m not sure why, but it looks better. And it’ll be harder for a big truck to run me over.
As the three or four of you can tell, I’m stretching this out to make it to a thousand words. For whatever reason, I think enough of myself to believe that what I say, write, take pictures of, make videos of matters. It’s an egotism beyond the seventh ring of Saturn.
Dirty carpet on the
fourth floor doesn’t
deter me.
The smell of Prell
attracts like you
wouldn’t believe,
especially when
you’re lonely.
There are people
a long way from here
who love me.
Why am I not with
them?
Instead, I’m sitting
here longing to
rub my cheeks
on Prell.
This woman of
many talents
taunts me with
her smile.
I want to sit with
her a while
and then go get
something to
eat.
I’d like to hear
how she got here
on the fourth floor
of a hotel with
dirty carpet.
The sun doesn’t do
the carpet any
favors. Streaks
of enlightenment
show up
caked mud
and whatever that
white stuff is.
I hope it’s milk
but it doesn’t smell.
There’s always drugs
and alcohol and
the Grateful Dead.
I’ll go there now.
There, we made it to a thousand words. I wish that I could tell the three or four of you that I’m all hyped up to stand on Indianapolis Boulevard and yell at big trucks…. and that I’m excited to come inside from the cold and talk about Trump. That’s why if you please, I am on my hands and knees… radio don’t you come around here anymore.
This is my fifth show of the week. It seems anymore that I rarely do five shows in a week. There’s Monday holidays. Thank god for that. And then sometimes I pick a day and sleep in. “Gotta get some office work done,” I say on the air. This is partially true. But I’m not sure which is stronger – the will to run the business more efficiently or the pull to get a couple extra hours of sleep. You tell me.
If there is anything that will drive me to not do the morning show in the future, it’s sleep. I have been waking up in the wee hours off and on since I was 15. On Saturdays in high school, I’d wake up about this time and go work making union Laborers wage for eight hours. We’d start at 6pm and were supposed to end at 2:30pm. Good luck with that. More than once I had to plead with my older cousin to let me go so that I could go play guard in a varsity basketball game. Here’s a secret for the three or four of you. As a senior in high school, I joined the speech and debate team. I did extemporaneous speech. That’s when they give you a slip of paper with a topic and you got a half hour to prepare a five to seven minute speech.
No shit. They give you that much time to get ready. This proved to be something that I could do, not solely because I’m generally a bullshitter. But also because back then I read a lot of meaningless news magazines. US News and World Report, Time, Sports Illustrated, the Hammond Times, even Barron’s, which my grandpa would give me. Not that world events effected me, it was more that I was bored with living in an industrial suburb of Chicago and waking up at 4:30 on Saturdays to run a chipping hammer.
There’s another reason that I joined the speech and debate team – the meets were on Saturdays. I thought that I was outsmarting my dad and my cousins and everyone else in the family construction business.
Then came the Friday before the first meet. It was in Elkhart, Indiana. It started at 8am – Eastern time. That’s 7am our time.
“Okay, Jim,” Mrs. Engstrom said to me that Friday. “We’ll see you at the bus tomorrow in the parking lot. It leaves promptly at 5am.”
You guessed it. There I was fumbling around the washer and dryer for a clean pair of pants at 4:30 in the morning, just like I’ll be doing here in a minute.
There’s no getting away from waking up this early in the morning. It’s 4:28 and I’m already feeling the anxiety. I should be eating a couple eggs by now and reading the paper, watching some news. There is beauty in being the only one awake in a house. But after 40 years of it, believe me when I tell you that it gets old. Sometimes you just want to lay in bed and scratch your balls. I hate to put it that way but it’s true.
In other words, one thing that could take me away from doing the morning show is waking up so early. I don’t know how long I can take it. There, the alarm just went off on my phone. It goes off at 4:30am but rarely does it need to. I am almost always awake, like now, long before the alarm goes off. And I don’t want to be. I want to be asleep, dreaming of phones I can’t dial and jackhammers that won’t shut off. There’s semi-nightmares on the other side, along with dreams of unmitigated pleasure. Every morning, I leave them mid-sentence, just as I’m doing with the three or….