Free at last, free at last

I read Blogblah's recent post about how much he has come to loathe the practice of law.

That's about the way I felt about what we euphemistically called 'journalism.' There were days, as I may have written previously, when I pulled up to the gate of the newsroom parking lot, sat there for five seconds, then backed out of the driveway and went back home. That's how much I despised it. And yet I plugged away at it, with a couple of brief interruptions, for 25 years. And if I hadn't been forced out of my last TV job, I'd probably still be miserably slogging out to live shots and homicides and possible potential maybe wall clouds even today, because I would never have been so fed up that I would have risked living under an overpass to get out of the business.

TV news looks glamorous from the outside, I guess – or at least it used to. But the glitter and excitement of it were mostly invisible to me. Most days it was just drudgery.

And parts of it were harder for me than they were for many of my colleagues. I am a good writer, and a fast one as well, and both are valuable skills for a reporter. But there are other skills which are valuable as well, and I possess none of them. Most of you know that I am not a very garrulous or outgoing person. I never had any talent for 'cultivating sources,' or as a lay person might say, 'kissing ass.' I hated schmoozing cops and politicians.

And I always had problems with my weight, which can be especially problematic in the TV side of the business.

Frosty Troy, the firebrand progressive Oklahoma commentator (and that's the first time in my life I've used 'firebrand' in a sentence), used to encourage reporters to have a 'go to hell fund,' which is to say enough money in the bank to be able to tell an editor or publisher to go to hell and still be able to eat for awhile.

I imagine every salesman, cop and convenience store clerk ought to have the same thing. But it's damn hard in this day and age to save an appreciable amount of money, especially if you have a family. I was never able to do it. It's just ten years of strange twists of fate that have left me more or less the master of my fate at this point in my life.