Dream Job

I suppose you could blame Dave. Not me. A more famous and infinitely more amusing Dave: Letterman. To be more precise, you should blame the book about Dave and his Late Night show that was written back in the days when such things existed. I remember a part that was not a description of some of the wacky features of that show but rather a report on the work habits of the staff, specifically the writers. The one I remember best was about a guy who lived in California, a continent away from the rest of the crew. He would get up around six in the morning, go out and get the paper, sit down in front of the morning news shows and look for that one item about which he might craft a joke. A single joke. And sometime before noon he would polish it up and put it in the fax machine to send it to New York where it would be considered for that night's monologue.

Then he would go back to bed.

I wanted that job. I knew that it would take a certain degree of talent and sophistication as well as a willingness to throw fifty pounds of fertilizer at a wall to see if you could get one pound of it to stick. Each morning I get up and face a similar challenge. I open up Al Gore's Internet and pore over the headlines, looking for something that amuses me or, more often, puts a burr under my saddle. Then I open up a new post and begin to type furiously before that sensation leaves me. If I am lucky, I have latched on to something that will amuse and antagonize the folks lucky enough to stumble up on it.

As the saying goes, these days if you're not amused or antagonized you're not paying attention.

I don't have that job. When I finish typing and press Publish, I return to my regularly scheduled day. I have not made a penny off of these musings, though you are welcome to click on over to the gift shop and pick up a hard copy of a year's worth of what I had to say. Or you could continue stopping by here once a day to see what was on my mind that morning. Or just once a week since that allows a little more of that fertilizer to stick.

Meanwhile, I continue to use this space to vent my spleen, which sounds a little messier than it actually is. I still wonder what happened to that writer who had that job. I wonder what became of him once Dave (not me) retired. Is he writing his own sit-com? Is he delivering pizza? Or is he getting up early and scratching out a daily blog before he begins a day teaching school?