The Last Day

Today is the last day of the WAMU Fall "Membership" Campaign. Tomorrow will be a happy day! More accurately, tomorrow will be a rainy, gray, wet day.

I'm not completely back in the groove. Of course, most of my dearest friends haven't even noticed that. But deep inside the recesses of my darkest self, I know. I REALLY know. I can tell that something is, somehow, different. Maybe it's the persistent post-nasal drip. Perhaps it's the odor emanating from my underarms whenever I raise my arms over my head to strike my just-do-me pose. Whatever, it has a dank, musty resonance that vibrates in my cranium, and anchors in my duodenum, then belches from orifices, unbidden eructations that scare the men in my life.

Actually, I think it's just the result of a mild sinus infection mixed with lots of well-intentioned fiber. I can't adequately express HOW HAPPY I am that the WAMU Fall "Membership" Campaign is in its very last day. These pledge weeks are always the most depressing, demoralizing weeks on radio, and as I pointed out in an earlier post, even if I did contribute this campaign, I'd still have to listen to the awful drivel about the needy nature of public radio for the rest of the campaign, anyway. It could drive the more unstable of us over the mental threshhold: I'm being cajoled to act, but nothing results from the action. That sounds like a recipe for mental illness, if I ever heard one. Public radio drives listeners insane!

What's even more irritating for me (and my bowels), is that I'm a habitual "user" of public radio. I'm hooked. I couldn't turn off WAMU if my life depended on it. Without that background noise, my life seems empty, without purpose. Unless I'm sleeping, of course. In fact, when I was on vacation in Europe, it was iffy the first several days whether I was going to make it or not, because I was in the mental doldrums from not having Rene Montaine and Steve Inskeep greet me every morning. And no Kojo was no mojo. I just couldn't get a grip on Madrid. Now, you might think it was the six-hour time difference, and the thirty-three hours without sleep, but the reality was, I couldn't get WAMU, and man, I really suffered for it. "Hello. My name is Happy Doodle, and I am a WAMUholic."

I caused the world financial crisis. Are you surpised about that fact? I'd been following the financial markets for weeks before I left for Europe. Four days after I leave, the markets tank. I felt bad about that, and because I couldn't listen to WAMU, I couldn't do anything to ameliorate the resulting ruinous free-fall spiral into doom. I tried, and if I'd been on my game in Wheaton, instead of being a playboy in Lisbon, well, world history would be different. Of that, I am supremely confident. You know, it's odd, too, that WAMU hasn't called me up for an interview about this. After all, Alan Greenspan gets coverage for making a mistake, but nobody from WAMU is knocking on my door! It's the last day. It really is the last day.

The financial markets will recover. This recession will end. Sarah Palin's speeches are mean, vicious, and ugly. She removed her lipstick.