Welcome to the Guilt By Assoc.
When I was going into high school, there were two shows that had my full and undivided attention: Max Headroom and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not necessarily in that order. Trek was more escapist, and I was more than happy to lose myself in it. Max Headroom, of course, was escapism of another kind, with a day-glo facade of more gritty down-to-Earth reality. Edison Carter always got the Big Story, and always Caught The Bad Guys In The Act. For a kid who was on the journalism track that everyone expected him to be, you couldn’t ask for a better hero. Little did I know that I’d later find myself identifying much more with Blank Reg. Played by the instantly-familiar-and-yet-nobody-remembers-his-name W. Morgan Sheppard, who has had a guest starring role in everything (seriously: check IMDb to see if there’s ever been a show called “Everything.” I bet he’s been in it…), Reg voluntarily lived on the outskirts of society, a kind of hi-tech gypsy running his own pirate TV station from an impossibly spacious VW minibus, refusing to buy into society – or to sell out to it. (Seriously, that minibus was bigger on the inside than the outside – it’s only fitting that he finally got a chance to guest star in Doctor Who not so long ago.) Now that I’m closer to 40 than to 20, I realize Blank Reg was the real hero of the show.
The thing about being in your 20s and finally moving out of your parents’ house is that you’ve got an opportunity, should you wish it, to replace your family with a whole different one, only this time your family’s not related to you by blood. I found that family, if a frequently dysfunctional one, at work. Working in broadcasting in any part of Arkansas that wasn’t Little Rock in the ’90s was an adventure, because you were already budget addled. You either fell into a tight-knit group determined to overcome that, or you found yourself in backstabbing bedlam. I served tours of duty in both situations before achieving escape velocity from the gloomy gravitational pull of the Fort Smith broadcast market and going to Wisconsin. … Read more
When I was going into high school, I was on a journalism track. That’s what I was good at, that’s what I was excelling in, and it was just assumed that I’d go from having been an MVP in journalism in junior high and high school to doing pretty much the same thing in college. There were a few factors that no one really could have predicted, however: starting with my mother’s death in 1987, home became anything but a welcoming place, and more and more I was concentrating on opportunities to work, because work was a bulletproof excuse for escaping the hell that was home. I flamed out as a college student in 1992. I’ve never set foot in a college as a full-time student again. And before that happened, I had surprised everyone by opting out of the journalism track I was on in my freshman year. I had an instructor who was challenging; any other time that would’ve been fine, but I was being subjected to daily doses of full-blast adversarial at home. In my mindset at the time, anyone who was even slightly challenging toward me was reading as adversarial. My failing, not my instructor’s. It was probably a good idea to drop out of school when I did – actually, I still think to this day that my life would’ve turned out very differently if I had spent a couple of years trying to make it in “the workforce” (of which, as a part-time radio DJ, I was barely even a part) and then gone to school. I probably would’ve had a much better idea of how hard it is to eat and keep a roof over my head with no degree, and I probably would’ve worked my ass off for it.
So the big news tonight, to anyone paying even the slightest attention to SEC college football, is that Arkansas coach Bobby Petrino is out of a job, nine days after he had a motorcycle wreck which gradually snowballed into a home-wrecking train wreck. The Reader’s Digest Condensed Books version of the story goes like this: Petrino was injured in a motorcycle accident on April 1st, seriously enough to need a neck brace; he told the news media and university officials that he was alone on the bike. On April 5th, the Arkansas State Police issued their report which revealed that Petrino wasn’t alone, but had a passenger, a 25-year-old woman who had just landed a job in the Arkansas football program a few days earlier; within hours Petrino admitted that he’d had an “inappropriate relationship” with her, though he expressed this in terms of it being a “former” relationship (because, you know, that makes it all better). Today, the U of A fired Petrino with cause after discovering that not only had Petrino selected this woman – with whom he’d had a prior relationship – for the job that she landed, but had also given her a gift of $20,000.
Game’s not over, but let’s check the halftime score.