no soup for you.

One of the best business moves I ever made was to fake my way into television. The other was investing in the stock market but that’s another story and just as unimaginable a success for an oddball high school dropout like me. A Rolling Stones, ZZTop concert at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas hooked me on video and a few years later tv news would be my way in. Looked simple enough. Find the on/off switch and point the right end of the camera towards the action, hit record, have a blast, get paid. What, is that it?? Surely there was more to it than just those things and there were but a lot of the rest of it had me wondering if it was even remotely possible that this is all there is to doing this. 

When I figured I had enough in savings to buy one of those big cameras I started calling around tv stations to get a feel for my chances of making any money before writing a check for every penny I had. At first no one would even talk to me. To get rid of my persistent calling and leaving messages for whoever the grand poo-bah was (the poo-bah thing was for you Mike at NBC5 to keep you anonymous for having laughed at me for even thinking I could just walk in and do this, oops…) that did the hiring, I finally got 5 minutes with the “anonymous” NBC5 guy who was anything but encouraging but just telling it like it was. 

Other than to ask what my experience was (I had zero) and what markets I had worked in (there are markets?), the goal was clearly to let me know, this ain’t how it’s done. I was a 10th grade dropout and was working in a warehouse at the time driving a forklift and apparently there just aren’t many openings for uneducated forklift drivers in the television business. Who knew.. The message I was given to remember was this, “son, if it were that easy to just walk in here and do this because you want to, there would be a line outside our door around the block.” Exact words and thanks NBC5, you’ll never know (well you do now) how much of a fire that lit under my ass to find a way. 

The naysayers were swarming out of the woodwork and for a few moments I will admit, they almost had me convinced this wasn’t doable especially for me. Long story short, 25-30 years later I made enough, invested enough, and retired early while I’m certain some of them, are still working in the most tarnished and disrespected profession that has ever fallen from heights of the Cronkite era when truth, facts, respect and dignity were the counterpoint in every newsroom. 

The camera in this photo was my first, a $36 thousand dollar Sony BVW 300A. Was 4:3, shot tape, and standard definition before high definition. That $36 grand was every penny I had to my name and I risked it all against sincere attempts to dissuade me from more educated and experienced professionals who knew more than I thought I ever would. That camera before it’s unceremonious retirement many years ago made me approximately 2 million dollars over the years of its life and I still have it as a souvenir along with my fake media credential I printed off the internet to get into scenes and learn how everything was done. Several cameras, network shoots and shows, corporate gigs and travels around the world several times later, here is this photo I found taken by who the hell knows at a time when broadcast media was a respected and useful profession. I had bucked all the odds and because I was too unsophisticated to know I wasn’t qualified, I just went ahead and did it anyway.  

I still have that hat around here somewhere. Never let your lack of education interfere with your success and NO actually means, oops, I need to take another route.

All this nonsense enabled me to discover that I had a lifelong dream I didn’t know I had. To finally make my mom proud. And she was. Things, money, travel, nothing compares to knowing she was proud of me before God took her hand and led her away to be with him. What an incredibly strange and weirdly rewarding life this has been.

close friends

I've never had many friends. Many acquaintances, but few friends. Now that I've reached the second half of my fourth quarter of life with health issues raining down, it occurs to me that my solitary lifestyle, one that I cultivated and perfected, might not have been the best way to go..

Facebook says I have almost 5,000 friends as if I needed more evidence that social media is fake and a poor substitute for life. Having never been a "people person," it's no surprise that this part of my life where days and nights are hauntingly quiet and dinners for one are my way of life.

Around this time of year with Thanksgiving and Christmas bearing down it is especially tough seeing what was once warm and comfortable enter the rear view mirror. So many we once knew have moved on and away, some have passed away and in some cases just walked out of our lives.

It's interesting how working on my Will recently and sorting through all the complexities of who to leave what and how much and all the legal jargon and wanting to be fair and on and on has ended up giving me an intense general feeling of, who really gives a shit more than anything else. People who were not much if at all in my life while I was here, I've spent hours trying to sort out what they will get when they accidently hear that I'm dead and now all that seems like wasted time and a bit foolish on my part.  

All of the people who made a difference in my life have passed away. There is no one left. I'm leaving a few things to some of the people who helped me along the way in my professional life that gave me the assets to need to write a Will in the first place and I feel good about that. Not life changing things, just things to say a final thank you, appreciate it, see you on the other side. 

Social media aside and back in the real world, it isn't the numbers that have any meaning to your life or mine, it's the closeness or the distance like in my case that matters at my stage. I would say that I have one close friend. Not dozens or hundreds certainly not thousands, just one that feels close. And two or three others that I speak to occasionally if I do the reaching out.

Depending on your definition of "friend," the "close friend," if you have one at all, can make a really uncertain 4th quarter of life a bit easier to think about. 24/7 no matter where I am or where he and his wife are, I could call and he would answer without fail. I cannot say that with any certainty about anyone else including those who I spent and probably wasted, a lot of time on in the process of the Will.. 

One final, here is a link to a youtube video made and written by Steve Faktor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JHsLJH0Rdk&t=211s

Paul McCartney and Carl Perkins - My Old Friend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn19iLYFZKw