April Showers

It has been unseasonably cold, wet and nasty for at least two weeks here in the western suburbs of Boston. My “daily” walks have been curtailed, and the yard/garden has been too wet for any of the normal springtime activities. My wife has remarked that my mood seems darker and my normal jovial personality has been drifting into negative territory.

The news has not been helpful. Last week, all anyone talked about was Imus’ botched joke getting him fired. This week, we have been besieged by 24 hour coverage of the terrible mass killings on the Virginia Tech campus.

For many years, we listened to the Imus-in-the-Morning program and enjoyed its irreverent over-the-edge humor, interesting guests and focus on the issues of the day. During the past year or so, we had been turning the program off, or switching to muzac instead of enduring the unfunny skits and lame attempts to be outrageous. Worse, Imus frequently devoted unseemly amounts of airtime (and the commercial breaks seemed like at least half of every hour of the show) to personal promotions of his ranch, his kid, his wife, his brother, his charities – all tedious and unfunny. His annoying and cynical use of this pulpit drove me to turn him off on a regular basis.

I will say that he often had good guests, and I would commonly switch to his station at least once during any given morning, hoping to hear an interview with someone who knew what was going on in the world. The format allowed the guest to have enough time to present information more completely than the typical sound-bite headline news or the smarmy morning TV shows. (For example, Joe Biden explained that the reason he chose to announce his candidacy for President on Imus’ show was that NBC would only give him 5 minutes and Imus gave him twenty. )

Imus greatest crime was not being funny. He got what he deserved, but not for the right reasons. The activities of the infamous Al (Tawana Brawley) Sharpton – a conked-out race whore – make him the least qualified to stand in judgment of anyone. He and his fellow partner in racism Jesse (hymietown) Jackson immediately make me want to side with anyone or any organization that they are against.

This week , the non-Imus news has been truly horrible. The unending coverage of the massacre at VPI has been unwatchable. The horror of another crazy guy with a gun running around shooting people at random is another one of the scary things we have to worry about these days. Add it to the list of Terrorist attacks, Tornadoes, Traffic accidents, Bird Flu, and a hundred other ways that “fate” can suddenly take away everything – not because you deserved it, but just because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It got me to thinking about my working days. Over the course of a long career we all bump into people who seemed, shall we say, “tightly wound”? It’s not PC to call people crazy – but they are/were definitely among us. People who you expected to lose it one day and come in to avenge the pain and suffering of their lives by murdering the nearest authority figure: The boss.

I have a draft version of a short story – based on true events – It began when a troubled hi tech office-mate told me about his plan to shoot our boss in reaction to the colleague’s recent demotion and humiliation. He told me in great detail how he was planning to wait in woods next to the parking lot, and when the boss arrived in his gray BMW, fix him in his scope and…bang. As he told me his plans, his voice was steady and evil and his eyes were unblinking, like a snake. I judged him to be insane, and serious. This created a dilemma for me which was both moral and practical. Should I report him? What if he decided I knew too much about his plans? I feared that he would kill the boss, then me -- not necessarily in that order. If you want to know how it ends, you will just have to wait until I finish writing the story.

I never personally considered killing the boss – but come to think of it, if I had killed that sonofabitch CFO who had me fired back in 1987 - I’d be getting out of prison about now. I don’t hold grudges. But, I will admit that I smiled a few years ago, when I heard that he had testicular cancer.

Now that I'm older and wiser, I have forgiven everyone and everything. Over and over is has been proven that life events that seemed like overwhelming crises at the time resolved themselves. Most of the time, we move on to better things.

Hey, the sun just came out. Time for a walk.