"A poor soul on Pompeii ... "

There was that time when I made a complete fool of myself, winning glory.

(Read more ...)

It began with me, gone in (apparent) disgrace from a well-regarded position in broadcasting to a station so bad I spent more time with a WetVac mopping up flooded floors than with a tape recorder.

Many of my old rivals would drive to this tiny town just to walk by and sneer at me through the display window of the little Main Street broadcast studio. Talk about a bell jar.

Then there was this terrible accident at the local lake. An awful multiple drowning. Again.

And they came: the national news media. Again.

This particular town (and lake) had been the scene of an earlier drowning, this one not accidental, that was followed by a sensational double-murder trial.

The victims of the second drowning were members of two families viewing a lakeside memorial to the first set of victims, when their van lost its brakes and they all rolled in to the water.

Except for two, one a mother and a little girl (not the woman's daughter) who watched lakeside as members of both their families perished under the water.

This story is difficult to write about, even now.

But that was not the end of the story, at least not for me.

What happened is this story went national, and a major cable news organization (then just starting out) called the station where I worked and asked for the news guy. Which happened to be me. The young lady on the other end of the phone was a producer, and wanted me to drop everything (I did all the news for the station solo) and drive 40 miles to a network affiliate's TV station to do a one-on-one (argot for "interview") with the host of the new show on the new network.

I suggested instead that I drive to the funeral home where the relatives of those who perished were gathering at that hour. The cable network was owned by a big mega TV network and the big mega TV network had a crew with a "live" truck out there already. Couldn't I just do it there, with them sending the signal to the cable network? I had suggested what the young lady apparently had wanted all along -- a chance to get the "big network" guys to work with her cable deal, too.

So, off I went. Once there, all my local broadcast rivals who'd been gloating at my failures were there, watching me get hooked up to go nationwide. They were green with jealousy. As for me, my chest was out and my head was high. The camera turned toward me, the sound tech gave me the cue, and the audio of the cable network host started -- oh no, it was barely audible over the roar of the diesel generator (which is what a TV "live truck" carries -- that and a satellite dish)!

I somehow made out a question or two the host asked me and I stammered some kind of replies. The live crew's world-famous on-camera big-network reporter appeared behind the camera to indicate to me that I needed to pull my finger out of my ear. Even though I was just trying to hear better, it looked on camera that I was picking the gunk out of my ear on national television. I looked absurd. The cable TV folks switched to someone else somewhere else about something else within a minute or so.

I had made a total ass of myself on national cable television. Yet, the local TV (and other media) journalists didn't seem to notice. They stayed "green" the rest of the time I was out at the scene, and they never sauntered by my station's window to gloat, ever again.

But when I got back to "normal" a few days later, that event (among other things -- this had been building for some time) made me realize what a ghoul I had become.

It had previously never occurred to me that my presence outside the funeral home there contributed (in however small a way) to the pain those victims' loved ones were going through. In the crush of events over the preceding years, so-called "public service" journalism was gone. Out the window. Never seemed to occur to anyone -- especially me.

And that weekend, as I rested up from one very frenetic week of news gathering, etc., I declared a silent war on journalism. Just me. Against all them. I would undo all the rest with silent opposition, come hell or high water.

No high water. (Except for the WetVac when it rained.) Hell? That I got.

And it went on for ten years, job after job. Now, it's over. No more covert, one-man war on journalism for me anymore.

Victory? No. I didn't win.

Defeat? No. I didn't lose, either.

Truce? No. No quarter asked or given on either side.

No. I just quit.

My personal war, that is.

More later ... .

Afternote: More came. I came to realize that my problems with journalism really were my problems with me. I had somehow taken sole responsibility for everyone else in the Great Deadline Game, and then turned around and took responsibility for making covert war on the entire enterprise. A poor soul on his personal Pompeii. I realized many other things, which I may address someday -- probably in another format. But what turned this one? Some drawings of Hellboy's BPRD allies conducting their pointless War on Frogs*. I saw myself doing the same, and I woke up.

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*You can review the covers of the BPRD comic published by Dark Horse at that time to see for yourself what I had in mind. In the story, however, (SPOILER ALERT NOTICE) the fiery passion of one agent destroyed those pesky frogs (and their "eggs").

LJ orig.: Oct. 8, 2008