The Major League Baseball playoffs are approaching. This should provide all of us with a welcome respite from what’s been, and pardon me for editorializing, an unsettling summer.
This summer, I’ve covered the Dallas police shooting, two officers who were shot in Ft. Worth, the attack at the nightclub in Orlando, the flooding in Baton Rouge… and I still haven’t taken the celebrity division of the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest in Ft. Worth.
One day last week, I even came home to find I had to park a block from my house because The Man was installing new water lines.
Sure, the construction company had been sending everyone regular fliers to warn us and now, the drain in my kitchen sink works amazingly quickly, but it was a slight inconvenience! A slight inconvenience! For several days! Now, I know how what those guys on Apollo 13 were going through.
I had been asking around on how to get more traffic to the blog. A Scaiaholic who reads the blog regularly and also works in public relations encouraged me to show more of the emotional side of stories I report. He would explain that people want to get to know everyone involved and me, the person, instead of just me, the voice on the radio.
I’ve struggled with an inability to show emotion for a long time, at least according to every woman I’ve ever dated.
The PR guy cited the first blog after I got out of the pokey from my car crash (other associates have encouraged me to stop referring to my time in the hospital as being “locked up in the pokey”), saying that entry was so popular because it gave me a chance to show emotion and gratitude that I never get to do on the air.
It’s nice to blog about people who still want to joke around even when everything’s going gunny sack, but I always suspected my strength as a reporter comes from my ability to disconnect from the emotional side. Now, though, I’m being told that I should embrace feeling ways about stuff just when the stuff is getting heavy.
After the violence this summer, I started telling people that I’m thinking about retiring from journalism. My plan is to crawl under a rock because society was becoming too much to handle.
A discussion about this plan would lead to even more consternation, though.
Where do you put the rock? Who has good rock weather!?
I started texting about this issue with an associate in Houston after the shooting there last week. He was shaken that the shooting was very close to his office.
I’m told that while I was in the pokey after my crash, I showed emotion a ton. That may indicate that feelings are the result of traumatic brain injury. I will, though, try to blog more about emotional “behind-the scenes” stuff at the stories I cover instead of just funny things that happen at the stories.
And anyone who wants to spend some time weeping softly is welcome to join the crying circle at my house. The sitar player strums calming chords on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3 to 5 pm.
