FAR BE IT FROM ME to pop out a plastic fern and pin a microphone to your smock, but I couldn’t help but notice you were getting your hair did! Which is quite the cowinky-dink since I’m doing a story on that very thing for our late breaking action packed newscast! Ya know, childhood hairstyles has been issue I’ve been pondering every since my assignment editor shoved a crumpled print-out of an e-mail the night guy saved into my Cheeto-stained fingertips about thirty minutes ago! Now, I know what you’re thinking: What’s a fella with a feathery melon like me know about haircare? Nothing a thirty year old can of mousse crust wouldn’t fluff up, I assure you! But from all that I gathered after reading some press release during that last long stoplight, pubescent grooming is first and foremost on the minds of men and women age 18-49! That may make precious little sense to a young lady like yourself, but I can assure you that someday when you grow up and are lucky enough to get a job you used to want that there will come a time when one of your many bosses will come up with some cockamamie idea that will instantly become your own personal manifest destiny. Manifest Destiny, that’s old school for ‘you gotta pick up ALL the socks in the rec room before you can even expect to watch Sponge-Bob or Breaking Bad or whatever the kids today zone out in front of just for fun’. Hey, speaking of television, do you ever watch the news? I don’t but I have it on very good authority that every night around 6:08 those pretty people run out of bad things to talk about and suddenly wanna sell some soap. Once that’s over, they’re usually in the mood to tease the weatherman but not before chortling over some banal piece of videotape featuring cute kids, old folks or woodchucks in tuxedos. Well, today you’re the woodchuck and back in the live truck I got some ruffle-fronted monkey suits that are gonna be all the rage once your friends see you sporting one between weather and sports! That is if your friends watched the news! Chances are they don’t! But see back in the say there were only a few buttons on the remote control and even those were hard-wired to the back to TV sets the size of bank vaults! Back then, we’d trudged halfway across the room to just to find out what some other uncle looking fellow had to say about hog futures! Most times it was the exact same thing the only other two guys on at that time had to say so very often we’d do the unthinkable and turn the TV OFF! Yeah, no kidding! I once spent a whole summer outside! Over the course of two months I watched only about three fifths of a Mork and Mindy episode and that was without ever realizing that Robin Williams was jacked out of his gourd on the kind of stuff that could make a grown man stay up all night talking to the kind of people he wouldn’t even look at in the light of day, but, HEY – How I spent the better part of that one lost summer isn’t important right now! What IS important is that I get your inner most feelings on the role of personal aesthetics in the post millennial renaissance. Now, I now that’s a mouthful, but we’re getting paid by the syllable here so if you don’t mind, just say and spell your first and last na– What’s that? … You don’t want to be on camera?

Never mind.

FAR BE IT FROM ME to pop out a plastic fern and pin a microphone to your smock, but I couldn’t help but notice you were getting your hair did! Which is quite the cowinky-dink since I’m doing a story on that very thing for our late breaking action packed newscast! Ya know, childhood hairstyles has been issue I’ve been pondering every since my assignment editor shoved a crumpled print-out of an e-mail the night guy saved into my Cheeto-stained fingertips about thirty minutes ago! Now, I know what you’re thinking: What’s a fella with a feathery melon like me know about haircare? Nothing a thirty year old can of mousse crust wouldn’t fluff up, I assure you! But from all that I gathered after reading some press release during that last long stoplight, pubescent grooming is first and foremost on the minds of men and women age 18-49! That may make precious little sense to a young lady like yourself, but I can assure you that someday when you grow up and are lucky enough to get a job you used to want that there will come a time when one of your many bosses will come up with some cockamamie idea that will instantly become your own personal manifest destiny. Manifest Destiny, that’s old school for ‘you gotta pick up ALL the socks in the rec room before you can even expect to watch Sponge-Bob or Breaking Bad or whatever the kids today zone out in front of just for fun’. Hey, speaking of television, do you ever watch the news? I don’t but I have it on very good authority that every night around 6:08 those pretty people run out of bad things to talk about and suddenly wanna sell some soap. Once that’s over, they’re usually in the mood to tease the weatherman but not before chortling over some banal piece of videotape featuring cute kids, old folks or woodchucks in tuxedos. Well, today you’re the woodchuck and back in the live truck I got some ruffle-fronted monkey suits that are gonna be all the rage once your friends see you sporting one between weather and sports! That is if your friends watched the news! Chances are they don’t! But see back in the say there were only a few buttons on the remote control and even those were hard-wired to the back to TV sets the size of bank vaults! Back then, we’d trudged halfway across the room to just to find out what some other uncle looking fellow had to say about hog futures! Most times it was the exact same thing the only other two guys on at that time had to say so very often we’d do the unthinkable and turn the TV OFF! Yeah, no kidding! I once spent a whole summer outside! Over the course of two months I watched only about three fifths of a Mork and Mindy episode and that was without ever realizing that Robin Williams was jacked out of his gourd on the kind of stuff that could make a grown man stay up all night talking to the kind of people he wouldn’t even look at in the light of day, but, HEY – How I spent the better part of that one lost summer isn’t important right now! What IS important is that I get your inner most feelings on the role of personal aesthetics in the post millennial renaissance. Now, I now that’s a mouthful, but we’re getting paid by the syllable here so if you don’t mind, just say and spell your first and last na– What’s that? … You don’t want to be on camera?

Never mind.

Ever drag a fully functional fancycam through a Department of Social Services? It’s like covering a red carpet event in reverse! Seriously, if I have one more crack addict look at me in disgust, I’m gonna go throat-punch my high school guidance counselor. Then again, I never paid much attention to that lady anyway. Now that I’m all growed up, though, I can’t help but think what a little forethought may have done for my state of mind, let alone something as meandering as my career path.

Would I be the same person if I never knew the reaction one gets when asking fresh vasectomy patients if they’d like to remove the bag of frozen peas from their lap and tell central North Carolina just what Obamacare means to them?

Could I better relate to the proletariat had I not first learned to pin Wal Mart shoppers in their cars until they came up with six good answers to “Hot enough for ya?” (Lay on their hood and twitch. It stuns them until you can get the microphone out.)

Would I feel the same about the judicial system had I never been dressed down by that bailiff that caught me filming him chortling in his sleep? And do you know of a website that would properly pay for that sort of footage?

Should I have truly pursued higher education, instead of filing daily digests on everything from hard cider homicides to tips on picking that perfect poinsettia? Would it have made me a more intoxicating cocktail party guest?

Would I have so warned my children about the perils of zealotry had I not spent so much of my working life sharing air with convicted criminals, city council members, and (shudder) TV consultants?

Could I have possibly spent s-o-o many hours writing about my workaday adventures had I fallen into something less skeevy that TV news? Like crime scene clean up, Port-A-John repair or premature taxidermy?

You’re right: There’s nothing’s skeevier than TV News.

Ever drag a fully functional fancycam through a Department of Social Services? It’s like covering a red carpet event in reverse! Seriously, if I have one more crack addict look at me in disgust, I’m gonna go throat-punch my high school guidance counselor. Then again, I never paid much attention to that lady anyway. Now that I’m all growed up, though, I can’t help but think what a little forethought may have done for my state of mind, let alone something as meandering as my career path.

Would I be the same person if I never knew the reaction one gets when asking fresh vasectomy patients if they’d like to remove the bag of frozen peas from their lap and tell central North Carolina just what Obamacare means to them?

Could I better relate to the proletariat had I not first learned to pin Wal Mart shoppers in their cars until they came up with six good answers to “Hot enough for ya?” (Lay on their hood and twitch. It stuns them until you can get the microphone out.)

Would I feel the same about the judicial system had I never been dressed down by that bailiff that caught me filming him chortling in his sleep? And do you know of a website that would properly pay for that sort of footage?

Should I have truly pursued higher education, instead of filing daily digests on everything from hard cider homicides to tips on picking that perfect poinsettia? Would it have made me a more intoxicating cocktail party guest?

Would I have so warned my children about the perils of zealotry had I not spent so much of my working life sharing air with convicted criminals, city council members, and (shudder) TV consultants?

Could I have possibly spent s-o-o many hours writing about my workaday adventures had I fallen into something less skeevy that TV news? Like crime scene clean up, Port-A-John repair or premature taxidermy?

You’re right: There’s nothing’s skeevier than TV News.

Ever have an old chum ring you up and be all like…

No? You must not shoot news. If you did, you’d be perfectly versed in the Doctrine of Improbability. It’s a basic precept in the Book of Lenslinger that exposits – through a series of Cheeto-encrusted flash cards – that the less likely something is to actually happen, the more likely you’ll be on call when it finally does. I can’t really explain it without breaking out the Handy Wipes, but just know the next time you’re scrambling up an overpass for a better look at the chunky purple smoke plume, you probably had it coming. Me, I got Inconvenience on speed dial.

Which is not to say I totally loathe spot news. Freight train derailments have their place (down by the tracks, I’ve found) but you really have to be in the mood. I wind my way to the back of the newscast, where there’s more control amid the whip cream rodeos. Less bloodshed, too. Not to mention other non household stains… “What’s that? Geysers are spiraling over the waste-water treatment plant and you need me on scuba-cam? That could be a problem. See, I’m all the way over in Itchy Grove, where they’re having their annual ‘Macrame Days’. I got all the sound I need, but the Mayor’s about to bust out his best oven mitt and I don’t wanna miss it. Fountain of brown wouldn’t look good in plasmas anyway. Clashes with the rest of the set. Hmm? Yes, I know, hot open and three teases. Bye.”

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, the breakdown lane. Ya know, I can’t recommend you ever loiter there, as many photogs I know consider it to be their own private flight path…

“Hey, life’s what happens when you’re missing slot. Besides, that glimmer in the distance is the competition raising their mast. If you don’t put the hammer down now, we’re gonna miss the widow again. Last time that happened, bossman made me spend the night in The Box! I didn’t walk upright for three days! Now is that a tripod in your trunk or did you just skip middle college? Those glass shards aren’t gonna rack themselves into focus, ya know. And that throng of zombies glaring at the sheet metal? They’re bristling with Emmy Award winning soundbites! Now step on it, before there’s no state troopers left to grill! For the love of Savitch, I want us turning wreckage into spectacle before that cable news trollop heaves the first bosom! My God, man, is there no logo on your soul? G-O-O-O!”

I gotta run.