I decided to rebuild my laptop. Easy enough, but fucking hell, getting all the little pieces back together blows a mighty big chunk.

Meanwhile, on the work front, yeah, M. has it right when he mocks my slacker failure. As in, I consistently fail to be the slacker of my dreams. The version of me with some suckass, screw the man, fuck you I’m getting high and then stocking the shelves, you don’t own me type job.

Nope, I can’t hold one of them low stress jobs with low skills and maximum time to think. Instead, I end up in all sorts of “important” work, fucking bullshit.

Right now, though I guess I suppose that I can’t complain, I might actually be drawing on a little gray matter and digging back into the 20-year-old cobwebbed archives to the glory days of earning my Bachelor’s. Back 20 years ago, when I studied print journalism, VDT’s were emerging technology, and most of my professors believed that media assuredly did not agenda set, it followed the public. Preposterous to think a business reliant on advertising could do anything but lag behind, lest it offend the public it needed.

Back then, Karl Rove, Roger Ailes and Fox “News” hadn’t been invented yet. OK, I suppose Ailes and Rove breathed and roamed the planet, but “news analysis,” a new idea back in the 80s that seemed to give agita to many of the old guard reporters, lovers of short ledes and “just the facts, ma’am,” hadn’t yet morphed into so-called pundits and self-appointed “fair and balanced” talk show hosts shouting editorials as news.

So, here we are, with Peter Jennings dead, thus losing a champion of world-wide reporting, and Sean Hannity still alive. (I typed and deleted a few of the people involved with “news” who I would prefer in the great beyond rather than Jennings. But, O’Riley and Coulter and Tucker Carlson are so aggravatingly idiosyncratic in their bullshit, I’m hoping they will self-destruct. Hannity stays (mostly) infuriatingly plausible in his lies.)

Seems like these days the media is the goddamn agenda. While else would otherwise sane people consider boycotting Aruba for one suspected murder, whilst living in a country with quite a few more actuals.

Back to the point of this little old trip down old-school, newsroom memory lane. I work for a place that thinks maybe juicing the playing field with cash encouraging mainstream media connections to the fucked up world and what’s going on in out there beyond our myopic domestic view could help. What the hell, maybe if the news actually showed, I don’t know, some semblance of reality with a little foreign correspondence, more folks would get how the world’s fucked-up-edness interconnects with their own fucked-up-edness.

You never know, and sometimes education does make a difference.

So, where, might I, a shitty-ass would be writer and comic (note to West Coast denizens who may not catch sarcasm and bullshit, I actually think I’m pretty fair at both writing and comedy), where do I fit in with this noble plan? Apparently, they might be giving me a shot at re-writing a tough-time getting birthed media strategy statement.

Go figure. I’m back to reading and writing about the kind of junk I used to study for credit and argue about in dorm rooms.