An On The Record Lament

So, tonight I find myself doing three things. #1. Drinking straight outta the bottle, #2. Finally playing poker online, #3 And digging through hours of audio, looking for stuff that I can use for a talk demo. I've been given the opportunity to do a sports talk show on my station on Saturday nights, possibly starting in the coming weeks. Of course, in order to find on-air material to use in a demo it means that I'm having to dig through the archives of Off The Record. This brings back a lot of memories and feelings about the show.

For the sake of history, Off The Record was a talk show that I hosted on 88.1 FM WBGU here in Bowling Green. We were at best an all-purpose show and discussed anything that crossed our fancy and ofter degraded into a cross of intelligent conversation and pure anarchy. At any one time, I was joined on the air by Reggae Joe, The Mad Doctor, Iowa Thunder, our resident rock-ologist Gregory, our tall friend Barb, my roommate Lew, and a cool guy from a few of my classes, Tom.

Anyway, having to listen to hours and hours of the show have done two things. First, it renewed my fire to get these shows cut up and posted online as podcasts so that some more people can possibly be entertained by the 8 months we spent on the air. I'm sure very very few of you actually got to hear us live. But secondly, and more heavy, it's making miss what we had in our show. It really was not just a show, it was an opportunity to get together with a great group of people and just have fun. Then in the process of us having fun, we got to share it on the air and hopefully the listeners could join in. I may be overemotional, waxing poetic, but I miss the feeling of a crew that we had. I got to have fun surrounded by friends, doing something I love in an attempt to pad my resume. On a few separate occasions, I've thought about trying to get my show back. But the more I think about it, the more that I don't want to. It would be no where near as good. The crew is pretty much been spread out and the show is not the same if there's a piece missing, as we would find out at various points. It is one of those things that happens in a moment and once it runs its course, it cannot be revived and renewed. Again with the possible over-dramatics, but it was kinda something magical. That is something that I have accepted, but it doesn't make missing that moment any easier.

Missing the show seems to be the tip of an iceberg that has been the last five years of my life. As much fun as I've had and as many friends as I've made (Don't take this as a knock to any of you at all), I feel like I've wasted my undergrad years in a way. At a time in life when all the people around me were going out, meeting people, and grabbing those coveted one-night-stands, I was on the opposite field. For a majority of the 2 years that I spent in the dorms, I would spent weekends in Ypsilanti, MI with my girlfriend and rarely did I stick around and get out and hang out and just be social. That mistake is a whole other can of worms, but regardless I feel that there's a lot of people, situations, and things that I missed out on while I wasn't being a college student 100% of the time. Instead, I spent a good chunk of those first two years trying to be a student, a long-distance boyfriend, and like 5 other things and I really wish that I could have dropped and instead focused on being a student. I hate to go down this route, but I really regret trying to keep a high-school relationship going long-distance in college. This is not really a knock on her or what transpired, but I really think that we both would have been better off apart after leaving for college.

After we got out of the dorms, things did get better despite the constant demands on my wallet. I think my roles got narrowed down to two things: student and employee. It was nice to narrow down a focus. I still got to hang out and actually, I got a lot more social thanks to the general party atmosphere of that shit-hole house. It was a year of fun, even with all the problems that arose, I made many close friends and some not so close friends, drank a hell of a lot, and was surrounded by an atmosphere that could almost be compared to a commune. There were many times that I would come home from class or work and find like 6 people in my living room, just hanging out. Mind you, none of them lived there and usually no one who lived there was at home at the time but it was cool. We never had a real problem and people were always cool. I really miss that feeling, that knowledge that friends were always close and the next good time was never far away. Nor was it usually planned out. The spontaneity of that place is what made it so much fun. Very rarely did we have a plan for the evening. Usually it went something like: "Wanna have a party?" "Ok, beer run?" "Yessir". The cell phones came out, the beer wen in the cooler, and the party started a few hours later. Again, another one of those things that was great in the moment and will never be able to be replicated.

Things slowed down when we moved to the Village of Sin, but the atmosphere was near the same. It really was not until we neared graduation that all of this began to hit me and I saw everything that I had taken for granted over the past 5 year slipping away from me. And that is where I stand now. A man, not sure where he should go in life, pining for times that he let get away from him, and wishing that I could find a situation where that time in my life could be closely replicated. That is how I feel about Off The Record, that is how I feel about my time here in BG, and that is how I feel about my life on the whole. That is the perfect metaphor for the depressed fog that I've been wandering about in for the past few weeks. Of course, you'd never know if not for this blog, but that's neither here nor there. With all of that in mind, I offer a line of advice that I should ponder myself:

Never be afraid of being wrong, only be afraid of being silent.