Of pubes and radio

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When I was 15ish, me and a friend would get stoned in this room off his bedroom called "The Studio." His dad owned an advertising agency, and the room was filled with cool surplus AV equipment.

On one such occasion, my friend brought the little rug that was in front of the desk, up on the desk and started inspecting it for pubes. He was in bliss, and it was a very funny occasion as he would pluck off pubes and separate them into little piles by name. There was the Linda pile, and the Denise pile, and I forget all who else pile. All the victims of his sexcapades since the last vacuuming were diagnosed and sorted. My friend preferred diversity, so there was a wide array of colors, lengths and thickness to aid the sorting process. Looking back now, it's a good thing for him that all his girlfriends weren't Chinese, or it would have been a very long afternoon, but I digress. But it was a funny thing for two stoned 15 year-olds to be doing.

Except deep down inside I was hurting. Because I had no rug with pubes. Well, my own. The dog's. And perhaps some renegade pube that blew in from another room, but that was about it. And I was embarrassed that this exercise in pube identification was the closest I had come to a real life pube other than the afore mentioned.

But this post is not about pubes, or my friend, or childhood wishes unfulfilled, or any of that, it's about me wanting to do a little night radio show. So far it seems like anything but that, but I'm getting there.

In my 20's I started getting a little bit of confidence, and the "I can do it too" thought started to crystallize within me. My niece was dating a very bight British engineer named Simon. I liked Simon, and we frequently chatted about events of the day whenever he'd visit with my niece at various occasions. But I found many of Simon's insights and opinion on certain subjects to be not as well-formed as my own. Around this time is when I started to grasp that engineers, mathematicians, chemists, you name it, don't have to be these "smart people" I need only gawk at, but I too could be one of those people. So I began school, and 6 years later (now near 30) I received my master's degree in mathematical statistics, a field I have now been working in for 16 years. So I did reach a point in life where I did not just have to live vicariously off of someone else's pubes, but started to get a few of my own.

Now I find myself at another "me too" moment in life. I'd really like to get my voice out there. I have a great gift of gab and grasp of issues that can stir people up in a conservative/populist kind of way. I'd love a little radio show, but radio is something only "other people" do.

But pubes and college degrees and careers were something that only "other people" did, yet over the years I've come to have my own fill of these things. With pubes I mean my own of course, but hey, a fill is a fill. But life keeps going, and after one meal we find ourselves hungry yet again.

And I know that if I step up to the plate, I can always be one of those "other people" myself. But part of me thinks radio might be a stretch too far, and doubt can be a killer. Is radio something I can really do, or is it just more of someone else's pubes? Is this whole quest a pube too far?

I need some inspiration. Perhaps I should call Simon, or maybe go back to The Studio and get stoned. Maybe there's even a time-forgotten fossilized pube or two still laying around to remind me from whence I came, and how far I've traveled.