The Big Season Finale

Some weeks, it seems, I simply don’t have enough time to write my little column for the newspaper.

Unfortunately, this is one of those weeks.

And even more unfortunately… I’m writing it anyway. YIKES!

If this were a weekly TV show – instead of a weekly newspaper column – we would be in the middle of “Summer Re-runs”, and it wouldn’t really be a problem.

But also, if this were weekly TV show, a few weeks ago we would have aired our Big Season Finale… a really big, exciting, dramatic, top-quality, climatic wrap-up weekly column to end the season… the culmination of all the weekly columns so far.

And, CLEARLY, that didn’t happen here!

Still, the idea that I could take a few months off and just re-use “summer re-runs” until September is appealing to me.

In addition to my failure to publish a “Big Season Finale”, there are several other problems with that plan.

First problem: There were columns about Super Bowl, Easter, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day, none of which will make much sense in August.

Second problem: There’s the annual celebration of Elvis in August. If I’m using re-runs from the winter and spring, I’ll completely miss my opportunity to write anything about The King. That seems a little un-American.

Third problem: Most of my January/February columns detailed my annual New Year’s Resolution Weight Loss Competition in which I, along with six or eight others, tried to shed the most poundage in am eight-week time period. If I re-run those columns, and people see me in my current hippo-pig-whale-like state, they’ll think I was fibbing in February… which is not true… I’ve merely been eating non-stop since the end of the contest. (Perhaps it’s time for a summertime weight-loss competition… any takers?)

Fourth, and perhaps most thorny, is this: I just re-read through all the columns I’ve written so far this year – all of them – and I realized that most of them shouldn’t have been published to start with. I have no writing talent whatsoever. I should immediately cease and desist from any attempts at anything resembling journalism whatsoever. I should not be allowed to own a laptop, or for that matter, an ink pen. They should take away all my tablets of paper, my writing instruments, and put me as far away from a desk as possible. I should get a job driving a truck, or roofing houses, or making sandwiches. But NOT writing column for the newspaper. I have no talent.

Or do I?!!!

Maybe I do, and I just think I don’t. And I’m just conflicted!!!

Do I or don’t I? That’s the kind of conflict that Big Season Finales are made of. Keep the audience guessing. What’s going to happen? It’s a cliffhanger. Nobody knows for sure.

So there you have it, folks. The Big Season Finale! I’ll see you in September.

Or will I?



--------------------------

You’re always welcome to let me know you agree, disagree, can’t make sense of, or simply don’t care about anything I’ve written here… or about any other topic that happens to be on your mind. You can email me directly at: RodShealy@aol.com.

And, if reading it once just wasn’t enough for you, read it again online – along with previous columns -- at my new blog: www.doingthefirst.blogspot.com