We're stuck right in the middle of a transitional period. It's no wonder so many grown people are acting like teenagers - history ITSELF is going through puberty all over again.
Or maybe I'm just at the point where I can see that history is stuck in an eternal adolescence. The endless waltz, repeating the three beats of rest, unrest and revolution.
That makes more sense. I've been having redundant epiphanies all week, being all Columbus, discovering things that've already been discovered.
Tuesday night I was asked to cover the primary election for New Jersey senator. Specifically, I was covering the Jersey City-based Libertarian-turned-Republican dark horse. He was pretty much like Ron Paul. You wish every politician was like him, but you know that nobody else cares, so you wonder if there's any point in your caring.
I hitched a ride with the photographer down to his campaign HQ. I couldn't tell if it was more like a baby shower for a teacher going on maternity leave or just a basic family reunion. Half of any present were by the row of computers checking the incoming electing results, and the rest were mingling or boozing on the opposite side of the room. Young guys with nice hair cuts, old guys in fitted suits with their younger wives. There were two kids, my age or younger, on Facebook or something, laughing with beers in hand.
Right away I recognized the senatorial candidate from the the Google image search result. I had no idea what I was supposed to ask him. It was supposed to do a color story. A joke story, really, because there was no chance the guy would win. The only reason we were covering him was because he's based in Jersey City. So while the award-winning photographer snapped away at the would-be senator and his supporters from all different angles, I leaned against a cubicle occupied by a mostly-drunken freeholder candidate and tapped my pen against my notepad with faux thoughtfullnes. I wrote down phrases like, "FRIENDLY ATMOSPHERE".
They were projecting live online coverage by NJN onto a nearby screen. The stream was nearly inaudible, but I stared into it as though I was gleaning all sorts of information from it. I leaned over people's shoulders and checked the results from the polls with them.
After reading about him in the Star Ledger's archives all day, I wanted their guy to win, too, but that would mean the story would be bigger than anyone anticipated, and I wasn't sure I wanted that.
While I wasn't looking, the candidate was suddenly being interviewed by another reporter who looked pretty close to my age. She was using a pretty beefy recording device to get all of his answers. I thought, Oh, man, a recorder, why didn't I think of that? But then I thought, Whatever, I'm old school that way, that bitch probably doesn't even know how to USE a notepad.
However, she DID seem to know how to interview someone, which was more than I could shake a stick at. As the votes came in, it became more and more obvious that our boy was going to lose. He stood contemplatively in front of a computer monitor with his arms crossed. I looked on as well, then I leaned on the chair next to him.
"So I noticed that every incident of the phrase "Legalize Freedom" is capitalized on your web site. Has that been trademarked yet?" I gave a sharkish smirk.
"Ehh. I don't know. Try asking Jimmy," he said pointing behind him. "He took care of the site."
I leaned forward a little more, and dipped into my serious voice. "So do you plan on staying in politics if you lose tonight?"
"Well, I've been writing about this for a long time, and that's not going to stop anytime soon..." I began nodding as I scribbled into my notepad, trying to write as fast as he was talking, like a real reporter. Not even before he finished his first sentence was I filled with dread as I watched the words come out of his mouth and onto my notepad in a horrifically jumbled mess while he looked on, agast at my sheer incompetence.
Terry the reporter, can't even read his own handwriting. I imagined the fate of Terry the F1 Grand Prix driver - putting his vehicle into reverse at the start of the race and careening directly into a crowd of seated patrons.
I continued to scribble as though I perfectly understood every cryptic line and arch. In reality, I was overcome by embarrassment. That special kind of private embarrassment that clouds your memory until you can't quite remember how it ended - just that it happened. Before I knew it, Mr. Candidate was looking at another monitor with his back to me and I was leaning against another cubicle carefully looking over my nonsensical notes.
Fortunately, the photographer had already left to cover some other politcal event. He probably would've been deeply disgusted by the fact that an idiot like me was hired by the same people that hired him
The cloud of embarrassment keeps me from remembering when exactly it was that the two Facebook kids started talking to me. The guy reminded me of a film student from Emerson. The girl worked as an aide of some sort for the candidate, and I couldn't decide which high school clique she would've best belonged to. Smart but snarky like the girls who would hang out in that nook in the hallway, with an air of vaguely cute annoyance that I would attribute to the majority of the Lunch Bunch. It helped (or didn't help, I guess, depending on how you look at it) that she was buzzed.
She was wearing what looked like a modestly low-cut prom dress, complete with one of those refrigerated flowers. Even after I already made a concerted effort not to, I kept looking at her cleavage. She's probably reading this, too, since she ultimately convinced me to befriend her on Facebook.
She complimented me on my eyes, beard and sense of humor. She also gave me a kiss on the cheek and wrote her number in my notepad as I was leaving. It felt incredibly unprofessional, but nice, too. This stuff doesn't happen to me often, so I never know how I should react.
With the help of a regular at the paper, I was able to put the article together on the blog. All in all, I was intrigued at how aloof the candidate was, standing around button-lipped with his arms crossed, clearly anxious as all hell. Meanwhile, all of his friend and support are have a good time, treating it like a regular party, almost as though they were enjoying themselves precisely because he could not. And then to find out that he lost after all of that waiting and campaigning and hard, hard work - to concede to men who he truly believed he were not suited as senator in comparison to him - that takes a lot of courage. He has to remain hopeful for the battles ahead. This loss was just one. He has to remain confident that liberty will prevail.
But if you look at the story as it's written, you realize that it could have just as easily been written by anyone about anyone at anytime. It was just like my dad had said. If you know how the game is played, you can write the story before it even happens.
I wanted to write with a sympathetic nod towards the candidate, but that's just not how news works. That's not the media's job. They have to convey the facts. Feeling is for the readers and the viewers to do.
Keeping that in mind, Tim and I did the video for the closing awards ceremony at the Hoboken International Film Festival. The main event as far as anyone was concerned was Billy Dee Williams accepting of a lifetime achievement award. We made the video with that in mind.
We also got footage of Jeff, the entertainment editor, on the red carpet with Billy Dee and others. Jeff is great, but didn't include him because he simply did not seem relevant to the rest of the report, and we didn't include much of our red carpet footage because it just wasn't very impressive. Frankly, we didn't SHOOT much red carpet footage because it wasn't very impressive. If it was interesting, we would have shot it, but it wasn't, so we didn't.
So what do I hear about our video the next day? "Where's Jeff? Where's the red carpet? Where's the glitz and the glam and the girls with their impossible amounts of cleavage?" I couldn't tell them, "On the cutting room floor where they belong," because they're paying me. Now they're asking for another cut of the video with all of that stuff put back in.
I'm just confused, that's all. I'm confused as to why I have to take the present emotion out of one event and infuse another event with artificial importance. I have to do a story on something that, as far as I'm concerened, didn't really happen.
I've already tried to look on the bright side. I nearly convinced myself that my stint at the paper was the best thing going for my career.
I'm through with lying. I done with pretending. I'm
so sick and tired of being admired
That I wish that I would just die or get fired
And drop from my label and stop with the fables
I'm not gonna be able to top what my name is~~
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