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Hooooooong!

Hooooong!

Homemade Radio.

I remember this one graduation ceremony at my college.

They were giving out awards to alumni, and it was this very imposing parade of people

who had done groundbreaking research on subatomic particles, or founded rapid response malaria clinics in remote jungles.

It was very intimidating, but then, finally, after three or four people like that, this novelist from the class of 1996 stepped up to the podium to accept his award.

And he was standing there, with sloped shoulders and a ratty sport coat bent eyeglasses.

He had recently published a novel that was loosely based on his family and his time at the college.

And this very distinguished magazine, like the most distinguished magazine, exactly the one you're thinking of when I say Distinguished Magazine, they had gotten it in their heads that this novelist would make a good journalist.

And so they had come to him, and they'd asked if he wanted to go to Chicago to cover a motorcycle race.

And being a writer and a college graduate, he was smart enough to know that he should not turn down a paying gig, even though, as he explained to us,

he was in no way a journalist, and he didn't have the faintest interest in motorcycle racing, or how to even begin reporting a story like that.

So he told us the magazine flew him to Chicago, they put him up in a hotel, and when he got there, he realized he was too scared to go out to this dusty racetrack and interview a bunch of bikers.

So he spent the entire weekend hiding in the hotel room watching TV and writing in his journal about what a failure he was.

And when he got back to New York, he went to see his editor, and the editor said, so what do you have for me? And he said nothing.

And the editor said, what? And he said nothing. I was too scared to talk to anyone.

Now this editor would have been well within his rights to tell the writer to go pound sand, but that's not what happened.

The editor said, look, I get it, but I need that story. I'm sending you back again this weekend. Please do your job this time.

So the next weekend, the writer got back on the plane, checked into the same hotel, and was still too scared to do any interviews.

He came back to New York, and he ended up writing this piece about feeling so intimidated by the very idea of bikers that he couldn't even bring himself to talk to them.

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