Some Settling May Occur...

No matter where my fancycam takes me, I spend a good portion of each afternoon locked in a box. Okay, it's officially an 'edit bay' and I'm not even sure you can lock it, but it hardly matters for when your reporter of the moment writes you into a corner, then you Sir or Ma'am are trapped. Throw in a digital clock and a few goofy phone calls and you have the makings of a 24 episode in which Jack Bauer spends the entire time hunched over a candy-colored keyboard. Sound dull? You've never dragged and clicked your way across a still-forming time-line as gaping chasms of black threatened to collapse your very narrative... Why last week they dragged one guy out in a straight-jacket after he overdosed on excruciatingly slow dissolves! Then there was the lady who locked herself in with a bunch of sick celeb obituary scripts and a stack of file tapes. It was six days before they even found her body!

Yes, when it comes to the perils of news-gathering, I'd put the daily edit sesh right up there with the inner city stand-off - not because there's any gun play in those little broadcast closets, but because there's so many other ways to poke your eyes out. Take the underdeveloped but over-imagined documentary piece - you know, the one you got six shots of ketchup packets with which to flesh out a three minute report on climate change! If that won't make you gouge out your cornea, there's always that intern who wants to sit in so he can tell you how he would have cut it on his Dad's iMac. Me, I can stand that particular intruder, but so help me if that reporter insist on hovering over my shoulder so he can orally debate my every slice, I'm gonna commit some kind of journalistic fratricide! A-hem. Sorry to get all worked up like that, but too many people think the edit bay is a bathroom stall or a snack bar or a ballot box in need of stuffing. To those folks, I say LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE!

Hmm? Was I shouting? A thousand apologies, but I get a little cagey after that kind of extended sequestration. Normally a bag of Funyuns and a lap around the weather center does the trick but today I spent much of my stretch trapped behind a stack of archive tapes. What are those exactly? Oh, just jumbo cassette recordings of every ribbon cutting, ride-along and rape accusation El Ocho has showcased in the last decade or so. Honest to God all I need are a few fleeting shots of Chinese people smoking cigarettes - you know, just the kind of thing a domestic television station collect in abundance. To be fair, I found what I was looking for - or rather Bob Buckley did - but only because I threatened to flesh out his thoughtful treatise on the tobacco trade with leftover sequences from Pee-Wee's Playhouse. That I got reams of, collected from a time when hallucinogenics and randy hand-puppets were thought to be the keys to a more universal understanding of our heartless orb. But I don't want really wanna talk about my senior thesis - I'd much rather discuss how you plan to get us out of the stifling little cube before that bean burrito I had for lunch melts the Windex residue off these TV monitors...

Don't say I didn't warn you...