It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part LXXIV
By Mitch Berg
It was 2AM, Thursday, April 3, 1988.
The previous day had been pretty much like every other day, these days.
I had gotten up up around ten.
I’d started keeping my radio station calling to Mondays; the long-distance bills were sorta out of hand, if I didn’t ration things. And there was really not much going on, anyway.
I walked Mookie. I went to the library.
I drove out to City Limits, the bowling-alley bar in Rosemount, and worked the evening. It was a slow, dull evening, like all weekday evenings at Jams.
I drove home, stopping at Perkins in Apple Valley, at the corner of Cedar and 42, to grab an idle late-night snack. I loved the potato pancakes – although I never figured out why they served ’em with syrup. Potato pancakes were like fluffy hash browns; we all know that ketchup is the only acceptable topping.
It was probably 2:15AM as I went to the counter to pay. I took out my checkbook and filled it in…
…April 3.
It’d been a year since I’d gotten whacked at KSTP. One year to the day.
And I’d not made one millimeter of progress. Things had gotten worse, in fact. I hadn’t had a voice-over job since October; I hadn’t sold a newspaper article since January.
Of course, I’d stopped trying to do either. Pointing that out to myself made it worse.
The anniversary sat in my stomach like an undigested golf ball as I drove back to Saint Paul.
Now I was depressed.
