My career advice: don't be like me!

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Yesterday was one of those days when the hopes of optimistic college students eager to become career freelance writers were crushed when my most emphatic advice to college students eager to become freelance writers is to become plumbers.

I’ve been thinking for the last two months about writing a post headlined, “The Great Chris Rodell Life Experiment Fail.”

I’ve decided against that because it’s too depressing, in my heart I don’t believe it’s true and because it drives me nuts whenever headlines are too long to fit on one tidy line.

Yesterday I was back at Ohio University. Back in Athens, a place where so many of the characteristics that make me me — binge drinker, deadline shirker, chronic napper — were forged for my duration.

I revel in being back in Athens. I get roaring drunk with old friends, laugh too loud, and am renown for cranking out really huge farts at inappropriate times.

The people in charge of Athens know this so whenever they want me to talk to their students they insist I do it via Skype and far downwind.

And what I wrote about my feelings of failure is bullseye true. I’ve lately been at a really low ebb.

I do feel like a failure. My credit card bills are at an all-time high. I needed to buy lots of books at the end of the year in order to have lots of books to sell this year. I shelled out substantial bucks to join professional organizations that promise to help me land lucrative speaking gigs.

Those are not frivolous expenses. They are necessary.

What is frivolous and unnecessary is all the money I spend on cigars, bars, golf and baseball and right now all those soulful recreations are in jeopardy.

The last time I went a whole summer without any of those elements in my life it was the interim months between the 3rd and 4th grades.

The Stones are coming to Pittsburgh June 20. I’m deluged with questions from friends about my plans. Where will I stay? Do I have any ticket deals? How many cities will I see them in?

All are incredulous when I tell them I just can’t afford it.

I keep thinking I’m on the verge of some enormous professional breakthrough that will catapult me to real success.

I tell the students I’ve been saying that very same thing every morning since I quit my last real job way back in 1992.

The students are interested in the blog. They want to know how I make money on it.

I tell them I don’t. Friends urged me to put up a donation app and assured me support would pour in.

In fact, I say, in the four months the app’s been up, I’ve received exactly $102 in donations. One exuberant supporter — the one who urged me to put the dang thing up — bless his heart, gave $100. The other $2 came from when I snuck onto my wife’s computer and made a sneak transaction on her account to make sure the app was functioning.

“And she made me pay the $2 back!”

I’m nervous as the Skype session progresses. I feel like I’m in a race against the clock to see the class end before Val gets home and usurps the screen to rail against my many miserable failings.

I know most days she’d rather be married to a handsome plumber. 

I can’t blame her. Hell, there are days when I’D rather be married to a handsome plumber.

Any fresh household catastrophe could ruin us. Same goes for car trouble or if my 6-year-old MacBook Pro goes dark.

It never bothered me that freelance writing would be a career high wire act. I just never dreamed the wire would get so high.

What drives me mental, too, is all the people to whom I go to for advice say I just need to keep doing what I’m doing.

“You’re doing everything right,” said one successful writer. “You have no idea just how close you are to it all coming together for you. Just stick with it.”

Stick with what? Sleeplessness? Bouts of depression? Chronic feelings of failure?

I’ve long said it’s not surprising writers like me drink. What’s surprising is writers like me ever stop drinking.

What’s also insane is my persistent optimism that friends are correct. Meeting planners around the country are receptive to my pitches.

They believe my message — in essence, to cheerfully persist through every hardship — is one all their associates need to hear.

And financial stability is the only element missing from what is a truly wonderful life.

I was reminded of this when at the very end one of the students asked what my daughters think about what their Daddy does.

“They love it,” I say. “And they love me.”

It’s true. We have so many happy times together. Ages 14 and 8, they both have made expressions that they’re proud of me and the book. Josie says many of her friends have read copies their parents have bought and have told her they love it.

“I’d have missed out on a world of love if I’d have followed a different path and it’s cliche, but no one on their deathbed’s ever said they wished they’d have had more bylines in Golf Magazine.”

Of all the things I said, it’s the one thing I hope that sticks.

So today, the day after the 150th anniversary Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, I am once again Scarlett O’Hara saying, fiddle-dee-dee, I won’t think about even crushing defeat.

Tomorrow’s another day

I will yet again raise my middle finger to looming despair and believe in my heart that a better day is soon to dawn.

I may never enjoy the means and stability of a really fine plumber, but as God is my witness, I’ll one day be able to afford one.

Related . . .

The No. 1 Party Boy from the No. 1 Party School

An exercise in ironic education

My novel frustrations

Best picture? It’s “Gone with the Wind”

Roll on, Stones

My business plan: Keep on feeding the unicorn

I nearly killed a weatherman golfing

I almost did the unthinkable this week while golfing at Latrobe Country Club. I nearly killed the only man there with the potential to be more famous than Arnold Palmer.

Yes, I nearly killed a local weatherman.

He’s Scott Harbaugh, a forecaster for WPXI-Channel 11, Pittsburgh. That’s the station we watch for the same reasons most discerning news consumers watch theirs: the anchors all look nice and cuddly.

Scott’s part of that. He’s always come across like a forecast that has people planning for picnics. He’s sunny and pleasant.

As my ball was sailing straight for his noggin -- which was about 70 yards away from where I was aiming -- I wondered how my life would change if I was responsible for ending his.

I’d be a pariah, I knew.

People love weather forecasters. Me, too, as I wrote in this still-popular June 2009 post, “Weatherman is my Superhero.”

You don’t kill Weather Man.

You invite him to be grand marshall in your holiday parade.

Some men like to go to fantasy baseball camps where they shell out big bucks to meet their heroes and rekindle dreams of what it would be like to play pro ball.

Me, I’d like to attend Fantasy Weatherman Camp.

I’d get up early in the morning, banter with the chipper co-anchors as we applied our hangover-concealing make-up, and try to look professional as they filmed the action promos where I’m studying weather systems the way Ike did on D-Day.

Then . . . Show Time!

It’d be no stylish business suit for me. Instead, I’d wear a long flowing robe like the kind the artists depict God wearing when they want to convey omnipotence.

Because there’s something so God-like about beaming to the universe with almighty authority just what the world will be like five days hence. In fact, I wish they would try their hand at predictions outside meteorological realms.

“A low pressure system will bring sunny skies, the Pirates will sweep Detroit at PNC Park and Lindsay Lohan will find love and stability in time for the weekend, which includes a chance of scattered showers -- details after traffic!”

Happily, fate intervened and I did not smite Scott, nor his father, with whom he was golfing in the group directly behind us.

My ball ricochetted off the top of the golf cart behind which they ducked when they heard us scream, “Fore!”

I immediately felt terrible. My friend tried to cheer me up by telling me it was maybe the most remarkable shot of the day.

“The putting surface is maybe 50 times times the size of that golf cart,” he said. “Yet, you were able to catapult a golf ball off that tiny roof. Amazing.”

Another friend decided to be controversial. He approached the Harbaughs and said the last words I spoke before teeing up were: “Watch this: I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.”

Happily, they took it all in good humor. It would have been justified if the weatherman had experienced a reaction that could have been characterized as “stormy.”

I was glad because I got to sit next to Scott for dinner and he couldn’t have been more pleasant. Turns out, like me, he, too, studied journalism at -- link alert! -- Ohio University, the nation’s no. 1 party school.

He told a great self-effacing story about his days forecasting weather in Bluefield, West Virginia.

Conditions indicated an emerging storm could either be a whopper or a non-event. He relied on his expertise, consulted colleagues and eventually told his audience not to sweat it.

Well, you can guess what happened. Bluefield got hammered; 44-inches of snow.

“I felt really terrible,” he said. “I knew people were counting on me and I let them down.”

Weeks later, he said an old lady approached him in the grocery store, pinched him on the cheek and said, “It’s okay. We still love you.”

So I’m relieved I didn’t kill a man who can inspire that kind of affection.

Plus, I now have friendly access to a man who can help perpetuate what, to me, will be a really nifty prank.

It’s always been a dream of mine to see a weatherman proceed through a routine forecast until it comes to the part where the High and Low pressure systems begin working their way across the screen.

That’s when the weatherman can shriek in terror and yell, “Run for your lives! There’s a giant H about to land on the city!” and dash off the set as startled anchors  try to recover their composure.

It’d be an instant YouTube sensation.

Of course, it’s just as likely that I’ll never see Scott again.

He blew that West Virginia forecast, but I’m sure he can predict nothing but trouble next time he sees me coming.

No. 1 party boy from America's No. 1 party school

It’s probably because of my years at Ohio University I drink responsibly whenever I should and irresponsibly whenever I can.

It’s a vast over-simplification to say, but the only thing I can recall learning with any clarity there from 1981-1985 was never mix Ouzo and beer. In the same glass.

We used to do that all the time and, guaranteed, whenever we did someone was bound to lose their pants.

You can’t spell bourbon or ouzo without OU.

It was a fountain of knowledge where I went to drink.

Those were some of the T-shirts they sold on campus when I was there. I still see variations of them when I go back once every year or so to see the old gang.

We fly or drive in from all over the country and get two or three rooms at the diviest hotel down near the Hocking River. In a town where big guys are called “Tiny,” the hotel on the lowest point in southeastern Ohio is called The Highlander.

Tell someone who attended most any other college a group of 40 somethings are going to go back to the university they all attended in the 1980s and many assume lecherous activities will ensue.

They think the guys will slip off their wedding rings and spend their nights chasing around the comely innocents.

This is wrong on multiple levels. First: I never met an innocent at OU, not to be confused, please, with Ohio State University in Columbus.

Second: most of us are too fatigued and too wise to chase anything anymore.

Third -- and this is key: there’s not a soul within a 50-mile radius more important to us than the dozen or so people clustered around those tables tilting from too many pitchers of beer.

It was after leaving Athens I began to understand games were for people who were inept at the art of conversation.

Why would you engage in any distraction that kept you from learning more about the people sitting right next to you?

Those were some of the things that crossed my mind when I learned Ohio University was named by the Princeton Review as the No. 1 Party School in America.

It’s a chicken and egg sort of question, but I didn’t go to Athens because it was a party school. But I did go there because at the time the Ohio drinking age was 18.

I learned later on -- surprise! -- it had a great school for journalism. Hey, I liked to journalize!

If anything exceeds its reputation for being a party school, it is its reputation for grooming dynamic journalists.

Media big shots Roger Ailes and Matt Lauer graduated from there. Legendary actor Paul Newman dropped out of there.

My academic achievements fall somewhere deep in the middle of that spectrum.

I remember when I went for one of my first post-graduate interviews. It was at the Nashville Banner. The managing editor, a fine southern gentleman, saw Ohio University on my resume and asked if that’s where Woody Hayes coached.

No, sir, that was Zero State in Columbus.

“How long were you on the school paper?” he asked.

One year, I told him.

“What’d you do the other three years, drink beer?”

Yes, sir.

“Good. I did it for four.”

In a world where crabby tight asses seem to make all the rules and then more rules regarding the original rules, convivial folk will always have a way of finding one another.

I got that job and it was instrumental in launching a career that has led me to friendships with some of the world’s most fascinating individuals.

Athens was where I became who I am.

So cheers, Ohio University. I’ve been under your influence for 30 years now.

And gloriously under the influence for many of those years.

And it’s all just been one hell of a good time.