thank you everyone who has supported me through this shocking period of time in my life. one of the hidden treasures of having a blog – of any size – is the virtual community that forms.

over the years i hope i have given back to you at least as much as what ive received. it’s out of that give/take that i write to you on a sunny day when all i want to do is go outside and walk around and try to figure out whats next for me.

i have totally appreciated all the kind words that some of you have put on your blogs and websites, however i still have lots of good friends at E! and i learned a lot there, so i would appreciate it if we took it easy on the e-bashing.

something that i have learned in my 20 years in LA is, its a tiny tiny place. only fools burn bridges because no matter what part of town you’re in youre bound to run across someone from one of your past lives. not that anyone should need an excuse to be decent and professional, and not that im all that interested in going back to television for my next gig, but im just sayin.

there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who work behind the scenes of tv production and even though we could all write volumes of interesting stories about the politics and dramas and quirks of this business that we call show, you really dont see much of it because there is a professionalism that runs through this industry that keeps it all together.

that is the part that i was ignorant to before i worked here, but is the part that i hold closest to me now that im out.

a show like anna nicole’s might give one the impression that all you need is a camera and a mic and a Suburban and you just let anna be anna, but there are so many people behind the scenes to make something like that a “reality”, you have no idea. not to say that its staged, just the opposite. simply the logistics required to make a show happen are staggerring and when you see those credits roll realize that there are thousands of people who never make it into the credits who helped that show happen too.

the same goes for the howard stern e! show, which i was lucky enough to hang out with on nearly a daily basis. stuart and al are listed as “producers” in the credits but if you knew the craziness that they have to deal with after the show gets delivered from NY to LA … it’s fascinating.

and secret.

and i was so lucky to be able to hang out with people who put together my favorite show.

so when people say mean things about E! theyre saying them about people who i love and shows that i tivo.

some people at E! made fun of me that i actually cared about the programming and that i actually watched all of the shows. but thats me. i wont work for a company unless i believe in it.

when i started at e! they had aisha tyler doing talk soup, jules and kmetko on the news, brooke burke hosting wild on, and joan and melissa on the red carpet. totally dynamite lineup that ended with howard at night.

i loved all of those shows and being able to walk down the hallway and be greeted by a huge smile and a hello from one of the amazon goddesses like jules or aisha was a thrill. almost as exciting as the warm warm warm greetings that id get when id visit the studio from Tom Mac the kickass stage manager who would say toooooony! the same way that the Cheers gang would welcome Norm. the whole studio crew would join in to welcome me and if a black man could blush i blushed every time.

hopefully things will work out between me and my former company and i will be able to go back there as a visitor and take pictures of my former cohorts and tell nice sweet stories from my unusual perspective. several people at E! have worked there over 15 years and are some of the most down-to-earth mellow wonderful people you’ll ever meet anywhere.

i always wanted to do something in television, i interned at mtv when i was younger, but this experience at E! showed me what it’s really like and i’m better for it.

so again, thank you all for the love and support you showed me this week. next week we’ll go back to our regularily scheduled adventures of riding the bus, kissing girls way out of my league, and butchering the english language.

i hope you all have a great weekend.

but before i go let me answer a few questions that have come up in my comments over the last few days

no i wasnt fired for blogging. my last job was in HR, i was very aware of when one could take breaks and when one couldnt and i educated everyone around me as to what i was doing when on my break.

i was also not fired for blogging “too much”. the archives of the busblog are to your left. most days i have three posts. one was usually written on my first 15 minute break, one was usually written during lunch and one was usually written when i came home from work. so many people think that this is “a lot” of blogging. i dont think it is. the Instapundit posts upwards to 30 times a day. he and i may have our differences regarding several things, but i will always respect him for his dedication and his work ethic. in comparison to glenn, i am a slacker.

i was also not fired for taking a day off on monday. not that its anyone’s business, but that day was a planned and approved Personal Day meant for me to recover from coachella. i had originally expected to go both Sat and Sunday, but i only went Sat but since my day off had been approved and i had gone 5 months without burning a personal day, i figured i’d use it. one of the very nice things about E! was they gave you a healthy amount of vacation, sick, and personal days.

i was also not fired for writing about sex in my blog. basically bloggers have a few constitutional rights that they should think about. the first ammendment is mighty strong, and one’s personal life, as long as it’s legal is usually off-limits to employers unless the employee is in a specialized job like a pilot or a doctor or someone. i was very careful never to write about my work, and therefore writting about what i did off the clock was never of issue to them. and it helps that i have that disclaimer calling all of this fiction, which it is, right.

i did not have sexual relations with joan rivers.

but i will finally say publicly that i think it was a mistake to let her go. i think shes a genius and a pioneer. and a freaking icon on the red carpet. how many cable networks have icons working for them at ginormous events like the oscars? ive always thought that she was hilarious and to be able to hear her jokes off screen was a treat.

why didnt i write for eonline? i applied at eonline several times. im a huge fan of theirs and im still shocked that it isnt the number-one no-brainer initial destination for entertainment news and gossip on the web. i know that they get decent numbers but in the blogosphere i dont see them getting linked very often. i gave them several proposals as to what i thought would help them but they were not accepted. in the real world noone is falling over themselves to have me write for them. lets hope that changes one day.

will i put ads up on this blog while i find a new job?

sadly i think that would be wise. hopefully you’ll still respect me in the morning.

will ads change what is written in the busblog?

absolutely not.

will i continue to write more “real” stories about my real life?

i dont know. probably not. my life is usually too weird to be believed, and marking everything as fiction protects the innocent and not-so-innocent.

has being rejected from grad school and fired i mean laid off crushed my spirit?

i am a chicago cub fan. i have dealt with rejection and misery and sadness my whole life. just the other day the cubs were up with two games left to play with wood and prior on the mound and they figured out a way to blow the lead and lose the playoffs to the team that ended up winning the world series.

this is nothing compared to that.

and that is nothing compared to real tragedies that happen to people and families around the world.

im am now going to walk around hollywood and take pictures for you.

xoxoxo
tony

plastic + dude man phat + pip

today because yesterday was karisas birthday and saturday is my lawyers baby shower and sunday is the lords day.

nothing in this is true neither.

she has the sweetest face

i’ll say why are you here

and she’ll say because youre great

and many of you have written very nice things to me and have said that something good is right around the corner but something good was right there,

slippin off her flip flops,

pretending to care what was on tv,

which rhymes with just waiting for me.

and here it is 452am. sterns on live from new york. shes snoozing on the couch wearing just a pink leapord print bikini bottom.

shut up.

i could look at that girl all day.

sometimes she would be ready to leave and id ask if i could just look at her for a quick minute and id use the entire sixty seconds to soak it in.

her snores sound like if mushrooms had motors

hawaiian and so sweet

i caller hello kitty with titties.

and i dont agree with those who say that something better is waiting for me because thats what people said when the dot com got rid of me and karisa and everyone else

unless they meant this chick

who i dont deserve

and who doesnt even mind when the beck cd keeps repeating and repeating and repeating.

this homestand’s 7th Inning singers at wrigley field:

Friday- May 6th – Scott Sanderson
Saturday- May 7th – Will Ferrell & Mike Ditka
Sunday- May 8th – Jim Belushi
Monday- May 9th – TBA
Tuesday- May 10th – George Wendt
Wednesday- May 11th – Gary Sinise

cubs blog + earth-info + bojack + volume2

for all of these years, a new dilema arises,

the busblog has been rolling pretty much as long as i worked at E!, so the other day when i was let go, i looked at this blog and thought, maybe the busblog should end now too.

as i have alluded in previous interviews, the busblog started when i was a closed caption editor for the e and style networks.

how it worked was, the shows would get sent to us on tape, one of the two transcribers would watch the tapes and use a court reporting machine to turn the show into a script. the script got sent to one of us closed caption editors who would break up the dialogue into little chunks that would appear on screen at the right time.

believe it or not, this wasnt a very easy job. not only was there a strict way of breaking up the text, but it had to be grammatical, it had to be spelled right, and it couldnt hang on the screen for too long or too short.

a half hour show would take a full day to edit, an hour show would usually take two days. but something like howard stern, a half hour show, i could do twice as fast because it just scrolled up – you didnt have to place it around the screen.

at that time we had four other captioners and none of them liked to do Howard’s because theyd get grossed out. me, i have always been a huge fan and one day i came up with this great idea of being The howard stern captioner who would knock out the rerun show before lunch and then do the new episode after lunch.

my boss thought it was a good idea but she never got around to giving it to me, instead she made everyone do everything regardless of what we liked. so i learned a lot about fashion from the style shows that i had to caption and i learned alot about the structure of shows like true hollywood stories whose 2hr shows would take nearly a week to complete.

right before i was going to remind my boss about our little idea about being the Howard captioner, i had a little sit down with my boss’s boss. he said that it was obvious that i wasnt meant to be a closed caption editor. he said that my boss showed him that on every show i would have one or two grammar mistakes and one or two spelling mistakes. i told him that i knew that i wasnt perfect, but that most people watching Wild On Barbados probably didnt care all that much when i would put a semi-colon next to the Wooooo! instead of a double dash.

he told me to watch my back and to get it together or else i would be looking for new work elsewhere.

right around this time i started getting carpal tunnel and i realized that it was due to the repetitiveness of pausing the vhs tape, editing the line or two, playing the vhs tape and then pausing it again, and then moving the mouse to the right part of the screen to edit the next line.

so what i did was, about every now and then i would get up, go to the break room, fill up my water bottle, go back to my desk and write a few paragraphs in this new thing called Blogger. sometimes i would write during my lunch break.

i already had a website, but i couldnt update it from work. Blogger was great because i could write whatever i need to say, post it, and be back editing captions in minutes. eventually i started writing little stories about being a superhero which helped me shake off all of the negative feedback that i would receive every time i finished editing a show.

at first just writing something good was enough, but soon i started getting very nice comments from strangers who would tell me that i was a good writer and that theyd be back. time went on and the popularity of the busblog grew. unfortunately my popularity as a closed caption editor was dipping steadily even though we had one guy who was regularily worse than me, and another guy who would disappear for hours and hours at a time.

one day my bosses boss said that there was an opening in the Scheduling department that he wanted me to interview for. he said Scheduling was far more fast-paced and incredibly difficult but i would be in the center of studio production because i would be hiring all of the freelance camera dudes, utility, teleprompter, tape, video controllers, ads, tds, directors, and audio dudes.

it seemed very exciting and a nice change of pace, especially since he was hinting that if i didnt move out of captioning i would probably get canned.

i walked about 1000 feet from my captioning cubicle, interviewed for the gig and a few months later i was transferred to Scheduling and hired to be the Studio Scheduler.

everything seemed amazingly fast paced. phones were ringing nonstop, all of the people in the department were talking to each other in a very quick manner, everyone was serious and Everyone said, youre going to hate it, you will probably quit, and you will most definately get an ulcer.

when i heard that i laughed and this very tall, goth looking dude who i would later find out was actually a very cool dude named Matt looked at me and said, this place will wipe that smile right off your face.

even my new boss told me that what i was in store for was going to be hellish and very few people can keep up with the pace.

two days into the job i was across the street at the la brea tar pits nearly in tears. matt was right, they had wiped the smile off my face.

when i got back to my desk i realized i had died and gone to hell.

and that day i started the first of the kurt cobain stories.

so working at e! has inspired and influenced this blog far more than most people know, and even though i obviously got the hang of working in Scheduling, in a sick bizarre way, the hellishness of my last job, and the dullness of my captioning job completely motivated me to write and escape and funnel all of the pent up engergies and creative juices into a positive thing.

sometimes it wouldnt manifest itself until i got home and wrote, but sometimes it would come out during one of my two government mandated 15 minute breaks, or sometimes it came out during my lunch hour. but i would be a liar if i didnt acknowledge that working where i worked, doing what i had to do, had a lot to do with what youve read on this page over all these years.

and thats why the other day i wanted to end this thing and start something new, called something different. because the busblog started in a moment of boredom, and could have ended because of a day of deceit.

but if i have learned one thing while in television production its the very famous line that youve heard a million times.

the show must go on.

so on we will go.

xTx + radiohumper + britcoal + matt good