My Intergalactic Apologies

Still no leads from my footage last week. Most of the advertisers I cold-called were pleasant on the phone--a welcome surprise--but nobody seemed interested. These are hard times for my economy and I think people are especially wary. Perhaps my initial triumph last year was merely riding the tail end of a now-defunct boom.

I'm not giving up, though. I can't; a recent investigation of my bank account reveals I'm nearly broke. It's now or never, and I'd like to be doing this rather than something else right now.

Which means I have to work harder. Tomorrow, one week after my last trip, I'll travel someplace new in hopes of a customer. And I'll repeat the process every week until I find something, so help me God.

Tomorrow I'm opting for Bakersfield. I went there at the end of last year, but never got around to analyzing the footage. Now it's just sitting there on six tapes dated December 3rd, 2006, likely obsolete now that we're in a new advertising cycle. I'm out of tapes so I'll have to take those tomorrow and record over them.

It's strange, though. I feel funny about overwriting that old footage, even though it's no use to me now. Almost like I might miss something important. Perhaps someone, something, wanted to get a message out to me on that exact day in that exact radio area. If aliens sent from a faraway galaxy with almost-perfect coordinates landed in the Greater Bakersfield Area and sent out a radio beacon to find their soon-to-be-anointed human crown prince, they almost accomplished their mission. Almost. But I have to use those tapes for something else now, so I'll never know. I can only hope that the denizens of Zorticon B or whatever obscure cluster of stars were able to find a substitute despot to take home on their pizza-catered mothership.

All of this is merely conjecture, of course. Perhaps I'll just be missing out on Christmas ads and insipid morning drive time chatter. Even then, though, doesn't it make you just a little bit sad? Recorded but never heard, pursued but never perused, sought but never examined?

Wish me luck. Better luck than I had last week, at any rate.