The News Lampoon.com

By Rick Bishop

July 5, 2008--It was mainly my fault.  It started back at the end of April with the retreat to Florida.  I had thought that some time away might help everyone get their heads together.  As anyone who has worked on a website such as The News Lampoon knows, the stress level is very high.  I feared something or someone was going to give, so as any good manager/administrator-type guy (or gal) would do, I immediately took steps to ameliorate the problem.  In the end, I had to ameliorate myself.

This is very hard for me.  I confess that I am a perfectionist.  This, I am sure, must be obvious to all of you.  With me, everything has to be just so.  I was trying so hard to deliver the hardest-hitting, most-accurately-yet-concisely-expressed, entertaining news stories in the history of the written word that I lost focus.  It was one of those trees for lack of a forest kinda deals.

I was reeling in this big old fucking fish when it came to me.  This thing came out of the ocean, man!  This big, had to be old, fucking fish was the biggest one I had ever seen, but with the ocean and sky backdrop, it occurred to me that this monster doing all these incredible spiraling flips with the hook at the end of my line in its mouth wasn't, in the scheme of things, that big a deal after all, so I let him go.

"What the fuck ya do that for?" the guide asked.

I lied.

"I lost him," I said.

How could I tell him that I had done it on purpose?

"He just got away somehow."

"Jesus," the guide said.

I felt like shit.  But already growing like a mushroom from this fuming pile of humiliation was humility.  There's a difference, you know.  Look it up.

It still pisses me off a little that I let him go.  But the beauty of it all is that it's no big deal.  I paid for it.  Technically, it was my fish, so I could do what I wanted to with it.  Right?  I merely exercised that  prerogative.

Same as with this website.

What an epiphany!  How empowering that moment!

The News Lampoon--Twisted News, Humor & Satire