The temperature was in the sixties and so was my score. Okay, the temperature was in the thirties and my score was in the eighties. But I decided long ago that if I ever wrote a book, the first line would be, “The temperature was in the sixties and so was my score.” Why? Because I like the way it sounds.

I’ve been making sounds since the day I was born, and since 1981 I’ve been paid to make sounds. Gibberish is my second language. Some would say it’s my first language, because I speak it fluently and frequently. It’s a language that’s hard to understand. But this is the first time I’ve put gibberish on paper to be read rather than heard, and I’m not really quite sure how it will sound. Will it lose something in the translation?

But I’ve gotten off the beaten path here. Unfortunately, I didn’t walk a straight and narrow path. I took the path less traveled, a.k.a. the Long and Winding Road. A road filled with potholes, roadblocks, no passing zones, and unmarked police cars. But why would I follow that Long and Winding Road? The better question for me has always been, why not? I’ve always enjoyed taking a hairpin turn at breakneck speeds. Just make sure if you do, your hands are at eleven and five on the wheel and the dial is at 100.3 from noon until three

Why did I write this book? Because the public demanded it. And my publisher demanded it after giving me an obscene advance. Besides, I have a lot to say about . . . nothing. If it worked for Jerry Seinfeld, then why not for me?

What follows in this “memoir” is a loose collection of stories, tales, yarns, and musings. Random thoughts and faded memories. Some contain the truth, the whole truth, or some semblance of the truth. Others, none of the above. You’ll have to venture a guess which of the aforementioned applies to each of the missives contained in this weighty tome. Or you don’t have to bother with guesswork at all: Can you enjoy a magician’s bag of tricks without knowing how he pulled the cat out of the bag? Or the genie out of the bottle? A tortoise out of his shell? A rabbit out of a hat? Here we go again. Wandering aimlessly on this piece of paper with a pen acting as a compass. But the pen is mightier than the sword. But I’m not sure what kind of protection a pen can provide while wandering through a closet filled with skeletons. If I owned a dog, I would have him bury the bones in the backyard. But I’m a cat guy, and you can’t fit the bones of the many skeletons in my closet in a litter box.

But my attraction to cats has more to do with the number of lives available to them. Nine. I added them up, and I’ve been fired eight times in my life, which means this is it. The end is near. But is it the beginning of the end, the middle of the end, or the end of the end? Who knows? Maybe the Shadow knows? But I’m afraid of my own shadow, and a black cat crossing my path. What I’m trying to say is, this appears to be the end of the road less traveled. The final wayside rest on that Long and Winding Road. Exit up ahead, stage left.

I’m a radio dinosaur, and KFAN is my La Brea Tar Pit. Someday archeologists and paleontologists will sift through the rubble that is 1600 Utica Avenue South and stumble across my skeletal remains with my cold, dead, rigor mortis–laden lips  attached to a microphone. A Neumann BCM 104 microphone, to be exact. Accept no imitations. So here it is. The Common Man’s story. His opus. His Pentagon papers. I did it. I finally wrote that book. Enjoy, because life is short and so is this book.

(This introduction was the first passage I wrote for the book. I’m told most authors write the introduction after the conclusion of the book. The editor thought it went in too many directions and didn’t make a lot of sense, but I like it that way. This way you’ll know I really did write this book, and not some ghostwriter.)