POSTED FERUARY 18, 2002 -- Shame on you, beautiful people. You have bored poor Budd Rugg to tears. Night after night I chase a microwave tray of Dinty Moore Beef Stew with an overdose of Body Solutions and wake up the next morning as unshapely and miserable as ever. Who knows? Maybe I’m just getting old, but –let’s face it—the world has gone to hell in a hand basket. Planet Budd is not immune to the grinding damage of this world.
For six months I have been troubled by the same terrible dream: I am on a bus traveling along a dark road towards the great city of my dreams. I am surrounded on this bus by row upon row of the slumbering elderly, snoring, wheezing, wobbling in their seats with bulging plastic bags clutched in their laps. The bus driver is a giantess, scowling, chain-smoking, and guzzling from a plastic two-liter bottle of RC Cola. Budd Rugg, alone among the passengers on this bus hurtling through the darkness, is sleepless. Eventually, at some point in the night, the bus enters the city and makes its way through quiet, deserted streets. The giantess steers the bus beneath the awnings of a cavernous, crumbling depot downtown, and the doors wheeze open. My bags are deposited on the empty sidewalk outside the depot, the driver lumbers back aboard, the doors close with a gasp, and the bus disappears back down the wholly abandoned street.
The bus depot is dark, and locked tight. I take my bag and wander off into the city. The city is eerily silent; red traffic lights stretch away into the distance, seemingly paralyzed, for as far as the eye can see. Nothing is moving anywhere, and there is not a single business open anywhere along the dark streets.
I walk along for what seems like miles, until I come to an immense automobile junkyard, scrapped cars crushed and stacked everywhere. I make my way into this junkyard, towards a wrecked car whose dashboard glows from a dark heap in the distance. I can hear voices, a radio playing. There, abandoned in this wasteland of destroyed automobiles, I come upon a rusting Monte Carlo, its radio tuned to WCCO; I instantly recognize the familiar and comforting banter of Boone and Erickson. I wrench the door open, crawl into the backseat, and cry myself to sleep.
Budd Rugg has always had unrealistic expectations. I make no bones about it. Every time I talk on the telephone with my poor mother –who is increasingly indifferent to the unsightly whiskers that are sprouting from her chin—she concludes our conversation by imploring me, “Don’t do something crazy.” Which is at this point like begging a hyena to lay off the dead gazelle.
After all these years I suppose I have given up the notion that I will one day see my name in lights, but I still can’t help thinking that I deserve to at least travel in a small, warm bubble of light, or to bask in the overflow light of brighter beings. I would even settle for groveling in their long, dark shadows. Can I help it if I have long lived in a world where Brian Lambert burns more brightly than the Dalai Lama? Can I help it that my own peculiar fantasies have involved such elaborate scenarios as the one where I invite world explorer/Elton John groupie Jerry Zgoda into my modest home for a private slide show and feed him macaroni and cheese and tator tots until he vomits in my foyer? I cannot help it, but even these most modest of fantasies have begun to recede into the darkness of the lost city of my dreams.
Real celebrities are too omnipresent and elusive, and the thought of worshipping such distant gods bores me to tears. Turn on the television at any hour of the day or night and it seems like you see the same cast of characters wherever you look; I feel like I’m trapped in hell with the cast of Cheers and Friends, and not a single one of these dreadful, boring, beautiful people can hold a candle to Randy Salas or any of the other faceless, mysterious bylines in the local newspapers. Substantial disillusionment aside, Budd Rugg continues to maintain that he would rather have Jules Dyson sneeze on him in a crowded room than share a bubble bath with Angela Lansbury.
Yet some days I feel like I’m about to swell up and float away like a bubble. I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. Time was when I had the energy to jump up and dash out the door at the mere prospect of encountering someone like Moose Miller at a local used car lot. But the sad truth is that since I have returned from the Twin Cities from my real-world wakeup call Budd Rugg has felt a bit, well, jaded. Perhaps even bitter. Is it my imagination or have we become somewhat lax in our standards when it comes to media celebrities? I’m sorry, but even ga-ga Budd Rugg has a very difficult time embracing someone as plainly, shamelessly average as Mike “Mumbles” Max. Such a man –with the low-wattage star quotient of a nightlight—is an affront to Budd Rugg’s zeal. I know it’s catty and bitter, but if a man like that can make a name for himself in these towns, shouldn’t there be a place for poor, pitiful me?
How is it, I ask myself, that such a plain man –albeit one with obviously hyperactive salivary glands—as Mike Max can now pass himself off as a media celebrity in these towns? What in heaven’s name have we come to? Who knows how it happens? Surely some powerful tribunal anoints these people. Sid Hartman, Bill Carlson, and Barbara Flanagan sit down over beefsteaks and cocktails, a crippled goat is sacrificed, they all shout and wave their arms and slobber all over their bibs and 
eventually they send a smoke signal up the chimney at Murray’s and –voila!—Mike Max is a star. And, really, who is Budd Rugg to quibble? I bow down. It may smart initially to worship a small-g god as plainly false as Mike Max, but I suppose I’ll get used to it. What choice do I have?
For a year or so I thought perhaps it was time to hang it up; even poor, wretched CJ is getting old and boring; and she’s clearly as bored with you as I am. Let’s face it, most days CJ is about as fresh as Dollar-Store Masengil. I started to think to myself, I can’t feel anything for Mike Max, a man more obsessed and fawning and hyperventilating than Budd Rugg himself. I could care less what he does in his private time. Yet even such a milquetoast sad sack as Mike Max has demonstrated anew the oldest, surest Budd Rugg truism: let even the most undistinguished mediocrity hang around long enough and poor Budd Rugg will eventually find his fat, helpless heart wobbling at the mere sight of said mediocrity standing in line at Bruegger’s. I understand that these are sad, lean times, and an aging media parasite must take what he can get. Still, how can I feel anything but ashamed when I find myself helplessly excited over even the most innocuous Mike Max sighting?
God knows, though, I’d like more from you people, but if Mike Max is the best you can give me, well, what choice do I have but to embrace him, however queasily? 
But, really, is it too much to ask that you –my ever more distant and aloof media friends and heroes—drop me a line from time to time? Surely even Mike Max has some twisted proclivities that would further endear him to Budd Rugg. Surely some one among you can confirm for me the rumors that Dan Barreiro has shaved himself as bald as a Vienna sausage, right down to his eyebrows. Honestly, Budd Rugg loves Bea Arthur as much as anyone, but don’t we have aging wrecks of our own I could celebrate? I refuse to believe that there aren’t homegrown, hometown shenanigans going on in these towns that I need to know about. Toss a spitball in a local newsroom and you’re sure to hit a drunk whose most prosaic and humiliating daily exploits would make for more entertaining fodder than the juiciest Judith Krantz or Sidney Sheldon novel.
Budd Rugg doesn’t want much from you; all I ask is that you be interesting, be tragic and beautiful and petty and newsworthy. I want what you want; it’s not enough to be loved –you know this—or even to be desired; what I crave –what we all crave—is for people to want my life.
Is that too much to ask?
Please, people, send any and all media gossip and mindlessly trivial information to your old friend Budd Rugg, at buddrugg@cursor.org