For many years now I have found myself driving at night in unfamiliar places listening to the radio – it comes with my job as a traveling auditor. Each time that the Delilah Show comes on, I can’t bring myself to change the channel. It should be noted that I don’t really like this about myself but that’s the way it is.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the premise of the Delilah Show, she’s a silky-voiced DJ who takes calls from the broken-hearted, jilted lovers, recovering addicts and other emotional black holes to pretend that she cares about their respective problems after they pour their hearts out to her on her nationally syndicated radio show. Her solution to each problem? Play a song. Dedicate it to the caller or to the subject of the caller’s source of pain to make things all better.

I get wrapped up in listening to all the tales of woe and frequently wonder (sometimes aloud in the solitude of my rental vehicle) if the caller might better their situation by taking some sort of action rather than starting a pity party for themselves on a nighttime radio show? It makes me feel almost exactly like I felt when I watched episodes of Breaking Bad…that ‘this is KIND of relatable, but I’m SO glad that I’m not caught up in this kind of stuff’ feeling.

But one thing that bothers me more than anything and gets me really fired-up is when the caller finishes the story and then asks Delilah if she might play a song that would capture the essence of the situation. “WHY WOULDN’T YOU PICK YOUR OWN SONG!”, I’ll sometimes scream at the top of my lungs. If you’re going to call a radio show to carry on like that, shouldn’t you at least come prepared? Maybe you’re in your current predicament because you can’t master such basic life skills as making trivial decisions for yourself? Then I start to think whether or not it’s healthy for me to get myself worked up by this? Then I think about whether or not I should continue listening to Delilah and wonder if I am the only heterosexual male in his mid-40’s who can’t seem to change the dial when I hear her show? And how I could probably advance my station in life if I could make better use of times like these, over-analyzing relatively trivial things, and, instead, listen to some Tony Robbins audio books or some of those Ted Talk things.

I have no answers to those questions but I often come to the conclusion that, at minimum, I should explain all of this ad nauseam to Delilah by calling into her show and then requesting Overkill by Men At Work. At least I would be ready with my own song selection.