nobody gets my mom wetter than…

allow me to be the 5,123,766,169th media outlet to say it – tonight ends an era.

…which for some of us, started before late night:

see, that was the first time i ever saw david letterman – as the sleazy self-help guru on mork & mindy. that was 1979 – a year before his bomb of a morning program, and three years before he started to do late nights.

sit down and shut up, folks!

but it was late night that stole our hearts, as well as many hours of sleep we probably shoulda got but we just couldn’t turn it off (keep in mind his show hit twenty years before the dvr was invented, and while you could record on vcr’s very few of us did). the top ten lists were usually home runs (with over six THOUSAND shows everybody’s gonna miss occasionally) and with almost a hundred appearances, it was one place we were guaranteed to see bill fucking murray typically doing whatever the fuck he wanted to do…

…and for that alone it was magical.

i watched my first late night with david letterman in the same room i’m watching the last late show, just upgraded from a shitty tweed sleeper sofa to a leather sectional and from a thirteen inch magnavox to a fifty-five inch toshiba. i still have to keep the volume down so i don’t wake the person in the master bedroom (back then mom and now the ufc) and i still have a dog curled up with me (then butterball (1974-1984)) now budnik.

the more things change the more they stay the same.

dave, you kept it real and did it your way…and for that we will forever admire and miss you. enjoy the ranch and fatherhood…i’m gonna go rewind the dvr since i just typed past the end of the commercial break…