Weatherman Goes Pulp Fiction on Groundhog Day

Roanoke TV weekend weatherman Matt Lamont* just couldn't take it anymore. The hordes of screeching fans who tore at him like lions on a wildebeest as he left the WSLS station each Saturday and Sunday night, thought of him like meat. It was crazy the way women and men alike begged on their knees to pleasure him, exposing themselves and throwing bling, drugs and underwear, hoping for a glance. And to the 10 percenters, the hangers-on and the flunkies who kissed his ass and bought him drugs, he was nothing but a gravy train; a gold mine. The yes-men, the liars, the lifestyle, were too much. And then came Groundhog Day.

Groundhog Day - the most self-abasing day of the year for weathermen. The day when the best computers and mathematical models man designs don't matter. The day when fronts, millibars and radar are meaningless. The tragic day when a "large squirrel" as Bill Murray put it, trumps human ingenuity to cast a prediction the country respects more than the U.S. Government itself. It was Groundhog Day when Matt almost ended his life with a heroin overdose.

It's true! A local weatherman went Pulp Fiction style on Groundhog Day.

Pep predicted it! Sort of. He always called Matt "Rummy" because he'd come on the air red-faced and watery-eyed as often as not. It was clear to anyone with a careful eye that there was something wrong with the guy, but I assumed he was ill and that his medication put him off-kilter . . . Well, it was his medication!

*Matt Lamont is not his real name, but you can read his real name in the articles linked above.