Easy shift.

It's a process of learning not to panic. Of knowing where things are and not being surprised by things. Of doing things at the right time -- not early, and not late. Of keeping every little thing as drama free as possible. First time in a month my shift didn't have anything unusual happening to it. I didn't even have many carts that needed playing. I was nursing the board. Went online and looked at porn. Follow the link if you don't believe me.

Somebody *seriously* needs to buy me at lease one each of the RCA 44 and 77 series ribbon mics from the 'thirties. You can still get 'em, in good working order, for under $2,000 apiece. I'm not sure which design I prefer, you see, and need to live with it for a while and check them out against eachother. I would *so* kill to go on the air with one of those.

I'm still the doorman.

But not at Foxes.

Worked one day with Charles this week during which he spent all day planting pansies dressed in a diving suit.

Yes, a diving suit. He told me late in the evening he'd worn it because it was cold when he'd woken up, only to realize it was the only clean warm thing he had -- not counting the various assorted coats from Arney's, Barney's, Hermès, La Martina, Ralph Lauren (purple label only, of course) and Verugamo, none of which he'd *ever* plant in.

Of course he didn't tell me *that* until he'd gotten me to believe -- I mean *completely* believe -- that he was actually an avid and experienced scuba diver, and a skydiver as well, or least *had* been before his proclivities for diving ran him into sufficient financial trouble that he wound up planting pansies for a living.

If fags are truthtellers, they're also beautiful liars, or at least can be. He had me hooked. His story was believable, the way he told it, and what's more, was presented in such a way that I *wanted* to believe it, and for the sake of the moment, I did.

Then again, maybe it *is* true, and he only came to think better of telling me after he'd explained everything. There's no telling with Charles. To love him is to love the mystery.

He eventually put on some little christmas-coloured jingle-bell thing in his hair that I think was *intended* for dogs, and wrapped a sarong around his waist. Sissy and I were more than just amused, we were *charmed*. If anyone wonders where the word "fairy" comes from, you need look no further than Charles on that day -- he was weaving magic in the garden. Of course, later on, when one of the minions from the cleaners or the dog groomers or someone of that ilk came by, he got self-conscious about being dressed that way. I don't know why. I wish I had the guts to plant pansies in a diving suit. Perhaps when I'm as old as he is. ;^)

I work with him a couple of days later and he's breathing fire on my arrival. Ostensibly 'cause I came in later than I said I would, but I suspect because he had to slam in pansies at the manor on the day the "lady" of the manor was set to return.

Oh, by the way -- the lady of the manor (*not* to be confused with Sissy) was in California when the wildfires started. A couple of months ago, her house got hit by lightning, which I only know because it totally screwed up the sprinklers. What next, I wonder, may hit her: perhaps a plague of locusts? The way god hates this woman *almost* proves his existence to me (not to mention his infallible, Old Testament sense of justice).

Anyway -- *after* the diving suit day, Charles is in one of his blackest moods ever when I show up. By now I know it's a mood, and that he's turning around and giving just some hint of whatever shit he got from someone else to whoever happens to show up at the wrong moment.

A couple of years ago I would have gotten all wounded about it and stopped talking to him, in a huff. Now? Fuck it. We've got to get these goddamned pansies in, and I'll know he'll get over it regardless what I do. I'm learning.

An hour or two later he's more or less back to normal.

By the time he's seen that yeah I really did figure out what to do with all those goddamned pansies even though I showed up late, all is forgiven. His worst nightmares have not come true, because I did show up in time to get the pansies in. We sit around after work smoking cigarettes and such on the "sidewalk cafe" portion of Sissy's property.

Charles is devoted to Sissy. I'm devoted to Charles. He sits up waiting for her to get home and attend to her needs. I sit up waiting for him to get done attending to Sissy's needs and try to attend to his. Not that he's making me stand at attention in livery or anything. I enjoy his company more than that of almost anyone else I know. And while he's gone attending to Sissy, I get a chance to look through his collection of books and things.

This time, Sissy's just coming home from a dinner and he thinks he may be detained in the hose for a while, so he shows me a film called "Kriemhild's Revenge". It's the second in Fritz Lang's 1924 (or thereabouts) two-film series based on the Nibelungenlied. Silent, of course -- but with a new performance of the original score. It was one of the most visually engrossing films I've *ever* seen. I don't know what prompted him to show it to me -- possibly the fact that he'd been in a foul mood when I showed up, and after we'd gotten to talking about costume and German history, the two-and-a-half hour film was the best possible setup for the punchline he had coming: "if you *ever* see me dressed like that, keep *very* far away".

For Charles, that's an apology. God bless him, he'll never, *ever* say "I'm sorry" in the way they make you say it in kindergarten; but as gawd is my witness he'll *always* make right anything he even *thinks* that may have done you wrong, if he did it. He'd be offended if I described him as anything so pedestrian as "ethical". So I won't. He's fashionable. Charming. Exquisite. Outrageous.

In his "if you ever see me dressed like that" comment, he was, of course, referring to Kriemhild. If you know Wagner, this *isn't* the tale Wagner told in his Ring cycle! But if you know Wagner, the general contour of events should be deeply familiar. It's a different adaptation of the tale Wagner based his Ring cycle on. In the films -- and, I presume, in the Nibelungenlied, Kriemhild and Brünhilde are two separate and distinct characters. There's lots of other stuff that would make your head spin even more if you're not already a fan of Wagner or the Nibelungenlied -- or both.

Anyway. All that matters for the purposes of enjoying this film -- besides an operatic sense of timing and a silent movie buff's sense of visual nuance -- is that Siegfried was married, not to Brünhilde (as in Wagner), but to Kriemhild (who figures not at all in Wagner's "Ring"). So Siegfried gets killed by Hagen, which would be fine and dandy, except that two of Kriemhild's brothers are sworn by oath to protect Hagen, since Hagen is sworn by oath to protect the Kriemhild's eldest brother, King Gunther, who is a goddamned ineffective chickenshit, but who approved the marriage between Siegfried and Kriemhild in the first place.

And so to *way* oversimplify a fairly complex story: When the film "Kriemhild's Revenge" opens, Kriemhild is mourning for Siegfried. She asks her brothers to expose Siegfried's killer, but all refuse, because of the oath that Hagen has sworn to Gunther, and the oath(s) Gunther's brothers have subsequently sworn to Hagen. There's one brother she prefers to the others -- I suspect he's the youngest, but I don't know, and cannot remember his name. (Charles' cellphone is busy, and yes, I did indeed just call him in Colorado to get the name, but this isn't a news story, so please, I beg you, let it slide).

Kriemhild gets a knight of Attila (yep, yep! *the* Atilla) to swear an oath to her -- not on the cross, but on the sharp edge of his sword, in his own name and that of his king, Atilla -- that anyone who did her wrong in Atilla's court would be made to pay.

Kriemhild goes off to marry Attila. Her departure from the Court at Worms is heartrending. Notwithstanding the pleadings of her mother, she only recognizes one of her brothers, and will not bid farewell to any of her other brothers, even as the priest asks whether she really wants to travel such a distance without making peace with her family, to which she replies, in no uncertain terms, that she wishes to do just exactly that. Beeyotch. I am in love.

Then she goes out to the snow covered grove where Siegfried was killed, scoops up a snowy handful of dirt stained with his blood, and swears revenge in the name of the earth. I think it's aspen trees but I'm not sure, maybe they're birches -- she's out amidst the trees when she does this. But she's wearing a floor-length thing that's almost like a burqa except with this triangular design around the head and shoulders and the visuals are simply STUNNING.

Then she arrives at Attila's court. Her costumes get increasingly elaborate as the film moves on and picks up steam. By the end she looks like a Gustav Klimt painting. And the way the Huns are portrayed in this film -- less than subhuman. They're goddamned monkeys. But Attila's clearly the king of the court, having won the most fights, and being the most brutally scarred. He's a monster -- but he wears a quadruple tiara in the style of the Vatican's triple tiara. (Never hurts to outdo the pope, I guess.) He falls in love with the cold Kriemhild on sight and swears the oath that no one shall offend her in his court without dying a hundred deaths.

Then, next we hear, about nine months later (maybe more), Attila is busy laying siege to Rome, when he gets the news that Kriemhild has borne him a son. He returns at once, and swears to fulfill any wish Kriemhild has. She, of course, wishes that her brothers be summoned to Attila's court.

And they are.

Attila offers to fight Hagen in a duel to the death, but Kriemhild insists that he have him assasinated. But Attila can't do that, because Hagen's a guest, as are all of Kriemhild's brothers. Kriemhild goes surreptitiously behind Attila's back to promise a shield full of gold to anyone who brings her Hagen's head. She's in the habit of dropping bags of gold into the hands of the poor.

I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say, everyone dies. Everyone. Horribly. It's a tragedy. But it's a great fuckin' film. Beats the pants off "Metropolis", if you ask me. It's overwhelming.

Anyway -- by the time Charles came back from attending to Sissy I was watching the Summer Solstice feast and feeling sorry for the little kid who played Attila's son and was completely wondering what would happen next. He could tell I was totally into it. I can't believe Hagen did what he did on the feast table. Sick. Wrong. Totally.

So enough about gardening.

Thursday Jim calls and asks if I'd be willing to cover ATC that evening. Uhm, YES. I double check with Charles to make sure there are no super-urgent things happening that day and next thing you know I am at the station.

It was a disaster of a broadcast. One sloppy break, and I forget it, moving on to the next one. Only the next one's worse. And the one after that. Yeesh.

Next day I go in to the station to cover ATC again, which I'd agreed to some time back, and everything is smooth. Two minor mistakes for the whole two-hour drivetime broadcast with its eleven or so breaks, but it actually sounds pretty good.

It comes and goes but I figure it's not learned overnight. I was actually happy with yesterday's broadcast. Not satisfied, maybe, but happy.

Then to a live remote -- at the cooperage. I've always wanted to go inside that funny building on Lomas shaped like a whiskey barrel. I've known it's a respected music venue. Tonight I had a reason. Marcos, the program director, is retiring, and there was a live remote set up for his retirement party.

The lady who runs Youth Radio said it best: Marcos is the opposite of a gatekeeper, he's an opener of doors. He's done this for literally *hundreds* of people over the 20-plus years he's worked there.

He opened one for me.

Least I can do when he comes to the after dinner party (live broadcast or no) is open the door for him to his party with amazing live salsa music being broadcast live.

P.P.S. -- you are the *best* weather bed music ever.

OK.

Now I've listened systematically to everything you've ever recorded in the studio.

Yeah, you're still "weather bed" music.

But shit, dude, I'm a news guy! What the hell more can I do? We can't play music beds under *news* stories. Pathetic though it may sound:

You guys make the best weather music ever.

That's not an insult, believe it or not. I just have to watch the timing super-carefully and audit everything before I air it.

And if people *really* knew what I think is the single greatest track you've ever recorded, they'd laugh *me* off the face of the planet. Not you.

Like I care.

It kicks ass.

P.S. -- yes, you *are* my "music bed" for "weather".

Dear Radiohead:

You've meant so much to me over the years that I don't hesitate for a moment to spend forty pounds sterling on your latest release. And I love it. And I can hardly wait to get the box set.

But with your latest release clocking in at a mere 42 minutes, and not breaking new musical ground so much as exploring old ground more fully, yes, the opening measures to "Reckoner" are indeed my "music bed" for "weather" on the night of the first National Weather Service freeze warning for my listening area.

Not that you can ever do anything to make me stop listening. Not that I'll ever stop paying to listen. You've changed my life. More than once.

But you're better than "weather bed" music. I know that.

Forgot: the Sunday preemtion.

Preempted ATC on Sunday afternoon for a speech by David Barsamian on "Targeting Iran".

The phone rang off the hook in the control room, starting before I even announced that ATC would return next week. People tuned in at their accustomed times expecting NPR, and wound up getting hit with an hour of Pacifica-style broadcasting, complete with allegations of war crimes against sitting (ahhem) so-called (gurgle) presidents (cough) and the like. It probably didn't help that last week was the pledge drive, and the week before that Sunday ATC got preempted for a Republican Candidates' Forum. Too many weeks in a row with no Sunday evening newscast makes the listeners restless.

Like it or not, people depend on ATC because it's, well, dependable. And listeners tend to tune in at the same time, over time, for the same sort of thing. And they may like variety, but damn it -- come the time they expect to hear headlines spoken by certain people in a certain way, after three weeks of interruptions for other things, they just get tired and desperately want things to go back to "normal".

What to make of it all? I'm not sure. I've made my opinion known around the station what might have been done better regarding the preemption; but I have no regrets whatsoever about having aired Barsamian. Not for a split second. It was a totally important speech, with *tons* of good information most listeners might not have known beforehand.

Marcos, the outgoing program director (he's been with the station for about twenty years) forwarded me some voicemails he'd gotten -- apparently evenly divided between "how dare you preempt NPR for this crazy hippy" and "this is more like it -- let's hear this guy every week instead of NPR's talking heads".

I guess it just goes to show you're doing a passable job gathering news if you piss *everyone* off equally! This sure ain't a line of business you go into if you're out to win popularity contests.

Maybe I should quit doing news and just be a food, fashion, garden, and interior design critic for the station. (I bet it would be easier to find a grant for that than for journalism.)

I could say more, but for once in my life, I'll think better of saying *more* than too much, and *just* leave it right there, having *just* said too much. :^)

My flubs, cont'd.

OK -- so there's this thing Steve does on board that sounds *great*, and I never even noticed it 'til after I'd run board for ATC a couple of times and found myself playing the "bum-bum -- bah-bah-bum-bum" theme music *way* too long with nothing else to say until it's time to join the network, clean. *Besides* timing his billboard out ahead of time, he *doesn't* start the theme music *at* five o'clock. At five o'clock, he says, "It's -- five o-clock!", and *then* he starts the theme music, like at 5:00:02. This buys a couple of seconds and makes for a good, solid intro to the program, with time left for the theme music to play out at the end.

I tried it today. Went into the control room a good 25 minutes early, lined everything up (Luciano had all my carts pulled and laid out in order -- a *huge* help), and then at five sharp, just varying my words a little bit so it doesn't sound like I'm trying to copy Steve's technique (which I am, but don't tell anybody), I say "The time is -- five o'clock!" Then I hit "on" for the CD2 module on board, which *was* cued up with the top-of-the-hour theme music -- twenty minutes ago. Shazam. Perfect silence.

The CD players go to sleep after about 20 minutes in cue. This is something they tell you, again and again, and *still* under some circumstance or other, it just gets forgotten. I'd timed out my billboard *very* carefully so I could let the first little fanfare play its heart out, then start talking over the "bum-bum -- bah-bah-bum-bum" thing. But there is no fanfare. There's no "bum-bum -- bah-bah-bum-bum" thing. There's nothing. Yikes.

Well, damn. Not enough time to coordinate my right hand with my left, the very awake board going out over air with the sleeping CD player ("-- Servo On", indeed!), but just enough time that I have to start talking a little bit *early* so people don't think we've gone off the air completely. Which is OK, I guess, except it screws up my timing right before the cut to network, and it *doesn't* sound *anything* like ATC is beginning without the fanfare. Buh. If nothing else, I'm *starting* to understand the art of "stretching" what I've got to say. I shouldn't have to, but uhm, well, I guess everyone makes these kinds of mistakes, sooner or later. Apologies to listeners for experimenting on their ears, during their drivetime. Learn from mistakes, and move on.

The rest of the broadcast is pretty smooth. Not perfect, by a long shot, but better, frankly, than I had expected. There were a couple of damn near perfect joins -- I'm down to shaving hundredths of seconds off to make them *perfect*. Read the headlines at 5:04 and did a piece at 5:30:30 on the Bingaman teleconference.

I say "did a piece" because I produced it as a 1:31 "package" so that I could just click the proper button in the computer *once*, without having to line up multiple clips and read live between them, while reading script *and* watching the clock *and* looking for the pointer on the computer screen to make sure I clicked on the next proper thing. On its own, yeah, it sounded OK. But when, after it was over, I go live on mic to read a funding credit I realize (live!) that I sound *distinctly* different, recording in the newsbooth around 4:35 and speaking live on air at 5:32:01 (more or less). I used maybe three or four clips of Bingaman and made a point to end the piece with *his* voice, and not mine, which I *knew* wouldn't work. Still, it didn't sound right, to me. Is it the acoustics of the different rooms? Is it my state of mind? Is it my angle relative to the mic? Is it my breathing? I honestly don't know, but I'm *not* doing that again! I'd rather risk getting lost lining up soundclips than sound like two whole different people. Doing it like that, frankly, is a crutch. It may be "excusable", once or twice, but I've done it twice now, and it *doesn't* sound *good*.

I am tired of sounding like I'm training on board by subbing the odd shifts that come open. I can only guess that listeners feel about the same. Again, I apologise here, because apologizing on air wastes time and usually sounds bloody stewpid, besides which it only draws attention to mistakes that most people might not even notice.

I hope.

And I didn't answer calls to the request line. With apologies, again, in here, I'm just *not* that good yet. Were you calling to tell me I sounded like a bloody fool? Or that I sounded great? Or that the story that just aired was dead on *perfect*? Or that it was *horrible*? I honestly don't know.

Richard Towne, the station manager draws an analogy on this -- when you're on air, even if your audience is only ten thousand (it's *way* more for ATC), that's like having five sold-out Popejoy Halls all in one place, and would you tell them all to wait while talking to somebody in the wings? Of course not. I *want* to answer the phone in there. I really do. But I'm not that good yet. I know it.

Speaking of crutches, I've been planning out the breaks on index cards and flipping them so I don't get all googly-eyed and totally forget what's coming up for the next break. Jim recommended that I "start to move away from those as soon as possible, or at least keep in mind that you'll want to move away from those in time". When he said it (the day after my first shift on the day Domenici resigned), it honestly sounded to my ears kind of like "I want you to dive off a 500-foot cliff, wearing a Barney's trenchcoat and Vergugamo shoes, into the roiling sea -- but before you hit the water, make sure you've dialed up the Coast Guard to tell them how far down the shore they can expect to find your body -- and if you can, call Barney's first so they'll expect to have to clean and retailor the coat".

Today I started out early writing out everything to do on every break on index cards and quickly found that it was actually *way* more trouble than it's worth, past maybe the first break or two (which are so simple they should not need cards to begin with). For lots of reasons.

First because "borrowing the log" from the control room in order to xerox it and then write out every single cart you have to play is a royal pain in the tocus, not only for me, but for whatever poor soul happens to be in CR when I go in to ask as sheepishly as possible if I can just casually pull out the carpet from beneath *their* broadcast, hours in advance of my own.

Secondly, because there are any number of better ways to spend the several hours before you're set to go on air than making sure you air whatever carts whenever you're supposed to. (They're in the log.)

Third, because you're working in a newsroom and the nature of a newsroom is that stories break! They don't *announce* that they're breaking three hours ahead, they just *break*, and you've *got* to cover them, as soon as possible. (Not running a breaking story because you've "planned everything out" three hours before is *not* an option!)

Fourth, because once you're in the control room, you really only have a limited number of stacks of paper you can read from during any break, and if you know the difference between "Wire Copy" and "Local News" and "Weather" and can actually backtime to the post, and ad-lib a few seconds "pad" when needed, you are *way* better off than going from what you wrote out some hours before newsworthy things actually started happening.

Fifth, because it really *isn't* all that hard, if you *know* the program log and various kinds of stories you'll be running, to fit everything in. There may be a couple of "scrambly" moments, but if you're *really* prepared, you know them without having written it out five hours beforehand.

Sixth, and finally, any maybe most importantly, because the *last* thing that you really *need* in front of you is yet another thing to follow from a piece of paper when you're on the air.

I may still write out my top and bottom breaks on cards just in case, but only as emergency backup.

So I had my first few breaks all planned out on the cards today, and then started to listen to the carts in cue and realized "this one has background music" and "this one is only words". So then and there, I just broke out of leaning on the cards. Next thing I know, I've got it covered and the cards are just "clutter" on the board as I find myself several breaks in with the card from half an hour back cluttering my board.

Things I *need* to improve: reading headlines during hour one (which is actually hour two). I skipped them today because I am the sort of person who listens to both hours and I don't like hearing headlines repeated. But I need to get into reading them during both hours -- the listenership "rolls over", for the most part. I just get to where I am slightly crazed from backtiming and figure since I'm not running the locally produced stories in hour two (which is hour one) again, I can just slide on headlines. No way. That's a crutch. I know it. I'll get over it. Soon. It didn't help that today most of the wire stories were "if it bleeds, it leads" type deals I'm sure the TV stations and commercial radio stations covered to death.

The people who listen deserve the best that I can give. I'm just not quite there yet. Give me a few more times on board and see if I can't pull it off.

Best ATC ever.

That was a HOOT!

Showed up around eleven. Puttered around the newsroom, accomplishing painfully little, and wandered back and forth a few dozen times between the control room and the phone room as needed, mostly ferrying papers. Helped Spencer Beckwith line up a phone interview for Performance New Mexico in the newsboth at one point 'cause Studio C was all discombobulated for reasons I never bothered to ask. (I assume, at this point, that when the Station Engineer is on his hands and knees beneath the console with a drill in one hand and a thousand wires in the other that we're simply having "technical difficulties", and that asking him "whatcha doin'?" is among the least helpful things on the face of the earth I could possibly do, even if I do wonder.)

Stuck around some more, drank too much coffee, had more than my share of volunteer food, and did some more editing on Barsamian's speech 'til I was totally worn out by his voice and just didn't know what else to cut. Got it down to under an hour with all the careful shaves that I could manage and am ready to hack out a big old chunk somewhere -- not sure where exactly -- but I've got several options. Probably will be some supporting examples and a few anecdotes. I approached it kinda "backwards" -- the expendable hundredths and tenths of seconds are gone, and now I've got to start hacking seconds and maybe even a few minutes. The most important thing to preserve is the overall message of his talk, and I have no doubt I can do that now -- I've heard the whole thing at least six times, end-to-end. I don't know how he does what he does on Alternative Radio -- I respect it completely, but that long-form kind of job takes a whole different *kind* of concentration.

By 4 PM I was completely, totally exhausted. "Why am I doing this?" I would ask myself. Basically because nobody asked me to leave, and there was nothing else better that I knew I could be doing right then. That, plus the fact was just kind of quietly hovering in the back of my brain that after this was over I'd be free to come and go and cover stories and host drivetime news more or less as I please.

At five Jim and Elaine and Linda and I all head into the control room for the final push "All Things Considered" (ATC) pledge drive. Same old story. I can't speak for them, but I for one am weary and tired and just want the week to be over. People have been coming and going all week and everything from "I'm here to get a cup of coffee" to "we've got a different system to tally pledges" takes negotiation. I'm pooped! Then Elaine says "STANDBY", we put on our headphones, mics get faded up. The control room goes silent, and the silence is heavy and thick.

We all seem to become different people. Again, I am possessed by a deep enthusiasm that I *must* communicate, and *urgently*, because tomorrow *will* just be too late! Tomorrow, the phone room will be disassembled and turned back into the calm and stately conference room it usually is. (It's not really "stately", but I like the sound of "calm and stately".) We've only got two hours to finally convince anyone holding out that this is their last chance to pledge for the next several months, and *if* they love the news, even enough to sit through us bantering back and forth trying to get them to pledge money, they *need* to call this number *now*. They need to understand, they *are* the reason we are there. By this point in the week everyone's worked the scripts to death. Everything has been said that *can* be said. The talking points are talked to death, and we've got nothing else to do but speak from the heart and try to get people to call and pledge. Right now. Please. Thank you for that call. Here's the number.

We whip ourselves into a crazy, happy froth. Normally pitches are politely laid-back. Casual. Conversational. The person talking will indicate through eye contact and gentle points who's getting handed off to next. The board op will make any number of gestures (the best are gentle "wrap it up" motions, typically at thirty and ten 'til the join, unlike the "frantic decapitation" gestures I found myself making on Sunday, since that was my first time mixing people live. I know that now! It's a wonder Steve and Tristan didn't decapitate *me*, after that!) With minutes ticking down, tonight, we start just volunteering to say things every time someone else says something that reminds us of something important, raising hands in the air, pointing at ourselves, jumping up and down in our seats like enthusiastic kindergarteners, and even just plain jumping in to say whatever comes to mind. It's a free for all, but it's *totally* fun, and it comes through over the air. Elaine's mixing five mics (including the one in the phone room) and a music bed live.

Mary B comes on to pitch the tote bag and gets my attention on it. Avery, the kid who was the "runner" between phone room and control room comes on air at the very end. It was an eerie flashback for me -- my mother just these last few weeks showed me a photograph of me at his age being interviewed on a KCOS (El Paso's PBS station) fund drive. We wind up bleeding over into Salsa Sabrosa because we're so painfuly close to our goal for the show. Wellington Guzman be praised, he let us finish "clean".

Then back to the phone room. There are ten phones in it. They ring in order -- first #1, then #2, and so on, all around the room. We had them all ringing much of the time. Of course it wasn't just us in the control room, it's also the volunteers answering the phones, and the runner bringing us tallies and yellow sheets with names of people to thank, and all the staff coordinating *everything* that you don't hear on air. And of course all the people at NPR putting together the show that people are tuned in for in the first place.

Every station does "goals" for pledge drives differently -- if memory serves me right, KCRW used to set goals in dollar amounts. At our station we do it by number of pledges, with no reference on air to dollar amounts. I don't know exactly why we do it that way, but that's the way it's been done for as long as anyone remembers, and for us, it seems to work.

Mary Oishi was bold this time around -- she set "goals" for each show a percentage higher than what we achieved in the spring. Systematic and fair: the percentage was the same for every show, whether the "baseline" from the spring was two calls or a hundred. It worked undeniable magic for a *lot* of shows. But I think, with tonight's ATC, we just hit the wall of what was physically possible to take in terms of number of calls. Friday drivetime is *always* the busiest time. She's done a fine job of scheduling drawings and such so more people call sooner in the pledge drive, but it seems lots of people still put it off 'til the last possible minute.

If we'd had twenty phones instead of ten, I think we might well have exceeded the goal. As far as I can tell it's just a physical limitation. Is it worth rewiring the entire building? Do we even *have* a space for backup pledge-takers? I honestly do not think so. I'm not complaining -- I just think we did about what we could do tonight, with what we've got to work with.

Here's how I understand it -- I'm sure someone with some math skills could explain it better, but this is how I see it. It typically takes 3-4 minutes to take a single pledge. Less if we're taking just the bare essentials ("I'm driving but here's my name and number, I'm pledging this amount, call me later if you have any questions!!! I've got to merge but just had to show my support for this show!!! There's a cop behind me!!! Bye!!!"); more if we're getting into comments and details ("well, I *did* prefer when you had that show on in this time slot, I mean, I still listen to it when I can, but it worked better for me back then, and why *did* they reschedule it? Oh, I see. But if you'll pass the word on, I *would* appreciate it. And by the way, there's this *amazing* talk show out of Minneapolis that I hope your program director will listen to sometime . . .").

That means it's *usually* 3-4 minutes before phone #1 (or #2, or another low-numbered phone) is free to take another call. If it takes that long for the circle of phones to "ring around", that's fine, because it means the last caller's getting picked up on about as the first is getting thanked one final time. But if -- and this *isn't* a physical problem -- this is human nature -- everyone puts off pledging until the last day of the drive, and all the phones fill up in under two minutes, well -- yikes.

We're still on air pitching the number to call and people calling in are getting busy signals and even calling the control room to say that they can't get through. At that point, too, it gets confusing 'cause based on what we hear in the control room, we don't hear phones ringing, we just hear talking. Does that mean that no one's calling, or that there are no free phones and all the talking that we hear is volunteers taking pledges? Should we pitch *harder*, or calm down, talk slower, and ask people to try again?

I'm not saying this to snipe at anyone. I just seriously wonder enough to ask these things as rhetorical questions. In a *perfect* world the control room and the phone room would always be on the same page -- and here it seems the public TV stations have a natural advantage over us, 'cause viewers can *see* when *all* the phone volunteers are on the line, and so can the hosts. But in radio, the considerations are -- well -- different. Both the control room and the phone room get crowded during pledge drives. And we can't have all that "noise" in the control room, to begin with. And even if we could, we couldn't have the control room and the phone room any closer, just because of how the building we are in is laid out. What's the solution? I honestly don't know.

I'll spare you the off-mic control room banter, except for one brief exchange between Elaine, Jim, and myself:

Jim: So you're killing the handoff.
Elaine: Yeah. I want to do a short weather.
Jim: How short?
Elaine: Really Short.
Me [mock "radio voice"]: It's seventeen degrees -- somewhere!
Jim [mock "radio voice"]: It may rain! Or -- it may not!

He *still* beat me by a syllable.

Ah well. I'll learn. ;^)

A google "adwords" slipup?

Best I can figure is that on the same front page I happen to write about working with a young sports reporter in one post, and then happen to mention drag queens in another.

The top ad from google? "19.99 Sports Bras -- Stock up for fall!"

Allrightly then.

Enjoy the internet, folks.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming . . .

Pledge drive week continues.

Little more to do at Sissy's but keep the pansies and violas alive with watering as often as needed. Takes a couple of hours to do it properly but doesn't need to be done every single day since it's cooling rapidly off now. So I'm spending lots of time at the station. That'll change when Charles gets back to town and we need to plant a few thousand additional flowers.

Hanging around the Control Room and Newsroom more these days than I did even back in the spring. It helps to have a few decent stories under my belt and to honestly feel I can do better work in there than in the phone room, most of the time. (I love working in the phone room, truly, but when I'm expecting three callbacks from three different people on two very different news stories that only I am following, I kind of need to be *in* the newsroom as often as possible.) I put off signing up for phone room shifts 'cause when the sheet went around the first time I was kinda chasing people down like mad and spending most of the rest of my time editing or preparing to cover for an overnight music shift I was crazy to agree to cover in the first place or figuring out the breaks during drive-time newsblock programming (which *no one* is *born* knowing how to do).

The scheduling is super-tricky: one week I'll stretch myself perilously thin, and the following week when everyone else is stretching themselves thin, I'm just sorta taking everything in stride and casually taking up slack wherever I can. What tomorrow will bring is anybody's guess.

Did what may be the first interview, by telephone, with the state's newest Supreme Court Justice, who was just appointed today. I really liked the way he talked. Most lawyers go in circles and won't ever just say "I can't comment" if they can't, but start expounding on Article Six Section Thirty-six, or lecture you from on high about the finer points of litigation strategy. They can literally spend twenty minutes saying that they have nothing to say.

This guy, on the other hand, struck me as pretty straightforward. He put *me* at ease, actually -- I was all nervous about talking to a Supreme Court Justice, while he seemed all happy that a reporter had finally thought to call him, directly. And he's *easy* to edit. Did a two minute thing with him mostly explaining how the judicial system works in New Mexico, in language anyone can understand. Not groundbreaking investigative work or anything but just sort of "New Mexico: meet your newest Supreme Court Justice". I think most New Mexicans don't even know we have a Supreme Court. Seriously. I *love* watching the courts, and I wasn't sure myself until recently. They don't make many headlines. It won't win any awards but it's a basic public service.

The appointment/election of judges here is a weird hybrid system -- we used to elect judges, but there was a judicial reform movement (about twenty years ago) which would have amended the constitution to allow for the gubernatorial appointment of judges from a pool of candidates named by a specially constituted Judicial Selection Commission. Then in order to pass the reform out of the legislature, it was amended before final passage to allow for the retention of appointed judges by election following their appointment. Huh!?

Basically, judges are appointed, and pretty much the minute they're appointed, they have to start campaigning for retention against candidates who haven't gone through any vetting process whatsoever. (Whether any judge up for retention has ever lost to a challenger, I don't know, but it would be interesting to look into.)

It's not what I'd intended to have him talk about, but he explained it well enough that I'm sure a lot of people will "get" it who hear the piece that didn't, before. Was I being "used"? In this case, I honestly don't think so. Sometimes people will *use* you (as a reporter) to get *their* particular viewpoint out there -- when they do, it is usually horribly skewed, and you can usually tell before you go on air that you're being manipulated. (That's why you kill stories. No fun, but that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach after two hours of editing is *nothing* compared to losing credibility with listeners, which can *never* be undone.) I got the impression that we were really kind of on an equal footing here -- both nervous and glad to be talking to eachother for our different reasons, when he just kinda happened to explain some purely factual thing quite well which not near enough people understand. If I'm wrong, well, I'm open to criticism.

It's a weird system, but that's what you get when you've got a state legislature that only meets for ninety days every two years and spends way too much of that time listening to mariachis and eating free food before they have to push out as much backlogged, amended-to-death legislation as they possibly can late at night in the final few hours of the session. ("VOTE!!!!") Far be it from me to suggest that the state legislature makes some bad laws, but if you ever wanted to concoct a recipe for making bad laws, you could at least get some key ingredients for doing so right here in New Mexico.

Red or Green?

Then a long distance, over-the-road trucker came in to the station from out of nowhere. A perfectly beautiful, gentle man. He'd called before he came in, but I hadn't heard anything about it -- I just walk into the control room and there he is with Steve and Jim and Paul and his 92-year-old mother. He just came by to show his support for the station -- he's been pledging since 1981. Amazing. They interviewed him on air, and I recorded him afterward doing a 54-second pledge pitch he'd written out by hand on the back of one of his truck logs. His favourite shows are Democracy Now and Alternative Radio.

That's one thing about the pledge drive -- it brings out some of the most surprising people who are deeply moved enough to do something extraordinary to help. It was a great spot. Heartfelt. Perfect on the first take. I didn't touch it -- didn't edit out a single silence, nothing. It was perfect. As is.

What else? Finally got myself a domain name! Not sure how the migration's gonna be handled but I don't think anyone'll get lost. Over the next couple of days you should be able to see this whole mess of a blog, warts and all, at xeltifon.com. I've wanted the domain name for a long time and figured now was the best chance to get it before it gets snatched up by some Chinese manufacturer of faulty intrauterine devices that lead to an epidemic of grotesque birth defects or something.

Need to finish up editing the Barsamian speech for Sunday. I think I've honestly done about all the "shaving off quarter seconds with razor blades" that I can and need to just take a machéte to the maybe one or two segments where he largely repeats something he's already said, even if he *does* say it to bring people back around to someplace near where he left off. (It's a METAPHOR, people.) I *hate* to cut out "examples" of what he's talking about. But if I have to, I can. Judiciously. The final stages of editing can be gruelling, but the sooner I stop bitching and moaning about it and start back in on it, the better. I just need to give it a little time between sessions so I don't get completely lost in the ocean of words.

Am covering either two or three "All Things Considered" shifts next week and the week after that. Not sure yet. Will check before it happens (obviously). I keep thinking "it's only so much time before life goes back to normal". Thing is, first time I think it it'll be one week. Then it's two. Then it's a month. At this point I hardly know what "normal" is.

(Soundtrack: Radiohead: "In Rainbows": Track 9, repeated 4x)

Was "normal" when I was miserably processing insurance claims? Trying desperately to stay out of jail? Risking my life every night for minimum wage to keep an old dive bar open for drag queens who alternately hated and used me? Hand-manufacturing tortillas by the hundreds of thousands during graveyard shifts in a paper hat while my coworkers routinely got murdered? Ducking behind the rolltop desk to avoid the bullets of the people robbing the Dairy Queen outside my front window? Driving clear across town every night at odd hours to avoid the odd speed-freak stalker boyfreind? Memorizing Milton, Joyce, and Nietzsche and trying to synthesize the three conceptually? Trying to keep a smelter from opening back up? Dodging bullets from LAPD? "Normal"? What the hell is "normal"? I honestly don't know.

All I know is I turn into someone different on mic, and I actually kind of like that person. He doesn't have to preach at people about how great he is, and if he starts windbagging it, trying to sound like Ed Murrow, I can just laugh when I flub it, loosen up, and try again. He just kinda talks about stuff that's happening right now and people kinda listen 'cause I guess *something* connects with them at some level I can't begin to comprehend when writing in the blog, because I don't hear my own voice as I'm speaking when I type.

All I know is the more I hang around the station, the better my chances of winding up on mic. The better my chances of becoming, ever so slightly, more the person I am that I like than my staying the person I am and have been forever that I don't like and can barely stand being around for even one moment longer.

A year ago: talking on air for the first time and hearing myself through headphones simultaneously, it felt like Paul on the road to Damascus. Or, nontheistically, a "Rinzai" versus a "Soto" Zen experience. Makes for a good story, but reality's not so archetypically simple. Blogging was this way for me for a time. Palace was before blogging. It's an ongoing thing. I'm still becoming who I want to be. I don't know who that is yet. But I'm closer than I've ever been before, and I know it.

I've been blogging for over two years. (Longer, if you count the original "Random Musings", which I did way before they had slick templates to automate "blogging" or even had an ugly neologism for it.)

I've been palacing for over ten.

I can only just begin to wonder how long I'll talk on radio.

Now I'm sticking around the station and gradually finding out, in fits and starts, that I have only just *begun* to find my voice.

Pledge drive week begins.

Pledge drive week started Monday. Had a morning shift in the phone room on Sunday and thought I was late when I woke up at 6:33 AM. Winds up the Sunday shift started at seven, not six. Whew. Was a mess since I didn't get to bed until late Saturday so went home to groom before my on-air shift. It was six kinds of goofitude getting that together, but we did, and did rather well. Was one slightly tricky transition but it didn't sound that way on air, so everything was grand. Most of the shows are bringing in way more calls than we'd expected or aimed for.

Downloaded Radiohead's "In Rainbows". Actually ordered the box set before downloading, because I've *never* been disappointed by anything they've put out, and forty pounds is not enough compensation for what their music has meant in my life. "In Rainbows" is no exception. I've already developed quite an attachment to some of the songs. It all seems to hold together better than "Hail to the Thief", too, which I enjoyed, but didn't quite seem to have the same structure as their best work. I highly recommend "In Rainbows".

This morning I went over to Sissy's to finish topdressing the pansies and violas. It was getting kind of critical by the lozenges near the fountain since the violas came to us not properly rooted out and they *needed* propping up -- all the more since they're what give definition to the beds (which are currently sunk in the lawn). But the dirty work of colour rotation, phase one is now done and now nothing remains for me to do but keep everything properly watered 'til Charles gets back and we get the flowers for phase two, which won't be near the vast operation phase one was. And then, of course, at some point, the manor's going to need its colours rotated, too. I like topdressing, honestly. It's dirty work but it brings out the colours and makes the new transplants perk up.

Went home to wash off as much of the compost from my hands as I could manage in short order, change into clothes not speckled with dirt, and head into the station for the first weekday afternoon drivetime newsblock pledge drive. They were very fully staffed so I kinda hung out in the newsroom waiting for a callback from a US Forest Service fire information officer about a forest fire happening in the Cibola National Forest. Not award-winning journalism, but a step up from "reading wire copy" that breaks up the voices on air. Mostly just intro-ed and outro-ed the soundclip and let *her* explain what was going on with the forest fire.

After news was over I headed into the booth (which becomes my super-secret lair at night) and edited David Barsamian's "Targeting Iran" speech from 30 August for broadcast on 21 October. (The station manager announced it during Saturday's ATC since we're not going to have carts playing for it during pledge week.) Spent three hours cutting out 14 minutes. He's good to edit in that he knows how to talk for someone who edits. He's hard to edit in that he goes in circles within circles which always wind up at a logical next step in his argumentation but you can't tell without hearing things fifteen times which things you can cut where and which you have to leave if what he says five minutes later is going to make *any* sense. He talks like some college professors -- which I enjoy listening to, but it's, well, "fun" to edit. You have to be *super* careful 'cause you could destroy his meaning without meaning to. What seems like an irrelevant aside may critically undergird something he says after he's said three other things, and if you cut it out before realizing where he was going, you ruin the structure of his talk. Cutting out the final six minutes to bring it in under time may be the most challenging part. I've already gotten rid of most of the humour and sarcasm, which is a shame because he really *doesn't* talk in long, unbroken streams of historical facts and figures. My challenge? Bring in a 1:37 speech in at 54 minutes without changing his meaning or leaving anything out that's central to his argument.

Tomorrow? Who knows? Charles may arrive out of nowhere and announce that forty flats of pansies are ready to get planted. Or I may go the station and spend all day walking around finding things that could stand being done. No telling 'til it happens.

New stove.

My mother came down to visit yesterday with a rented pickup truck *filled* with stuff.

Highlights?

A GAS STOVE. No more cooking on this electric range nonsense! Thirty minutes to boil water, indeed. Since the electric stove belongs to the landlord, I figure I may move it out onto the front glass-enclosed patio, which I intend to use as a greenhouse, and use it as a plant stand. The landlord's idea was to move it into the storm cellar -- but my god, I won't live here forever, and getting it down there is going to be damned near impossible. Getting it back up is going to be the *last* thing I want to have to think about when I'm trying to move out. So I'm figuring it's gonna turn into a plant stand which can be cleaned off and moved back into the kitchen on short notice when that time comes. A thousand thanks to Meredith for the stove -- it's *identical* to my grandmother's -- with not one, but *two* ovens.

A PHILCO RADIO. Well, really, just the empty husk of one, since my mother refinished it years ago and replaced *most* of the innards with equipment that actually worked at the time -- a 'seventies vintage turntable, cassette deck, AM/FM tuner and eight-track tape player. I don't *care* if we destroyed its resale value when we did that -- that's the stereo system I grew up listening to, and it's drop-dead gorgeous; and even has all its original knobs and facings. I figure the knobs are probably worth more than the rest of the thing combined.

MY ANIMATION TABLE. Remember when all animation went from flipped sheets of paper painstakingly traced onto celluloid sheets painted from behind to *digital*? Well, precisely one year before that definitively happened, I happened to buy an animation table with an Oxberry 12-field disk and backlighting unit. Damn, that was a stewpid purchase. Except now it's pretty unique. If worst comes to worst I can use it as a writing desk -- or better yet -- use it to display (for special occasions) some of the many fabulous drawings I happened to collect from certain cartoon studios back as I was just beginning to realize I have no aptitude for drawing whatsoever and will never, never, *ever* be an "animator" in the traditional sense of the word.

MY TRANSCEIVER. A late-sixties Swan 260 which I bought but never used after I got my Novice Class radio license from the FCC. The "CW" (Morse code) portion of the test was the hardest thing for me to get past -- but I did get past it, and got licensed. Since then, I've use CW in palace and enjoyed the hell out of it. Now I'm looking over my materials from way back then and find myself thinking things like "whoa -- I really *understood* all those schematics?" So now I'm toying with the idea of taking it up again -- only now, Morse code has got me *hooked*.

Ten thousand pansies.

We're just about done -- Charles and I -- planting in 140 flats of pansies and violas. Each flat contains eighteen four-packs of either pansies or violas (which hold up better under frost than the pansies). Do the math. We've planted over ten thousand pansies, just at this one house.

This year it's yellow violas for borders and blue or red pansies for beds. We're almost done.

Appparently the whole "I am a lousy worker and am not to work without Charles there" thing hasn't quite panned out. Charles spoke with the lady and the lady spoke with her book-keeper and apparently I am still welcome to work on the estate. Which is great for me, except that it makes Charles look like a liar to the lady when in fact the only thing missing here is open, honest communication on the part of, basically, everyone.

The joke is that maybe the lady of the house is orchestrating all of this in order to amuse herself between pedicures. (She wouldn't. She's better than that.) Or maybe Charles *is* paranoid for no reason, or maybe I *was* seen smoking a cigarette when I should have been working. It's all a complex game of "telephone" with more than a touch of Machiavelli's "The Prince" thrown in at every level, just for good measure.

But the lines are all straight and the spacing's all even.

And I'm paid, so I'm not getting evicted this month.

What more could I possibly ask for?

Pics.

For the visually inclined among you, some recent cameraphone photographs may be found in the "Bastard Son of Random Musings, Cont'd. Photographic Supplement".

Preemption.

We've been playing a cart all week that says "This American Life" and "All Things Considered" are going to be pre-empted for Tavis Smiley's Republican Presidential Candidates' Forum. Come yesterday evening, the special program is nowhere to be found in any of the places it might be expected to be. I call Tristan and Rachel emails him and we hear back from him what happened.

Basically, the broadcast was cursed from way the hell before it happened.

First, it was scheduled to run over ATC and Radio Theatre. Only problem with that was that we'd already published listings for that week's Radio Theatre, and it happened to be a world premiere production by a local playwright. So then the word was there's no preemption. Then it got rescheduled to run over This American Life and All Things Considered instead, allowing Radio Theatre to air. So it was back on the log, but at a different time. When I went into the station this afternoon I still didn't know what the plan was, and thus had CDs burned of "This American Life" just in case.

You *have* to be flexible in this sort of environment. But -- you *also* have to be prepared for what you *do* expect to happen. So, basically, you have to be *very* prepared for what you *expect* to have happen, and *fairly* prepared for several different versions of what all *might* happen.

Then PRSS didn't have the Candidates' Forum available for download because its air window was only September 27th. So Tristan went and got the sound from the PBS website, but the sound was craptastic, with levels all over the place, mostly peaking, then peaking some more. I put a hard limiter on it 'cause I didn't want to have to ride the board with all those voices barking at eachother through the monitors for two hours.

Then, the package was *supposed* to be two hours, but *actually* came in at 1:24. If this were a weekday, we could pad for a couple of minutes, then cut clean to NPR for headlines on the satellite feed, but since NPR doesn't *do* bottom of the hour breaks on the weekend, we're stuck having to fill up half an hour. Someone (I don't know who) chooses a program called "Voices of Our World", which is about the US and the Middle East. I found what little I heard of it pretty interesting actually, but of course, it couldn't possibly have been on a more controversial topic. I feel like Peter Griffin in reverse. ("We're replacing 'grinds my gears' with 'spotlight on the middle east'.)

So the plan is to run a top-of-the-hour billboard for NPR at four, then cut to headlines on satellite at 4:01 and cut to the forum at 4:04. Supersmooth, supernifty. Only problem with that is the satellite doesn't feed headlines at 4, but at 5, when we normally do ATC. Tristan says he'll set it up.

At 4:01 I have no idea whether I'll actually get headlines or not, despite auditing SAT in the cue channel repeatedly. I've never done this before and so I have no idea when they *actually* start feeding, but at 3:59:49 there's still nothing but silence. And so, I've got my backup plan all lined up, ready to go. I play the minute billboard theme for ATC and forward announce the preemption. "And now, headlines from NPR." Fade out the billboard music, cut to SAT, one - two - three - nothing. The satellite's not feeding *anything* to us. Dead air. Then as casually as I can muster, "in the absence of headlines from NPR, we'll listen to Pearl Django". Three minutes and twenty-six seconds of lovely, mellow gypsy swing music follow. The fade up is sloppy, but hell. The timing's not perfect, but it's close enough. Then a few seconds after 4:04, with the computer faded up on LS1 and the line on, I hit "play" and voila. Candidates' forum.

Then we get several calls from people who miss This American Life, or All Things Considered, and one from a guy who just *hated* the fact that we were letting our airwaves be used by a platform for "that palestinian propagandist" and why didn't we just give Mr. bin Laden a show of his own. He was fun. I calmed him down explaining nah, I'm not *excusing* anything, but this is the mundane, day-to-day *why* behind how we wound up playing that, and here's our program director's number, and he's the person to talk to, and I'll gladly record your comments in the log, and yes we take these comments *very* seriously. I heard him out and he thanked me.

Then about halfway through radio theatre a drunk guy called and said he loved whatever we were playing. Thank you, I said, which one -- Radio Theatre or Voices of our World? He didn't know, he just loved it all. Uhm, well, yes, thank you very much. Glad you like it. Have a great day. Buhbye now.

People generally hate working board during preemptions. I can see why, but I did enjoy the challenge. It's just that there are so many variables to begin with, and they increase exponentially when you suddenly change plans. It's still a cakewalk compared to doing your first ATC on the day Domenici resigns.

I did miss doing my normal broadcast, though, what with its easy-paced breaks and plugging what's coming up next and reading weather and all. Ah well. Next week.

And it's nice to hear from people that they miss my normal thing, and that they even plan their days around it -- heading out of work in time to hear "This American Life", for example. I'm *not* the only person who does things like that. I'm not alone. There *are* people out there. Listening. And they kick ass.

My flubs.

Listened to the aircheck from last night.

That guy who called all incensed that I transposed the initial consonants in the name "Don Cheadle" in a funding credit was right. At least I wasn't rude to him. I did, in fact, mess up the name (Wound up saying "John Teadle", like anyone watches whatever crap cable TV show we're promoting 'cause they give money to NPR. I wouldn't be surprised to hear it was Don Cheadle himself who called, whoever the hell he is.) I didn't remember it, just vaguely recalled saying the name. He was right -- I screwed up. But jeez, he was going nuts. Must have been a rough day, I suppose, when the best thing you can do to make yourself feel better is calling up the announcer at the local station you're listening to and say that he mispronounced a name that isn't even in the news. He's probably jealous. I don't blame him. (I'm ON AIR and he's not. Nyaah.)

And a couple of sloppy cutaways -- nothing terrible, but there's plenty of room for improvement. And lots of other things I could drive myself crazy over if I chose to let myself do so. Screw it. It's my second time doing weekday ATC and I'd rather learn from my mistakes than dwell on them.

The one that just makes me giddy is when, at the end of my shift, I very casually say something like "that's coming up next, as All Things Continues -- continues". Shit, I got the number of syllables right, and kept on going like there was no mistake, if nothing else.

I still can't bring myself to listen to my first air check from Thursday. Historic newscast though it may have been, it was a total train wreck, partly because it *was* historic, but mostly because I *thought* I was prepared when I was not.

Worked with Charles today and I'm starting to seriously think that faggots' purpose on earth is to be truth-tellers. Charles does it by gossiping about what people gossip about behind other peoples backs to their faces. I do it by being on radio. Different techniques, same end result. We're truth tellers. Like court jesters.

I'm kinda being played as a pawn in an ongoing dispute between Charles and the House Servants whose family has worked for the family Charles works for, for generations. (You know, kinda like slavery, but without that whole "being property" and "3/5 human" thing.) They've come to feel a great sense of entitlement and seem to feel threatened by the garden's architect, and so they slander the architect's garden assistant behind his back -- not to the lady of the house, directly, but to her accounts manager, in order to get at the garden architect. They don't slander *him* directly because he happens to be the lady's best freind. They go after the low man on the totem pole, who just happens to be me.

At the same time, they're pretty bloody stewpid about it. They set sprinklers to run for seven hours and then try to blame me for flooding the street, even as I don't know where the key to the irrigation box is, much less how to program the sprinklers. And then they lock up all the water spigots so that either all the plants die from not getting watered (or by having their leaves watered in full sunlight by "Tender Like Woman", who is "Man Maid's" son) -- assuming, I presume, that I am dumb enough not to call Charles and ask where the key is when it comes time to deep-water the potted, shaped Japanese maples which *they* let the leaf-tips die on this season by shallow watering in the full heat of summer, and water them with a watering can in the absence of the ability to water them with a hose.

Their complaint? That I show up and don't work. Bull-fucking-shit. Look at my invoice. Two hours here, Three hours there. That's how long it takes just to choreograph all the hoses running in various places at different times, as opposed to the "be seen running around like a fool with a watering can sprinking everything shallowly" school of watering plants, which results in browned leaves. Not to mention the complaint is about a period of time for which I haven't even billed the house in the first place. And I don't stick around once I'm done. I am not getting paid to sip cognac and smoke cigars on the back patio of the guesthouse. I may step back and walk around the pathway to determine how things blend and how the beds are defined and see if I've missed anything, but I *don't* lounge around.

And they don't go directly to the lady of the house; they go to her accounts manager. Fine with me, and I *really* don't give a rat's ass if she *has* got cancer. If she's got problems with how I'm working, she really *can* tell me to my face, and we can both be perfectly civil about it. But if she won't, I'm well within my rights to bring it up with her. I've had the whole near death thing happen to me, too, and it made me *more* honest and up front. Not less.

So the word from the accounts manager is that I'm not to work in the yard when Charles isn't there. Fine with me. I work better with Charles, and I know it. But I don't overcharge when he's not there, either. Is the problem that I charge what I do? Fine! Talk to me! I'm flexible. If you want your plants to live, then talk to me.

At the same time the lady hears from Charles what's happened and she's none too happy about it, because she *does* like me, at least a little bit. (I know the difference between Hermes and Barneys and Yves Saint Laurent, you see, thanks entirely to Charles.) Who knows how this will all play out? I really could not possibly care less, except that I do have to pay rent.

Charles took me out to eat after that -- partly because I'd taken him out to eat a few days prior, partly because he was hungry, and partly because he felt bad about something having "happened" to me (even though I'm not fully convinced that it has). We went to Luigi's -- the frankly sad, geriatric Italian restaurant on Fourth, which he sometimes prefers to Sadie's (across the street) because Sadie's always seems to have a waiting list.

Luigi's has this insanely *awful* lounge pianist who literally plays his electrontic keyboard while hooked up to an oxygen machine, and forgets half the notes to "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" (which he plays in July). I suppose I should admire him for hanging in there and loving his craft, but it's frankly sad and creepy to go in there and sit next to him and have him make eyes at you while doing ridiculous glissandi all the time that you're eating in the hopes of a two-dollar tip.

Then they've got this "all you can eat" buffet which is *crap*. I mean *garbage* for food. I'm talking mystery meats drowned in mystery sauce, overcooked pasta going hard in a steamtable, chicken smelling decidedly "off" in a sauce with grease floating in puddles on top, instant pudding, and pizzas fresh out of the oven three hours before -- the whole deal. Dreadful. That was what I had the first time I went there.

First impressions can be misleading.

Today, Charles is stressing over where to eat, as he always does, and I am too, like I always do. There aren't that many options in that part of town, and all of them have *something* to disrecommend them. Charles says Luigi's calzones are "great" and says it's totally different if you order from the menu. Finally, to get it over with, and get fed, and get back to the station by 2:30, I basically say "fuck it, let's go to Luigi's".

He was right. We ordered off the menu and the food was in a whole different class. We both had green chile chicken lasagna. It was *delicious*. If the owners of Luigi's were smart, they'd get rid of the pianist and the buffet and just run daily lunch specials like a *normal* restaurant. As it is they turned me off to them until I was just plain desperate enough to let someone else buy lunch for me there.

The vagaries of managerial ineptitude of every single North Valley restaurant I've ever tried could make for a whole blog in itself. Alas, I'm not volunteering at KUNM to be a food critic. I'd be damn good at it! But there's something about reviewing restaurants, covering uranium stories, and hosting news programs besides that just doesn't quite "mix".

Got back to the station just in time for the pitch training for on-air hosts for the pledge drive which is coming up week after next. Yeah it's kind of a pain to get over there to make the meeting but it definitely helps. (Today was the last of two "pitch training" meetings, and it was packed -- *everyone* put it off.) I know it sucks to be asked to attend a meeting if you've done pledge drives a dozen times before. But it really does keep everyone more or less on the same page.

Mary Oishi's done some amazing work putting together donated prizes. I know, the pledge drive's not about the prizes, it's about the programming. But she's got to raise the funds to keep the station running, and frankly, not near enough of our listeners pledge. She's trying to change that -- if it takes daily drawings to push people over the edge and pledge their five bucks, so be it. And she's got to keep it interesting and new and fun and engaging each and every fund drive. Bumper stickers and coffee mugs don't cut it anymore.

Redemption.

Today, I think, I redeemed myself.

Yesterday, I seriously think I made every mistake a person *can* make running weekday "All Things Considered", and hung in there, regardless, which is about the best that I can say for it.

Today I went in knowing what all *could* go wrong, and knowing *when* it could go wrong, and was therefore prepared to be prepared to take the right steps at the right times to prevent problems before they happened. Were all my cutaways 100% clean? Nope. Did I have segments of a few seconds in length playing the annoyingly repetitive NPR theme when I *could* have been ad-libbing something clever, amusing, and/or informative? Yep. But on the whole, I think the newscast held together *far* better than yesterday, and I can *still* only improve from here. I *know* it.

I think it was a pretty solid newscast. Not great radio, perhaps, but pretty solid. Ed Murrows aren't made overnight.

Showed up before noon; promptly started preparing. Steve left around 12:30, meaning I was the only host-type person in the newsroom for most of the afternoon. Being a newsroom -- surprise, surprise! -- things kept happening. I'd get into focusing on what I had to do and something would come up. I'd follow the sidetrack for a few seconds or minutes as needed and then get back on track. Other stuff was important, or not so important, or whatever, but I knew all along that in precisely two hours, seventeen minutes, and thirty-four seconds I *must* be ON AIR. The tyranny of time's inexorable forward march was now my freind, because I had submitted totally to it. There's no stopping the clock.

Work-study students kept asking me questions -- like I really knew much better than they did what all was going on. All I knew was that I neeed five minutes from them for my Hour 2 (which is really Hour one, for us) Segment D at :48:30, and that a *little* bit over or under was fine, but that the margin of error *wasn't* a full minute or more on either side.

Devon Armijo (who hates that I pronounce his name like the native-born El Pasoan I am) guided me through the Friday two-way interview with him on sports. I know nothing about sports, but Devon actually makes me want to know more, which is a very rare gift. His passion is contagious, even for this thing that I consider unworthy of my time and consideration. Besides, by now, people are expecting to hear him do a sports two-way on Friday. He wrote out the questions for me, and I actually had more occur to me during the interview. I didn't ask 'em until afterward, though, 'cause I was on deadline and so was he. (Perhaps I should have. It would have made for better radio.) Of course anyone who hears that will just hear me and think "Damn, he's no Steve Shadley" but whatever. It may not be a tape that either he or I use in our audition tapes but damn it, I did pull it off, with his guidance.

The news today wasn't Domenici's resignation -- it was the vultures circling around him after he's announced his resignation due to his incurably degenerative brain disease. Too bad we don't live in Shakespeare's time when we might go on air (although I guess they didn't have "AIR" then) and just say that King Lear was resigning due to "madness". It would sound better. But we don't live in such times, alas, and thus the Senator's not "going mad", you see, not "going senile", doesn't have "a touch of the dementia", but suffers from "frontotemporal lobar degeneration". Not that I don't feel sorry for him, and not that I don't take it seriously, but geez, try saying that fast in front of a hundred thousand people with no chance to go back and correct yourself, and then repeating the word "degenerative" about a dozen times in one live broadcast sometime, and *then* tell me Shakespeare knew something we don't!

As I predicted, Wilson jumped right in and got to be the first to formally declare herself running for his seat, fulfilling my water cooler prophecies of yesterday quite admirably, and proving herself to be the on-the-ball Air Force Academy type I have known all along that she is. Then it's about half a dozen others saying they won't run, or will run if so-and-so doesn't, or will run if so-and-so number 2 does; and of course the Republicans have their minds made up while the Democrats need all weekend to simply decide whether or not to declare their intentions.

Meanwhile there were other stories out there. A health clinic here, a call center closing there, a new case of West Nile Virus here, and of course a further development in the ongoing case of the lesser prairie chicken there. And then there was a plane crash right as I go on air. I don't mean that it happened right then, but that's when we first heard of it. Another medical transport flight going down -- wasn't like a transcontinental commercial jetliner or anything -- but still.

I got all the headlines read that I considered important and undercovered by the mainstream press. What more could you ask for? Oh, yeah -- consistency as to *when* I read breaking headlines. And weather.

My weather sucked. It was just currents and forecasts with very little in terms of what all was happening where, but what the hell. It's mild, with a few gusty winds here and there. And thank gawd for that.

I can hardly wait to do this again.

Hi! I'm new.

Worked with Charles all of yesterday 'til about four when I headed in to the newsroom. Jim says "something's come up"; I say "uh-oh -- what?". He says "Domenici's resigning", and I say "no, seriously". I thought it was a joke.

Pete Domenici's been one of New Mexico's US Senator's for 36 years. Six terms. Now he's resigning. No, seriously. He's resigning.

I make some phone calls and line up an interview with a respected New Mexico pollster whose name eludes me, so Jim can get some historical perspective on Domenici's legacy. There's a press conference tomorrow (now today) and Jim needs to go to that -- it's where Domenici's slated to formally announce his decision not to seek re-election, even *after* the big fundraiser and all. He's covering it not only for the station, but also for NPR. It's a national story for a bunch of reasons I won't bore you with.

I sit with Jim through his ON AIR shift yesterday and he's *totally* different in how he runs board. You can hear the difference on air between him and Steve -- they both sound good, but it's hard to pin down exactly what the difference *is*. It really only makes sense when you see it.

Then I stick around for my "Overnight Free Form" music show I'd agreed to do because no one else had, because it makes me better at running the board, and because I enjoy it. It went fine, I suppose. Played a bunch of stuff from vinyl. As I'm getting off the air at 5 AM I check my email and there's a tiny hitch in the plans.

Domenici's press conference is scheduled for 4 PM, so Jim has to go to that instead of being my training wheels in the Control Room while I operate the board. But Marcos (the program director) will be available to help me over any rough spots. Can I comfortably run the board for All Things Considered (ATC) without a News Department person in the room?

I don't see that I have any choice. I mean, I *do*, but this is a corner I painted my own damn self into. They ask if I'm willing to do something: usually I am, because 98% of the time I wind up enjoying it and it winds up transforming me. What's more, they never throw me out, and so I never leave.

The news shifts are all shifted around as it is this week: the morning person's out for a few days. The evening person's covering for the morning person and the reporter person's covering for the evening person when he can. That's how I got into agreeing to cover this Friday's ATC and started training for it formally: they needed someone to cover for the reporter person who's covering for the evening person who's covering for the morning person who can't be there. Are there others at the station who *can* do it? Yes. But right now I am *steeped* in the Control Room and the current needs of the Weekday ATC shift, which is unlike any other. I also feel passionately about news as few people do. (It's extremely exacting.) I need to put what I'm learning to use, sooner or later, and better today than tomorrow, let alone "who knows when".

Regular weekday news shifts don't open up *that* often. Maybe not as infrequently as Senators resign, but not often. Given the chance to substitute, I'd be a fool to say "no" when I know I'm physically and mentally capable of doing what needs to be done.

So I'm over the hump. I hosted All Things Considered today.

The best I can say is I didn't knock the transmitter off the air, set the station on fire, or utter anything on mic that might get us fined by the FCC. I kept missing buttons, and forgetting in the crunch of time to line certain things up. I did almost everything wrong that a person *can *do when doing a newscast, at least once tonight. I even caught myself apologising. I don't care. I mean, I do care. But I know I'll get better. I *can't* get worse. It was a rollercoaster ride, just holding everything together with duct tape and paperclips. I enjoyed it, thoroughly.

It was a busier than average news day, what with Domenici resigning and all. At least it seemed that way to me -- I'm sure my newbieness had lots to do with it. I had three local stories to run, and was still not 100% sure where to run them, and Jim and I discussed it and fit them all in. Tight timing. Not super-tight, but tight enough for me to start talking fast. Which isn't a problem, except that it makes me sound like a vacuum cleaner salesman, and more importantly, leaves me without anything to say at the end of the break. I start worrying about time when I miss a button by two seconds because the cart's not cued up or what have you and then RUN through the weather report (or whatever) in half the time I'd planned.

So I start out rushing, and then slow down as I see the clock has yet to come near running out. It sounds kind of like "coolandclearing, isolatedthunderstormscominginfromthenorthmovingsoutheast and! Then. In Aaaaaaallllbuquerqueeeee (long breath) it should. get. up. to. eighty. one. degrees. Faaarrrennheit. Tomorrow. Thaaaat's the high. Forecast. From the Naaational Weaaather Serrrrrvice." And then I've *still* got to play that damned NPR theme music for ten seconds which feels like a year with no voices because I rushed through it and have plenty of things I can say in *thirty* seconds, or a *minute*, but *none* on hand to fill up a mere ten.

Dreadful. Dirty cutaways and sloppy fadeouts littered the airwaves like dead bodies on the Western Front. It's the old fag joke: "Hi! I'm new.", only in front of thousands and thousands and thousands of people.

And every time I made a mistake I didn't have a chance to dwell on it. I just had to line up my next break. It's one thing to see it done. it's another thing entirely to do it! I can't believe they let me talk on radio. It was my baptism by fire.

Jim got back from the press conference early and *somehow* put together a cut and copy for me to air over the story we'd planned to air over the "Newscast IV" segment at the bottom of the hour. I clipped the first words of the Senator's soundclip but we did still beat the TV news.

And then somehow -- I have no clue -- he put together the whole farewell speech, which was actually fairly moving, into a 21 minute CD. Marcos wrote out an intro and a promo and we preempted the last half hour of ATC to air that.

And then from all the wire copy I'd printed out there was *one* story that I *had* to read on air, even though there wasn't time. Three hundred NM Air National Guard troops getting shipped to Iraq. Yeah, it's just wire copy, but damn, dude, I *would* have lost sleep if I hadn't fit *that* in!

I survived.

I am over the hump. Tomorrow should be *easy*, in comparison.

Thinking backward.

Worked at Sissy's this morning and found that the house servants had locked all the outdoor water spigots. Most unhelpful. Most decidedly unhelpful. Called Charles, he told me where the key was to the lock. Unlocked them and got everything all watered in beneath the eaves and on the patios, where it didn't rain.

Charles gave me a HUGE Aloe Vera plant. It's sitting in my enclosed patio now and I can tell it's going to become one of my most treasured plants. I have no idea how old this thing is, but I've only ever seen one bigger, and it was in the shop of a Curandera near my old apartment on Central.

Shadowed Steve in the Control Room this afternoon for the first hour of Weekday "All Things Considered" (ATC). Then he turned it over to me for the second hour -- "the easy hour". Hah! It's only "easy" if listeners don't already expect considerably more than is required by the program log.

I won't bore you with all the details of everything I screwed up on, but it *wasn't* a *complete* disaster. I had one dirty cutaway, and missed the 32:30 headlines when I had *everything* lined up for headlines at 34:30 at 32:10 and just let network run instead of going ON AIR and sounding panicked. No one called to complain -- though I did get one decidedly drunk caller who thought I was the host for the music show that followed me: "The Home of Happy Feet", which is probably the longest-running show we have. *Amazing* music, and I couldn't have asked for a better crew to take over from me during a weekday transition. But I did say something along the lines of "stay home for the tune of happy feet" in forward announcing. And I'm rather expert at being kind and polite to drunk people, and know at least enough to tell when they're talking about a folk singer whose name I vaguely recognise "slapping the shit out of Dick Cheney" that they're clearly meaning to talk to the takeover crew, and are just kind of free-associating what they're hearing on the news.

Instead of going over everything I did wrong, I'll just share this little snippet of conversation that happened in the newsroom yesterday:

Steve: So let's make this easy. You've got three stories to run, totalling 14 minutes. Where do you run them?
Me: Well, if I run them at 35:30, I've got 17 minutes to play with, and can start out with headlines.
Steve: No. You're trying to hit the post at 58:20.
Me: I know. But I mean. . .
Steve: No. You time from the top of the hour.
Me: I am. Oh. . . you mean. . .
Steve: Yeah. The other way.
Me: Oh. I see. I just have to think backwards.
Steve: Yes. It's called "backtiming".
Me: Oh, right. I did that for that music show.
Steve: Exactly.
Me: So I should be thinking, instead of 35:30 plus 14, I should be thinking 58:20 minus 14.
Steve: Yes.

And then, again:

Steve: Hypothetical. Senator Bingaman dies in an aeroplane crash at 5:41. What do you do?
Me: At 5:41? Jeez -- since hour one is hour two, I let the network run 'til 44:30 and then bump whatever I've got to lead with what I've got. Or I check the rundown and figure out what comes closest in time that I can read the headline and cut back to network or go to local before cutting back the stories we had scheduled.
Steve: More realistically -- Say Governor Richardson drops out of the presidential race. What do you do?
Me: Depends. When does he do it?
Steve: 5:57.
Me: I print out the wire and read it over "billboard" at the top.
Steve: Good. Then what?
Me: Then what? I dunno. I guess I keep checking the wires, let Newscast I run on network, and then lead other local headlines with it over Newscast II, then try to get the Governor on the phone, during segment 1A rather than nursing the board.
Steve: Good. Or, call Jim or me. He might be holding a press conference, and one of us might be able to get it.

It's a matter of factual legend in the radio news world to this day that when aeroplanes started slamming into buildings on 11 September 2001, the "Emergency Alert System" *never* activated.

Say whatever you will about how the press covered the events on that day. It was *only* the press covering it.

The nationwide emergency broadcast system *never* kicked in with *any* kind of warning.