Keeping busy. . .

. . . leads to weird dreams.

Which I'll get to, in time.

Elaine got sick at the end of last week. I've got *way* better "coverage" for my shifts than she does, since she has to be up by roughly four AM, while I get to onveniently sleep in. I *need* to get trained for her shift, if only because I live five blocks from the station. But any time either of us gets sick, it affects us all.

We ultimately *need* more people in the newsroom to maintain the quality of broadcasts listeners come to expect. Period.

My own ON AIR shifts go OK. Not perfect, but OK.

Then an email goes out marked "URGENT" to volunteers on Sunday night.

By the time I get it, I've had my first two consecutive days off in about two months and am jonesing for the ON AIR host mic. I get flip and casually agree to cover for "Overnight Free Form" if no one else offers. Part of me foolishly believes I still have to prove myself to everyone, even at this point.

I unfoolishly offer to play Wagner for most of it, figuring that will save me some late-night hours scrambling for music every three or four minutes.

And I get the word back: that's OK, *if* I just mix in all the different genres that I should, somehow, in the first part of my overnight shift. Which I do.

Last week left me completely and totally beat, what with finding out I won't get paid for three weeks (because I was too busy actually *working* to turn in my timesheet, while dealing with bureaucratic hooh-hah, more than half an hour late to make sure we don't get our broadcast license challenged with *legal* hooh-hah) and other assorted "stuff" that tends to happen when you work for the most powerful radio station in the state whose license happens to be held by the Board of Regents for the giant bureaucracy of a state university whose initials happen to be incorporated into your very call sign.

Annoying? Yes. But I am guessing, educatedly, that it beats working at the labs.

But at some point during being too exhausted to cover every important story I *know* matters, it *comes* to me.

The *only* thing that *really* matters is THE LISTENER.

Yes, I have been through fifteen dozen different kinds of wringers in about five days. But I *know* from *years* of personal experience that NONE OF IT can *possibly* compare with what MY LISTENER has probably gone through in one day, whenever he happens to tune in to hear two minutes, nineteen seconds (roughly) of sanity from me reading headlines and telling him current temps.

I'm damn lucky to be alive, let alone broadcasting.

The listener isn't tuning in to hear me sound tired, or flustered, reading headlines that barely affect him. He just wants me to deliver headlines that affect him directly, calmly, no matter what.

I admit. I'm *in love* with "the listener". After even the hardest day facing whatever distractions I face on a daily basis -- I can step out for a minute and *know* that "the listener" has, on average, been through FAR worse than I have on that day, and just needs me to sound sane, telling all the crazy things that routinely *happen*.

My overnight freeform shift rolls around. I start it out by letting the piece Ali started play at the end of "Global Music" because *someone's* going to just then be getting into it. If it pushes me over a minute or so on the "legal ID" I *must* let it do so, if I want to hold on to his audience. (Sure beats the "Tombstone Rock" crew I took over for that one time.) But I'm still close enough to meet FCC guidelines, as I understand them. There's a time to "cut in", but there's also a time to just let things "play out". It's not, at that hour of the night, like I'm so much a slave to the clock that I *have to* cut off Amy Goodman -- about whom I have some words, but for whom I will save them, for when I meet her in person, next time.

"Afternoon drivetime" and "after-midnight" are just different *enough*. I've done it *all*, at this point.

I go ON AIR. Give the legal ID. Introduce "a very special freind, from long ago, who's been with me from way before I ever started working in radio" and so forth. "It's my very special privilege, indeed, and honour, to introduce you to the one and only -- United States Naval Observatory Master Clock". Or something like that.

Radio geek joke. Just the sort of thing I can casually pull off in the middle of the night. But even then, I can't let it play out for more than a minute or so while I line up the next thing to play. After all, it's "precise", but *only* on the order of eight seconds (between myself and the listener) and 700 additional milliseconds (between the satellite, and myself) without spending *way* too long explaining it to people who don't care and who will eventually tune out.

If I let the USNO Master Clock play more than roughly a minute, I'll have to answer to people who find themselves setting their clocks and watches, only to find themselves such-and-such "off".

I actually broadcast the USNO Clock on "confidence audio" channel 2 on SAT-2, passing up the opportunities for all sorts of clever "shtick" to segue into a dance-club mix I happen to have found that seems to sound like a bomber crew honing in, second by second, on their target. How convenient an opportunity to practice my crossfading skills.

Then to a track from Radiohead's latest 12-inch "single" which matches, since it seems to be about nuclear war. "Too much, too bright, too powerful". Or something like that. Read it as a "political statement" if you want. Where I stand, it just made good sense in terms of cross-fading broadcast channels in the middle of the night when we have fewer listeners than pretty much anytime else.

Then to a nine-minute field interview I'd personally recorded *months* before but never aired from my tour of Sandia National Labs' Thermal Test Facility (TTF) -- complete with "warning" and "all clear" sirens bracketing explosions at Kirtland Air Force Base while the TTF's director talked about testing and simulation with another reporter from a specialty journal dealing with federal employees -- just because it was *way* too hard to incorporate into a news story the same day I recorded it. (Still wondering how much toluene I inhaled on that day.)

Then to this, and that other thing, and then that. I *want* to incorporate an Elmer Davis broadcast from WWII, but the sound from that website is just *way* substandard. So on the fly, I go in another direction, and play nearly half an hour of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, live, at Filmore East, in June 1971. Public radio cliche, perhaps, but it buys me some time. I am a NEWS man. Not a music man! God bless Zappa. he buys me time.

Then some Jazz that makes sense if you've listened to, I dunno, 40-plus years of our station's broadcasts.

Some bluegrass, winding up with "Sweet Sunny South's" song about "My Still" just as listeners stumble out of the bars.

But by now I've got it backtimed out so the closing refrain of Richard Wagner's "Das Rheingold" will meld *perfectly* with the opening sounds of the "Morning Edition" theme music from NPR.

I skip the John Cage -- which I probably shouldn't have -- and just casually play some Gamelan music. It buys me time.

I fade it down.

I do about seven minutes of a live reading from "The 13 and a half Lives of Captain Bluebear".

Thank gawd I gave myself a music bed.

I literally wound up gasping for air with some minutes to spare while finding out the pages didn't flip like I had meant them to. But -- I still sounded *damn* good.

I simply let the music carry me, and then take me out.

Then I "hit the post" starting "Das Rheingold", only to find I couldn't quite prounounce the name of "Sir Georg Solti", since by that time I was completely brain-fried.

Only to find Richard Wagner WAY THE FUCK MORE BOMBASTIC throughout "Rheingold" than I had remembered him.

But by now I'd kind of figured, what the hell, I'll set my levels and let it run, only to find out NO! I HAVE TO RIDE THE BOARD! I have committed myself to this.

Ali -- god bless him -- has a *gift* for backtiming. I'll spare you all the details how. But he looks at my second CD running down and checks the clock and tells me I'm going to be something like 2:37 over.

I trust him, but I don't trust numbers as a rule. I spend the next ten minutes crunching numbers only to realize he's right. I *will* in fact be roughly 2 minutes, 37 seconds over. I mean, within a few tenths of a second. Not that I trust my numbers. He does this calculation by closing his eyes and popping back three seconds later to tell you, without a doubt, "you're 2:37 off". I confirm his calculation by running numbers manually over a number of minutes and trying to figure out the math which frankly *baffles* me. Just enough to ruin everything I'm aiming for. Or -- just enough to plan for something for 2:37 inbetween this disk and that.

If I *don't* make up that time, somehow, my perfect "hit the post" between "Overnight Free Form" and "Morning Edition" -- backtimed roughly 2 hours, 22 minutes, and 11 seconds between three different CDs -- just *won't* work.

Ali's got a gift for numbers that is *uniquely* helpful in radio timing. It's like his mind is the slide rule we all want to design, but can't *quite* figure out. I may have done the calculations. But. If he says "you're 13 second over", or "you're 7 seconds short", you ARE. Period.

He tells me I have to kill this one track and "fill" for so long. In the middle of the night. Only Wagnerians *far* more dedicated than me will ever know I've killed this particular track to forward announce Morning Edition and read the weather.

He's a genius. For whatever reasons which I can't begin to know because I don't know how all the connections in the human brain begin to work. Ali *saved* my broadcast, and the timing of that broadcast in turn saved the day twelve hours later when I went ON AIR local hosting ATC from NPR -- after saving a broadcast of DN prior to ATC the previous day. He dislikes NPR rather more intensely even than I dislike it. But I don't *ever* want to work at a station that doesn't have a place for him. Yes, a conversation with him can go on for hours. But he's uniquely gifted, and priceless, in this environment.

I skip a single track in order to announce things -- and even read weather. I know my "post" at this point has shifted to such-and-such a time. I hit it. To the second. I've double-checked the calculation, but Ali has done the calculation in a few seconds, in his head, long before I've spent minutes checking it.

I couldn't *possibly* have done it without Ali. At the same time, I think he "gets" the whole "Wagner thing" way better than he might have if I hadn't been there to kill a few hours.

And I might have chickened out on the "Wagner thing", if he hadn't announced it.

Symbiosis, anyone?

Anyhow.

The transition happened -- pretty smoothly!

Elaine came in and took over my board.

And I went home to sleep.

But I had the weirdest dream:

Apparently some group of activists or other had secured the basement underneath Popejoy Hall at UNM -- I've never actually been *in* Popejoy Hall, let alone *underneath* it, so I have no idea how accurate my dream landscape may be -- but it was *definitely* Popejoy Hall, and they were there to hold a forum about the NNSA's "Complex Transformation" combined with the proposed closure and recovery at Los Alamos' radioactive waste dump at "Area G".

For some reason, I find myself, not there *reporting* the event, but dressed up as a Panda Bear (of all things). I find myself running around through underground corridors in a fursuit only to appear at this or that moment during whatever presenters' presentations. I distinctly remember running up through narrow staircases in the wings only to emerge someplace else to the amazement of my handlers who seemed to assume I would just appear "stage left" only to appear "stage right" or the like. No one can tell where I'll turn up.

Then -- in what I'll call a "dream within a dream" -- I envision my mother's house in Texas besieged by, of all things, a whole fleet of space shuttles. They fly over her house in formation and send down repeated volleys of arrows, such as might more reasonably be expected to come from medieval Japanese archers.

Then I wake up in her home. In the bedroom of my childhood.

I close all the blinds throughout the house. Carefully. Without panic. It is late in the day. A reasonable time to close the blinds.

After all the blinds are closed, I join my mother in the kitchen.

She's listening to public radio on the receiver that gets heard throughout the house.

But she hands me what amounts to an earbud, attached to a tiny receiver.

I ask her: "Police Skimmer?"

She silently nods, without saying it, "yes".

I put it in my ear. It's an "Auto-Cue" moment of realization.

In the ear *with* the skimmer, I hear a coded message in the lyrics of a pop music song, released the same day, which runs something like this, *a la* Karen Carpenter:

I hear a Panda Chewing up Bamboo
One or Two Popejoys gonna Fall
Panda digging up the Bamboo
One or Two Popejoys gonna fall

In the other ear, I hear myself reading headlines. Inexplicably.

And that's my dream.