Morning Show Blues

Yeah, one of those situations where there is at least one radio going on at all times, with the attendant morning radio personalities... I have been thinking and I must say it is even worse than I remember it. Morning radio is like the ugly older sibling of late night television. Radio - not only do they play the same song at least five times a day until you hate it with a more intense passion than you ever loved it (and gain the power of recognizing it immediately even faintly heard from a distance), but they've got the terrible idea of hiring sycophantic dickweeds to blabber excitedly and laugh (at me, the underemployed schlub? Go on talking about your coffee and cream, your wife's ass, why you hate winter) for a 6 - 9 or whatever morning show.

I'm sure there have been radio morning shows that are not completely oppressive and distressing for non-morning people. You know the kind of person I mean: coffee or not they are unlikely to smile, form a coherent sentence, or laugh for the first hour they're awake and working. To some varieties of them (for instance myself) the sounds of morning show hosts going on and on between ads and eerily upbeat music is worse than static, or any aggressively unremarkable or annoying song.

My brain, even when it is still half in the realm of sleep, does not approve of a bunch of modestly personable DJs doing their annoying and useless job while I add value to the region by trading my labour power for a ridiculous and mildly depressing pittance. Cognizant of the fact they earn more than me (and get to laugh out loud all the time, come up with groovy insider jokes, great phone interactions, crazy stunts, far-out contests, and yawn level jokes), I do feel a mild bit of resentment as well as annoyance. Change the station? Why risk it? You'd be surprised at the intensity with which some folk despise public radio, the music of the great canon of composers, and silence (my personal top choice for morning vibes). So what is left to me?

Answer: The annoying squawking of overpaid manchildren, combined with a hellish interplay of blaring advertisements and generally non-morning music. I don't do a line of coke or a bunch of trucker pills when I wake up, so their braying hijinks and high-energy excitedness is completely jarring to me. It is even mildly painful to the very core of my soul. I don't get pumped up by their dreary and doctrinaire choice of songs either. I don't enjoy these audio clowns, and even if they were funny, had material worth listening to, I would be hard-pressed to listen to them. Plainly put, I've only ever heard one or two radio morning shows I didn't hate, and even those were most often kind of boring.

Most stations advertise their appreciable web presence. So I wondered, who in the hell would go to the website of a radio station and check up on the blogs, latest news, and pictures from the morning DJs? I can only come up with a few major sources of traffic: intensely lonely, credible, or bored people, and the mentally ill. Otherwise incomprehensible. Plainly put, it always astounds me how much effort is put into the background of the world, where we while away our mortal hours generally enduring things we don't like. I mean, hell, I write a pretty non-important blog generally about non-topics... I add white noise to the internet. There's at least some difference between me and the morning DJ with laughter in his voice and more energy than anyone needs at that hour.

Generally I turn the radio down to reasonable limits and grit my teeth and do my work quickly so I can move elsewhere and do something else somewhere there is nobody pretending that the morning is a great or funny time (unless you stayed up all night, or are waking up to do something other than be underemployed in a mostly stagnant economy). Even the mildly funny shit, which is scarce, is run into the ground faster and deeper than a solid gold locomotive dropped from orbit. I don't know how people can stand it... you can get used to it, sure, but it is specifically just an unpleasant feature of life to me.

I've been listening to radio for years, when I was really uncritical none of this mattered to me as long as a good song came on, like the one by Aaliyah or that other one by L.E.N., or that later RHCP song about taxis or something. The era-defining hits of yesteryear were also generally overplayed and eventually annoying, and I ought to remember that, but they stuck with me, and some of your old favorites and mine are still being overplayed. I used to spend a lot of time in the company of radio, but have lived without it for many years now in the future, so coming from silence or chosen tracks to the hilarious cacophony of jokes and marketing and grut rock just adds a small element of objection to my day. Gotta blog about those awkward things, unavoidable things, and heartwarming things.

Now, if you're a morning show DJ and you're reading this and you are saying to yourself things like, "This fussy little internet geekblogger doesn't understand my dedication and verve, or the pain which I know as a morning show host, or that my slightly exaggerated manner is meant to help others deal with the pain of morning workaday life. A venerable and hallowed tradition. The skill of talking too much for minutes at a time was one I inherited from my father, who was himself a morning show DJ." Nah, man, this isn't personal and I'm not a geek... I acknowledge it's my problem I find you annoying. That you dessicate my environment with your wireless sonic depredations is just my perception of it, and I am the wrong kind of judge in this instance. In the end, I keep listening out of apathy, a perverse and ironic joy of laughing at your base shitness, and obviously for a chance to hear myself on the airwaves and win that hundred dollar wacky trivia question. Play those canned sounds again – you know the ones – and teach me how to lose my self-awareness... does your laughter taste like ashes to you?

July Predictions

July 2011 is going to be unremarkable compared to the months around it and the year its in. 2011 might go down in history for some reason or other, but at this point it looks as if July 2011 is going to be 'sleeper month' when the news networks could just as well be deactivated for a few weeks. Everyone would feel plenty better if this happened.

Predictions for July 2011:

- It's easy to be a news junkie, and this global habit will not be broken in July 2011.
- Consumerism will be defended and attacked by the listless people it has already exhausted.
- Someone will say something about 2012.
- A video game will be released. People will not like certain aspects of this game.
- People in a park will discover or rediscover the joys of public drinking.
- People will bitch about something. Privileged individuals will bitch most loudly.
- Pride will lead to at least one downfall. The term 'hubris' will remain purely literary.
- Annoying news events will take place, the reporting will be paid for by the subjects.
- Niche activism will convert another 33 people. Worldwide.
- Democracy will continue to be a byword. People in certain countries will protest for it.
- People in other countries will continue to abuse the term 'democracy'.
- A beautiful life will be cut short and largely ignored, because such things always happen.
- Twitter will inexplicably continue to exist. I will still be incapable of using Twitter on July 31.
- I will have extreme difficulty and trouble conceiving and finishing blog posts.
- My lovely audience will continue to visit half-heartedly.

New Year's Evil

Funny how short-lived my enthusiasm for a new year is. I think we went wrong by celebrating an arbitrary point in our collective orbit (good band name), and then by getting drunk about it, and again by making a big deal about how and where we get drunk for it. This is the classic loser's offensive remark: "I go to sleep at 10:00 PM because, you know, what's the point?"

It's a weak position and would not get you voted into office, and complements the life of anyone over a certain age living in warm places, or anyone who works New Year's Day and isn't extreme enough to make it through a shift hungover. I mean entirely to brag by saying that  I worked an entire shift in a retail store with no backup, one day, while I was hung over enough to be sickened by rosewater. Fun fact: since referencing hangovers and New Year's, this article has gotten 300% more predictable.

I've more or less given up on holidays, myself. I still participate, but the illusion has failed me. And, really, the best perspective on the so-called "holiday season" is a cynical one, because it means you won't be disappointed in anything, from the tacky advertising to the annoying advertising to the repetitive advertising to the heartrending advertising for charities or even the edgy advertising for cars. Cynical people also don't act surprised when the mall is busy, because the mall is always busy anyways, and only an idiot would think otherwise.

It really does seem that this arbitrary point in the orbit was picked by the northern elite to ensure that their subjects have something to look forward to, whilst they sip 500 year-old cognac out of opulent vessels and bask in the warmth of a paper-money fire. I actually understand this behavior, because Christmas is the great time of retail up-trickle economics, when the midwealthy get their yearly bonuses. When the midwealthy go out to buy luxury products on boxing day, that money trickles up again to the elite, who sometimes have to make the heartbreaking decision to burn older stacks of money in order to be able to store the new. Some of them even have to deal with the stress of renovating their overlarge money safes.

For regular little people, a bit of stress arises from the hope that gifts given are either appreciated for their inherent value or useful to whomever they are gifted to. Also I see that my decision not to slavishly post on this blog was a mistake, because my whole readership evaporated. I just checked the stats, and am impressed that the numbers held out as long as they did.

Yeah, I've got peanuts for material on this blog, but I've explained that I am a shoddy blogger. I'll do a lot better this year, I promise.