The Late Night Hype

My last hour on the air on Saturday nights I stop taking requests and customarily I spend my time listening to great music very loudly and mindlessly scanning twitter. I like loud music, I don’t really like scanning mindlessly on twitter. Saturday is the best time to be on twitter. People talk about the sports they like, the events they are at. People make funny observations. But I scan it, hungry for some zeitgeist I don’t always get. Maybe I’m looking for the perfect song to play on the radio. Maybe I’m looking for something magical about the night.

But running some thoughts on here might bring a different feel. God I love a good Saturday. Today I woke up a touch more hungover than I expected. Why? I drank Scotch and stayed up with my awesome neighbors. I also connected with my friends Rachel and John. We talked about the minor struggles in my life, the major struggles in hers and the difficulty of feeling like you are on solid ground in 2021. That wrapped up and I went across to my neighbors for last call. Found out my neighbor across the street’s grandfather is 100 years old. HE WAS IN WORLD WAR II. He was a veterinarian for Patton’s bulldog and a bunch of the pigeons they were using to send messages. Yes, that means he is a vet vet. But on top of that, the man has been around for so long. I was born in 1981, I was born into the arrogant post-history view of baby boomers. My dad told me Reagan was garbage but his influence wouldn’t last. He told me we’d run out of fossil fuels in my lifetime and he told me racism was slowly but methodically and consistently becoming less of a force in America. But, maybe somebody born in 1920 would’ve been told some variety of all of that pre the Depression, and then the world cuts open, Hitler and the Nazis walk in and we have one of the ugliest wars in history. Does a little boy or girl born in 1921 actually have something in common with 1981? Was it “morning in America” in both of those years? Remember when we acted like we were coming into the Roaring 20s? Remember July? Remember before DELTA? Not really, the memories just slip away. We are living somewhere new, we have to do something new. Do you know more Americans have died of COVID19 than died in World War II? Do you know that more people have died in this pandemic than in 1918? Do you know people keep dying everyday? Do you know a lot of them wouldn’t die if they took a vaccine? This shit is no joke. We are in the shit. We will be in the shit. I know a handful of people who point out we were meant to be born into this time, to do what needs to be done for these times. I am trying to feel called to a higher action, to step up and do more cause the world is worse. You try to find it and it slips away in the busy run of the days. I have two kids, I work two jobs, I play in a band that is still active. These are all fake excuses. I feel called to work to make my city better, to make my state better. My god there is room for improvement. It’s carving out that time not in huge unimaginable chunks, but find it in a free hour and more. Make it happen.

I was going to talk about how great today was. But I got sidetracked. The Current (me DJing tonight) is playing the song “Galacticana” by Strand of Oaks.

There’s something about this writer. Timothy Showalter. He makes a perfect song every two years. He’s been doing it for ten years. He’s not real famous, he’s not selling out big ass theaters, but he is making music that punches you in the heart and the people who need to hear it get to hear it. He’s the dream. Music is the dream.

Playing records for you on Saturdays is the dream. Here’s why the Saturday was good. I wake up, Rachel lets me sleep for maybe a short 10 minutes after the kids want breakfast. This is after probably twenty plus minutes of them being up but not demanding to go downstairs. This is kind. Rachel doesn’t know it, but I feel pretty tired. I make breakfast every morning for the family, but on Saturdays I make pancakes. Cottage cheese supported pancakes for the rest of the family and some paleo cakes for me based on advice from my nutritionist (I don’t do paleo in general, she just pointed out that regular pancakes is a hard way for me to start a Saturday). I made the pancakes, we ate. Rachel let me sneak in a shower which is such a hangover diminisher for me. We walked to Mattocks Park. This is my happy place when it comes to kids. I see my kids play and laugh and walk around. We ran into a neighbor I don’t know too well named Tyler. Nice. Just a great start to a morning. We got home and we had to eat early cause Sadie and I had a swimming appointment (dear future reader of this blog, for some amount of time after COVID19 became endemic you had to make appointments at swimming pools).

I warmed up pizza from the night before. (My neighbors and I determined the best thin crust pizza in 55105, it’s Italian Pie Shoppe first, Davanni’s second, Carbone’s third and Skinner’s fourth). We had leftovers of Skinner’s so I warmed that up for lunch. BTW, Skinner’s came in last, pizza is still amazing. Especially the next day. Simple lunch. Took Sadie swimming. Four and half year olds are magical. Sadie has some logic, her meltdowns have some cohesion to them and they are rarer. What they have been replaced with is just this joyous curiosity that explodes out of her mouth, her eyes, her arms. She is just wrapping herself around the world. It’s breathtaking. So at the pool she is discovering how independent she can be in the pool with a swim noodle. And the hour just goes by. AN HOUR. WITH A KID! It feels like ten minutes. She just swims around the pool, talks to bigger kids, laughs, grabs a ball, throws it, swims more. Climbs out, jumps in. And the whole time I am just glowing. My daughter is swimming. I love swimming. I loved swim team. I have no idea where she will land but this hour is magic. It’s not a lesson, it’s not practice. It’s me and my daughter in a pool. God damn it. Then we jump into the shower and Sadie can get so clean that she won’t have to take a bath tonight. She likes to use “daddy shampoo” and then she’ll ask for “Y soap”. This is all so magical to me.

I try to go get an Oil Change with Sadie in the back of the car and the good people at Valvoline told me my oil was fine. I tipped $5 for their trouble and headed back home. I made a big ass restaurant style Caesar salad. And there is nothing redeeming or “salady” about a Caesar salad with croutons, parmesan cheese and dressing, but friends, I bought the perfect kind of croutons. My god, what a treat. Caesar down, we decide to go visit Ida, the new baby our friends Anna and Amy just had. I’ve known and loved Anna in one way or another for 24 years of my forty years on this Earth. This is her first child and to see her and her wife Amy smiling, feeding and interacting with this little bundle of joy. It’s too much. We are in that part of life where friends are raising children, bringing new spirits into our Earth. My kids want to play on a hammock that is guaranteed to throw them off at the slightest alteration of their position. So Rachel and I take turns catching up with Amy, Anna and their new baby. I can’t hold this baby, I can’t hug Amy, I can’t hug Anna. I think of it as just part of the territory, but it’s just terrible. It’s so sad, there’s a distance this disease demands of us, a distance we aren’t designed to maintain. I want to hold that baby. I also skipped out on holding babies for so much of my life. We don’t expect young men without their own children to hold babies. Why? It’s magical, it’s special, and the only way you learn is doing it. I’m holding every baby the universe will let me for the rest of my years on this rotating rock.

Somewhere into this hang I realize that I have forgotten that my best friend Martin is holding a small get together and he kind of started it early so that I could be there for it before I had to go into work. I forget about these things cause I’ve changed my relationship with Facebook and with social media. I don’t know about it. And I don’t read all the texts between me and my friends. The pros: I’m present with my kids, I sleep better, I’m a better husband. The cons: shit that is important to my community sometimes blows right past me. Change plans and we order thai food instead of cook it. We get it together and end of grabbing Coconut Thai on Grand Avenue. I make off with my pad thai and egg rolls and head to Martin’s house. It’s just him and his wife at the party and it’s beautiful. We just sit and talk. It’s actually what you want out of a party. Friends show up as I leave to go to my shift at the Current.

The Current is wonderful on Saturdays. It’s a stressful time to be a part of this radio station but on Saturday I connect with magic. The classical jocks are running around making sure their stuff is lined up for their shifts. Mac is sitting in darkness playing jams on the Current and I prepare to go live on The Current’s FB page. Tonight we’re gonna rock out and play rock songs. The Current is largely a rock station, I enjoy some rock but ultimately, I don’t gravitate towards straight ahead rock. Alt country rock? Great. Fancy yacht rock rock? I’m in. Rock that has a ton of blues to it? Bring it on. But just straight up rocking, I usually like to have an ambassador to bring me into that, my brother or somebody. So it’s a really fun area to take requests in. I know the hits, I know the jams, but it’s like rediscovering them cause I don’t go back to this style all that often. So the shift has been a joy. I had a big printer problem up at the top of the shift but after that, smooth ass sailing. Beautiful, turn up the speakers and hear songs from The Walkmen, The Velvet Underground, Muse, Leon Bridges, Heart, Chastity Brown. It’s heaven. You don’t understand the speakers they put into studios. I think these speakers cost maybe $15,000. Could be so wrong about that. It could be more. But listen, they sound like a recording studio, I am basically in a recording studio. Musicians, you know how your shit sounds in the studio? That’s how I get to listen to all this music. And on Saturdays I get calls from kiddos who want to hear a song on the radio, lonely friends who want their shift to move just a little bit faster, people who want a little more community than Spotify can give them but maybe a little less community than being at a gathering will give them. We do this magic thing together and we’ve done it every Saturday. We didn’t miss one during COVID19, we don’t pre-tape, we can’t pre-tape. The show is the hours, the particular night, the moment. You can’t plan a Saturday night, why would you want to. And now I’m about six minutes past my shift and I feel this magic thing leaving my body. It feels like when you walk out of a movie where you forgot about yourself, it’s like waking up from a nap where someone stole your brain and gave it back just a little different. There are DJs who don’t realize how magical this thing can be, how special it can be. These DJs might even be better than me, in many ways, but when I get on this station and do this you can tell I know it’s magical and you can tell I know it doesn’t have shit to do with me. It has everything to do with the amplifiers, drumkits, voices, turntables and emotions that comes out of these $15,000 speakers but more importantly head into headphones all over the world, into coffee shops, into cars, into homes, into card games, into awkward first dates, into snack shopping at a grocery store. Today a couple times I popped out of my studio and coordinated a little bit of exercise with Scott Blankenship at classical. We did a plank. We did 20 squats, we did 20 jumping jacks. It was cool. Today was magical, tonight was magical. Life is good, the world is not ruined. We are all here for a reason, we can all play our part in helping the world out of this pandemic, out of this incessant racism, out of climate change. We are on a ruinous path. We are not ruined. And it’s not just the next generations responsibility. I counted on the forty year old to get shit right when I was a little kid. They didn’t do it. That doesn’t mean we have to do the same. Nobody expects us to do the same anymore. There’s space to change.