Monday, September 24, 2007

Full moon

I spent most of the evening at a vestry meeting and the last 30 minutes hurriedly posting my TV Club post on How I Met Your Mother, so there's precious little blog energy left. Today has been a weird day. I've been flummoxed and bewildered all day by how people's minds work and what in heaven's name they are trying to accomplish with their bizarre strategies.

The radio summed it all up for me on the way home tonight. Our local NPR station was playing the usual evening jazz programming, but at the same time, a feed of All Things Considered was also going out over the air. This led to the strange combination of some cool west coast riffage under an interview about North Korea's nuclear weapons program, and (even better) pre-war big band swing under a story about germs that have been experimentally shot into space.

I drove home thinking about the on-air monitors in the station control room that were turned down for who knows how long while the station, presumably, ran itself; about the channel left up while some late feed of news programming downlinked from the satellite service; about the dark, empty radio station full of flickering red lights and cool blue displays, and its lone caretaker down the hall feeding his wrinkled dollar into an uncaring Coke machine over and over.

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