No, We're Not There Yet

This process is very meticulous, methodical and bureaucratic... Naturally.
I will find out within the week whether I will step ever closer to becoming Kafa and be immersed in the government.

What happened to the radio?

Good question. Answer: There are many, but deregulation, the internet and corporate media mergers is what happened to the radio. Now, the music is still there, but it is bereft of personality, relevance and diversity.

I never could have gotten on the radio on my own. My dad happened to be in the business. What I really wanted to be was an astronomer, a writer, a computer scientist, a filmmaker. I was a big radio listener in the mid- to late-seventies, both music and spoken word. The last remnants of dramatic radio could be heard with shows like Mystery Theater on CBS Radio. KSFO AM 560 in San Francisco broadcast this show every weeknight at 9PM. It was on later than my bedtime (I was only 10 years old), so I would take my small AM-only GE transistor radio and listen to Mystery Theater through my pillow. After Mystery Theater, was the KSFO Comedy Hour. On Sunday Nights I listened to Dr. Demento's show of odd and occasionally funny songs. On Saturday nights, I scanned the dial, feigning sleep, and found stations all across the west coast.

I began recording radio programs when I got a cassette recorder for Christmas when I was 11. I would take the recorder with me wherever I went and listen to E.G. Marshall introduce a Sherlock Holmes or Edgar Allen Poe mystery. One week they did an original series of programs on Ancient Egypt. This was during the Tutankhamen exhibit that toured the U.S. that year. 1976? 1977? I still have some of these recordings to this day. I would listen to Mystery Theater and other programs over and over; while riding the school bus home, mowing the lawn, or hiking in the nearby hills. My peers may have been listening to music, but I was listening to these dramatic radio programs.

What a sad, isolated youth I led.

Who The Hell Is Kafka?

I know.

KD Lang, right?

Not really. Just a very important writer from Prague. He worked in an insurance office to make a living and wrote some of the most influential fiction in the 2oth century. (Wikipedia Bio here)

This picture was taken in 1917. Now, my ears aren't as big as his, but I'm pursuing a job in government to pay the bills. I've spent the last 25 years working in an industry that most people would think as fun, cool, or just really really neat: Radio.

Yes, radio. The lumbering dinosaur of the media. But I've become bitter about this industry. Radio turned its back on me November 30th, 2006. More on that later. I still love it, and it will always be a part of me, but the bitterness and cynicism wore me down long before they grew tired of me. More on that later, too.

Today I couldn't believe it. A panel of three government workers questioned me in a professional, non-judgemental way that was totally foreign to me. In radio, interviews always were about "selling yourself" and selling your soul. I always felt like I was trying to be someone that wasn't me. Does that make any sense? Well, I'll try to make sense of all this self-analysis through this blog.