So I’m back in radio.
But not like a triumphant return. It’s just Trey…working in radio again. The on-air studio actually looks like the performance studio at KUVO in Denver. It’s large and carpeted, beige on the walls and floor, and a long counter on one wall. At said counter is the sound desk.
I walk in for a shift and the board is absolutely buried in crap. Old commercials, commercials that haven’t been run yet, none of the air spots have been put away and they’re piled on the sound desk like carcasses after a rattlesnake hunt. There are so many CDs left out that they’ve fallen to the floor. Notes and scripts are everywhere, the text marked out in black and rewritten in red and red-penned in green. Two of three cups of cold coffee, a bottle or two of flat, warm soda. Old bits of pizza.
And worst of all, I can’t tell, from the marked up playlist and hour-script, where the hell we are. I can’t tell if we’ve done the last break of the hour or the first break of the next hour, I can’t tell what ads and network make-goods have been run – if any – and the phone lines are lit up like a fucking low-rent Christmas tree.
I stand there, at the sound desk, some kind of Muzak music blasting over the on-air speakers, and I have no idea what to do. The mess is so humongous, so all out of proportion to anything I’ve ever dealt with, that it has me in absolute, paralytic vapor lock. Not only do I not know how to begin to clean this shit up, I don’t even know how to think about figuring out how to begin.
And that’s it. The whole dream.
Next up on the hit parade, the trip through Trey’s subconscious in a vaguely interesting but mostly navel-gazing sort of way: my schooling.
I’m finished with the current class and it’s time for the exam. But unlike reality, I am in a room with my rat bastard instructor and he’s handing out those little ScanTron sheet where you fill in the bubbles. I’m sitting at a table with two #2 pencils and a tabletop jukebox.
He hands me the sheet and tells the class – and I seem to be the only one in class – not to do anything until he tells us.
So I promptly write my name on the ScanTron sheet.
And he promptly comes over, this hypocritical bastard more interested in format than content, and tears my sheet up. He glares at me and says, “Do it when I tell you.”
Uh…yes, sir, Mr. Control Freak, sir, no problem.
He hands me another sheet and I do NOTHING. I sit and wait. And wait. And then, when I’ve done that, I wait some more.
He, on the other hand, is doing I have no freaking idea what. So, bored, I turn to the jukebox because we all know how much I love me musics. I punch up something and lovely notes fill the air.
And my instructor, the rat bastard mope, he loses his fucking mind.
He races over to me, tears up my ScanTron sheet again, and then hands me two tickets.
Yeah, tickets. Like what you’d get from a cop. And not traffic citations, but actual criminal citations. They’re both for cheating and, using that odd dream knowledge people seem to have, I know they’re felony tickets and there’s not thing one I can do about them.
Then I’m done. Poof, just like that. Dreams are over, move along, nothing to see here.
What makes me sad is that my dreams are generally so banal, so easy to interpret as to be boring. Once, during the Chemo (and that’s how I’ve come to think of it, with a capital), my dreams were freaky and odd, with disco lights flashing and acidhouse jazz in the background…sort of like a coke binge…ahem, so I’ve heard.
Now they’re just boring. My instructor is a complete control freak who has been hammering me on format rather than content – yeah, because I started a Master’s Program to learn format – and who told me he was going to make me a better person by teaching me how to write well.
Yeah, no shit on that score. My friend Brad in Atlanta mumbled something about a piano wire garrotte and missing limbs but I don’t know anything about that if it happens.
So that dream was just my fear of really screwing that class up badly enough to get arrested.
The first, then, is nothing more than me feeling out of control – again. I’m sure it has to do with the bankruptcy and all kinds of little officious people telling me what to do and when to do it and what to pay and how to pay it and exactly how much money I can earn and not earn so as to fall into the bracket where I can actually declare bankruptcy and when to do my counseling (oh, yeah, two separate sessions of financial counseling are part of the package, wherein a guy asks all kinds of questions designed to make you feel like a complete fucking idiot for having had some financial problems when Bush’s economy fell completely apart).
Whew…the bankruptcy has been fun. You should all try it. It’s almost as much fun as…as…a heart attack. Or maybe cancer and a year’s worth of Chemo!
Oh, wait, been there, done that.
