Resurfacing
Oct. 10th, 2022 06:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
necturusI was listening to myself reading the news on WNTK this morning when a voice in my head suggested I log in to Dreamwidth. It's been years, and I've been busy, busy, busy.
This morning I am in Medford (MA) waiting for a Comcast technician at a transmitter site used by one of my clients. The modem got zapped, probably by a lightning hit, and needs to be replaced.
We bought "99 Rock" from Dartmouth College last year. Dartmouth put it on the air in the 1970s as a student-operated commercial radio station similar to WHRB, but over the past few years there had been diminishing student interest in the station, and the last student DJs left at the beginning of the pandemic two years ago. Last spring, Dartmouth put it up for sale, so we bought it and added its only employee to our staff. It's still running its long time rock format and is currently the number three rated station in the market, behind Vermont Public Radio and WHDQ "Q-106", which is owned by our principal competitor.
Two weeks ago, I got Covid. I was one of the last people I know who hadn't yet got it, and I'm pretty sure I picked it up at an awards dinner I went to the previous Thursday. There were maybe 200 people there and we were sitting in a hotel ballroom for two hours. The people sitting next to me didn't get it, but both of them had already had it.
I ended up spending the next few days lying down and coughing my guts out. I did get the usual flu-like symptoms, but they were milder than the last flu I got. I still have a cough, but I am otherwise back to my old self.
Since my last post back in 2018, I am four years older and more friends and relatives have died. I hate death. I have never yet come to terms with my own mortality. At heart I am still a child; sometimes I think I have spent my whole life playing with toys.
Whenever something that has always been a constant in my life goes away, I have trouble accepting it. The Cold War has been over for thirty years, but I find myself getting nostalgic for it. But at the same time, I've come to realize that the boundless growth and perpetually rising standards of living that characterized the fifties and sixties, when I was a child, were an historical anomaly, and the past half century of American politics, with both parties pledging to bring back the old prosperity, has been an era of self delusion. Indeed, the whole history of the United States has been an anomaly, the consequence of settling a largely empty but resource-rich continent separated by thousands of miles of ocean from potential enemies.
I still think Marx and Lenin were right, but they could not have anticipated the effects of new technologies on the course of capitalism, nor did they foresee the climate crisis or the effects of unsustainable population growth on the planet. There must now be a reckoning with nature; whenever an animal population outgrows the resources that sustain it, it must crash as predation, disease, and starvation take their toll. We are not so different than other animals, I think, and capitalism and the foolish faith in market forces have brought us to a tipping point.
In one of his more brilliant moments, JMS has Londo Mollari introduce his three wives as "pestilence, famine, and death". Unmentioned is the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, war, personified by Londo himself. And these are what we all face, if we cannot get our collective act together.
In my role as a broadcaster, I need to help get that message across, but I find myself hindered by the need to keep my bill collectors at bay. I find myself echoing Londo in Season 5, where he says he has all the power he ever wanted, but no choice at all. If I don't tell my listeners what they want to hear, instead of telling them what they need to know, they'll tune out, and I'll be unable to satisfy my advertisers, which will put me out of business. Capitalism is no freedom, even for the capitalist.
I'm still singing in the church choir. I've been doing it for 23 years now, and still consider myself a churchgoing agnostic. It occurred to me a while back that the question of whether or not God exists is the wrong one to ask; the more important ones are why did humanity invent religion, and why does it persist. I've come to believe that religion is best perceived as a tool, like science. But while science was invented to help us understand the nature of things, religion was created to help us cope with our mortality and our relative insignificance in a vast, scary universe. There is no real conflict between the two, as long as one uses each tool for the purpose it was designed. You don't want to drive nails with a sickle, nor cut hay with a hammer.
I've just got a text from Comcast; they will be arriving in a few minutes, so I'm signing off now. I hope they know how to get here.
This morning I am in Medford (MA) waiting for a Comcast technician at a transmitter site used by one of my clients. The modem got zapped, probably by a lightning hit, and needs to be replaced.
We bought "99 Rock" from Dartmouth College last year. Dartmouth put it on the air in the 1970s as a student-operated commercial radio station similar to WHRB, but over the past few years there had been diminishing student interest in the station, and the last student DJs left at the beginning of the pandemic two years ago. Last spring, Dartmouth put it up for sale, so we bought it and added its only employee to our staff. It's still running its long time rock format and is currently the number three rated station in the market, behind Vermont Public Radio and WHDQ "Q-106", which is owned by our principal competitor.
Two weeks ago, I got Covid. I was one of the last people I know who hadn't yet got it, and I'm pretty sure I picked it up at an awards dinner I went to the previous Thursday. There were maybe 200 people there and we were sitting in a hotel ballroom for two hours. The people sitting next to me didn't get it, but both of them had already had it.
I ended up spending the next few days lying down and coughing my guts out. I did get the usual flu-like symptoms, but they were milder than the last flu I got. I still have a cough, but I am otherwise back to my old self.
Since my last post back in 2018, I am four years older and more friends and relatives have died. I hate death. I have never yet come to terms with my own mortality. At heart I am still a child; sometimes I think I have spent my whole life playing with toys.
Whenever something that has always been a constant in my life goes away, I have trouble accepting it. The Cold War has been over for thirty years, but I find myself getting nostalgic for it. But at the same time, I've come to realize that the boundless growth and perpetually rising standards of living that characterized the fifties and sixties, when I was a child, were an historical anomaly, and the past half century of American politics, with both parties pledging to bring back the old prosperity, has been an era of self delusion. Indeed, the whole history of the United States has been an anomaly, the consequence of settling a largely empty but resource-rich continent separated by thousands of miles of ocean from potential enemies.
I still think Marx and Lenin were right, but they could not have anticipated the effects of new technologies on the course of capitalism, nor did they foresee the climate crisis or the effects of unsustainable population growth on the planet. There must now be a reckoning with nature; whenever an animal population outgrows the resources that sustain it, it must crash as predation, disease, and starvation take their toll. We are not so different than other animals, I think, and capitalism and the foolish faith in market forces have brought us to a tipping point.
In one of his more brilliant moments, JMS has Londo Mollari introduce his three wives as "pestilence, famine, and death". Unmentioned is the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, war, personified by Londo himself. And these are what we all face, if we cannot get our collective act together.
In my role as a broadcaster, I need to help get that message across, but I find myself hindered by the need to keep my bill collectors at bay. I find myself echoing Londo in Season 5, where he says he has all the power he ever wanted, but no choice at all. If I don't tell my listeners what they want to hear, instead of telling them what they need to know, they'll tune out, and I'll be unable to satisfy my advertisers, which will put me out of business. Capitalism is no freedom, even for the capitalist.
I'm still singing in the church choir. I've been doing it for 23 years now, and still consider myself a churchgoing agnostic. It occurred to me a while back that the question of whether or not God exists is the wrong one to ask; the more important ones are why did humanity invent religion, and why does it persist. I've come to believe that religion is best perceived as a tool, like science. But while science was invented to help us understand the nature of things, religion was created to help us cope with our mortality and our relative insignificance in a vast, scary universe. There is no real conflict between the two, as long as one uses each tool for the purpose it was designed. You don't want to drive nails with a sickle, nor cut hay with a hammer.
I've just got a text from Comcast; they will be arriving in a few minutes, so I'm signing off now. I hope they know how to get here.
