Thanksgiving Morning

This morning I was on the air on Freeform Portland from 2 to 6am.  When I arrived, there was no deejay - I guess he (it was a he, I think) either didn't show or left early.  Freeform has a rudimentary automation system - slightly more fancy than iTunes, which was KVRX's automation system when I did a show there a couple or three years ago - but not as fancy as XRAY's, which comes on after my show on Tuesdays & will cut me off the air like it's bigger & stronger than I am (which it is).

The wife doesn't understand it but I fucking love late night radio shows.  I discovered later that the streaming computer was offline, so my show simply went out into the ether, where it may, millennia later, convince an alien civilization to find the source of the transmission & destroy it.

Someone at Freeform actually wrote that he wasn't going to do his show because the stream was down - I suppose there's a sense that the internet is more important than terrestrial broadcasting - but I feel like I'd do a late-night show (or even Self Help Radio) even if it were just me in a little room where the only people who might hear the show were confused passers-by.  That's how I deejayed for the years before I actually got on the radio.

The deejay scheduled to come in after me didn't show either, so I stuck around for thirty minutes to make sure (I also texted him but got no response) & then I wrote the programming folks & headed home.  Maybe that deejay also knew that the streaming was down?  I didn't - I kept mentioning the website on the air - but I suspect he didn't come in because you know it's Thanksgiving.

It goes without saying I think that I don't believe in anything supernatural so I don't really have a deity or helpful elves or a space consciousness to thank on Thanksgiving but I am very grateful to have landed in Portland.  It's an embarrassment of riches with radio here.  I am literally turning down opportunities to be on the radio because I simply don't have the time.  (Also, the wife is getting jealous - she's always known that radio is her competition - & when I do three shows on three different station in three days, as I did last week, she can get a little grumpy.).

So yeah I guess I have an attitude of gratitude this Thanksgiving.  Even if people don't show up for shows that I would have died to do this time last year.