The Relocation Has Happened

Yes, gentle listener, Self Help Radio had finally saved up enough for a bus ticket from West Virginia but, instead of going to Hollywood to fulfill its dream of being a movie starlet at a lunch counter, it only had enough nickels to get to Lexington, Kentucky. But that's okay! It's very nice here! There's vegan pizza!

One very nice thing about Lexington, Kentucky, is that it was an awesome college radio, WRFL, & one of the reasons for its awesomeness is that it allows non-students to deejay. & so, I am very happy to announce that Self Help Radio will premiere on 88.1 fm WRFL on Wednesday night (August 11) at midnight. (Technically, it's Thursday morning, August 12, at midnight, but you know how I feel about midnight. Or do you? No? I'll tell you, then: I feel like it's the same day I woke up until I go to sleep unless I stay up past dawn, then it's the next day.) Huzzah! Hooray!

Oh, & you can listen live, if you are so inclined. You should go listen now. You'll love it.

This is only a fill-in position for a couple of weeks but I am hoping to continue in the fall. Cross your fingers for me!

There will also be new episodes of Sugar Substitute following Self Help Radio on the next two Wednesdays. The other shows I do will continue to appear on Saturdays starting next Saturday. There's still a lot of stuff in boxes, you know. Books & stuff. I might also have put the bus I was on in a box. Something does smell like diesel.

Did you hear me say hooray! & also huzzah! Self Help Radio on WRFL! Yippee!

I Know, It's Tuesday

But there are boxes of music everywhere & they can't be opened for a new Self Help Radio this week. But they'll be safely taken to Lexington in two days & then, next Tuesday, a new Self Help Radio! Hooray! Huzzah!

What? You didn't even know we were gone? Oh, bother.

Taking A Week Off

Hello, friends. Self Help Radio has finally found a hole in the fence & will be escaping from West Virginia in a matter of days. But that escape will allow the show only to carry a few songs, for even though we're not going far - just a hundred miles west to Lexington, Kentucky - we can't carry everything we need to make a radio show. No, we'll have to forage for it once we're there.

So the next Self Help Radio show will happen a week from Tuesday. As for the extra shows - like Tags & Tricks, which was supposed to happen tomorrow - that will happen two weeks from tomorrow.

Keep your eyes on this blog for furtive developments. I mean, further. Further developments. Furtively.

A Parting Guest

It's by James Whitcomb Riley!

WHAT delightful hosts are they—
     Life & Love!
Lingeringly I turn away,
     This late hour, yet glad enough
They have not withheld from me
     Their high hospitality.
So, with face lit with delight
     & all gratitude, I stay
     Yet to press their hands & say,
"Thanks.—So fine a time! Good night."

Riley wrote that after listening to this week's Self Help Radio (only he did it sometime in the late 19th century - don't ask me how) (ask Doctor Who how!) which you can listen to like an old poet at selfhelpradio.net!

Be my guest. Really. Be my guest!

Whither Be My Guest?

Hello! You're here for the party, I see. I must ask: do you know the rules? The Guest Rules?

They are available all over the place, but I will freely share them with you as I freely share my home.

Rule number one: did I invite you here? I did! Was it a formal invitation? It was! Did you RSVP?

Oh, you don't know what that means. It's French, the initials for "répondez s'il vous plaît." It means, "Respond, please," or, in the colloquial, "write back, bitch!"

So, you didn't. I see. Because you didn't know.

Well, why bother with the other rules if you're not going to follow the first? Jeez, who doesn't know what RSVP means? Get out! GET OUT!

Because I can't follow the Host Rules if you're too lazy to follow the Guest Rules.

I will keep this bottle of wine you brought as well as the spinach artichoke dip. I can't stand these chips, though. Too salty. Ick.

Next time follow the Guest Rules! You've only yourself to blame!

Preface To Be My Guest: Please Listen To Dickenbock Electronics!

It's true! I finally put Saturday's episode of Dickenbock Electronics on the Self Help Radio website for your listening enjoyments. You may visit selfhelpradio.net to listen to your heart's content.

Hey! There's new stuff from Mount Kimbie & James Blake & Baths & Walls. There's old stuff from Child's View & Console & Fila Brazillia. Someone wanted to hear Front 242 so I played Front 242. That's the kind of show it was. It is. It's there! For you!

Or are you like me & just totally freaked out about tonight's True Blood. I mean, my gosh!

Today's Dickenbock Electronics...

...will be posted some time tomorrow. I had a busy day.

Bleep beep boop boop.

A Blog Reminisces: When I Was 900

Bunny, you're a weirdo. Someone asked me to write a song in the middle of dinner, so I used snatches of conversation for lines 2 & 6 & for an unusually large portion of the chorus. Then I proceeded to inform the guest panel that I, indeed, helped write the controversial lyrics for the Will Smith song which contain the profound lines, "You saw my blinker, bitch."

Is it cosplay if you dress like Donny & I dress like Marie? Someone told me the best way to enjoy ackee & saltfish is not to eat the saltfish & to compliment the ackee. No, ackee fruit is not tacky fruit. You're thinking of mangoes. What fruit have you not eaten nor heard of? There is a remarkable amount of fruit on this planet, you certainly can't have tried them all.

In Proverbs, you might read, "Pride goeth before destruction, & an haughty spirit before a fall." Then you might think "AN haughty"? That's very British. Don't the British often fail to pronounce their aitches? Like they say "ello" & "ospital" & "omoseuxal"? Then wouldn't that read, in King James English, "a naughty spirit"? Is a haughty spirit always a naughty spirit? Who's translating whom here?

Can I raise half a glass (I drank the other half already) for 900 blog posts on this worthless blog? Let me put it another way. Is it at all possible any of you never-sober Onanists - who can't be bothered to even pretend to care at this point about my self-indulgent radio flights of fancy - would mind if I made a meaningless toast to a meaningless achievement at this point in the alcoholic proceedings? If so, please, might I suggest that you venture outside to play a game of hide-&-go-fuck-yourself? If not, then, hooray! A toast to 900 entries on this blog! May the fates be kind & not make me write 900 more!

A Life Underlived

Weird "milestones" like writing almost 900 blog posts make me think about the things I don't do or accomplish more than the things that I have done or plan to do. For example: when you log on to Blogger, it gives you a screen which lists all the blog you "subscribe" to or "follow." Wanna know how many I am subscribed to? None. Nada. The blogs I read regularly are bookmarked on my browser, so I don't have to log on to Blogger to find them. It may seem a ridiculously small thing, but it saves me that one step.

But it does mean I exist outside whatever community could possibly be created by being a "follower" of a blog. You know, they might notice that I like their blog, & return the compliment. Or someone who likes one of the blogs I like might notice this blog. There are always good reasons to dip one's toe into the lukewarm pool of human interaction, not the least of which is to alert folks who might not know that there's something called Self Help Radio which isn't a self-help radio show at all.

I just don't do that. I have a myspace page & a Facebook page & of course the selfhelpradio.net website & this blog & really I don't do much else. Some might say what I already do is a lot - other, more popular radio shows don't even bother. But if I were an up & coming band, this would be the bare bones of what I'd do to promote myself. & I'm not up & coming. I'm down & going.

The blog thing is pretty easy to maintain & write in, & it doesn't smack of crass hype. (That's a redundant phrase.) Also, since no one reads this, I'm not too worried about the content, which of course is probably why I don't try to enter into some kind of reciprocal relationship in the blogosphere: it's not a very interesting blog, is it.

I guess, though, it's better than 899 posts of my awful poetry. Hey! I could make a blog of that!

Countdown To 900!

Imagine, I'm two posts away from 900 entries into this blog! That means that, if I write here today & tomorrow, Friday will be number 900. Not all of the entries have been full-sized & virtually none of them were interesting, but it's surely something of an achievement. I've previously tallied the length of time that it took to reach other milestones, so let me update that (assuming, as I probably shouldn't, that I'll reach 900 by Friday):

I started this blog on September 12, 2006.
The 100th post happened on March 7, 2007. That would've been roughly 176 days later.
The 200th post happened on August 13, 2007. (158 days after the 100th post.)
The 300th post happened on January 9, 2008. (149 days after the 200th post.)
The 400th post happened on May 26, 2008. (138 days after the 300th post.)
The 500th post happened on October 14, 2008. (141 days after the 400th post.)
The 600th post happened on March 25, 2009. (162 days after the 500th post.)
The 700th post happened on September 23, 2009. (186 days after the 600th post.)
The 800th post happened on February 19, 2010. (149 days since the the 700th post.)
& the 900th post will happen on July 23, 2010 - which would make it 154 days since number 800.

If I add it all up, it's 900 posts spread amongst 1,413 days - an average of .64 posts a day. If my math is right, & it probably isn't, that's about one post every three days.

By the way, virtually no one visits this blog, which is about right, since that's also the number of people that listen to Self Help Radio. I have "Google Analytics" installed to keep track of visits, but I don't think it's all that reliable - I've talked to people who've said - sincerely, so I should believe them - they've downloaded & listened to certain shows, & the Analytics contradicts them. But if I just use the Analytics data, I can see that this blog has had a mere forty visits in the past month, & of them, it says, only eleven were "absolute unique visitors." If you're reading this, you're an absolutely unique visitor. That makes you awesome.

Should I plan something special for number 900? I sure like adding up days. We'll see. One special thing that'll happen that day for sure is my love returns home from Africa then. That's celebration enough for me!

There's A Riot Goin' On

On July the twentieth, 2010
I was serving time in the state pen
Ten o'clock at night
I was ready to do my show
I heard a whistle blow
And I heard somebody bellow

There's a riot goin' on!
There's a riot goin' on!
There's a riot goin' on!
Over at selfhelpradio.net!

Yes, you can listen to today's Self Help Radio by clicking the above link. It's the closest thing to being in a riot short of having a self-important neighbor beat you down with a truncheon. Listen!

Whither Riots?

Ah ah ah! you say. You, sir, have been slacking off! We know for a fact that today is your show, & usually you write your "whither this theme" or "whether that theme" on the day or so before your show! In fact, isn't it true you haven't written anything in this blog for days & days?

It's true, I haven't written since Saturday. But I have good reasons!

Everyone always thinks they have good reasons for neglect!

Well, now, I don't mean to neglect this blog. I spent the day Sunday in Lexington, Kentucky, for reasons that may become clearer later.

Ooo, a mystery!

No mystery - we're relocating there. & by we, I mean, the family. Self Help Radio will still be produced by increasingly deranged clones of myself in a little shack somewhere outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. Or Hong Kong. Wherever they've stored the cloning machine.

So Self Help Radio will be on the air in Lexington!

You're not listening.

What happened Monday?

In what spirit is that question asked?

Why didn't you write in this stupid blog, you self-involved homunculus?

Oh, I've been going through my old stuff, throwing most of it away - like I should've done in Austin but there was no time to do before we moved. I spent hours yesterday. I found some amazing stuff.

Such as?

None of your business. Do you wanna hear about riots?

Can't I just wait for the show today?

You can!

Hooray! Sugar Substitute!

That kind of sounds like a cheer you might hear from a diabetic. I don't mean that. I mean that today's episode of Sugar Substitute, which is the pop show I used to do every-other-week after Self Help Radio, but which I now do every-four-weeks on Saturdays, is now available for your listening pleasure if you are one of those people who uses a computer to listen to music. I am one of those people too. I should go listen!

Oh, I forgot to tell you where it is. It is where it ought to be, at selfhelpradio.net. It's where the elite meet the effete. Not the elite effete nor the effete elite - only the non-elite effete meet the non-effete elite. It just seemed safer that way.

Thanks for listening!

Funny How Time Fails

It's not nearly enough to copy old poetry & pretend it's how you currently feel. Even old photos won't quite capture the way you finally want to feel today. Because at the time you didn't know how you felt & now that you do you no longer feel that way. Did you think you were the only person feeling unfeeling then, & now do you think no one else fails to feel the same?

Some people would be more impressed with how much money you spent on video games you can barely remember playing. You might as well have been drunk, or doing drugs, or signed up for an informal class in which you learned some sort of craft you would never use. You might even now feel that, somewhat, in your hands, like something you once did but cannot or will not do anymore.

Luckily no one believes now that you reach a certain age with a cachet of answers, sometimes called "wisdom," since the bare stupidity of the world is on continual display. But you did believe that, didn't you. You thought at some point you could walk out of the therapy room in your head & begin living life like a character in a movie right before the credits.

Even if your insides now are simply a reverse mirror image of your outsides then, you can still continue. Just tread lightly. & for fuck's sake, be honest with yourself. What's wanting is not what is, & may never be, but what you're wanting is what you are.

& stop going through the old boxes where you put your days after you've squandered them.

I'm Not Cruel

But Self Help Radio is today. It's all about the cruelty. You can hear it all at selfhelpradio.net.

I hope you'll be so kind as to have a listen. I thank you.

Whither Cruelty?

Cruelty is the opposite of kindness. To someone with a healthy morality, cruelty is so incorrect, so wrong, so needless, so vile. Yet humans can be so cruel, so unconsciously cruel, so uselessly cruel. To strangers, to family members, to friends, to lovers. Some people even enjoy it.

We are, it seems to me, most cruel to animals. Most of us eat them, which may not seem so cruel until you realize that it's not necessary for us to eat animals to stay alive. & in the United States, the majority of the animals eaten live such constrained & torturous lives that the phrase "free range" is attached to the animals which are not raised & processed in factory farms. We experiment on them, our scientists & researchers for corporations, such horrible tests that a product which is not tested on animals is called "cruelty-free." We pollute their habitats & we've hunted many of them to the brink of extinction, if not extinction outright, often just for sport.

People can justify all of these things as not cruel, & that's also a cruelty, the self-justification that is the process of the human mind, a cruelty to ourselves. Our brains, alas, are wired in such a way as to make it possible for us to explain in glowing terms the miserable things we do, to ourselves, to others, to other creatures. If we don't pay attention to what our mind does, we can find ourselves as cruel as those we loathe & abhor, & we can still vindicate ourselves in the process. Many is a cruel human being who thinks him or herself truly kind.

I myself remember my cruelties as vividly as my kindnesses. I have stepped back & traced the steps which led me to a satisfaction that the cruelty wasn't so cruel, or was even a kindness in disguise. In many cases, the very fact that I was not caught, or was not specifically blamed for a cruel action, was enough to release me from crippling guilt - unless someone else was blamed. My cruelties, fortunately, have never resulted in any real harm (I tell myself at least) because most were petty, mere outbursts of cruelty at perceived wrongs, never anything planned & executed with intent to cause great pain. Maybe most of our cruelties are like that.

Most, but obviously not all.

Preface To Cruelty: The Past Is Cruel, You Know

I just spent an afternoon going through many a box of stuff. I should have gone through these boxes of stuff many many years ago. They contain notebooks, letters, newspaper clipping, scraps of stuff saved from the past twenty-five years. I am trying to lessen the amount of things that I am dragging with me through time. I know it only has value to me. If I were to die tomorrow, no one would spend any time going through it; it would just be tossed away. But my friend Joe said today that he keeps the stuff as a kind of evidence of existence, no matter how ridiculous.

Names of people I'll never see again, some of whom I can barely remember. A note here, a letter there. I read through some of them, just to see if it stirs any memories. Do they still exist? Should I look for them online, on Facebook, do a Google search? If they're not looking for me - & I think it's pretty easy to find me online - should I even bother looking for them? Probably not. Everything, it seems, happened a long time ago.

How cruel, my past, you have been to me today. How appropriate, too, on this week when Self Help Radio examines cruelty.

The Zeke Moonshine Show?!?

Yeah, yeah, Zeke Moonshine wanted to just call it the Zeke Moonshine Show. He said, "The Heliocentric Hootenanny is already taken." Of course, Zeke is really just me speaking in a vaguely Southern accent. Not really all that convincing. Maybe that explains the vague egotism. I mean, I'd never call a radio show "The Gary Dickerson Show," but I guess I don't mind if it's a dumb pseudonym. I hope it doesn't offend Dick Dickenbock or Vance Chamberlain. Those guys are sensitive.

The show is waiting for your eager ears at selfhelpradio.net. It's just the first episode, so forgive it its shortcomings. But the records are really all that scratchy. I can't help that.

Countdown To Yesterday

Tomorrow is the premiere of my country/blues show, & I don't have a name yet. Seriously. I don't have a name. It was hard enough to come up with Tags & Tricks for the jazz show. What shall I call an old-timey blues & country show? Why aren't you helping?

I do think that I'm going to let my old pal (& seventh cousin thrice removed) (the last time he was removed was by the sheriff) Zeke Moonshine. Maybe he'll come up with a name. But you know, if he comes up with a name, it's going to be something like "Zeke Moonshine's Country & Blues Emporium" or "Zeke Moonshine's Ninety Minutes Of Hoots" or "Zeke Moonshine Presents Scratchy Radio For Your Edjumacation." It'll be Zeke Moonshine something, that's for sure. Can you live with that?

I guess I can too. Check back tomorrow! I'll let you know when the show's been posted to selfhelpradio.net!

Something Creepy This Way Creeps...

Okay, it's not that creepy. I mean, this isn't a Halloween show or anything like that. It's just a show with the theme "creep." It covers people who are creeps, things that are creepy, & people & things that creep. Very straightforward. Ish.

You can listen to the show now at selfhelpradio.net. I'd write more about it but I don't want to be a creep & hassle you. If you wanna listen to it, you can listen to it.

But seriously. Listen to it.