Self Help Radio 062015: Drifting

(Original image here.

I have to do this fast or I may drift away!

I did a radio show this morning with the theme "drifting."  Lots of driftful music (there's no such word as 'driftful') was played and very drifteous discussions (seriously, there's no such word as 'drifteous,' either) were had, all captured digitally for your driftaneal enjoyment (please stop making up words with 'drift').  I spoke with an actual drifter, with my spiritual mentor (who confessed he was once a drifter), & with a drifting friend in Hollywood.  As the show was happening, the continents drifted slowly - very slowly - away from one another.

When it was done, the show drifted over to the Self Help Radio website where it is not anchored firmly in place.  You can listen to it there!  You should pay attention to username/password information on the page!  You can peruse the playlist there or below!

Excuse me now, while I drift off to sleep….  (Thanks for listening.)

(part one)

"Drifting Along" The Riverside Ramblers _Black & White Hillbilly Music: Early Harmonica Recordings 1920s-1930s_
"Driftin' Blues" Johnny Moore's Three Blazers _Charles Brown 1944-1945_
"I'm A Drifter" Fred Neil & Vince Martin _Tear Down The Walls_

"Vagrants, Tramps, Hoboes, Drifters, Transients, Bums, & Winos" George Carlin _When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?_
"The Drifter" Ray Pollard _Big City Soul, Vol. 1_
"Drifter's Escape" Bob Dylan _John Wesley Harding_
"The Drifter" Heidi Bruhl _The Get Easy! Sunshine Pop Collection_

"Drift Away" Narvel Felts _Drift Away_
"Drifting" Claude Huey _Moaning, Groaning, Crying - A Galaxy Of Soul_
"Drift" Heinz Kiessling _The In-Kraut, Vol. 3_
"The Drifter" Green On Red _Gas Food Lodging_

"Frantic Drift" The Chills _Kaleidoscope World_
"Adrift Again" Bradford _Shouting Quietly_

(part two)

"Drift 13" Jane From Occupied Europe _Coloursound_
"Driftin Blues" His Name Is Alive _King Of Sweet_
"Drifting" The Rockingbirds _Rough Trade Shops: Country, Vol. 1_

"Crowd Of Drifters" The Magnetic Fields _The Charm Of The Highway Strip_
"Drifter In The Dark" Ween _Chocolate & Cheese_
"I'm A Drifter" Johnny Cash _Unearthed_

"You Drift Away" The Postmarks _The Postmarks_
"Drifting" Goodnight Monsters _Summer Challenge_
"Drift" Vermillion Lies _Separated By Birth_
"Drifting" Sugar Plant _After After Hours_

"Garage In Drift" The Hit Parade _Cornish Pop Songs_
"Drifter" Wild Nothing _Gemini_

Whither Drifting?

This is the first image that comes up

when one writes "drifting away" in

Google image search

It's from here.

Haven't we all at one point or another felt like we were drifting?  Hasn't every one of us, when thinking about actually drifting, or when feeling like we're drifting, or when imagining our selves & consciousnesses just drifting away, started looking really, really hard at the word "drift" & came to think, "That's a weird-looking word.  It doesn't look right.  Is that really how you spell 'drift'?"

& hasn't every person who's had this experience suddenly developed a temporary brain injury, where the word "drift" looks so much better spelled "drfit" or "dritf" or even "difrt"?  & then, magical new pronunciations enter the head?  & the desire to revenge on those who have wronged you grows mightily within?

No?  Have I gone too far?

After the antipsychotics took effect, I was able to appreciate the word "drift" again for its many uses, for the feeling one gets when one's mind drifts, for the eternal desire which I believe all troubled humans share to just one day drift away, hopefully to some happy eden where there's lots & lots of pizza.

That's how this show came about.  & it's happening tomorrow morning from 7 to 9am on 88.1 fm WRFL in Lexington & online at wrfl dot fm.  If I don't completely drift away after the show - if I don't become a drifter - I'll archive the show on the Self Help Radio website.  But I hope you drift on by to listen.  If you get my drift.

2100

This is the twenty-one hundredth post on this blog.

For a long time, I counted wrong, so you can (but don't) go through this blog & see me writing little celebrations of yay! making it to an arbitrary even number divisible by 100.  Many times I am wrong about that.  There is an awful good chance I am wrong right now.  Here's what I have as a kind of record-keeping that I just did because I don't trust anything I wrote in the past:

Post 1: September 12, 2006
Post 100: March 7, 2007
Post 200: August 13, 2007
Post 300: January 11, 2008
Post 400: May 29, 2008
Post 500: October 19, 2008
Post 600: April 2, 2009
Post 700: October 4, 2009
Post 800: March 2, 2010
Post 900: July 30, 2010
Post 1000: January 4, 2011
Post 1100: May 30, 2011
Post 1200: October 23, 2011
Post 1300: March 11, 2012
Post 1400: July 30, 2012
Post 1500: December 23, 2012
Post 1600: May 23, 2013
Post 1700: November 22, 2013
Post 1800: April 21, 2014
Post 1900: September 12, 2014
Post 2000: January 29, 2015
Post 2100: June 18, 2015

I have been doing this a long, long time.  Gosh, sometimes I even write about my radio show!

Hout There

Sitting at the computer, he wrote the word "hout."  His spellcheck seemed untroubled by it.  Usually, he thought, there would be a little red line - oftentimes dashed - underneath the word, indicating it was misspelled.  Sometimes there might be suggestions, depending on the program: "Did you mean hour?  Might you have meant house?"  But although he was certain that there wasn't an English word called "hout," the computer chose not to consider it an error, and indicate it as such.

A quick search online found that it was a word in Dutch.  It meant "wood."  It was also a word in Finnish, a plural version of the word "hoku," which meant "rhyme."  Hout, in Finnish, therefore, meant "rhymes."

In neither case did he look up pronunciation.  He continued to say the word, in his head (for at no point since the mistake did he say the word out loud), as though it rhymed with "bout" or "scout."

One last thing: the word meant "today" in a language called Vilamovian.  Vilamovian!  Now there was a word that his spellcheck did. not. like.  It seemed to him that the dotted red line under the name of this obscure language pulsed like an angry vein in someone's neck!  It seemed to him that his spellcheck hated this word.

As usually happened in cases like this, he willingly found himself going down the rabbit hole of curiosity, even if he knew - and he knew - that any information he found would not be of any use to him afterwards.  So he discovered this:

Wymysorys, also known as Vilamovian or Wilamowicean, is a West Germanic micro-language actively used in the small town of Wilamowice, Poland (Wymysoü in Wymysorys), on the border between Silesia and Lesser Poland, near Bielsko-Biała. It is considered an endangered language. At present, there are probably between 70 and 100 native users of Wymysorys, virtually all bilingual; the majority are elderly.

Micro-language!  Endangered language!  West Germanic language spoken in Poland!  For a few minutes, it occurred to him that he could learn this language and be one of the one hundred people who knew it.  That would be exciting!

Then he noticed that his spellcheck didn't like the word Wymysorys, either.  So he said (again, in his head, not out loud), "Aw screw it.  I don't want to learn a language my spellcheck doesn't recognize."

He did like the way Wymysorys looked, however.  He thought the word might cool good on a shirt.  A conversation started.  He'd get to say to whomever asked, "It's an endangered language!"

All of this brought him back around to why he wrote the word "hout" in the first place.  He thought about it, and he realized he wanted to write "hot out there."  As he got older, as his typing skills got sloppier, he often found he'd inadvertently combine words or add letters intended for one word to the end of the word preceding it.  Since he was just writing an email, and not anything of consequence, it didn't really matter much, but it did waste a tiny bit of time every time he stopped to correct it.  He was glad he read over his emails before he sent them.

Because there was nothing he hated more than wasting time.

Sugar Substitute Episode # 161

As I have explained previously, & will probably explain again, I am playing music for an hour before Self Help Radio this summer.  It's a show without a theme, it's what we in the biz used to call "freeform" radio (who knows what it's called now), & it's hopefully an entertaining mix of stuff, including a tune from a seminal Brian Eno record (pictured above).  Because I would hate for a radio show to be called "Gary's Fucking Around For An Hour On The Radio," I call it instead "Sugar Substitute," which is the name of a freeform radio show I used to do not too long ago.  It makes it feel like it's more of a prepared package, when in fact it's really just me fucking around on the radio for an hour.

In any event - should you desire listening to such a thing - you can do so now & whenever at the Self Help Radio website.  Like Self Help Radio episodes, there's a username/password combination it's easy to find, & like my blogger posts about Self Help Radio, I'll tell you what songs I played (besides Brian Eno) below.

I hope you enjoy!

"Black Cloud" Morrissey _Years Of Refusal_
"All I Can Do" Eggplant _Anorak Twat_
"No Ladder" Coves _Soft Friday_

"The Great Pretender" Brian Eno _Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)_
"Camouflage" Ed's Redeeming Qualities _More Bad Times_
"North Marine Drive" Ben Watt _North Marine Drive_
"Last Man Alive" The Grifters _Ain't My Lookout_
"Needle & A Knife" Tennis _Ritual In Repeat_

"Days Of Grace" Tanya Donelly _Sleepwalk EP_
"I Started A Blog Nobody Read" Sprites _Modern Gameplay_
"Slit Skirts" Pete Townshend _All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes_
"No Smoke Without Fire" James Hunter _People Gonna Talk_

"Sugar Factory" So Cow _The Long Con_
"Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends" Phil Ochs _Live In Lansing 1973_
"Be Fast Be Clean Be Cheap" Age Of Chance _Crush Collision_