(Creaky old meme whose origins are lost to time; found here)
If there's one thing the average person doesn't want any insight into, it's the mind of someone like me. By "someone like me," I don't necessarily mean "deejay." Or "deejay who does a radio show based on themes." Or anything like that. I mean, "Someone who becomes unnecessarily fixated on something that can ruin their entire day if they don't learn to focus it somehow." Is this a form of OCD? Is it akin to anxiety? Should I be talking to a professional about it? I don't have any answers, I just have this thing I do.
Which is this: one day something reminded me of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." It's not a song that I have memorized in toto. If I had to recite it I might get 70% of the lines right but I'd almost certainly get them out of order. But the song popped into my head one day while I was feeding my animals & I somehow got stuck on the first lines, "Johnny's in the basement, mixing up the medicine." This took many forms - like, reminding myself how terrible a rhyme "government" is for "medicine" in a song where there's brilliant rhymes like "the phone's tapped anyway Maggie says that many say" - but mainly I focused on the "mixing up the medicine." I wasn't all that interested in what the word medicine means in the song, if Dylan's referring to drugs (he is) or what, I just like the phrase "mixing up the medicine." It made me think of mortars & pestles, of homemade pharmacies with bubbling beakers, bunsen burners aflame. Needing somewhere to put all this, I thought, "What would a radio show about medicine be like?"
What it wouldn't be like would be too broad. I didn't want to have specific medications. I wanted it to be about the idea of medicine - from whatever uses one could find. & I probably wouldn't play the song that started it all. But I could tell you about it!
Self Help Radio's show about medicine airs today, Thursday, from noon to 2pm, on 90.3+98.3fm in Portland & online everywhere at Freeform Portland dot org. It is not a substitution for actual medical advice. As if you needed to know that.
Which is this: one day something reminded me of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." It's not a song that I have memorized in toto. If I had to recite it I might get 70% of the lines right but I'd almost certainly get them out of order. But the song popped into my head one day while I was feeding my animals & I somehow got stuck on the first lines, "Johnny's in the basement, mixing up the medicine." This took many forms - like, reminding myself how terrible a rhyme "government" is for "medicine" in a song where there's brilliant rhymes like "the phone's tapped anyway Maggie says that many say" - but mainly I focused on the "mixing up the medicine." I wasn't all that interested in what the word medicine means in the song, if Dylan's referring to drugs (he is) or what, I just like the phrase "mixing up the medicine." It made me think of mortars & pestles, of homemade pharmacies with bubbling beakers, bunsen burners aflame. Needing somewhere to put all this, I thought, "What would a radio show about medicine be like?"
What it wouldn't be like would be too broad. I didn't want to have specific medications. I wanted it to be about the idea of medicine - from whatever uses one could find. & I probably wouldn't play the song that started it all. But I could tell you about it!
Self Help Radio's show about medicine airs today, Thursday, from noon to 2pm, on 90.3+98.3fm in Portland & online everywhere at Freeform Portland dot org. It is not a substitution for actual medical advice. As if you needed to know that.
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