Radio Ga Ga
Thursday, October 16th, 2008
Sir Isaac Newtown’s mind was on something other than physics, I would guess, when he had his epiphany on the laws of gravity. An apple came loose from its branch high above, gaining speed on the drop down and shattering his daydream like an unexpected bomb going off, the thud of its odd shape hitting the ground reverberating in his head just as loud as the ideas that would follow. My theory: breakthroughs are not unfamiliar to people who slip off into a dream state while sitting in the shimmering light beneath a shade tree.
One day last week, while I was parked under a shade tree journaling, I decided I wanted hear talking on the radio rather than music –not just in that moment, but for what’s been more than a week now. I’d already been leaning that way on the weekends, specifically Saturday mornings, listening to the Jayhawks play football. I enjoyed being part of a smaller audience and the smallness of the state that comes through in the local commercials for the small businesses in Kansas, the farm products and the local sports talk shows.
I’ve seemed to cross over to the golden age of people huddling around radios and imaging the athletes slashing through the line and tip-toeing down the sideline line, the hash marks flowing past their strides in a blur. In the mornings now, I listen to sports talk while I’m shaving and leave it on while I’m in the shower, though I can’t hear anything above the shower drain and the water splash at my feet.
I checked out some audiobooks from the library to listen to on the drive into work – a straight shot up the interstate on the city’s south side where the traffic is thin and I can look out on the rain-soaked farmfields and half-way envision Hemingway’s descriptions of wild African prairie and the scenery around a tent where an unnamed character lies waiting to die with a leg rotting from gangrene.
On my lunch hour, I’ve continued the trend of taking my car to a different parking lot and space out under shade trees, flipping back and forth between sports talk and classic rock (if the tunes are lyric-laden, like Springsteen or Dylan or Pink Floyd, I heave the dial there. You never know when you’re going to switch the station to classic rock and Thunder Road.
“I feel like a killer in the sun.”
I don’t, but Bruce does. He’s got a guitar and he’s learned how to make it talk. I haven’t, but I wish I did. His lyrics soar out from the dashboard, poetry really, with sweet piano and sax on the chorus together striking hard and sending a wave of notes cascading into the beige seatbacks.
I feel dull sitting there … listening. What is that really but passing time? I wish that I could be as enraged or impassioned as Bruce. If I could play, I’d be in my bedroom now on the edge of the mattress, strumming, going deaf from the sound confined to four walls. These ideas I have and put to words shouldn’t be any less soaring than music.
Either me or someone else could shout them from rooftops at the top of our lungs and strained vocal chords – soaring out over the bodies and the cars and the hurried people who don’t want to be bothered but come out into public anyway because they really do want to be noticed. All of them passing unnoticed by fire door – DO NOT BLOCK – and the pharmacy and grocery signs waiting for twilight to be lit.
Then the dream lifts and I come back to the athletes dodging questions, the announcers making nothing from sounds-like-something sound bites of coaches and who speculate on whether or not that coach is responding honestly. Usually, no.
These sportscasters guess they make about teams, who will play and what the score will be, all play themselves out in time. Two days from now, the collegiate results will be in. Three more and the NFL schedule will be nearly complete for the week. My fate will linger on quite a ways past the weekend. Everyone seems to forget that the weekends are for relaxation or for catch up, and that little meaningful is supposed to happen. Yet, that’s not how athletics are treated. They define some people’s lives and to a certain extent, the spirit of the city.
We all know better, though. In those 48 hours, we make connections with our children and become important to them again – regaining the status we lost earlier in the week, as soon as Monday rolls around.
Noon-hour lunches alone offer just as much conjecture as sports talk, watching the bodies pass through the crosswalk and into the automatic doors.
No one has called in to the sports talk shows to ask them about the deeper meaning of weekends. In my consideration to do so, I realize I’m unlike Newton. My mind is definitely focused on something. I may not be the target audience for these shows after all, so I wait for my moment to come before calling in and talking sense to people who float ideas and confusion on invisible waves.
