..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Thursday, February 17, 2005

"I know it sounds absurd but please tell me who i am..."
- Supertramp


tonight i'm sitting in the radio station of WYEP Pittsburgh, 91.3, doing the midnight to four am "free form" shift. my friend Justin is here as an intern and we alternate hours picking music and wandering empty halls. i found this computer humming away online around the corner under a framed platinum David Gray album and figured it would be a good way to fire off a post while i'm here all night. it's not such a bad way to spend a Wednesday (Thursday), once we come in at midnight the building is ours and ours alone. i creep around and look at the stuff they pin to their walls and it makes me yearn for a full-time job in a place like this. all these people have these toys and cds and happy pictures on their desks and when they get home at night, they probably can talk about their day at work without raising their voice. me, i spend 40 hours a week dealing with cry-babies and incompetence and ridiculously unprofessional blame-oriented management and now I want a desk with bubblegum machine toys and snapshots and tiny cactuses on it. time out, it's my hour to play 12 songs...

okay, the last couple Thursday mornings (every other Thursday actually) i've tried to give my two hours some kind of theme. first it was good songs from bad movies (lots of Cameron Crowe in there) then it was songs from the credits of movies (got my first call-in request with that theme when some drunk bastard wanted to hear that Faces song from the end credits of the movie "Rushmore") but tonight my mind is jumping all over so it's just a bunch of songs. started off the hour with "The Logical Song" because it has to have the best rhyming i've ever heard in my life (rappers take note) and then some INXS because it reminds me of elementary school and i had Semisonic "I Wish" after that even though it's some serious cheese but Justin just walked out and said it's eight minutes long so it won't fit in my hour. maybe i can balance it out with that Smithereens song "Tell Me When Did Things Go So Wrong," that thing is only like 2 minutes tops.

here's something i wanted to get off my chest:

when i'm standing at the sink in a public restroom pulling some food or a hair out of my teeth or something and some waterhead walks over to the urinal and we have those couple of moments to spend together, tell me this.....WHY CAN'T HE PISS? i will never understand why so many grown men have to cough and flush and spit to cover up the fact that they cannot piss with anyone else in the room. damn that's annoying. do they think i'm going to judge them by the force of the stream or the length of the emission? it's really pathetic and i had to mention it. seriously, what's the matter with people that they are afraid to piss in front of a stranger? you should be afraid to, maybe, SHIT in front of a stranger, if it's into a coke bottle or a prison toilet in the middle of the cell, but at a urinal where i couldn't see your joint even if i wanted to? no excuse. you really are half a man with that nonsense. you wouldn't have survived the pre-industrial age, let alone the caveman days.

this keyboard is stiff as hell. i got Nick Cave's "When I First Came To Town" playing right now for anyone out there who is listening, then Cohen's "Waiting For The Miracle" after it. that album cover is great, nice change from the lame posing and head shots so many people waste album covers on. this one looks like some strange flag or confusing tattoo or something. you know, it doesn't pay anything to be doing this, and i'm hungry as a stray dog come 4 in the morning but i actually enjoy it. i haven't said that in a while. walking around these empty desks and looking at their toys and music does make me jealous but it also gives me enough hope to get me through another shit day at my real job.

update! check it out. it's 3:33 am and i just made my radio debut. got to say the call letters and cue up Tom Waits "Romeo Is Bleeding." at least ten drunks might have heard me, although, at this hour, that song is known to cause manic-depressives to put a shotguns in their mouths.

::: david - 1:05 AM [+] :::
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