Relocation 1; Granger to Millcreek (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

My parents moved my family from Granger to Millcreek when I was 4, and I don't think I've ever been the same. I lost everything and everyone, and thereafter, for the rest of my life in the cool, cruel world of Millcreek, I was always an outsider, always "The New Kid...not the cool new kid with the BB-gun, but the weird new kid who plays with his toy trucks."

In Granger I had a best friend, Lance Martin, (name changed) who once pushed me off a rock wall and made me scream with terror so loud that his mother dropped her cigarette and ran outside and dragged me into her kitchen and berated me for screaming like a girl. She made me sit at the table and think about it for a while, then she sent me home.

Another time, I pressed my face into the Martins' screen door and Lance smacked it with his open palm. I didn't scream this time, I ran to my own mother and told her about Lance hitting me and she dragged me into the kitchen and made me sit at the table and think about it, and then she sent me back out to play with Lance, who berated me for whining like a girl.

In Granger I also met the love of my life, June Sorensen (name changed, I think), who never berated me for behaving like a girl, as she was a girl herself and approved of such behavior. Once June, Lance and I were jumping around in the bed of a pickup and Lance belted me in the stomach and June, mortally offended, knocked Lance down and kicked him over the tailgate off the end of the truck and Lance's parents laughed so hard the tobacky leaked out of their nostrils.

I also had a dog in Granger, named Slick, an evil dachsund with a pointy face who bit me on numerous occasions but managed to fool the rest of the family with his pious front and silky bark. I avoided him whenever possible, but my brothers would drag me out to the backyard and make me throw a ball across the lawn and Slick would rush over and seize the ball and return it dutifully to my feet, then wait hovering over the ball with his filthy nose dripping all over it, gazing up at me with those dark, red-rimmed eyes, malevolently a-glow, communicating in the most visually eloquent terms his intention to sink his yellow fangs into the spongey flesh of my fat little hand at the moment I reached down to lay hold of that wet, slobbery tennis ball.

"Take the ball," my brothers would say. "He wants you to take the ball and throw it."
Slowly I would lean down, bringing my eyes, wide with fear, down closer and closer to his, until our noses were only centimeters apart. Slowly I would reach out with trembling hand, expecting with the faith of a missionary the treacherous snap of his jaws over my palm, and as I put my hand on the ball, the very faintest kind of growl would reach my ears, from deep in his throat, a growl so faint that only myself and only because my ears happened to be inches away from the source could hear it, and I would feel an icy chill along my spine as I took the ball and heaved it across the yard as quickly as is four-year-old humanly possible. And Slick's dark little eyes would twinkle at me, and he would race over and grab the ball with an extra relish in his bite.

And I would throw the ball a few more times for him, and then my brothers would throw the ball, and then Slick would seem to suddenly lose interest in the fetching, and my brothers would horse around, maybe play a little football, knock each other down while Slick barked joyfully, and then Mother would slide back the patio door and call out that it was dinner time, and we would go inside to eat, and then Father would say; "Somebody call in the dog," and one of my brothers would call to the dog and then tell me;
"Go out and call Slick," and I would go back out through the screen door and look around the yard for him, and call out;
"Slick!" and at that moment I would feel his little teeth sink into my calf as he sprang out from where he'd been hiding behind the barbecue by the patio door, and I would scream with terror and my family would drag me into the kitchen to berate me and make me sit at the table and think about it.

But lo! On the day we moved and were packing and putting boxes in a truck and I stood wandering around the yard with my Batman cape on, I heard my father call for Slick and say to my mother; "where's his collar?" and at that very moment I saw his collar on the cement step by the back door and I reached for it and thought to give it to my father and receive some kudos but also at that very instant for the first time in my life I had a vision of the planar pentoidals from beyond the stars who spoke to me and asked me how it was going and mentioned that it would be a shame if someone adjusted the collar so it was two holes bigger and loose enough that a dog might pull and twist it off and run away at the very time the family was about to permanently change address...

Much later my brothers and sister and my parents would often ask me if I remembered Slick, our old dog, and I would say I barely remembered him, and I would ask whatever happened to him and they would sigh and say that he got away and ran off just as we were getting in the truck to drive over to the new house, and we lost him on the very day we moved. And I would sigh, and say what a pity it was, as my eyes took on a faraway look...

And much much later I was visiting my parents and my mother asked me if I remembered Lance Martin, and I said barely, and she said she'd been talking to his mother and she asked about me. "He's getting married next month," she said.
"Oh really?" I said. "To who?"
"A girl in the ward...June Sorensen..." She took the wedding invitation off her desk and handed it to me. There on the invitation was a picture of the happy couple, neither of whom I recognized, but there on the lawn far behind them and barely visible, the unmistakeable form of a dachsund rampant on the field of green, eyes glowing red with hideous import...

I got lost on the day we moved into the new house, my parents found me one street down, disoriented and weeping, sitting in the gutter in front of the house that I thought was our new house. As I saw my mother and got up to walk over to her, a car pulled up to the driveway and stopped for me. The woman driving the car turned to her daughter; "Hold on a sec, Honey, we have to wait for this little girl."

Crisis 6: Every Community Radio Station Will Eat Its Children (From 6 Crises: Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)

My last few years at the station resembled the early history of the Soviet Union, with myself playing the part of Kruschev, the earnest, well-beloved member of the Politburo who couldn't understand why people kept getting arrested and why Comrade Stalin's eyes twinkled whenever he was asked about it and why anyone would want to live in Moscow anyway...

Of course the station never controlled a country of millions, but the staff and volunteers would fight over whatever the station did control just as tenaciously as if it was a large country of millions, and would intrigue and scheme and complexly maneuver as if cabinet posts and dachas and nuclear weapons were at stake...

But what was really at stake was Air Time. Air Time is a special thing when it Belongs to You, when you sit in the chair in the on-air studio and for 60 or 180 or 240 minutes have absolute power over everything that people hear on that bandwidth, and people know your name, and they know your music, you are an absolute monarch and the listeners are your honored guests and the musicians are your glittering courtiers that you call up at will, to entertain your guests...well, obviously it's good for the ego.

I'm not saying it's a bad way to be, to love the Air Time. It takes a certain personality to really love it, to love the absolute control and the attention and to pour everything they've got into those 180 minutes to make it as perfect as it can possibly be, and it just so happens that those kind of personalities don't get along with each other or usually anyone else. They especially don't get along with anyone who tries to tell them what to do with their 180 minutes of absolute monarchy, ie the staff.

I myself experienced the rush of Air Time on a few rare occasions. Many things had to go wrong before I would be shoved into the studio; the usual program host would call in sick or drunk or confused, which happened fairly often, and if Stan had some time, usually at least a day but sometimes only a few hours, he would call his usual reliable substitutes, volunteers with flexible jobs or no jobs or who had no show and would take any opportunity to get on air or who were just good soldiers and soft touches and really wanted to help him out of a jam, and if that small handful of reliables every once in while failed him and then he would ask Annette the PA Director and if she had meetings he would with an extremely sour look on his face go in an do the show himself and on the rare occasions that everyone was gone Stan would poke his head into my office and with his voice cracking with weariness and strain and on the brink of quitting he would say; "You feel like doing Global Gumbo?"

And a part of me would weep and another part would secretly revel in the glory until about two songs into my stint I would realize with 40 seconds to go in the second song that I had no idea of what to play next and then I had to go on air and then the phone would ring and at that point I would surrender the glory and begin methodically searching the world music CDs on the rack for long tracks, the longer the better, that I could use to fill the time and establish a calming space for myself to enjoy the show without having to open and close the CD players and fiddle with the switches on the big board every two minutes like you have to do when you fall prey to the cursed 3 minute track rule of Good Radio Programming that the staff teaches to all the new young volunteer djs because they're suckers! After a while I began to relish the opportunity of creating the Perfect Global Gumbo program, consisting of eight 15 minute tracks by Krishna Das or David Arkenstone with some Peruvian flutes thrown in for variety.

We had years of staff solidarity after Linda and Bart had been driven out, and the krcl board members were our friends and fellow-travelers and sometimes difficult to tell from volunteers. This was the Old Board I'm talking about, very similar to the High Elves from the First Age of Middle Earth, the aging hippies who started the station and were still around and still on the board 20 years later and remembered Betty back when she was just another staff flunky.

For Example. At one point or another Betty decided to put the kibosh on a monthly live-remote that the station did from a local bar ("private club for members and their guests," in on-air speak). I'd helped with the remote a couple times and enjoyed it because I never had to do anything but help Brad, (name changed) one of the engineers, with the equipment and Brad didn't need any help with the equipment so I didn't really have to do anything but watch Brad work and then sit with Brad and eat free bar food with him and try to shout conversation at each other over whatever live music we were broadcasting that night. I enjoyed helping until for a reason which I'm ashamed to say I've completely forgotten, I had a falling out with the owner of the club, the man who'd provided the free food. Anyway, for a while we didn't speak to each other and when he'd come strolling into the station with his miserable little monthly donation that was far less than the business we'd provided him with the free advertising, he'd do so in stony silence, and I would receive the payment without thanks.

This feud had nothing to do with Betty's decision, I'm sorry to say. She just thought he should be buying underwriting or paying more or something, I didn't really pay attention. She took the issue to the Old Board, and angered many members of the greater KRCL community, who waxed very poetic about all that the live broadcasts - from that particular bar in particular - had done for Utah and humanity and civilization in general. And no one waxed more rhapsodic and poetical than the owner of the bar, who happened to have many friends on the Old Board, and who had actually once been a member of the board. And Betty suffered an adverse vote. The live remotes continued.

Betty took the adverse vote to heart, to a degree that surprised me - she described it as if it had been a physical beating. It was to be the last adverse vote she would endure from the Old Board or any board. Steps were taken, Term limits introduced. The Old Board voted itself wearily, gratefully, out of existence, and joined Gandalf on his faire Elvishe boate, which did gentlye sail out of the intermountain West.

The Staff vs. Board fight thus eventually ended with the Board conceding greater disinterest, leaving the Staff to fight the Volunteers, and some of the staff to fight some others of the staff, and some of the volunteers to join some of the staff when fighting other staff but not the staff person they happened to be auditioning with for a weekend slot, and some of the volunteers to fight other of the volunteers especially the volunteer whose show had followed theirs for ten years and who they had had to see every week and use the microphone right after and who left their CDs and crap everywhere and who therefore they didn't talk to and hadn't spoken to for years of coming in every week and not talking to in icey silence for so long that there were armed guards and dogs and electrified fences and searchlights along the boarder between the two programs and any incursion of even 20 seconds or so of one program into the time slot of the other resulted in alarms and lights and exchange of gunfire and tanks rolling and generals dragged out of bed and hysterical phone calls to the president from submarines and secret airbases.

All of which made for great stories at the staff meetings, with Annette doing her dead-on imitations of preposterously outraged volunteers and Stan and Betty and Barbara and Anita and I howling with laughter and shaking our heads sadly and rolling our eyes heavenward over those crazy feisty volunteers...

Until the staff itself began to grow increasingly impatient with Betty's long-time monopoly of power, and began to complain to each other and intrigue and rage impotently, like heirs of some rich miserable old miser who've put up with the old man for years in the common belief that he can't last much longer until they start to notice the wrinkles in their own reflections and each wonder my god am I going to spend my whole life waiting for him to drop? And staff groups formed and re-formed and drove a Development Director out and people began to quit and the staff complained to the board president and he wept and shook his fist at the sky and said something would be done and the board, which had long since been effectively gelded and could no more remove Betty than a bunch of Cardinals could remove the Pope, met with Betty and advised her to be more careful about who she hired in the future...

At some point in all this intrigue I realized that I was actually not Kruschev, I was in fact a spy, a double-agent working among these commies and talking about peace and flowers and world socialist utopia, yuck yuck yuck, oh those aging hippies, and then going off to report their plans and secret codes and military numbers to my secret masters in some secret base underground somewhere...

Even if I had no secret masters in a secret base I could still be a spy and make careful reports of everything I saw in the hopes that someday highly-developed super-wise beings would come along who would find my notebook and peruse the reports and use the knowledge gained therein to take over all the community radio stations and lead the country and the world into an era of peace and cultural awakening through community-supported local media outlets...

Crisis Resolved: I got another job and thereafter interacted with my friends from the station in a more relaxed and carefree manner without having to spy on them.