March 13, 2010

• My dream to be radioactive

  The first music album I ever got was at age thirteen.  It was by a lanky white rapper named John Reuben.  It was amazing.  I would lie on the carpet and listen to it for hours and hours, sometimes all day. 

  And then I decided I wanted to start a radio station.  I figured it must be possible because there were so many numbers left.  There was 88.1, then 88.7, then 90.1 . . . obviously this meant that 88.2, 88.3, and 88.4 were still available. 

  Thus, I looked up all the things you needed for a radio station.  There were several pieces of equipment, some for the transmitting, another for adjusting how the music sounded, an antenna for on top of the house, and they were all pretty expensive. That's okay, I thought. I will probably have to work for mom and dad, but they will probably help out until I can pay them back.

  My head became enthralled with the idea of running a radio station from my room.  I would walk around the house all day practicing what I would say in-between songs. "How about it, folks? What a great song. One of my favorites. Now for the next song from John Reuben . . ."  I'm sure family members probably said things to me at times like this, like "Philip could you go turn off the timer?" or "Philip do you have any homework?" but unfortunately for them they were a part of the normal world, and I was not in the normal world at that point in time.

  Of course, I only had one CD, so I would just have to play all those songs.  Hopefully people wouldn't get bored of the same songs over and over again.  But I didn't, so I guess they wouldn't either.  But am I allowed to just play one CD? Radio stations seemed to only play certain songs from artists.  This made me very worried that John Reuben was going to sue me if I played all his songs over and over again.

  Then a tragedy happened.  After a few days I found out about this thing called the 'FCC'.  It was horrible.  They were a building of Big Brothers who demanded that you pay them lots of money to be on the radio.  I was barely going to be able to afford all the equipment, but this extra fee for a 'radio license' was really going to sink my battleship.

  However, it was okay! Surfing around on the web for solutions proved successful. Eventually I found out about this great way to start your own little radio station without being one of the big stations called being a 'pirate' radio station.  As I looked over it, it was everything I had dreamed of.  Lots of people had pirate radio stations, and they probably played their favorite album over and over again too.  And the best part about it is that the FCC didn't have to know anything about it.  Which was great.  No FCC, no license, no fee.  Huray!

  Tragedy again.  Later on I discovered one key problem to pirate radio stations . . . they were illegal.  I began to suspect this as I read about how to keep the police from finding your pirate radio station on all the websites about pirate radio.  So I went back to the FCC site and sure enough it said that pirate radio was illegal and you would get a huge fine if they caught you.  My heart sank as I read this.  All my dreams were crushed.

  Thus ended the saga of my quest to become a radio DJ in the sixth grade with only one album.  I am still not a radio DJ.  It is very sad.  But the few days I spent imagining I was were good enough for me. The world is a big world with lots of possibilities, and as long as finding out that being a radio DJ in the sixth grade is not one of them does not make us all dead and sleepy, we will have quite a fun time chasing wildly after something crazy that is possible. 

  • 5:17 pm
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