Rooms

This is this this is, is this this?

Bad poetry, bad cold, snot pouring forth.

Song on the jukebox is “Year of the Cat” which is an old favorite from my late-night radio days in Tampa. Ah, here’s that great saxophone solo.

I think this is the first song ever played on the new Magic 96 in Tampa. That first song might also have been Wildfire. Whatever the song I remember feeling proud or somehow on the leading edge of radio knowledge in Tampa the night 96 KIX FM switched to MAGIC 96. I think the format and playlists of the new station were very similar to the old but I felt like I was at the forefront of radio in Tampa for having been listening at the moment the station channged its format.

One thing about radio that seems to be unchanged since that 1980s Magic 96 midnight is that stations change format abruptly. The DJs rarely know they are soon to be fired and audiences are rudely surprised.

A story I tell often — and which surprisingly receives a fair amount of disbelief — is that my sister and I were watching TV at the exact moment MTV first came on the air. I guess “on the air” is a misnomore for a cable channel, but we were looking right at that channel the moment it changed from static to a test pattern to the Buggles singing “Video Killed the Radio Star”.

I got things done today but I can’t remember what. This, that, here, there. Tired and achey from this stupid cold. I don’t get colds. Not now, not ever. Last night’s sleep was crazy. Insane and crazy, to evoke a Paul Zindel line from one of his adolsecent novels I read as a teen. I had a long and rambling dream about moving in to a 3 bedroom apartment with as yet unknown roommates. I had first dibs and was choosing my room. None of the rooms had doors.

I have had nearly identical dreams in the near past. In one dream I am choosing from rooms in a palatial house in a rural area. In another dream I am choosing from rooms in a glamorous 5 room suite in an overpriced residential hotel. In all these dreams the rooms get bigger and bigger as I see each next one, and the dream ends with me deciding if I want the biggest room or a smaller one.

Most times I can tell what my dreams mean but with these I do not know.