My laptop's been on the fritz for months now. I think it's one of the ones that got invaded, violated, and enslaved. The FBI should be calling me any minute about it. So if you get an email from me telling you I have a nine-inch penis, and some little blue pills for you, it's not necessarily a lie, but it's probably not really from me.

WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T OPEN THE ATTACHMENT.

One of the downsides of running your PC in perpetual safe mode is that there's apparently no audio. Which means no net radio. And there is almost nothing in the world worse than radio radio these days.

Which is kind of a shame. I was always more of a radio- than a TV-person, myself. Growing up when there were four channels on TV and no such thing as X-Box or the internet probably helped, somehow.

Not having a TV in my room growing up was another thing. At night, I'd tune into public radio, not for the news or the music (although I liked the blues and jazz programming on my local station) but for the wealth of radio dramas mainly the BBC was producing and NPR was broadcasting in the eighties.

I first heard The Hitchhiker's Guide on NPR. I used to listen to "Mind's Eye" dramatizations of everything from Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Willa Cather's "The Sculptor's Funeral" to epics like A Canticle for Leibowitz and Lord of the Rings, which have remained, to my mind, much more compelling than any of the screen adaptations. A favorite was ZBS Productions' Jack Flanders series, starting with The Fourth Tower of Inverness.

Nowadays public radio seems to be doing one endless fund-drive. Public television is running commercials. The so-called "News Hour" is actually about 52-minutes long. It doesn't help if you give them money, either. I have. They're still nagging me nearly every time I tune in. 

But I like music, too, and you used to be able to hear it every once in a while on the radio. Not so much anymore. Commercial radio's become a kind of audio version of a neon-sign and strip mall-littered stretch of God-forsaken highway, an endless procession of obnoxious ads for things you don't want, dotted with a tune or two deemed "radio-friendly" enough to play over and over ad nauseam by DJs whose job seems to be to insult your intelligence every chance they get.

College radio DJs are worse for thinking what they have to say or play is any better. You switch on college radio, nine times out of ten you've got some kid droning on in monotone about God knows what trying to show off his arcane knowledge of the obscure and inscrutable and then playing something that sounds like someone taped themselves doing the dishes from two rooms away with a Fisher Price Tuff Stuff tape recorder.  When you grow up you realize that sometimes those obscure, undiscovered bands are obscure and undiscovered for a good reason, and should probably stay that way.

Where to turn? AM is out of the question. AM radio is the precursor to the modern-day internet chat room, where hopeless cranks and malcontents go to talk out their asses at each other. Satellite radio is more than I want to pay. And while the audio channels that come with cable are pretty good—no talk and no commercials—I don't have a TV in my workspace, which is where I usually am when I have a hankering for music.

But web radio. There's hope there. There's music, first and foremost. Any kind you want. Often completely free of the redundancy of a radio DJ.

So, to make a long story short, lately I've been blogging in solemn silence.

Not that I mind silence all that much—I suppose we should feel lucky to catch a few moments of it when we can in this hurly burly world of ours. It can be refreshing, after all. But asceticism must be self-imposed to be of any use. Otherwise it's just deprivation to no purpose.

My roommate S. has embarked on what could be the ultimate ascetic's diet:



That was lunch. 

When I asked her if she had anything with the rice, she said she was going to add salt but had forgotten.  That's hardcore. I mean, even John the Baptist had wild honey with his locusts.

Later she assured me that she had had some chicken, equally au naturel, and I just saw her gnawing on a nude boiled potato.*

She is on a journey.  From IBS to Eternity.

My other housemate and I decided, since we scored a gas grill last week, that we would have steaks slathered in a roquefort sauce with bacon and pommes frites tonight.

S. took it as well as could be expected, but then ascetics should expect to be tempted by the decadents and voluptuaries in their midst, shouldn't they? She was such a good sport, in fact, that she's decided to throw a couple of rice balls on the grill tonight, too.

And I suppose if she can soldier through without salt, sauce, or spice of any kind, I can make it a while more without my workaday music.
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*And as I write this in the living room, she is sitting in for my net radio, singing, rapping and scatting the theme to "Woody Woodpecker" with alternate lyrics in a voice not unlike Eartha Kitt's. I think this diet may be getting to her.