Radio Sweethearts

I do almost everything differently at night. Which is to say less that I drive a different route home at night than I do when I leave in the morning (which is true – I still haven’t figured out which is really quicker) than that the senses work differently.

For the sense of sight, this should go without saying. Sometime after sundown, our eyes adjust to the yellow light of incandescent (or compact flourescent) light bulbs. After dark, the emphasis of eyesight seems to shift from shape to movement.

Touch and smell and taste seem to change accordingly, each heightened in correlation with sight’s compromise. Eat a sandwich at lunch and it’s tasty. Eat it after dark, and each ingredient is distinguishably tasty.

But for me, the sense most strongly affected is hearing. I suppose this should go without saying; I’m writing for a blog about public radio. It’s well established I’m an occasional insomniac. The two make sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone out there had a mental image of me, up for 72 hours, stinking and gaunt with lack of sleep, hunched over a speaker, listening to the BBC World Service.

But honestly, the BBC World Service always annoyed me. Maybe it’s that they invited SMS commentary on their programming – before I even had a phone capable of SMS messaging in any usable sense.

But I don’t always listen to public radio when I listen to the radio. Sometimes I do the sacrosanct thing, and turn the radio to the AM talk stations, where the hourly news is brought to me not by Carl Kasell (and listeners like me), but by the oppresively massive, conglomorated hand of Rupert Murdoch.

Why do I subject myself to that? Because people are weird. Because things I don’t believe in can still terrify me in very real ways. Because the universe is very large and very strange, and really, George Noory’s “Coast to Coast AM” is really not that dissimilar to Ira Flatow’s “Talk of the Nation Science Friday“. Especially when comparing their awkwardly-designed Web sites.

Well, that might be a bolder statement than I should really be making. “Coast to Coast” deals in psuedoscience and conspiracy theory, while “Science Friday” deals with structural science and string theory. And other stuff.

Sure, I love the topics covered on “Coast to Coast,” but I also love the way the program sounds. Because I love that I can fall asleep listening to an AM station from 800 miles away and wake up in the morning to soft static.

When I lived in Indiana, I listened to “Coast to Coast” on a station broadcasting from New Orleans. Even though it was closer, I hated listening to Indanapolis’ 1070 WIBC, because it was closer. I knew what the traffic reports referred to, the weather applied to me, and there was only static during a thunderstorm.

But that New Orleans station offered static and fadeout. Occasionally, if the discussion was of demonic possession or ghosts, and the station became awash in static, something in my deepest animal brain would assume that demons and ghosts had teamed up together to overwhelm the signal, as though we had uncovered their deepest secrets and they wanted to reclaim their privacy.

There is something truly pleasurable in this; by bringing some barely intelligible static out of my nightmares into the mundanity of a sleepless night, it makes the terror into something very visceral and palpable, but still controllable. Confronting this fear confirms its status as fear. It conquers nothing.

I don’t believe in ghosts or demons. In fact, I’m confident enough in that statement to say that I know there’s no such thing as ghosts or demons. But when, in the dark, I hear that static fade out into a warm, distorted buzz, doubt creeps in. And in doubt lives fear.

Likewise does doubt live in darkness.