radio_ghosts raze i've been listening to cjam for half as long as i've been alive. it's the only nonprofit campus-based community radio station in this city. 2,084 watts of omnidirectional effective radio power on the fm dial. i've always told people this station is one of the best friends my music has ever had. when the pandemic hit last year and flipped everything on its head, it became a closer friend. it became the way i started and ended my day. it still is. every morning and every night, when i'm turning my body against itself to keep it alive, i've got the radio on. it's never tuned to any other station. a lot of shows went dark last spring. only the station manager and music director were allowed in the station. not everyone had the equipment they needed to record their shows at home. some of my favourite shows are the ones that don't exist anymore, that are now nothing but a handful of earlier pre-recorded episodes. pieces of last year or the year before that keep repeating. voices that belong to people who won't ever set foot in the station again. rosie tells stories about her dad and plays every cover she can find of "i'm so lonesome i could cry". she plays protest songs i've never heard by singers i didn't know existed. she plays norma tanega, and for a second i think, "i've never heard this joni mitchell song before." but it isn't joni. it's norma singing, "time is an illusion. my confusion takes away from me the pleasure of your smile. the way you used to smile." rosie plays sibylle baier — someone i never thought i'd hear on any radio station — and i want to stand up and cheer. and then i notice i'm already standing. willy wilson plays syd barrett, nick drake, donovan, the doors, traffic, john martyn, and i swear i can hear his magnificent beard in the timbre of his voice. i can see it brush against the microphone's black foam windscreen. i want to call both of them while they're on the air. i want to tell them i love them. but i can't. they're not really there. it's worse with emily. she isn't even still alive in repeats. she isn't even a ghost. i used to wish i could hug her voice. she had a lisp. she never tried to hide it. every time the khruangbin song she chose as her background music would kick in on a tuesday morning, i knew that voice wasn't far away, and i knew everything would be all right. i know she isn't gone from the world everyone else lives in. but she's gone from mine. tuesdays still feel wrong without her. so most of what i listen to now is a record of a not so distant past i can't step into. more things to add to a_list_of_all_i've_lost. sometimes i walk past the radio that sits inside my bedroom closet on an old wire record rack someone left in an alley near the house i lived in twenty-one years ago, and my body blurs the signal. sometimes the static sounds like passive applause doled out by a small group of people in a room almost too small to hold them. sometimes it sounds like a storm that isn't sure yet what it wants to be, and all it is right now is wind waiting for the rest of its life to start. sometimes it's the sound of a few small animals scurrying just outside my field of vision. sometimes it's the sound of an abrasive grain smoothing away the sharp edges of something i couldn't touch even if i wanted to. sometimes it's the sound of nothing at all. and i know someday new voices will come along to erase the old ones, and all these ghosts that have come to mean so much to me will be gone. it's the story of my life. but i'm learning to be okay with it. and i hope you can hear me singing to you on your radio, telling you i love you, i love you, i love you, and i always will, no matter who or where you are, no matter how far away from you i might be. 210905 ... raze rosie's gone. her show was called "my dad's radio". a month ago they played a repeat of "steel-belted radio" in her old time slot — a show jim still hosts. "that's the wrong voice," i said. "that's the wrong radio." the next week rosie was back, even though she wasn't really there. the week after that it was jim again. and that was it. they've scrubbed "my dad's radio" from the program guide now. it's still the wrong voice. it's still the wrong radio. i knew this was coming, but it feels like losing a friend i wasn't ready to let go of. all the archived mp3s for her show are gone. i downloaded one of them when they were still there. i wish i'd saved more when i had the chance. one of the first songs she played on the show i was savvy enough to save was "fire and brimstone" by link wray. "i had a dream last night while i was layin' on my bed and the whole world was standing still and the moon was turning red i saw a sign in the sky 'i have come to set you free' there's a light shinin' bright shinin' down down on me" you don't get to choose your last song when you don't even know you're leaving. but that's not a bad note to end on. not bad at all. 211103 what's it to you? who go blather from