KDAY-AM – Santa Monica – November 26, 1969 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
For everyone who says that holidays are a gigantic drag, there are those few people for which the possibilities of the holiday season are endless. It may have happened to you.
There was always that one person – the one you saw on the other side of the auditorium during Assembly. The one you stared at for the entire hour, completely missing the lecture on Marijuana from the visiting cop. The one who none of your friends knew – the one who has burned a hole in your mind, the one who the more you think about the more nervous you get.
And you could have done something about it. You could have said something months ago. You could have found out their name and looked up their phone number. You could have done all those things – but no; you spend the next three months being too nervous to make any kind of move. With each passing minute the object of your affection looms larger and larger in your life and more and more impossible to reach. But that’s you. Your problem is your imagination – you have a big one. And your imagination talks you in and out of things all the time. Where love is concerned, it does a great job of talking you out of things – your imagination has the other person already going with someone, already totally uninterested in you, already not even liking you as a person – not even noticing you – in their own world – totally self-absorbed. You’re almost convinced it would be a disaster if you ever met and that it would be doomed from the start. You’re not relationship material – love is not destined to find you any lifetime soon.
So naturally, the day before Christmas vacation you’re in the school library working on that paper for History class- the one you were assigned in September but never quite got around to but have to hand in before 3 o’clock. You glance toyour right for a split second, and they’re standing right next to you – even your elbows touch. It happens so fast you don’t have time for every ounce of saliva to drain from your mouth – don’t even have time for your palms to become soggy – you just open your mouth and words fly out – you don’t know what those words are, but there’s a steady stream of them and you can’t stop.
And the object of this unbridled attention – this symbol of endless sleepless nights starts to laugh. And it’s not the nervous laugh of someone who has discovered you’re insane – it’s the laugh of someone who legitimately thinks you’re funny – and you can tell; you don’t take your eyes off each other.
And all those months you put your life on hold – all those months of staring from a distance and losing your appetite – all those months you spent convincing yourself you’re nuclear waste and unfit for human consumption – just evaporate, like they were never there.
And all of a sudden the world is overflowing with possibilities; Christmas is going to be memorable this year, you can feel it in your bloodstream.
And your soundtrack to all this comes from KDAY-AM in Santa Monica – it’s from November 26, 1969 – two hours worth. A little funky in places, but that’s what AM radio sounded like in 1969.
Editors note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
