Tuning In To WHAT?

Montage: head photo © John-Francis Bourke/zefa/Corbis; park photo by Wil Ortiz

By Tom Finnegan

You're in Dolores Park on a Sunday afternoon. It's a buzzing place, filled with clumps of people each making a cloud of noise: a boom box here, the shouting of a pick-up soccer match there, squealing kids, maybe a concert or stage show with its amplified speakers or applause or laughter bursting from the crowd, another boom box cursing over there, barking dogs and chatty dog owners, yet another boom box with its human in trail on the sidewalk....

Now it's bedtime, but in Dolores Park you're tuning in to the cacophony of the next wave of partygoers and passers-by....

Now it's well past midnight, and the thinning stream of passing Harleys, overnight parcel jets, sirens of emergency vehicles, and crazy people inveighing against the system all do their best to hold off encroaching silence....

Now it's somewhere in predawn, as quiet as it ever gets in Dolores Park....

And finally you become aware that all this time, all day and evening and night long, there has been the thin sound of a tiny, two-watt radio station going inside your head.

Around the clock, radio station WHAT (and its west-of-the-Mississippi counterpart whose call letters are KNOW) has been broadcasting its monotone message to your distracted brain.

Global AM radio punyhouse WHAT and local FM radio whiner KNOW have been pulsating, feebly but ceaselessly, a nonstop cycle of "programming that is good for you," or so the voice audaciously asserts inside your head.

"This is WHAT"

"You need KNOW"

"Here you are; this is WHAT you need to KNOW."

It's been there all the time, this message to which you could dedicate a life.... in the extremely foreign languages of dream and metaphor, myth and story, insight and epiphany and a-ha... has been coming to you WHAT you need to KNOW about your life purpose, trying to get and hold your attention....

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