2004-09-20 #3

Silence

I'm sitting here at the computer at 9:30 PM, surfing the web. Reading some crap on K5 about how 1984 is now, but that's not important. What is important is that I'm not playing any music. For years when I was at the computer at home I had music going. Through speakers, through headphones, radio, CD, tape, whatever, there was music going. Music was the background to my life, even as I wasted it away. All that seems to have changed since Alex came. Now, I don't play music in the morning because I don't want to wake him. I don't play music in the evenings because I have to listen for Alex while Jenn does her end-of-day routines. And I don't play music through the day because I'm never up here through the day and my work environment isn't conducive to music. I've simply fallen out of the habbit.

Going to the concert last night made me remember hanging with my friend Mike through High School. He was a rabid Floyd fan, and played all the albums constantly as we drove around town in his '74 Dodge Dart. It was a big part of my life that I kept going until Alex came. And until last night, I didn't miss it.

Back in April or May we got tapped to be part of a radio listener survey. Probably May, because I was off work at the time. I said yes we'd participate, even though our radio usage was practically non-existant. The surveyers kept calling to spot-check us, asking how many hours I had listened to the radio that day. I had to keep telling them less than one hour. So they'd always say, including in the car and at work? and I'd always say well I'm not working, but even when I am there's no radio at work and my commute is five minutes. They couldn't wrap their brains around the possibility of someone who didn't listen to the radio. But it brought home to me again how much I have changed since those days of High School, with all the music draining away from my life as my time gets spent on the TV.

I have to admit that I behaved slightly abnormally for the survey. I made a point of listening to the CBC Radio 1 news at 6PM for most of the week. I always try to listen to it when I am in the car at that time, but it hasn't happened for quite some time now. Also, the survey seemed far more concerned with our exposure and susceptability to the marketing which happens on radio. What we buy, what we spend, what we earn, that kind of thing. You know that the marketing is what drives radio (and, actually, everything else in the media) but you don't really get how deeply it is all tied together until you go through one of these things.