1999.

I was a DJ in 1999.

You wanna know how many times I played that fucking Prince song to drunk people?

’99 was a year of massive changes that were mostly brought about by my new FutureSpouse™ FirstLove™ and me diving completely into that world without looking back.

I was SMITTENED.

Which is one of the worst things that can possibly happen to a person who has a BusyLife.

Oh sure, every movie and book likes to portray love as though it’s fun and wonderful and… yeah… it is…

But, it can also cause some disruption to your life of 5 Jobs™ and Full Time School™.

How does one make room for a whole new person who will become the dominating focus of your entire life?

A brewing battle between my DJ company employment and my Ice Scuplting company employment is that both of the owners of those respective companies were also partners in a new endeavor to mass market molded ice sculptures around the world.

I would receive an employee of the year award that year– told you I was an overachiever– and both of these companies would fight each other for the right to employ me full time.

I had been let go from the Mulan Parade after an injury that I was gaslit into believing wasn’t Disney’s fault– btw, I ended up NOT juggling fire in the parade and I wound up being one of 17 performers in a giant dragon/great wall of china puppet that was a monstrosity of engineering, and dangerous for lower vertebrae/discs.

And the reason I was demoted from juggling to puppetry… Disney brought in a troupe of Chinese jugglers/gymnasts/plate spinners/etc from Mainland China.

And to those who may have quaint thoughts about the idea of totalitarian regimes and think Trumpy will be just fine re-installed as your new DictatorLite™… working with Chinese performers who had their communist minders backstage at all times in case one of them tried to defect was a very sobering education in what government control is.

Having conversations with performers and the way they would look over their shoulders if you asked certain questions… it was rather sad to see and something I hope never occurs in this country.

A thing to note about Disney Parades is that they mostly employ college age artists. Who else will work for next to nothing?

Which means that many of the people performing– and falling in love with each other– are the same ages and in the same stages of life.

And FutureSpouse™, ya know The One™ that I’ve smittenified myself to death with, is the same age as me. And the next year of her life will be her… *checks notes*… senior year of college.

She’s about to graduate, bro.

And where am I at in life?

I have completed precisely 1 semester of 4.0 college.

I’m effectively still a freshman.

And even though I’m drifting away from evangelicaltopia now that I’m realizing gay people are not sinners defying The Church™… and that maybe The Church™ is not a loving and kind place for people like me….

I still do have very toxic ideas about men and women and the roles of relationships and what the expectations of being a man were.

And my FutureSpouse™ is about to graduate college and I have nothing to show for the last 4 years of my life.

The Autumn of ’98/Winter ’99 this all comes to a head as I start getting these intense, debilitating headaches that were so painful it would stop me in my tracks and I’d have to lie down– sometimes for hours.

The headaches appeared to be cluster headaches which I had never experienced before, and were almost certainly brought on by all the stress my overloaded and in Denial brain/body were being put through.

Disney letting me go knocked me down from 5 Jobs™ to 4 Jobs™ and now that I want to spend all my time with The One™, it makes things like Having 4 Jobs™ seem like overkill for my time constraints.

Eventually, the DJ company wins out in the battle for Dave’s Working Life and I quit delivering the sculptures and end my Apprenticeship.

4 Jobs™ becomes Only 2 Jobs™.

Some day if I ever become obscenely wealthy… I will build a freezer and restart my love of ice sculpting.

Since The One™ is about to graduate in a year… suddenly spending the next half decade of my life toiling at CC feels like I’m running out of time.

I need a more aggressive option with my skillsets.

And something would happen that would reignite the Unusual Itch™ in my soul of acting/VO work that I had been missing out on.

Even performing in the parade… it still wasn’t really delivering the necessary dopamine hits I needed like the sad Acting Addict™ I am.

One day, I’m driving home from one of the myriad jobs and I’m listening to the radio like all good drivers in SoCal do for traffic updates– this was pre-cellphone era, had a very nice pager on my belted khakis thankyouverymuch(input911ifit’simportant)– and one day I hear a voice I know on the radio.

Btw.

I have failed to mention what the experience of going off the meds is like.

Want to know what it’s like being stuck in a body/brain that is emotionally gray and dead inside and then slowly– AND SUDDENLY!!!– all your emotions come back on line– sometimes in ways that you aren’t expecting. At times that may not be appropriate.

Perhaps my feelings of loveiosity that are blowing my mind… imagine being dead inside for 4 years and then all the lights come back on and your feels go through the roof.

ALL EMOTIONS.
GOOD AND BAD HAD BEEN MUTED.

And now someone has flipped the brain/emotion light switch back on and holy shit I am chock-full of every emotion in my world going to 11.

Repressed emotions flooding back like a freight train into my world are not something I am expecting.

So imagine my shock when one day, as I’m listening to the radio while stuck in LA traffic, I hear the sound of…

*checks memory*…

Hal’s Voice

I don’t remember which of the zillion cartoon characters he did that it was– I think it was Winnie-the-Pooh or Owl– but it was definitely Hal’s Voice.

I know that vocal timbre.

It’s seared into my brain.

The man I loved like a grandfather.

Being stuck in the fast lane of a gridlocked freeway while your New & Shiny Unmedicated Brain™ suddenly decides to start grieving someone who died years earlier and your body was unable to process the Grief™.

Buckets of tears burst from my eyes for the first time in 5 years.

My heart is racing. It feels like it’s going to shatter.

I am literally a sobbing, snotty, shoulder-heaving mess that can’t see where I’m driving.

It took several minutes to work my way to the shoulder of the freeway–

SORRY!!

*honk*

GRIEVING DRIVER COMING THROUGH!!

*honkhonk*

THIS IS FOR EVERYONE’S BEST INTERESTS!!

*honkhonkhonkhonk*

IT’S SAFER IF GET ON THE SHOUL–

This is the story of:

GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY WAY I’M ABOUT TO UNLOAD 5 YEARS WORTH OF TEARS AND I CAN’T HOLD IT OFF ANY LONGER, YOU MOTHERFUCKING AWFUL DRIVERS!!!

In the cinematic version of this the camera sits on the trunk of the car while we see the silhouette of CryingDave™ sobbing intensely for a solid 20 minutes while he listens to a radio DJ continuing to play Hal’s Voice as a gimmick sound effect in between fart jokes on some afternoon drive time ShockJockSchlock.

And every time they punch the sound effect button again and replay the clip for laughs I am sobbing my guts out FINALLY grieving a man who had meant so much to my life.

The ability to finally feel again was a blessing and a curse.

I am a moody motherfucker.

I feel things very strongly.

It’s partly what makes me such a good actor. I can access the entire palette of human emotional experience.

And I think it was having my emotional life flooding back to me in the context of this new relationship with The One™ FutureSpouse™ and her impending graduation and achieving of Life Goals that I realize the Unusual Itch™ has returned.

Something about hearing Hal and finally letting that tension that had been stored in my body for half a decade out… it reminded me how much I loved what I did.

FutureSpouse™ tells a story about me and how the first time I ever mentioned AIO.

At this point, I’ve basically tried to do anything I can to not think about the fact that all my favorite people still get to make a show I’m not allowed to be on anymore because of my ProdigalBrain™. And I had told FutureSpouse™ at some point in those first years,

“Oh yeah, I used to do a radio show….”

I never bothered to tell anyone because nobody ever knew what it was and now that I don’t do it anymore… it hurts too much to ever think or talk about.

Don’t think I’ve ever told anyone the story of crying for Hal on the side of a freeway 4-5 years later, for example. I keep it all compartmentalized in dealing with people. Plus, you learn as a mental health patient to not share your life story with people. You stay quiet. You deflect. You are more interested in the other person. People can’t handle your world when you’re mentally ill. Just saying those words to someone is enough to lose friends, jobs, housing…

1999 was the first time I was ever kicked out of someone’s home as a guest when they found out I was mentally ill. I thought the person was a friend and trusted them with the information and 5 minutes later a door was being closed in my face.

Anyway….

The Unusual Itch™ has returned.

FutureSpouse™ is going to graduate in a year.

What is one to do?

Enter Radio Broadcasting Trade School.

It was the one skillset I knew I had, and there was a trade school in Huntington Beach called: The Academy of Radio Broadcasting.

And most of the students who attend had dreams of being drive time DJs like they listen to on the radio. This is the major selling point for students of the school.

But I was not interested in being an on air DJ.

What caught my attention during my tour of the school….

All the post-production rooms had a…

*checks notes*

Reel to Reel Machine of Dwindling Time3000™!

And it would be here… sitting for hours splicing tape and marking my cuts with grease pencils that I would finally get to learn that part of the production process that had eluded me years earlier when I sipped my 2.735 packets of hot chocolate and pestered the editors in the Pomona facility.

Now I was learning how to finally make the sound effects and edit the vocal tracks and layer the music in!!

And as the months went by I found something new to love. Sound Design. A new skill added to the mix.

And as I would hand twist the reels until the voice sound ended… right…. THERE.

*marks edit point with white grease pencil*

*unlocks the tape*

*pulls tape out and lays across razor guide*

*cuts once*

*cuts twice*

*cuts tape*

*tapes literal splice back together*

*winds the slack back onto the reels*

*locks machine*

*rewinds*

*play*

*perfect edit*

I would sit for hours now that I was gaining the knowledge of post-production…

“If they won’t let me back on their show… I’ll make my own.“

And as I’m creating commercials and doing news segments, in the back of my mind I’m creating a show called Edwin & the Orbs.

The basic idea was to take my favorite elements of my experience recording AIO– the Imagination Station episodes– and use that device to tell my audience about US History that conservative white evangelicaltopia is NOT teaching their padawans.

Edwin & the Orbs was a show about time travel where a character gets stuck bouncing throughout US History… and now that I’ve experienced a half decade of condemnation and discrimination… I was more sensitive to the fact that the “winners” get to tell history’s stories. But what about the people that the “winners” stepped on? What about those who were genocided? What about those who were sick and ignored? What about those who have been discriminated against?

Who is telling their stories to white evangelical audiences? Because white evangelical audiences need to hear about these things so they can learn how the way they vote actually affects people.

And this is where my knowledge of the propaganda we were making… I intended to use all those same tactics and methodologies that I learned at the feet of the AIO team… now I could do the exact same thing. But instead of pimping a very, very white idea of the world– a world I’ve now been excluded from– I want to tell the stories of those who had “Lost”.

Doesn’t really matter what the show was about anyway because I was never able to fund it… but for those who have followed me closely over the years and heard about this series that I’ve never been able to get off the ground… here is where it started. In the post-production rooms at the Academy of Radio Broadcasting in 1999 taping bits of magnetic tape together and imagining all the narratives in our culture I wanted to destroy.

Because I’m beginning to sense some very serious problems in our culture with white people in SuburbanAnchorBabyLand™.

One day I arrive at the studios and I check the AP News Wire service we had–

wait

Tangent Time

At the Academy of Radio Broadcasting there were different elements of the radio broadcasting experience that you had to fulfill. You had to have X number of hours per week doing live on-air broadcasting that you record all your sessions on for the counselors to grade, and you would also have News shifts where you would do the news for someone else’s air-time segments.

We had an actual News Area/Room with a real and functional AP news wire that would spit out the latest and greatest stories that all the other newspapers use to write their breaking stories. We also had subscriptions to every major national newspaper.

So on days when it’s your turn to do the news, you head to the News Area and pull stories out of the AP Newswire pile and grab a bunch of the days newspapers from around the country and this is where you would assemble and collate your news reports for that day’s shift.

This is where my daily habit of news digestification develops.

And it goes like this: Every morning while I sip my coffee I work my way through about 10-12 media sources and just scan headlines. Not even interested in reading the stories. Headlines tell you enough when you see the same ones on 8 different papers. And here I would learn how the media often works in tandem and tells the same narrative.

This habit has persisted to this day.

I first hit the Huffington Post because they usually have the fastest headline of whatever the breaking story is for that day. After that, it used to be CNN to see what the mainstream dribble is to the mass audiences at home. But CNN joined the cult long ago and I stopped consuming their porn. So now BBC gets my first click. Then NPR for the other stories that aren’t being told and what the GentleCenter™ of the country wants to hear whispered to them in library tones. Then USA Today for what middle America is being sold. Then Washington Post for the headlines around Washington and our political discourse that Jeff Bezos lets us learn about. Then the NY Times to see what the paper of record is selling about America to the rest of the world. Then AP. Then Reuters to see what the adult journalists are covering. Then I finish with Twitter and a quick Reddit scan to see what the social media bots are thrusting into our lobes.

I view news in America from a forest perspective. Maybe if an article is particularly interesting I’ll take 3 minutes to read it. But most of what I observe is narratives. What do the people with all the money and power and printing presses and tv stations want you to think about and what do they NOT tell you about?

Aggregating news is, imo, the only real way to find out what’s happening in the world. You need to read the right leaning headlines just like the centrist headlines and the liberal headlines– actually… there is no liberal media in America.

This is another lie the rightwing has convinced a media illiterate captive audience about to the point where we just call the media “The Liberal Media”. And I’ve been in the mix and I’m here to report as a liberal/progressive dude… there is no news media in America that has the narrative and focus that actually leans left.

It’s all Oligarch Media™ now.

Keep in mind, 1999 is a time in US Media where corporations like Clear Channel are gobbling up every radio station they can get their grubby paws on to dominate the entire market share of a region/nation.

We would read the trade magazines scattered all over the break room as one story after another as one parent company bought out another and a diverse media became monopolized by 3-4 companies. You used to not be allowed to own more than one station in any region.

This is the entire plot of the Weird Al film UHF, btw, where Al buys a defunct TV Station and battles the rich oligarch who wants to buy it and turn it into a parking lot because he’s not allowed to own more than station in the area. That used to be a real and actual rule in the United States in my lifetime.

Where was I?

“Because I’m beginning to sense some very serious problems in our culture with white people in SuburbanAnchorBabyLand™.”

Oh yeah.

WhitePeopleProblems™

One day in April 1999… I walk into the Newsroom at the Academy and the AP wire is spitting out story after story after story and a group of people are huddling around talking and everyone seems upset.

“What’s up, Fellow Radio Nerds?”

Columbine.

And to think this nation has done nothing to stop this 25 years later.

Fuck Republicans.

Fuck the NRA.

Fuck Charlton Heston and his cold dead hands.

Maybe things aren’t going so well in AnchorBabyLandtopia™

Maybe white people are tied into systems that are harming them and they’re too arrogant and comfortable to bother considering that they might Be Fucking Wrong™ because they won’t shut the fuck up and listen to others..

Maybe having access to guns in a country where mental health isn’t taken seriously by a corporate medical system….

*grumble grumble*

Remind me, what do Fucking Evangelicals™ do about school shootings?

NOTHING

Anyway…

It was around this time that our culture was imploding, that on another day I arrived at the Academy and in the middle of a lecture on whoknowswhat I suddenly start feeling a cluster headache arrive in my twerking brain lobes <— I don’t know why I love those three words together so much.

And at some point the pain gets so intense that my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder takes over and my medical Anxiety and Hypochondria suddenly kick in with full force. I don’t have a cluster headache…

I’m having a brain aneurysm or a stroke!

Feelin’ kinda woozy…

The only thought I could muster was that I needed to get home to my family before I died.

I leave the lecture.

I get into my car.

The pain is intense and terrifying.

And then over the next 20 minutes as I’m driving up the 57…

I start getting tunnel vision like the aperture of a camera closing… and then I can’t see anything while driving 80 MPH. ohfuckity!!

Somehow I get over to the shoulder– spending a lot of time on the shoulder of freeways this year– and it just so happened that a cop car pulls up seconds later. (I must’ve been swerving or something)

The cop knocks on my window.

License and registration?

I don’t remember how to roll down the window of my car.

I don’t know where my wallet is.
(it’s in the same pocket it’s always been in for 40 years because I am obsessive compulsive.)

I don’t know how to shut off the car.

I don’t know my name or where I live when he asks.

I can’t answer anything.

My brain has totally fritzed out and I. am. dying.

As I am being loaded into the back of an ambulance and the police are arranging an expensive tow for my car, I am told by a paramedic, “sounds like you’re having a panic attack”

Panic Attack?!?

gtfoh

I’m CLEARLY DYING.

Hours later, I sit in the ICU somewhere in Orange County with an IV in my arm and staring at a doctor who is explaining to me that my BrokenBrain™ just had a severe panic attack.

Yay!

How will I ever pay these bills?

Ambulances and ICUs and IV bags of electrolytes…

After 5 years of trying my best to NOT end up in hospitals with BrokenBrains™…

In a hospital suffering from Brain Problems™
is
where
I
find
myself
once
again.

Denial.
is.
a.
bastard.