Month: October 2006

When I started this blog 2 years ago, it was so I could write down some things that have been bouncing around in my head for years. Things like basic principles of good engineering, observations on people and the world, maybe the occasional rant (I’m saving one for Election Day). I haven’t much gotten to those long-form pieces yet, and instead up to now it’s been mostly travelogue pieces and other short posts.

My mother died last week.

She was in a car accident, got banged up but thought she was fine and so refused medical attention, and then proceeded with her day. But she had bleeding in her brain, and as the day wore on (at work!) she got groggy, was taken to a hospital, fell into unconsciousness and then into a coma. She passed away a couple days later, by which time the whole family had gathered at her hospital bedside.

She was a force of nature, and was an unforgettable presence for anyone who knew her. Raised in Germany as the runt of the family, she emigrated to the US on her own pretty much as soon as she could, continued her nascent dental career here, met my father and started a family. She ran the household, ran the finances, ran us through school, ran her career as a dental hygienist (and occasional artist) and ran whatever else needed running.

After getting divorced in 1985, she established her own home in Lambertville, a masterpiece of a house by all counts. She had worked with the contractor to adjust the design per her desires, and the house became a huge personal statement. Beautiful, open, lush … it was and is my mom’s place. She continued raising my littlest sister there until she left for college and the world in the mid-90s. Then, after her third and final heart surgery, she really seemed to bloom and started pouring her energy into all sorts of things.

We talked many times about how she was envious of my career as an engineer; she was always so interested when I started explaining technical things. Just like her son, she was meticulous and thorough in her work and life, to the point of appearing nearly anti-social (but not as much as her son …). So much to do, no time for chit chat! If she’d been born later maybe she’d have followed the same career path that I did. In recent years I’ve been looking for Iridum flares and she really took to that, even finding some herself on clear evenings.

She demanded excellence from me as a child, which was pretty tough going because although I was damn smart, I was also damn lazy. Seems like I was always getting in trouble for blowing off some big school project until the last minute, which gave her grief to no end. This continued pretty much into college, with me skating along on my smarts (and test performance, including blistering SAT scores) and getting middling grades. Finally in my third year of college, after nearly flunking out and spending a dreary six months back at home living with Mom and working some deadend job, the proverbial lightbulb turned on in my head and I started taking charge of my own life, and haven’t look back since. How do you thank your parents for putting you through college? By taking advantage of the opportunity, and I’ve tried to do that. I often think about what motivates me to keep doing the non-work activities that I do, such as [formerly] helping to run WREK and [lately] helping to run Eyedrum, not to mention other smaller deeds. My parents gave me a stable childhood and a good education, with no trauma to put me in therapy or otherwise bind me up in tangles of self-doubt or indifference. And so I’ve tried to use that good start to plow forward and get stuff done with my life.

It was in recent years that she really seemed to be coming into her own. All three children were raised and successful, she’d paid off the mortgage on the house (that she designed), she’d found a lucrative job with a great employer, and was starting to think about retirement. But retirement always seemed to be getting put off, because she loved work so much. And it wasn’t just “work” work, it was doing things for other people. Somebody at the Oct. 22nd gathering at her house (nearly a hundred people showed up) said that my mother had this ability to make you think that you were the most important person in the world to her. So many people had stories of her bending over backwards to help them, whether it was building and painting theater set backdrops, or driving a friend to and from chemotherapy, or just getting together for lunch once a month to talk. But she was private about a lot of these activities, so we (the kids and ex-husband) really had no idea about it all until we started calling through her Rolodex last week. We just knew Mom was always on the move.

Two weeks from today she was supposed to come down to Atlanta and visit me and Sharon for a long weekend. Finally she would see for the first time the elaborate stained glass piece that she had made for me (did I mention that she sold stained glass?!) installed in the custom window box that I’d designed as part of our house renovation of July 2004. I was going to finally take her to Eyedrum, where a new sound-based show is opening in mid-November. We had a yard project all ready for her — it was a running joke in our family that you better have some big project ready for mom when she visited because she was definitely going to do *something*. I’d already bought tickets to the Georgia Aquarium, an afternoon trip which surely was going to get us talking about our week-long trips to the Georgia barrier islands, some 15-20 years ago, to patrol the beaches for nesting loggerhead sea turtles. We’d talk about the trip to the Galapagos Islands that I had promised to her just last month upon her 65th birthday; it seemed like my mom had been dreaming about going there for decades, and suddenly last month it occured to me that *I* needed to take her there. So that was going to be my 2008 trip.

So obviously I wanted more time with my mom. We always want more time. But I also remember, growing up, how my mom’s heart condition was always in our consciousness, whether it manifested itself as her being tired and winded after [deservedly] scolding me for some offense, or heading into open-heart surgery as she did about every 10 years. The specter of being a motherless child seemed to be there, always, until after we’d all grown up and it seemed that, in fact, she was going to live forever. She made it to 65! Instead of being robbed of the future years, it’s almost like we got 20-30 extra years. Years during which she re-established herself in her own household, forged an incedibly close and warm relationship with her youngest daughter, got to share in the joy of the first grandchild, and watch her family blossom around her.

Last week was full of sharp, sobbing grief. This week has the constant undercurrent of dull, lonely pain. There’s a huge hole in my life now, and forever. I’m settling back into my regular life, listening to music, watching TV, even laughing occasionally, but there’s still that hole there.

God, I miss her so much.

Bye, mom.

Update Dec 5th: Added pictures. It’s almost two months later and it’s still a shock. Not a day, an hour, goes by without me thinking “damn, I’d love to tell my mom about that”. Without seeing her in some random detail of the world.

Note: I drafted this post in 2006 but I guess I never finished it and I definitely never published it. In 2025, when Typepad shut down and I moved this entire blog to a new domain, I discovered this old post sitting here drafted. I am publishing it now as-is (backdated to 2006) to capture my thoughts, but please be aware that it is unpolished, both in the writing itself (e.g. grammar) and in the tone (e.g. maybe I said something offensive that I would have edited out later). That said, here I go, pushing the publish button …

WREK is in the news lately, so I guess it’s about time I dump the WREK treatise out of my head.

I started at WREK in the fall of 1988, having been at Georgia Tech for a couple years by then. I was in the middle of a rapid evolution of my musical tastes, which had started with the typical pop radio / classic rock corporate crap in high school and the first year or two of college, winding through the corporate “new music” (e.g. Smithereens, Living Color), spending about 6 months blowing through standard college radio WRAS-style pop rotation at the time (Mission UK, Robyn Hitchcock, etc.), and ending up with an enormous appetite for MORE. WREK happened to be the station at my college so I dove in and discovered a world of music … beyond rock. Sufi chant, free jazz, ambient noise, 20th century composition, all in addition to the more approachable fare of old school HC, electronic, bebop, and so forth.

And as I’ve heard others say so many times over the years, WREK changed my life. It inducted me into a music and culture underground that you would have no idea existed … I ended up spending the next 8 years deeply involved with the operation of the station, but by 1996, graduating with my second degree, I decided to quite cold turkey and just be a regular listener, a consumer. Well, 3 years later I could stand it anymore, it was obvious the station was falling apart (more on why later). So in 1999 I dove back in, this time more as a professional engineer and project manager who was determine to Make Shit Happen, and for the next 3 years I busted ass and practically rebuilt the whole station. I took a station that was heading towards the dumpster and, with the help of 3 other guys, converted it back into the functional juggernaut that I remembered. We fixed equipment, built new systems, set up operational processes, and basically made the place work again.

In 2002 I started a new job and again I said goobye to WREK. This time I was more deeply entangled, so I couldn’t just quit, I had to slowly shed all of my roles, and after about 2 years that was done. I still do a handful of things for WREK, but generally they are a few low-maintenance technical tasks that I hold onto only because it would be far more work for me to explain them than to just keep doing them. Generally these are tasks that will be retired over time anyway so it’s not like it’s an open-ended commitment. And the one bit of “fun” work that I do at WREK is the monthly Eyedrum radio show, which makes for a neat tie-in between my old hobby (WREK) and my new hobby (Eyedrum).

WREK is definitely dying. The staff of WREK (of my halcyon days of 1988-1994) was far more engaged in the music scene, far more active in Getting Shit Done, far more engaged in life. These days everybody seems to be sleepwalking through their lives, and I’ve attributed to the following things.

1. College radio doesn’t attract motivated people to work there anymore. Up until the mid 90’s, the only way to be exposed to independent/alternative music was to be involved in the local scene — listen to the local noncommercial radio, go out to shows at clubs, read zines, and so forth. People that really wanted to express themselves had to do it by publishing zines, working in college radio, promoting shows, playing in bands. But with the advent of the web in the mid-90’s, most of that energy coming from the urge to express oneself flowed into the internet — home pages, internet discussion forums, even net radio. Obviously blogs and Myspace were still to come. So the people who were really driven to get involved in the scene had an outlet for expression, and they are no longer driven to college radio (and the other outlets I mentioned). So what’s left? The average losers who walk in the door to get on the radio ’cause they think hearing their voice on the radio sounds cool. That quality person does not make for a well-run radio station, it makes for one that slouches its way through life.

2. We now have the Playstation Generation in schools. Now, this is definitely going to make me sound like a cranky old geezer, but kids really are getting dumber and less capable of independent thought. They’ve had their entertainment spoon fed to them through their vibrating video game controllers and Sidekicks, and that creates a person who can’t take an empty canvas and create something new with it. It’s all one collosal shrug now.

3. The drinking age went up to 21. This happened back in the mid-80s, so it obviously isn’t anything new like the internet, but it created a definite braking effect on the scene. The average college student is under 21 and can’t get into the clubs where most of the music scene is being played out. Yes, there are alternative venues and all-ages shows, but the bread and butter of the scene is happening night after night in the over-21 clubs.

I don’t think any of these things are reversible. College radio, even radio itself, had its day in the sun and the sun is setting; real creative expression has moved on to other outlets. We’ve got a great infrastructure in place so certainly we can milk if for all its worth, and try to keep the remaining faded gems of radio (including WREK) going as long as possible, but it’s just postponing the inevitable. WREK, if it continues to exist at all, will eventually revert to the echo chamber of frat boys playing “new music” for their buddies, or just get taken over completely by the fine folks in “public” radio. Perhaps not this year but soon enough.

Some people currently (or recently) at WREK will read this and complain that things are fine, but I don’t think they have the hindsight to see what’s missing: – there’s no effort to feature recordings of local music; there are some great ways to implement this but nobody cares anymore – no real effort – no more promos for weekly shows like Earwhacks – oh wait, they cancelled Earwhacks (an album in its entirety) altogther, golf clap – hardly any Sunday Specials, virtually none outside of my own monthly show

Some folks recently asked me about my opinion of the WREK events, and I’ve basically told people that my opinions are too dark and I’d rather not say.

But it’s not dead yet! So tune in while you still can and soak it all in. It’ll be replaced with morning shows and Nickelback and marketing-driven fare soon enough.

To get you started, I’ll post some highlights of WREK’s programming soon. Shows that I listen to religiously every week.