Airwaves

When I was little I used to stay up past my bed time, pretending to be asleep when my parents came to check up on me. I'd curl up under the covers with my little boombox, a pair of headphones, and a blank tape, listening to the nightly Top 40 countdown and recording the songs I liked. I was a pirate, at age 11, and I didn't even know it. I loved that radio, those homemade bootleg tapes I re-copied every weekend.

Now I'm older; I get my music from iTunes and Last.FM and (yes) the Pirate Bay. I pump indie-country-downbeat riffs into my ears through studio-grade headphones, desperate to preserve the sound quality despite so much effort on the part of my artists to destroy it. I am never without at least two music-playing devices; powerful machine learning algorithms ferret out new bands like trendy high school friends. I love music, and sound, and all the little rituals that go with it.

But we're killing radio. It's dead, just not yet gone -- and no one seems to care. Old media fades away, merged into this glowing, pulsating tube that links our machines. I miss my radio, damn it. I want my ink-stained newspapers, my novels printed on pulp and bound with cheap glue. I want to hear the static in the airwaves, and I want to be connected. Why is that so much harder now?