would you, could you, in a tree?

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10 march 1997

8:49 p.m.

Dear diary, It's gone. Radio Free Hawai`i is gone. Radio Free, who I woke up to every morning. Radio Free, programmed button number one on my car radio. Radio Free, whose bumper sticker holds the Spot of Honor in my rear window. Radio Free, the only station that would play Vivaldi, Dead Can Dance and King Missile in the same set. Gone! I know it's unhealthy to get so worked up about a radio station, but I can't help it. I feel like I've lost a good friend. I'm not the only one, either. Since the station went off the air -- suddenly and with no warning -- half my conversations with friends and coworkers have begun with, "Did you know RFH's gone?" Gone! Suddenly, instead of being jolted awake by the indelicate prattlings on the "Jacked Up Morning Show," I was dragged sluggishly from my slumber by the sound of static. Hssssssssssssssssh. I played with the tuner for five minutes before I even got out of bed. All day, any radio I passed, I listened. Nothing. (Or re-remixed bass-enhanced hip hop, which is worse than nothing.) I wasn't worried... at first. Radio Free went off the air all the time. I'm convinced most of the time it's some deejay who tripped over the wrong plug. They had their broadcaster vandalized once, and Waipahu, where the station is located, is prone to power outages. This time, though, it smells a bit more permanent. With no warning, they disappeared. No sendoff, no announcement for a riot-esque wrap party at some grungy club, no gratuitous broadcasts of obscenity just for the hell of it. I still instinctively turn on the radio, only to hear a computer spin random -- but essentially identical -- sappy love songs from the late '80s. Word is they've been bought out. Bought out by the same company that already owns KQMQ and some other local station -- purveyors of shallow, artless, overproduced commercial pop. Why? Why in a state of cookie-cutter broadcasters -- where a swing through the dial finds you four seperate mixes of one Mariah Carey song and three simulcasts of the Spice Girls' zigga-zig -- do we have to lose the one station with any character? It's not like Radio Free was the center of my life, but it was a constant part of my life for the last five years or so. Sometimes it was scream-out-loud awesome, and yes, sometimes it sucked. But either way, I really felt like it was my radio station. In high school, one of my few true joys was hearing my friend Poptart Seance -- an old BBS sister and a deejay during the first first era of RFH -- read my ballot on the air and laugh at my choices. RFH was also behind my first taste of "activism." Apathetic as I was (and am) by nature, it was a big step for me to join the "campaign" to get Pachabel's Canon in D on the charts. I followed the lead of other equally weird friends at other high schools in getting batches of voters to list it on their ballots. Sure enough, Canon in D got onto the chart -- then hit number one in three weeks. Then it stayed there for what had to have been a month. Voting and listening... it was like an island-wide tug of war. I'd vote vehemently against some songs that others loved, and I'd vote valiantly for other songs destined for the sledgehammer. (An excess of negative votes empowered Norm, the station owner, to smash the offending CD to bits over the air, never to be played again. Ever.) That was the thing about Radio Free. You were part of an eclectic -- if not downright criminally insane -- set of voices that decided what Honolulu would hear. You'd try to enlighten (sadly, my "Fish Karma" song never got picked as a Song Discovery of the Week) and be open to enlightenment (the station is most responsible for my taste for all brands of ska). Gone. Again. Yes, Radio Free Hawai`i was bought out before. Its last posessor was "The Blaze," which sounded exactly like "The Edge" (97.5 FM), which in turn sounded like all of the other 3,603 radio stations in in the country that also call themselves "The Edge." So I'm crossing my fingers. I'm hoping whoever's behind "The new 102.7 FM" (they haven't even picked a name yet) will give up too. There has to be a limit to the number of Billbored Pop 40 stations one town can hold. There has to be. Last week in Hawaiian class, we read and translated a folktale. The story begins with two women who go to dig up `uala, or sweet potatoes. They then retire under a puhala tree and prepare to cook them. Suddenly, the boyfriend of one of the girls shows up. Pi`i a`e ke kaikamahine me kana ipo ma luna o ke kumu puhala e ho`oipoipo. Or rather, "The girl and her sweetheart climbed on top of the puhala tree to make love." From that point on, the class wouldn't stop giggling. The story goes on to say, essentially, that lazy girls who spend their work hours fucking in trees will burn their sweet potatoes and lose their boyfriends. A`ohe u`i palaualelo -- there is no beauty in laziness. Instead of asking about the syntax or vocabulary, though, one of the students in class started debating at great length about the viability of having sex in a tree. He insisted it wasn't possible, whereas the kumu maintained, "Where there's a will, there's a way." Things started getting out of hand when the student started comparing the relative comfort of various positions. My kumu then uttered a phrase of such coolness that, in only the last four days, it has already entered my everyday vocabulary: "Mai hele i laila!" Mai is the negative imperative -- that is, "don't." Hele is the verb "to go." Laila is the directional "there." It's an ideal phrase, I've learned, for when coworkers begin to discuss various types of penile trauma over lunch.