After years of letting my education in math lapse, I learned a new equation yesterday while reading the news:

(”coup” + “boon”) - verbal dexterity / race = “You are fired” x speed of light

Every once in a great while, someone will suggest that I should get into radio. While this is not exactly what I’m imagining when I say, “No, I certainly should not,” it is close enough. If my brief, barely-counting history on college radio is anything to go by, I would be much more likely to dig myself in with something clearly enunciated and intentional.

While I don’t normally keep up with the ins and outs of Freudian sports radio, I did recently discover something new in the medium I usually think of as dead, namely 89.1 FM, “The Wood.” This station was recently playing in some public space where I had to wait (dentist? hair salon?) and it caught my attention by being both completely commercial-free and completely commercially unviable. There is “you would never hear that on any other radio station,” and then there’s “Did I dream that radio station?” The last time I heard it, they were playing Dar Williams and Ani DiFranco doing an acoustic cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” What the devil is that? Judging from what you normally hear, I would have speculated that it was illegal to play any one of those elements– how can what I’m hearing even exist?– and somehow “The Wood” is playing them all at the same time.

Taken as a whole, “The Wood” sounds like a station we used to have in town questionably called “Alice,” which I remember as Radio Free Lillith Fair. “The Wood” is like Alice’s sadder older sister who’s gone to grad school, gotten knocked around by life in the city a little bit, but still likes to don her Birkenstocks and go knit at the coffee house with her friends and cluck her tongue at the hipsters every so often. That “The Wood” is a college station out of the exurban Elba that is St. Charles only adds to its surreal aura. None of this is an endorsement, necessarily, merely an alert.