I’ve been writing quite a bit for this blog. I’ve just not posted any of it yet. It’s stream of consciousness, as it stands, and I’m wanting to publish something more cohesive. There are many overlapping themes, repetitive segments needing to be combined and edited down. But I do have quite a bit of raw material to sort through.
This blog is inspired by the 1990 film, Pump Up The Volume, written and directed by Allan Moyle and starring Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis. If you’ve seen it, please bear with me a moment while I set the scene for those who haven’t.
In the film, Slater plays high school student Mark Hunter, a painfully shy, awkward, highly-intelligent kid who’s just moved to town. By day, he can barely squeak out a word to his classmates. By night, he’s a pirate-radio shock jock named Happy Harry Hard-On. In the privacy of his room, with a radio setup originally intended to communicate with his old friends back home, using a voice disguiser and assured of his relative anonymity, he felt free to say what he so desperately needed to get off his chest.
When I first saw this movie in the theater back in 1990, it became an instant favorite. I identified so completely with Mark, and with Harry, two very different people, as I am two very different people. Speaking was physically impossible at times. I would have to duck out with a nod and a scurry. Yet, at the same time, I had so very much to say.
I felt the ending of that movie. Spoiler alert, as the credits roll we’re treated to many different voices, speaking out, being heard, many for the first time. It produced in me that swell of emotion we humans experience when we know we’re in the presence of something great, something whole, something so much more powerful than ourselves alone.
And now, I think that movie was prophetic. I feel like the Internet is that swell of voices at the end of Pump Up The Volume, and this is my little station. This is the band I’m broadcasting on. And I’m just going to talk. I’m just going to be me. I’m rude, I’m crass, and I have a lot of issues. I hope to talk some of those issues out. There are things rattling around in here that I thought I buried a long time ago, but I haven’t, because, sometimes they come back (apologies to Stephen King).
Steal The Net. Blog Hard.