Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

 

I've always listened to audio late at night. As a kid, I would flip the dial of my tiny boombox  and listen to whatever weird audio oddities I could find. I was never content with listening to the average music that saturated the FM bands, so I often would switch over to the AM dial to find suitable alternatives. I have written before about playing pool and listening to the radio while always searching for something interesting. Other times I would record myself talking or intersperse my dialogue with snippets from the radio and television and listen to them over and over again. I particularly loved recording dialogue from old television shows on Nick At Nite. Sometimes I even recorded full episodes and listened to them. It's sad that I never found that many old time radio shows. My great aunt Alice had a ham radio, and I remember loving when she would go on and find people from other countries and places talking. I knew nothing about numbers stations at that time, but I re...

Photo Credit:Chris Wyman One summer after I graduated high school, I worked at a resort in Northern Wisconsin wrangling bears and mowing lawns, but truth be told I spent most of my time collecting garbage. An older, German gentleman, Hans, and I drove around in a blue late 1980s F-150 truck, picking up garbage from assorted cabins around the property. He would play polka music on cassette tapes and tell me stories about his younger days. On the days that he was off work, I would drive without music and collect the beer cans that vacationers left in the cabins. If they left food or beer behind, it was fair game, so I had a seemingly endless supply of cheap beer that summer. I did not buy light beer like Keystone, Coors, Busch, Miller, and others, given that I was a Heineken and Newcastle man in my misspent youth. My friends were pleased when I always had extra beer that no one had to purchase. The bear wrangling was less dangerous than it sounds because they were leery of us...