Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

I’d like for my radio to be placed somewhere around RIMAC, or any athletic site at UCSD. (This is a stream-of-consciousness series of paragraphs I wrote while walking around the soccer field at night)

I’m thinking about the Cthuluscene, and how interconnected our health/identity is with the health of the landscape, despite how capitalistic value systems try to cleave us apart from our environment. I think about petitions from the NFL Players Union for stadium fields to replace artificial turf with grass because of injury rates. Upkeep, cost, numbers. Safety, legacy. I remember seeing men skid across fields blanketed in snow, and how fans paint this panorama: that’s right. That’s our fucking field. This is Our Statefarm Arena, Verizon Dome, Companyname Stadium, God damn it. Our Home; we are defined by this hardship. Our stadium is the one that lets rain turn to sleet, sleet to snow, let it all jettison out of the sky, bullet everyone’s backs. Let what comes from the sky in this portrait moment reflect what we face at work, on the roads, when the Sunday floodlights turn off and we are alien, thrust back into the unlit alleys of day to day living. Glare against rain, glare against snow. The fans are carpeted. The players counterpaned— this is the coalescence. This is the narrative movement, the immersive storytelling: the baroque exaggeration of weather, the safe unity it promises. Let our meteorological precedent— how our soil gets watered, our houses decimated, our crops grown— terrify the Other. Let Our Suffering be Our Strength. Let Our Players become one with Us; let Our Pain be home. 

UCSD does not use artificial turf. We do not have a football (in the American sense) field. The walls of RIMAC are lined with the names of all our Nobel Prize Laureates, and they put sporting achievements on the walls that face away from the court. Our Home is Fairweather, not unlike the way the weak of allegiance are described. And even so, Our Basketball is played enclosed, and the numbers of Our Science/Engineering/Mathematical Achievement are what is chosen to bullet the Other— the energy generated is nebulous; the messaging of two ostensibly distinct languages. The language of movement— clear performance— and the language of counting— digitized infallibility. The gym is filled with a silence that sprawls horizontal instead of ritual cheer that hails down. The Other sees the numbers and wonders about Our Allegiance to the ground we are on, how we define 

Our Staying; have we always been here, and what is home? Does what we call home belong to us? Is home a place or a story? In Underworld, DeLillo says that to radio call a sport is to invent a story— to decide what to keep. What to escalate towards, how to frame a moment to generate eminent psychic energy, energy that binds people together. In Poetics of Space, Bachelard says to conceive of home is to conceive of borders: the border marking an end of safety, an Other to be relegated, cast into. Is Our Team our team? What belongs to us, and what do we belong to?