Blue_Opossum

Night of October 18, 2013. Friday.



I am sitting and relaxing during a work break at night at a small motel I worked at with a maintenance crew in real life over twenty years ago. There is a smaller analogue television in the corner which, at first, is receiving the broadcast of a news report. A little later, there is mostly only snow and static, but soon, the song “Spanish Harlem” (Ben E. King version) starts playing over and over, audio only, with occasional additional video glitches such as horizontal wavy lines and such. However, the song had been altered and distorted (partly relative to the signal - which may be the result of a nearby storm) to where it seems certain frequency bands have been stripped and replaced almost flawlessly so that almost all of the vocals are gone and particular instruments come and go sort of like a dub reggae mix.

Every now and then, the original vocal line “IN…my GAR..den…” is heard abruptly, sometimes causing the other maintenance workers on the longer break to look up or seem confused or annoyed. At these points, there is sometimes also the brief fuzzy video transmission (only about a second or two at different times) of a shadowy female figure (in a cloak?) standing on the outside of a beginning garden, sometimes the “snow” (video term) becoming actual snow relative to the scene, but it mostly seems like a sunny region where the scene takes place. The song transforms into the Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass version, at times seeming like overly loud and overly-compressed-sounding tones coming from old squarish loudspeakers at a bullfight. I enjoy the song, though (one of my older favorites which I also played on the piano fairly often). I am not sure where the broadcast is coming from, or if it is some sort of mix-up of television and radio broadcasts as I have seen in real life in the past from either medium. There is a very slight association with the “Prince of Darkness” movie from 1987. The “broadcast” as at the end of the movie is perhaps coming from my wife thirty or forty years from now, in the future, through some sort of advanced technology sending “broadcasts” directly into my mind (again, as in the movie but in a far more viable and positive light) to give me clues about the present (as it sometimes seemed in dreams when I was very young and as a young adult).