I just saw a video of one of my favorite modern rock performers, and former American Idol contestant, Chris Daughtry performing the Foreigner classic "Feels Like the First Time" for the League of First Time Voters.

First Time Voters... wow , I would hate to be you. For YOU are deciding your own future and destiny and that of your nation.

I once thought that this would be the year we did something different as we did in 1992, the last time I started as passionate and remained so through an entire campaign.

I feel that way no longer.

Here in my area of Colorado, we are allowed to vote via a mail in ballot. I have had mine for three weeks, and have yet to open the envelope.

Where once I was so amped to get rid of yet another Bush, like I was in 1992, I'm just not comfortable with the candidates for the future of this country, my security and that of my friends.

Maybe it is time that I as a middle aged man... and I hate that term, always been so young at heart but realizing that I am getting older every day I crawl out of bed, that we turn this nation over to the youth.

I may be dead in ten years or less, but they must live in it and lead for the rest of thier lives.

I have recently abandoned a forey back into the decade of the 80's with an online radio station that was the age in which I grew up in.

We had Boris Yeltzsin, Michael Gorbachev, Perestroika, and Glasnost who were kept in check by the last Rebuplican I have had respect for, Ronald Reagan.

I mentioned in an e-mail last week with a friend that I didn't agree with her fears that the world was falling apart and an uprising was imminent.

I say here tonight, that I back down from that statement.

With the "new" Russia, acting a lot like the "old" Russia or the Soviet Union as we knew them then, and our troops still fighting the new Vietnam in the Middle East, how do we protect ourselves.

Ever see the movie "Red Dawn"? Some lessons to be learned there.

No matter who wins the election in November, this nation is no better off.

I wanted to believe in Obama, and think that health care, education and domestic issues were top priority. The only way to have a strong nation, is to make the people strong, which we have not done since 2001.

But he is not the answer, and if you wanna follow most people's racist fears that I do not subscribe to, he is the anti-christ.

But the fact is, our present system of government is flawed, controlled by big business and who can pay the most money to the lobbies.

This is no longer, a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people."

I won't tell you how to vote, if you even vote at all. But when you do, drop down to a knee and say a prayer that the choice you made protects your children and this world.

I don't know why I feel what I feel, but I think some changes are going to be happening for me personally and they are for the better.

Everyone knows I am a stress attack waiting to be happen, most of that has been centered around my job, and the costs inferred and the lack of what I considered appropriate compensation.

One of my clients, and my biggest, is the local Chevrolet dealership, where I traditionally spend two days a week at helping them with thier IT problems and user support.

I was caught off guard this morning when I was called into a meeting with the General Manager and several contractors to help discuss their voice and data needs for their new building that will be starting construction next month.

From the sounds of things they are about to really launch one of the cities oldest dealerships into the new century and the integrating and supporting the technology that goes with that will be a potential fulltime position.

And from a couple of under the breath hints today, a possible job offer may be in the works.

I like my current bosses, as friends I have known them for years, but this being by recond working relationship with them I remember how difficult they can be to work with, and I have been growing more frustrated as the last few weeks has gone by.

Working at the dealership might not be as big of a challenge and chance to work with all the new technologies, but it will give me a change to specialize.

Is it best to know a little about a lot of things, or know everything about one?, I guess is what I am asking.

I had already been offered a job once at the dealership, over a year ago by the G.M., which I politely declined at the time, but now, I would be more willing to entertain.

With a better salary offer, and I already know they have a better insurance plan than I have, an end to putting all those miles on my Jeep every week and burning gas, and working around a core group of people I have come to know, respect and enjoy being around is a interesting prospect.

To solve some of the stress and financial issues may allow me to resolve other things that have been bothering me like where I live and bringing back my radio station which had to go off the air because of my financial condition, which all in all is a much happier me.

I've always been told when one door closes another one opens, and I may be ready to cross that threshold.

Tomorrow, Thursday, marks the fourth anniversary of my last professional day as a radio broadcaster.

July 30, 2004... Aaron Phillips signed off his last shift at KOLT Country in Flagstaff, Arizona without even a goodbye to my listeners or an explanation of where I had gone, as that, by contract, was forbidden.  I would be there, one day and gone the next.

Sorta like that last experience in professional radio seemed to take a little more away from me, one day at a time.

I normally would have been on the next stagecoach, or U-Haul outta town, but my friend Walker and his band were playing the next week there in town, so I decided to put off the majority of the critical packing till the last minutes, take a week to chill, and have one final night out in the small town the following Saturday night, which was attended only by my best Flagstaff friend and her husband, and of course Walker and the band.

I think back to that last day in radio, and the 20 years in broadcasting before that, and reading the news tonight made one long forgotten nightmare jump back into the here and now consciousness.

Local authorities announced Monday that human remains had been found in "the area" and speculation runs rampant that they are of Paige Birgfeld, a proprietor of an escort service called Models, Inc who disappeared over a year ago.

The reason this somehow became relevant is I suddenly was reminded of a young woman named Sheryl Bonaventura who I had a chance to help and didn't.  I don't know if what I could have done would have made a difference, but I made the wrong and always regretted choice not to try.

Sheryl Bonaventura, 18, was kidnapped from a Grand Junction mall, and a witness described a bearded, well-dressed man who looked like Wilder talking with her.   He had wandered through the mall, soliciting women for photographs and modeling jobs.  Someone had seen him with Sheryl, a girl who'd already done some modeling and hoped to do more.  She had likely been an easy mark for him.  Her Mazda was left in the parking lot, locked, with her sunglasses inside.  With a nationwide alert now targeting Christopher Wilder as a fugitive and predator of pretty girls, this missing-persons report received immediate attention.

A waitress later said she had spotted Sheryl on the same day she disappeared having lunch in Silverton, Colorado, a hundred miles away, with a man who looked like Wilder.   She had given her name to the waitress and told her they were heading for Vegas.  Another teenage girl had eaten lunch and left the restaurant with them as well.

Wilder and company spent the night in a motel in Durango and went into Las Vegas, but that was the end of the ride for Sheryl.

The nude body of Sheryl Bonaventura of Grand Junction, Colo was found in southern Utah along a road 12 miles north of Kanab, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said.  The authorities said she had been stabbed to death.

Linked with three murders, one kidnapping, and four disappearances, Wilder was described by FBI spokesmen as "a significant danger." His name was added to the Bureau's "Ten Most Wanted" list on April 3, 1984.

Wilder himself met his end on April 14 when the killer stopped for gas that afternoon in Colebrook, New Hampshire, unaware that he had reached the end of his run.

Passing by the service station, state troopers Wayne Fortier and Leo Jellison recognized Wilder's car from FBI descriptions. Approaching the vehicle, they called out to Wilder and saw him break for the car, diving inside as he went for his pistol. Jellison leaped on the fugitive's back, struggling for the .357 magnum, and two shots rang out. The first passed through Wilder and pierced Jellison's chest, lodging in his liver; the second snuffed out Wilder's life, resulting in what a coroner termed "cardiac obliteration."

With his death, Chris Wilder was inevitably linked with other unsolved crimes. A pair of girls, aged ten and twelve, identified his mug shot as the likeness of a man who snatched them from a park in Boynton Beach, in June of 1983, and forced them to fellate him in the nearby woods. His name was likewise linked with other deaths and disappearances across two decades, in Australia and America. In 1965, Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock accompanied a young man matching Wilder's description into the beachfront dunes near Sydney; strangled, raped and stabbed, their bodies were discovered in a shallow grave, but no one has been charged to date. In 1981, teenagers Mary Hare and Mary Optiz were abducted from a mall in Lee County, Florida; Hare was later found, stabbed to death, while Optiz remains among the missing. During 1982, the skeletal remains of unidentified women were unearthed on two separate occasions near property owned by Wilder, in Loxahatchee; one victim had been dead for several years, the other for a period of months.

And the list goes on. Tammi Leppert, teenaged model, kidnapped from her job at a convenience store on Merritt Island, July 6, 1983. Melody Gay, 19, abducted on the graveyard shift of an all-night store in Collier County, Florida, on March 7, 1984, her body pulled from a rural canal three days later. Colleen Osborne, 15, missing from the bedroom of her home in Daytona Beach, March 15, 1984. Chris Wilder was seen in Daytona that day, propositioning "models."

The complete story on Wilder is here: http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/serialkillers/wilder.htm or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Wilder

That whole episode had been blanked from my memory for decades until today.

Another night of sweet dreams for me, I'm sure.

As everyone knows, I have always enjoyed my time in radio, and the phases of my career are easily broken down into two genres, the 80's, and Country, which I started jocking in in late 1987, right about the time that 80's pop and rock was starting to get kinda crappy.

And of course, it would only be two years before Country exploded with The Class of 1989, a group of stellar artists like Garth Brooks, Clint Black, Alan Jackson and Travis Tritt changed the face of country and opened the doors for future acts like Brooks & Dunn, John Michael Montgomery, Shania Twain, Lonestar and many many more.

I spent nearly 20 years working in country until a 4 year anniversary fast approaching, when I signed off of KOLT Country in Flagstaff, Arizona on July 30, 2004 and walked away from country radio.

Or have I?

I have already been streaming a Internet based 80's radio station for the past seven months, and I have always wanted to expand my broadcasting empire on the Internet to as many as four stations, with the next one being a smooth jazz station.

However I am reanalyzing my Internet stations plans both present and future.

Totally 80's radio has struggled to find a loyal listener base that will get involved with the station through phone calls, e-mails, and most importantly donations to offset the costs of broadcasting.

It is possible I may "change formats" as so often happens in real radio, and why you see so few real life 80's radio stations on the over the air airwaves. For reasons unknown, they seem to have an expiration date.

That's not to say Totally 80's doesn't get people tuned in. In fact Tuesday was the second highest day in the stations history for thr number of listeners and the time spent listening.

But to launch a second station streamat this point may be cost prohibitive with needing to get a new PC or rebuild and upgrade one, another license for the radio studio software and another stream of fees for broadcasting over the net.

So it's possible that I may take Totally 80's off the air, and instead salvage some of the resources to launch my second station format which is called Pure Country.

One might ask why would they want to listen to a country station on the Internet when Country stations are a time a dozen over the airwaves of their own towns.

Well because Pure Country would be concentrating solely on those years between 1987 or so up through around 2000, eliminating those pop country acts that have sadly deluted the sound of Country music these days.

I mean after all Jessica Simpson is now a country singer??? Isn't that one of the signs of the end of the world? I must reread Revelations but I'm sure it's in there somewhere.

I also would use Pure Country to help with a recent challenge that Alan Jackson made to the industry to return to a tradition based country music sound, made famous by George Strait, Reba McEntire some of those Class of 89 artist we mentioned, inclusing Alan himself.

And of course, as I did in real radio, a fairly liberal sprinkling of unsigned and independent artists that fit the station's focus, like my old friend Walker Williams.

I'm going to begin a MySpace page for the station to gauge the interest before I decide to try and expand, or just change course with what I already have.

I'll keep ya posted.

 
I was pleased to read an update this evening on a large wildfire that is burning on the mountain nearby and the smoke plume clearly visible from Grand Junction.

I was driving yesterday between Grand Junction and a small town to the south called Delta about 35 miles away.   The Highway one must travels passes right passed the Kannah Creek area where this fire began.

It was discovered yesterday morning, not long before I passed by the first time and was just a small but steady smoke cloud rising.  Returning home, 2 1/2 hours later, the fire had grown exponentially to about 65 acres.

The blaze, which officials suspect was ignited by lightning more than a week ago, was spotted by a Kannah Creek resident Tuesday morning. The fire is burning on U.S. Forest Service land within the city of Grand Junction's watershed but is posing no threat to city's municipal water supply or any structures.

Firefighters have not worked to suppress the fire, but two engine crews and aerial reconnaissance continue to monitor it, the fire management unit said. Fire officials plan to let the fire burn to manage dense forest growth.

The fire is more than two miles from private land and burning away from it in pinon and juniper, and no structures are in danger, the fire management unit said. The fire will be suppressed when and where necessary to protect private property and to keep it within the fire management boundary.

I've got a number of issues that I stress about in today's society... the economy, the war, affordable health care, the safety of people in their own homes and neighborhoods.

I've been distraught the past week over an accident in Flagstaff, Arizona, where I lived for two years not all that long ago, that I thought might have involved some friends.

OK, and that relationship in itself was born under some unusual circumstances beginning with me in a hospital CCU where I was legally dead for a few minutes, on my 40th birthday, which if you ask anyone who has known me for any time, I have always said I would never see.

It was odd to be that close to death on that particular day, almost as if I forsaw it or wished it on myself.

Needless to say the events that led me to be here still today brought me to have some close ties to those in the Flagstaff medical community, some I feared may have been directly involved in last weekend's accident that killed seven on medical helicopters.

So as Billy Crystal was blamed of in the movie City Slickers, when recognizing the passing of a life, you always come to thinking of your own mortality.

The past few days have been odd. I have been in some pain because of a broken tooth and concurrent infection... I've been on a few drugs to bring the swelling, infection and pain to managable levels.

But as I lay in bed last night... in that state between sleep and not quite awake. I hear things. I swore last night someone threw a rock at the bedroom window... and later that someone knocked on the door. Which I realized was not the case in reality, because Dakota would have raised hell, but he slept peacefully sprawlled out underneath the A/C.

Drug effects, paranoia or the afterworld?

There are things... recent events that I know occurred or did not occur in my life that I either have a memory or no memory of, but to me they should exist.

Am I that close to being crazy, finally after all this time?

I admit. I've not led the most cautious of lives. I've forsaken those who I know cared deeply for me for those that were more exciting. I've lived for the present and not the future. And after all this time, I realized, at what cost.

I can only think of two people, women, who I can say I know I broke their hearts. One died in 2000, in California asking her father on her death bed to call me and say goodbye for her. Another a few years earlier, who for weeks played No Doubt's "Don't Speak" on her answering machine as a message to me.

Both I left for someone else, and either I would love to be near today. The grass is NOT greener on the other side. Hell, I can't say moving back home to Grand Junction was an improvement from me being in Flagstaff, where I thought I was miserable, yest where I have lived in my mind the past week.

I'm not proud of who I am. There was a time I thought I was larger than life, but that time no longer exists.

I've been watching a lot of movies this weekend. Old warrior movies, like The 13th Warrior about Viking warriors and Gladiator about a man who died for his faith and thinking of his dead family.

They all fought to the death in pride and faith and a blaze of glory.

That will not be me. I will die alone... a sick, lonely old man... in a hospital room or in my own bed, because I have given myself no other path.

I've been to more than my share of funerals so far this year, and at all I looked around at the number of people present, and look back to others I have attended including a DJ colleague I knew almost from the days I learned about radio... the chapels filled with people. And I wonder, who would mourn for me.

Morbid I know... Just been on my mind.

Woody Allen said it best. I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.