According to last week’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, today is WPTS-FM day in the city of Pittsburgh.

Join me in the celebration, will ya?

I didn’t get my college radio start at PTS, but I sure blossomed there. I took an hour and a half of weekly heavy metal programming and turned it, at its peak, into 11 hours a week. I interviewed bands, went to shows, built a staff, networked my way into what I thought I wanted: a career in the music biz.

You guys know how that ended. I walked away from the biz…but keep writing about it. The seed had been planted before PTS, sure, but up in the Pitt Student Union (fourth floor), it grew. And grew.

So… celebrate with me today. PTS was seminal in my quest for self-discovery, the place that was my home during the years I lived in the (ahem) residence halls. I met true goths and women who took over the role of promotions director, ordered a bunch of WPTS-branded rubbers, and had all the musicians she met sign them. I wonder if she still has Chris Cornell’s. I met groupies and promoters and journalists and had my face splashed across the front cover of the Pitt News. I met the guy who told me I should forget about going to New York and working at a label ’cause I’m better as the big fish in a small pond, not as a small fish in a big pond.

Ahh, the tales I could tell. We’d be here for days, weeks, months. And you’d all laugh and say yeah, that sounds exactly like me. You can see it in the Trevolution writings.

Congratulations, PTS. I still miss you — and this alum is proud as hell that you’ve been named one of the top five stations in mtvu’s ranking of the nation’s college radio station. I’d like to think I played a small part in that. Who knows? Maybe my legacy lives on over there.

I’ll have to stop in and see.

Yep, it’s time for that annual celebration we call Rocktober in these parts. If you’re new around here, that means we celebrate the collision of music and books all month long.

I don’t have a super-awesome lineup like I did last year, but I did drop the prices on my books at Smashwords and (supposedly) Amazon. there are some fun things ahead, and there are more players this year, too.

If you’re one of them, drop me a note in my comments here or on the West of Mars Fans Facebook page.

If you run into one, encourage the site owner to drop in and leave it him/herself.

As you guys give them to me, I’ll link them up at the bottom of this post, so be sure to bookmark it and check back frequently.

As October rocks on, do the same, will ya? Let’s celebrate the amazing collision of books and music.