Good songs

I'll warn you now, this blog post is a long one. Kind of like how Proust filled volumes with memories spurred from eating a single madeleine, this blog post is filled with the shadows of memory conjured by just the mention of a particular song. Music is a big part of my life. Kind of like American Graffiti, there's a soundtrack that seems to roll fairly seamlessly through the various parts of my life. Right now, I'm in kind of a techno-disco glam pop sort of phase where I coo over Kylie Minogue and dance to Lady GaGa. (And my gay friends tell me these are the things that make them wonder about me.) My childhood was full of old-school Michael Jackson and Earth, Wind & Fire. So as time goes on, we associate songs with various periods in our lives and often when we say "Hey, that's such a good song," what we're really saying is "This song reminds me of a great time in my life." It's less about how the song itself is great and more about the memories and feelings the song brings back to you.

A friend of mine tweets what she's listening to periodically and today, one of her songs totally sent my mind screaming back to high school. It was the closing song for the 80's classic movie The Breakfast Club. Don't pretend like you don't know what I'm talking about; you know you watched it and secretly wished you were part of the group. I wanted to make out with Ally Sheedy. But the song is Don't You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds. In case you need a refresher or haven't heard it in awhile, here it is.

Some songs span a whole period, but for me, this song is nailed to a particular evening, which like most of the times of years past that we remember most clearly, was a fairly mundane memory.

My friend's older brother is way into music. That wasn't emphatic enough. Let me try that one again.

My best friend's older brother is WAY into music. His musical collection took up a decent portion of their bedroom and he often subjected us to the minute differences in the various versions of the same song he kept scrounging up. Not only that, but he gets abnormally excited about things. You know how Tom Cruise jumped all over Oprah's couch because he was excited about his new squeeze Katie? Yeah, he would do that about going to Taco Bell (and he was 18). So you can imagine how excited he got about things he actually liked. There were times we were afraid he'd have an aneurysm. Also, all this happened before the internet was around and CDs were a new technology. I only throw that little bit of information in because it's essential to the story.

We were hanging out together with some girls at my friend's house, watching a movie or something that's gone now, overshadowed by the rest of the evening's events. I seem to remember that it was either a rainy spring evening or just a darkish overcast evening. It may not have been, but for some reason I remember it that way. Our viewing inertia was shattered when my friend's brother (for the sake of the story, let's name him Paul) burst into the room with an idea that it seemed was going to explode his head. It's hard to gauge the levels of excitement once they pass that "going to wet your pants with awesome" stage, so we thought it was just that he had rediscovered crayons or something and kind of blew it off.

Paul bounded in front of the TV and held hostage whatever it was we were doing until we listened to his plan. "Nononononono, WAIT!" he yelled. And then he outlined his devious plan. He had just decided that he wanted to hear this song and for some reason, it had to be on the radio. I can't explain this one because he undoubtedly owned 3 (imperceptible to everyone but him) different versions of this song in his CD collection. So he enlisted the 5 or so of us who were there to call the radio station and request the song. It's the same kind of logic we use when pressing the button to cross the street or call an elevator: if you press it once, it'll work, but if you press it 843 times, that'll make the system think there are far more people interested in crossing the street and change faster.

We were supposed to call the DJ at the radio station, tell him we were from different towns, give a fake name, and request this song. Because so many people (a whopping 5) from all over the area wanted to hear that song inexplicably at the same time, the DJ would be obliged to play it soon in order to appease his diverse listening audience, right? That was the plan, so we called, spacing out the calls a little bit so it didn't seem like we were crowding the phone lines to the radio station.

I remember thinking that I didn't really want to hear the song that badly, but it was unarguably a good enough song to request hearing it, so I didn't mind calling. I remember that the song played on the radio pretty soon after we called and Paul cranked up the volume on his fantastic stereo while we all danced and yelled the song at each other as best we could over the speakers.

I don't remember what happened after that because it doesn't matter. In that moment, we danced ourselves into a frenzy because we made something happen. It was a moment of high school that I didn't forget about. And I'm glad that Paul tied that feeling to a great song for me all those years ago.

questionable career path

Ages ago, I was in an engineering physics class at the community college where I grew up and there were a whopping six people in the class, not counting "the old guy" who was auditing the course. He was there for every lecture, did the homework, just didn't come to the tests and we always wondered why you'd choose to audit a class like Engineering Physics. Anyway, that's not the point of the story. So there were a half-dozen of us in the class and we all knew each other fairly well.

One time, as the professor was handing out one of our tests, my buddy Patrick turned to me and said, "Okay, if we both fail this test, let's move to Europe and get jobs as gigolos." Apparently he was as unsure of his performance as I felt. "Sure," I said, fully expecting to drop school right after the test and start somewhere like London or Paris. Amazingly, when the grades came back, I had passed comfortably. I'm not sure how Patrick did, but he stayed in class for the rest of the year.

Now, though, I'm revisiting the idea. Not that I'm seriously considering it, since I don't have the body for it anymore, just wondering how robust that job market is. I would imagine the sex trade is fairly stable, since everyone wants to feel loved, even if it's just an illusion of love. We want to feel someone close, someone who cares. I guess I'll keep looking for a company that needs me to help them with their work. I know there's work out there that I would be good at, it's just a question of finding it at the right time.

Teenagers

Walking around the bus stop in the summer and watching the teenagers is an interesting study. When I was a teenager, I remember feeling like I was so grown up and could pretty well blend in with a bunch of adults and I can see that same feeling in them.

The funny thing is that they're so wrong. I was so wrong then too. They almost all look so young, and the ones who don't look as young as they are give themselves away when they start interacting with their friends. I don't know what it is that fixes that in the space of just a few years, but something changes that inexperience for most people. Maybe we all have different experiences that make us older. I think mine started with frostbite. I don't know where this is going, so I'll end it there. Just part of the WASTE system.

Memories of Scout Camp

Scout Camp is one of those events that ranks highly on the list of male bonding moments and not only because you spend a whole week with a bunch of other guys. Although I guess you could argue that the mere proximity of so many adolescent boys has a significant impact on the
dumb stuff that could go on.

I'm standing at the bus stop, listening to the rain on the canvas cover, listening to music, and wondering how it's cold and rainy in May in the freaking desert.

It rained almost every year I went to Scout Camp. And it rained for the whole week each time. So we'd sit in our tents between classes, rain hitting the canvas of the old square framed tents, shoes covered in mud, and write things for the requirements of the merit badge classes. To keep from going completely batty having to deal with the paradox of staying inside while we were outside, we came up with some pretty typical 'boy' activities, most of which either involved the threat of physical injury or making a huge mess. Not the threat of making a huge mess, we actually made them. I remember one year, we got ourselves so scared about alien abduction (we weren't too far from Roswell) that none of us could sleep for hours. In retrospect, it was completely ridiculous, especially considering an actual bear showed up in the camp a couple of years later and tore some kid's tent apart looking for some popcorn he had stashed away.

But we invented games that involved throwing sharp sticks at each other's feet, wrestled each other into the mud, stuff like that. I wasn't a huge fan of that second one, considering I'm not on the big side of the size spectrum. But we did all kinds of stupid things and had fun doing it.

Funny how that sound of rain on canvas brought back memories of some of my less-than-bright moments.

In an unrelated note, I was listening to a writing podcast, where they were talking with a book editor and the editor mentioned something I probably knew at some point but had forgotten; she said that an editor can help a writer with plot but voice is something that a writer just has to have. So I'll probably be trying new things to develop a voice that's mine. I feel like most of my writing feels sterile, with just flashes of me every now and then. I tend to be more serious and staid in my personal writing and explore some of my humor in, say, technical instructions that I write. Does that make nonsense to you too?