July 8th, 2004
108926274453729237
Snowed with nostalgia
It’s funny how quickly one’s memory can snap to attention when supplied with the proper music. I took a break this morning from my normal programming meat and potatoes of trance and instead took the route of mp3lib_vol8 (alt&oldies). Sure, it started out sensibly enough, MFC, Gerry and the Pacemakers. Then I hit Dion’s “Abraham, Martin, and John” and couldn’t shake memories of my spunky cousin Emily, and the smell of slowly decaying nylon-fiber industrial carpet in my grandmother’s basement. Frankie Valli came in strong with “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”, and I remembered Amar [KING of the BRI-TONS] requesting the song at every damn party we threw first and second year. That was back when he was small, and loud.
Later on after some Zombies, Vogues, and Four Tops I was hit again with Dion, this time with “Runaround Sue” and images of Sharon Billington strumming a guitar in her erudite linoleum palace at Brown. I was so crazy about her for a while, but it didn’t work out. I remember going to TJ’s semi-formal together, and how absolutely enchanting she looked, lithe and glowing in that red and green dress. Corsages and butterflies in the stomach… When I was at Virginia I usually didn’t know what the deal was, or how to go about making it work. But I guess that’s okay, because none of the girls ever seemed to be able to make up their minds about what they wanted anyway. Stupid older, external boy swooning…why do they have to do that? The mass of honest men die teenage deaths at the hands of adolescent girls’ distorted fantasies. ::laughs::
Judy Collins finished the “oldies” section of my playlist. This time it’s “Both Sides Now”, but it makes me think of Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days”, an ironic choice which I for some inconceivable reason listened to for the first half hour every time I started up Warcraft II. I started really getting into WC with Joe Chen, a quiet revolutionary who was viewed with wonderment by all. Here’s a guy that could plow through EE436, raze Orcen villages and write a song all in the manner of twelve minutes on a whim. An enigma, like most stabbingly brilliant people he didn’t seem to take notice. Joe was a fellow whose bedtime routine involved a full seven seconds of turning off the monitor and ripping the belt out of his jeans, his head already on the pillow of the top bunk before the buckle even hit the floor. I had a short-lived fascination with Sarah Michelle Gellar and one time at Parents’ Day I told my visiting father (half out of guilt, half out of comedy) that all of the magazine pages in our room (which had taken over not only the wall by my desk but all of the real estate above Joe’s bed) were of Joe’s girlfriend, who went to JMU. I miss him, I miss all the people that I admired so much, yet appeared to move through undergraduate so effortlessly.
For some reason Filter’s “Take a Picture” always puts me in the middle of some sunshine room of my Frederick life. On a yawn (why does that always happen?!) all previous reminiscing was bulldozed by the hurtling express of the inflatable pool I had as a child. Summers with no school, no clubs, no nothing. Just being clad in Snoopy Jams shorts and asking my mom to fill up that crazy wading pool in the backyard. The conversation would usually go like this, “Mom, please blow up the pool.” “No, not today. I’ll spend all that time getting it ready and you won’t even play in it.” “YES I WIILLL!!!” “(sigh)”.
A perennial fascination of mine, I marveled at the pool’s graceful arcing rings when filled properly with my tired mother’s breath. I loved how taut it would be, how I could push it and have it barely deform, yet nothing at all was inside but air. I derived secret pleasures from rubbing my finger over the surface when it was wet, and the plasticy, squeaky sound that followed in whines and pops along with my stuttering rhythm. It was hot when dry, so warm and soothing on my skin like a slab of fresh concrete on the sidewalk by our mailbox. Bugs would land in it and befall the doom of inescapable aquatic limbo from wet wings. I was reviled and fascinated with them at the same time, using one of my mother’s stainless colanders to siphon them out of my pristine water playland. Resolute and entranced, I would spend hours simply staring at the odd, bubbly shadows made on the bottom from blades of grass or the errant G.I. Joe leg. I think it was Disney, and every year in the radiant, temperate sun Donald’s beak got a little lighter, Minnie’s skirt all the more pale pink. It saddened me to no end when the season came that I could no longer sink down to my neck in the cool hose water, it just felt wrong when things became small enough not to be a world unto themselves anymore.
