'Cause who's getting played is not me

Even though released nearly a year before I moved, I swear I heard it in those earliest cab rides and blaring in bars I didn't know were shitty yet. God, I can just hear the beats coming out all tinny on a pre-digital (right, in 1998?) jukebox, or in someone's upper or lower in a two-flat on the thousandth Lakeview street that looks like another, and feel my throat raked by trying to talk over it with...whoever. Maybe it was the guy who I met at a party I went to with Margaret in Roscoe Village...or Lakeview (Ashland to my left, Brown line tracks behind me, gonna say it was on Marshfield?) in October 1998. The next week, he took me to dinner at some retro-supper club type place down on Milwaukee between Augusta and Chicago, right past the moaning expressway, and, after ordering pork chops with lip-smacking delight, sent them back because they were somehow wrong.

God, I used to know why, because I told this story about him with lip-smacking delight since I hadn't really hung out with people who could afford to send expensive food back and had never met a free buffet they didn't like (actors and guys in bands, right?).

But I don't remember why, and he and his name and everything except his short temper (and possibly general shortness) has left me.

Eh. What matters is then, when everything was new, and how that felt. Everything gamely accepted: that this dude could be cute, the Hidden Shamrock is a good bar, and that I enjoy this metallic-sounding Jay-Z song.

In too deep

I used to scorn listen-at-work Lite FM. Now, I crave it. I need it playing next to me while I sit in front of a computer screen looking at myself, an unasked-for mirror. I have to gaze at my meeting self as well as be in the damn meeting. This meta-meta reflection of the self I want to keep compartmentalized in between close-enough-to business hours is why I need to hear late 80s Genesis bleating out of my ipad or phone next to me. The actual content of the meetings isn’t that bad, it's always looking to the future and, as I have always said, it ain’t like we are performing surgery on babies. But it calms me to hear Phil’s nasal falsetto faintly nearby, or when I step into the room where I sometimes keep it playing. (This is a family thing; both my sister and father keep a radio on in their garages for most of a day.)

“It” is internet radio. I also a need human-programmed sequence of songs coming at me. Even though it’s computer-served, it’s not calculated by bytes—if algorithms are indeed composed of bytes. I don’t feel like looking this up. I’ve had enough of examining the parts of Dr Frankenstein’s monster that has run a lot of my life since...well, I can pretty much pinpoint since when. I used a black-screen, orange typeface computer 1992-95 while working, but not very much. I used the typewriter and phone more often (that is, when I wasn’t wandering the museum's galleries shooting the breeze with my friend Thom or sneaking out to walk by the lake, or to Summerfest). I remember the first time I looked at the friggin internet, at email, I mean, by sneaking (there I went again) into the library of the Art Museum after its public hours in 93 or 94 and using that computer because it was the only one in the whole joint hooked up to a modem. Somehow (!) I knew how to connect. Maybe Rob S., gave me the instructions, because I distinctly remember that the first email I either sent, received, or both, was from/to him. I have a print-out of it somewhere (Jesus). But I remember that. The pup’s ears hearing Pavlov’s bell for the very first time. Aww. 

When was 1992? Oh, 28 years ago. Nice. 

When I used a computer more comprehensively, at my next job (1995-98), it wasn’t internet connected (was it?). It was at the TYA theatre company I worked at as administrator for its educational/outreach department. I needed music off to the side next to me there, too, but it was classic rock, WKLH 96.5. I heard enough "China Grove" to last me another lifetime, but that was okay, it and the other "classic" (some twenty years old at the time) were the window to the outside of that office, because--well, there weren't any windows. We were in the basement of the hulking performing arts center, and I needed that radio not only for mental background variation but also to temper the urgent grind and whine of the elevator machinery in the room right next to (across from?) my office.

Do I want to be back there? No, not by that machine room, but, yes, back in the untroubled shifts of pecking data entry, laser printing sheets of Avery 5160 labels (and, yes, I pulled that product number directly from the rayless reaches of my mind), affixing said labels, answering the same questions on the phone every day, writing ideas on scrap paper, and daydreaming about plays, boys, clothes, traveling...No. I want that structured and tranquil frame around me now. But in then. I don't want to be 24 again, no, thank you. I don't want the the FOMO we didn't know had a name, the robotic going-out, the magnetic draw of emotionally stupid people and men who were good-looking or cool, the lack of money. 

I want to feel emotions spurred by the radio, not by the unreal amphitheatre of words, words, words, opinions, and everyone's unbridled emotional waste of the last decade. Lite FM radio in the 90s. Whitney, Gloria, Phil, Sarah, Hootie, Elton, Tina, Rod, the Boyz, Sheryl, and, yes, the goddamn Goo Goo Dolls. "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" Yep! I can in "This Kiss," and I'm "Building a Mystery" even though it's like ray-aaaaaayn on your wedding day! I miss this kind of comfort like the deserts miss the rain. I mean, I just played this twice. 

I draw the line, however, at Jewel. That flight back to this there I'd rather be is grounded.