If it's all in the air

This is the place I will always return to. 

I love you. Thank you.

All my best memories come back clearly to me

I was slapping my forehead while the kitchen radio (you always gotta have one there) blared this one over the half-unpacked groceries. 

If you want to know why I am what I am, and why I feel what I feel, listen. Just replace "every Sha-la-la-la/every Wo-o-wo-o" with "Hey now, woo! Look at that!"

Lookin' back on how it was
In years gone by
And the good times that I had
Makes today seem rather sad
So much has changed.

Or, in a word: Never Over Stuff That Always Leaves Great Attachment.

Of course, I can't even go into how embedded her voice is in my neural grooves, how it makes me feel like I am two or three or four, and being lovingly mothered, I am safe, I am home, I am clothed head to toe in polyester and all is well with the world. That cig smoke-tinged, beige, everyone shaggy, green grass and metal playthings, Ore Ida and Sesame Street world.

It can even make me cry.

If change is what you require

Imagine you suddenly have to look at yourself all day (or a good chunk of it) while you work. 

Blimey.

For richer memories of the song, try this. I've got to Zoom away from this screen.

You've got something about you that I want around me

'81 must have presented me with a well-working radio because I know each and every one of these songs.

Was this now-clunky, then-spectacular alarm clock radio the source? I think it had been handed down to me by then, and I sure didn't get a boombox until a few years later. It was this beauty

I know I inherited this one and had it from high school well into the 2000s; I am intimately familiar with the feel of that SNOOZ button. Hard to push, had to bash. 

Before it served as an alarm clock in my adulthood, waking me first with Double Q, then with KLH, and then with XRT, the alarm clock radio was a day-and-night companion, telling time, connecting me to the world outside of my bedroom, making that sanctuary feel super doubly safer, especially when down-list latter-day charters by synth pioneers played. 

It's not the same, coming from the flatness of the internet. Give me the tinny speaker of the morning squawk box, sending, ethereally, a voice from another time right to me in my insomnia or sadness, dreams or waking up.

And I wriggle like a fish caught on dry land

I can't stop talking about Sting sometimes--though apparently I have for the last 7 years.

Do you know how you're pulling yourself out of and/or away from one way of being and surging, imperceptibly, toward another? 

Sure, this takes me back, way back, to MQ and Jennifer's room in Tower Hall, where one of them had this CD or tape, and I distinctly recall hearing half or most of the album in one sitting in their room, which overlooked the always-moaning Marquette Interchange to the south.

But since then, it's about the surging uncertainty in it. Positively tensed, and ready.

You know the one that takes you to the places where all the veins meet

I never liked dystopian stuff. I always found it scary and, under the outright fear, too possible. 

What do you do when you suspect you have been living in it? Skim the surface of it all. Look at the bloody sky and trees even if they are barren. Find birdsong where ever you can. Roll back or ahead with something like this. The best song ever written?

I think I bought this full CD sometime around 99 so I could get hold of this song. It's deeply tied to being here, so that's probably why. Or I took it off of the hands my roommate or someone* who didn't want it. 

No, I acquired it likely all the walking around I did, especially on those three arteries, starting to understand the city through my feet.

Now, I'm stranded, limited to a tight grid of bungalows and brick flats and bland developer cash cows. But I can go back, if I can't walk forward right now.

*I remember who now

Just move your feet an' you'll feel fine

I want to say more about this, but I have a headache. I have to balance hydration with the constant plume of hot air churning at me to combat the cold (which makes me pinch in my shoulders) from a space heater. Which makes me squint. Which makes a headache. And if there isn't the right volume of water to match the volume of air divided by movement out-of-doors times if there was protein for lunch: headache to the nth power.

See also: constant screens. 

I gotta get out of here.

'Cause when all the curtains are pulled back we’ll turn and see the circles we've traced

Losing your freedom to move may result in acute nostalgia. Ask your doctor (self). Symptoms may include shopping for t-shirts that you can cut the neck out of, air drumming bongos, requesting that your friends play songs for you on the radio, and wanting to feel like you felt before when you felt/heard/saw things that you didn’t fully understand but knew were unconventional enough to make you, maybe, unconventional, too. 

Causes may be Side B deep cuts that never became singles that you can repeatedly listen to that begin with the sound of a cigarette lighter (probably Silk Cut because that just sounds like what they would smoke) and include vibraphone and make you feel like palm trees are rustling overhead and you’re wearing something gauzy that looks like this.

Funny, it’s just like a scene out of Voltaire.

To stop the truth from hurting you

This one hypnotized me in the fall of 85. 

I have this exact 12-inch, and based on when I bought it, where I bought it (most assuredly Record Bar in Turfland Mall), and where it’s from (UK import), I probably spent a lot of allowance on it. I had to be deliberate in my purchases before that next summer, when I was earning my own money, after having trudged back to the mall not to shop but to find a job, which, luckily, was within 100 feet of Record Bar.

Then, inexplicably, I heard it again while sitting in the hair salon chair, probably delivered to someone’s phone app by an algorithm seeking synthy 80s. 

But algorithms can’t identify the juxtaposition of word and sound that sounds like the longing you had at the same time as leaves whipped off of trees outside of your window while you were supposed to be doing homework.

On My "Starburst" Album: To make what life's about

Alright, I've already written about this over twelve years ago (!), so maybe my concerns have not changed in over a decade, okay. Maybe I'm trying to get back to feeling like myself while living solely and literally (forgive me) within four building walls and a 10-block area for the last year (!). 

But Starburst was the first non-child's, non-Disney record given to me in June 1978 (accompanied by the Grease soundtrack, as I noted a dozen ! years ago)--so it's also the first non-soundtrack record I had. 

In other words, this was the first grown-up, adult, on-the-radio music that was solely in my possession, to play as often as I liked and damage as quickly as my small fingers could with the plastic arm of my own plastic-carry-case record player.

God! Thank you for giving me these things! A record player and records! Had I shown interest? Did other kids have these things? My friend Eva down the street did, I think Rosemary did and Ruth, of course, had her brothers playing records and getting her quickly up to speed on Bowie and Warren Zevon at a tender age.

Thank you, whoever gave me Starburst! Two lps of disco, AM pop, funk, a little bit of rock, and...Meat Loaf. Well, let the man tell you what's on it:

This is pre-might as well face it, you're addicted, slick-suited Robert Palmer, coming off of several albums with covers featuring or suggesting women undressed (so maybe there is a theme, okay). Funky, chunky, and heartwarming, though, this one is. Palmer didn't write this track; instead, it was Andy Fraser, who also wrote this song by Free, which I have thought for time immemorial was Bad Company. But then it was the same singer, so same diff. Lord above!

What? Starburst. Being introduced to the idea of "every kinda people" before third grade struck me, and stayed with me. It will pop into mind when surveying some kind of panoply of humanity, the airport, the beach, the L, or someplace that's not these four walls/ten blocks. (The slightly terrifying view of a street-sized tent of white people dining out in the suburbs this summer doesn't count.)

Actually, I've thought a lot how "each and every man's the same inside" over the last year, forcing myself to return to this fact of biology and humanity as both are ravaged by nature and nurture.

Everyone is lucky, everyone is so kind

 There was a lot of good music in 73, not that I'd really remember. But when I hear this one, what I remember is this:

This scene, that is, and the joys of weekly, communal destination TV viewing. As with just about everything, I need a routine and a schedule to keep up with the teevee, having lived "I have rehearsal" a good portion of my younger and adult life, and I don't find myself rushing to compare notes the moment I've finished an episode of The Crown. Though did you see that last season and whoa, what use of music throughout. Just like this scene.

I'll talk about that, or how distressingly awful Thatcher was, or even what I can remember of Lost beyond this scene. You can have the Smoke Monster, I love the sunnier stuff anyway.

When we hear the voices sing the book of love will open up

You used to not run from the winter blues, scanning bright screens all the livelong day, watching TV show after TV show at your leisure and not that of the head of A/N/BC/CBS.

No, you got right down IN it, trudging through it. But a haunting soundtrack, synth songs without resolution got you through it. 

Doldrums of February 86, good grief, what moody, white-sky, lachrymose glories! Nos. 15-18 alone could wrap you in pensive cashmere as you trudge, snow bits pricking your face between the tears. February 86,  the shoulder-padded and Roland-ed evolutionary phase of rock bands that had once straddled, stages with guitars--Erectus. 86: Big Neanderthalic sounds, hair, sadness!  

Not these guys, who eased from soft rock bubbling-under into that BIG sound and pallets of hair gel and a dorky new name.

Do I care about any of that now?

No. I just need this butter on top of my winter blues.

[ ]

This is where I am right now. I profoundly need no words, a time with no pecking, typing, seeking a word to express what I am doing and especially to define what I am thinking. I'm talking about (though I don't want to talk) some chill out music. These guys are especially good at it.

Just these sounds, natural warmth, peaceful ease. And an island where I can even "go to get pancakes and a milk shake and just relax with a book."

That's where the hell this beautiful above-tropical beach is and these people mingling--oh, so mingling!--are. I didn't know Germany had relaxing-escape islands on the North Sea coast. 

These dudes have the right idea. Bring everyone together someplace so untroubled and sacramental, no words are needed.

I missed the peak sensation

 Over. And over. And over with this one. 

Is it the cadence, the creepy guitar? More likely, the video, this huge, angular man haunting a comfortable house, the comic tableaux of the band playing on the couch, in the dining room, the kitchen, the anthropomorphic appliances and shoes--oh, yeah, the shoes! I would have dug those white booties with the ruffle and big buttons, and the hint-of-the-70s dressy platform sandals. 

I probably did. This one's pretty burned into the back of my eyeballs, so far back there that all I can do is just play over. And over. And over.

I've invested too much time to give you up that easy

I wish it was February 1985 instead of February 2021, because then we'd all be looking at MTV and Space Shuttle launches and returns, and wondering "Where's the beef?" instead of preening and pissing on the internet constantly. Which is what I am doing right now, but that's not important right now. 

I'm sure I'd feel much lighter and connected--to physical things, like papers, pens, desks carved by dozens of bored teenage hands, mildewy girls' restroom corners, cig smoke undulating out of the Faculty Lounge (and sometimes the girls' restroom corners), mimeographed exams, formaldehyde in the bio classroom, Giorgio Beverly Hills and Drakkar Noir drifting down the halls. Or like cold, glassy tv screens, permanently leaden November-March Kentucky skies, the pops of color in everyone's clothes, pops of their collars, the nubby acrylic of my sweaters from McAlpins or Jean Nicole or Deb (did I shop there?), a needle on a record, pencil lead dust on the edge of a ruler after making one third of an isosceles triangle. Baked potatoes and Pop Tarts.  The wondrous web of hair spray in another girl's curls.

My heart lurching under my Oxford-cloth button down and sweater when I saw him down the hall.