This is your chance to believe

Twenty-three and some change years ago, I stood in the center room in your apartment on Grand and scanned the tall shelves of cds while you showered. You'd put on disc--pretty sure it was a disc, I don't remember there being a turntable--of Gaucho. Maybe we'd recently been at that party in the Gold Coast (the one thrown by the woman who'd openly flirt with you the first of multiple times that night and, eventually, convince you--as if it was a hard choice--to date her) where on the way, you and I and Fuller walked past some middle-aged dudes and you both stopped dead in your tracks and shouted in unison at each other: "Steely DAN!!" Maybe it was not long after that, so you played it, probably for my edification. Thanks. I mean that, thanks, this was as valuable--no, more, than the discs of Neil Young's Decade you burned for me.

Midsummer early evening sun slanted onto the dirty carpet in that room while this track played. I was frozen, by it, in it, for it. I was asked by it, can you remember this moment, later? 

I'm in the kitchen of my apartment, now, and it just played on the radio we leave on to keep the cat company. (It really gives us more comfort than she.) I can go into the middle room in this apartment and look at other tall shelves of other cds. I've travelled to come back to the same place. Seven miles, more than three times that in years, a couple of Steely Dan concerts, and inumerable listens to Gaucho (most of them in Southern California).

I never got the chance to ask you to burn that one for me.

Five-minute write: Can't find a way back home any more

This is my hand clawing onto dock, I'm desperate to pull myself out of the water and up on to the hard surface that's real, feels real, is real underneath my bent body. But this unibody aluminum clamshell has got its one or two teeth in me, pulling me to do one or two more things in/on it. Just one more! It's only...oh, crap, sorry, now it's 9:00 and you're still working and you don't need to hide from highly perturbed and uncertain world out there, and phone notifications, and random thoughts (am I dying? what is the age difference between Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas, anyway?) any more.

I can do this. I can get up here, if only because I can hear this coming out of a radio somewhere. Not out of this computer (okay, yes, really, but I need to keep this scenario going).

If anything can pull me out of this, it's this pair of "California v888na sailors".  The wise man has the power, after all.

Five-minute write: Nothing takes the past away like the future

Not far from where I'd bike home, heading west on Kinzie, past the produce warehouses and distributors who'd finished for the day, some of the vegetables languishing in the gutter, no one really driving past me, no one interrupting my ride, my thoughts, I heard, live, for the first time, some of the songs that beat my feet into the pedals in the summers of 2001-2003. I was in as much of a trance as I'd have been on a dancefloor, except the ray of light was high summer sun of rush hour sluicing through the West Loop grid. I'd pedal, and feel, and dream, and feel some more. And, somehow know that something else was out there for me. 

If that's not what she sings about in just about every song, and what this concert was about, then I don't know  what matters, really.

No, don't disappear

Sometimes you need a bit of pop sparkle when hard winter is descending and punitive and you need to be pulled out of a stretch of daily mundane chaos and, well, it's just dark all the damn time.

Kind of like ABC adding two non-musical "performers" to their line-up in 84-85 for the How to Be a...Zillionaire! album, a journalist and a--well, musician, actually. But David Yarritu only pretended to play an instrument during performances and spoke on the tracks, making an immortal declaration on this track's B-side "A to Z," something we'd repeat endlessly in the multi-color spring of '85.

Spring will come here again, too. I'll take this taste for now.