Thursday, 2:45am — It’s supposed to replace our brains, right? Middle of the night, song fragment runs through my head. Ancient history. What is it called?! Not much to go on, I’ll grant you that – a fleeting memory so ephemeral I can’t hum it but it keeps naggingly drifting in and out on the periphery of memory… I think there’s the word “vampire” in the title. Too broad a search… related songs? For some reason I’m hearing it on a mixtape I made with…. oh! Bad Religion‘s “Stranger Than Fiction”! Yes, that’s a start! Something I can work with. 1994. Okay. But listening to that track reminds me it teansitioned into Counting Crows‘ “Einstein On The Beach” (why the hell can I remember that kind of thing? From a mixtape I made in 1994?! Really?!). Google doesn’t help me with “songs around 1994 with the word vampire in the title”. Semantic web, my ass!
Now I’ve been up too long, even that wisp of a melody has evaporated like a barely-remembered dream. All I’ve got is the word “vampire” in the title (maybe) and somewhere around 1994…
(Aside: my friend Lisa and I decided that the 90’s will perpetually be “about ten years ago.” Because, seriously, it feels like about ten years ago… sort of… in the same way that everything a couple hours away is “a couple hundred miles” whether you’re talking about Sacramento, Reno, or Nebraska.)
The dog implores me just to shut up and go to sleep. Too late. I pull out the big guns: the binder with my old CDs:
Now it doesn’t feel like “about ten years ago,” it feels like an archeological dig. Sifting through artifacts left all but forgotten in a binder on a shelf out of the way. But it’s no good — there’s no organization here and it spans too great a time in my life. Not that that’s something I have any intention of doing.
Organizing a record collection biographically still sounds… I don’t know, nostalgically romantic. To do the same thing with CDs lacks that sort of gravitas, it’s like preparing a “Paint-by-numbers” exhibition at the Louvre. Don’t get me wrong, there was some good music in the 90’s, but the CD’s time, in hindsight, seems so limited. Purists will quibble with dates, but the heyday of the CD lasted barely a decade — the 90’s — after which Napster effectively ushered in the Fall of The Roman Empire for the recording industry by showing us that, technologically, we didn’t need shiny, damageable plastic platters to listen to music. Yes, yes, you can still buy CDs, it’s better fidelity, blah blah blah. But the truth is that the CD is synonomous with a very limited scope of music, chronologically-speaking, whereas the vinyl LP stretches from the goddamn Beatles until present day — and you’re not going to see a nostalgic renaissance for CDs. No one will cry on that grave except the music executives who got away with charging twice the amount of an LP for a medium that literally cost a fraction of the price to manufacture.
But I digress…
Even the wispy trails of the melody are gone now. Winston has opportunistically taken my side of the bed. I’m giving up for now, as soon as I can shove his hundred-pound frame onto the far side of the bed.
