"The Best is Yet to Come..."

It is 11:41 pm.  I just removed my tie a minute ago.  This is a rarity.  A tie at 11:39.  Had my first day of training at my extra job today.  Happy hour with my friends.  Just enough time to write the book, get in touch with important parts of the past, and write about some music.

We talked about just how lucky we were to have access to so much music compared to when we were younger.  We traced the stages of Walkman's, discman's, generic iPods and the thing everyone has now that pretty much does everything they need to perceive.

Then we talked about how we used to get music when we were younger.  We had cassette recorders and listened to the radio, and would wait for our favorite songs to come on and then rush to the recorder and slam down both necessary buttons to physically record the awesome melodies we were hearing on physical tape that was winding itself together right before us.  I remember I started doing that when I was 12, at the beginning of seventh grade.

The first time I recorded a song was toward the end of the summer of 1997.  I heard this song by the Smashing Pumpkins everywhere, because I'd heard it many times on the school bus and a few times on the radio, and I really wanted to know what it was like to always have access to music from my generation.  I already listened to serious music, but I mostly listened to funny stuff from ages 9-12.

Anyway, the first song I recorded on the radio came on when I was in the shower.  I had actually suspected that they might play it at any minute, so I brought the cassette boombox into the bathroom (but not the shower, obviously) and turned it up so I could hear it over the water.  I went racing out of the shower as soon as I heard those ultra-smooth opening notes to "1979," which was on the bus all the time that year.  That double album later became the first alternative rock album I ever owned.

We moved from there to when we were going to college, and how we finally started owning personal computers.  We had a family computer until I went to college and they recommended every student at least have a desktop for school purposes.  So that's how I got a Dell through a school discount, and realized I had the power to make playlists from my pretty large CD collection and then burn, or, rewrite them onto blank CD's I had purchased.  That's how I enhanced most of my walks around campus that first year.  The summer before was when I started using my Walkman.

Before I had a computer and hi-speed internet (we had dial-up in the country in 2002) I was lucky enough to have friends who did and offered to make me CD's of any songs I wanted.  I remember that the first mix CD came from my musician friend, probably when I was 15 or so, and it had the song "Prizefighter" by Bush on it.  I never really liked that song, although I did like Bush.  But then I worked at the vineyard a couple years ago and realized just how much music I had to play, and it took on a whole new meaning after a long day (and usually night) of hard satisfying work.

Anyway, a great way to deal with all of that hard work to learn and understand and involve and evolve your personality with the world you help create through what you do is to experience many ways to be you.  And one of the best ways is to laugh and love and imagine the most extraordinary scenes possible.  And after the first entrance into the ecstatic understanding of the power of music, I began to combine it with one of my first love's: imagining anything, and once that was extensive, having fun with it.  I loved and still love weird crazy funky energetic large hearted but nevertheless crazy imagination for what the world could and should be.  Then again, I'd already been fed quite a bit of insanity from the TV and suburban America of Long Island all around me.  But more about that tomorrow.

Until then, "the best is yet to come"...